“A woman left lonely”: pariah femininity and the posthumous career of Janis Joplin

ABSTRACT

American singer Janis Joplin (1943–1970) is famed for her impressively raw vocals, intense performance style, and as a pioneering woman in rock. She is perhaps equally well-known for her hedonistic philosophy and her tragic death from a heroin overdose when she was 27. Using newspaper coverage of significant events in Joplin’s career as well as biographies and documentaries, an overall arc can be traced which demonstrates the changing reception of her music and career across time. Especially important is the narrative woven around Joplin’s life which situates her behaviours as a result of loneliness and vulnerability. This over-simplistic reframing of Joplin’s hedonistic attitude, appetite for sex, alcohol, and drugs, and raspy vocals merely as the actions of a troubled soul is a reductive account of a complex situation: it removes Joplin’s agency. This article argues that this provides a way of retrospectively neutralizing the threat of transgressive womanhood—Joplin deviated from an idealized femininity and this can be retrospectively reframed or rationalized by commentators; a “deviant” woman poses less of a threat to the dominant gender order if she is not perceived to have been in control of her actions.

KEYWORDS:

• Janis Joplin
• posthumous fame
• agency
• addiction
• femininity

Introduction

Writing about posthumous fame, the musicologist Sheila Whiteley (2006) has claimed that, “It is (…) apparent, and important, that women do not enjoy the same mythologizing as their male counterparts, the gods, the kings, the shamans of rock” (334).

Certainly, it is hard to argue with this sentiment. But if we do not mythologize dead female musicians in the same way we do with dead male musicians, then how do we remember them? In particular, how do we approach female musicians who have died from the excesses of rock, a death typically associated with men?

Where figures such as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison—rock stars who died through misadventure—become secular deities in death, women such as Joplin, who met a similar fate, become moral lessons. They are also less financially lucrative, as evidenced by Ruth Penfold-Mounce's (2020) research into the Forbes Dead Rich List. Writing in 1995, Simon Reynolds and Joy Press have pointed out that where Hendrix and Morrison sell millions of records each year, Joplin shifts around 50,000 (271). This paper explores the narratives formed around Joplin and her career before and after her death. Using newspaper coverage from significant events in Joplin’s career, an overall arc can be traced which demonstrates the changing reception of her music and career across time.

Particularly important is the narrative woven around Joplin’s life in which she is framed as lonely and vulnerable. Discussions of the traumas she faced during her lifetime posit her as a victim of bullying, unhappiness, and crippling insecurity. Whilst this reading perhaps has some validity, the over-simplistic reframing of her hedonistic attitude, appetite for sex, alcohol, and drugs, and impressive, raspy vocals merely as the actions of a troubled soul is a reductive account of a complex situation: it removes Joplin’s agency. This article argues that by removing her autonomy in this way, the narratives formed around Joplin provide a way of retrospectively controlling the story of a “deviant” woman, one who transgressed the boundaries of “hegemonic femininity” (Mimi Schippers 2007). Sustained writing on Joplin in academia has so far focused on questions of white femininity (Gayle Wald 1997), bisexuality (Jana Evans Braziel 2004), and questions around the appropriation of blues music (Ulrich Adelt 2010). This paper builds on existing knowledge about Joplin by examining the posthumous narratives constructed around her. A rebellious and influential figure in the male-dominated counterculture, Joplin was a pioneer for women in rock. The framing of her as a defenceless victim obscures this, thereby diminishing the achievements of a ground-breaking female artist.

Dead women and moralizing

The stories of dead musicians provide a narrative platform from which commentators can create and promote meaning. Once a musician has died, they can no longer complicate perceptions of themselves through the natural contradictions of human behaviour, and so they become a fixed entity onto which various meanings can be projected. In life, a combination of carefully marketed personae and public discourse help to build a consensus on what a musician represents, and this becomes more potent following death. The dead celebrity becomes a series of broad themes that are simplified from their living persona, as per Catherine Strong and Barbara Lebrun (2015): “memorial practices appear restrictive in reducing the full complexity of an artist’s life and work to a much smaller set of signs, with the tendency to ignore certain aspects and to essentialise others” (8).

With female artists, these practices are often gendered. It appears that following death, the narratives formed around controversial female musicians change direction. Mediated retrospectives around Joplin frequently reframe her as a victim of her own success or of the people around her. This article argues that this reframing serves purposes that are consistent with the promotion of dominant moral norms concerning femininity; if she is not perceived to have been in full control of her actions, she poses less of a threat to hegemonic assumptions about how women should behave. Her “cautionary tale” additionally promotes an idea concerning the limits of female success—whilst Joplin is celebrated for her musical contributions, her untimely demise is framed as an inevitable result of the evils of fame. Jude Doyle (2016), in their research into “the women we love to hate, mock, and fear,” has said that “by dying, a trainwreck finally gives us the one statement we wanted to hear from her: that women like her really can’t make it, and shouldn’t be encouraged to try” (114). By displaying death as a consequence of fame and fortune, the sources cited in this article seem to subliminally warn women of the costs of being too famous, successful, or talented.

In Steve Jones and Joli Jensen’s (2005) seminal edited collection Afterlife as Afterimage, the three chapters that focus on female posthumous fame reveal much about the ways in which female celebrity deaths become vehicles through which commentators can achieve this presentation of societal moral norms. Peggy J. Bowers and Stephanie Houston Grey (2005) examine the idealized, innocent femininity Karen Carpenter came to represent and the great efforts made to preserve this image after her death (98–102). Joli Jensen (2005) discusses how the broad themes of Patsy Cline’s life are manipulated in various ways to appeal to various demographics (132), while Mary C. Beltrán (2005) illustrates how Selena has become an American icon through promotion of her as an “unpretentious and clean-living American role model” (87). These three diverse cases demonstrate how the stories of dead female musicians become allegories for ideas surrounding femininity.

Furthermore, in her book Death, the Dead and Popular Culture, Penfold-Mounce (2018) elaborates on how dead celebrities can serve as “parables” in cases of death-by-misadventure:

The tragic celebrity dead become the embodiment of unhealthy lifestyles, vanity, poor judgement, careless or stupid behaviour, or hubristic, illegal, immoral or sinful activities. Essentially, they become a location of documented societal transgressions as well as overt criminal deviance (… .) However, what is also core to these parables (…) [is] a sense of underlying tragedy (15).

As a woman, Joplin occupies a special position in this mixture of tragedy and moralizing. As Harry Shapiro (1988) has pointed out in his book about drug abuse and the music industry, female addicts are often perceived to be more “deviant” than their male counterparts as they challenge “the status quo by not fulfilling [roles] as (…) dutiful wi[ves] and mother[s]” (83). They are thus already enacting a femininity that goes against the grain of dominant gendered practices. Bronwyn Polaschek (2018) has found in Asif Kapadia’s (2015) documentary Amy “the archetypal cultural narrative of the creative woman as a passive victim,” a reading that contrasts with her live persona of “excessive performativity, a close identification with her working-class origins and active resistance to neoliberal values of decorous femininity and self-control” (19). This article argues that a similar rereading can be found in retrospective discussion of Joplin’s life and work, which has the effect of rationalising her enactment of a transgressive femininity.

Hegemonic and pariah femininities

In order to understand how women like Joplin perform a transgressive femininity, I turn to Mimi Schippers' (2007) work on gender hegemony.

Schippers expands on R.W. Connell’s (1987) influential work on “emphasised femininity” – that which is “defined around compliance (…) and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men” (1987, 184) – by suggesting that “any empirical exploration of masculinity and femininity and their role in gender hegemony must focus on relationality” (2007, 100). Particularly important here is the relationship between hegemonic masculinities and femininities. Early formulations of the concept of hegemonic masculinity saw it as a “pattern of practice (…) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue,” while other masculinities were “required (…) to position themselves in relation to it.” R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt’s (2005) “rethinking” of the concept allows for multiple hegemonic masculinities across different contexts, but hegemony overall refers to “ascendancy achieved through culture, institutions, and persuasion” (832). Whilst Connell has posited that there are no hegemonic femininities, Schippers (2007) points out that “hegemonic features (…) are those that serve the interests and ascendancy of ruling classes” (90). In Schippers’ formulations, the relationship between masculinity and femininity is crucial to the preservation of gender hegemony. Hegemonic femininity, then, entails “characteristics defined as womanly that establish and legitimate a hierarchical and complementary relationship to hegemonic masculinity” (2007, 94). Importantly, she points out that there is “an ascendancy of hegemonic femininity over other femininities to serve the interests of the gender order and male domination” (2007, 94). From here, she makes her case that there is frequently “swift and severe social sanction for women who take on or enact hegemonic masculinity” and suggests calling this “pariah femininity” (2007, 95). “pariah femininity” poses a threat to hegemonic gender relations in its rejection of complementary practices that enable male domination over subordinate gender identities.

In her book about ideas of gender in rock culture, Mimi Schippers (2002) writes that the typical “rock and roll lifestyle” fits with features of hegemonic masculinity. In rock culture specifically, she claims that hegemonic masculinity encompasses “having anonymous sex with countless women, and talking about it in public” (29). Pauwke Berkers and Merel Eeckelaer (2014), in their comparative study of broadsheet coverage of Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty, extend these behaviours to include “alcohol and drug abuse (…) fights, and legal problems” (4). Joplin can thus be said to have performed “pariah femininity” in her enactment of “rock and roll” behaviour usually thought to be the reserve of male musicians such as perceived promiscuity, substance abuse, and occasional run-ins with the law.

There is evidence to suggest that such behaviours are framed as masculine domain in the media. Berkers and Eeckelaer (2014) have found that, overall, Doherty was framed as someone “living on the edge” whereas Winehouse was viewed as a victim. They conclude from the sources that “female enactment of masculine behavior is not sanctioned in British broadsheets” (13). Similarly, Reynolds and Press (1995) claim that Joplin’s “self-destructive impulses (…) [do] not have the same charismatic, Dionysian aura” of fellow counter-culture casualties Hendrix or Brian Jones, which they claim can be seen in both album sales and mediated coverage. They suggest that this may be because “the break she was making with acceptable feminine conduct was more drastic than anything her male counterparts attempted” (272). Indeed, a certain mythology often emerges around the dead or addicted male musician, as can be seen in sustained academic work on Kurt Cobain, who became the “voice of a generation” in mediated responses to his death (Sharon R. Mazzarella 1995), and Michael Hutchence, who was described in posthumous coverage as “intense, charismatic, recklessly charming, generous, thoughtful, bright, articulate, passionate, fragile, sensitive, insecure—a hard-working, struggling yet committed family man who had a lot to offer and who died far too young” (Katrina Jaworski 2008, 271). Further, Whiteley (2006) has suggested a comparison between the young male rock and roll fatality and the Romantic poets based on reactions to the deaths of Jones, Hendrix, and Morrison, as well as Cobain and Hutchence (331–332). Crucially, this literature indicates that these male artists have been granted an agency over their life trajectory that has at times been denied to Joplin.

Schippers (2007) suggests that “The consequences of embodying these [disruptive] ideals and putting them into social practice in terms of the distribution of power, resources, and value are the true measure of gender inequality” (102, original emphasis). This article suggests that in Joplin’s case, her challenge to hegemonic gender relations has been rationalized through central framing of vulnerability and victimhood in mediated coverage. It goes beyond stigma and sanction and involves the construction of alternative narratives: Joplin is framed posthumously as having had little control over her actions, and this extinguishes the threat posed to the dominant gender order. Whilst Schippers (2002) points out that Joplin is “consistently considered a rock legend or genre-defining rock musician” (29), and she occupies something of a distinguished place in rock music history as a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and as Rolling Stone’s (2010) 28^th Greatest Singer of All Time, the newspaper documents collected for this article demonstrate reductive themes in journalistic writing about her. Eliminating a female artist’s power to make her own decisions removes agency, as it suggests that she was not in full control during her perceived transgressions, and she therefore appears less dangerous.

Methodology

In order to uncover the stories told, mainstream articles from across significant points in Joplin’s career have been gathered and analysed (see Appendix A) to extrapolate the most common themes. These primary sources follow two initial criteria: they must be in the English language, and they must contain sustained engagement with Joplin (passing references are excluded). The documents included consist of concert reviews, film reviews, obituaries, and op-ed pieces, and so provide a varied representation of journalistic writing around Joplin. Due to issues of translation and interpretation of meaning, the searches were limited to English-language publications only. Whilst it would be possible to translate sources published in other languages, there is a risk that the implication of the text will not translate reliably.¹

Lifetime writing

It is possible to detect in sources from Joplin’s lifetime the beginnings of themes that will become important in posthumous reception. Firstly, her performances are perceived as wholly uncompromising: she is famed as a singer who threw all of herself so completely into a performance as to bring herself to the brink of exhaustion. Writing in 1968, Robb Baker states that “Janis brings the blues to whatever she sings. She epitomizes the complete performer: Each beat comes alive, in her hair, her face, her hands, up the pulsating right leg thru [sic] the entire torso” (1968a, 14). In a review from later the same year, he states succinctly that “she gives herself completely on stage” (1968b, 18). For Baker, the perception of authenticity in Joplin’s performances comes from the extra-musical factors in performance, and the hoarseness of her voice is also important: “Some pop singers shout and yell. Janis screams. It’s a chaotic, unholy sound that is, at the same time, music and control. It overwhelms thru [sic] a depth that is tenderness and pain, and thru [sic] sheer brute force” (1968c, 16). This is reiterated by Robert Shelton (1968): “Her voice shouted with ecstasy or anger one minute, trailed off into coquettish curlecues [sic] the next” (51). It is important to note here that some of the more vulnerable-sounding features of Joplin’s voice were remarked upon this early. She is famed mostly for her vibrancy as a performer and the harsher uses of her voice, but its “tender” and “coquettish” features have become more important in contemporary writing as they are more in line with the common presentation of Joplin as defenceless and lonely.

A common interpretation in posthumous coverage is that by throwing so much of herself into a performance, Joplin made herself vulnerable and the beginnings of this trend are clear in writing from her lifetime. At this time, she was perceived as an artist who performed out of a compulsion to do so, as illustrated by this review by Geoffrey Cannon (1969):

She is original. She hides nothing. In her singing, she creates energy and direction out of making her every impulse a need; and she sounds harsh because her task is harsh. She creates tension in an audience because it’s painful to feel how mean and cautious one’s own (statistical) normality may be. She must touch and breathe on everything she confronts; and so she does (10).

There emerges here a sense of sacrifice. Joplin’s “task,” which seems to be to enlighten her audience according to Cannon, and the description of it as “harsh” suggests that this may have made her vulnerable. These ideas of an innate, irresistible urge to perform are also described by Michael Lydon (1969):

Janis—such a strange, unsettled mix of defiance and hesitancy, vulnerability and strength—doesn’t wait; every moment she is what she feels (… .) The intensity makes her always magical (… .) She consumes vast quantities of energy from some well inside herself that she believes is bottomless, and the heat of it warms everyone who meets her. When she sings all that terrible energy is brutally compressed into the moment (36).

Lydon’s words take on a supernatural tone here: he suggests that the authenticity perceived in Joplin’s performances is so intense as to be transformational. Cannon’s description of her willingness to expose her innermost thoughts and feelings to benefit the music and thus her audiences as “terrible” and “brutal” contributes to a narrative in which she was a singer who performed because the urge to perform was too great, despite any detriment to herself.

Some factors of her biography become far more significant post-death. During her lifetime, her alcoholism is often remarked upon in passing, but her drug abuse is rarely mentioned; in fact, in the sources collected from before her death I have come across only three mentions of it. There is some mention that she is a poor influence and of potential future health problems. Yet overall, coverage of Joplin during her lifetime frames her primarily as a musician. The difference following her death is striking, as will be examined now.

Vocal timbre

In the data collected, Joplin’s vocal style is treated as a wellspring of meaning. This rests on the assumption that the voice expresses an essential component of the vocalizer. Nina Sun Eidsheim’s (2018) recent research into timbre and race highlights the central “acousmatic question:” “Who is this?” (1). Her work goes some way to explaining why discourse around Joplin operates as it does:

We assume that when we ask the acousmatic question we will learn something about an individual. We assume that when we ask the acousmatic question we inquire about the essential nature of a person. The premise of the acousmatic question is that voice is stable and knowable (2018, 2–3).

For Eidsheim, this is a fiction; she writes that “we don’t ask the acousmatic question … because voice can be known … . We think we already know, but in fact we know very little. We ask the question because voice and vocal identity are not situated at a unified locus” (2018, 3, original emphasis). Yet this is not the interpretation that has recurred in the data, which is more in line with Adriana Cavarero’s (2005) claim that the voice is entirely unique. Whilst the extent of Joplin’s fame might mean that the acousmatic question is not necessarily acousmatic, public discourse suggests that audiences do “ask the acousmatic question” as if the voice can be known. Due to this conflation of voice and selfhood, the voice and perceptions of the self are closely linked; audiences typically believe that the singer expresses something of themselves. Thus, the sonic qualities of Joplin’s voice have become tied up in knowledge of her biography.

There is a contradiction at the heart of writing about Joplin’s voice: on the one hand, her harsh vocals are taken as aural indication of her hedonistic philosophy, while on the other, they become confirmation that she was a troubled soul. The release of Amy J. Berg’s documentary Little Girl Blue in 2015 led to reconsideration of Joplin’s career in public discourse. A persistent theme is that Joplin was deeply unhappy—evidence of this is taken from letters that she wrote to her family throughout her career—and that this can be perceived aurally through vocal timbre. Stephen Holden (2015) reviews the documentary, claiming that Joplin’s “neediness” is evident, but that she is nevertheless an honest and intelligent artist:

[T]he sound that erupts from Janis Joplin singing the 60s R&B classic “Cry Baby” (…) is as disturbing and powerful as ever (… .) More than any rock star of her generation she fearlessly vented the emotions of her needy inner girl-child (… .) Read aloud by singer-songwriter Chan Marshall (…) in a gentler voice than Joplins scratchy yowl, [the letters] reveal a forthright honesty, emotional openness and fierce intelligence.

Holden recognizes the power of Joplin’s voice and its expressive gravitas, but notably he suggests that once Joplin’s words are heard in a softer voice a deeper meaning is unearthed, pointing to a disjoint between her gravelly vocal and the desire to treat her as a victim. A similar sentiment appears in Rebecca Dargie’s (2015) writing, in which she seems to suggest Joplin suffered from an innate loneliness, but recognizes her ongoing influence as a musician and as a woman:

[T]he raw power of her unique voice and subversively poignant lyrics has endured (… .) Joplin’s voice is inimitable (… .) [She] was a pioneer for hard-drinking rock chicks and her songs of loneliness and isolation sound remarkable among today’s highly produced female soundscape.

Such accounts place her voice as part of her musical legacy as well as using it to unearth deeper meaning about her life. However, some of the reviews situate this far more simplistically. Here, Joplin’s hard-living persona and the perceived sadness lurking underneath are not down to the complexities and contradictions of human behaviour: the former is a cover for the latter. For example, Sean P. Means (2015) writes that “Janis Joplin’s powerful voice and life-of-the-party demeanor masked a lot of pain” whilst Jonathan Romney (2015) asserts that “[her] raucous crazy-mama persona concealed a profoundly wounded soul.” The use of the verbs “conceal” and “mask” might imply an inauthenticity, but since the documentary is mostly made up of letters that Joplin wrote to her family, their veracity is not called into question. Indeed, all of the extracts imply (somewhat contradictorily) that Joplin presented all of herself in her music and the intensity of this served to hide her perceived loneliness, yet sadness can still be perceived in the sound of her voice. This reading provides an account of Joplin in which she is a “troubled soul,” and this can be detected in her vocal timbre.

Jessica Clark’s (2015) review of Berg’s documentary demonstrates how Joplin’s relentless stage performances and the vulnerabilities demonstrated by the letters are not mutually exclusive:

Unlike the typical, perfectly polished popstar, Joplin was boisterous, messy, flawed, but also more passionate than anything else. She was coarse, free, and sexual. She defied all the norms dictated by the conservative society in which she grew up during the 1950s (… .) These newly released letters depict Joplin’s most intimate feelings. Despite her wild success, Joplin’s personal reservations and loneliness pervade her letters.

Clark presents Joplin as someone who was uncompromisingly true to her instincts and desires, but who was nevertheless lonely and apprehensive. The documents collected suggest that this has become the dominant narrative—despite some recognition of Joplin’s radicality in terms of the make-up of the music industry at the time and the way she “defied all the norms dictated by (…) conservative society,” her actions were ultimately those of someone who was lost and lonely. The timbral qualities of her voice are sometimes taken as an audible reflection of her pleasure-seeking lifestyle, but they also eliminate any threat posed by Joplin as “boisterous, messy, [and] flawed” by allowing a narrative wherein they both conceal and expose an inherent vulnerability.

Meaning making around Joplin’s voice demonstrates how the timbral qualities of her voice have been manipulated to encourage a reading of inherent sadness: her “chaotic” vocals become not the disinhibition of an unrelenting performer, but the primal scream of a wounded soul. This framing contains Joplin’s gender transgressions by characterizing her as helpless, thus diminishing her autonomy and presenting her actions as out of the ordinary and irrational. Such a depiction allows a femininity that accompanies hegemonic masculinity to be illustrated as the norm.

Vulnerability

Following her death, Joplin’s uninhibited performances are still remarked upon, but “vulnerable” becomes the dominant descriptor. The sudden change in this narrative is exemplified by Stewart Parker (1970) for the Irish Times, who it is worth quoting at length:

Three times in recent months, death has electrified the rock music factory [Al Wilson, Hendrix, Joplin] (… .) Joplin’s is the most pathetic but perhaps the most comprehensible. From the moment she entered the limelight with that raddled face and slept-in hair and the odd irresistible voice screeching desperately towards ecstasy, she took her place alongside [Marilyn] Monroe, Judy Garland, [Édith] Piaf, and Billie Holiday. Moreover, with her tequila and her heroin and her heavy debt to Bessie Smith, she always appeared an anomaly in the rock world, more a figure from the Jazz Age stranded in the wrong generation. Certainly she never really seemed to find a group with which her express train of a voice could be musically reconciled. Even so, it is a voice that won’t be easily forgotten. Already it begins to haunt, like the voices and legends of those other ladies. Why does this tormented figure of the female victim keep recurring in the iconography of Western popular culture? (10)

Aside from the prejudice on display here (why is Joplin’s death more “pathetic” than those of Hendrix or Wilson? What is the relevance of her lack of traditional beauty as perceived by Parker?), the narrative that emerges here is interesting. The first part is the idea that she was somehow “lost” – whilst Parker suggests she is musically lost, performing in the wrong era to truly be appreciated, the “haunting” quality of her voice as a “tormented female victim” seems to suggest a more general sense of being adrift. Further, Parker seems to claim that the timbre of her “screeching” voice somehow cemented her amongst the other casualties he mentions, suggesting that the sound of her voice provides some sort of foretelling of her fate. The qualities that made her “fierce” (the drinking, the unpolished image, the uninhibited vocals) are now firmly signs of vulnerability and the beginnings of the change in narrative are clear. Don Heckman (1970) of the New York Times describes her and Hendrix as victims “of the very real physical excesses that were part of the world that surrounded them,” whilst an editorial in the Chicago Tribune (1970) reiterates the idea that her intense style of performing made her vulnerable: “Her rough, throaty singing and the intensity with which she converted her songs to her personal style quickly attracted attention (… .) Her voice became hoarser all the time, and some rock writers feared she would burn herself out.” These sources, released immediately after her death, show the beginning of a sharp shift in narrative, and perception of victimhood has become crucial to Joplin’s posthumous career.

By 1995, this change in narrative had developed and expanded to the point that her drug abuse and eventual overdose were framed squarely as the product of vulnerability and insecurity. Lisa Sabbage’s (1995) profile is particularly interesting:

She was known as the wild woman of rock, a hard-drinking, tough-talking singer (… .) Yet there was another side to Janis Joplin, one that longed to conform to the middle-class values of her childhood and dreamt of being the homecoming queen (… .) Unfortunately, while Janis gave the impression of being liberated and comfortable with herself, privately her self-esteem was at an all-time low, and she had become addicted to heroin (22).

Here, there is a clear continuation of the idea that Joplin was insecure and that it was this that made her turn to drugs. The narrative develops further; not only had audiences supposedly misunderstood her intense performances as the embodiment of her hedonistic lifestyle, but Joplin had actually wanted to “conform to middle-class values,” presumably a veiled reference to wanting to follow a more traditional path for women, rather than the Dionysian option she chose. Again, this softens the edges of Joplin’s personality and choices—in this narrative, her “hard-drinking, tough-talking” demeanour was not dangerous, but a cover for crippling insecurity. Joplin’s vulnerabilities are starting to become a key part in trying to make sense of how she died, and there is a sense that she sacrificed some of the real-life stability that may have prevented her demise in order to provide music for her audiences. These readings continue to contribute to the “woman left lonely” trajectory and rationalize Joplin’s “unfeminine” behaviours by presenting her as an object of pity rather than a serious threat to dominant gender relations.

Victimhood

Closely related to these ideas of vulnerability is the introduction of the victim narrative. In these extracts, Joplin becomes a victim of unreliable romantic interests, childhood bullying, and crippling insecurity. Take for example this account from Ruby Millington (2005):

There’s a terrible poignancy in her failure to find any personal fulfilment offstage. Despite the advent of free love she remains romantically impoverished. In fact, her desire for love is thwarted by her execrable taste in men. On the night she dies, Joplin’s fiancé Seth Morgan is playing strip pool with a couple of waitresses he has picked up. Even her beloved dog, George, runs away (46).

This “even the dog left her” narrative goes some way towards alleviating responsibility for her actions—in this reading, Joplin is lonely and abandoned and her behaviours are an understandable reaction to this. It must be noted that the aim of this paper is not to make any moral judgements around Joplin’s life, but the way that these extracts use personal travails to make sense of female drug abuse exposes a need to extinguish any threat posed. Millington’s article also provides a villain in Seth Morgan, whose apparent betrayal of Joplin is placed alongside her death, tying the two events together and alleviating some of the focus on her. Suggesting that Morgan is at fault removes a degree of culpability for Joplin and rationalizes the transgressive act of overdose. In this narrative, her death-by-misadventure is the product of loneliness and romantic misfortune, not the pursuit of any hedonistic thrill.

There is an increase in the redemptive narrative arc in 2015, quite likely due to the release of Berg’s documentary, which frames Joplin as the titular “little girl.” This childlike depiction of her also continues to remove agency, and ideas of victimhood are crucial to this. Where Millington posits failed romance as the perpetrator of Joplin’s supposed unhappiness, Holden (2015) turns to her early years:

The emotional wounds Joplin sustained are the kind that never completely heal (… .) The antithesis of the all-American prom-queen ideal, Joplin suffered merciless verbal abuse and rejection, and fought back by donning elaborate hippie regalia and parading as a raucous, bad-girl roustabout. At the University of Texas (…) a fraternity campaigned to elect her the “ugliest man on campus.” She put on a brave face, but how does anyone really shake off something like that?

Through this framing, Joplin’s actions are again the result of some sadness deep within her and the most brutal and striking instances of her bullying are laid out here to reinforce this. This serves the same purpose as Millington’s article. It provides alternative “villains” in Joplin’s cruel classmates and allows for a method of meaning making for commentators that alleviates her challenge to dominant gender relations by removing her agency. She took on characteristics of hegemonic masculinity and to use Schippers’ (2007) terminology, this “must be contained” (95). In this case, it is contained through early suffering as a narrative device that makes sense of her “unfeminine” behaviours and seems to be loosely based on a Freudian model of childhood trauma and its symptoms in later life (Sigmund Freud 1910). If Joplin’s hedonistic philosophy is reasoned to be a reaction to trauma rather than arising out of purely hedonistic desire, then it becomes easier for commentators to make sense of her troubling fate. This model of trauma offers a way to attach fathomable or reassuring meaning to Joplin’s self-destructive streak. This is reflective of Schippers’ observation that when women enact hegemonic masculinity, this needs containing. In the data, Joplin is presented as inherently unable to cope. This provides a retrospective way of containing her behaviours by presenting them as unsustainable, and arguably serves as a cautionary tale for other women.

Conclusion

This article has explored the narratives constructed around Joplin’s posthumous career in order to uncover the broad ideological functions that they serve. Dead female celebrities are often used as a site through which to reinforce societal values and norms and their posthumous identities are simplified and individually constructed to reinforce or subvert collective moralities. These constructions frequently serve ideas connected to gender hegemony. The article suggests that reframing Joplin as a lost or troubled soul allows control over the story of an unruly or deviant woman. This reframing is achieved through several narrative devices, with vocal timbre, victimhood, and vulnerability being the most common. The features that made her tough in writing during her lifetime are reworked into narratives of vulnerability and victimhood. In some coverage, alternative framings are projected onto Joplin that construct alternative desires on her behalf by making reference to domesticity and positioning her as lonely and lost. These devices remove her autonomy by displaying her as inherently vulnerable, and when agency is removed from female figures such as Joplin, it lessens the threat of autonomous women who reject or transgress the boundaries of hegemonic or emphasized femininity by enacting behaviours consistent with hegemonic masculinity. A “deviant” woman poses less of a threat if she is not deemed to be in control of her actions. In Joplin’s case, the narratives constructed around her arguably reinforce dominant social norms in which femininity is expected to complement hegemonic masculinity. Her perceived transgressions are contained so as to preserve the “hegemonic gender relations” outlined by Schippers (2007, 94). Ultimately, these readings distract from Joplin’s achievements as a “catalyst” for women in rock (Sheila Whiteley 2000, 1) and her important musical legacy.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Sir Jack Lyons Research Scholarship at the University of York to pursue a PhD.

Notes on contributors

Alice Masterson

Alice Masterson is a PhD candidate in the music and sociology departments and a Humanities Research Centre Doctoral Fellow at the University of York, where she holds a Sir Jack Lyons Research Scholarship. Her thesis explores the posthumous legacies of female musicians who were vilified for their lifestyles while living, particularly the ways in which they find public “redemption” through death.

Notes

1. I have judged analysis of media coverage to be the most advantageous method of assessing Joplin’s reputation as it provides an overview of broad public opinion; the article draws on Stuart Hall’s (1973) “Encoding/Decoding” model (hereafter, E/D), in which dominant readings are produced collaboratively between encoded media messages and the ways in which audiences decode them. In Hall’s theory, generally, the “encoder” is able to project the “pattern of ‘preferred meanings’ (…) [which] have the institutional/political/ideological order imprinted in them, and have themselves become institutionalized” (13–14). Allowing for dissent, it is these meanings that become dominant.

However, “E/D” is a seminal text to the point that there is a danger of “ritually [invoking]” it without proper engagement, contention, or challenge (Michael Gurevitch and Paddy Scannell 2003, 232). Indeed, one of the fundamental criticisms of the model is that Hall uses “preferred meaning” and “preferred reading” interchangeably, when in fact, according to Poonam Pillai (1992), the former “refers to the dominant or preferred codes with which it is inscribed by practices of encoding and media production located within the institution of broadcasting” and the latter “occurs when such a correspondence is achieved through practices of decoding” (222, original emphasis). In Pillai’s view, the limitations of the model can be at least partially overcome by employing Hall’s articulation theory – “a way of theorizing the ‘contingent’ but ‘non necessary’ relation between ideologies, practices, subjects, and subject positions” (225) – which “enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or class position” (Lawrence Grossberg and Stuart Hall 1986, 53). In other words, in using the E/D model, it is important to not essentialize the reader. Nonetheless, the model provides an effective way of unearthing the dominant moral norms present within media discourse.

Hall (1973) points out that, allowing for the complexities of reception,

Any society/culture tends (…) to impose its classifications of the social and cultural and political world. These constitute a dominant cultural order, though it is neither univocal nor uncontested. The question of the “structure of discourses in dominance” is a crucial point. The different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into discursive domains, hierarchically organised into dominant or preferred meanings. New, problematic, or troubling events (…) must be assigned to their discursive domains before they can be said to make sense (13, original emphasis).

Therefore, an examination of the denotative and connotative meanings constructed in coverage of events in Joplin’s lifetime should reflect the “dominant cultural order” in relation to them, whilst allowing for the intricacies and variances of decoding. After all, the “dominant cultural order” is an ongoing communicative process between encoding and decoding. A distinct sense of “making sense” of Joplin’s death is detectable in the sources collected. Her untimely demise is indeed troubling, and commentators can be said to construct narratives that map her life trajectory onto these discursive domains to create fathomable or reassuring explanations out of it.

Appendix A

1966: joins Big Brother and the Holding Company.

1967: appears at Monterey Pop Festival with Big Brother and the Holding Company.

1968: Big Brother and the Holding Company release Cheap Thrills – certified gold.

1968: Big Brother and the Holiday Company perform at the ‘Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr.’ concert in New York.

1969: first solo album, Kozmik Blues, released to mixed reviews.

1970: dies of an accidental heroin overdose.

1971: Pearl released posthumously.

1995: inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

2005: receives a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

2015: Amy J. Berg’s documentary Janis: Little Girl Blue released.