David Mills
In her “Memoir of Mary Ann,” published in Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor offered a famous comment on sentimentality:
One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. . . . Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.
In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
Another writer has popularized this insight, in the character of Dolores Umbridge, who first appeared in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She wears pink and lace and talks girlishly and does horrible things. J. K. Rowling writes about her on the Pottermore website (registration required):
I have noticed more than once in life that a taste for the ineffably twee can go hand-in-hand with a distinctly uncharitable outlook on the world. I once shared an office with a woman who had covered the wall space behind her desk with pictures of fluffy kitties; she was the most bigoted, spiteful champion of the death penalty with whom it has ever been my misfortune to share a kettle. A love of all things saccharine often seems present where there is a lack of real warmth or charity.
The history Rowling provides on the Pottermore site shows her to be even worse than the books did. Stephen King called her “the greatest make-believe villain to come along since Hannibal Lecter.”
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