The Female Complaint

<div><i>The Female Complaint</i> 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.<p>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 <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> and its literary descendants reaches from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison's <i>Beloved</i> touching on Shirley Temple James Baldwin and <i>The Bridges of Madison County</i> along the way. Berlant illuminates different permutations of the women's intimate public through her readings of Edna Ferber's <i>Show Boat</i>; Fannie Hurst's <i>Imitation of Life</i>; Olive Higgins Prouty's feminist melodrama <i>Now Voyager</i>; Dorothy Parker's poetry prose and Academy Award-winning screenplay for <i>A Star Is Born</i>; the Fay Weldon novel and Roseanne Barr film <i>The Life and Loves of a She-Devil</i>; and the queer avant-garde film <i>Showboat 1988-The Remake</i>. <i>The Female Complaint</i> is a major contribution from a leading Americanist.</p></div>