8: "Eldest Daughter" — the showgirl takes off her makeup

What is this confessional ballad doing in the middle of an album about the glamour of the showgirl life? 

In this episode, we explore the surprising intimacy and aching vulnerability of “Eldest Daughter.” Our heroine—fresh from the ruthless triumph of “Father Figure”—seems to be asking herself who she’s become and whether she can stay kind, loyal, and true to herself in a world that rewards performance and punishes softness.

We’ll unpack the song’s use of slang, its play with hot and cold, and how it reframes the showgirl’s story at the midpoint of the album. 

Plus, stay tuned for discussion questions and writing prompts to help you reflect on your own creative and emotional life.

For access to a document with all the writing prompts in one place, head to www.maraeller.com/prompts to get them sent straight to your inbox.

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Get all the LIT112 writing prompts in one place: www.maraeller.com/prompts.

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Transcript

1:18

Welcome to Lit one 12, the Life of a Showgirl where we treat Taylor Swift's latest album like a novel, peeling back the layers of meaning from Shakespearean allusions to character arcs and auditory techniques. I'm your host, Mara Eller, a literature and writing teacher with 16 years of experience at the high school and college level. I just retired to focus on editing and book coaching, but when I started getting requests for this series on social media, I couldn't resist. Whether you're a veteran swifty or just an AP lit nerd like me who happens to like her music, all are welcome here. I've even got something for you writers, creative prompts inspired by the subject of each lesson. You can find them at the end of the episodes. So grab your metaphorical notebook and let's unpack this record together, chapter by chapter, song by song. today we're talking about Track five Eldest Daughter, which on first listen doesn't really seem to fit lyrically or musically with the previous four songs What is this sentimental ballad doing in the middle of an album about the glamor of the showgirl life? And if we read the album like a novel, how does this song fit into the larger narrative? and heads up, this one does contain some explicit language. For the first time on the album, we have a ballad. It's just her and the piano until the second verse when the guitar comes in, but it still has a very acoustic feel in comparison to the obviously highly produced sounds of the previous songs. Our showgirl has taken off her costumes, scraped off her makeup, and is giving us a much more confessional glimpse into her inner life. The chorus ends with a promise. I'm never gonna leave you. So the big question is like in so many of these songs, who is the you? Who is our showgirl singing to? Is it a lover? Is it a younger sibling? Like the brother she mentioned in track three? Is it her fans? Is it herself? In juxtaposition with Father Figure, the previous song, this one is particularly incongruous. As I discussed in that lesson, so go check it out if you haven't yet our heroine just completed a major coup in which she flipped the table on her exploitative mentor and became her own father figure of sorts. It's the first time she's overtly exerted her power in this story, and it's pretty vicious. Even if it was justified and necessary threatening to kill someone is definitely crossing some significant ethical lines. That context is important for our reading of this next chapter of the story. I imagine it like she's finished exalting in her recent triumph and is now reflecting on who she's become. Maybe she's also received some media backlash for what she did. That mentor is almost certainly talking crap about her and misrepresenting the situation. So she's dealing with another wave of public criticism, which we can see in verse one. It begins. Everybody's so punk on the internet. Everyone's unbothered till they're not. Every joke's just trolling in memes. Sad as it seems. Apathy is hot. Everybody's cutthroat in the comments. Every single hot take is cold as ice. She intentionally uses a lot of slang here, apparently dated and cringe, but it's in an ironic way. How do we know that? Because there's suddenly so much of it pervading the song and because the song itself is a comment on the, for her futile attempt to seem cool, as she says, I've been dying just from trying to seem cool, meaning it's not really working. So it raises the question, what does it cost when we try to seem cool? There's a ton of hot and cold language in this song. It should remind us of only as hot as your last hit from Elizabeth Taylor. Hot and cold brings up fickleness again, rapidly changing opinions, but here apathy is hot. Apathy means not caring, not feeling things being detached, But that's what the cool people do. They pretend not to care. So now we have a new kind of performance. She seems to be saying, everyone is pretending. Everyone is performing. We pretend not to care until we fly into a rage on the internet. It also reminds us of Taylor's statement in an interview that we all have public lives now. We are all performing, we're all pretending one thing or another, even if it's just pretending that we don't really care, and she, the showgirl has tried to pretend not to care too but it's killing her and she's ready to confess, at least to part of it and to whomever she's singing to hear. She says that was a lie about saying she was busy and saying she didn't believe in marriage. Both are ways of pretending she's not vulnerable. If you're busy, you can't be rejected because you're not available anyway. And if you don't believe in marriage, you can't be hurt by someone not proposing to you after however many years of a relationship. But now she's confessing that was a front. In other words, I am vulnerable, I'm soft. I care. As much as I try to pretend that I don't, I do. She says. I have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness. It's one of my favorite lines. Maybe because I'm an Enneagram four side note. I think Taylor might be a three wing four, but this tells us she doesn't feel like she fits in and she talks about it like it's a disease, but then she flips it in the next line because she says she's been dying from trying to seem cool. So it's actually the trying not to be unique. That is killing her, or maybe both. She's damned if she fits in and she's damned. If she doesn't, then we get to the chorus, but I'm not a bad bitch. And this isn't savage. It's this soaring, romantic, gorgeous melody paired with this blatantly incongruous language slang, but not just any slang, a curse word. The clean version says, I'm not the baddest, but we lose something there. I think the melody feels so earnest, but the words themselves feel almost forced. We could talk about her word choice in this line alone for probably an hour, but I'll leave it at pointing out how she is once again playing with dissonance. Intentionally making us uncomfortable by putting two things together that don't quite fit, which should make us ask why. Why don't they fit, and what might she be trying to communicate through that? As far as the words themselves, I read this as her commenting on maybe explaining what she did in father figure. She sure seemed like a bad bitch there. So she's saying, I know it seems that way, but that's not really what's going on. And in the next line, she clarifies her true motivations. But I'm never gonna let you down. I'm never gonna leave you out. So many traders, smooth operators, but I'm never gonna break that vow. I'm never gonna leave you now. There are so many smooth operators who will betray you out there, but I'm not one of them. I'm never going to betray you. I'm never gonna let you down. I'm never gonna leave you. Perhaps what she did in Father figure was, at least in part, in order to protect whomever she's singing to here, or at least that's what she's trying to communicate. Vow certainly has connotations of a marriage vow, but let's remember, that's not the only kind of vow or promise out there. Hadn't her mentor promised to protect her? Sure. There's probably a layer of this that is Taylor singing to Travis, but that doesn't mean our showgirl is also singing to a lover she's promising to marry. Remember, this is only track five, so we're not even halfway through the story yet. and in the next song she's singing about wishing she'd kissed her high school crush. So that seems like a bit of an odd choice if this song is saying, I want to marry you, and then five minutes later she is singing about how she wished she'd kiss someone else. That said, I don't hate the idea of her having met her honey this early in the story because that emphasizes that finding her Prince charming is not the point. It's part of the story, but it's not the climax. It's not her primary goal. It's part of a fulfilling life, but it's not the sum total. Still, the song leaves it open-ended. It could be a sibling or a friend or a protege of her own or herself a part of herself, maybe her inner child that she's singing to. Whoever it is. This person or this moment certainly seems to make her think about her childhood. And the next verse makes it sound to me like it might have been someone she knew as a kid. Someone who maybe knew about her broken arm. She says, this is verse two. You know, the last time I laughed this hard was on the trampoline in someone's backyard. I must have been about eight or nine. That's the night I fell off and broke my arm. So whoever she's singing to here makes her laugh something she hasn't done in a genuine way since she was a kid. How sad is that? There's also a hint that laughing that hard, letting her guard down is dangerous since she fell and broke her arm. what other kind of injuries might she have suffered when she let down her guard in the past. And then shortly after that it says she learned cautious discretion. Be careful. Don't let your guard down because you might break your arm when your first crush crushes something kind. Her first heartbreak, maybe with some cruelty involved, that hardened her, taught her not to let down her guard. Then our pre-chorus, every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter, so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire. We get the title of the song. I love the word play here of sheep and wolves. There's the saying, wolves dressed up in sheep's clothing, which might be a great way to describe her former mentor. but here it's reversed. She and all the other eldest daughters who had to grow up too fast were sheep, in need of protection pretending to look like wolves. They had to pretend to be tough for their own protection so that they weren't slaughtered. so we dressed up as wolves and we looked fire. It is a weird choice of words there. Fire brings in the hot and cold motif again. It also is another piece of slang that hits kind of strangely in this line. They looked hot, meaning attractive. So to me that line comments on how we as women can be complicit in our own objectification and sexualization. something I talked about in my lesson on the fate of Ophelia music video. We think that's what we want, that that's what will bring us the attention and praise that we so desperately long for. But in so doing, we end up participating in our own enslavement. Then we get to the bridge, we lie back a beautiful time lapse Ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs and things I said were dumb. She said these wholesome innocent things were dumb because she was trying to be cool. The bridge continues cause I thought that I'd never find that beautiful life that shimmers that innocent light back like when we were young. So she thought she would never find that innocent life again that she experienced as a child. The last new lyrics in this song are every youngest child felt like they were raised up in the wild, but now your home, so whoever this is, this person is a youngest child, at least in some sense of that phrase, yes, that is literally true of Travis. Could also be true of many other people. Again, literally or figuratively raised in the wild on their own. But now you're home. You're safe with me. It leaves me asking the question, though, does she feel like she's home? I'm not convinced she does. The song revolves around insecurity. I'm not really like that. I promise I won't betray you, even though it seems like I might. Even though you're starting to hear things about me, to see things in me that scare you or at least concern you, it's not true. That's not the real me. It also continues the theme we noticed in the fate of Ophelia, where she is getting what she thought she wanted, but then realizing it's not as great as she expected. She had a huge triumph and father figure. And it's not that she would necessarily do things differently or that she isn't glad to have the artistic control and financial independence that she fought so hard to attain, but she's also not as fulfilled as she thought she would be now that the dust has settled. She's looking around at her life and wondering, why am I not happy? Isn't this everything I wanted? And in this song, she's realizing that none of that matters if she becomes a person she doesn't like. I hear it as her reassuring herself as much as anyone else, and in fact, when she says. I'm never gonna let you down. I'm never gonna leave you. I'm never gonna break that vow. I hear it as her reassuring herself as much as anyone else reassuring herself about her loyalty, her morality, and there's a longing throughout this song to return to something that she feels like she's lost. An innocence, an open-heartedness that she perhaps sees vanishing as this showgirl persona takes over. In fact, the whole song could be sung to herself, to her inner child, or that part of her whom she finds when the showgirl takes a night off. She's saying, I have to be tough to survive in this world, but I don't wanna lose who I really am. This introduces a new layer for our inner conflict, defining the focus for what I see as Act two of our three ACT drama. Can she stay kind? Can she stay vulnerable? Can she stay loyal, including perhaps most importantly to herself? so hopefully that helps you make some sense of how this song actually does fit in this story about a showgirl, both musically and lyrically. And it might make you rethink your interpretations of some of the songs that follow. Here are some discussion questions for you to ponder, First one, who do you think the showgirl is singing to in this song? Support your answer with evidence from the text as always, and be sure to consider the songs that came before this one. And perhaps those that come next as well. Next question. Humor me. If this album is a villain's origin story, how would that change your reading of this song? What if this confessional tone is actually her most convincing performance yet? And now for your writing prompts. For memoir, what is your birth order and how do you think that's influenced who you are? Write about the role you played in your family as a child and what that taught you about life number two. Write about a time when you laughed really hard. Who were you with and what was happening? Then, do you laugh like that now? Why or why not? Number three, who feels like home to you? Who can you be your most authentic self around? What comes out when you're with that person that you often keep hidden around others? And for fiction. Explore the concept of your main character, realizing they're starting to become someone they don't want to be or don't like. How is the challenge they're facing pushing them to sacrifice their values in some way? Number two, begin a story with a character promising. I'm never gonna leave you. Who are they speaking to? And why is this promise difficult to keep? Number three, write about a childhood experience that informs your adult character's behavior. What happened and what did they learn from it? Experiment with it being a kind of parallel to something the character is experiencing in the present of your story. Now, if you're enjoying these writing prompts, I've got something special for you. I am collecting all of them in one place so that you can easily reference them instead of having to write them down as you're listening I will be updating it as I release each episode, so you'll always have everything that's been released to date. You can get your hands on it by going to maraeller.com/prompts. Just enter your email address and I'll send it straight to your inbox. And that is it for today's lesson on Eldest Daughter. We'll be picking up next time with Ruin the friendship. if you're loving these deep dives. Make sure to follow the podcast or come join the discussion on social media. My links are in the show notes. I'd love to hear your questions, comments, and insights. class is always about bringing you into the conversation, helping you to do your own thinking and come to your own conclusions, so I'd love to see you involved. Until next time, class dismissed.