Zoöphilpsychosis: Why Animals Are What's Wrong with Sentimentality

Only the mind and thought of a sentimentalist could have found expression in such emotion-laden expressions as those about the fowl of the air which neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns.

—Leo Baeck (1958)

There are few emotional imperatives in Anglo-American culture so widely accepted, if hazily understood, as those embedded in the perception that there is something essentially suspect about sentimentality. "[S]entimentality," the philosopher Anthony Savile observes, "is always open to criticism" (315). This criticism takes two contradictory forms. In its most familiar usage, sentimentality implies superficiality or duplicity in one's expression of feeling, often with a gendered subtext imputing a specifically feminine form of emotional indulgence. In the psychological novel, sentimental characters either lack emotional complexity or are morally flawed, driven by social calculus rather than authentic impulse and conviction. The term remains a favorite epithet among reviewers, middlebrow and highbrow alike, for whom sentimental art is by definition bad art. A film or novel deemed sentimental requires little consideration, offering an occasion for carefully modulated pathos without confronting its audience's values or expectations. Sentimental emotions may range from the merely self-absorbed and formulaic to the hypocritical and false, but, in any case, they lack substance and integrity. For all of his or her theatrical exuberance, however, the sentimentalist is understood to be indolent, an implication captured in the most famous attack on sentimentality, Oscar Wilde's long letter to his one-time lover Lord Alfred Douglas, composed in Reading Prison. A "sentimentalist," he writes, "is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it" (768). Wilde condemns sentimental feelings as a psychic vice because they lack sufficient intensity to engage the will and precipitate action. Reframed as ideology critique, this formulation underlies the frequent interpretation of sentimentality as a species of bourgeois bad faith: a self-affirming sympathy that eschews ameliorative activity.

By another definition, it is not sentimental feelings but rather their objects that are false. Although the sentiments may be heartfelt, they fail to correspond to reality. The problem with sentimentality, in this sense, is not a deceitful self but a deceived, because overly sanguine, understanding of others. Sentimentality represents a form of political utopianism, the proponents of which advocate visionary schemes of social harmony that disregard innate human aggression and self-interest. Camille Paglia invokes this connotation when she writes of outgrowing her political adolescence: "The traumas of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error . . . . I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary" (104). The problem with sentimentality is not its underbelly of cynicism, as Wilde saw it, but rather its earnest and idealizing failure to account for the darker facets of human nature. It is often implied, moreover, that such idealization precipitates and excuses the very violence it overlooks. Sentimental art of this sort is facile, if not dangerous, because it deemphasizes moral complexity and the inevitability of social conflict. As Julie Ellison has shown, this conception of sentimentality as political quixotism supplies an early stage in the psychic life of liberal guilt, the subject of which retains a sense of obligation toward disenfranchised others and yet transforms his or her idealism into an embarrassment of youth. Liberal guilt reflects the mature, if paralyzing, realization that the good intentions of the privileged will never overcome systemic inequality, a realization the sentimentalist has not yet made. A step beyond liberal guilt, the sophisticated grownup finds several remedies for naïve sentimentality, including hermeneutic suspicion, postmodern irony, cynical reason, and epistemological skepticism.

In "Everybody's Protest Novel," his well-known excoriation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, James Baldwin demonstrates that these conflicting definitions often intersect. Baldwin identifies "sentimentality [as] the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion," as at once a dangerously utopian "devotion to a Cause" and a "mark of dishonesty" (12). This peculiar (dis)juncture in sentimentality's connotations—it at once signifies affective surfeit and parsimony, a distortion of the world and the self—offers a useful clue in the...