4.6: Sentimentalism
As this article states:
"For most of the past two centuries, 'sentimentalism' has been used pejoratively to refer to a tendency towards overt emotionalism in literature and other cultural forms, an evocation of sympathy based on the most common-placed and clichéd situations and images. [...] According to the older tradition, as the country modernized, becoming more market-oriented and urbanized, popular taste withdrew into the pleasure of an easy emotionalism, feelings of nostalgia and sympathy that allowed people to feel an untroubled connection to characters and to avoid the deep intellectual puzzles and problems that the true literature of the period addressed. Such a view provided a foundation for many critics to dismiss much of the most popular literature of the period, especially literature written by women, as women authors and readers were seen as particularly emotional."
To learn more about the characteristics critics used during this time to distinguish between serious literature and sentimental novels, read this article.
Read Ruth Hall, the autobiographical novel by one of the most famous authors of the era, Fanny Fern, the pseudonym of Sara Payson Willis. Willis' novel, as with much of her writing, both embraces and critiques domestic ideology. She defends her autobiographical heroine's foray into the public world of publishing in terms of her role as a mother, while simultaneously revealing, with caustic wit and satire, the hypocrisy of those who object to women taking a more active role in financially providing for themselves and their families. As such, her novel does not fit squarely within the category of domestic sentimental fiction but rather delineates some of the populist ideas behind such fiction as well as their limits.