They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
In the end, it was Sylvia who thought that death was worth it indeed, but her disciples now can and should have the chance to feel like queens. The thing about that beloved quote I was so originally unimpressed by, about all the lives Sylvia wanted, is that it continues into a more tender consideration of what it means to be fully who we are. She acknowledges that though she is limited, she is not incapacitated or wounded. She writes, “I have much to live for, yet unaccountably I am sick and sad. Perhaps you could trace my feeling back to my distaste at having to choose between alternatives. Perhaps that’s why I want to be everyone—so no one can blame me for being I.”
The girls who adorn their persons and bedrooms and websites with the work of Sylvia Plath, who allow her words and images and sounds to give shape to their lives, are her legacy. Defying the command that they not end up like Sylvia, they document their lives in details that are always personal, and they do so in kingdoms they’ve crafted and breathed meaning into themselves. The ways they tag and arrange their posts are signals in the night, reaching out to others enduring suffering and nonsense in a world that tells them their hearts are burdens rather than treasures. They are good witches in the wilderness and sages and romantics regardless of any present romance. And they know they are not drawn to the bulb at the back of the oven, but by the flare signals sent out by their fellow travelers. They are flashes of light and recognition, momentary reflections of the sun onto a shred of glitter. But they are something vital nonetheless.
Heavenly Creatures
The Gospels According to Lana, Fiona, and Dolly
This is what makes us girls,
We all look for heaven and we put our love first.
—Lana Del Rey, “This Is What Makes Us Girls”
FIONA APPLE WAS BORN FIONA Apple McAfee-Maggart, the child of an actor father and a singer mother. Her birth name was a mouthful for a performer whose record label wanted to package her as something more ethereal. But the clumsiness of her full name is at home in a childhood spent volleying between Los Angeles summers with her father and school years with her mother in an eclectic New York apartment that featured, among other bizarre decorative flourishes, a crucified Kermit the Frog stuffed animal on the kitchen wall. Fiona’s team reportedly considered endless variations of her names when they were crafting an image for her that they could sell. Fiona’s only reported request was to not include “Apple” in the name. She told Rolling Stone in 1998 that in the end, her contract arrived and her stage name was unceremoniously declared “Fiona Apple” before she was able to object. She said the metaphor didn’t strike her immediately: “The apple: the thing that starts all the knowledge, but that also starts all the trouble.”1
Lana Del Rey came into the world as Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, the child of two Manhattan advertising executives who retreated to the more tranquil boredom of Lake Placid, New York, when she was an infant. It is a digestible, Waspy name certainly, though the wealth and nobility of her background have been in constant dispute since her detractors came for blood in the wake of discovering she had not sprung into the world as a devastated femme fatale. Like much of her life and legend, the origins of Lana’s stage name are shrouded in mystery. Her name’s meanings are more easily discoverable. “Lana” is the Gaelic for “child,” while “Del Rey” is Spanish for “of the king.” This combination is ripe with possibilities for interpretation. The girl child of a king is most literally a princess. More critically, the king can refer to Christ or God himself, his child being either a protégé or a disciple. In any of these cases, where she comes from is explicitly a place of male power. She languishes and thrives under it in due course, but never escapes from that inheritance.
Both women are preternaturally beautiful in that way that makes them hard to look at for too long. Their beauty gives you the sense that it might break something, if it hasn’t already. But in appearance, they share little more than alluring looks and occasionally similar tawny waves of hair—when Lana is not indulging her predilection for more dramatic colors. Fiona Apple’s center of gravity is her eyes; Del Rey’s is her mouth. A Quietus story on Lana from 2011 called her figure “hardy” and “healthy,”2 which stands in stark contrast to the endless speculations that littered media coverage around the time of Fiona’s debut that she was in imminent danger of dying because of her low weight. The press obsessively remarked on Fiona’s slight frame, calling her anorexic as an accusation more than a diagnosis.
Both women draw apt comparisons to their husky, soulful counterparts from yesteryear. Lyrically, they both toil endlessly under the gazes of a sordid assortment of men. They know too well the violent hypnosis of those who hope to possess them—men who can smell the blood on the places where a woman is breaking. And Fiona and Lana have wounds to spare. But what sets them apart further from many of their musical peers are their preoccupations with the theological: the question of how God is present and active (or absent) in their lives. In both of these fragile but well-constructed worlds, the ultimate manifestation of the male gaze is to be witnessed by God. But they diverge sharply when it comes to what that gaze means and how they might be rescued from it or, in some cases, redeemed by it.