[MUSIC] [NOISE] Lauren Berlant offers one influential definition of sentimentality in her critical study, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. In this work, Berlant claims that the sentimental is a juxta-political form. Because she says, it hangs around the political, but does not actually trust the political as a resource for living. Instead, Berlant claims the sentimental is part of a broader women's culture, which includes women's magazines and websites, Lifetime television, and Chiclet. All of which Berlant says express quote, a general sense of confidence in the critical intelligence of affect, emotion, and good intention. In the world of sentimentality, what you feel is truer than what you know. You trust your heart more than you trust political action or change. Because of this faith and emotion, Berlant argues that the sentimental subject is vulnerable to repetitive and damaging attachments. Put simply, Berlant thinks that sentimental women are addicted to love. They know it's bad for them, but they can't or won't let go. Berlant writes, from the nineteenth century on, we witness in women's culture's stories the many kinds of bargaining women do to stay in proximity to the work of love at the heart of normative femininity the utopian and pathetic impulses behind this bargaining, and its costs and pleasures. Berlant's conception of the sentimental is thus distinct from Suzanne Clark's in important ways. Berlant does not celebrate the sentimental's capacity to build community with the reader as Clark does. But instead, warns that these effective attachments can be destructive and dangerous. To Berlant, the sentimental is a fantasy. Which defers subjectivity or projects it onto an imagined future where romantic fulfillment and individual freedom are always waiting, just out of reach. Berlant's indictment of the sentimental is in fact not entirely unlike the new critics. John Crowe Ransom claims that a woman lives for love. And Berlant similarly announces at the outset of The Female Complaint, everyone knows what the female complaint is. Women live for love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking. But of course, not all love poems are sentimental. Louise Bogan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Genevieve Taggard, and Elinor Wylie thought they were working against a dominant women's culture that they found oppressive. They would be surprised to learn that many critics now consider them part of it. In my readings here, I've tried to call attention to this poetry's formal and political sophistication. I do not believe that these women poets were enthralled to romance in the naive way that their worst critics have claimed. But because of a century of critical debate over women's writing and a critical establishment that still has trouble taking women's lives and experiences seriously, these women poets remain under-read and under-appreciated even today. We still underestimate these women poets. [MUSIC]
