The lights are so bright, but they never blind me.
New AP Taylor Swift Podcast episode "Cities" out now
This week we’re taking a tour of Taylor Swift’s favorite cities to sing about. We explore the personification of different cities, and how Taylor uses these cities to tell her stories. In this episode, we’re covering “Welcome to New York” from 1989, “London Boy” from Lover, and “Paris” from Midnights.
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🏫 This Week’s Extra Credit - Brought to you by Maansi
In this week’s episode, we discuss how Taylor incorporates cities into her music, focusing on three prominent cities mentioned in her songs. We thought this would be a fun topic for an AP-level discussion because, as we briefly mentioned in our discussion, cities often play a significant role in literature. Whenever an author prominently features a city in a novel, it’s important to ask the questions: is the city a character in the story? What role does this city play? In today’s extra credit, I’m going to talk about three novels in which the city itself is an important part of the story.
London
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway opens up with Clarissa Dalloway, the main character, wandering about London to fetch some flowers and follows her journey, and that of a character named Septimus Smith, around London throughout the course of the day. The two characters live by very different ideals and norms, but in many ways they are parallel characters. The striking differences in Clarissa and Septimus’ norms and ideals, yet the similarities in their passions, help the reader better understand the actions that these two characters eventually take. Geographically, these two characters start in the same part of the city. Throughout the day, they wander to different parts, the reader follows along in the journey, and they eventually end up with two very different endings. Ultimately, through these characters, Woolf takes the reader on a journey to understand how different people who have similar passions may cope with their very different situations. Written in a stream-of-consciousness style of writing that Woolf was renowned for, Woolf uses landmarks from across the city of London as jumping-off points to transition characters and perspectives.
When reading Mrs. Dalloway through a more literary lens, people often argue that the city of London is its own character in the novel. Whereas much of the novel is written from the stream-of-consciousness perspective of characters such as Clarissa Dalloway or Septimus Smith, there is quite a bit of narration that also happens outside of any characters’ heads. These outside events are all in the city of London. The sounds of the city, such as various explosions, sirens, and Big Ben’s chimes, are often heard echoing throughout the city and are responsible for orchestrating key events in the novel. They act as a voice for the city and establish the very city of London as an important character throughout the novel.
Dublin
Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses compares its main character Leopold Bloom to Odysseus, from Homer’s famous Odyssey. Throughout the day, Bloom wanders throughout the city of Dublin, on a sort of exile, an odyssey if you will, from his own home. The city is described in such detail that people have been able to recreate reasonably accurate maps of Dublin just based on the description alone. Each of the locations throughout the city of Dublin plays a critical role in the telling of Bloom’s story. The city is such an integral part of the novel itself that every year on June 16th, literary nerds around the world flock to Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday, the day on which Ulysses is set, to retrace their beloved main character’s footsteps throughout Dublin.
To give an example of how Joyce plays with the city of Dublin in his novel, the fourth episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, also known as Calypso, introduces and establishes the character of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of the novel. In this episode, Bloom journeys out of his house to town to fetch a pork kidney and returns home again. It is a mini Odyssey that Joyce leverages to pack lots of little details in about his central character. Every little tidbit is a piece of the puzzle that is Leopold Bloom. As Bloom walks past St. Joseph’s National School on his way to town, a string of seemingly gibberish words that cross his mind is not only a memory of his school days but is also an important clue to Bloom’s, and by extension Joyce’s, Irish identity. Joyce leverages the school to jolt memories of Bloom’s schooldays, and thereby reveal important information about the character. This is just one such location sprinkled throughout the novel. In writing so deeply about Dublin, Joyce manages to use the city to progress the story forward, but also manages to immortalize a city he loves deeply in the same vein.
Paris
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Long before Virginia Woolf and James Joyce set out to immortalize their own cities as a voice in their novels, Victor Hugo wrote a beautiful love letter to Paris in Les Miserables, the novel. The locations of all the events that take place in the daunting tome that is Les Miserables are so accurate and so well documented that people can very easily revisit 18th-century Paris to retrace the characters’ steps. The city of Paris is written in such detail that it too takes on its own personality and acts as an important character within the novel. Indeed no study of this 19th century literary marvel is complete without paying close attention to the map of the city.
Whether it’s Jean Valjean’s constant struggle to avoid Javert, or the rebels’ setting of the barricades, the city is undoubtedly a character that is constantly interacting with the other characters of the novel. One of my favorite examples of how the city comes to life is the sewer chapters of this novel. A significant chunk of the novel is set in the sewers of Paris. These sewers are documented extensively in these chapters, with great accuracy, revealing Jean Valjean’s, but more importantly Victor Hugo’s intimate knowledge of the city. At a key moment in the novel, while barricades are being attacked, Jean Valjean grabs an injured Marius and takes to the sewers to escape the action and escort the man his daughter loves to safety. It’s in these sewers that Valjean finally comes face to face with his arch nemesis, Javert in a final confrontation. The climax of this tale happens in the sewers, and Hugo chooses this moment to digress and detail the sewers so meticulously because, in many ways, the sewers explain and encapsulate everything that is wrong with 19th-century Paris. They are the ultimate representation of the miserableness of the city, symbolizing the filth, disease, and inequality of the city that is buried underground, hidden and ignored. And yet the sewers are what bring these major characters together to cross paths because ultimately they are what connects everyone in Paris.
Bringing it back to Taylor Swift
The idea of making a city a main character of any narrative is not new — it is quite literally hundreds of years old. Cities bring together the lives and thoughts of so many different kinds of people — they are epicenters of trade and culture, they are the vision of generations of artists, designers, and architects brought to life, and most importantly, they represent time. Cities are whatever they are in one particular moment, but they are also simultaneously everything that has been, and they are also ripe with opportunity, representing everything that will be. For all these reasons and more, they prove to be the perfect characters to drop into any narrative, whether it be in a novel, poetry, or song lyrics. Taylor Swift is no less moved by these incredible cities than the literary greats before her, and like Woolf, Joyce, and Hugo, chooses to immortalize the cities that are important to her in her writings.