«Have They Come To Take Me Away?» Madness, Midnights, and the Feminist Antiheroism of Taylor Swift

With her work recalling literary figures such as Charles Dickens’s Miss Havisham, Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason and Lucy Snowe, Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois and the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Swift frequently
identifies herself with unhinged outliers who trouble social expectations of womanhood and whose resistance is often framed in terms of insanity. In acknowledging and even embracing her own ‘madness’, Swift argues for its potential. Her work posits the hazy space
between fantasy and reality as a liminal zone that is highly conducive to creativity, empowerment and subversion. Often linked with what we might term ‘intentional insomnia’ in her lyrics, this aspect of her feminism also recalls modern works such as Otessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), which deliberately frustrates conventions of heterotemporality and identi"es conscious pursuit of unconsciousness as a form of feminist rebellion. Moshfegh and Swift both experiment with the unlikeable protagonist or
antihero, a figure who is paradoxically both repellent and compelling, and in so doing expose and refuse the impossible demands of modern-day patriarchal capitalism.

Swift is often identifed as championing feminist causes through her vocal support of other female artists, songs such as You Need to Calm Down and The Man, and her pioneering decision to re-record her masters. This talk demonstrates that other currents of feminism, with long literary and cultural histories, irrigate her work, and locates Swift within a long line of women – real and "ctional – whose embrace of madness can be seen as a means of reclaiming power.