On the Importance of Literary Sad Girls (And Why Women of Colour Need Them, Too)

Written by Aarani Diana, one of our literature, current events, and opinion writers, as well as one of our advice columnists. This piece was edited by Sarah Saint Anne, one of our editors!

A quick Google search of “sad girl literature” will produce various lists with a myriad of titles, such as The Bell Jar; My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Girl, Interrupted; and Normal People will all pop up in the search results. These are primarily novels featuring twenty-something-year-old white, middle-upper class protagonists navigating life, education, careers, and relationships with a deep sense of listlessness and apathy. The literary sad girl exists as a familiar character in fiction. The book covers show her as a faceless entity surrounded by bright colours, her novel's title in bold text. Her melancholia is not a temporary state, one not alleviated by tears, rather, it is something existential—a condition integral to her being. Daintily destructive and depressed, she has become a staple of contemporary literature.

I love sad girl books. There is a kind of empowerment in reading stories of feminine sadness and liberation in acknowledging the weight of pain and loneliness. Women’s emotions, often treated as passive, don’t receive a lot of value or weight. For many, sad girl books are their first exposure to multifaceted, three-dimensional portrayals of womanhood; a deviation from superficial caricatures written as side characters in male-centric narratives. Literary sad girls are messy, make bad decisions, and don’t always handle their suffering in the healthiest ways. They are elegiac and beautifully tragic.

I've previously written about my affection for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and how Esther's feelings about herself, as well as her gender, were the first portrayals I saw in literature that I could completely empathise with. I felt Plath was the first author to put so much of my feelings—feelings I had as a young girl living in a world that isn’t always kind to young girls—into words.

Perhaps in portrayals of women displaying the more destructive traits associated with men, they can assume a type of control not usually afforded to women within the constraints of patriarchy. Audrey Wollen, the creator of the ‘Sad Girl Theory’, argues that “...young girls have used their own anguish as political tools for centuries”, and that “...being a sad girl is an act of resistance”. In a society that encourages women to be subservient and palatable, selfishly indulging in your own emotions is a form of resistance. Reading sad girl novels is often a cathartic experience for young women. However, the dissatisfied young woman genre usually features white protagonists. Books that exist outside of that white gaze are rarely lauded with the same acknowledgment or acclaim.

Leslie Jamison defines the literary sad girl in her New York Times article ”Cult of Literary Sad Women”, as being -“contoured and whittled by her suffering, self-destructive and utterly destroyed”, her appeal being the fact she is relatable. Jamison defines this relatability as coming from the way the protagonist goes through life. Like many, she struggles, and at times, completes fails as she attempts to make her way through the world. Her sadness exists as an apathetic, irrational haze of loneliness and confusion, but her relatability comes about from her default whiteness. Without the added weight of trauma and prejudice women of colour face, the white literary sad girl remains a steady and easy trope. Women of colour are not considered as desirable or relatable as their white peers, and with that, their sadness is less attractive or perceived as having less value in their literary depictions.

In pop culture and media, it is The Bell Jar that is synonymous with female sadness, yet narratives featuring similarly depressed Black women are more often tied to their racial identity and oppression as opposed to their feminine sadness. Similar English-language explorations of East and South Asian young women, though present while rare, often feature intergenerational trauma and immigration as key components of the melancholia faced by their female protagonists. Whiteness existing as a default in the Western world means that white femininity is normative. Therefore, white womanhood is congruent with femininity. We grant literary sad girls beauty and romanticism in their melancholia—a privilege their nonwhite counterparts do not receive. Now more than ever, racial trauma and oppression are topics that are both important and relevant for people to explore and become educated on. However, as shown in literature, women of colour rarely receive the privilege of being sad for sadness’ sake. Instead, their pain is a product of their oppression, as opposed to something inherent and feminine.

Perhaps part of the reason women of colour’s melancholy is not given the same weight is the fact that they are often stereotyped as being more aggressive or less feminine. They do not receive the same generosity in depression, nor can they act out or come unhinged in the same way white protagonists can. Women of colour are denied the support and help they need. Mental health and illness are largely stigmatised in minority communities, and seeking help for it can be incredibly difficult. Additionally, therapists are not always equipped to deal with the specific kind of trauma that comes from immigrant or racialised experiences. Women of colour do not have the freedom of white women, they are more likely to be perceived as a threat or othered for certain behaviours associated with mental illness.

Women of colour deserve stories where their protagonists are emotionally complex. We deserve stories where we can see ourselves beyond racial trauma. So we should write them. We should write about those coloured women who are flawed, ones that make bad decisions and regret them. We should write protagonists that allow young women to see themselves in their messiness and heartbreaks as opposed to their trauma and racial identity. I think many writers turned to the craft because they found themselves in the words of others, and were able to learn to understand themselves through reading. They wanted to evoke that feeling in others and be the architect of such wonder. We can do that—so we should—to give a home to all the sad girls of colour in literature. They deserve to feel like they belong there just as much as anyone else. We can be flawed, messy, make bad decisions, be funny, broken, witty, bright, and beautiful. We can be sad girls, too.

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This piece was written by one of our literature writers, Aarani. Reach them at @aaranistar on Twitter!

This piece was edited by one of our editors, Sarah Saint Anne. Reach them at @sarahsaintanne on Instagram and @kittenbritches on Twitter!

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