Everyday Canvas

The Word Sentimental and Sentimentality in Writing

Prompt: Write about the word sentimental.

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Sentimental as an adjective refers to a person, an action, or an artwork such as a story, a poem, a painting, or a musical piece that has to do more with emotions than with reason. If a person does something for sentimental reasons, he or she is doing it because of an emotional attachment.

In its further affected and fouled-up form, sentimental also refers to someone or something that is gushingly or insincerely emotional, such as soap operas, some novels in the romance genre, or passionate and extra-sensitive songs.

For most people, it is difficult not to become sentimental, at one time or another, as sentimentality is a human condition, but giving into it totally, destroys reasonable, sane action. When it comes novels and such, Victorian literature is famous for it.

Yet, the word sentimental is pejorative and scornful in the writers’ circles and in the minds of the critics as it points to a work that tries to arouse feelings in excess of what the described scene rationally necessitates. This is what may be called a sham pathos. It is as if saying to the readers, “You are not sensitive enough to project yourselves into this situation and suspend your present one, so I, the author, am telling you how you should feel by qualifying the scene with directly persuasive, emotion-provoking, and possibly outrageous adjectives and other such words and phrases.”

For me, a bit of sentimentality is not something to scorn at, if not carried to extremes. The best way to handle a sentimental scene, such as a child watching a drunk parent or a person seeing his beloved in the arms of his enemy, is to just portray the scene as realistically as possible without trying to evoke an emotional response through words--with the writer projecting his/her thoughts--and let the scene itself point to such profound feelings. The latest book I read by the Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton, does just that so effectively that, since finishing the book, the emotions of the main character and my feelings for her still resonate inside me.