The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant's
groundbreaking "national sentimentality" project
charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as
an affective space of attachment and identification. In
this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and
conventions of the first mass-cultural "intimate public"
in the United States, a "women's culture" distinguished
by a view that women inevitably have something in common
and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate
and revelatory. As Berlant explains, "women's" books,
films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a
woman's life is not just her own, but an experience
understood by other women, no matter how dissimilar they
are. The commodified genres of intimacy, such as "chick
lit," circulate among strangers, enabling insider
self-help talk to flourish in an intimate public.
Sentimentality and complaint are central to this
commercial convention of critique; their relation to the
political realm is ambivalent, as politics seems both to
threaten sentimental values and to provide certain
opportunities for their extension. Pairing literary
criticism and historical analysis, Berlant explores the
territory of this intimate public sphere through close
readings of U.S. women's literary works and their stage
and film adaptations. Her interpretation of Uncle Tom's
Cabin and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet
Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison's Beloved, touching on
Shirley Temple, James Baldwin, and The Bridges of
Madison County along the way. Berlant illuminates
different permutations of the women's intimate public
through her readings of Edna Ferber's Show Boat; Fannie
Hurst's Imitation of Life; Olive Higgins Prouty's
feminist melodrama Now, Voyager; Dorothy Parker's
poetry, prose, and Academy Award-winning screenplay for
A Star Is Born; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr
film The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and the queer,
avant-garde film Showboat 1988-The Remake. The Female
Complaint is a major contribution from a leading
Americanist.
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