Sad girls have long fascinated the cultural imagination, ranging from pre-Raphaelite paintings of Elaine of Shalott drowning in water to Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar. The trope of the sad, disaffected heroine, often spiraling into self-destruction, recurs in pop culture, notably in bestselling novels like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Phoebe Wallers-Bridge’s hit BBC TV series Fleabag, and in the music of Mitski and Lana Del Rey. But the sad girl as she stands today traces her roots to the tragic women of Greek myth and 19th century literature, such as Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Dido in Virgil’s The Aeneid, who fell victim to the whims of men and the consequences of love lost. An offshoot of the ‘mad woman in the attic’ trope popularized in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the sad girl is more passive and mournful, resigned to her fate, using sadness as a way to romanticize and critique her predicament.

In this fifteen-week course, we will learn about the different ways in which the sad girl appears in contemporary literature, looking at Jean Rhys’s street smart heroines, waif girls from Les Misérables to Sally Rooney’s books, and Anaïs Nin’s passionate adventuresses. We will consider the sad girl’s adjacency to the antiheroine through films and texts like Wide Sargasso Sea and Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire, identifying how the sad girl overlaps and ultimately diverges from ‘bad girls’ in literature into a distinct archetype of her own. With the rise of medical awareness around mental health, the 1990s saw the popularity of narratives about neurodivergent women, typified in the film Girl, Interrupted starring Winona Ryder, which helped lay the foundation for the sad girl phenomenon as it exists today.

While depictions of sad girls in mainstream media are often critiqued for representing privileged women, the canon of sad girl literature includes cult classics like Nella Larsen’s Passing, which grapples with class, race, and womanhood, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, a romance about lesbian longing. Melancholic states of being, likewise, are complex, encompassing cultural theorist Edward Said’s “mind of winter”, a condition borne of exile and displacement, and ninth-century Japanese poet Ono no Komachi’s love gloom. Traversing different time periods, cultures, and literary traditions, this course will explore how sad girls have always appeared in storytelling, expressing and mirroring the wistful sorrow inevitable to being alive.