Modern Sentimentalism

Anton Chekhov's “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) ponders the end of a century and a cultural epoch. Over twenty years prior, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1877) showed a woman's life rent apart by a love affair of epic intensity. Much shorter and more understated, Chekhov's short story follows two people in loveless marriages who also find themselves falling in love. After some dramatic twists and turns, their affair arrives at a stable state. At long last, the protagonist—a banker in his thirties—and his beloved, a thirtysomething housewife whose titular “dog” is, comically, a Pomeranian, admit not only that they love each other but also that they want to live together permanently.The earnest confession that produces this mutual admission floods the narrative with happiness and relief—as well as a sense of wonder that such a desire could have been contemplated and articulated by both parties. But by what steps could their happiness become attainable? Chekhov moves quickly from his characters’ initial happiness to their recognition that the new, more genuine, and more liberated life they want to lead is fraught with logistical and emotional difficulties. These are, of course, the difficulties of breaking social decorum—but also those of transitioning from an excitingly clandestine, episodic affair to a quotidian marital existence whose emotional stakes are much higher than those of their preceding marriages of convention. The challenge that Chekhov's lovers face is brought about by their liberation, but also by a breakdown in the Tolstoian narrative patterns with which they are familiar; by their self-discovery, but also by their difficulty in finding new character types into which to settle. As these considerations loom on the horizon, they grow solemn: “the most complicated and difficult part of their journey was just beginning.”By ending “The Lady with the Dog” with this sentence, Chekhov's narrator marks an ambivalent opening. He suggests that the couple—and, implicitly, the coming century—face difficulties created not just by modernity's new speculative freedoms but also by the process of switching into new patterns of behavior from within older social and conventional grooves. To imagine and to dream of a new life does not in itself quite prepare one for embarking on it; as soon as such practical steps into liberation are taken, the old, familiar grooves of the conventions one is attempting to divert from reassert themselves.The authors gathered in Lisa Mendelman's Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America take up a version of the challenge of modernity that Chekhov describes here. They do so through generic experiments and fusions that produce a tone, which—also not unlike Chekhov's—is paradoxically both ironic and heartfelt. Chekhov, of course, was a man, though he showed sympathy for the late nineteenth-century plight of women. Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Anita Loos, Jessie Fauset, and Frances Newman are roughly one generation after Chekhov; their characters are, generally speaking, young women coming of age during the Roaring Twenties. As women whose careers peak in the 1920s and 1930s, they have direct, personal stakes in the early twentieth century's promises of suffrage. Moreover, they are caught not at these changes’ precipice but in what Jill Richards, in The Fury Archives (2020: 72), describes as these transformations’ awkward “long middle.” Having left a conventional past behind, their characters are thrown into a new world that feels half-baked and precarious; one whose outcomes, whether comic or tragic, are as yet far from sight, and what's most visible is the disappointing slowness with which it takes shape.Compared to many of the formally experimental male-bodied novelists around them, the women authors whom Mendelman examines might, at first glance, seem quite reactionary. Their novels hark back to the conventions of nineteenth-century sentimentalism; they are at once mocking of this sentimentalism and nostalgic for it. Caught in these seemingly dated dilemmas are women whom the Roaring Twenties would have designated as definitive symptoms of America's break with the past: “the New Woman, the flapper, the free lover, the New Negro woman, and the divorcee.” Mendelman argues that “these figures embody aspects of a traditional sentimentality while also recognizing sentiment as incompatible with the ideals of modern selfhood” (1).Mendelman describes the shared generic and affective features of these novels as “an aesthetic of mixed feelings that translates nineteenth-century conventions of sincerity and emotional fulfillment into the skeptical, self-conscious modes of interwar cultural production” (1). The ironically sentimental characters these novels depict struggle to attain some of the promises of first-wave feminism and are alternately starry-eyed and deeply suspicious of them. In one part, their ambivalence stems from the degeneration of an older, more traditional set of cultural expectations in whose place no new, coherent model of selfhood has as yet settled that could accommodate both the cerebral and the emotional parts of these characters’ selves. As Mendelman memorably puts it, “the flapper is as fashioned by the old as she is revivified by the new” (88). In another part, these figures’ combination of earnestness and distance arises because they feel that too little has changed around them and even within them. They fear that neither they themselves nor their surrounding communities can really change except by shutting down some parts of themselves.Successive chapters of Mendelman's book arrange themselves around these supposedly liberated new female types. Each of these types is explored through the lens of a new novelist, as Modern Sentimentalism also slowly wends its way from the nineteen-teens to the thirties. In chapter 1, with Willa Cather, Mendelman considers the New Woman as a complicated social and inward performance, a new emotional and tonal challenge both to this Woman herself and to the writer who wants to sell novels about her.In chapter 2, devoted to the flapper, Mendelman shows how Anita Loos's satirical flapper characters in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes are caught between old and new generational expectations. She takes these characters’ plight to “express the more muted pathos of unfreedom” (88). Chapter 3, centered on Frances Newman's long-forgotten but amazingly titled Hard-Boiled Virgin, explores with comic pathos the contradictions and disillusionments of free love. Newman's titular hard-boiled virgin realizes that “sentimental desire can coexist with emotional paucity and physical dissipation . . . while abandoned chastity and other non-virtuous behaviors can yield a visceral and affective vacuum” (89).Finally, chapter 4 studies notions of the New Negro Woman, as depicted in Angela Murray's Plum Bun, which Mendelman helpfully juxtaposes both against its contemporary visual culture and against the more recent art of Kara Walker. As Mendelman shows, “protagonist Angela Murray gradually develops an ironic sentimental sensibility that comprehends her paradoxical circumstances as an individual supposed to participate in racial uplift only indirectly, as a hyperembodied but asexual being who finds her self-worth in self-sacrifice” (123).Taken together, these novels amply demonstrate what Mendelman terms the “equal performativity, internal incoherence, and social inhibitions of these models of female selfhood” (135). Mendelman sees these contradiction as due to a general social gap between “expectations of feeling and physicality” (149), between the norms of how a new, modern woman was supposed to act and the paradoxically small space that her supposed liberation leaves for genuine emotional self-searching and self-expression.I find much to admire about this book. On a most basic level, it amply fulfills the promise of its introduction, convincing me that “American female novelists reinvented sentimentalism in the modernist period” (1). Mendelman reveals that, under the guise of satire and self-irony, women writers of the period undertook a profound and earnest analysis of why their generation's supposed liberation often came at the cost of self-alienation. A variety of social mores and educational practices conspired to initiate but also to unmoor and poison the new ways that these women were inventing of leading fulfilling and meaningful lives.Mendelman also convinces me of the radicalness of what might otherwise seem like a retrograde, reactionary gesture on her chosen writers’ part. She outlines how sentimentalism became a surprisingly malleable and utopian form for expressing otherwise silenced kinds and depths of women's generational experience, asserting both the intensity and the inarticulable newness of their ongoing attempts at self-re-fashioning.Many questions bubbled up in my mind as I read Modern Sentimentalism. The first of these questions concerns the relationship between the female novelists on whom Mendelman focuses and their male counterparts, on whom she intentionally does not focus. The novels Mendelman examines are, for the most part, lesser known within the modernist canon; yet the light they obliquely shed on the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Raymond Chandler, among many others, is bright and deeply, instantly clarifying. To read Modern Sentimentalism is to start building, in one's mind, richer emotional backdrops to otherwise flat or caricatured characters such as Fitzgerald's Daisy. It rapidly makes one notice the acts of psychological erasure, or simple misunderstanding, that crowd so many of the period's other representations of women. Mendelman makes a strong, if implicit, case for why we ought to read the novels she examines and give them to our students, to read alongside The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby; such an American modernism, reconstellated more amply to include Murray, Loos, or Newman, is thrilling.Modern Sentimentalism also makes me wonder, more broadly, about the place these represented women and their authors do or should have in our narration of the history of American feminism. These flappers, virgins, and divorcees are the foremothers of the disenchanted housewives of The Feminine Mystique; they are also the forebears of the more mainstream, centrist women who would only come to self-identify as feminists in the late fifties or early sixties. The absence, within these modernist narratives, of clear feminist rebels such as Emma Goldman is an important part of the story Mendelman tells: the story of a mainstream supposed female liberation founded on compromises and self-abnegations that would soon, inevitably, become ever less of a laughing matter.Part of me wishes I had heard more from Mendelman, in this book, about big-picture questions such as these. Such more speculative excursions might have mitigated what occasionally came across, in her argument, as a conceptual repetitiveness, a growing predictability to how her chosen novelists’ irony becomes laced with confusion and disappointment. But to demand such greater generalizations is already to acknowledge and appreciate the ambition of this book's argument as it stands, within its concision. My understanding of a significant strand of American modernism is changed by this book, and I look forward to seeing where Mendelman's thinking will take her next

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics) · Art · Irony · Literature · Political science · Sociology · American and British Literature Analysis · Communication · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Gender Studies · History · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies