“Dead Women” by Mitski is about the way society prefers women silent, passive, and dead. The song argues that a woman’s death makes her easier to control, mythologise, and possess than her living, complicated self ever could.
“Would you have liked me better if I’d died / So you could tell my story the way it ought to be?”
This opening line lays out the central question; that when a woman is no longer alive, others can rewrite her life to suit their narrative rather than engaging with her complexity.
That’s the blunt version. The full picture is considerably more layered.
The Setup: Who Would Like You Better Dead?
The song opens with a question that functions as an accusation. The singer asks someone, an ex-lover or a wider cultural audience, whether they would have liked her more if she had died.
Because then they could “find my parents and ask to see my things / rifle through it all, fill the blanks with what you need.”
Her death would give them unlimited editorial control over her life. This is the trap Mitski is mapping, not just physical violence against women, but the violence of narrative.
The way a living woman’s inconvenient complexity gets flattened the moment she stops breathing, converted into whatever shape is most convenient for the people who survive her.
The “you” in the song is deliberately unspecific. It could be a romantic partner. It could be the music press. It could be any culture that finds women more loveable once they have lost the ability to contradict expectations.
The Virginia Woolf Reference
Most listeners catch this on a second or third pass, and it changes the song completely.
In the second verse she sings, “If I’d died willing, you’d have taken it nice / If I’d sewn rocks in a dress, gone with grace into a lake.”
This is a direct reference to Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941 by filling her coat pockets with stones.
Woolf was one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century, and her death has been extensively romanticised in the decades since in a way that does precisely what “Dead Women” describes.
The genius of the reference is what it reveals. Woolf’s life was messy, brilliant, troubled, and fully human. Her suicide was the result of mental illness and despair.
But because she died this particular way, quietly and with a kind of tragic grace, she became easier to canonise, easier to mythologise, easier to love in death than she may have been in life.
The grace is the problem. Society has a template for acceptable female deaths, and Woolf’s fit it.
Mitski is pointing out that the template exists, that women who match it are mourned correctly, and that women who don’t, who are alive and angry and refusing to cooperate, are simply inconvenient.
The “Perfect Victim” Argument
The concept running through “Dead Women” has a name in feminist scholarship: the perfect victim paradigm.
Society’s sympathy for victims of violence is conditional, extended most fully to women who fit a narrow template. Young, passive, silent, conventionally moral, and above all, no longer in a position to complicate the story.
A dead woman is the ultimate perfect victim, because death guarantees she stays that way. She cannot contradict her own narrative. She cannot have difficult feelings or make choices you disapprove of.
This is why later in the second verse she confronts the violence of being alive: “since I’m alive, you’ll have to break in as I sleep / when you find my love beside me / choke him dead for havin’ me.”
Here she imagines not just the rewriting of her story but the punishment of anyone close to her while she lives.
The living woman is always at risk of ruining it. She might say the wrong thing, survive in ways that are inconvenient, express anger instead of gratitude, love someone you didn’t expect.
This is why the third verse is so deliberately horrifying. While she imagines “while I dream of flying, stab me twenty-seven times / ransack the house for what you’ll auction, what you’ll keep,” the violence becomes symbolic of the lengths to which people go when they feel they haven’t been given ownership over her narrative.
And then the imagining of what comes next “then embalm me up ’cause you’re hosting the viewing / saying ‘she gave her life so we could have her in our dreams’ / ‘she gave her life so we could f*ck her as we please’” ties sentimentalisation and violation so tightly there’s no gap between them.
The Murder Ballad Tradition, Inverted
“Dead Women” works within the murder ballad tradition that runs through country and folk music, and it knows exactly what it is doing to that tradition.
Classic murder ballads are almost always told from the perspective of the killer, or from a neutral third-person narrator observing the event.
The woman who dies is the object of the song. Her interiority is incidental or absent. She exists to be mourned, feared, and explained.
“Dead Women” gives the woman her own voice and her own anticipatory dread. She is not the subject of someone else’s ballad.
She is articulating what she knows will be written about her if she doesn’t survive. That structural inversion is the whole point.
Mitski is not writing another song about a dead woman. She is writing a song about what it feels like to know that this is the song waiting to be written about you.
What the Chorus Is Doing
The wordless “do-do-do do do-do-do-do” chorus strikes a lot of listeners as strange, even a little bright against the lyrical darkness. It is doing something precise.
After the verses describe scenarios where she is objectified, violated, or imagined dead, the chorus refuses to articulate what comes next.
The melody continues but the words stop. Mitski is recreating the experience of the narrative gap, the blank that gets filled in by whoever holds the pen.
The chorus is where the listener, the culture, the partner writes their own version of what happens to her. And then the next verse arrives and shows you the uglier truth of what you just imagined.
It also reads as dissociation. Women who anticipate violence often describe the mind going elsewhere when the body is in danger, a kind of mental departure from the unbearable.
The “do-do-do” is the mind floating away from the thing it cannot process. The third verse makes this explicit: the imagined flight and the imagined stabbing are simultaneous.
The most tender, hopeful image in the song exists inside its most violent one.
The Meaning of “Dead Women” in Mitski’s Own Story
Mitski has spoken openly about being a Japanese-American woman in a predominantly white indie music scene, about feeling like her identity is something others want to interpret rather than engage with, something to be projected onto rather than listened to.
Nothing’s About to Happen to Me as an album theme deals with being observed and defined in ways that feel contrary to one’s inner experience, and critics have noted how “Dead Women” blends horror and dark comedy in ways that highlight this conflict.
“Dead Women” takes that personal experience and makes it structural. This is not a song about one relationship or one bad actor.
It is a song about a pattern, about the way women of all kinds are treated as raw material for other people’s narratives, and about how death simply makes that process easier and more complete.
The song’s singer is still alive at the end. She has not gone “with grace into a lake.”
And Mitski’s choice to write and release this song rather than the version of herself someone else would prefer is, in its own way, an answer to the question the song opens with.
No, you would not have liked her better dead. But you think you would have.
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