Modern Sentimentalism and the New Negro

Chapter 4 focuses on Jessie Redmon Fauset’s acerbic use of sentimentalism to diagnose the tensions inherent in New Negro femininity and artistic production, as exemplified by her novel Plum Bun: A Novel Without A Moral (1929). Fauset’s anti-didactic Künstlerroman highlights the conflicted demands of Harlem Renaissance/New Negro ideology and the particularly fraught position of the black female writer. The chapter extends recent scholarship on racial feeling and the gendering of double consciousness to theorize Fauset’s sentimentalism as an ironic and melancholic mode that registers the New Negro woman’s unique form of self-estrangement. Plum Bun ultimately proposes racial laughter as an apt response to the position of a black female artist in late 1920s America: a mode that is at once an adaptive gift of internal distance and a creative prison of the same.

Introduction

The Introduction describes the vital rebirth in sentiment’s lived and literary form that occurs in interwar America. The result is an aesthetic of “modern sentimentalism.” The chapter defines this aesthetic of mixed feelings as it captures the conflicted affective dynamics of icons of modern femininity and the stylistic practices of interwar female novelists. The chapter discusses the assumptions that have led scholars to overlook this aesthetic’s purchase in modernist literature and culture, and indicates its consequences for understandings of modernity, sentiment, and interwar gender and affect. The chapter lays out the study’s methodology, which synthesizes traditional and quantitative research methods, features a transatlantic archive of period discourse and critical theory, and establishes a novel approach to evaluating literary affect. The chapter concludes that the crisis in female character can be best understood as a matter of practical experience and lived reality, not a problem of abstract representation.

Conclusion

The Conclusion takes up the conspicuous absence of life after marriage in the prior chapters by examining Edith Wharton’s late novel The Gods Arrive (1932), other interwar writing about marriage and maternity, and more recent media that likewise deals with these stumbling blocks for modern ideals of female independence. The Gods Arrive is both a catalog of modern love—divorce, trial marriage, companionate marriage, free love, single motherhood—and a saga of failed female authorship that enumerates how new liberties differently disempower women and preserve expectations of their affective labor, while further excluding them from alternative forms of production. The chapter concludes by exploring the endurance of modern sentimentalism in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing by female authors, and argues that ironic sentimentalism continues to afford women artists a formal and structural logic for expressing the double binds of modern femininity.

Free Love and Hard-Boiled Sentiment

Chapter 3 examines Frances Newman’s neglected avant-garde novel The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926), as the book elaborates the exchanges between the sentimental tradition, the evolving free love movement, and the nascent concept of hard-boiled fiction. The chapter details how these developing cultural ideals reconfigure sentimental narratives of emotion and the body and doom their female versions to inevitable failure. The chapter further analyzes Newman’s synthesis of sentimental and modernist style to register these circumstances. Newman’s trenchant irony and elaborate prose experiments dovetail with writings by free love advocates like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, particularly in their treatment of gendered corporeal concerns like birth control and abortion. Like the disillusioned free lover whose experience the novel relates, Virgin’s negative aesthetic of feminine emotion affirms sentimental ideals.

The Old Fashioned Flapper

Chapter 2 examines the politics of emotion and corporeality in Anita Loos’s 1925 satire of Jazz Age femininity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Blondes is both a satire of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel and a sentimental novel in its own right. The chapter argues that such indeterminacy undergirds Loos’s send-up of the flapper as a figure whose interiority and exteriority are vitally opaque. Loos’s “more old fashioned girl” performs the flapper’s conflicted sexuality and exposes the gendered contradictions of Freudian psychoanalysis and the modernist language experiments exemplified by Gertrude Stein. The chapter connects the novel to contemporary legal debates about minimum wage and prostitution. It therefore argues that Blondes can also be seen as a mock manifesto, a companion piece to other period texts that tread an unclear line between irony and sincerity as they engage politicized discourse about women’s bodies.

Willa Cather and the New Woman’s “Un-Sentimental Sort of Success”

Chapter 1 discusses a paradigmatic New Woman narrative, Willa Cather’s 1915 The Song of the Lark, in which Cather ostensibly reclaims sentiment for the New Woman, only to place her female opera singer in sentimental relation to art, not domesticity. The chapter analyzes the Künstlerroman’s unorthodox marriage plot as it stages the conflicts of New Woman sexuality. The chapter further explores Cather’s use of a New Woman artist to reconfigure the role of emotion in the aesthetic encounter, and links this representational paradigm to both the nascent neurophysiological concept of empathy and the modernist ideal articulated by T. S. Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility. Reiterating stereotypes of traditional sentimental reading as uncritical, overemotional, and unsophisticated, Lark develops and endorses a self-conscious and discerning alternative.