On Sentimentality
When essayist Leslie Jamison wrote to female friends and colleagues asking for their thoughts on female pain, one friend described herself and her upbringing as being “thoroughly, thoroughly obsessed with not being a victim.” Another friend, a poet, “confessed that her greatest fear was that her poems would come across as solipsistic transcriptions of private suffering, and that in this, self-concern would register as somehow ‘feminine.’” An overarching fear of sentimentality has pervaded the female consciousness. These anxieties culminate in what Jamison defines the “post-wounded woman,” who embodies self-deprecation and jadedness, and is quick to trail any possibly-construed demonstrations of self-pity with biting sarcasm.
My mother’s car cuts through Houston traffic. My little brother is babbling about a discussion with his friends one afternoon; they decided on each other’s largest misconception of themselves. My back leans easily against the butter-soft pale leather as I watch my mom deftly weave between cars to switch lanes, zipping the sedan along the congested road. I ask the car audience what my greatest misconception of myself is, and my mother doesn’t miss a beat. “You think you’re more damaged than you are.”
The silence that follows is thick and sticky. My chest retracts, as if I had been shoved, enough to feel my body collapse further into myself.
My little brother, ever the expert mediator, swiftly brings up a new topic of conversation; he describes the tacos al pastor he plans to cook that night. First, he’ll have to marinate the pork shoulder in a mix of chiles, spices, and pineapple, then skewer the slabs of meat and stand the stick upright in the oven. It’s supposed to mimic the act of roasting the animal on a spit, the method itself an authentic art form. I’ve created enough family conflict the past few days, so I hold my tongue and allow the conversation to stray onto this new course.
Weeks earlier my mother and I sat in a different car in a different state and I told her I was damaged. She’d come to visit me at school in Vermont, aware I’d been struggling, and in the car she’d pressed me for reasons, explanations for the muted, anxious, panicked state I was exhibiting. Instead, I gave her evidence of my suffering. Pain as performance. I told her about the extra bottle of pills I hid in my underwear drawer and about the razor blades I used to serrate my wrists and upper thighs. In divulging this information, in performing my own pain, I risked being discredited due to my own melodrama.
I had committed the transgression so many women fear, risking the invalidation of my own feelings by performing overt, overdramatic pain. Instead of conforming to Jamison’s post-wounded woman’s jadedness and self-deprecation, I had openly attempted to prove the severity and degree of my pain.
Hysteria, the definition of excess emotion, is derived from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. In ancient Greek medicine, the physical reason for hysteria was thought to be linked to the uterus, meaning the disorder was only found in women. To be hysterical, which is to be excessively emotional, overly dramatic, it is necessary to be female.
Historical structures and assumptions made about women mean that women carry the burden and anxiety of falling into tropes so easily written onto them. In her essay In Defense of Saccharine, Jamison questions, “I am trying to remember how I first learned that sentimentality was something that I should be running away from.” Thinking that this attitude towards sentiment might have originated during her time writing for her college literary magazine, she searches the web, hoping to find articles in which her fellow writers criticized “art that dared to feel anything too unabashedly,” believing she’d find “some record of our collective taste proclaiming itself, a dismissal of shameless sentiment.” Instead, only one short story pops up, Jamison’s own.
He would never say haunted, though, she was sure of that. He seemed like the type to find that kind of melodrama unseemly.
Her response to this revelation is introspective: “Turns out I was the one preoccupied with the unseemliness of melodrama. I was just like the woman I’d written: always imagining that others had a problem with sentimentality because I couldn’t figure out the problem I had with it myself.”
Virginia Woolf recognizes this same fear in female writers of her time. In writing her essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf tasks herself with gaining insight into women and fiction, what factors are necessary for women to write it, and to write something significant. She aims to investigate how the language of earlier women writers influences contemporary ones, just as she knows the important works of contemporary men were all built upon the knowledge and works of early scholars. Woolf studies Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure and concludes Carmichael’s sentences give the feeling of “being out to sea in an open boat.” Woolf supposes Carmichael’s “terseness… might mean that she was afraid of something, afraid of being called “sentimental” perhaps; or she remembers that women’s writing has been called flowery and so provides a superfluity of thorns.”
Rejecting sentimentality out of fear of falling into a female trope risks erasure of emotion, which is not only destructive to what art can be, but possibly damaging to women as well. Jamison writes: “relying too much on the image of the wounded woman is reductive, but so is rejecting it- being unwilling to look at the varieties of need and suffering that yield it.”
In a dark dorm room, tinged with the musky scent of vanilla amber candles and illuminated from the warm glow of a desk lamp, my friend Lizzie described an experience working with a woman whose pain was so raw and so open it was physically painful to watch. I looked at Lizzie’s face; her red hair curled softly across her forehead and tucked behind her ears, and her crimson lipstick kept her lips meticulously outlined as I watched them pour lessons into my lap. Lizzie told me that the only thing she could give the woman was her own refusal to look away. This is so much of what pastoral ministry is, she told me of the profession she hopes to enter; it is simply refusing to look away from people who are in pain, giving credence to their pain and recognizing it for what it is.
To be wounded is itself painful, but to have others refuse to see and acknowledge your pain is to be discredited, dismissed, unknown. “We don’t want to be wounds,” Jamison writes, “but we should be allowed to have them, to speak about having them, to be more than just another girl who has one.”
I have a bad habit of pushing myself into pigeon-holes that other people set up around me. Once, through a cold, grey winter, I stayed in a relationship when my partner told me I was broken, that my feeling served as proof of my instability. When he left me, I used a friend’s scorn of my open display of pain to tell myself I was damaged. I could be the poster child for female performance of pain; I’m hopeless at covering up my emotions or hiding my hurt away.
As my roommate slips a fraying bracelet- brown string connecting small gold circles- around my wrist, he whispers to me, “You wear your emotions so openly, it scares people who can’t understand, and that’s their problem, not yours.” But when I let their reactions define me and their judgement decide what I was, it turned into my problem. I believed them when they treated me like I was broken, and I let that become me.
Through those months I remained fixated on the unseemliness of my own melodrama, and I convinced myself I deserved punishment for such actions. I pushed a strangling guilt onto myself for the difficulty my over-sentiment inflicted on those I loved, for what it had done to my ex, my friend, my parents, who were tortured by the fear-inducing knowledge of my tendency towards self harm. The only way to overcome this guilt was when people looked at my pain and refused to look away. My roommate found me on the floor, unable to breathe, saw the red lines twisting across my thighs. He didn’t look away. He told me I was healing but I wasn’t broken.
I once told my little brother I read to feel less alone, that I go to books to find small morsels- sentences, a few words- that I clutch, a toddler curling her fingers around her blanket for comfort. Written expression of sentiment that I too have carried with me, lugging around the heaviness in my body and gut, brings me greater clarity and removes me from the isolation which threatens to overwhelm me.
My mother was right. I did think I was more damaged than I was. I let other people’s fear of my ability to feel, their trepidation towards the liberty with which I revealed my wounds, determine that I was damaged, wrecked, wrong. Sure, my mother and I, so dangerous in our similarity, are different entities. I bristled at her attempts to push her own structural affinities onto me. The truth in her statement doesn’t disregard the reality that my mother’s words were a rejection of me, of how I held and perceived myself. My mother’s comments continued to play into the narrative that how I was acting was somehow wrong, unruly, hysterical.
But my mother had never been able to appreciate the sentiments I culled from books and held up to her, seashells glimmering in the sunlight. “Look,” I would say, “isn’t it beautiful?” One night my mother entered my room and I looked up at her, feeling small in my queen bed, wrapped delicately in my soft flannel sheets. “Listen to this,” I told her, “this will change your life.” I proceeded to read her a paragraph from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, so confident that she too would find it beautiful how a sentence so delicate could convey such a real, recognizable feeling. I was blown away by Nelson’s ability to communicate something I hadn’t known how to articulate, and by what her words told me about how to move past so many of these feelings. My mother however, stood her ground in my doorway, she wasn’t pulled in by the poetry but wrinkled her nose instead. “Isn’t it incredible?” I begged her for validation. “I don’t understand it,” she countered.
It’s in these moments that it’s clear: being cut from the same cloth can’t eliminate all discrepancies, and sentiment itself encapsulates divergent meanings. Beyond that, the ‘feminine’ sentiment is an unruly, deviating entity, unbounded, and unique. And that’s what’s freaking beautiful about it.
