I think a lot of you are on the right track with picking up on the imagery the song uses, but you're taking it very literally. Rarely does a songwriter of Polly's caliber tell a story for the sake of explaining a series of events. It's almost always a conduit for something else.
I agree for the most part with idoubtthat. To take that another step further and discard as much literal translation as possible, I think it's reasonable to see the song with dualistic meanings. It could very well be about the tensions and conflicts of sexual maturation. From my standpoint, though, it's always partly been an anthem for difficult childhoods. I think that separate avenue of meaning might be where a lot of the connotations of rape and molestation people are picking up on come from.
Growing up with a difficult, inflexible mother in specific, whose love and reliability are contingent on other things and who sees any assertion of independence as an affront and a betrayal, you learn that you have to lie and disguise yourself from a very early age. When it comes to maternal ineptitude and loading responsibilities on a child, you mature very quickly in order to cope, at the cost of your innocence. You become the mother to your mother. These dysfunctional dynamics in the mother-daughter relationship are very difficult to change once they've been established. It fucks you up and it follows you into your adult life. Most people who've been forced to revoke their childhood and act as adults when they're children end up later on being prone to immaturity and longing to make up for their childhoods as adults.
There will always be some level of personal interpretation that differs from person to person, but I think we all seem to agree on the general framework that there's ambiguity and uncomfortable tension between the mother-daughter roles, this is a story about lost innocence in some form, and the loss is being lamented. From there, it's a Rorschach connect-the-dots blank canvas for ourselves, as most songs are. And who really wants to take that kind of purging self-projection away, anyhow?
I think a lot of you are on the right track with picking up on the imagery the song uses, but you're taking it very literally. Rarely does a songwriter of Polly's caliber tell a story for the sake of explaining a series of events. It's almost always a conduit for something else.
I agree for the most part with idoubtthat. To take that another step further and discard as much literal translation as possible, I think it's reasonable to see the song with dualistic meanings. It could very well be about the tensions and conflicts of sexual maturation. From my standpoint, though, it's always partly been an anthem for difficult childhoods. I think that separate avenue of meaning might be where a lot of the connotations of rape and molestation people are picking up on come from.
Growing up with a difficult, inflexible mother in specific, whose love and reliability are contingent on other things and who sees any assertion of independence as an affront and a betrayal, you learn that you have to lie and disguise yourself from a very early age. When it comes to maternal ineptitude and loading responsibilities on a child, you mature very quickly in order to cope, at the cost of your innocence. You become the mother to your mother. These dysfunctional dynamics in the mother-daughter relationship are very difficult to change once they've been established. It fucks you up and it follows you into your adult life. Most people who've been forced to revoke their childhood and act as adults when they're children end up later on being prone to immaturity and longing to make up for their childhoods as adults.
There will always be some level of personal interpretation that differs from person to person, but I think we all seem to agree on the general framework that there's ambiguity and uncomfortable tension between the mother-daughter roles, this is a story about lost innocence in some form, and the loss is being lamented. From there, it's a Rorschach connect-the-dots blank canvas for ourselves, as most songs are. And who really wants to take that kind of purging self-projection away, anyhow?