Cage
The cage as a site of confinement and control: the speaker has been contained, restrained, and prevented from expressing her natural power or wildness. Connected to the circus animal and the asylum.
The cage represents the systematic containment of the speaker's authentic self - by the industry, by cultural expectations, by gendered norms. The caging is what produces the 'crazy' behavior the cage-keepers then use to justify the caging.
Appears in 2 songs
“You caged me and then you called me crazy I am what I am 'cause you trained me”
The cage represents the confinement and control imposed on the speaker by the industry and culture, she was contained, controlled, and then blamed for the damage that confinement caused. The cage connects to both the circus animal imagery (caged tiger) and the asylum (institutionalized).
“I just learned these people only raise you To cage you”
The cage represents the constricted, predetermined life the small-town religious community has built for the narrator, childhood and adolescence as an enclosure designed to contain and control rather than nurture. Uncle Jerry reads it as 'capture your spirit, to keep you enclosed in this space that I've built for you that we call your childhood and adolescence.'