America's New Sentimental Journey

By Frank Trippett

The signs are everywhere, and proliferating. Some of them are trivial but telling; others seem to reflect yet another shift in the national mood and the social mode. If the signs are to be believed--and sociologists are sure to debate their significance--the cool-hip chic that has held sway since the 1960s, with its scorn of sentiment and its do-your-own-thing code, is giving way gradually to something suspiciously like a new romanticism. Says Psychologist Sol Gordon, professor of child and family studies at Syracuse University: "Americans no longer want to be cool; they want to be hot."

The pronounced American yen for romanticism and sentiment has surfaced intermittently in one place or another for several years now, but it is finally blooming in virtually every zone of the social spectrum, in folkways and cultivated appetites, among middlebrows and highbrows alike. Take America's dance floors--often a useful symbol of how people view themselves.

Partners are touching each other again, and dancing to music that is meant to have them do just that, such as the marvelously variable hustle. Extraordinarily, the oldfashioned, dress-up tea dance has returned from oblivion to become a popular mixer all over the country--a departure, to say the least, from the meat-market atmosphere of the singles bars. The disco scene has grown generally less barbarous, and is now in retreat from the narcissistic solo gyrations that became fashionable in the early '60s. The most phenomenal pop-song hit of the season? That saccharine hymn to a sweetheart, You Light Up My Life.

In fact the relationship between the sexes, so buffeted by the feminist movement, seems once again to be taking on some subtlety and civility. Men are sending women flowers in greater numbers, the florists say, than at any time in the past decade and are regaining some of the manners that they felt superfluous when faced with militant wives or sweethearts. Women today are less apt to dress like sodbusters on a holiday, and frilly dresses, flouncy skirts, ruffled underskirts, lace, gauze blouses--all as feminine as possible--have returned to everyday fashion. Advertisements heralding coming spring fashions ooze lyricism, and sentimental trinkets and totems are booming. "Everyone is into hearts," says a Chicago shopkeeper, "the same way they were into peace symbols a few years ago."

The country's freshly romantic disposition is to be found in the worlds of symphony, opera and ballet; increasingly audiences have cooled on experimental and abstract works while warmly receiving new performances of old favorites such as Brahms' Second Symphony, Carmen and Swan Lake. The mood of theatergoers was dramatized neatly on Broadway when an effort to revive Hair fizzled dismally with critics and public alike, while Man of La Mancha, with all its improbable visions, came back successfully (to run alongside such other hits as the shamelessly treacly Annie and Neil Simon's latest domestic frolic, Chapter Two). Movie fans are in tune too: having rejoiced not long ago over a fable of apocalypse like Dr. Strangelove and a parable of triumphant evil like Easy Rider, they are today cheering over a heart-grabbing fable like Rocky and a simple-minded parable of triumphant good like Star Wars. Certainly the romantic mood appears, if somewhat dissembled, in the reading habits of the American woman; after years of listening to liberationists, she is devouring the adventures of subjugate female heroines in the heavy-breathing epics of writers like Kathleen Woodiwiss (Shanna) and Rosemary Rogers (Wicked Loving Lies). The hot market for romantic novels has publishers gurgling with joy.

Indeed, nobody peddling romance in any form seems in grave risk of unhappiness these days. Even books on sex seem to sell best when "joy" is part of the title, and a gossamer tale of juvenile heartbloom and heartbreak called Happy Days is one of the strongest-running sitcoms on the tube. Weightless romance, to be sure, has always been a TV staple, but now the lovelorn soaps have gained such a galvanized following among old and young that television can spoof itself with an unsavory parody of the genre called Soap. Public TV found out not long ago that it could gather its most zealous audience ever with the quality soap opera called Upstairs, Downstairs. Many radio stations, meanwhile, have discovered that it is possible to ignore rock and develop sizable audiences with the schmaltz of Barry Manilow or the mellow golden oldies of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller and the like. In the real world, clubs and restaurants are dimming the lights more than ever, and many such spots have provided the stages for the big continuing renaissance of jazz. As Benny Goodman once said, "Jazz is romantic." But these days one might ask: What is not?

America's new sentimental journey, believes Psychologist Gordon, may spring from the active efforts of many Americans to find something better than "the depersonalization of sex and relationships" that has occurred in recent years. Others think that, in some mysterious way, it is related to a conservative trend in national politics; even Jimmy Carter, with his homespun ways, kissin'-cousin courtliness and studied gentility, is given credit for restoring some sentiment to the land. To many, the search for form and formality, the yearning for tradition and sentiment, are part of the mysterious emotional process by which the nation is healing itself from the bruises and fatigue accumulated during recent years. Those years produced, in numbing succession, the civil rights upheavals, riots, assassinations, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, oceans of porn and a life-style whose followers were seldom tempted to distinguish self-indulgence from self-realization.

It is easy to challenge the description of the current mood as a return to romance, if only because America's essentially romantic character has never really been in abeyance. Even in a basically romantic country, however, romanticism has its highs and its lows, and right now it is flying high. Besides, what hap pier condition can visit a land whose national ideals and myths are known as the American Dream? Ah, perhaps that is it, the exact word to describe the new sentimental journey on which the U.S. appears to have embarked: dream. Americans have finally begun to dream again--and high time too, after nearly a generation of nightmares.

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