216 Book Reviews Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America By Lisa Mendelman Oxford UP, 2019. 256 pp. $65.00 cloth. Reviewed by Nir Evron, Tel Aviv University One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fner early short stories, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (1920), turns on a clash between two styles of femininity. Te frst, embodied in the painfully conservative teenager Bernice, hearkens back to nineteenth- century sentimental ideals, and in particular to the Victorian celebration of pliancy and emotional responsiveness as cardinal feminine virtues. Te second, represented by Bernice’s cousin, Marjorie, is New Woman head to toe. An assertive, sexually acquisitive and, above all, unsentimental “society vampire,” Marjorie has little time for her cousin and her dainty ways (Te Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scribner, 1989, 37). “Oh please don’t quote ‘Little Women’!” she cuts Bernice of during a heated exchange. “What modern girl could live like those inane females?” (33). With her blanket rejection of the sentimental ideal and proclaimed aver- sion to the “ghastly inefciencies that [pass] as feminine qualities,” Marjorie would seem to ft neatly into the model of femininity that emerges at the turn the twentieth century, and which becomes a sine qua non of modernist rep- resentation from the 1920s onward (34). According to the critical narrative that has been drilled into us and that we still ofen drill into our students, the New Woman—a social ideal which Edith Wharton’s Ellen Olenska, Ernest Hemingway’s Brett Ashley, and Nella Larsen’s Clare Kendry variously repre- sent—stands at the antipode of its sentimental precursor: self-assertive where the latter is self-efacing, uninhibited where the latter is chaste, cool when the other dissolves into what Marjorie scornfully describes as “a weak, whining, cowardly mass of afectations” (34). Te modernist New Woman, so goes this familiar line, is the death of sentimentalism. Lisa Mendelman’s rewarding Modern Sentimentalism seeks to complicate this received wisdom. American literary modernism, it claims, was not senti- mentalism’s undertaker but the site of its “vital rebirth” (2). Within the modern- ist tradition, we fnd not a sharp break with sentimental tropes and conventions so much as their interrogation and reinvention. And while many modernist female protagonists may share Marjorie’s disdain for the “womanly woman” Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/edith-wharton/article-pdf/36/2/216/1426649/editwharrevi_36_2_216.pdf by guest on 06 February 2022