SAD GIRLS

As of late, sad girls have dominated books and pop culture, appearing significantly in the dreamy melancholic songs of Lana Del Rey, Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides about a haunting suicide pact among blonde teenage girls, and in Sylvia Plath’s iconic novel based on her own life The Bell Jar. In more recent literature, Ottessa Moshfegh’s icy, WASP-y, pill-popping heroine who literally sleeps in bed for a year and doesn’t work in My Year of Rest and Relaxation sensationalized readers and critics alike, and Stephanie LaCava’s slim, cutting novel I Fear My Pain Interests You spotlights a rich girl nepotism baby with congenital analgesia—a harrowing condition in which you literally can’t feel physical pain (and therefore nothing at all). The trope of the disaffected, beautiful, and often white heroine has struck a chord with many young women, who once customized their Pinterest boards, Instagram profiles and Tumblr blogs to reflect the pared-down, pastel aesthetic of feminine sadness.

But what exactly are the merits of the sad girl, if any? In music critic Lindsay Zoladz’ assessment of Lana Del Rey’s 2014 album, Ultraviolence, which features songs like “Pretty When You Cry” and the now-infamous lyric “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”, Zoladz writes Del Rey’s “universe feels stiflingly monochrome”, even if the singer’s ante reflects the dissatisfaction and sadness women often feel when performing a certain hyper-feminine ideal to tantalize the male gaze. Likewise, book scout Miriam Gordis tweeted, “I think the main problem with sad girl lit is that none of the girls have jobs.” It’s a compelling, if not new, point. In the viral essay “All Alone in Their White Girl Pain”, Somali-American cultural critic Safy Hallan-Farah critiqued how the sad girl aesthetic overwhelmingly centers on whiteness, fetishizing pain and victimization, which culminated in Lana Del Rey’s cringe “Question for the Culture” in 2020 when the singer hyper-sexualized Black women artists in a clumsy attempt to point out how ‘fragility’ lacked esteem among critics and feminists.

The truth is that the trope of the sad, tragic woman stems—perhaps more dynamically—from literature, such as Leo Tolstoy’s party girl Anna Karenina, who embarks on an extramarital love affair in imperial Russia before throwing herself in front of a train after her lover abandons her. Emma Bovary in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary similarly cheats on her husband in the French countryside, spiraling into debt and leaning into her reckless behavior as a way to escape the existential constrictions of being a wife. And yet, the sad girl isn’t always an unhappy (or bored) married woman: Victor Hugo’s street waif Éponine has since become iconic for her bravery against poverty and unrequited love for Marius in Les Misérables, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles signals the fatal misfortune of victim-blaming when Tess, who is vulnerable and working-class, experiences sexual abuse, and is defined by it till the very end of the 544-page novel.

Even so, the pervasive doom-and-gloom of sadness, and the redundancy of its hopelessness inspire frustration among readers and critics, who argue that depicting women as sad can kind of become a self-fulfilling prophecy, not allowing women to triumph over their burdens. Leslie Jamison, an essayist who built her career writing about her own struggle with alcoholism, wrote of Jean Rhys’ early novel Good Morning, Midnight: “I felt sickened by everything Sasha embodied. She was not only oozing self-pity, she also seemed self-righteous about it. . . as if she believed herself to be the only person who had ever known crippling despair.” Now sober, Jamison regards a novel she initially venerated as a 22-year-old with the self-disgust of genuine healing and growth. Optimism and grit, after all, are faculties of women who, even if they feel sad, don’t particularly possess the means to mope everyday about it. Similarly, women who are generationally poor, and/or not white cannot always drown in the Barbie-doll passivity of white feminized sadness. The world demands they greet its excesses and humiliations everyday with a fighting spirit and an arrogant smile on their faces, and this attitude appears in the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Terese Marie Mailhot’s lyrical memoir Heart Berries.

That isn’t to say, of course, that Lana Del Rey doesn’t have a point: “Don’t tell me to be glad when I’m sad, I really hate that,” she sings in her 2021 album Blue Banisters. The enforced happiness of American culture stemming from consumerism and the aspirational visuals of advertising, and its pressure on women to embody aesthetic ideals, has probably played itself out. Maybe the solution lies in a middle-ground: expanding the space to feel and express sadness in mainstream culture, and understanding grief as a universal inevitability revealing what it means to be human rather than an individualized, self-pitying subjectivity. After all, sadness holds pride of place in cultures outside of the Anglophone remit. Jorge Luis Borges’ ornate poems on love lost reach epic proportions, reveling in the stunned dissatisfaction of desiring someone he cannot have; Forugh Farrokhzad’s Persian verses express the wistfulness of her loneliness, discerning a poignant beauty in her pain; and gham, a word that means sorrow, orients Urdu poetry, influencing lyrics of Bollywood songs and much of pop culture in South Asia. Sad girls have only scratched the surface of an all-consuming, elevated art form ranging from Latin America to the Indian Ocean, which tells us to actually feel our emotions (rather than numbing ourselves), perhaps accidentally opening a portal to a better acceptance of grief in the literature that depicts it.

Written by Iman Sultan