#sentimentality
Once the Russians have flattened and occupied Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv, etc., as surely they will (for anything less would be a defeat), the question will be asked in the West, “Who lost Ukraine?”—as once the question, “Who lost China?” was asked. My preferred answer would be Greta Thunberg—or perhaps I should say, to be a little fairer, Greta Thunberg and people like her.
The Thunberg episode must have been of great aid and comfort to the man in the Kremlin, for it must have convinced him, as it convinced his apologists in the West, of the almost total decadence and fundamental unseriousness of the West. Here was a spoiled upper-middle class Swedish girl claiming that her childhood had been stolen—by whom and by what, exactly?—and no one in any position of power or responsibility had the guts to tell her to shut up and to stop broadcasting her disgusting self-satisfied and highly privileged self-pity. Instead, she was the object of deference and almost of adulation, as if she were being brave in the way that anti-war demonstrators in Russia have been brave.
Why did no one in any position of power or responsibility take on little Greta and tell her to go away? The answer, probably, is sentimentality: She was young, and everyone knows that adolescence is the springtime of idealism. To destroy the fatuous illusions of the ignorant and inexperienced is cruel; therefore, we must submit meekly to be lectured, or hectored, by them, and to do as they say. The fact that the person in question may have been as manipulated as a cruise missile was not allowed to enter anyone’s mind.
- Theodore Dalrymple
Why does no one ever comment on the inherent sadness that is present whenever one packs one’s luggage - whether to move house, fly abroad, or even just on one’s way to a leisure trip? There is a sense of sentimentality in saying farewell to a place that had been your home, whether for weeks, months, even years - by packing up belongings, one tries to salvage as many pieces as one could, to retain a sense of home. Yet one could never really replace home, for home is not objects, nor is it really a location, an apartment, a house. It is a feeling - an attachment to old things, new things, borrowed things. And packing one’s luggage is the final act of acknowledging one’s departure.
I’ve lost count of the number of older works of fiction that some people refuse to take at face value. So many literary critics, when faced with an aspect of a classic book or play that they don’t like, will claim that it’s really a deconstruction or a satire, or that the author didn’t really want to write it that way, but reluctantly gave in to the mores of their time period. Whether it’s because the work is out of step with modern values, or because the tone is inconsistent, or because certain storylines play out differently than the critic wanted them to, or, very commonly, because the work is too romantic, too optimistic, etc., and not edgy and cynical enough, the critics cry “insincere author.”
We see this when people claim that Romeo and Juliet is really a satire or a deconstruction of a love story. Or when they claim that the ending of Wuthering Heights inconsistent with the rest of the book, and probably wasn’t the original ending Emily Brontë wrote, or that Jane Eyre’s happy ending is supposed to ring false and hollow. Or that the ending of Little Women is another false happy ending that’s actually supposed to be disappointing. Or many other examples.
Now I’ve seen this thinking applied to Alice in Wonderland too. Namely to the sentimental poems and gentle real-world scenes that frame both of the two books: the poem “All in the golden afternoon” that opens Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the reverie of Alice’s sister that ends the book, and Through the Looking-Glass’s framing poems “Child of the pure unclouded brow” and “A boat beneath a sunny sky” and its opening and closing scenes of Alice playing with her kitten.
I’ve now seen two people (composer Unsuk Chin in her notes on her opera adaptation, and an essay writer whose name I’ve forgotten) argue that these poems and scenes are tonally inconsistent with the rest of the text, and that they’re much more conventionally Victorian in their sentimentality and idyllic portrait of childhood than Alice’s dream adventures are in all their surrealism, humor, dark edges and cultural satire. Unsuk Chin wrote that Carroll was probably forced to give the books a conventional, sentimental framing, or else they would have been too radical for the era, and she suggested that he probably would have written very different opening and closing scenes if he had his own way. I also found an essay targeting the opening and closing poems, which suggested that they should be read as satirical, because their sentimental tone and their framing of the stories as simple, wondrous fairy tales for innocent children is so out-of-step with the books’ actual tone.
That’s an interesting idea that I had never considered before. I always have noticed that difference in tone between Alice’s adventures and the framing poems and scenes. But I’ve still always assumed that the framing sentimentality was sincere on Carroll’s part, and that this was part of the books’ complexity. The idea that it might really be satire never crossed my mind until now.
But to be honest, I still lean toward thinking they’re sincere. In the first place, Carroll’s satirical poems within Alice’s dreams (e.g. “How doth the little crocodile” and “You are old, Father William”) are obviously satire. Gleeful, wicked satire of the popular moralizing poems of the day. Not poems so subtly satirical that most people would think they were straight examples of the sentimental Victorian verses they parody. Secondly, in 1887, Carroll wrote an article called “Alice on the Stage,” in which he gave detailed descriptions of each of the book’s characters and what he thought of their portrayals in a recent stage adaptation. His description of Alice herself is very similar in tone to the framing poems and the affectionate reverie of the older sister at the end of the first book. He waxes very sentimentally about her loving, gentle, courteous nature, and of the innocence, joy, and wonderment of childhood that she embodies. Again, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the angel-child he describes and the character he actually wrote – is this girl, “loving as a dog and gentle as a fawn,” the same one who kicked Bill the Lizard out of the chimney and who remarked “I don’t think it’s a pity at all” when told that the Duchess was sentenced to death? But unless he meant this article as satire too, I can’t imagine after reading it that the books’ openings and endings are insincere in their tenderness.
Besides, as I pointed out, commentators are always trying to explain away aspects of classic literature that they don’t like by saying “It was meant as satire” or “The author was forced to write this by the mores of the time period.”
Still, the idea that the sentimental poems and framing scenes might have been meant as satire, or that they might have been concessions to Victorian taste so the books wouldn’t seem too radical, is worthwhile to consider. They are very different in tone from the surreal and satirical stories they frame, after all. I might personally view that difference as just a part of the books’ complexity (and as reflecting the complex, enigmatic character of the man who wrote them), but it’s worth exploring from every possible angle.
What I believe to be memories are probably daydreams. Still, my own sentimentality yearns for them as if they were the truth, suspect or twisted though they may be. I have forgotten that they were stories I heard from another and feel an intimacy with them as if they were my own direct memories.
–Yasunari Kawabata, from “Oil,” The Dancing Girl of Izu and Other Stories (Counterpoint, 1997)
