The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (review)

Avid readers of theorist Lauren Berlant will be pleased as her latest book, The Female Complaint, continues her ongoing project of charting national sentimentality in U.S. publics. Berlant's new work examines the ways intimate publics are constituted through and by affective connections. The Female Complaint examines popular twentieth-century literature directed toward "women's culture." Berlant identifies women's culture as an intimate public that has been hailed in the United States since the 1830s through commodities marketed to make women feel a sense of commonality, as women, through consumption of these same products—those products marketed to make women feel like women, so to speak, including cosmetics, perfumes, and apparel. Berlant, however, engages with a different sort of commodity: literature and subsequent film and stage adaptations that are arguably emblematic of the twentieth century, including Showboat, The King and I, Imitation of Life, and A Star is Born, for the sentimental messages they project toward women. Interestingly, Berlant doesn't fully engage with the moniker of the text, the female complaint, until the second half of the book. This review will instead begin with the idea of the female complaint and then chart the key ideas offered in the beginning chapters, concluding by explicating the relevance of Berlant's thesis to scholars of public discourse.

Although this text makes many notable theoretical contributions, the primary function of The Female Complaint is to understand the fixity and power of women's culture in molding women to perform conventionally and urging them to feel in similar ways. The first dimension of this politicizing of sentimentality is an exploration of the ways texts produced for women's culture repetitively deploy the female complaint, understood here as the general sentiment that "women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking" (1). These texts not only hail love, but they track women's disappointments with romantic love. The dimensions of the female complaint are best illuminated in chapters 5, 6, and 7. In the literary and film texts explored by Berlant, women are compelled into romantic love relations. These relationships, however, are not at all the utopic fantasies for which the female characters hoped. What is utopic, however, is their participation in the normative, conventional fantasy that is projected so pervasively in women's culture. Here, the feelings and ideals associated with love are so powerful that the characters find themselves bound to love's object in order to stay near the conventional. Not only are women hailed to forget love's failures and pain in order to stay near love (a premise developed in chapter 5), but they are also figured to be "held by the promise of the normal as ideal" (211), regardless of the pain that might be present in relation to love's object, as Berlant argues in chapter 6.

Thus literature marketed toward women's culture fosters a sense of belonging, or commonality, among women based on what they feel. Surviving love's disappointments happens when women abide by the predominant ideology of "normative, generic-but-unique femininity." This is what Berlant posits as women's "love affair with conventionality," as women continue to perform heterofemininity in very particular yet general ways in the hope that better love will happen someday (2). Women feel commonality—despite differently classed and raced positionalities—because all women are hailed with the affliction of surviving love. Here normalcy is marketed as what one should be and do to live through love. Importantly, Berlant positions the analysis of sentimentality in feminine intimate publics as both a personal project—having watched numerous female family members "who entered femaleness at different historical moments and yet whose styles of being in femininity have contained uncanny similarities" (vii)—and consequently a political project of witnessing singular personhood being replaced with women's aspiration toward general personhood. The political implications of all of this sentimentality...