#sentimentalism

Lust by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, c. 1789

In Robyn R. Warhol's A Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, she lays out 7 techniques sentimental narratives use in order to induce physical emotional reactions, especially tears, from readers and audiences. Rather than criticizing the formulaic 'manipulation' in the use of these techniques or suggest they conceal accurate depictions/understandings of the world as modernist critics tend to do, she describes an alternative theory of emotions that argues reactions to texts can rehearse and reinforce feelings to inspire real world action.

Understood through the latter lens, the assessment of media working in a sentimental mode--many BLs, GLs, soap opera, telenovela, lakorn, romance, women's weepies, shoujo--ought to reflect that framework rather than directly comparing it's success as a story to more modernist media. Below, I've briefly summarized the 7 techniques Warhol describes with some BL examples in gif form.

Sentimental 'Style.'

Pictured: Team’s tearful reaction to Win in Between Us

In writing, that means 'flowery writing.' Poetic language, alliteration, punctuation the emphasizes emotional affect (exclamation points, emdashes, ellipses, italics), and the play between presence and absence to blur the lines between the world of the story and the world of the reader.

In performance fiction, we get melodramatic theatricality: acting styles with big physical expressions of characters' emotions, sentimental instrumentation, and use and repetitions of familiar musical themes.

2. Too Big to Tell

Pictured: Atom and Kongthap’s first ‘kiss’ in My Love Mix-Up Thailand

Sentimental fiction will often suggest representation, either in the form of language or visual depiction, is inadequate to convey the size or depth of an emotion.

Because of their feelings, characters are pushed beyond speech--think of the quote from Jane Austen's Emma "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more"--and even consciousness--all the fainting! The narrator in a novel might claim a momentous event is indescribable, like in Little Women, "I don't think I have any words in which to tell the meeting of mother and daughters; such hours are beautiful to live, but very hard to describe, so I will leave it to the imagination of my readers."

Visual concealment happens, too, with cut-aways, occlusion by objects, or obscuring angles. A visually hidden kiss or moment of intercourse, while possibly having a relationship to censorship, also might be drawing on erotic and sentimental narrative strategies. All of these failures to articulate or depict, far from denying emotions or events, invite the audience to fill in the blank for the emotions, becoming an active co-creator of the affective power of an experience.

3. Focus, but NOT Identification with Suffering Characters

Pictured: Ae finds Pete after he’s assaulted in the rain in Love By Chance

Scenes tend to shift perspectives across sentimental stories to be limited to a single character's consciousness, either a character who's a victim in some way or a character who formerly oppressed character now triumphant, even when they don't speak the narration. It's seldom granted to those are actively oppressing but might be granted to that character in another scene when they are the one suffering under someone else's thumb.

Notably, in drawing on the suffering as the main orientation to deserve focus, it makes no claim that the audience themselves should need some familiarity with the experiences or emotions to care for this character. There is no 'hidden truth' or subconscious 'real feelings' in sympathizing with someone who's suffering for any reason, be it a victim homophobia, rape, or enslavement, and celebrating their achievements.

4. 'Preachy' Address

Pictured: Med’s opening monologue in He’s Coming To Me

Sentimental authors/narrators often address the audience directly, "calling upon [them] to recognize parallels between lived experience and the situations represented in the fiction." This is another way, the approach refuses an 'identification' strategy in order to take the work and characters seriously, instead providing them with more explicit means to connect.

In film, non-diegetic voice-overs and addresses to an unseen audience through things like interviews and vlogging allow this direct address to occur as well. Moralistic monologues and unrealistically sincere dialogue that can be read as lessons directed towards the audience as much as the character can also fall under this strategy.

5. Close Calls and Last-Minute Reversals

Pictured: Phupha surprises Tian by showing up at the last minute in the airport A Tale of Thousand Stars

If you allow yourself to get absorbed in these fictional worlds, you get to experience emotional jolts when expectations are dashed or suddenly fulfilled despite the odds, which is a narrative strategy to bring-on the waterworks. These can be narratively produced or rendered through editing choices. And they're made more emphatic by the building up to them through just missed chances of an event occurring: multiple almost meetings before the fated characters finally do find each other; almost kisses before the big smooch; a character coming closer and closer to a foretold death only to avoid it in the end, or at least find peace before they go.

These emotional jolts aren't meant to be surprising, exactly--they're part of a sentimental formula, after all. In fact, their effectiveness depends, to a major extent, on their resonance with other sentimental works and the whole good-cry plot-reversal tradition.

6. Character Reversals

Pictured: Diew opens up to trying something new with God in Monster Next Door

While sentimental fiction is often accused of presenting two-dimensional characters, they in fact often present characters that are popular culture 'types' who are given mixed traits to break-down or reverse the archetype, creating an emotional response to their change of heart. In these narratives, it can be understood that a 'type' will coexist inside a character with its 'antitype.' A repressed miser will also have a generous, vulnerable heart, a shy child will also have the potential for boldness. The sudden complications can induce tears at the realization of change and unexplored depths.

7. Bittersweet Counterbalance

Pictured: Jom returns to the present in I Feel You Linger in the Air

Sentimental fiction always depicts grief and suffering, but it exists in intimate counterbalance with joy, triumph, and love. Overall and even within a single scene or sentence, it establishes a strong sense of majorly tear-jerking bittersweetness. This is the 'good cry' at the heart of Warhol's argument and the one that draws people to the experience. The experience is overall triumphant even amongst the struggles. The audience here is not purging negative emotion in a cathrsis process, but rehearsing and reinforcing affirmations of joy in the face of grief.

Portrait of Maria Ivanovna Lopukhina (1797) 🎨 Vladimir Borovikovskiy 🏛️ Tretyakov Gallery 📍 Moscow, Russia