The Cultivation of the Sad Girl
by Sarah Kennelly (Arts & Lit Editor)
Women’s pain is rarely taken seriously, routinely portrayed as a problem that is threatening, irrational, and sometimes even beautiful. It is morphed into something that functions for men, an alluring trait that makes her different from the rest. There is no depth or reasoning to this melancholy, it is just an innate part of being a desirable woman. From the damsel in distress, to the tortured beauty queen, feminine sadness is neatly enclosed in a single identity. Their despair is not a trait of their character, but their entire character. And when prince charming swoops in to save her, women are taught to embody her. The sad girl becomes something to covet, rather than something to empathise with.
The cultivation of the sad girl is not just the latest microtrend on TikTok but a long-standing literary tradition. It can be traced back to Aristotle who argued that we cannot live a beautiful life without a little bit of sadness. This assertion was closely followed by Shakespeare whose female characters became the archetype for sad women in literature. Following this, Edgar Allan Poe went as far as glamorising the bodies of beautiful dead women, claiming that “[t]he death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. What this shows us is not a concern for the fate of women, but a romanticisation of their pain. It is not their struggles that are lamented but the regrettable loss of a beautiful woman. This perpetuates the belief that a woman’s worth is determined by her desirability which is made all the more enticing by a dejected personality.
And because women are taught to chase the desire of men, the sad girl becomes the model for feminine perfection. Although authors play an important role in the cultivation of this tired trope, the cultural response has been equally influential. If you are part of the generation who grew up on Tumblr, you will know that the idealisation of depressed women was an unfortunate characteristic of the website. Entire blogs were dedicated to publishing images of crying girls featuring poems and quotes alluding to suicidal ideation. This prompted the glamorisation of self hatred, spawning thousands of posts encouraging eating disorders, self-harm, and substance abuse. This showcases the harm that mass media can cause when it perpetuates harmful tropes that fall into the hands of impressionable audiences. Teenage girls came to idolise characters with mental illnesses because their sadness is what made them worthy of attention. This spawned a generation of young women who were encouraged to adopt dangerous coping mechanisms rather than seek adequate help.
Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Virgin Suicides embodies this idea by detailing the suicide of five sisters who are thin, white, and dazzlingly beautiful. Although the book claims to be a critique of the fetishization of sad women, it is anything but. The protagonists are perfect caricatures of the unattainable and problematic beauty standards enforced by society. It frames their mental illness as something intriguing and mysterious which attracts the attention of several boys in their class. Eugenides fails to analyse the roots of their depression and presents it as something innate to their personalities. This only furthers the idea that feminine sadness is one-dimensional and not worthy of more nuanced analyses. The novel is just one example of many narratives that aestheticize women’s pain, packaging it as a sexy quirk, with a fine pink ribbon tied around it. This genre of literature serves no purpose but to catch the sight of the male gaze, disempowering women and arousing men.
Another core element of the sad girl is her appearance, it follows a strict set of guidelines that rarely change; conventionally pretty, skinny, white. Authors continuously reinforce these unattainable beauty standards by creating heroines that conform to them. This prompts women to aspire to a narrow representation of womanhood that leaves many others on the margin. Because fat women don’t fit this rigid image of beauty, they are not afforded the same empathy in many narratives. Instead, their characters are often dehumanised, making their depression seem trivial. The romanticisation of sadness only extends to thin women who are portrayed as worthy of male desire.
The sad girl is also inseparable from her whiteness, contributing to racist myths about mental illness in black women. Historically, black femininity has been juxtaposed with white femininity which has been portrayed as fragile and innocent. This is a prejudiced representation of black women that fails to afford humanity to these characters. Whiteness is central to the identity of the sad girl and is weaponised to perpetuate racist ideas against black women. Although not every text that glamorises feminine sadness is racist or fatphobic, many work together to create exclusionary beauty standards that become synonymous with the trope.
Fortunately, in more contemporary literature, authors are challenging this misogynistic representation of sad women. Sally Rooney has been applauded for her creation of multi-dimensional female characters that struggle with their mental health. However, her protagonists are always white, rich, and thin, contributing to the idea that conventionally attractive women are most worthy of a reader’s attention. For example, the character of Marianne from her novel Normal People often skips meals and her thin frame is consistently alluded to throughout the text. The emphasis on Marianne’s body weight serves no purpose in the narrative and fails to draw attention to the harms of disordered eating. As a result, her representation of feminine sadness is not free from the exclusionary ideals that she claims to denounce.
On the other hand, Ottessa Moshfegh successfully satirises this phenomenon, acting as a brilliant critique of the sad girl trope. It follows the life of a woman who yearns to escape reality through the use of prescription drugs that put her into a comatose state. Although the protagonist is white, thin, and wealthy, she is entirely unlikeable, exposing how readers too often afford empathy to women on the basis of their appearance. The novel also exposes how capitalism has led to the commodification of every aspect of our lives, even female sadness, especially through the use of social media. Although the text is not perfect in its representation of sad women, it successfully highlights the ills of this trope and why he must abandon it.
Although the sad girl genre has produced some of my favourite books, women deserve accurate representations of their sadness. Women should be written as nuanced characters that have emotions completely separate from the influence of men. The fetishization of their struggles has led to the romanticisation of mental illnesses that have very real and ugly consequences. If we continue to portray this as a desirable quirk through characters like the manic pixie dream girl we trivialise their experience. Furthermore, by design, this trope works to exclude women of colour and plus-sized women from the narrative. This has created a sub-genre that spews many problematic messages and is dangerous for the young teens who follow it closely. As #SadGirl continues to trend on BookTok, I hope that we can platform books that challenge the negative legacy of all things sad girl.
