What does it mean to cry over a book? It’s a question that has been in the foreground lately, thanks to “The Great Y.A. Debate of 2014”—the conversation, sparked by Ruth Graham last month in Slate, about the merits of John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” and other young-adult fiction. The debate has been about a lot of things, including the tension between high and popular art, the role of criticism, and the fate of maturity as a cultural value. But it has also been—peculiarly—about the value and meaning of tears. “I’m a reader who did not weep,” Graham wrote, defiantly. “Does this make me heartless? Or does it make me a grown-up?” By contrast, Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review, revealed that he had read the book lying down, “to obviate the need for a hanky”; Dana Stevens, Slate’s film critic, left the movie version with dry eyes and wondered, “Am I a bad person?” What might have been a purely intellectual debate about our collective literary taste often centered on a personal, emotional question: Did I cry?
Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was still a new form, crying was a sign of readerly virtue. “Sentimental” novels, brimming with tender and pathetic scenes, gave readers an occasion to exercise their “finer feelings.” Your tears proved your susceptibility to the suffering of others. The literary historian Richard Darnton writes that, in going through Rousseau’s fan mail, “one is struck everywhere by the sound of sobbing.” “[O]ne must write to you that one is choking with emotion and weeping,” an admirer of Rousseau’s “Julie, or the New Heloise,” wrote. “Never have I wept such delicious tears,” another wrote. “I verily believe I have shed a pint of tears,” one of Samuel Richardson’s admirers, Lady Bradshaigh, wrote to him, after finishing “Clarissa”:
Sentimental novels were hugely popular; Richardson’s “Pamela,” the story of a virtuous serving girl who is terrorized by her employer, Mr. B, was an early example of the best-seller phenomenon in English fiction. But sentimentalism was also, from the beginning, vulnerable to attack. Tears, after all, had no necessary connection to actual virtue, and they could be feigned. (In “Shamela”, Henry Fielding’s still-funny parody of “Pamela,” Richardson’s heroine is exposed as a schemer who uses her tears to manipulate “Mr. Booby” into marrying her.) They could also be overindulged. As the critic John Mullan points out, by the end of the eighteenth century, according to the O.E.D., the word “sentimental” (“exhibiting refined and elevated feelings”) had acquired a new meaning—“addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion”—bringing it closer to the meaning that it has for us today.
In the nineteenth century, the meaning of tears evolved in two divergent directions. Some writers sought to provoke ever more “elevated” feelings in their readers: Victorian sentimentalists wrote tear-inducing scenes, often centered on the death of a child, in an effort to inspire social and political reform. (Think of Dickens, or Harriet Beecher Stowe.) Other writers embraced the idea of an “addiction” to emotion. The “sensation” novel, a different type of Victorian best-seller, showed that tears could be enjoyable in themselves. Sensation novels were the forerunners of the modern thriller, mystery, and tearjerker; heavy on adultery, blackmail, bigamy, secrets, madness, and melodramatic twists and revelations, they were known for creating physical “sensations” in their readers— goosebumps, shivers, a pounding heart, and, in melodramas such as Ellen Wood’s “East Lynne,” tears. But these were tears without moral purpose or effect: sensation for sensation’s sake. Reviewers found the novels distasteful; readers bought them in droves. (A few have held up well; T.S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers both thought that Wilkie Collins’s “The Moonstone” was the best detective novel ever written.)
Pleasure and moral feeling, of course, don’t have to be exclusive: watching “Terms of Endearment” always makes me want to call my mom. But, after the sensation novel, it became possible to talk about tears solely in terms of pleasure. Today, it’s a familiar way of talking. Recently, a reader looking for book recommendations on the site Ask Metafilter wrote, “I want to cry my eyes out over a book … if it made you sob and sob and say at some point, ‘Wow, I can’t stand this’ it’s probably golden.” More than eighty people wrote back, with recommendations ranging from “The Bone People” (“it’s good, and it hurts”) to “Brewster” (“I can promise intense terrible sadness … So good”) to “Marley and Me”— endorsed, in wonderfully Lady Bradshaigh-like terms, by a user named “hairy terrarium”:
A few decades later, the modernists aimed to push readers beyond sympathy and sensation into new, cooler territories of feeling. The tears they talk about are more concentrated, more aesthetic: in place of floods and puddles, we get Henry Green’s dictum that prose should “in the end draw tears out of the stone,” and Nabokov’s exhortation to readers to “enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece.” But the modernist rhetoric of aestheticized emotion didn’t eclipse what came before; it’s just the most recent layer. Today’s debate about Y.A. draws on all of this history. When Laura Miller praises “The Fault in Our Stars” for showing us what being a teen-ager with cancer “feels like,” and when Dana Stevens asks what her dry eyes say about her character, they’re both using the language of sentimentalism. When advertisements for the movie proclaim, “Bring on the feels” (or, “Get your ticket with a free side of feels here”), that’s sensationalism. And when Ruth Graham argues that reading is about “so much more” than feeling empathy—taking pleasure in “astonishing sentences,” for example—it’s hard not to hear Nabokov in the background. (One should read, he said, “not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live” but rather to “feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction.”)
The Y.A. debate, in short, is about more than young-adult books and their not-so-young readers. It’s a recapitulation of a deeper debate that we’ve been having for centuries—a debate about why books matter to us, and what reading is “for.” It’s also a debate about who we want to be. Talking about what makes us cry is also a way of talking about ourselves. With each way of talking—sentimental, sensational, aesthetic—we say something different: that we’re kindhearted and empathetic, or passionate and romantic, or sensitive to beauty and the pleasures of art. Saint, lover, artist: surely these are all good ways of being. Probably, though, we’ll keep arguing about them forever. Nabokov was wrong; we never lose interest in the adolescent project of learning to live.
Photograph by David Alan Harvey/Magnum.
