Martyrdom / Christ-figure

In Taylor Swift's songwriting, the martyr or Christ-figure is the speaker, or occasionally the person she loves, cast as a sacrifice, borrowing the imagery of Christ: dying for someone's sins, being crucified, laid out on the altar. It is the religious version of giving everything up for love, but with a particular shape, the willing victim who suffers so that someone else is spared. In The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived she says she would have died for your sins, taking on the wrongdoing of the man who hurt her. In Guilty as Sin? she imagines rolling the stone away from the tomb only to find they are gonna crucify me anyway, cast as the figure punished no matter what she does. The same sacrificial note sounds in So Long London's I died on the altar waiting for the proof, which the catalogue keeps under Altar for its wedding-and-sacrifice double meaning.

The point of the figure is that the suffering is chosen, and that it is suffering on someone else's behalf. It gives heartbreak the weight of a sacrifice, not just losing someone but being made the one who pays for them. That can be sincere, a real sense of having given herself up for a love that did not save her back, or it can carry an edge of irony, the speaker noticing she will be blamed and crucified whatever she does, so she may as well choose. It is close kin to the Altar, where the sacrifice is laid, and closely related to Worship, but where worship is about the devotion given, this is about the body offered up. The cluster is still small, so the reading is held lightly for now.

Appears in 2 songs