Now that the glitter has settled on The Life of a Showgirl’s release, and I’ve spent enough time on Reddit fan forums and the comments section of Instagram to feel that I’ve gained both a comprehensive overview of audience reactions and a deep, visceral need to go outside and touch some grass, I wanted to… Continue reading Is it ‘Actually Romantic’ to renounce one’s feminism?
Tag: Mary Wollstonecraft
On being, and not being, The Man: modern-day vindications of gender rights
As preparation for one of our seminars in English Literature (Taylor's Version) — in which we look at connections between writing, gender, and power, focusing on Taylor Swift's 'The Man', 'mad woman', 'Dear John', 'Hits Different', and 'the last great american dynasty' — I ask students to write a modern-day version of 'A Vindication of… Continue reading On being, and not being, The Man: modern-day vindications of gender rights
Why do we need feminism? Thoughts from English Literature (Taylor’s Version)
As part of our session on feminism, writing and power, we looked at Mary Wollstonecraft's seminal 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman', a 1792 treatise that argued for the importance of women's education during a period where it was habitually denied. Expected to be little more than delicate parlour ornaments, women were not seen as worthy recipients of the kind of education offered to men - a state of affairs which Wollstonecraft laments, while pointing out its idiocy (surely men would prefer a wife with whom they can hold a conversation). As a thought experiment, I asked my students: 'If you could write a modern-day "Vindication of the Rights of Woman", what feminist - or gender-related - issue would you focus on, and why?' Here are some of the responses - you can also see a word cloud of the most frequently used terms above. Click on it to read more.
English Literature (Taylor’s Version): Seminar 4
In Seminar 4 of English Literature (Taylor's Version), we looked at the relationship between writing, gender and power, asking what Taylor Swift can teach us about literary feminism. We listened to 'Right Where You Left Me', 'Dear John', 'Mad Woman', 'Hits Different' and 'The Man', asking: What construction(s) of femininity do we see in the song? What is the relationship between writing and power? Are there any literary allusions? Is this a 'feminist' song? if so, why? If not, why not? We used this discussion - also bringing in Swift's re-recording of her masters, seen by many as a feminist act - to segue into two important feminist literary texts: Mary Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman' (1792) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). [Click above image to read more]
Baited hooks and silly books: why Taylor Swift is the new Gothic novel
‘Too many young women yearn for annihilation’, reads the clickbaity subtitle of Mary Harrington’s article ‘The Dark Truth about Taylor Swift’. Published on 16 August 2023, Harrington’s piece observes a troubling tendency in young women towards ‘a craving for romantic transcendence that’s difficult to distinguish from self-destruction’: in other words, an obsession with, and yearning for, love affairs made all the more intense by the knowledge that they are doomed to failure (such as Jack and Rose from Titanic, or Romeo and Juliet). Harrington attributes some of Swift’s popularity to the fact that her oeuvre satisfies this desire: her best songs are about romantic liaisons that don’t end well (‘got a history of stories ending sadly’). Harrington then goes on to link this to thirteenth-century France and the massacre of the Cathar sect of Christianity, who saw our incarnated world as fundamentally evil and longed to escape the ‘prison’ of flesh to return to unity with God. Following their persecution during the Albigensian Crusade, the Cathars’ beliefs went underground and spawned what we now know as ‘courtly love’ literature.
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