Sentimentality
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Sentimentality is both a literary device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. "A sentimentalist", Oscar Wilde wrote Alfred Douglas, "is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." Yeats wrote, "Rhetoric is fooling others. Sentimentality is fooling yourself."
Sentimental began to accrue negative connotations in the nineteenth century. Before that it had been an adjective denoting "feeling", as in The Man of Feeling (1771), Lawrence Sterne's Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and Flaubert's Sentimental Education (1869).
In modern times "sentimental" is a pejorative term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader's sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: "excessiveness" is the criterion; for most of the twentieth century Tchaikovsky's symphonies were denigrated as "sentimental". "Meretricious" and "contrived" sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is both intrusive and pat.
Sentimentality applies feelings in inappropriate situations. The sentimental fallacy is an ancient rhetorical device that attributes human emotions to the forces of nature, such as mourning or anger.
Complications enter into the ordinary view of sentimentality when changes in fashion and setting— the "climate of thought" —intrude between the work and the reader. The view that sentimentality is relative is inherent in John Ciardi's "sympathetic contract", in which the reader agrees to join with the writer when approaching a poem. The example of the death of Little Nell in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), "a scene that for many readers today might represent a defining instance of sentimentality", brought tears to the eye of many highly critical readers of the day. The reader of Dickens, Richard Holt Hutton observed, "has the painful impression of pathos feasting upon itself."
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