#sentimentalism

[ddestroyangels]

Lust by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, c. 1789

Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts

[maybe-boys-do-love]

Sentimental Strategies

In Robyn R. Warhol's A Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, she lays out 7 techniques sentimental narratives use in order to induce physical emotional reactions, especially tears, from readers and audiences. Rather than criticizing the formulaic 'manipulation' in the use of these techniques or suggest they conceal accurate depictions/understandings of the world as modernist critics tend to do, she describes an alternative theory of emotions that argues reactions to texts can rehearse and reinforce feelings to inspire real world action.

Understood through the latter lens, the assessment of media working in a sentimental mode--many BLs, GLs, soap opera, telenovela, lakorn, romance, women's weepies, shoujo--ought to reflect that framework rather than directly comparing it's success as a story to more modernist media. Below, I've briefly summarized the 7 techniques Warhol describes with some BL examples in gif form.

Sentimental 'Style.'

Pictured: Team’s tearful reaction to Win in Between Us

In writing, that means 'flowery writing.' Poetic language, alliteration, punctuation the emphasizes emotional affect (exclamation points, emdashes, ellipses, italics), and the play between presence and absence to blur the lines between the world of the story and the world of the reader.

In performance fiction, we get melodramatic theatricality: acting styles with big physical expressions of characters' emotions, sentimental instrumentation, and use and repetitions of familiar musical themes.

2. Too Big to Tell

Pictured: Atom and Kongthap’s first ‘kiss’ in My Love Mix-Up Thailand

Sentimental fiction will often suggest representation, either in the form of language or visual depiction, is inadequate to convey the size or depth of an emotion.

Because of their feelings, characters are pushed beyond speech--think of the quote from Jane Austen's Emma "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more"--and even consciousness--all the fainting! The narrator in a novel might claim a momentous event is indescribable, like in Little Women, "I don't think I have any words in which to tell the meeting of mother and daughters; such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe, so I will leave it to the imagination of my readers."

Visual concealment happens, too, with cut-aways, occlusion by objects, or obscuring angles. A visually hidden kiss or moment of intercourse, while possibly having a relationship to censorship, also might be drawing on erotic and sentimental narrative strategies. All of these failures to articulate or depict, far from denying emotions or events, invite the audience to fill in the blank for the emotions, becoming an active co-creator of the affective power of an experience.

3. Focus, but NOT Identification with Suffering Characters

Pictured: Ae finds Pete after he’s assaulted in the rain in Love By Chance

Scenes tend to shift perspectives across sentimental stories to be limited to a single character's consciousness, either a character who's a victim in some way or a character who formerly oppressed character now triumphant, even when they don't speak the narration. It's seldom granted to those are actively oppressing but might be granted to that character in another scene when they are the one suffering under someone else's thumb.

Notably, in drawing on the suffering as the main orientation to deserve focus, it makes no claim that the audience themselves should need some familiarity with the experiences or emotions to care for this character. There is no 'hidden truth' or subconscious 'real feelings' in sympathizing with someone who's suffering for any reason, be it a victim homophobia, rape, or enslavement, and celebrating their achievements.

4. 'Preachy' Address

Pictured: Med’s opening monologue in He’s Coming To Me

Sentimental authors/narrators often address the audience directly, "calling upon [them] to recognize parallels between lived experience and the situations represented in the fiction." This is another way, the approach refuses an 'identification' strategy in order to take the work and characters seriously, instead providing them with more explicit means to connect.

In film, non-diegetic voice-overs and addresses to an unseen audience through things like interviews and vlogging allow this direct address to occur as well. Moralistic monologues and unrealistically sincere dialogue that can be read as lessons directed towards the audience as much as the character can also fall under this strategy.

5. Close Calls and Last-Minute Reversals

Pictured: Phupha surprises Tian by showing up at the last minute in the airport A Tale of Thousand Stars

If you allow yourself to get absorbed in these fictional worlds, you get to experience emotional jolts when expectations are dashed or suddenly fulfilled despite the odds, which is a narrative strategy to bring-on the waterworks. These can be narratively produced or rendered through editing choices. And they're made more emphatic by the building up to them through just missed chances of an event occurring: multiple almost meetings before the fated characters finally do find each other; almost kisses before the big smooch; a character coming closer and closer to a foretold death only to avoid it in the end, or at least find peace before they go.

These emotional jolts aren't meant to be surprising, exactly--they're part of a sentimental formula, after all. In fact, their effectiveness depends, to a major extent, on their resonance with other sentimental works and the whole good-cry plot-reversal tradition.

6. Character Reversals

Pictured: Diew opens up to trying something new with God in Monster Next Door

While sentimental fiction is often accused of presenting two-dimensional characters, they in fact often present characters that are popular culture 'types' who are given mixed traits to break-down or reverse the archetype, creating an emotional response to their change of heart. In these narratives, it can be understood that a 'type' will coexist inside a character with its 'antitype.' A repressed miser will also have a generous, vulnerable heart, a shy child will also have the potential for boldness. The sudden complications can induce tears at the realization of change and unexplored depths.

7. Bittersweet Counterbalance

Pictured: Jom returns to the present in I Feel You Linger in the Air

Sentimental fiction always depicts grief and suffering, but it exists in intimate counterbalance with joy, triumph, and love. Overall and even within a single scene or sentence, it establishes a strong sense of majorly tear-jerking bittersweetness. This is the 'good cry' at the heart of Warhol's argument and the one that draws people to the experience. The experience is overall triumphant even amongst the struggles. The audience here is not purging negative emotion in a cathrsis process, but rehearsing and reinforcing affirmations of joy in the face of grief.

Warhol admits that in politically charged works, this technique, among some of the others listed, can reduce situations of moral and logistical complexity to epiphanies of pure simplicity, if only momentarily. It works, counter to the reader's possibly painful lived realities, to render dire situations hopeful through fiction. It affirms certain fantastical beliefs: memory can transcend death, family can accept one another fully, true love will prevail, kindness will be rewarded, etc. These beliefs sit right beside their opposite in the works, creating the tension that makes it emotional and possibly transformative to the audience's real life behavior, not because these explain all the facts of a political matter thoroughly or these characters serve as models to behave like, but because the emotional responses induced incite people to react and act when faced with experiences of others' or their own suffering.

[valentineua]

Blond and Brunette (1879) - Charles Burton Barber (1845-1894)

[vital-information]

"The modern view says we weep because we feel sad, and in weeping we get that sadness 'out of our systems.' Based on essentialist assumptions about 'human nature,' the modern view leads to the evaluation of some feelings as more genuine, more fully human than others--which leads inexorably to the denigration of the emotional experience of persons whose cultural or social marginality marks their feelings as 'different.' Perhaps the most unexpected aspect of the Victorian view is the easy alliance it forms with postmodernism, in that both reject essentialism as a way of accounting for interior experience. Furthermore, the Victorian idea that we feel sad because we weep puts a radically different spin on weeping's ultimate effect. This means that from the Victorian perspective, crying over Uncle Tom's Cabin or Little Women did not drain a reservoir of stored feelings, nor did it debilitate readers from taking action in the extratextual world. Instead, crying was seen as creating and promoting the feelings, which then might presumably serve as goads to acting, or indeed to being, in the 'real world.'"

Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms

[artsandculture]

Portrait of Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina (1797) 🎨 Vladimir Borovikovskiy 🏛️ Tretyakov Gallery 📍 Moscow, Russia

The portrait of M. I. Lopukhina is one of the intimate portraits painted by Borovikovsky at the turn of the 18th–19th centuries. Similarly styled works by the artist are his portraits of E. G. Temkina (1798, Tretyakov Gallery), E. A. Naryshkina (1799, Tretyakov Gallery) and others.

Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina (1779–1803) was the Count I. A. Tolstoy’s daughter and F. I. Tolstoy’s sister. In the year the portrait was made, she turned eighteen and got married to S. A. Lopukhin, a Jägermeister and chamberlain at the court of Paul I. The portrait appeared because of this event. It could have been commissioned by the prospective husband or the woman’s parents. The painting was intended for the family gallery and had to correspond to the latest trends in painting of that time, the trends of Sentimentalism.

The art of Sentimentalism praised the harmonious relationship between man and nature. In portraits the women images were incorporated into landscape themes (corners of parks with clear blue skies). Nature both beautifully framed a woman’s beauty and reminded of the world of the artist’s heroines who went on solitary walks, read sentimental novels, and had girlish dreams.

Borovikovsky created the image of a young woman whose perfection resembled an ancient statue. Everything in the image (the soft shape, the white marble skin, the grace of the pose, and the embossed folds of the tunic) seems to be borrowed from classical sculpture. But the earthly beauty of youth emerges through the charm of the statue that has the evanescent, soft complexion, and she looks lively with a blush and sparkling eyes.

The expression on Lopukhina’s face, like the famous “smile of the Mona Lisa” portrayed by Leonardo da Vinci, cannot be definitely described. The model’s look changes with each viewpoint and the light: it becomes either proud and indifferent, or soft and thoughtful, and then mocking and rather flirtatious. It was characteristic of Sentimentalist artists to wish to convey a rich range of feelings.

The landscape surrounding the woman’s figure was invented by the artist. It acquires the properties of a mirror: the woman’s shawl is similar to the color of roses; her tunic is akin to the color of lilies and trunks of birches; her belt is of the color of the sky and cornflowers, and the gold threads in the belt and the bracelet are similar to wheat seeds. The interchange of color emphasize Lopukhina’s inextricable relationship with surrounding nature.

The portrait of Lopukhina is the pinnacle of Borovikovsky’s art. Later, Ya. P. Polonsky dedicated his poem “To the Portrait” (1885) to this canvas.

[ladycatashtrophe]

It is very inch resting being an English Writing student with 3 different disorders that all have obsession/compulsion/impulsivity as symptoms because do I ~like~ Hawthorne or Emerson? No. Am I, perhaps, wasting my time in a library that closes too damn early researching transcendentalism and romanticism and how they lead to a whirlpool that contains gothic literature, surrealism, and sentimentalism because these crotchety old men were out of their gourds but sometimes right? Yes. Yes I am.

[purasvagancias]