The Plotline Of Taylor Swift: Her Ultimate Heroine’s Journey
Taylor Swift has been on a journey of self-discovery, right before our very eyes, since the beginning of her career.
Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, our heroine has left the comforts of the familiar, journeyed through a strange land, battled pretenders and flying monkeys, and conquered her demons.
I previously outlined her career as it aligns with the classic 12-step hero’s journey, but how does her story line up with the heroine’s journey?
Both journeys are commonly used narrative devices, but it’s not simply about a male hero vs. a female hero.
A hero’s journey is a journey without, through external forces, seeking traditional success.
A heroine’s journey is a journey within.
Our heroine seeks to find her true self, through a difficult exploration of her soul, her true nature, society’s patriarchal ideals, crippling self-doubt, and understanding her role in the world.
What has Taylor gone through on her heroine’s journey? Where has she learned about herself, her place in a patriarchal society, and her innate power? And, as The Eras Tour comes to an end, can we use the heroine’s journey to see what will happen next?
Here’s Taylor Swift’s heroine’s journey, step by step and lesson by lesson. Let’s see what we can learn by using this narrative framework.
The Heroine’s Journey vs. The Hero’s Journey
The heroine’s journey was first coined by Maureen Murdock in her book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness (1990), then honed and refined by Victoria Lynn Schmidt in 45 Master Characters (2001).
Like Christopher Vogler’s more contemporary version of the hero’s journey vs. Joseph Campbell’s original, Schmidt’s is more popular and commonly used in modern narrative construction.
So what’s the major difference between the hero’s journey and the heroine’s journey? Is it just about male protagonists vs. female protagonists?
Nope. It has very little to do with the gender of the character, and more to do with what the protagonist is seeking.
Both types of journeys can be found in pretty much any modern plotline, but the main difference is this: the hero’s journey reaches for outward success. He’s looking for the ring, or the ruby slippers, or to take the crown, or to save a friend.
The heroine’s journey, however, seeks to attain inner success.
In Moana, the titular character seeks her own identity within the context of her family, ancestry, and destiny. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy seeks to find her place in a world which confuses her inner compass. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy seeks to return home, but must accept her own inner power first.
While the hero’s journey is linear – our hero leaves his everyday world, battles enemies, and returns with the magical elixir – the heroine’s journey is cyclical. She can go through several stages simultaneously, backtrack, jump forward, and start over at any time.
The hero’s journey is centrally focused on the plot and the end-goal: get the elixir, return home.
But the heroine’s journey is focused on the journey itself: self-discovery, lessons, understanding, community, and acceptance.
Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey
Here are the steps of the heroine’s journey, as outlined in Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s 45 Master Characters (a must-read for any writer).
- Illusion of the Perfect World: In her everyday world, our heroine keeps themselves naive or disillusioned in order to function. Deep down they know this ordinary existence doesn’t work for them, but they believe if they just keep it up (being “the good girl,” people-pleasing, taking care of others, etc), then they will be fine.
- Betrayal/Disillusionment: Our heroine is betrayed, or something falls apart that breaks her bubble of illusion. Her coping strategies don’t work anymore; this world is not what she thought it was and she can’t exist comfortably until something big changes.
- Awakening & Preparing For the Journey: The whole direction of her life is changed in response to the betrayal or disillusionment. She doesn’t know where her path leads, but she knows she has to move forward.
- The Descent: Passing the Gates of Judgment: She’s given up her old life and way of being, but she experiences doubt, fear, shame, and anxiety about what she’s about to do. She has to surrender control and keep pushing forward with every bit of her strength. Sometimes she experiences a small or large victory against her enemies.
- The Eye of the Storm: She gets a small taste of success, but it gives her a false sense of security. She takes it easy, but the storm hasn’t passed yet: she’s in the eye. Villains are lurking around every corner waiting to pounce.
- Death – All is Lost: The villain comes roaring back with a vengeance. He’s threatened by her accomplishments, and seeks to destroy her. It looks like all is lost. She may momentarily wallow in defeat, but then regroups and comes up with new strategies.
- Support: She’s gone through the turmoil, and learned that she has to accept help from others. She needs to prove herself to herself, and learn that just because she accepts help doesn’t mean she’s not enough.
- Rebirth/Moment of Truth: She faces every challenge head-on; nothing can stop her now. She comes into her full power. She can never go back to the woman she was before, nor does she want to.
- Full Circle: Return to the Perfect World: Our heroine returns home to see just how far she’s come. Her reward is within her: she’s now different, so her world looks different. Her experience is shared with others, and has a ripple effect. Her outlook, and her story, pave the way for others to complete their own heroine’s journeys.
Taylor’s Heroine’s Journey, Step by Step
Here’s each step of Taylor’s journey, outlined with in-depth explanation.
For each step, I’ll give you an example to help provide context: the heroine’s journey of Cady from Mean Girls (yes, Tina Fey writes not just comedy, but heroine’s journeys, too!).
Stage 1: Illusion of the Perfect World
Cady in Mean Girls: Our protagonist Cady moves from Africa back to America, optimistic that she’ll fit right in and have a normal high school experience.
Taylor Swift’s self-titled debut album, released in 2006, presented us with our protagonist: “a small town girl, living in a lonely world” (to quote the iconic Journey song).
“Debut,” as most Swifties call it, was full of hometown heartbreak, the optimism of youth, country twang and yearning to leave her small town roots.
Taylor was young, extremely talented, and – most importantly – a songwriter. In an era of mass-produced music and manufactured pop groups, Taylor wrote and performed her own creations, distinguishing her from every other performer at the time.
She then introduced Fearless in 2008, which would go on to become the most acclaimed country album of all time.
She revealed in the Fearless TV Prologue:
“Fearless was an album full of magic and curiosity, the bliss and devastation of youth. It was the diary of the adventures and explorations of a teenage girl who was learning tiny lessons with every new crack in the facade of the fairytale ending she’d been shown in the movies.”
The cracks were beginning to show in her everyday world. She wasn’t like everyone else, and soon she’d learn that that otherness would become both a vulnerability and a superpower.
As she told us in the Miss Americana documentary, her entire persona when she was a teenager was about people-pleasing: trying to be the “good girl.” She lived for applause and pats on the back.
As she began her trajectory to superstardom, the cracks in her world – and in her confidence in her place within it – were beginning to show.
Stage 2: Betrayal/Disillusionment
Cady in Mean Girls: Comes to find that high school is complicated, and the new people who populate her world are treacherous, two-faced, and must be navigated carefully.
After the release of Fearless, the awards began pouring in. But with the acclaim came the inevitable criticism, the loudest of which were the voices questioning her worth.
She revealed in the Speak Now TV Prologue:
“I was trying to create a follow up to the most awarded country album in history, while staring directly into the face of intense criticism. I had been widely and publicly slammed for my singing voice and was first encountering the infuriating question that is unfortunately still lobbed at me to this day: does she really write her songs?
Spoiler alert: I really, really do.”
Between Fearless and Speak Now, Taylor faced her first big betrayal. The world, who saw her as the small town country girl, began to question her talent. For a girl who lived for pats on the back, this was a huge blow.
Her coping strategies weren’t working anymore, so she came up with a new one: solo writing credits, in order to prove everyone wrong. She wrote the entirety of Speak Now with only one name in the liner notes: Taylor Swift.
“…this was the beginning of my series of creative choices made by reacting to setbacks with defiance…my stubbornness in the face of doubters and dissenters would become my coping mechanism through my entire career from that point forward.”
-Taylor Swift, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) Prologue
But another big betrayal landed at this point in her career: heartbreak. Not small, everyday heartbreak, but massive, all-encompassing, hide-under-the-covers-for-weeks heartbreak.
Red is a reflection of this second major betrayal, and the album “resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end.”
Both of these major betrayals would set the scene for her journey, and for her massive career that was just getting started.
Stage 3: Awakening & Preparing For the Journey
Cady in Mean Girls: Agrees to befriend “the plastics” in order to gain intel for Damian & Janis and take down Regina from the inside. Cady crushes hard on Aaron from her math class & pretends to be stupid to get him to talk to her more.
In her Red era and leading up to 1989, Taylor reinvented herself for the first time.
“You see—in the years preceding this, I had become the target of slut-shaming—the intensity and relentlessness of which would be criticized and called out if it happened today, the jokes about my amount of boyfriends. The trivialization of my songwriting as if it were a predatory act of a boy crazy psychopath, the media co-signing of this narrative. I had to make it stop because it was starting to really hurt….Being a consummate optimist, I assumed I could fix this if I simply changed my behavior.”
-Taylor Swift, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) Prologue
She moved to New York, stopped dating and only hung out with female friends, and changed her personal style and style of music.
She was criticized for dating, and for writing about dating. So she stopped both. But it didn’t stop the criticism.
What she likely didn’t know at the time was that this first reinvention was akin to a practice-run for her largest reinvention yet to come. But first, she’d have to descend into the depths of despair and disillusionment.
Stage 4: The Descent – Passing the Gates of Judgment
Cady in Mean Girls: Fully immersed in the world of the plastics, Cady starts becoming one of them. She has trouble deciphering what’s real and what’s pretend. At a house party, she’s betrayed by the head plastic when Regina “steals back” her old boyfriend, Cady’s crush.
After 1989, Taylor disappeared from the public eye. Snakegate targeted her name and reputation, and the minions of her enemies tried their hardest to cancel her.
It didn’t work.
Taylor hid away, regrouped, and shapeshifted again. When she re-emerged with her sixth studio album reputation, in 2017, it was a different Taylor than we’d ever seen before. Her color palette was dark, her lyrics were darker, and she no longer shied away from biting back at her critics.
“I’ve been in the public eye since I was 15 years old. On the beautiful, lovely side of that, I’ve been so lucky to make music for a living and look out into crowds of loving, vibrant people. On the other side of the coin, my mistakes have been used against me, my heartbreaks have been used as entertainment, and my songwriting has been trivialized as ‘oversharing.’ “
-Taylor Swift, reputation Prologue
It’s at this point that our heroine is stripped of everything from her old world, and her old weapons and coping strategies don’t work anymore. She must up the ante, and find power within herself to keep moving forward.
Instead of running away from the critics as she had done before, reputation confronted them directly. She leaned into the gossip, turning the entire narrative on its head.
She seemed to come out on top once again, but “the descent” also usually foreshadows the major battle that is to come in step 6, usually with the same enemies.
For Taylor, the battle with Kanye & his crew wasn’t over, and she’d need all her strength to make it past the next devastating blows.
Stage 5: The Eye of the Storm
Cady in Mean Girls: Janis, Damian & Cady regroup after the betrayal. They plot to take down Regina once and for all.
After reputation shot Taylor back into the stratosphere, she completed a stadium tour and began working on her seventh album, Lover.
Things seemed relatively calm in this era, but all was not calm behind the scenes. Taylor quietly left her original label, Big Machine Records, after her contract was up, and signed with Republic. This would come back to haunt her in the years to come.
Lover really was the eye of the storm; a halo of purple-pink sky before the hurricane hit. The hurricane still had Kanye’s face on it, but the swirling, twirling chaos within was actually his manager, Scooter Braun.
Little did she know (or maybe she did know?) that she’d made another enemy behind the scenes: her former manager and label owner Scott Borchetta. For while Taylor was planning Loverfest and basking in her pastel-hued era, her enemies were building their armaments.
Stage 6: Death – All is Lost
Cady in Mean Girls: Regina is ostracized, and the plastics look to Cady as their new leader. Janis & Damian have fully lost her to the plastics and her newfound popularity. Regina frames Cady with the burn book, making her public enemy #1 & sending the school into chaos.
In 2019, Scott Borchetta sold Taylor’s former label, Big Machine Records, to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings. Included in the sale (and likely the very reason for the sale) was the rights to the master recordings of Taylor’s first six albums (Swifties refer to this situation as “the masters heist“).
This was the blow to end all blows. Taylor had tried to purchase her masters, but was offered ridiculous terms that would force her to submit new music to “earn” her old music back. It was a power struggle built for her to lose.
On top of this, another enemy was creeping up: Covid. Taylor’s planned tour, Loverfest, was canceled, and like the rest of the world, Taylor went into isolation. How would she keep writing music about her life, when she couldn’t be out living her life?
But like the true heroine that she is, she didn’t go quietly into that good night. She kept writing, kept reflecting, and kept making new music. She dropped folklore and evermore only a few months apart, hitting the world with the most vulnerable and nuanced music she’d ever written.
She also did something incredibly important with these two albums: she wrote fictional worlds. folklore and evermore were released with the caveat that the contents of the songs was partially fiction, which really killed two birds with one stone.
The first bird was how to write about life when you can’t leave your house, and the second was the constant criticism she received for writing about her dating life. It was a brilliant move, and showed that our heroine was far from crushed. She was just re-arming herself.
Stage 7: Support
Cady in Mean Girls: After a school-wide brawl, the girls come together to talk through the issues with their cliques and judgmental attitudes. Regina, insisting she’s not the problem, is hit by a bus.
In her pandemic bubble, Taylor wasn’t only working on new music; she was also working on old music.
With the support of her collaborators, friends, family, and fans, she released her first “Taylor’s Version” album in April of 2021: Fearless (Taylor’s Version). To keep fans incentivised, she included entirely new art, new vault tracks, and a new prologue.
Red (Taylor’s Version) followed the same path of success, and was released just six months later in November of 2021.
In 2022, she released her 10th studio album, Midnights. Retaining the vivid storytelling of her folkmore era, Taylor also retained part of her secret weapon from those albums.
While folklore and evermore came with the caveat that not all of these stories were true, Midnights came with the caveat that not all of these stories were current.
Midnights contained musings of “13 sleepless nights” throughout her life. In other words, these songs were autobiographical, but not chronological.
This was an important weapon in her arsenal, as it kept speculation to a minimum while still allowing her to live and write about her life.
Schmidt says of this step of the heroine’s journey, “She accepts that she is female and embraces it as a positive thing. So often, she has tried to become a man to live in a man’s world. Now she’ll define her own world.”
While she was working on Midnights and her re-records, Taylor was indeed crafting her own world from beginning to end. She was also – quietly, behind the scenes – crafting a groundbreaking tour that would tell her entire life story through her music.
Stage 8: Rebirth/Moment of Truth
Cady in Mean Girls: Cady comes clean, reunites with her true friends Janis & Damian, and apologizes to everyone. She joins the mathletes, no longer denying her intelligence and becoming her true self.
Taylor announced The Eras Tour in 2022, and fans went absolutely wild. It immediately became the hottest ticket ever issued, and broke all sales records from the very beginning.
She kicked off the tour in Glendale, Arizona, on March 17, 2023 to immediate acclaim. She had already been in the headlines a lot with her whopping 5 album releases in 2 years, but The Eras Tour sent her fame and power to a new height, breaking every glass ceiling ever conceived of.
In 2023, she released Speak Now TV and 1989 TV during the tour, but all was not shiny and sparkly behind the scenes. Taylor and her longtime boyfriend broke up during the tour, but being the consummate professional, the show went on. And on. And on.
A short-lived fling with another huge star fueled speculation and criticism, but the show kept going on, despite the constant tabloid and social media headlines.
As if seven recent albums weren’t enough, Taylor began hinting at new music. In 2024, she debuted her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department and The Anthology, which gave us a candid look at what she was going through personally in 31 devastating songs.
Here’s what I find most interesting about TTPD and its timing: her studio albums leading up to TTPD (folklore, evermore, Midnights) were either “fiction,” or “history”.
TTPD came with no such disclaimer. In fact, it came with a blatant, full-on confessional in the form of a candid poem and prologue.
These songs were about her current personal life, lived largely in the public eye due to the tour, and gave us more personal access than ever before.
Why now? Because she was (and is) too big to fail. Her fanbase is too large and passionate for another cancellation. Her position on the pedestal is too high to be knocked off – no one can even reach her to try.
This is where her real heroine arc comes full circle. She wrote about her life, got criticized for writing about her life, stopped writing about her life, gained more power than seems humanly possible, then blatantly wrote about her life once again.
Why? Because she’s come into her full power. She’s learned that no matter what she does, someone will hate it, and someone will try to take her down because of it. But she’s built an arsenal, stockpiled her castle, and rallied her allies to defend her.
She is now truly queen of the castle, and she wasn’t simply placed there by nepotism. She built that castle, brick by brick, and then rebuilt it brick by brick, until it was an impenetrable fortress.
What keeps her there? Her innate power, her arsenal of tactics and weapons, and her allies (including the largest fanbase in the world).
Stage 9: Full Circle: Return to the Perfect World
Cady in Mean Girls: At the school dance, she wins the crown and breaks it apart and hands out the pieces, symbolizing the disbanding of the school cliques once and for all.
In my view, we’re nearly at this step in Taylor’s heroine’s journey right now. The Eras Tour is about to end, we’re coming up (hopefully) on her last two albums of the re-record project.
So what will happen after the heroine’s journey comes to an end?
Most writers agree that the central difference between a hero’s journey and a heroine’s journey comes down to two simple differences.
First, the hero’s journey is about one person, while the heroine’s journey is about the collective.
In Mean Girls, Cady and the rest of the school learn to live in harmony by simply accepting themselves and others. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy, her co-workers and friends, learn that you don’t need to sacrifice your morals to be successful. In The Hunger Games, Katniss and her compatriots learn you can only defeat the enemy by banding together.
Second, the hero’s journey is linear, while the heroine’s journey is cyclical, and can skip around from step to step based on the plotline. Villains re-emerge, the heroine experiences a loss, an ally turns to an enemy, what was lost is now found, etc.
While Frodo seeks the ring and gets it through a series of trials, what Cady seeks is less tangible: a “normal” teenage social life. There is no single defining victory in the heroine’s journey, because the real victory is within.
Taylor’s journey, in other words, isn’t over. It will keep going, and keep cycling between steps, forevermore.
But if we are the collective in Taylor’s heroine’s journey, what have we learned? What has our ultimate heroine taught us in her journey so far?
Ultimately, it’s a lesson about feminine power and the patriarchy. You’ll always get knocked down as a woman in a man’s world, and you have to keep pushing – and keep trying – to get back up.
Power isn’t given freely; it’s earned through hard work, perseverance, and harnessing your innate feminine power.
That’s our lesson, and it is one that will resonate through the ages because of a small town girl and her guitar.
Taylor’s Heroine’s Journey: Final Thoughts
Since the heroine’s journey is really about inner change and not outward success, we may not ever get to know what the real conclusion to the story is. We can guess, but we may never get to know the most important aspect: what it means to Taylor, the heroine herself
Of course, I sincerely hope that Taylor will clue us in before she moves onto the next era, either with a documentary, the final vault tracks, or with new music.
But if she doesn’t? That’s just fine!
It’s her journey, and not ours. We can take our lessons, as the collective feminine watching our powerful heroine, but we may not get to find out hers.
It’s been a long time comin’ for this heroine, and I – for one – can’t wait to see where she goes next. It’s a joy just to be in the audience.
Read More:
What Will Happen After The Eras Tour? Ranking the Possibilities
Mapping Taylor’s Hero’s Journey & What Comes Next
The Ultimate Guide to Taylor Swift’s Literary References
The Narrative Thread: What Taylor’s Plaid Looks Really Mean
Why is Taylor Swift So Popular?
Taylor Swift’s Songwriting Style & What Makes it Effective
