Why Taylor Swift’s gothic work is as important as the novels of Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker

By Matthew J.A. Green, University of Nottingham

Taylor Swift has cultivated a global brand that might seem incompatible with the darkness, abjection and monstrosity of gothic fiction. But, beneath the friendship bracelets and sequins, her global Eras Tour makes extensive use of gothic elements to engage her audience and articulate her feminist politics.

Her elaborate set designs, for example, incorporate subjects common to gothic art and use contrasting light and shadow and exaggerated perspectives to depict the sublime and the supernatural. Swift’s costumes, meanwhile, transform images of monstrous femininity – the lamia, the witch, the madwoman – into symbols of empowerment.

The potency and global reach of Swift’s creations demonstrate not only the gothic genre’s pervasiveness but its renewed cultural relevance. Her use of the genre has even provoked right-wing accusations that she performs dark magic.

The gothic tradition was made famous by novelists like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley. Writing during the industrial revolution, their popular novels used desire, the supernatural and the sublime to ask questions about gender, power and personal freedom. Like these writers, the value of Swift’s work is often undervalued due to biases over gender and genre, but she too references and develops a rich literary tradition.

Her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department (2024), includes several forays into the literary gothic. While tracks like The Albatross and The Black Dog rework imagery from Samuel Coleridge and British folklore, the Fortnight video references Shelley’s Frankenstein.

In May, when Tortured Poets was incorporated into the tour, Swift designated this new era “Female Rage The Musical”. On stage, Swift performs Fortnight in a literary asylum, and in Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? she levitates beneath a giant screen depicting a haunted house, which eventually shows her face with glowing eyes and a morbid pallor.

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