SENTIMENTALITY

Yesterday's post about "The Apology" with echoes of Trump's relationship with his daughter, whom he insisted on taking to an international political meeting where she dressed like a little girl, awoke some thoughts about the figure in Western thought of the pure, barely pubertal, blonde virgin.  Partly arising from the first blonde people coming into the Brit world, which already had a dark underclass that became mixed with coal mining, and partly amplified by American racism. the ideal woman for a certain kind of male became this specific set and a mythology grew up around the image.  Hugh Hefner picked up on it in Playboy sometimes, but there was a photographer who made a career of nubile pretty blonde girls in fields with straw hats, charmingly teasing each other.  "Angels," you know.  There can be boy versions.

This innocent image can arouse the most evil and degrading behavior from some.  A desire to possess mixes with need to destroy.  Such blameless creatures are not seen as dangerous, except by what they arouse in the viewer.  They are said to attract unicorns and you know what that horn stands for.  An almost-defense against this is sentimentality, the Hallmark card reduction of reality to formulas about childhood, covering over abuses with bows and ribbons.  It's about power concealed.  

I've thought about it over the years, but this linked article is a good place to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/the-dark-side-of-sentimentality  The article says, "Sentimentality can be a way of denying reality."  Trump's declaration of his daughter's attractiveness to him is more honestly a way of denying he is not capable of intimacy with an adult, separate being.  He can only rape them. Deform the cheerful little dark-haired girl into a "model" in Victoria's Secret lingerie catalogues full of kitschy crotchless black lace, showing off breast implants.  You can find photos of her "modeling" through Google, calling eyes and promoting the goods.

The article goes on to cite a book by Johanna Skibsrud called "The Sentimentalists" about her father's experience of the Vietnam War, which ties the concept to narcissistic psychopathy.  The dependably caustic Sam Vaknin says "The narcissist is a human pendulum hanging by the thread of the void that is his False Self.  He swings between brutal and vicious abrasiveness -- and mellifluous, saccharine sentimentality."  Mom and apple pie.  Puppies and kittens. Weddings and babies. God and country.  Death and nobility.  War.

Another harsh book is "Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality" (2010) by Theodore Dalrymple who says kitschy sentimentality is a substitute for true morality.  People don't like the book much.

I.A. Richards, a literary critic, is a bit more palatable.  "We cannot judge whether any response is sentimental unless we take careful account of the situation."

My own father -- indeed, most of my cousins on both sides are sentimental rather than moral.  They are guided mostly by social context, as are most people, and my own re-framing seems to them eccentric and possibly insane.  I finally just blanked them out, partly because I get impatient with their obtuseness and partly to spare them.

Sentimentality is about presentation, not motives and dark depths.  It is middle class and curiously German, having some connection with the idea of the natural innocence of nature, which we know to be quite relentless.  There's a connection to curing disease, and also a dimension about insuring primogeniture, so that the "right" boy inherits the big house.

Those persons who were once innocent sentimentalists but found themselves nearly destroyed by the sentimental fascists and torturing dominators of the world can resort to a rhetoric of obscenity, rotting remains and bitter despair which have their own aesthetic.  When I praised a friend's poetry in an online poetry forum for being "stripped and burned," girls rose up to condemn me for not saying "nice" things because they believed that poetry was a safe and rosy place for sentimentality.  Hallmark again.  But if you google "Innocent nubile girls", at the top of the list will be Pornhub.  The thrill is in the access to and the supposed corruption of innocence, the dark dimension of sentimentality.

Yesterday's blog post included two books, "The Apology" which is dynamically reviewed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/12/the-apology-eve-ensler-review  and "Lolita".  Both books speak of their actions through the imaginations of the authors.  Can we trust them?  Can we trust ourselves as authors to read and remember them accurately?  So many men speak of Lolita wistfully, not at all mindful of her abuse, just thinking maybe they could make her love them.  Make. 

Maybe I'm noticing too much, but it seems to me that many plots in vids recently have focused on fathers and daughters.  A theme is Iphigenia, the daughter in Greek mythology who is sacrificed for her father so that ships may sail.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/12/the-apology-eve-ensler-review  How do we sort true sentiment from sentimentality in a world where we have no time?  When is sacrificing a daughter ever a true way of saving a wife or a male cohort or a father's success?

The sentimental tactic is a social box, dictating how to behave.  When sentimentality is captured by advertising and money-making, the result is going into debt for weddings worth tens of thousands of dollars or taking dying children to Disneyland instead of really listening to them.  Bringing flowers and chocolates after a quarrel.  The greater community finds it's good for business to promote gifts instead of real emotions, which can't be bought and sold.  Traditional kitsch replaces reality,  When I was clergy, I sometimes told brides who insisted on too much fancy stuff to have a big coming-out party and then, weeks later when the excitement died down, come back for a quiet exchange of vows.  It made them angry.

Denying sentimentality can be what is lately called a "trigger," meaning that it releases a flood of emotion that hasn't been dealt with.  It works in the short term, but the truest reality we can summon up will save our sanity and possibly our "souls."