Alright, Alright, Alright: Violence in "The Rake's Song"

Rachel Miles
Jeannina Perez
WST 3015 (Introduction to Women’s Studies)
8 March 2010

Alright, Alright, Alright: Violence in “The Rake’s Song”

The Decemberists’ “The Rake’s Song” describes the extreme violence a man commits to escape the perceived limitations of married and parental life. Shortly after marrying at age 21, the song’s protagonist finds himself father to three children—a boy, Isaiah, and two girls, Charlotte and Dawn—each one considered more of an unfortunate, unwanted burden than the last. But with his wife’s death in labor for their stillborn fourth child, he finds his chance for escape. He systematically poisons, drowns, and beats to death his other three children, leaving him free physically and emotionally to resume his previous bachelor lifestyle.

Personally, I am still a bit unsure about the point of the violence in the song. On one hand, it presents violence as excusable within the confines of the narrator’s perspective, which is certainly an issue. For the narrator, his marriage is a means to an end. He signs on for readily-available sex, not for children and the responsibilities of a family. In his understanding, the children “her womb [starts] spilling out” (The Decemberists) are his wife’s burden, completely detached from him by his lack of desire for them. This understanding of women and children connects the protagonist’s later violence to the “general pattern of violence between the powerful and the powerless” (Kirk and Okazawa-Rey 267): as a man in a patriarchal society, the narrator’s freedom and power before marriage were seemingly unchecked; even after marriage, and furthered by his alienation of himself within his undesired family, his power remains greater than that held by his wife and children. Killing his children, then, is simply him exercising his greater power over people he views as disposable. Because he associates his children entirely with his wife, her death, for him, removes all reason for their existence; they are now entirely unwanted, and as such, his disposing of them to reclaim his freedom and identity as a bachelor is acceptable. As we are given no other insight into the story, it is expected that we, too, will understand his reasoning and excuse his violent actions as a man’s rightful struggle to regain his autonomy.

Obviously, this presentation of violence is problematic. But are there grounds for viewing “The Rake’s Song” as a statement against domestic violence? In some sense, yes. By presenting us with only the protagonist’s reasoning behind his actions, the song pressures us to accept the story and the violence within it. However, doing so also raises the question of why we feel so compelled to easily accept and excuse violence when we are confronted with it. Are there larger systems and influences at work convincing us to sweep things under the rug and move on? The lyrics hint at addressing such larger systems, particularly patriarchy, in their reduction of women to wives and wombs, even as they idealize men and the concepts of masculine freedom and independence. Unfortunately, they never seem to go beyond hinting at it as something pervasive and dangerous to all of society. The patriarchal mindset is here ascribed to a self-identified rake, or “dissolute man in fashionable society” (“Rake”), furthering the perception that such an attitude is an individual problem, not a systemic one. So while it neatly raises the question of why “we make excuses for male temper,” the song’s presentation of male temper and resulting violence as being the anomalous traits of bad-apple individuals ultimately distracts us from the larger issue that these are, in actuality, things we “as a culture” (Seely 200) create.



Works Cited

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. “Violence Against Women.” Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Ed. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 257-272. Print

“Rake.” Princeton WordNet 3.0. Princeton University, 2006. Web. 8 Mar. 2010. .

Seely, Megan. Fight Like a Girl. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Print.

The Decemberists. “The Rake's Song.” The Hazards of Love. Capitol Records, 2008. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.