The Sentimental Touch: The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism

4 /A Touch of Miss Lonelyhearts

Chapter 4 argues that Nathanael West's surprising use of sentimental language in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) typifies the ways that sentimental tropes have changed in the eighty-one years since Uncle Tom's Cabin. West's work is important for the way that its language and form respond to a deep shift in the organization of daily life in the United States. West's unexpected use of a sentimental literary figuration becomes a gauge by which we can measure his response to a bureaucratized civilization that seems to be failing. The sentimental touch is not merely the moment when characters overcome a crisis of personal alienation; the sentimental touch becomes the moment when West both demonstrates and resists the social changes that have rendered moments of unmediated bodily expression so fragile and unlikely. The human touch seems to be lost in the world ruled by the manager, but might be gained in literature.