Chapter 4, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 4 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” (pp. 61-82) by Sherry R. Truffin, Associate Professor of English, Campbell University.

• Chapter summary
  • Sherry Truffin’s “‘Crying Like a Woman ‘Cause I’m Mad Like a Man’: Chrissie Hynde, Gender, and Romantic Irony” focuses on Chrissie Hynde as the frontwoman for the Pretenders. Truffin considers in Hynde’s lyrics, autobiography, and other resources the ways in which Hynde negotiated her rare position as a female lead singer and rhythm guitarist for an otherwise male rock band. Drawing from Löwy and Sayre, Truffin observes how Hynde resorts to Romantic irony as defined by Schlegel and Anne Mellor to negotiate tensions between the influences of the relatively undeveloped Akron, OH of her early childhood and the industrial city that Akron later became. Truffin also explores how Hynde negotiates her conflicting views of her own female identity by adopting masculine, feminine, and androgynous identities in turns. These tensions ultimately cause Gothic sensibilities to surface in many of Hynde’s songs as her female identity is expressed through Gothic tropes and situations: she suffers violent abuse from men, refuses to complain about that treatment or accept victim status, and then uses that refusal as a means of asserting her own agency.
• Music:
  • The Pretenders
    • “Brass in Pocket“
    • “Birds of Paradise“
    • “My City Was Gone”
    • “Waste Not, Want Not”
    • “Middle of the Road”
    • “Money Talk”
    • “Dance”
    • “Hold a Candle To This”
    • “Revolution”
    • “Break Up the Concrete”
    • “You Know Who Your Friends Are”
    • “Don’t Get Me Wrong”
    • “Complex Person”
    • “When I Change My Life”
    • “Up the Neck”
    • “The Adulteress”
    • “Almost Perfect”
    • “I’ll Stand By You”
    • “Lie to Me”
    • “Mystery Achievement”
    • “My Baby”
    • “Kinda Nice, I Like It”
    • “I Should Of”
    • “Tattooed Love Boys”
    • “Lovers of Today”
    • “Clean-Up Woman”
    • “Precious”
    • “Bad Boys Get Spanked”
    • “I’m a Mother”
    • “Sense of Purpose”
    • “I Hurt You”
    • “977”
• Literature
  • Jack Kerouac
  • Friedrich Schlegel
  • William Blake
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Virginia Woolf
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