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Jasmine Choate
My Sense of the Sentimental
Okay I’ll admit it, I, like many others,
am a sucker for sentimental literature, movies, music, and poetry. Before this
course I honestly would not have been able to fully explain why I fell victim to
the guarantee of tears being shed or heart strings being pulled. I mean doesn’t
everyone enjoy finishing a book/movie and being overwhelmed with the feeling
that they’re heart had been stomped on and put back together with cheesy- but
heartfelt- tape?
Yet now, I can pinpoint exactly what the
author/artist is doing to have their audience feel emotions, and better yet, I
can understand why. Sentimental literature, or Domestic literature from the
American Renaissance was mostly aimed towards women of that time period. This
being mainly because of how it relies heavily on emotion to help the reader
plunge into the world and experiences of the characters within the work. Easy to
spot characteristics of sentiment would be anything involving children, small
animals, motherhood, and familial relationships. Authors use these to help draw
out emotion and sympathy from their readers and directs them towards an
understanding of the characters.
One of my favorite examples of Sentiment
within the texts from this course was in
The Lamplighter by Maria Susanna Cummins. When Gerty holds the little live
kitten in her arms and is preparing to put her down and let her go the kitten “crept
from Gerty's arms up to her neck,
clung there, and, with
feeble cries, seemed to ask her to take care of it.” [1.27] Not only was there a
LITTLE kitten, the kitten CLUNG to Gerty and let out weak cries practically
begging for Gerty’s help. By mentioning that Gerty knew that taking care of the
cat would prove to be difficult and contemplated leaving it there, yet being won
over through the affection of a frail kitten and deciding to love and care for
it is relatable for any animal lover out there no matter what gender. With this
example, we see firsthand the simplicity of ‘manipulating’ the reader’s
emotions, however there are more complex circumstances that execute this same
method of creating emotion.
In
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher
Stower there are many instances where sentiment is used to create a connection
between the reader and the characters. For instance, when the slaveholder Simon
Legree is dreaming it states that a figure appeared to him and “rose up that
solemn veiled figure, and drew aside the veil. It was his mother; and she turned
away from him, and he fell down, down, down.” [36.28] By having the
figure appear dark and hidden the emotion of fear from this evident nightmare is
built, then to reveal this figure as his mother who has turned her back on him
invokes a much more complex feeling. With women, particularly mothers, comes a
sense of morality that they withhold and expects their children to do the same.
By having his mother appear in this dark and mysterious way to only turn away
from him creates this sense of disappointment that his mother might have in him
and his moral decisions. Everyone can relate with the feeling that comes from
the experience of disappointing a loved one, especially a mother.
As
mentioned in the course webpage for Sentiment/Sentimentality, Romantic
literature is often disliked or criticized by the fact that it “can cross the
line from honest sentiment into exploitative sentimentality.” This results in
readers feeling that this makes the work less complex or challenging by
manipulating them into feeling the character’s obvious emotions. If you think
about the types of movies and books nowadays that use the method of
sentimentality, they are often forced into the genre of “chick-flicks” or
“chick-lit”. By labeling these works as this they are degrading the actual work
and basically defining it as less than the male centered works. However, I’d
like to state my case for why I am a fan of the excessive grab for emotions and
feelings within literature and other forms of art. We as humans yearn to
experience emotions, even the darker ones like grief and heartbreak. However, we
do not always want to deal with the real-life consequences or circumstances that
coincide with them. So, by watching a sad movie, or reading a heartfelt book
about family, we live vicariously through the characters and build a stronger
connection to them and subsequently the art itself.
