From “Don Juan” to “1989”: Why autobiographical art sells

By R.L.

FEW artists have been willing to lay themselves as bare in their art as Sylvia Plath. Her poetry brutally dissects all her personal relationships; her mother is sharply rebuked in “Medusa” (“Old barnacled umbilicus…Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous/repair”), her father in “Daddy” (“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”) and barbs are saved for her unfaithful husband, Ted Hughes, in “The Jailer” (“I wish him dead or away…what would he/do, do, do without me?”). The posthumous collection of her poetry “Ariel”, in which these poems appear, sold 15,000 copies in ten months in Britain. Plath reaped her personal experience for her artistic output, and audiences devoured these snippets of searing emotion from a too-short life.

Plath was far from the first to give public voice to her own private struggles and frustrations—and to make a name for herself in doing so. Thomas Wyatt, a courtier to King Henry VIII, wrote of the “vain travail” of pursuing a lover, rumoured to be Anne Boleyn. Philip Sidney, also a courtier-poet, adopted the language of tormented love as an allegory for his own frustrated career prospects. Airing one's dirty laundry in verse isn’t exclusive to Renaissance rhymesters: the tactic was reused by Romantic and Victorian poets, and especially by modern lyricists. There are very few elements of her career in which Beyoncé can be compared to Tudor poets, but singing about her personal life is one of them. The anger-fuelled lyrics of “Lemonade” —“you ain’t married to no average bitch, boy”, “ten times out of nine, I know you’re lying” and “he better call Becky with the good hair”—were integral to its success. It sold 653,000 units in its first week.

Personal readings, too, were encouraged; the album was touted as a “journey of self-knowledge”. Listeners were invited to go behind Ms Knowles’s public image and delve into a marriage breaking down, with all its accompanying rage, jealousy and reflection. As a commercial strategy, this self-referential approach worked—“Lemonade” has already gone platinum. One website estimates that the album is pulling in $3m a day.

Yet no artist appreciates the market value of self-reference more than Taylor Swift. Her success is founded entirely upon conducting her personal life in the public eye, and then penning bitter, blatant and catchy songs when a lover spurns her. Articles unpicking which song is about which male celebrity abound, though they hardly seem necessary. Most fans of the songstress are aware that her swift relationship with Harry Styles provided the bulk of the content for the bestselling album “1989”. “If my life had been turbulence-free”, Ms Swift states, “maybe my music would be more beige, maybe the stadiums wouldn’t be so full and the mantle would be a little more empty.” Quite right: the “1989” tour alone grossed over $250m.

Ms Swift has received a lot of criticism for her approach, deemed egotistical, pathetic and bitter (this, too, provided song-writing fodder—in “Blank Space” she croons: “Got a long list of ex-lovers | They’ll tell you I’m insane”). But her artistic strategy—selling off the details of her personal life for profit—finds corroboration throughout literary history. Behold George Gordon Byron, whose comic masterpiece “Don Juan” is, in his own words, “almost all…real life, either my own or from people I knew.” Famously described as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” by a lover, he describes the titular character in this work as a “loving lord” who is both “mad” and “bad”. A friend, John Hobhouse, scribbled “this is so very pointed” in the margins. Byron collapsed fact and fiction, and asked his readers to bear in mind his own scandalous life.

Oscar Wilde, another literary celebrity, wove the details of his life and homosexuality into his works. In “The Importance of Being Earnest”, the practice of “bunburying” (using the illness of a fake friend, “Bunbury”, as an excuse to avoid social engagements) allows characters to lead a double life. In “An Ideal Husband”, Wilde presciently imagines his fate through the character of Sir Robert Chiltern: “public disgrace, ruin, terrible shame, the mockery of the world, a lonely dishonoured life [and] a lonely dishonoured death”. Most poignant is “De Profundis”, written to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison, in which Wilde explores their tempestuous—and highly publicised—relationship. Entrusted to Robbie Ross, his literary executor, Wilde clearly intended it for publication, and his confessional brims with details of his pain, sorrow and pleasure. Six editions were produced in five months; so financially successful, in fact, that it allowed Ross to clear Wilde’s bankruptcy.

A university professor once told your correspondent that “no critic takes Sylvia Plath very seriously”, and so it is with Ms Swift (Ms Knowles has suffered less reproach, given the album’s pertinent racial themes). The invective that clouds the careers of Plath and Ms Swift—“melodramatic”, “psychotic”, “conniving”—has rarely been used to describe men doing the same thing. They, like Wyatt, Wilde and Byron, are merely expressing themselves—and reaping the rewards of intrusive celebrity culture at the same time. Giving form to feeling, no matter how dark, bitter or trivial, has been essential to their financial success. Perhaps Ms Swift could include Plath’s words in her next album:

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

and I eat men like air.

Correction: This piece misattributed a quotation to Plath that actually belonged to Maya Angelou. Apologies.