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I am, I confess, a rank sentimentalist.
I indulge in sentimentality. I express feelings of love and sadness in ways that anyone else would regard as foolish and excessive. I rely more on emotions than reason in making decisions. I have an unfortunate fondness for kitsch.
If I had to seize on a single word to describe who I am, it’s bathetic, but not, I think, with that word’s connotations of insincerity.
I am a product of a particular post–World War II culture: a mawkish, mushy, soppy, sappy middle-class culture of innocence and sentimentality that has certainly left an indelible imprint on my tastes, expectations and emotional makeup.
That culture found expression in golden-era Broadway musicals’ show tunes, like South Pacific’s “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Younger Than Springtime,” or Carousel’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone”; in films like Old Yeller; and TV shows like The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It was instilled in me with summer camp songs (“Kumbaya,” anyone?) and the early 1960s girl-group hits (“Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” “One Fine Day,” “Soldier Boy”).
I, like so many others, was immersed in a fantasy world of unwavering American goodness, upward and onward progress, undying love, and other phantoms before discovering that U.S. policy in Vietnam was designed to advance U.S. interests rather than the well-being of the Vietnamese people.
Sure, there were countercurrents that somehow failed to take, apparent in the brazen cynicism of Pal Joey and the over-the-top, Oedipal attachment of Gypsy’s Mama Rose and the comic critiques voiced by Lenny Bruce and Dick Gregory.
I am, of course, not the only sentimentalist. Beneath his cynical shell, so, too, was Casablanca’s Rick Blaine, as Captain Renault archly observed.
In fact, even before the Civil War, a culture of saccharine sentimentality pervaded the higher reaches of American art and literature. First identified in Ann Douglas’s 1977 classic, The Feminization of American Culture, and fleshed out in Shirley Samuels’s 1992 edited collection, The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, the embrace of sentimentality was often interpreted as an expression of antebellum women’s culture. It certainly encouraged the development of a new view of the child as a little angel. But it also fueled middle-class Northern women’s involvement in the temperance, common school, prison reform and abolitionist movements.
The culture of sentimentality was also taken up by many men. It could be seen in the immense popularity of weepy parlor songs, brimming with nostalgia, like “Home, Sweet Home” and “The Old Folks at Home.”
The deeply romantic, sentimental culture was temporarily suppressed by the Civil War’s bloody violence, which seemed to reveal that power alone could tame volatile, unruly environments. But sentimentality would return toward the end of the 19th century, one of many later eras of American innocence.
It’s not an accident that library shelves are littered with books with titles or subtitles that contain the fateful words “the End of American Innocence.” Because American innocence has been struck down, only to arise again and again, like the phoenix.
Two decades ago, Richard Halpern, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, grappled with the nature of American innocence, sentimentality and naïveté in a biography of Norman Rockwell, who was long dismissed as nothing more than a commercial illustrator.
As Halpern pointed out, Rockwell’s “paintings are darker and more complex than most viewers are willing to acknowledge.” They are neither the “reassuringly wholesome if somewhat nostalgic vision that wards off the sordid, threatening aspects of modern existence” nor the “kitschy sentimentality that promotes a sanitized view of the world.”
“There is no overt sex in Norman Rockwell’s paintings, no violence, no real or insoluble unhappiness, no poverty or serious illness or crime,” yet as Halpern shows, complex commentaries about gender, sexuality and even pedophilia “are infused within Rockwell’s work in a mature, nuanced and provocative manner.”
His pictures, in Halpern’s eyes, “are not so much innocent as they are about the ways we manufacture innocence. For innocence is indeed something we make, not something we are born to—a story we tell about ourselves, not something we are.”
American adults, Halpern argues, “bathe themselves in innocence” as a way to evade “ambiguities, complexities and problems” in their private and work lives and within their society.
Like Rockwell, Walt Disney was a key architect of American innocence, naïveté and sentimentality. Also, like Rockwell, Disney’s major early works—like The Three Little Pigs, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo and Bambi—are more complex, more sophisticated and much bleaker than many assume. Shadowy undercurrents belie the animation’s surface sunny innocence.
Manufactured innocence, whether at Disneyland or in Rockwell’s paintings, was a way to veil life’s ugly underside. Rockwell acknowledged as much in an interview: “Maybe as I grew up and found the world wasn’t the perfectly pleasant place I had thought it to be, I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn’t an ideal world, it should be and painted only the ideal aspects of it.”
Today’s counterparts to those earlier architects of innocence include the Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel comic empires.
In Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality, a cranky 2011 critique of present-day pathologies, the acerbic English cultural critic and prison physician Anthony Malcolm Daniels, who writes under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, decried a culture that has made feelings “the yardstick of everything we do.” Sentimental cant and unrestrained emotionalism, he insisted, have corrupted public thought and have had a “pernicious influence, especially on child-rearing, education and on our understanding of human nature.”
According to Dalrymple, excessive sentimentality has produced a “feel-good” educational culture so infused with Romanticism that it is unwilling to confront unsettling classroom realities: that students don’t come to class equal in motivation or background knowledge or even a willingness to work hard or accept critical feedback.
In today’s fast-paced world, ideas worth remembering are much too quickly swept into history’s dustpan. Reinhold Niebuhr warned his contemporaries about various myths, including the myth of American benevolence and the myth of American innocence—and how these myths can foster illusions of moral self-righteousness and blind us to how we are viewed abroad, even by our closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico. No wonder Niebuhr likens the United States to Don Quixote, ever seeking dragons to destroy.
Then there are other foundational myths that inform this nation’s cultural imaginary and that we should treat skeptically and critically, including the myth of self-made man, the myth of American exceptionalism, the myth of the melting pot, the messianic myth of America’s special mission and the myth that history bends toward justice.
I myself am of two minds about manufactured innocence and the culture of sentimentality. We mustn’t allow illusions of American innocence or dreamy romantic fantasies to blind ourselves to distasteful realities and unpleasant truths. Yet we should also recognize that the culture of sentimentality offers a critical vantage upon a predatory society filled with power trips, self-seeking, cynical game playing and cavalier one-upmanship.
Sentimentality can certainly cloud our vision, sanitizing awkward, painful realities. But sentimentality can also help us see through the steely realism that tolerates wholly unacceptable levels of inequality and that dismisses visionaries as mere dreamers.
