Taking the Penis Out of Genius: Predictions for Taylor Swift’s The End of an Era

by Lindsay Illich




For the last two years, I’ve taught an undergraduate capstone course on Taylor Swift, and I have two predictions to share with you about what we’ll learn in the highly anticipated docuseries, The End of an Era, premiering on Disney+ on the eve of Taylor Swift’s 36th birthday, December 12. 



One: Taylor will confirm that the persona at the heart of The Tortured Poets Department was the figure of Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 



Two: it was the Eras Tour–and her fans–that rescued her from the fate of Ophelia as much as it was Travis Kelce.


To be fair, the evidence for Ophelia (Taylor’s Version) was there all along, even before The Life of a Showgirl dropped. It was in the white gowns, in the TTPD album cover, in the liner poem “In Summation,” written in the voice of a brokenhearted woman confessing temporary insanity, in the “Fortnight” lyrics and video set in an insane asylum, among many, many others. For an artist who prides herself in training her fans well, as she said in the TLOAS album reveal episode of New Heights–how to be good readers, to Easter egg hunt, to recognize a fountain pen song from a glitter gel pen song, and above all to appreciate that the biographical is the least interesting thing about a song–this time, as far as The Tortured Poets Department goes, she overestimated our takes and taste, especially when it comes to Elizabethan drama and the history of psychiatry. 

Which is why she gave fans a second chance, ever the cheerleader (all hail, queen of the esoteric). 


Reveal #1: Ophelia TV

Like the technicolor Oz, the album cover of The Life of A Showgirl shed the “cinephile in black and white” canvas of TTPD for an electric aquamarine and tangerine, Taylor partly submerged in a bath, evoking the flattened glass pane image of Ophelia we recognize from so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, most famously by John Everett Millais. The cover, coupled with the first track, “The Fate of Ophelia,” make a strong case that the artist saw herself as an Ophelia figure who’s been rescued from her fate in Hamlet–drowning by suicide–by a new love: “And if you never came for me/I might’ve drowned in the melancholy.” Beset by past loves she compares to “a cold bed full of scorpions” whose “venom stole her sanity.” The new love “dug me out of my grave and/Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.” The borrowed lines from Ophelia: “‘Tis in my memory lock’d,/And you yourself shall keep the key of it” (Act I, Sc. iii, lines 85-86). Amor vincit omnia and all that. At least, on one level. We’ll get to that in a minute.


We have Elaine Showalter to thank for chronicling historical representations of Ophelia going back to the time of Shakespeare to the twentieth century in her groundbreaking 1985 essay, “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism,” especially for the way female sexuality and insanity had become superimposed in representations of Ophelia. According to Showalter, the Elizabethans had created a visual shorthand for female insanity in the depictions of Ophelia in elaborate white dresses, playing the lute with her hair down, singing “wistful and bawdy ballads” (224). 


Starting with the announcement of The Tortured Poets Department at the 2024 Grammy Awards, Swift’s visual aesthetic of the TTPD era aligns with the historical representations of Ophelia in a white gown, hair down. The black gloves also echo the lithographs of the actress Harriet Smithson who played Ophelia in a white dress with the addition of a black veil. 


Then, in the video of “Fortnight,” the first track and single of the album, the first scene opens in an insane asylum, Swift wearing what looks like the white dress from the Grammy’s, this time with a garter visible at her thigh. She’s shackled to a bed, the same bed, some online observers noted, from the music video “You Belong With Me.” On the Eras tour, when the Tortured Poets Department set was added, or “Female Rage: The Musical,” as Swift once referred to the TTPD era, we see the white-gown clad Swift in full effect screaming to the fans “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me” in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” while the choreography and performance bear a striking resemblance to the images of Elizabeth Taylor’s mental breakdown in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The reference to Elizabeth Taylor is a continuation of the references to her in “...Ready For It?” lyrics from Reputation: “he can be my jailer/Burton to this Taylor.” A line followed by “Every love in comparison is a failure/I forget their names now/I’m so very tame now,” a reference to Taylor and Burton’s own foray into Shakespeare in the 1967 film adaptation of Taming of the Shrew.  


Showalter’s work also points to the cultural history associated with women and drowning. According to Showalter, death by drowning is coded feminine, as “water is the profound and organic symbol of the liquid woman whose eyes are so easily drowned in tears” (225), a victim to love-melancholia. (“I’m always drunk on my own tears/isn’t that what they all said?” Swift asks in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me”). In the late seventeenth century, “the most celebrated of the actresses who played Ophelia were those who were rumored to be disappointments in love,” the embodiment of the iconography of love-meloncholia. In the age of Samuel Johnson, the part of Ophelia was mostly censored, the part often played by a singer, while the Romantic Ophelia was blended with the figure of the madwoman with big feelings, better to be seen than heard, which is when the explosion of visual arts representations of the death of Ophelia begin. 


And here’s where things get weird. Visually speaking. Showalter’s work documents instances of the figure of Ophelia in clinical examinations of female insanity. Doctors in the nineteenth century were noting that patients were presenting with hysteria in ways that resembled the stage depictions of Ophelia, instances of life imitating art, as evidenced in Charcot’s photographs of asylum patients, images of women posed or frozen in contorted anguish, poses that resemble the cover album art of both The Tortured Poets Department and The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.



Interesting also was Charcot's experiments with dermographism as a clinical intervention for hysterics (“What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh?”: “Guilty As Sin”). Without the visual connection between Charcot’s photographs of institutionalized women and the history of his experiments with dermographism, it would be easy to write off the facial tattoo scene in the video of “Fortnight” as merely a mirroring of Post Malone’s facial tattoos. With the context, it’s difficult not to see it. 




By the 1960’s, Showalter notes, the madwoman of Ophelia was depicted as schizophrenic, and women were being treated for Ophelia syndrome. The psychiatrist R.D. Laing described Ophelia syndrome as a state of having “no integral selfhood expressed through her actions or utterances. Incomprehensible statements are said by nothing. She has already died. There is now only a vacuum where there was once a person.” 



And then there are the lyrics of TTPD. 


The connection to Hamlet in “Fortnight” lyrics begins with the opening lines “I was supposed to be sent away,” which readers of Hamlet may aptly connect with the Mousetrap scene when Hamlet, berating Ophelia, tells her to “get thee to a nunnery.” Most critics agree that this line has a double meaning–it either means she should join a convent or a brothel. However, these critics may have overlooked the fact that historically, convents were places of asylum for the mentally ill where the nuns would care for them. A few lines later, “All of this to say, ‘I hope you’re okay’ but you’re the reason/And no one here’s to blame, but what about your quiet treason?” A theme of Hamlet is treason, what counts for treason, who is treasonous, and also the notion of time involved–how long should Gertrude have waited before marrying Hamlet’s uncle after the king’s death? How long should Hamlet waste in indecision? This notion of time treason also appears in “Fortnight”: “For a fortnight, there/we were forever,” and also “All my mornings are Monday, stuck in an endless February.” 


In the title track “The Tortured Poets Department,” both lover and beloved are poets: “You’re no Dylan Thomas/I’m no Patti Smith,” In Hamlet, both Hamlet and Ophelia write poems (Ophelia, songs). Ophelia’s father, Polonius, reads a poem he found written from Hamlet to Ophelia: “Doubt thou the stars are fire,” offering the poem as proof of Hamlet’s love. 


In “The Tortured Poets Department,” both lover and beloved are suffering from depression (“We’re both crazy”) and threatening suicide if the relationship ends: “But you told Lucy you’d kill yourself if I ever leave/And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen.” Hamlet hints at a marriage proposal–or so Ophelia believes–as does the beloved in TTPD, if only gesturally: “At dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one/People put wedding rings on/And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.” This business about rings comes up again in “Fresh out the Slammer” when the children who used to play “with imaginary rings” are united, and then again in “loml”: “you shittalked me under the table/talking rings and talking cradles/I wish I could unrecall/how we almost had it all.”


“So Long, London” opens with vocals that resemble church bells (wedding bells? funeral bells?) in weather reminiscent of the dank fog that hangs over Denmark in Hamlet. She’s leaving, asking “How much sad did you think I had in me? How much tragedy?” Her clothes are wet, bones weary. Like Ophelia in Act III, scene i, she’s angry about her wasted youth: “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.” 

  


Reveal #2 The Rescuing of Ophelia

At the end of “The Manuscript,” the last track on The Tortured Poets Department, a professor offers some sound, if not well-rehearsed, writing advice: “Looking backwards may be the only way to move forward.” It’s a (Taylor’s) version of one of the oldest’s maxims in Western culture–”Know Thyself”--inscribed not only on the walls of the Temple of Apollo, at the mythologized omphalos of the world, but also in Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Act IV, scene iv:


What is a man,

If his chief good and market of his time

Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

Sure He that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, have us not

That capability and godlike reason

To fust in us unus’d. (lines 33-39).


Translation: God didn’t give humans the ability to reflect on the past just so we could let it go to waste. In “The Manuscript,” the maxim led the speaker of the poem (aren’t all the songs in TTPD poems?) to an epiphany: “And at last/She knew what the agony had been for,” and then, internalizing the lesson in first person: “the story isn’t mine anymore.”  


Who does the story belong to?


I reminded my students of Taylor’s prologue at the beginning of The Era’s tour, when she tells the audience that her “secret dream for the evening” is for the songs to become less hers and more theirs, that after the concert, when they hear the songs, she wants for them to think about the experience–the event–of the Eras tour. I remind them about Lewis Hyde’s idea of art as gifting. I remind them of narrative theory and the power it holds when you are telling the story of your own life. I reminded them of the lyrics of “Long Live,” “I’ve had the time of my life fighting dragons with you,” a song widely interpreted as praising the collective Swiftie fandom as well as Swift’s entire team, musicians, and collaborators. I reminded them of “You’re on Your Own Kid”: “take the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it. You’ve got no reason to be afraid.”

And then, the album dropped, along with the Target exclusive vinyl album of The Life of Showgirl, which included the poem, “The Crowd is King,” a poem written on letterhead with the address 13 Ophelia Ave. The poem says that the collective experience was “worth everything it has cost you,” that “You would choose all of it again.” Finally, the lesson was love is what you do every single day–the lesson of an artist honing her practice.


Taylor said in her interview with Apple music that the Eras Tour was the greatest thing that ever happened to her.



So while it’s easy to listen to “The Fate of Ophelia” and read it at the surface level–that romantic love rescued Ophelia–there’s also another reading, one that I think will be revealed in The End of An Era–it was the fans, the tour, the entire experience that rescued Ophelia. Not that it isn’t about “your hands, your team, your vibe,” but great art isn’t univocal, and yes, I’m saying this is great art because great art invites you over and over to reconsider it. We’re being asked to consider an alternate timeline for Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In Taylor’s version, she gets the guitar, maybe Polonius moves to Nashville to pursue Ophelia’s music career, maybe she gets to be fearless, maybe for her all the world becomes a stage. Just like she rewrote Romeo and Juliet’s fate in “Love Story,” in Ophelia TV, Ophelia becomes an artist, and it saves her life.  



Understanding Taylor’s Version of Ophelia means coming to terms with the cumulative effect of male-coded constructs of genius, of repressing the self, shoving all the billowing fans of ombre fabric back in a box too small to hold them, trying to fit a mold that cracks young women up, or finds them wielding a saber on a livestream.


And didn’t we see it? The curative power of art–for Taylor, for us–on The Eras Tour?

Countless fans described the Eras Tour as transformative. 



I think the End of an Era will change the way people think about The Life of a Showgirl. A rescued Ophelia doesn’t have to wrap herself in a pretzel anymore the way Taylor described in Miss Americana. The showgirl embraces every version of herself–the vulnerable AND the ribald, the sweet AND the spicy. It means she can swing her figurative big knob in “Father Figure” and sing about her man’s hog in “Wood.” She’s funny and snarky. She doesn’t need three pens anymore because she’s writing with all the colors. It’s unapologetically ambitious and quite possibly the first pop album that passes the Bechdel test. The showgirl is no trad wife. 


It was there all along, as clear as the arrowhead leading you home. 


The crowd may be king, but Taylor Swift is the reigning queen mother.


But you knew that already.