Sentimental Satire and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

238 Pages·2015·1.66 MB·English

UCLA
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Modern Sentimentalism: Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9xz0m5fh
Author
Mendelman, Lisa Anne
Publication Date
2015

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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Modern Sentimentalism:
Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy
in English

by

Lisa Anne Mendelman

2015
© Copyright by
Lisa Anne Mendelman
2015
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Modern Sentimentalism:
Feeling, Femininity, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

by

Lisa Anne Mendelman
Doctor of Philosophy in English
University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
Professor Michael A. North, Chair

“Modern Sentimentalism” chronicles the myriad ways in which sentimentalism evolves
as modernism emerges. I demonstrate that sentimental aesthetics are more complex than we have
thought and that these aesthetics participate in modern literary innovation. I likewise demonstrate
that modernity, and the American interwar period in particular, enjoys a more complex relation
to the sentimental than we have understood, and that twentieth-century constructs of gender and
emotion equally revise and restyle sentimental precedent. Finally, I demonstrate that, when it
comes to analyzing historical cultures of feeling, contemporary theories of affect have much to
gain from archival methods. Synthesizing these claims, I identify a new form of feeling in
modern aesthetic experience. Neither an idealized lapse into the past nor a naïve vision of the
future, what I call “modern sentimentalism” most often registers the ironic consciousness of an
enduring sentimental impulse.
ii
“Modern Sentimentalism” thus overturns conventional notions of sentimentalism as a
nineteenth-century style antithetical to modern artistic innovation and to representations of
modern sensibility. Participating in recent efforts to contextualize modernism and adding new
historical and formalist dimensions to theories of twentieth-century sentimentality and affect, I
reconstruct sentiment’s authoritative influence in the interwar period’s shifting constructions of
gender, race, and sexuality; emergent concepts of emotional experience like “ambivalence” and
“empathy”; and evolving literary interests like irony and stream-of-consciousness narration.
“Modern Sentimentalism” thus enriches our understanding of the originality and
experimentation that characterize modernist-era literary production. At the same time, this
project elucidates an archive of fiction by female authors, including lesser-known novels by
canonical figures like Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and texts by under-studied authors like
Anita Loos, Frances Newman, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. These authors idiosyncratically revise
and update the aesthetic paradigm that forms a modern woman writer’s most obvious
inheritance, but their novels collectively establish that interwar concepts of gender, emotion, and
literature do not simply break with a sentimental past. Rather, these authors and their inventive
modern novels signal how sentimentalism transforms with the times.

iii
The dissertation of Lisa Anne Mendelman is approved.

Ellen DuBois
Kathleen McHugh
Richard Yarborough
Michael A. North, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles
2015

iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Sex Without Consequence: American Fiction and Femininity Between the Wars
1–20
CHAPTER 1
“An un-sentimental sort of success”: Willa Cather’s Modern Sentimentalism
21–73
CHAPTER 2
Sentimental Satire and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
74–98
CHAPTER 3
Feeling Hard-Boiled: Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin
99–124
CHAPTER 4
An Ambivalent Tradition: Race and Modern Sentimentalism
125–74
CONCLUSION
After Happily Ever After: Marriage, Maternity, and the Future of the Modern Woman
175–197

APPENDIX
Modern Sentimentalism in Digital Terms
198–202

Works Cited
203–29

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As William Saroyan once observed, whether or not one’s writing is sentimental, it is a
very sentimental thing to be a human being. My debts of gratitude are many. UCLA, and the
Department of English in particular, has been a phenomenal place to grow as a scholar. I am
grateful to UCLA’s Institute of American Cultures and the Roter Research Fellowship for
supporting my research in its early stages; the English Department, the Friends of English, and
Graduate Division have generously seen it through. Richard Yarborough, Kathleen McHugh, and
Ellen DuBois have provided invaluable feedback and mentorship at every turn. With equal
measures of brilliance and patience, Michael North has transformed and improved this project
and my thinking from the inside out. I am likewise indebted to Gordon Hutner and my
anonymous readers at American Literary History for their expansion and enhancement of my
work.
I am lucky to abound in generous readers and incisive interlocutors. Mitchell Thornton
has been the most generous and incisive of them all. My family of several generations continues
to offer living proof that the life of the mind and the life of the heart can be one and the same. I
cannot imagine better, more inspiring models for being in the world. My brother Jeff and my
parents Betsy and Paul are my best daily reminders that sentimental feeling not only endures but
also matures in wonderful, unexpected ways. This project is dedicated to the three of them.

vi
VITA
2004 B.A., English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

2007 M.A., English
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

2012 C.Phil, English
University of California, Los Angeles
Los Angeles, CA

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Mendelman, Lisa. “Feeling Hard-Boiled: Modern Sentimentalism and Frances Newman’s
The Hard-Boiled Virgin.” American Literary History 26.4 (Winter 2014): 693–
715.

———. “Sentimental Satire in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The
Sentimental Mode: Essays in Literature, Film and Television. Ed. Jennifer A.
Williamson, Jennifer Larson, and Ashley Reed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. 36–55.

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Sex Without Consequence:
American Fiction and Femininity Between the Wars

The birth of the modern woman has long been imagined as the death of
sentimental feeling. The protagonist of Edna Ferber’s 1917 novel Fanny Herself suggests
as much. “I’m through being sentimental,” marketing genius Fanny Brandeis asserts (65).
“When a woman of my sort marries it’s a miracle. I’m twenty-six, and intelligent and
very successful. A frightful combination. Unmarried women of my type aren’t content
just to feel. They must analyze their feelings. And analysis is death to romance” (140).
Declaring the end of “just feeling” in the wake of first-wave feminism and Freudian
psychology, Fanny nonetheless judges her life by nineteenth-century paradigms of
femininity and emotion: marriage is “a miracle,” while her professional success and
intellectual capacity present a challenge to a potential suitor and, it seems, to her as well.
Fanny’s analytical schema repeatedly returns to sentimental patterns, if only to measure
her distance from them.
Fanny is indeed a “type”: a Google Ngram search, like a reading of many interwar
novels, proves that discourse about the sentimental—the literary mode and its cultural
analogs—flourishes at the precise moment its cultural relevance supposedly ceases.1
Despite this Foucauldian paradox, the perception of sentiment’s waning authority in
women’s lives and in literary production has been remarkably durable in scholarship on
modern femininity and interwar authorship. Even in recent critical work that recovers
sentimental aspects of modernist writing, sentimentalism appears as the echo of a past
that refuses to go away. “Modern Sentimentalism” overturns these notions. What Fanny
perceives, and what critics have failed to note, is not a slow death but a vital rebirth.

1 See Appendix.
1