by Alana Massey
When she considers what it means to be a young woman, she feels the full weight of both its peculiar fragility and its attendant lack of mercies. Sylvia knows full well that the world had neither her particular intellect nor her body in mind when it was designed. At eighteen, she berates herself for the urge to gaze inward, but she cannot find a reprieve from her own fascination:
I am a victim of introspection. If I have not the power to put myself in the place of other people, but must be continually burrowing inward, I shall never be the magnanimous creative person I wish to be. Yet I am hypnotized by the workings of the individual, alone, and am continually using myself as a specimen.
Sylvia was an early literary manifestation of a young woman who takes endless selfies and posts them with vicious captions calling herself fat and ugly. She is at once her own documentarian and the reflexive voice that says she is unworthy of documentation. She sends her image into the world to be seen, discussed, and devoured, proclaiming that the ordinariness or ugliness of her existence does not remove her right to have it. You might be so very good and generous if you could only relinquish that nagging sense that you matter at all, the world tells them now and told Sylvia then. The ongoing act of self-documentation in a world that punishes female experience (that doesn’t aspire to maleness) is a radical declaration that women are within our rights to contribute to the story of what it means to be a human. I look to the girls and women who adore Sylvia on Tumblr and mourn that I had no such home for self-expression and mourn for a world that won’t allow itself to behold the richness of their lives as the art of ingénues rather than the nuisances of adolescence.
Clicking through the profiles of girls who share Sylvia-related images and words, it is not uncommon to find images of self-inflicted wounds displayed through carefully selected filters. Reds are turned up and backgrounds are darkened. There is a young Parisian whose scroll is a well-curated collection of literary quotations relating to the discomfort of being human. Another describes herself as having a “rebel soul and a whole lot of gypsy,” her account a gallery celebrating literature and landscapes meant to break the heart. These young women awaken a maternal impulse in me, and at some points I get close to reaching out to encourage them to get care. I realize this is both invasive and unproductive at first, but I later realize that it is an underestimation of their capabilities. The very act of sharing the images is a way of seeking care, not as cries for help or as declarations of their suffering. Their blood is proof that something is alive in them. They are making art of their pain. Many experience these platforms as communities where their pain is acknowledged in gentle, more reassuring ways than those available from family and in-person peers.
“Now I know what loneliness is, I think. Momentary loneliness, anyway. It comes from a vague core of the self—like a disease of the blood, dispersed throughout the body so that one cannot locate the matrix, the spot of contagion,” Sylvia wrote. I wish I could tell them to stop hurting themselves and have them miraculously listen. I also want to tell them that I am so happy they’ve found one another instead of finding the back of an oven. I want to tell them that the contagion source is not dispersed in the blood but in fissures in the heart. These fissures do not course through the body and require an aggressive medicinal annihilation. They require the tender touch of one willing to deal with the brokenness of the flesh, and they require the trust of the wounded heart’s owner to know that their insides can and should be beheld.
I want to call out to the girls who repeat Sylvia’s poisonous directive, “I must bridge the gap between adolescent glitter and mature glow.” This is a fallacy, a lie intended to kill the spirits of girls so that they might become what we have come to expect of women. It is telling that among the ranks of quotes on Goodreads and in the bottomless scrolls on Tumblr, it is words from Sylvia’s earlier works in her late teens and early twenties that are the most popular. The girls may repeat her longing to grow from glitter to glow, but their affections favor glitter overwhelmingly. Glitter is the unbridled multitudes of shining objects that have no predictable trajectory and no particular use but their own splendor. A glow is contained. Its purpose is to offer a light bright enough that those who bear it will cast a shadow, but not so bright that their features will come fully into focus. “Never surrender your glitter” sounds like the cliché battle cry of a cheerleading coach or a pageant mom, but I still find it a suitable message for young girls. I also want to show them a line of Sylvia’s poem “Stings,” written from the point of view of a bee:
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
In the end, it was Sylvia who thought that death was worth it indeed, but her disciples now can and should have the chance to feel like queens. The thing about that beloved quote I was so originally unimpressed by, about all the lives Sylvia wanted, is that it continues into a more tender consideration of what it means to be fully who we are. She acknowledges that though she is limited, she is not incapacitated or wounded. She writes, “I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that’s why I want to be everyone—so no one can blame me for being I.”
The girls who adorn their persons and bedrooms and websites with the work of Sylvia Plath, who allow her words and images and sounds to give shape to their lives, are her legacy. Defying the command that they not end up like Sylvia, they document their lives in details that are always personal, and they do so in kingdoms they’ve crafted and breathed meaning into themselves. The ways they tag and arrange their posts are signals in the night, reaching out to others enduring suffering and nonsense in a world that tells them their hearts are burdens rather than treasures. They are good witches in the wilderness and sages and romantics regardless of any present romance. And they know they are not drawn to the bulb at the back of the oven, but by the flare signals sent out by their fellow travelers. They are flashes of light and recognition, momentary reflections of the sun onto a shred of glitter. But they are something vital nonetheless.
Heavenly Creatures
The Gospels According to Lana, Fiona, and Dolly
This is what makes us girls,
We all look for heaven and we put our love first.
—Lana Del Rey, “This Is What Makes Us Girls”
FIONA APPLE WAS BORN FIONA Apple McAfee-Maggart, the child of an actor father and a singer mother. Her birth name was a mouthful for a performer whose record label wanted to package her as something more ethereal. But the clumsiness of her full name is at home in a childhood spent volleying between Los Angeles summers with her father and school years with her mother in an eclectic New York apartment that featured, among other bizarre decorative flourishes, a crucified Kermit the Frog stuffed animal on the kitchen wall. Fiona’s team reportedly considered endless variations of her names when they were crafting an image for her that they could sell. Fiona’s only reported request was to not include “Apple” in the name. She told Rolling Stone in 1998 that in the end, her contract arrived and her stage name was unceremoniously declared “Fiona Apple” before she was able to object. She said the metaphor didn’t strike her immediately: “The apple: the thing that starts all the knowledge, but that also starts all the trouble.”1
Lana Del Rey came into the world as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, the child of two Manhattan advertising executives who retreated to the more tranquil boredom of Lake Placid, New York, when she was an infant. It is a digestible, Waspy name certainly, though the wealth and nobility of her background have been in constant dispute since her detractors came for blood in the wake of discovering she had not sprung into the world as a devastated femme fatale. Like much of her life and legend, the origins of Lana’s stage name are shrouded in mystery. Her name’s meanings are more easily discoverable. “Lana” is the Gaelic for “child,” while “Del Rey” is Spanish for “of the king.” This combination is ripe with possibi
lities for interpretation. The girl child of a king is most literally a princess. More critically, the king can refer to Christ or God himself, his child being either a protégé or a disciple. In any of these cases, where she comes from is explicitly a place of male power. She languishes and thrives under it in due course, but never escapes from that inheritance.
Both women are preternaturally beautiful in that way that makes them hard to look at for too long. Their beauty gives you the sense that it might break something, if it hasn’t already. But in appearance, they share little more than alluring looks and occasionally similar tawny waves of hair—when Lana is not indulging her predilection for more dramatic colors. Fiona Apple’s center of gravity is her eyes; Del Rey’s is her mouth. A Quietus story on Lana from 2011 called her figure “hardy” and “healthy,”2 which stands in stark contrast to the endless speculations that littered media coverage around the time of Fiona’s debut that she was in imminent danger of dying because of her low weight. The press obsessively remarked on Fiona’s slight frame, calling her anorexic as an accusation more than a diagnosis.
Both women draw apt comparisons to their husky, soulful counterparts from yesteryear. Lyrically, they both toil endlessly under the gazes of a sordid assortment of men. They know too well the violent hypnosis of those who hope to possess them—men who can smell the blood on the places where a woman is breaking. And Fiona and Lana have wounds to spare. But what sets them apart further from many of their musical peers are their preoccupations with the theological: the question of how God is present and active (or absent) in their lives. In both of these fragile but well-constructed worlds, the ultimate manifestation of the male gaze is to be witnessed by God. But they diverge sharply when it comes to what that gaze means and how they might be rescued from it or, in some cases, redeemed by it.
“Who is that girl? She’s going to die soon,” my friend Andrea’s grandmother asked, going from one thought to the next about Fiona Apple before either of us had time to respond. It was the summer of 1997, and we were watching the video for “Criminal,” the instantly infamous piece of music video history wherein the teenage Fiona appears in her underwear alongside a number of faceless, similarly famished youths. People could not decide if the video was more outrageous because it was a glorification of child pornography or a glorification of anorexia. In either case, blame was hurled at Fiona herself rather than on the much older music executives who were largely responsible for establishing her brand.
From a marketing standpoint, they made an excellent choice. The perverse brand that rendered the teen Fiona the commissioner of her own exploitation was one that girls of a certain age and disposition were enthralled by. We were the kind of girls who fantasized about looking beautiful at our funerals instead of our weddings. But we were not girls who especially wanted to die. In Fiona we sensed a similar disconnect, a fascination with death that did not translate to finding a sense of solace in its promises. I was too young to imagine Fiona as a friend, so I thought of her as an older sister. Her particular neuroses and heartbrokenness were far enough away from my reality to make them romantic in a way that the very real afflictions of my own households were not. Like Fiona, Lana let death linger in her mind long enough for her to breathe it out of her mouth and let it seep out into the world like smoke, the poison all the more appealing when it was mixed with her overtures on love.
Years after taking my posters of Fiona looking characteristically forlorn off my walls and removing her music from heavy rotation on my playlists, I am still touched from time to time by hearing news of Fiona that indicates something like healing in her life. Even as her music matured into something too sophisticated for my untrained ears and my overactive heart, I consumed stories about her like a consummate fan. Whereas the happiness of former idols like Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins has made me lose interest, I remain invested in Fiona as a person. I wanted her to win, at what game, I am unsure. I did not feel this protective of a female musician again until I was over twenty-five years old, well past the age Fiona was when I drifted from her music.
In February 2011, Lana Del Rey tweeted, “Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.” It is a clever take on the concepts of perception and persona, but it is not hers. The quote comes from the eighteenth-century political theorist Thomas Paine, though Lana did not mention this in the tweet. She was a new face on the music scene, four months away from releasing her self-directed music video debut of the song “Video Games.” The video made her an indie darling for a few fleeting months before it became the primary piece of evidence used against her when information and images surfaced online about Lizzy Grant: a cute, blond, and far less alluring pop singer than Lana. Whoever managed her marketing efforts had effectively killed Lizzy Grant and replaced her with the pouting temptress Lana Del Rey. Audiences felt duped and sought to punish her for their own suspensions of disbelief.
Lana would soon be accused of performing as a false persona that was too meticulously manufactured. Rather than an image that was especially dangerous, as people claimed Fiona’s had been, Lana’s was derided for being artificial and self-indulgent. Lana’s femme fatale looks and her hypernostalgic music videos looked labored and amateurish, how a high school girl who got her hands on some old Hollywood movies and a bustier might adorn herself more than how an adult artist with a legitimate interest in a genre might. Fiona was accused of glamorizing child porn in the Hollywood Hills; Lana was accused of pornifying authentic Hollywood glamour.
Those who accuse these women of fraud in their image craft seem not to have heard of David Bowie’s successful alter ego Ziggy Stardust or even Bob Dylan, the folksy creation of a genius named Robert Allen Zimmerman. There is a tradition of male artists taking on personae that are understood to be part of their art. It is as though there is so much genius within them that it must be split between these mortal men and the characters they create. Women who venture to do the same are ridiculed as fakers and try-hards; their constructed identities are seen as attention-seeking stunts more than new embodiments of the artists themselves. Madonna is perhaps the most successful woman to reinvent herself but never to fully slip into an alter ego, and even she is routinely called an insufferable bitch for it.
But within what is meant to be the exclusive territory of men who invent and inhabit images that add up to more than the sum of their aesthetic and musical parts, there is a trespasser. She has gone undetected for decades, despite having crafted a highly visible and truly magnetic image. Like Lana and Fiona, she is powerfully moved by the wiles of careless men but is motivated, too, by the surveillance of God, who seems to care even as he judges her. That artist is Dolly Parton, a performer so rigorously committed to her craft that she has not publicly broken character once in a career spanning more than forty years. Famously taking her image cues from “the town tramp” of her rural Appalachian origins, Dolly can reliably be found in a wardrobe of formfitting dazzlers that accentuate her large bust and tiny waist and are always topped off with a blond hairdo that is as much a production as her stage shows. The visual of Dolly’s full face of bright makeup, even brighter jewel-toned outfits, and bleached hair appears in sharp contrast to the subdued auburns, deep reds, and earthen tones of Lana and Fiona, of course. But beneath these exteriors are hearts breaking under the cold oscillation between negligence and affection of those whose love they seek.
Fiona’s first hit, “Criminal,” centered on confession: “I’ve been a bad, bad girl / I’ve been careless / With a delicate man.” She reportedly wrote the song in under an hour when she was seventeen years old. Record executives listened to the album in progress that would become Tidal and said she did not have any hits. And so, on command, she wrote them a hit. There is something perverse about a child writing a song implicating herself in the decline of a man, like the abused Dolores discovering that she had been Lolita all along, inadvertently hurting Humbert Humbert. Fiona declares early in the song, “And
I need to be redeemed / To the one I’ve sinned against / Because he’s all I ever knew of love.” These lines could be read as a deification of the delicate man of whom she spoke earlier, but the lines “I’ve done wrong and I want to suffer for my sins / I’ve come to you ’cause I need guidance to be true” negate such a premise quickly with the hints of godly intercession. Fiona seeks redemption for her sins, unaware that she is not nearly so guilty as she feels. Lana, in sharp contrast, courts sin actively.