In Defense of Sentimentalism

Dear Editors:

I have followed the increasingly heated discourse surrounding “On Repressive Sentimentalism” with fascination.  Not least because I think it’s the piece’s bloodlessness that’s aroused such passion. The accusations have ranged from high-handedness to self-absorption to white-hunterism (my brand-new meme for invoking the Ivory Tower) to heteronormativism to watered-down Jessie Bernard-ism. My own objections, and the reflexive wave of defensiveness the piece provoked in me--and so which I understand--were less reasoned. When I was asked to really think about it logically, I realized that they were, in point of fact, pure sentimental drivel. And therein, for me, lies the piece’s central problem: dismiss “sentimentalism” as an unworthy construct of society, a sop to the masses, an ill-judged concession, and still it persists. And isn't rhetoric devoid of sentiment as potentially destructive as that which springs from pure emotion rather than logic? If the theoretical were this easy, Philosophy would be a far more practical major than it is, and I wish I didn’t speak from bitter experience.

I’m apparently the very worst sort of sentimentalist myself. I want, for instance, to get married. Tell me this is retrograde and socially irresponsible, a product of media and 500 years of degradation. I might hang my head, I might feel ashamed, I might get mad, I might try to mutter something half-hearted about Kierkgaard just to give myself some credibility, but the desire remains, and arguing against it is as futile as it is gratuitous.  And what progressive doesn’t resent the implication that their personal is not only political, but reactionary? This is, as the piece points out, a central tenet of the abortion debates. But the concession of abortion as a “necessary evil,” which the essay characterizes as a frustrating bit of rote soft-pedaling, is far more than this. As a friend emailed me, “I felt pain and regret after my abortion that has nothing to do with political convictions or my theoretical ideas about 'choice' and I was angry at myself for it.”  But that anger, at oneself and at those who’d seek to deny it - which, while not universal, is also far from isolated–can’t be conveniently swept under the rug, and I can’t help wondering if demonizing, or dismissing, the very real reactions of a very significant population, isn’t irresponsible as well as cold-blooded.

And that brings me to another niggling concern the piece awoke in me. Let’s face it: “sentimental” has always been a pretty legible code-pink for “feminine.” It doesn’t take a thorough examination of women’s suffrage, the Cult of Domesticity, the temperance movement, the course of 19th century fiction, or the continuing subtext of manipulative advertising from both sides of the political aisle to understand that “sentiment” has always been the women’s issue, something to get over prior to moving on to the work of objective reason. I couldn’t help but thinking, repeatedly, of the title of the nursing-history documentary, “Sentimental Women Need Not Apply,” and it seems to me pretty disingenuous to ignore the implicit connection between the two. And to jump wildly between historical eras (sentimentalist’s prerogative!) these dichotomies, in deep primitive ways, somehow manage to hearken back to the days when university faculty were forced to live, celibate and cloistered, like monks, keeping the flame of reason safe from the sop of my sentimentality--or the medieval version thereof. Sentiment has long scared those who are "objective," who’ve sought to de-claw and re-scent and soften and demonize it, dismissing it first as the purview of inferior intellect and later, perhaps, of inferior conviction. But if Ruskin and his cohorts saw sentiment as wholly feminine and a necessary balance to the harsh reason of men, now we’ve stripped the notion, not just of its retrograde teeth but also of its moral authority.  And maybe the idea that sentimentalism can have a moral authority needs to be reexamined, if only because denying its validity apparently results in anger.