Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Evan Harrington : George Meredith's Use Of Comedy As A Corrective To Sentimentality, Joyce Stanley Scott

Master's Theses

Because it leads an individual to increasing loss of perspective, George Meredith considered sentimentality a real tragedy. The deluded sentimentalist convinces himself that all his efforts and attitudes bear him steadily down the road of spiritual progress, when actually he is using his ideals of society as an excuse for willful blindness, a shifting of responsibility, and self-deception. The sentimentalist's primary concern is to cushion himself against hard fact instead of training himself for encountering it, and he accomplishes this by drugging himself against the perception of truth.