Who is Clara Bow and what does she have to do with The Tortured Poets Department?

Edited By Sanghmitra Khanna

The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor Swift’s next album, set to release on April 19, 2024. There are sixteen songs listed on the album, which was developed during the US leg of the Eras Tour in 2023. 

Clara Bow, the final song on the album, is interesting in particular because the titular character was actually a real person. Bow was a famous American actress in the 1920s, and became a sex symbol of the time. She had some major breakdowns over the course of her career, even ending up at a sanatorium.

Something about Clara’s personality reminded me of Swift herself. There is definitely some deeper connection between the two. While Swift has had no obvious, serious breakdowns during her career at the time of writing, she does often sing about heartbreak, mental health, and dealings with anxiety. Perhaps this was the reason Swift resonated with Bow.

Clara Bow was also infamous due to her romantic entanglements with various celebrities like Victor Fleming, Gilbert Roland, and Gary Cooper. Her love life was the subject of much discussion, even after she married. It is evident that this is one of the reasons Swift chose to incorporate Bow into her album — it is an understatement to say that Swift’s romantic life is constantly scrutinized and plastered publicly. After all, the first things that came up after one types “Taylor Swift” into a Google search bar are seven newspaper articles on her and Travis Kelce — in this case, spotted kissing in Singapore. Swift and Kelce have been publicly together since September 2023, so one would think that headlines like this would be tired by now or old news, but the public continue to consume this kind of journalism. In this sense, there are obvious similarities between Bow and Swift’s lives.

Bow was also considered the world’s first ‘it girl’ (the term being coined after her role in the movie ‘It’), whilst Taylor Swift is arguably the ‘it girl’ of the moment. This represents yet another similarity between the two. It seems the phrase ‘it girl’ does not just project images of a young woman with sex appeal and an engaging presence, particularly para-socially, but also to women who suffer. Both Swift and Bow have had difficulties during their lives, which one documented through songs whilst the other spoke about: but both had these difficulties broadcasted and in part shaped by media. 

Something Bow once said has stuck with me: “All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing, there’s a feeling of tragedy underneath; she’s unhappy and disillusioned, and that’s what people sense”. Here, Bow characterises the flapper is pretending to be someone she is not — someone putting on a brave face, but not quite being able to mask it. Underneath the act, there is something else: and this is not quite unlike contemporary Swift. Think about all the times that TikTok has been full of shots of Swift singing along to songs about Joe Alwyn post-breakup and the analysis that accompanies: while she sings and dances, she is actually unhappy. To be an ‘it girl’ is to be linked to sadness. To have everything you must also have nothing.

Swift has clearly incorporated Clara Bow into her album for a reason, perhaps to make a statement about the media and how it depicts women and the effects of such journalism. Until the album comes out and we have access to the song as a whole, we can only speculate; but whatever the reason is, there are undeniable links between both Bow and Swift we can be sure she’ll highlight in her lyricism.