Sentimentalism

Abstract

The category of sentimentalism and its general features have been extremely useful to literary critics. With the publication of F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, sentimentalism stood as the dividing line between high and popular literature, between male and female writers, between serious and maudlin representations of American life in literature. One of the most complex issues taken up by sentimental fiction is the marriage relation, because sentimentalism demands that its novels conclude in marriage. Yet virtually all of the novels are acutely aware of just how vulnerable a woman is when she marries. Caroline Lee Hentz's Ernest Linwood deals with a woman's mental abuse after marriage. E. D. E. N. Southworth devotes her entire career both to situating her female protagonists within the limitations of being femes covert and finding away within or beyond those limitations.

Additional details