The Fate of Ophelia

By Regine Chia

Everyone’s been pointing out the parallels between The Life of a Showgirl cover and Millais’ painting of Ophelia, and I don't disagree. (the flowers, I know!!!) 

Of course, Track 1 being The Fate of Ophelia makes the connection tempting.

My bet is this: the song won’t be a literal retelling of death and madness—because the fate of Ophelia, is not, and will never be, the fate of Taylor Swift. 

If you’re not familiar with Ophelia, she is one of the most tragic characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. She exists largely in the shadows of the men around her: Hamlet, her father, and her brother. She is obedient, silenced, and passive. 

When her father is killed and Hamlet rejects her, her sense of self unravels. Shakespeare portrays Ophelia as drifting into a state of madness. She sings fractured songs, distributes flowers heavy with symbolic meaning, and ultimately drowns in a brook, her death ambiguously accidental or suicidal. Ophelia has since become a cultural emblem of the doomed woman: beautiful, fragile, and destroyed by forces beyond her control.

Ophelia’s madness is powerful. It's not just incoherence, but a form of truth telling. 

In so, it becomes both her only form of agency and her undoing. It’s the only time she speaks freely, unfiltered by obedience to father or brother. Yet it also marks her as pitiable, fragile, and doomed. Her voice, once suppressed, is unleashed only when it is already too late.

Herein lies the dramatic tension:

Women are often remembered only when they’re broken, when their pain becomes palatable as art, when their unraveling can be staged as both spectacle and dismissal. Madness becomes their legacy, not their life.

This is why Ophelia resonates so deeply as an archetype. She embodies the cultural script handed down to women, which is to be silenced when whole, and mythologized when ruined.

But this is exactly the tension Taylor Swift has grappled with for her entire music career. From the literal silencing by Kanye West at the 2009 VMAs (an act that reduced her to a punchline in her own moment of triumph) to the endless criticisms that she “only wrote songs about her exes,” Taylor has been cast again and again in the mold of the dismissed woman. The industry and the media have tried to strip her voice of credibility, presenting her success as trivial, hysterical, or undeserved. 

Each time she reinvents herself, society positions a “new” Taylor Swift waiting in the wings, as if she is disposable, replaceable.

She herself calls this out in Nothing New, where she wonders what happens when novelty fades, when her relevance is measured against the arrival of younger women. And in Clara Bow, she points to the cycle of cultural consumption that exalts women as icons only to discard them in favor of the next ingénue.

Like Ophelia, she has been placed in narratives written by others, where her artistry risks being overshadowed by spectacle or dismissal. But unlike Ophelia, she does not drown. Instead, she weaponizes the very archetype, the “madwoman,” the “showgirl,” the “hysterical ex”, and transforms it into performance, agency, and survival.

So when The Fate of Ophelia opens The Life of a Showgirl, we should not expect a song about madness that consumes, but about how that archetype has shadowed women, and how Taylor rewrites it.

The fate of Ophelia was to be erased into myth—her voice scattered in half-remembered songs, her body swallowed by water, her story told by others. 

The fate of Taylor Swift, however, has been the opposite: to seize the narrative over and over again. She has taken every label the world has thrown at her: “crazy ex-girlfriend,”  (Blank Space) “snake" (Reputation), "Her songs all sound the same" (literal entire genre shifts), and turned it into performance, mythic and music. she bends the spectacle to her will, turning dismissal into an enduring legacy.

By invoking Ophelia, Taylor acknowledges the archetype of the silenced, tragic woman. By embodying the showgirl, she rewrites that ending. The showgirl sparkles under scrutiny, endures reinvention after reinvention, and commands her stage.

And Taylor is no stranger to subverting myths. From the very beginning, she has taken stories written about women and reshaped them into something else entirely. In Love Story, she rewrote Romeo and Juliet, and stripped the tragedy from the ending and giving her heroine the happy ending Shakespeare denied her. In Blank Space, she leaned into the “crazy ex-girlfriend” stereotype the media hurled at her and turned it into biting satire, turning mockery into a self-authored caricature. In The Last Great American Dynasty, she retold the vilified legend of Rebekah Harkness and reframed her as a woman who lived boldly, even gloriously, in defiance of those who sought to contain her. Taylor doesn’t just narrate that story! She places herself inside it, linking the myths spun around women in history to the myths that have surrounded her own life.

So yes, the art suggests Ophelia, but the story Taylor tells will be her own.

The fate of Ophelia is not, and will never be, the fate of Taylor Swift. ❤️