3 “Sentimentalism” refers specifically to the literary mode that reproduces this subjective emotional emphasis in its aesthetic detail and other formal choices. My use of the term “sentimental” refers to a structure of feeling that characterizes subjective emotion as a source of individual knowledge and potential interpersonal connection. 2 In each of these capacities, Blondes reflects the evolving sensibilities and aesthetic interests of the modernist period and demonstrates the enduring relevance of sentimental feeling therein. It then details Blondes’s revised sentimental plot, heroine, and community, and highlight intersections between its rendering of Jazz Age femininity, female sexuality, and labor and the contemporaneous cultural discourse about these topics. This essay presents a theoretical and historical context for a reading of Blondes’s sentimental satire. Rather, as Blondes establishes, satire and its related technique of irony can be sentimental. Invoking the logic of this aesthetic category, this essay argues that Blondes is not simply a satire of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel in which a working-class girl from Arkansas becomes an author and a Hollywood actress through her sympathy, understanding, and moral “reverance ” (Loos, Blondes 53). This essay reads Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a sentimental novel, one that exemplifies the aesthetic category of “modern sentimentalism.” As described below, modern sentimentalism reinvents the sentimental mode through experimental aesthetic practices, including, in Loos’s epistolary “diary of a professional lady,” stream-of-consciousness narration, dialectical writing, and an extensive use of irony. 1 What would it mean to treat Loos’s ironic sentimentalism sincerely, as a revision rather than a rejection of the literary mode? Pitted against Loos’s cynical persona, the “witless blonde” evokes Blondes’s protagonist, a woman whose allure derives from apparent sincerity, sympathy, and naiveté, combined with the hint that she may not be as innocent or inexperienced as her exterior suggests. Rather, in this quip as in her 1925 bestseller, Loos’s ironic rhetoric gestures toward and plays with sentiment’s various nineteenth-century connotations. Juxtaposing mere “liking” with the alternative embodied by the “witless blonde,” Loos does not exclusively redefine “sentiment” in terms of erotic desire. Menck liked me very much indeed but in the matter of sentiment, he preferred a witless blonde.Anita Loos, “The Biography of a Book”Īnita Loos’s euphemism for sex in her 1963 preface to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes invokes a long literary tradition of implicit physical intimacy.

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