The sad girl, the hopelessly distraught lover, and the depressed widow are prominent figures sprinkled throughout the history of art, music, and stories. She epitomizes beauty, wrapped up in a wrinkled blanket of suffering. Did I mention beauty?
Oh, she's pretty (a sad girl can never NOT be pretty); she has a frontage of men lined up, falling head over heels at first sight. She has a brilliant sense of style and radical music tastes. The "Sad Girl" does not have many friends and revels in her trauma and depression, all alone.
And we love her.
These "sad girls" have always existed; the internet just gave them a shiny name (we love labels!). Have you noticed?

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Get notified of top trending articles like this one every week! (we won't spam you)The “Sad Girl” in Literature, Art, and Music
Sylvia Plath was known to write about the great depths of depression in her poems before succumbing to her death. She writes in her poem Lady Lazarus,
"Dying is an art, like everything else I do it exceptionally well
I do it so it feels like hll.
I do it so it feels real.
In Jean Rhys's 1939 book Good Morning Midnight, Sasha is the consummate literary sad woman, self-destructive and disconsolate. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 novel The Yellow Wallpaper addresses the madness and deprecating state of an unnamed woman who is losing herself in the confinement of domesticity.
The character of Ophelia from Shakespeare's Hamlet was painted by Sir John Millais in 1851. Ophelia is depicted floating in the water gracefully, her pose of submission to be noted, as she sings her last song before death. She is beautiful, sad, and is dying.

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Fiona Apple, Mazzy Star, Mitski, Lorde, and the one and only Lana Del Rey have cemented their places as notable 'sad girls' in the music industry, Lana explicitly. Her 50s-60s styles, kohl-rimmed doe eyes, lavish dresses, the black-and-white noir music videos. All while she croons about being a ‘sad girl,’ about loving older men—men who desire and abuse.
Whether we realized what she sang about or not, we as gullible teenagers (or adults) did not care. She was gorgeous and sad, and we wanted to be her.
If you go down the never-ending rabbit hole, i.e., Tumblr, and search up ‘sad girl aesthetic,’ you'll find Lana gifs, grunge-esque pictures of skinny girls lying on the bed with smeared mascara, cigarettes, tears, and quotes like, “the feminine urge to cry.” Celeste Zucker eloquently describes the phenomenon in her essay,
“The sad girl aesthetic glorifies sadness as beautiful and encourages its participants to wallow in endless despair. While some defend the sad girl aesthetic as a healthy and productive expression of emotion, it romanticizes women’s misery as a surface-level trend.”

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All in all, we paint the sad girl as a person filled with suffering who refuses to grow out of this state. Our culture loves putting girls in a small box, shaming their interests and beliefs. What happens when the “sad girl” embraces her pain, is raw and messy in this sadness, and learns to find hope in this despondency? Is she as adored?
In the Virgin Suicides, written by Jeffrey Eugenides and adapted on the movie screens by Sofia Coppola (a director adored by the sad girl community), a group of boys are obsessed with the conservative couple and their five teenage daughters. The girls, ranging from 13 to 19, feel suffocated in their sadness, and by the end of the film, they all have ended their lives. The story is narrated from the boys' perspectives, and they treat the girls like fictional creatures, giving no care to the girls' dreams and inhibitions.
Ultimately, the world loved the girls because of their mysticism and beauty. They were the perfect Sad Girls.
Finding comfort in your sadness using art is not a crime; it can even be healthy. The point here is the cruel profitability of this sadness by the media. The sad-girl indie starter pack on Spotify or the coquette aesthetic threaded together using bows and tears are the perfect examples of the phenomenon. The question is, why do we have to commodify a girl's sadness and use it to classify groups of women in their communities?

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Those bows and painted tears do not apply to people suffering from mental and physical abuse, people who use self-harm, people who have eating disorders or people with chronic mental illnesses.
This is something a lot of young teenagers and adults have internalized throughout their lives, eroticizing their misery and remaining ignorant of their true feelings. We ignore all the facts, proof, and truths to find validity and fit into this aesthetic. The singer-songwriter Mitski, worshipped by the sad girl community, made a statement in response to a fan's tweet, saying that the day on which Mitski releases new music is a “big day for sad b***es.”
“You know, the sad girl thing was reductive and tired like five, ten years ago, and it still is today”.
The community ignores all the depth of her music, the implications, and her commentary on her race and sexuality, choosing to pick the pieces that fit their aesthetic.

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When you come across “sad girl” art, it is crucial to understand the layers of vitality, to fully comprehend what the artist wants to say. Manipulating art and using it to dismiss serious issues is the issue. It's important to give light to women's suffering; it is no less significant than a man's. What's crucial is to respect the artist's actual sorrow and allow them to thrive as themselves, without shelving parts that do not fit the trend.
Most importantly, they should stop dismissing their tragedies as a pathetic cash grab. Being the ‘Sad Girl’ may seem empowering to many, but we do not realize that this echo chamber we scream into has been built by the media and society, and no one is taking her seriously. We can escape this cruel archetype made for us by embracing the grief and ending the unecessary romanticization.

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Ending the Trope
Kojima from the book ‘Heaven’, written by Meiko Kawakami, has stood out to me as I indulged in the compelling story. The book follows a fourteen-year-old boy in a Japanese school in 1999 who is subjected to heinous bullying due to his lazy eye. His classmate Kojima experiences treatment similar to that of his classmates.
They console each other during their difficult times. Kojima could have been the perfect sad girl, except she's not. Meiko Kawakami wrote her to be a raw and powerful character who chose to fight back with her own beliefs.
Kojima was not conventionally attractive; she faced bullying for being dirty, with grimy shoes, disheveled hair, and an unkempt uniform. As the story unfolds, we discover that she chooses to express herself this way because it makes her feel closer to her impoverished father. He lives in poor conditions, and she believes that by maintaining a similar appearance, she could feel a stronger connection to him. In a conversation with the book's protagonist about the bullying they both endure from their classmates, she shares something compelling.
"I know there's so much pain in this, but we have to keep going. I have my signs because of the way my family is, and you are who you are because of your eyes. That's why we were able to meet.
That's why we can talk like this, why we can be together like this. A time will come when everything will be clear. Even the other kids will understand. A time will come, I'm sure of it when everything will be alright."
Kojima asserts her autonomy over her narrative. We encounter a side of her that is rarely visible in media. She isn't afraid of being emotional or feeling alienated; all she wishes is for the other kids to understand her.
She fights the pain using her words. She chooses to separate herself from her grief and stays resilient. Kojima is an example of a complex yet inspiring character in literature.
A girl to end the trope of the Sad Girl.

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