Maxine Lewis: taking on Taylor

The classics are having a moment. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a box-office hit and singers from Beyoncé to Hozier are referencing classical mythology.

Then there’s Taylor Swift, who tends to translate myths into contemporary personal stories, as she does in ‘Cassandra’ (The Tortured Poets Department, 2024), co-written and produced with Aaron Dessner.

A self-confessed ‘Swiftie’, Dr Maxine Lewis, a senior lecturer in classics and ancient history, has a long-time fascination with the mythological Cassandra.

“She’s a really interesting figure because she speaks in public, she’s visible, but she’s also completely ignored, and she’s often portrayed as being mad – although she’s always right in the end,” says Maxine, who also leads the University’s gender studies programme and is a musician.

A recap: Cassandra was a Trojan princess who received the gift of prophecy from the god Apollo, but after she rejected his romantic advances, he cursed her so that no one would ever believe her. Consequently, her fellow Trojans dismissed her predictions about the Trojan Horse, which led to the sack of Troy. She was later claimed as a war prize by the Greek king Agamemnon and taken to Mycenae. Although she clearly foresaw their fate, her warnings were again ignored, and she was murdered, alongside the king, by the king’s vengeful wife Clytemnestra and her lover.

Listening to Swift’s take on this story in her song, Maxine had the idea to connect several things in one article: Cassandra the myth, Swift’s version, and her own expertise in classics and gender.

“I started to go back into all these other versions of Cassandra and different ways that people have portrayed her and other supposed mad women. A lot of Swift’s songs already deal with this idea of women who have been disbelieved while they were actually correct, and who experienced sexism and were treated as witches.”

In ‘Cassandra’, Swift controversially suggests her prophecies were believed, says Maxine, but people just didn’t want to deal with them and so they killed her because she knew the truth.

So, did Swift misunderstand the original myth or was this deliberate? 

“Songwriters can make mistakes, but it might have been a deliberate intervention, and she’s changing an aspect of the story. If so, what does that mean for her song?”

In an article published in Classical Receptions Journal, Maxine argues that Swift has consciously transformed Cassandra’s story to highlight how society can punish female truth-tellers.

Swift positions herself as a woman songwriter, and this helped Maxine fit her into the lineage of female poets – from Sappho and Erinna to New Zealand poet Anna Jackson – that the academic teaches.

In the past five years, academia has woken up to the cultural phenomenon of Swift, who Maxine says now has a recognisable body of scholarship devoted to her.

“Swift didn’t attract very much scholarly attention for at least the first ten years of her career, partly because of sexism in the music industry.”

For example, prominent online American music magazine Pitchfork didn’t deem any of her albums worthy of review until Ryan Adams covered 1989, although it chose to review his version of the album, not Swift’s.

Tellingly, Maxine notes that the first journal issue anywhere dedicated to Swift had the subtitle ‘Taking Taylor seriously’, and that was in 2021.

Maxine’s own Swift scholarship is now moving to a potentially bigger project. She’s gone through “every word of every song and every music video, cataloguing every Swiftian reference to sex, gender and sexism” – something she believes she’s the first to do. The result, ‘Taylor Swift, Gender, and Feminism: What Do the Data Say?’, appears in The Manuscript: Journal of Taylor Swift Studies.

Maxine says her research on Swift is the perfect confluence of her own musical interests, and her focus on gender and sexuality in history and literature.

“But ‘Cassandra’ really gave me an excuse to completely immerse myself.”