A Soundtrack For The Queering Impaired

I've decided to take a break from textual analysis and try something more creative. When I read a really engaging novel I always find myself making a list of songs that I'd include on the soundtrack. Here's a compilation for three of my favorites on our reading list so far:

Girl Meets Boy
Song: "First Day of My Life"- Bright Eyes

This is a song about a revelation! A self-actualization that is realized through, by, and for love. I enjoyed every page of Robyn and Anthea's romance even though it seemed a bit too optimistic. This song is reminiscent of the moment Anthea sees Robyn up on the ladder.

"This is the first day of my life, I swear I was born right in the doorway. I went out in the rain suddenly everything changed. They're spreading blankets on the beach. Yours is the first face that I saw,
I think I was blind before I met you..."

Wide Sargasso Sea

Song: "A Rush of Blood to the Head"- Coldplay

My reasoning here is a bit abstract but I chose this song to reflect Jean Rhys' intentions for the novel. The mad woman in the attic has become an important feminist symbol since Jane Eyre. Rhys' writes to challenge patriarchal and colonial discourses by revealing Antoinette's voicelessness and making the reader sympathize. Rhyse justifies Antoinette's madness and destructiveness in Jane Eyre as symptoms of her oppression. She's burning down the walls we put around Antoinette as biased readers in Jayne Eyre!

"I'm going to buy this place and watch it fall. Stand here beside me baby in the crumbling walls.
Oh I'm going to buy this place and start a fire. Stand here until I fill all your heart's desires. Because I'm going to buy this place and see it burn. Do back the things it did to you in return."

Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a 

Nineteenth Century French Hermaphrodite

Song: "Half Jack"- Dresden Dolls

I chose this song for the speaker's loathing for her masculine sex characteristics. The song is about gender reassignment surgery but I think the identity crisis that the speaker voices really captures the crux of Alexina's suffering. Alexina simply could not relate to the world as an actor of the masculine gender. Like the speaker in her song, I believe she would have gone to drastic measures to reject the male features of her body so she could go on as she knew herself.

"Two halves are equal. A cross between two evils it's not an enviable lot. But if you listen
you'll learn to hear the difference between the halves and the half nots ... I'm not big enough to house this crowd. It might destroy me but I'd sacrifice my body if it meant I'd get the jack part out."