• Home
  • About the book
  • About the author

MADE IN AMERICA

Notes on American life from American history.

Feeds:
Posts
Comments
« LeBron & the 10th
Alone or Lonely? »

Sentimental Journey

August 4, 2010 by Claude Fischer

Page through most general magazines or flip through cable television and you are likely to see several ads like the one here by World Vision, featuring Jeopardy’s host, Alex Trebek, and a cute orphan girl. (I should note that World Vision indeed does good works.) These ads, sometimes with pictures of disfigured or suffering children, are meant to draw your sympathy and compassion  – and then your money or time. They work because they arouse  sentimentality – “tender emotions.”

That such ads work is not a given of “human nature.” They work because their audience has learned sentimentality – to feel the melancholy of suffering, sympathy,, and compassion – even for people so far away and so different from the audience as orphans in Africa.

Before Sentimentalization

People had sentimental feelings in the pre-modern era, but those sentiments were less common and often overwhelmed by practical needs and circumstances. This was true even among family members, who often kept cold-blooded accounts with one another. In seventeenth-century Andover, Massachusetts, for example, fathers and sons commonly wrote contracts stipulating that the father would deed land to the son in return for specified annual payments to the parents, even getting into practical details such as promising annual delivery of “120 pounds of pork, 2 barrels of cider,” and so forth.

Everyday public and private life was marked by a level of cruelty – animal torture, brawling, child abuse, attacks on slaves, servants, and spouses, and so on – that people today are “naturally” repelled by. Only it was more common, less worthy of attention, less dreadful to bystanders then.

Sentimentalization

Beginning in the late 18th century and accelerating through the 19th, middle-class Americans increasingly learned and taught their children sentimental “feeling rules.” (A few sources on this topic are listed at the end of this post.) In the emerging bourgeois culture, respectable people, especially women, were “sensitive,” they felt others’ emotions, especially their pain, and then expressed sympathetic emotional resonance. A young woman’s letter to her fiancé illustrates this tuning-fork responsiveness: “I feel intensely . . . more than words can express every thrill of joy which bursts from your heart—and every sigh of sadness which is breathed from your bosom.” Those who did not empathize deeply were brutes.

Romance, of course, provided many opportunities for sentimental expression, and middle-class women of the 19th century immersed themselves in the romantic sentimentality of novels. Increasingly, love was not reserved for the star-crossed couples of novels; it became a prerequisite for marriage. Indeed, being capable of loving became essential for having good character. Advice books urged sustained tenderness between spouses; couples’ letters and diaries increasingly expressed marital passion; divorce petitioners complained more and more about loveless marriages (rather than simply about physically abusive spouses). Marriages became more drenched in sentiment — or, at least, were supposed to be.

Parents’ feelings toward their children also became more intensely sentimental, which made the loss of children all the more crushing. Whereas mothers had once written fatalistic, matter-of-fact diary entries about their children’s deaths, mothers in the antebellum era more often wrote anguished, detailed accounts of the experience. Clerics tried to soothe the pain of babies’ deaths by no longer depicting the deceased infants as doomed for eternity – they had not had a chance to repent of original sin – but as innocent angels called back to sit beside Jesus.

19th-century sentimentality focused a great deal on death. Middle-class Americans adopted practices that intensified expressions of grief (for example, elaborate mourners’ clothing). A new form of internment developed. Forested cemeteries replaced simple churchyard plots. In the romantic sensibility of that era, the “natural” scene helped draw mourners into greater depths of feeling and gave them an experience of the sublime.

Contemplation of death inspired melancholy, a poignant emotion many Victorians sought and clasped to their bosoms. In the early 1800s, the teenage daughter of a Massachusetts  businessman described in her diary how, as she sat by her window at twilight, “a sweet melancholy diffused itself over my heart. Memory recalled a thousand tender scenes; the silent tear fell, from an emotion, which it was impossible to control.”

Such melancholic sentimentality provided fodder for Mark Twain’s parodies. Readers may recall the character of the late Emmeline  Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn: Her drawings of tear-streaked mourners carried titles like “And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas,” and her treacly poetry delivered lines about anything “just so it was sadful.” In the end  Huck concludes, “I reckoned that with her disposition she was having  a better time in the graveyard.” Spoofing as Twain was, his character reflected emerging bourgeois sentimentality of the mid-19th century.

A Wider Horizon

Sentimentality spread into public life. The great reform movements of the 19th century such as abolitionism, temperance, and child protection drew on middle-class Northerners’ sympathetic responses to others’ pain and suffering. Parents brought in household pets to cultivate their children’s feelings of compassion; such feelings, in turn, spurred the movement against cruelty to animals. Displays of physical torment, most famously in stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, aroused pathos. One historian refers to a “pornography of pain”: Anguishing at drawings and stories of awful suffering showed the observer to be a delicate and sensitive soul, another sign that he or she was superior to the unfeeling masses.

Gradually, more and more Americans learned to be emotionally repulsed by what had been common, unremarkable cruelties, such as bear-baiting, lynching, eye-gouging, child-whipping, and wife beating. Many 20th-century Americans found (as Huck Finn had) the florid sentimentality of their grandparents’ era a bit much, even laughable at times. Still, the underlying code of sentimentality and compassion spread. Expectations for marriage rose beyond having a good partnership to having intense companionship, mutual esteem, and never-flagging love. Children became increasingly – fawningly, some charged – objects of devotion. In the public arena, social movements extended the targets of sympathy beyond local orphans and abandoned pets to include virtually every piteous victim, from hungry children half a globe away to polar bears and coral reefs.

Bourgeois sentimentality may have lost its Victorian flounces, but it still works. Those ads of suffering innocents do move us.

———

Some sources on America’s sentimental journey

Clark, E. B. “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’.” Journal of American History (1995).
Eustace, N. 2008. Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (2008).
Halttunen, K. 1995. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain.” American Historical Review (1995).
Haskell, T. L. “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility,” Parts 1 and 2, American Historical Review (1985)
Lystra, K. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (1989).
Pfister, J., and N. Schnog, eds. Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America (1997).
Stearns, P. N., and J. Lewis, eds. An Emotional History of the United States (1998).

Share

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Tumblr
  • LinkedIn

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged charity, emotions, romance, sentimentality |

  • Made in America: Now available in Paperback, on Kindle, and via Google eBook

  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 448 other subscribers
  • Comment Back to:

    madeinamericathebook @ gmail.com
  • * 2010 winner, PROSE Award for U.S. History, American Association of Publishers.
    * "A shrewd, generous, convincing interpretation of American life" -- Publishers Weekly
    * "Masterful and rewarding . . . exactly the sort of grand and controversial narrative, exactly the bold test of old assumptions, that is needed to keep the study of American history alive and honest" -- Molly Worthen, New Republic Online
    * "... brave and ambitious new book ...." "Made in America sheds abundant light on the American past and helps us to understand how we arrived at our own historical moment, and who we are today." -- David M. Kennedy, Boston Review
    * "... this book ... already belongs to the prestigious line of works which decipher the singular character of America. It is in itself a mine of definitive information for all those who are interested in American society and its fate in modernity" [trans. from the French] -- Nicolas Duvoux, Sociologie

  • Pages

    • About the book
      • Corrections & Updates
    • About the author
  • Previous Posts

    • How Red v. Blue Became Me v. You: Polarization, Part I
    • The Covid Experience Reveals How Weird America Is
    • Americans Continue to Associate. For What Cause?
    • Slavery, Capitalism, and Reparations
    • Opening Day, 2022: Still Unresolved
    • No Peace, No Justice
    • The Right’s Reaction to Americans’ Leftward Shift: A Supreme Example
    • The Culture Has Moved Left… So the Right has Mobilized
    • Overcoming Distance and Embracing Place: Personal Ties in the Age of Persistent and Pervasive Communication
    • The Death Surge Before Covid-19: Who, What, and Why.
    • Women Rising: Life Stories from the Last Century
    • Whither Big Tech, or When Novelties Become (Regulated) Necessities
    • Opening Day, 2021: Baseball’s Crises
    • First Takes on the Election #2: What About the Polls?
    • The Political Census
    • First Takes on the Election: #1, What Happened?
    • Now for Something Different: Is Sex Wilting?
    • Explaining Trump: The Next-to-Last Time (I Hope)
    • Covid-19: Exceptionalism with a Vengeance
    • Is Left Cancel Culture Cancelling Left Culture?
    • BLM Protests: Surprisingly Successful… So Far. Why?
    • White Liberals’ Political Correctness Could Help Trump Get Re-Elected
    • Asteroidal Change or Glacial Change? Peering Over the Covid-19 Horizon
    • Opening Day Under Covid-19: Do Fans Matter?
    • COVID-19: Balancing Short-Term Solutions and Long-Term Effects. Are There Lessons from 1918?
    • Bernie: The Left is Still Waiting for the Proletariat Vote
    • AG Barr says attacks on religion are loosening the hounds of hell. Are they?
    • One Year Down, One to Go: Still Explaining Trump
    • Lead, Brains, and Behavior: Sociology Meets Biology
    • The Year’s Racial Flare-Ups: Signs of the Future or Signs of a Last Gasp?
    • [Bracket] Political Commentary [End Bracket]
    • Parental Love, Opportunity Markets, and Inequality
    • Brain Twisting, or How We Evolved
    • Opening Day, 2019: Data-Crunching, Inequality, and Baseball
    • Fixing Inequality: More Opportunity is Not the Answer
    • A Christian America? The Talk and the Walk
    • Shareholder Value: Law, Inequality, and the Doubting Justice
    • After the Election: More Polarization or Less?
    • Searching for the Authentic Self (… and Finding Trump)
    • The Politics-Religion Vortex Spins
    • Loneliness Epidemic: An End to the Story?
    • Get by with a Little Help from…
    • Feel-Good or Do-Good Politics
    • Do Americans Tolerate Zero Tolerance?
    • How Can Size of Community Still Matter?
    • Sending a Message by Pollster
    • Loneliness Scare Again… and Again… and…
    • Where Have You Gone, “Alienation”?
    • Opening Day, 2018: Politics, Race, and Baseball
    • Local Cultures
    • Chain Migration
    • Explaining Trump Some More
    • “Okie from Muskogee” a Half-Century On
    • Reversing American Voluntarism
    • National Character? A Reply to Stearns
    • Do We (Still) Value Family?
    • Is Marriage Over? For Whom?
    • Bannon, Brown, and the Identity Debate
    • The Great “American” (or is it New York?) Songbook
    • Is Health Care a Right?
    • Church Social
    • Inequality is about Security and Opportunity
    • Democracy in America, France, and “Hamilton”
    • Opening Day, 2017: Inequality on the Field, in the Stands
    • Voting for the Five Percent
    • More (on) Polarization
    • Americans and the Unassimilables
    • Explaining Trump
    • ***** Hiatus *****
    • The Great Settling Down
    • Election Reflection
    • Is the U.S. No Longer Religiously Exceptional?
    • Technology and Housework: Other Tasks for Mother?
    • Can Sociability Blunt Political Polarization?
    • The End of Good Work?
    • RFD, Media, and Democracy
    • Long Tails, Big Cities, Critical Masses
    • A Woman President?
    • Magazines: 19th Century Internet
    • Friends and “FB Friends”
    • Reversal of Fortune: American Cities
    • Does Education Work?
    • A Tony by Any Other Name…
    • Bernie, Hillary, and Historical Memory
    • Driving Cattle, Driving Exceptionalism
    • Build Bigger Wall? Get More Undocumented.
    • Opening Day 2016
    • Great Again
    • A Celebrity Strong Man
    • Survey Says . . .
    • Veterans and Suicides?
    • Odd Man In
    • The Pace, the Pace
    • A Street Divided
    • A History of Health and Health Inequalities
    • Why Diversity
    • Family Wages
    • What Happened When They Came?
    • The Grandma (and pa) Effect
    • Turkle, Times, Technology, Trauma–Yet Again
    • Just Deserts
    • Cell Phone Etiquette
    • Changing Hearts, Changing Matters, 2011-2015
    • American Self-Creation
    • The Immigrant-Crime Connection
    • Black by Choice?
    • The Marriage Contract
    • Attaining Adulthood
    • Left Out: Working-Class Kids
    • Life is a Stage, or Several
    • Family Farms vs. Americanism
    • Censor This, Political Correctness
    • Opening Day 2015
    • Science vs. Religion… or Science and Religion?
    • Building the Natural Market
    • Dressing Down
    • Untangling the Race Gap
    • Finding Public Relief
    • Surveying Change
    • Snap Decisions and Race
    • Holy-Day Exceptionalism
    • Where Does the “Don’t Shoot” Movement Go?
    • Reporting from America’s “Slums”
    • Racism as Mental Illness?
    • Which University?
    • The “Shared” Economy
    • Of Places Past
    • Long Story of the “Long Tail”
    • The Blameless Only
    • When Epidemic Hysteria Made Sense
    • Latest News on “No Religion”
    • Vocabulary Retrogression
    • American Way-Differentism: More a Club than a Family
    • Do Ideas Matter?
    • Alternative to Empathy
    • Women Dining
    • Too Much Social Science?
    • Ferguson and Social Media
    • Blame Who or What
    • “Libertarianism is Strange” Revisited
    • All Tech Is Social
    • How Ideas Make Themselves Matter
    • Women in Politics 1780-2014
    • Government Works
    • Telling Stories vs. Telling Data
    • Persistence of Race, 2014
    • Selfishness or Self-Awareness?
    • Virtuous Debt
    • Work Hours and the Pay Gap
    • Life in Public, Then and Now
    • Mourning 9/11 Victorian Style
    • A “Friends” Gripe
    • Bible Readings
    • Old Days, Fast Times
    • De-Democratizing?
    • Eco-Puritanism
    • Bring Me Your….
    • Thinking Inequality
    • Which Radical Ideas Come True?
    • Pastime – Opening Day 2014
    • Where Did “Hispanics” Come From?
    • Kitty Genovese: The Emblematic Story
    • Public Health
    • Exceptionalism Ending?
    • Risk-Sharing
    • Folktales of the Policy Elites
    • Male (Job) Insecurity
    • Libertarianism is Very Strange
    • Art and the Machined World
    • The Public Housing Experiment
    • The S-Curve of Cultural Change
    • Artful History
    • Inventing the Social Network
    • American Dream, Twisting
    • Deservingness
    • Place Matters More
    • Squirrely History
    • Atheist Evangelism: “Nothing New Under the Sun”
    • The Giving Season… and Era
    • Cell Phone Science
    • Boo! Americans and the Occult
    • You Call That a Shutdown?
    • More Inequality Updates
    • Political Responses to the Crash
    • Child Labors
    • Word Counts and What Counts
    • Loss of Economic Exceptionalism
    • Learning Sympathy
    • Respecting the Science
    • Economic Equality, 1774 and Beyond
    • Declaring You’re a “None”
    • Extremely Local
    • Robert Bellah
    • Inequality Hits Home
    • The Supreme Court Ducks Immutability
    • Postcard from Paris
    • America’s Religious Market
    • American-Made Ethnic-Americans
    • New Media and Old Manifestations
    • Novel Data: Promise and Perils
    • Immigrants and Historical Amnesia
    • Inequality Update
    • Psychologically Damaged
    • Race in the Eye of the Beholder
    • Getting Smarter
    • Suicide Boom?
    • Tweedledee-Tweedledum Nostalgia
    • Sexual License, Sexual Limits
    • Markets, Prices, and Justice
    • Immigration and Political Clout
    • Is the Gender Revolution Over?
    • Writerly Baseball – Opening Day 2013
    • Back Home
    • Catholic Schism
    • How Material Are We?
    • Unholy Alliance: Laissez Faire and the Church
    • The ’60s Turn 50
    • The Left’s Religion Problem
    • Paying Attention to the Kids
    • We’re # Last!
    • Risk Taking
    • The Elderly and Their Children
    • Guns
    • A Modern “Antebellum Puzzle”?
    • Makes One Anxious
    • Psychological Labeling … and Enabling?
    • The Giving Nation? Philanthropy’s Problems
    • Religion, Politics, and the Sunday Mail
    • The Happiness Boom
    • What Americans Have Been Thinking
    • The Verdict on Class and Voting
    • Panderocracy
    • 9/11 Reaction and Resilience
    • A Cost of Inequality: Growth
    • Obama’s Racial Penalty
    • Choose Your Choice
    • To the Poorhouse
    • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux
    • The 47% Charge in U.S. History
    • The Survey Crisis
    • Competitive Intelligence
    • Execution Songs
    • Spiritual and/or Religious
    • “Who Built That?”: Chance and History
    • Meeting, Mating, and the Web
    • Live Long and Prosper — and Plan
    • Voting Violence
    • Sex and the American Car
    • The Assets Gap
    • Differences Under the Differences
    • Why Americans Don’t Vacation
    • Virtuous Voting
    • Clothes Make the Common Man
    • Driving Blind
    • Geography of Inequality
    • Slavery’s Heavy Hand
    • Gay Vows
    • Explaining Poverty (Again)
    • Out- and Insourcing
    • Still Under God
    • The Loneliness Scare is Back
    • Sunday Pleasures, Private Faith
    • Between Dole and Market
    • Opening Day 2012 – Worldwide
    • Tolerating Americans
    • What’s the Common in the Common Good?
    • End Times and Presidents
    • The Abortion Puzzle
    • The Army of Black Liberation
    • The South Has Risen
    • Can’t Believe It
    • Marrying — Up, Down, Sideways
    • Occupy 2012: Another 1968?
    • Over-Impacted
    • How Bad is “European”?
    • Unique, Sovereign, American
    • The Working Class’s Party
    • Reconstructing Memory
    • Make-Your-Own Religion
    • Consume This
    • Self-Absorbed: Emerson & Thoreau
    • What Works? Votes.
    • Stumbling in the Dark
    • More on Occupy
    • Occupy! Now What?
    • Lost Children
    • Cheerful Yanks?
    • Tolerating Ambiguity
    • New News, Old News
    • Unequal Denial
    • Timing is (Not?) Everything
    • Breastfeeding History
    • What’s a Life Worth?
    • Homesick Blues
    • Summer Break
    • Spinsters No More
    • Missing Tramps
    • City Crime; Country Crime
    • Living Togetherness
    • Naturally Clean
    • Women Graduating
    • Home Owning Dreams
    • Technology and Fundamentals
    • Protected Class
    • Faith Endures
    • American Exceptionalism
    • Buying a Head Start
    • A. Lincoln, Socialist?
    • Opening Day 2011
    • Shaken but Secure
    • Jobs Go and Come
    • Heavy Hand
    • The Big Change
    • American Ties (III)
    • Money and Character
    • Going Out–or Home?
    • Degree Inequality
    • American Ties (II)
    • Ugly or Needy
    • 18th-Century Twitterfeed
    • American Ties (I)
    • Grammar Rules
    • Christmas Struggle
    • Ancestor Worship
    • Was Slavery, Is Slavery
    • Hanukkah or Vanish?
    • Pilgrims, Puritans, Americans?
    • Return on Investment
    • Solidarity, Soldiers, and Baseball
    • Win Stay, Lose Change
    • Why Vote?
    • We’re All Geniuses
    • Caring More or Less
    • Life Begins
    • Equal Visions
    • No Dinner Invitations?
    • Depressing Comparisons
    • Labor’s Laboring Efforts
    • Multiculturalism Lite and Right
    • Who Has Your Back
    • A Natural Romance
    • Alone or Lonely?
    • Sentimental Journey
    • LeBron & the 10th
    • We’re #1 !
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 2
    • A Fragmenting America? – Pt. 1
    • Fighting for the 4th
    • Gentrified Memories
    • Juneteenth: Race? Slavery?
    • Boomer Blues
    • No Longer the Tall American
    • A Crime Puzzle
    • Memorial-izing Day
    • Angry Old White Men
    • Sisters Take the Streets
    • Brooks, Policy, and History
    • Tongue-Tied to America
    • Happiness Happy
    • Inventing Friendship
    • American Individualism – Really?
    • Tax Day: The Government-Enterprise System
    • Opening Day 2010
    • Did “Consumerism” Blow Up the Economy?
    • A Christian America? What History Shows
    • The Myth that Never Moves
    • Good Health, Long Life, and Big Government
    • Announcing the “Made in America” Site

Blog at WordPress.com.

WPThemes.


  • Follow Following
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Join 448 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • MADE IN AMERICA
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Copy shortlink
    • Report this content
    • View post in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: