A modern-day sentimental journey can be laced with cynicism or longing

Say "sentimental" and most people probably think of Hallmark cards, posters of adorable kittens, Thomas Kinkade paintings, and anything pink.

But the word, along with the constellation of meanings it represents, has a long and interesting history, one that's newly relevant in a political moment when we talk about "values" and "terror" and even "Social Security" -- to say nothing of a cultural moment in which Hello Kitty, girly fashions, cupcakes for grown-ups, and the collected works of Mitch Albom are all swirling in a pastel bubble around our heads. It's also locally relevant right now because of a show at the DeCordova Museum, "Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art."

Not getting the connections? Come along for the ride.

Let's start in, oh, 1768. That's the year that Laurence Sterne published his "Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy," a benchmark in the literature of feeling. Sterne, like his contemporary Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reacted to the strict rationalism of the Enlightenment with a little enlightenment of his own: the idea that emotions were to be valued, not despised as "irrational," and that true wisdom could come only through listening to the heart as well as the head.

That's a strain of thought -- of feeling -- that weaves its way through much of the next century or so. Think of Dickens, beloved not just for his way with plots and language but for his heartfelt, passionately realized characters. But, of course, there was always a counterstrain: take Oscar Wilde's famous remark about "The Old Curiosity Shop: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."

Wilde wasn't the only cynic, of course, to assail Dickens's "sentimentality." But for many other readers, that very sentimentality was the author's chief virtue, and it still didn't exactly mean kittens and flowers.

In the context of 19th-century literature, " 'sentimentality' generally means a value scheme that is an alternative to money and the market," says Scott Sandage, a history professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh who has just published "Born Losers: A History of Failure in America." "That means not only 'Oh, poor little Eva dies' in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' but the message that Harriet Beecher Stowe is conveying: that each person's life has value, not just their value to a buyer in the slave market but an emotional, spiritual, individual value unto themselves."

For Lauren Berlant, a professor of English and gender studies at the University of Chicago who is at work on the final volume in a trilogy about American sentimentality, Stowe's brand of "sentimentalism" is critical to understanding its real importance in our culture.

"Abolition was the first moment of the rise of true feeling as a norm in American culture," Berlant says. "Before that, a 'citizen' was a rational being who was capable of making decisions. With abolition, we came to have an image of a citizen as someone who could recognize your pain."

Berlant notes, however, that "there's been a long struggle over the value of this positioning," and that cultural elites have tended to attack sentimentality in art and literature. But, she argues, their objections are about more than differences of taste.

"Women's culture, minority culture, the culture of any subaltern group, has always been dismissed as being overemotional," Berlant says, because the claims of these groups on the dominant culture are emotional as well as political: They're asserting a shared humanity, shared emotions, as well as shared legal rights.

So it's not surprising that, both in the DeCordova show and in the culture at large, it's often art from members of subcultures that uses "sentimental" imagery. Sometimes this use is ironic, sometimes it's nostalgic, and sometimes it's just hard to tell.

When a grown woman carries a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox, or an artist uses tissue-box cozies or stuffed animals as her medium, or the Polyphonic Spree dons colorful robes to sing Up With People-like tunes, who's to say how serious the sentiments are?

Whatever the intent, the result is often criticism and rejection, or outright ridicule. But that may say more about the audience than about the art.

Attempts to distance ourselves from art that feels too "emotional," too "sentimental," Berlant says, arise out of insecurity and fear. "The bourgeois aversion to sentimentality is about the aversion to becoming exposed as simple," she says. At the same time, though, we haven't lost the longing "to have a simple feeling -- wanting to be comfortable thinking of a scene of emotional attachment as something lovely and moving and perhaps ethically transformative."

Out of this ambivalence and discomfort comes kitsch or, more specifically, the ironic appreciation of kitsch.

"When sentimentality is brought up now, usually it is tongue in cheek," says Gary Edgerton, a professor of communications and theater arts at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. "But often artists try to have their cake and eat it too: to give a wink and a nod while doing it, but also try to tug at the heartstrings."

That's a classic TV approach -- have everybody hug, but then make a joke about it. (Only "Seinfeld" stayed immune to sentimentality right through to the end -- which may be why viewers, emotionally attached despite all the irony, felt surprisingly let down by the final show.) But we may be entering a new cultural moment, one in which we once again attempt to use sentimental imagery unironically. There are a lot of reasons for this gradual shift, but one of the most important may be the attacks of Sept. 11, the emotional outpourings they provoked, and the ways in which emotion has been used since then to shape discussions of public policy.

"Every major American crisis does have some financial aspect and some moral aspect," Sandage says, "from the Great Depression to Columbine to 9/11." And you can see "sentimentality," he says, in "everything from the sort of cheesy plaques with the Twin Towers and inspiring verses on them to some very serious policy debates, such as how do we put a monetary value on the lives that were lost? Was each human life worth the same amount?"

Our struggles with these questions, Sandage says, are "sentimental" in the older meaning of the term: more concerned with emotional and personal values than with the values of the marketplace.

And "sentimentality" fuels other debates as well, he says. "The Social Security debate turns on those kinds of issues. We have a sentimental view of old age, as a part of life that should not be entirely captive to the laws of the marketplace, versus the idea that you have got to be making deals from the time you turn 13 until they carry you out on a shingle."

We're a long way from Laurence Sterne. But maybe not: What's relevant here is the swing toward bringing feelings, emotions -- sentiment -- into the public sphere.

"Between the sensationalism of tabloid journalism and the renewal of melodrama as a source for television and filmic depictions of everyday life," Berlant says, "you have an incredibly interesting moment for thinking about whether [public consciousnesses] are created by emotion."

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.