Why do we idolise the tortured soul?
I think I have always been enamoured by sadness. Phoebe Bridgers has been the soundtrack of my (relatively suffering-free) teenage years. I have whiled away train journeys with Bridgers’s ‘Waiting Room’ blasting in my ears, staring out the window melancholically as if I were the tortured protagonist in a coming-of-age film. After any minor inconvenience, I have paced urgently to Castle Sands, journal in hand, ready to sit poised and wistful on the rocks as I pen myself some problems.
I always thought there was a certain glory in suffering, a prestige in anguish.
Aged fourteen, I would’ve sworn that Effy Stonem was the pinnacle of coolness. For the uninitiated (or the American), Effy Stonem is the black eyeliner wearing, drug-taking, deeply miserable protagonist of the British TV Drama Skins.
In her first speaking appearance, Effy confesses, “Sometimes I think I was born backwards. You know, come out of my mum the wrong way.” Effy immediately asserts her fundamental difference to everyone else. From the moment of her birth, she has known that no one will ever understand her or her plight. In order to escape these feelings of difference, Effy experiments with drugs, seeks control by undereating, and engages in meaningless sexual relationships. These anarchic acts of rebellion, through my teenage lens, only served to further her status as a paragon of coolness.
As I made it through my teens, Effy’s place atop the coolness podium was usurped by my new favourite tortured soul: Normal People’s Marianne Sheridan. I admired her self-assured nature, her confidence in the face of unpopularity. On the novel’s second page she matter-of-factly states, “I’m smarter than everyone else.” The internal anguish she experiences throughout the novel thus appears high-brow, a consequence of her intellectual superiority, which sets her apart as the black sheep of both her family and her peer group.
Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, contains a possibly even more miserable female protagonist. Frances is deeply self-destructive: she pushes away those closest to her, preferring to seek out deeply problematic (and married) men in a perverse quest to amplify her own misery.
She writes poetry in which she figures “[her] own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit.” Both of Rooney’s protagonists readily consent to being used and discarded by men: seeing themselves as fundamentally unlovable, they masochistically permit their own emotional or physical mistreatment.
This female archetype can also be found in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, even if the misery is slightly offset by comical one-liners and silly fourth-wall breaks. Fleabag struggles with forming normal relationships, pursues unfulfilling sexual encounters instead of love, and participates in self-destructive behaviours that leave her with long-lasting emotional scars.
In a teary confession to Andrew Scott (the hot priest), she voices her suffering, disclosing, “I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far I think I’ve been getting it wrong.”
Yet, despite all these women’s evident unhappiness, and their countless, and very apparent flaws, I still wanted to be like them. I didn’t actually want to share in their suffering or experience their misery. I think I just thought seeming anguished was cool. I too wanted to be different, set-apart from all of my peers, experiencing some kind of internal anguish which they could never possibly understand. I wanted to drift about listlessly, rim my eyes with black eyeliner and sob in corner cafés, writing deeply miserable poetry which would even make Sylvia Plath tell me to lighten up.
So when it comes to deadline season, and you’re crying in the silent section of the main library, when your fellow students turn to look at you, I’m sure it’s not anger in those eyes but pure admiration for just how utterly cool and anguished you look. After all, all the best artists are the most tortured souls.
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