Click on this link to see the lyrics of the song, “Lily Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts.” In this blog entry, we will look at the female characters.
A ballad essentially tells a story. In the song “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” Dylan tells the story of “The Jack of Hearts.” The characters in this song are Lily, Rosemary, Big Jim and “The Jack of Hearts.” However, “The Jack of Hearts” is the main character that the song is revolved around.
“Lily was a princess, she was fair skinned and precious as a child.” The character Lily’s name can be interpreted to symbolically meaning the plant lily. The plant lily symbolically represent a bunch of different things. I believe that the name Lily is a reference for the “white-lily” because Lily is “fair-skinned.” The white lily represents virginity, purity and feminine sexuality. It is ironic that the Lily is represented for “purity” because she isn’t pure or a virgin. “She’d come away from a broken home, had lots of strange affairs with men in every walk of life.” This supports the claim that she isn’t a virgin because she had affairs. Also she isn’t pure because she had many affairs. If someone is pure then they would only stay with the man that they had married. Also we can say that Lily isn’t pure because she has a fake identity. We are able to make this claim that she is fake because she had dye in her hair. ““Lily had already taken all of the dye out of her hair.” However at the end of the song she takes the dye out of her hair as if she was becoming pure to herself. At the end of the song “she was thinkin’ ‘bout her father, who she very rarely saw.” Also when Lily takes “off her dress and buried it away” we can see that she is changing. Back in the western days, a whore or prostitute would dye their hair to appeal to customers. They would also wear dresses to appeal to the men. When Lily combination of Lily taking off her dress and burying it away, taking the dye out of her hair, and her thinking about her father are all different reasons to claim that Lily was changing as a person to become “pure” to herself.
Rosemary plays the role of Big Jim’s wife. The name Rosemary can be connected to the plant rosemary. The plant rosemary represents constancy, fidelity and loyalty. It is also ironic that rosemary symbolically represents loyalty and constancy yet the character Rosemary completely goes against being loyal. We are able to see this when she was “lookin’ like a queen without a crown.” Big Jim is referenced as being a “king.” A crown in Celtic tradition represents loyalty. So “a queen without a crown” suggests that she isn’t loyal to Big Jim. She also misrepresents loyalty when it is stated that she was “tired of playin’ the role of Big Jim’s wife” and that even though “she was with Big Jim, she was leanin’ to the Jack of Hearts.” Here you can see that she was not going to be loyal to Big Jim. She clearly didn’t want to be his wife. She wanted to run away with the Jack of Hearts. So Rosemary kills Big Jim with her penkife. “Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back.” We know that Rosemary killed him because she had “her reflection in the knife.” The knife is the penknife that killed Big Jim.
What is interesting is that between the two characters Lily and Rosemary is that the both represent plants. The plants symbolically represent different things. Lily represented purity while Rosemary represented loyalty. The really ironic thing is that both Lily and Rosemary didn’t really represent those meanings of purity or loyalty. Lily was pure at all and Rosemary wasn’t loyal to Big Jim.
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