Sad Girl Autumn and The Gendering of Seasonal Affective Disorder
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It’s that time of the year again: the biting chill of the morning air, the under-boot crunch of fallen leaves on the sidewalk, the re-emergence of the Rory Gilmore sweater on many a TikTok For You page and I’m ready to fall back in love with the much coveted coziness of autumn. As a transitory period between the final days of the scorching summer heat and the first hints at the winter-to-come, autumn has always been a natural harbinger of contradictory states of being: simultaneously associated with decay and death as well as harvest and rebirth. It is a season of and for change; often romanticised as a comforting reminder of days gone by, wherein nostalgia for the past intersects with a pensive longing for what’s to come against the backdrop of red, orange and yellow foliage.
But beyond the literary parallels frequently drawn between autumnal states of transition and the weather induced sense of melan-fall-ia, this time of year also happens to occupy a special place in internet girl culture. From the endlessly memefied Christian Girl Autumn and the much anticipated - not to mention ridiculed - annual return of the cult favourite Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte, to the timely resurgence of interest in Gilmore Girls and cable knit sweaters, the ubiquitous aesthetics of the layering season dominate online spheres the moment we enter September.
So much so that it has coined a whole new search prompt for a particular kind of niche autumnal content: sad girl autumn. The new phrase gained traction in the late September of last year – endorsed by the new music releases from certified “sad girl” artists such as Adele, Mitski and Taylor Swift – as an antithesis of her more carefree and frivolous sister the hot girl summer.
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If hot girl summer is the physical embodiment of prancing on the beach in a tank top and denim cut-outs day drunk on 10-dollar Happy Hour cocktails, then sad girl autumn is the placid willingness to stay in and indulge in the peace and quiet of one’s bedroom, perched on the window sill in a chunky fisherman sweater with a book in one hand and a cup of piping hot tea in the other. Riding on the coattails of similarly seasonable online sub-aesthetics such as dark academia or cottagecore that aestheticise winter and spring respectively, sad girl autumn reflects a period of reeling in and ruminating on the passage of time, kindled by the changing colors of the leaves and fluctuating temperatures.
“If hot girl summer is the physical embodiment of prancing on the beach in a tank top and denim cut-outs day drunk on 10-dollar Happy Hour cocktails, then sad girl autumn is the placid willingness to stay in and indulge in the peace and quiet of one’s bedroom”
This feeling of kinship between women - girls in particular - is nothing new: autumnal melancholia precedes the sad girl autumn phrase. Once used as a medical diagnosis of what we would now define as acute depression, melancholia refers to an all-consuming feeling of solemn, introspective sadness; equal parts mediative and morbid.
In her seminal book The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature, scholar Juliana Schiesar explores the role of gender in this tortured genius narrative of the melancholic Western artist. Examining a wide range of formative texts from Aristotle to Shakespeare, Schiesari illustrates how melancholia as experienced and expressed by the male artist has historically been celebrated as a marker of creative genius, whereas female grief and public rituals of collective mourning traditionally led by women have been pathologized and dismissed on grounds of hysteria.
Female melancholia is more often than not pushed to the periphery in Western art and literature: women being relegated to secondary figures of alienated depression without being granted the same leeway of emotional depth as their male counterparts. Think Hamlet’s Ophelia: the quintessential tragic Elizabethan heroine, whose fatal affliction is not one of melancholia but rather erotomania, a type of delusional paranoia fostered by romantic infatuation; anchoring her love begotten delirium to an overflow of emotion for the eponymous melancholic of the play.
In light of the historically gendered framing of melancholia, the recurrent interest in emotionally profound and fittingly wistful media this time of year subsumed by the catch-all term of “sad girl autumn” gains a reclamatory meaning.
From essential female singer-songwriter albums that capture the tumultuousness of navigating the rocky road between girlhood and womanhood - Blue by Joni Mitchell, Tidal by Fiona Apple, Little Earthquakes by Tori Amos - to the velveteen deep purples of 90s whimsigoth witch flicks like Sabrina The Teenage Witch and The Craft that reify our childhood fascination with magic as a metaphor for the perplexing physicality of coming of age, the common ground of cult autumnal media seems to be the full-fledged embrace of a chronic sense of flux: the kind that floats to the surface with the first sip of cinnamon sprinkled foam. Ever so appropriate for a transitional season marked by erratic weather and equally as confused emotions.
In hindsight of the chokehold the basic fall girl had on the internet in the early 2010s, sad girl autumn comes across as the TikTok generation’s attempt at recuperating plaid skirts and UGG boots for taking emotional stock in the aftermath of yet another disappointing hot girl summer.
And while we certainly shouldn’t reduce emotionally potent art made by women to SEO friendly taglines like sad girl autumn that obfuscate its nuances, - a label more often not resented by designated “sad girl” artists - we also shouldn’t undermine the enduring collective fascination of women and girls with all things fall, as it pertains to artistic and memetic expression. Much like the 17th century cult of melancholia before it, the dedicated online following of melan-fall-ia is a distinctly gendered phenomenon, but unlike its predecessor it favors the sad girls over the brooding men.
Words: Elif Türkan Erisik