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and make quaint in America, that she begins to suggest the bizarre
unreality accepted by the sentimental eye. And as she does so the variety
and diffusion, the sheer density of the activity of sentimental life, seem
larger than can be adequately accounted for by her outline of the
process of "feminization."
Douglas' explanation of the dynamics of this process suggest that
the problem was capitalism.
If
sentimentalism always borders on
dishonesty, she writes, "it is a dishonesty for which there is no known
substitute in a capitalist country." But although she indicates the
immense complexity of the problem with this statement, she does not
organize the detailed material of the book to illuminate the intercon–
nections of capitalism, sentimentality, and sexism. She offers the
general explanation that "pressures for self-rationalization of the
crudest kind were overpowering in a country propelled so rapidly
toward industrial capitalism with so little cultural context to slow or
complicate its course." "Sentimentalism" provided the means for this
rationalization. But Douglas backs away from a straightforward discus–
sion of the forces of money.
Douglas asserts that what was needed to deal with sentimentalism
was a "fully humanistic historically-minded romanticism." The con–
cluding section of the work, entitled "Protest," explicates Margaret
Fuller's life and Herman Melville's work as examples of this romanti–
cism.
It
is clear, however, that for all the strength with which both
figures resisted their culture, both were terribly damaged by it; in the
face of the massed forces of their time their answers seem fragile.
Douglas' own work is also presumably an example of this "fully
humanistic historically-minded romanticism." However, the book
seems not to have escaped entirely the process of trivialization about
which she writes. To convey the relevance of past to present, Douglas
uses analogies from modern consumer culture in describing
nineteenth-century women. Thus sentimental ladies exhibit "con–
sumer amnesia," avoid looking into a "candid camera," their world is
seen as the origin of "camp." A character like Little Eva is the original
"teen angel." This strained and trendy tactic takes on unsettling
proportions with her title. For to refer in the title of a book to the
"feminization" of a culture as opposed to, say, its "sentimentaliza–
tion," seems a kind of high cu ltural advertising, a move to draw
attention to the subject by way of fancy relevance to the present. And in
this instance she is advertising with a very sensili ve word.
Douglas is at pains to explain that she is trying to avoid what
might be called a merely "feminist" analysis. She explains that she uses
