11/22/2023 0 Comments Tumblr aesthetic lyricsThe hashtag #sadgirl has over 16.1 billion views, and #Tumblr has over 6.8 billion views. With the popularity of TikTok, the sad girl aesthetic has resurged, achieving a presence similar to what it had on Tumblr’s platform in the 2010s. Thelandersson states, “ is something that touches more upon sadness in general, a sadness that is creative and inspiring, rather than the debilitating ‘stuck-ness’ associated with depression.” An article by Fredrika Thelandersson for Capacious: Journal For Emerging Affect Inquiry discusses the idealization of sadness in society’s culture, describing the phenomenon of melancholia. The idealization and exploitation of tragic women for the sake of art has spanned centuries and is still prevalent in today’s society. Robert Wiles, a photographer, took a photograph of McHale that “Life” magazine published the image is often referred to as “the most beautiful suicide.” Marilyn Monroe is another example of how the media and society have profited from a woman’s beauty and pain, as evidenced by the 2022 Netflix film “Blonde.” In 1947, a woman named Evelyn McHale committed suicide by jumping off the Empire State Building and landing on the hood of a car. Even Edgar Allan Poe stated in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” ![]() In his poem “A Carcass ,” Baudelaire remarks on the beauty of a woman’s corpse, taking artistic pleasure in the sight of her feasted on by nature. Image from Tate Britain ( ).įrench poet Charles Baudelaire also discussed the death of beautiful women. The poppy flowers symbolize beauty and Ophelia’s impending death, emphasizing the correlation of beauty with dismay and destruction. Flowers surround her, and she wears beautiful attire as she lies with her arms stretched out, accepting her fate. The oil painting “Ophelia,” by Sir John Everett Millais, portrays Ophelia as elegant in her death. Shakespeare is known for creating tragic female characters, such as Juliet in Romeo & Juliet, who killed herself for love, and Ophelia, a beautiful woman who was driven insane and drowned herself in Hamlet. Seeing this similarity, I wanted to explore the reasoning behind romanticizing mental illness, how the tragic female has been culturally apparent across many periods, and what that figure has transformed into today. There has been a resurgence in the sad girl aesthetic through TikTok that is reminiscent of the Tumblr trends I saw as a young teen. Not only can these types of blog posts undermine mental illness, but they also romanticize it. ![]() ![]() Instead, like me, the community submerged themselves into feelings of sadness not as something to get help for but as something too profound and beautiful for the outside world to understand. When being sad or depressed is a source of connection and common interest, it can become difficult for someone to get the support to seek help for mental illness. However, this community can also be detrimental. Tumblr provided a community of young girls like me who felt too embarrassed or ashamed of what was going on inside their heads and instead vocalized their pain and suffering to strangers online. In the years 2014 through 2016, I found my middle school self scrolling Tumblr for hours at night, looking at blog posts of Sylvia Plath quotes, Lana Del Rey Lyrics, and images of young, thin girls with captions like, “It kills me to love you.” I related with these people, thinking, “I’m young and sad, too!” Tumblr users somehow turned their pain into something beautiful, or in other words, an aesthetic.
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