But You Look So Pretty When You Smile: 20th Century Hysteria and its Legacy in “Sad Girl Indie”

Abstract

This text seeks to make a connection between the now-debunked diagnosis of hysteria on women writers of the 20th century with the reductive labeling of female singer-songwriters as “sad girls” in contemporary culture. These subjects expose a cycle that occurs for many women artists, and really any non- white-cis-male artists for that matter, in which emotional expression can become an all-consuming marketed trait, causing these artists to be defined by their suffering, and in turn giving new cause for its renewal.