Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason.

Sentimentalism in philosophy is a view in meta-ethics according to which morality is somehow grounded in moral sentiments or emotions. Sentimentalism in literature is both a device used to induce a tender emotional response disproportionate to the situation at hand,(and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments), and a heightened reader response willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation.

“A sentimentalist”, Oscar Wilde wrote, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus sends Buck Mulligan a telegraph that reads “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done.” James Baldwin considered that ‘Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel…the mask of cruelty’. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald, contrasts sentimentalists and romantics with Amory Blaine telling Rosalind, “I’m not sentimental–I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last–the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

In modern times “sentimental” is a pejorative term that has been casually applied to works of art and literature that exceed the viewer or reader’s sense of decorum—the extent of permissible emotion—and standards of taste: “excessiveness” is the criterion; “Meretricious” and “contrived” sham pathos are the hallmark of sentimentality, where the morality that underlies the work is both intrusive and pat.

‘Sentimentality often involves situations which evoke very intense feelings: love affairs, childbirth, death’, but where the feelings are expressed with ‘reduced intensity and duration of emotional experience…diluted to a safe strength by idealisation and simplification’.

Featured Music:

Bodies by the Sex Pistols

One More Time by Joe Jackson

Jealous Guy by Roxy Music

“There was a word for what he was that nice people didn’t say except in the dirtiest jokes. He knew. Always had. There was no need for more of him. His life was a gross testament to cowardice and repugnance.”

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Sam Tallent’s Half Hour Prophecy Ep. 24: Sentimental Mentality

Sam Tallent is a comedian and writer from Denver, Colorado. He lives in Las Vegas, Nevada with his wife and dog. His interests include Southern Gothic fiction and the “death” of Elvis Presley. He enjoys slow simmered suppers and writing in the third person.

Audio Mixing by Wally Wallace

A Sexpot Comedy Production

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