In the chapter on motherhood, Vickery provides a sane counterpoint to the prevalent eighteenth-century
sentimentalization of the mother.
As he notes in an afterword, it must be acknowledged that contemporary "critics of colonialism have tended to construct `others' quite as false as those invented by their opponents," their views often "grounded in a corresponding
sentimentalization of the 'other." Earlier Europeans, he observes, did seek to understand, but locked in their own preconceptions, they often failed to comprehend the Other.
This reformulation of children's utility was accompanied by the now-familiar and much broader cultural movement toward the
sentimentalization of children and childhood.(2) This paper will trace the evolution of institutional initiatives to standardize the early life course(3) and explore the extent and forms of resistance to their implementation by working-class families in New Haven, Connecticut over the latter half of the nineteenth century.(4)
(75) This erasure of guilty adults who exploit young criminals' hunger and poverty is a telling silence; including them would have heightened the
sentimentalization of Jack as a poor boy living a difficult life on the streets, and so strengthened Defoe's reformist cause of charity schools.
While much of antebellum sentimentalism held a "preoccupation with death," this particular sketch offers a humorous take on such obsessions, which were still "under the influence of grim Puritan ideas of death" (42), and Hawthorne [repeatedly illustrates] the era's
sentimentalization and domestication of death" (38).
During the nineteenth century, however, broadsheet and street ballads were subjected to a regime of sexual sanitation and
sentimentalization. Even purportedly subversive murder ballads, which portrayed lurid, sensational crimes, tended to rally around familial authority and exalt the retributive power of the state.
An example of the latter can be traced in the essay The long arm of the small town: here, Lewis describes the life of the boys who lived in such a place as the American small town, but in Schorer's (1961: 8) view this description implied a "sad
sentimentalization of the life of the boy who left it, who made it famous, and who never left it."
sentiment, including the traditional
sentimentalization of women and
which involves our society's recuperation and
sentimentalization of a moment in its own history of four hundred or so years ago." (10)
She explores the "unhappy effects of happiness" (2) when she considers "feminist critiques of figure of 'the happy housewife,' black critiques of the myth of 'the happy slave,' and queer critiques of the
sentimentalization of heterosexuality as 'domestic bliss'" (2): happiness can be used to oppress individuals and to enforce social norms.