Tis the Damn Season: Taylor Swift's evermore
That Taylor Swift makes two references to The Great Gatsby on her new album is perhaps the least surprising element of this surprise release. F. Scott Fitzgerald is Swift's favorite writer, and she previously sang about "feeling so Gatsby for that whole year" on 2017's reputation.1 On evermore, however, Swift is no longer "feeling so Gatsby"; she is feeling so Daisy Buchanan.
Though evermore's seventh track "happiness" makes reference to the green light — the symbolic representation of Gatsby's dreams — Swift does not seek this light as Gatsby does.2 Instead, she positions herself in the Daisy role of potential granter of its promises when she sings "all you want from me now is the green light of forgiveness." Coupled with her adaptation of Daisy's famous meditation on ideal womanhood into the lyric "I hope she'll be a beautiful fool / Who takes my spot next to you" on this same track, Swift's allusions to The Great Gatsby seem specifically deployed to examine the constrictive roles that men expect women to fulfill. This reflects a wider concern with female autonomy seen across Swift's 2020 output.3
When Daisy claims in Fitzgerald's novel that "the best thing a girl can be in this world" is "a beautiful little fool," she implies, given her own experience, that women who find fulfillment in their marriages and forgive their husbands' transgressions are happier than those who think, question, and ultimately want more than this.4 The "beautiful little fool" is what society expects and desires, and Daisy is aware that she does not embody this, though she tries. Almost a century later, this ideal of womanhood still persists, as evermore's fifth track, "tolerate it," shows. Superficially, Swift's character in this song appears an archetypal "beautiful little fool," greeting her husband "with a battle hero's welcome" and taking his indiscretions "all in good fun." But by the song's final chorus, her frustrations with the life she leads are clear, as she expresses her desire to "break free and leave us in ruins."5 Elsewhere on the album, too, women struggle to conform to the expectation placed on them to be good wives. In "champagne problems" a woman is declared "fucked in the head" for rejecting a marriage proposal; the protagonist of "ivy" relieves the pain of her unhappy marriage through adultery; and "no body, no crime" sees a woman murdered for daring to challenge her unfaithful husband.6 One of evermore's overarching themes, then, is women's desire for an existence where their happiness and success are not entirely dependent on men, and Swift's allusion to the The Great Gatsby develops this theme in more ways than one.
The phrase "beautiful little fool" did not originate with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was uttered by his wife, Zelda, who said "I hope it's beautiful and a fool — a beautiful little fool" after giving birth to the couple's daughter.7 Fitzgerald's appropriation of his wife's phrase from an intimate moment is uncomfortable, not least because this is not the only occasion where Fitzgerald took material from Zelda. According to Zelda's biographer, Nancy Milford, "Fitzgerald drew almost ruthlessly upon her letters and diaries," and another Zelda biographer, Judith Mackrell, demonstrates how he subsequently gave her words to his heroines.8 His use of "beautiful little fool" is part of a pattern of his taking her words without offering credit.
Therese Anne Fowler's Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, which Swift read in 2014, dramatizes Scott's appropriation of "beautiful little fool."9 In using the phrase, then, she draws parallels not only between her characters and Daisy, but also between herself and Zelda. Certainly, there are similarities. Swift, like Zelda, has endured men in a position of trust taking unearned credit for and ownership of her creative achievements, foremost the sale of her master recordings by her old manager, Scott Borchetta, to Scooter Braun without Swift's consent in June 2019.10 "happiness" could well be about Borchetta, as Swift has likened the demise of their fifteen-year professional relationship to a divorce in recent interviews, and the song's lyric "all the years I've given is just shit we're dividing up" conjures the image of a couple sorting through their possessions during a divorce.11 Zelda's line thus appears within a song arguably directed at the man who stole Swift's music from her.
Daisy and Zelda fit within evermore's tapestry of women who, to use a Swiftian phrase, wish to shake off the role of the beautiful little fool and step out of men's shadows once and for all — and Swift knows this. By calling on them, Swift pointedly draws attention to the persistent challenges to female autonomy across a century. She knows her history, and, in 2020, she has become the kind of woman who is not going to let it repeat itself.
Elisha Wise (@ElishaWise_) is a recent MA English Literature graduate from the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Christopher Isherwood, Edith Wharton, interwar modernism, and life-writing.
References
- Swift names Fitzgerald as her favorite writer in: Zara Wong, "Read Vogue's Taylor Swift Cover Story Here," Vogue Australia, November 13, 2015. More recently, Swift expressed her admiration for Fitzgerald's ability "to describe a scene so gorgeously interwoven with rich emotional revelations, that you yourself have escaped from your own life for a moment" in a 2019 personal essay: Taylor Swift, "For Taylor Swift, Pop Is Personal," Elle UK, February 28, 2019. See also, Taylor Swift, "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things," track 13 on reputation, Big Machine Records, 2017. [⤒]
- The green light is explicitly linked with Gatsby's dream in the novel's final chapter, when its narrator, Nick Carraway, "thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (London: Scribner, 2018), 180.[⤒]
- Taylor Swift, "happiness," track 7 on evermore, Republic Records, 2020.[⤒]
- Fitzgerald, Gatsby, 17.[⤒]
- Taylor Swift, "tolerate it," track 5 on evermore, Republic Records, 2020.[⤒]
- Taylor Swift, "champagne problems," track 2 on evermore, Republic Records, 2020; and, Taylor Swift, "ivy", track 10 on evermore, Republic Records, 2020; and, Taylor Swift, "no body, no crime (feat. HAIM)," track 6 on evermore, Republic Records, 2020.[⤒]
- Nancy Milford, Zelda (New York: Harper Perennial, 1970), 84.[⤒]
- Ibid., 102. See also, Judith Mackrell, Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (London, Basingstoke and Oxford: Pan Macmillan, 2013), 4, 149. Mackrell uses an example quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 short story "The Offshore Pirate", which bears remarkable similarities to a line of a Fall 1919 letter that Zelda sent to him. Fitzgerald's adaptation of Zelda's words is first presented in Flappers as a summary of the attitudes held by women of the 1920s before its plagiarism is later acknowledged.[⤒]
- Therese Anne Fowler, Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (London: Two Roads, 2013), 142. Swift mentioned reading Z in two 2014 interviews: Naomi Nevitt, "12 Things You Never Knew About Taylor Swift, Straight from the Star Herself," Teen Vogue, May 9, 2014; Jo Ellison, "The Vogue Interview: Taylor Swift", Vogue UK, June 29, 2015.[⤒]
- For a summary of events concerning Swift, Braun, Borchetta, and the sale of Swift's masters, see: Amanda Arnold and Melinda Fakaude, "Untangling the Incredibly Complicated Taylor Swift-Scooter Braun Feud," The Cut, November 22, 2019. Last month, Braun sold Swift's masters on—again, without her consent—to a private equity company named Shamrock Holdings. For Swift's reaction to this latest development, see: Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13), "Been getting a lot of questions about the recent sale of my old masters. I hope this clears things up," Twitter post, November 16, 2020.[⤒]
- Alex Suskind, "Taylor Swift Broke All Her Rules with Folklore—And Gave Herself a Much-Needed Escape," Entertainment Weekly, November 2020; Swift, "happiness."[⤒]