Angela & Uncle Jerry examine mad woman from folklore (2020), exploring its feminist critique of how women are characterized as hysterical, mad, or witchy, and how Taylor Swift reclaims those labels through animal imagery, literary allusion, and sustained repetition.
Key Insights
Uncle Jerry identifies the title's central ambiguity — 'mad' as both insane and angry — as the poem's governing tension, with both meanings active throughout. The song opens in medias res as a dramatic monologue, immediately generating multiple unanswered questions from a single line. Angela & Uncle Jerry trace the characterization of women as hysterical or insane through 3,000 years of male-authored literature, from Plato and St. Augustine through Thomas Aquinas and Robert Manning of Brunne. The song's sustained use of animal imagery — scorpion, bear, dragon — functions as a kind of witchy shape-shifting, with the speaker willingly embracing each monstrous characterization. Uncle Jerry notes that repetition is used more consistently and pervasively in this poem than in any other Taylor Swift song they have analyzed.
Literary Analysis
Uncle Jerry frames the song as a dramatic monologue beginning in medias res, with a first-person narrator addressing a silent second-person interlocutor. He traces the word 'hysteria' to the Greek 'hystera' (uterus) and the ancient medical theory of the wandering uterus, connecting this to centuries of male characterization of women as insane, citing Plato, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologia, and Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar is identified as a foundational feminist critical text, particularly its treatment of Jane Eyre's literal madwoman and the subversive character of Jane herself. Uncle Jerry identifies the scorpion metaphor through three folkloric traditions: the Scorpion and the Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Frog, and the myth of Scorpion and Orion. Bear imagery is connected to bear baiting (outlawed 1835) and witchy shape-shifting traditions including Navajo skin walkers. The 'noose' image connects to witch-lynching. The phrase 'there's nothing like a mad woman' is read as an echo of William Congreve's The Mourning Bride ('there is nothing like a woman scorned'). Uncle Jerry notes the double use of 'like' as preposition and verb in the chorus as particularly sophisticated wordplay. He falls into biographical criticism for the bridge, identifying possible references to Scott Borchetta, Scooter Braun, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian. The theme of 'making your own monsters' is explored through Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, the Bride of Frankenstein, and the film Splice. Uncle Jerry suggests the poem would be stronger without the biographical elements of the bridge, preferring a more universal, detached treatment of the larger problem of how women are treated.
Concepts Explored
Literary Devices
References
Literary Quotes Referenced
None quoted verbatim; references discussed include The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar)
Summa Theologia (Thomas Aquinas)
Handlyng Synne (Robert Manning of Brunne)
The Mourning Bride (William Congreve — 'there is nothing like a woman scorned')
the Scorpion and the Frog/Tortoise fables
and the myth of Orion and Scorpius.
People & Figures Mentioned
Connections Across the Work
Shared themes appear across the archive
Recommended Reading
In Medias Res: Definition and Examples To Start a Story in the Middle; Dramatic Monologue; The Madwoman in the Attic; Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World; Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language; How Gender Shapes Anger and Aggression
In the Archive
In the archive:
mad womanView song →5 themes traced
10 motifs traced
26 literary devices explored
8 literary references noted