Agriculture Reference
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model by looking at how class impacts on its efficacy. However, no straightforward
model emerges from her data on the relationship between emotional involvement
and educational achievement. She found for example, that some of her working-class
mothers found it significantly harder than their middle-class counterparts to supply
their children with the resources of emotional capital. Often constrained by economic
struggle, lack of educational competencies and confidence - some of the mothers she
spoke to were using their emotional energies to survive the everyday with limited
resources. Conversely, she also found that middle-class mothers' anxieties about
their children's academic success meant that while their cultural capital increased
as a result of being forced to do homework - there were costs for their freedom and
their emotional capital was reduced. In these ways emotional capital, 'is context and
resource constrained' (Reay 2000, 581); as a form of capital, its complexity lies in the
fact that it eschews clear links between class, value accrual and success. But perhaps
most significantly, Reay found that even in the face of the knowledge that their
children were failing at school, in contexts where emotional capital had little cultural
capital to nourish, working-class mothers insisted on supporting the emotional well-
being of their children. This idea is central to my own findings of how emotional
resources continue, even when those concerned are sentient that their practices are
not valued beyond local contexts, in ways which turn a blind eye to the values of
the dominant system. My working-class gardeners were not interested in accruing
value beyond the local. In the following section, I explore sentimentality - a term
which represents a family of emotions which reinforced positive feelings within
the gardening community I studied, but which place further blocks on particular
gardening aesthetics beyond the local.
In Defence of Sentimentality
'I think we must face,' argues Knight, 'that sentimentality cannot be defended'
(1999, 411). She goes on :'One cannot coherently praise the irrational, the shallow,
the simple, the passive, the fantasized, the confabulated' (1999, 418) Indeed, in
Knight's thoroughgoing review of the standard philosophical and aesthetic literature
sentimentality is associated with a fault, a spiralling down of standards in moral
or aesthetic sensibility. And despite the fact that sentimentality acts as an umbrella
term for a host of humane and appropriate emotional attributes, 'it is taken as a mark
of psychological decline … in ourselves as cognitive and moral agents' (ibid.) The
critical language condemning sentimentality is also undoubtedly gendered, think
excessive, passive, self-indulgent, shallow: 'sentimentality is a
femme fatale,
only
she wields a contagion rather than a gun. Masquerading as an innocent, and working
on the inside, it is the undoing of the rational self' (Knight 1999, 418). Other critics
note the ways in which sentimentality has been excoriated: Gorton (2005) argues
that television studies has marginalised critical engagement with sentimental or
emotional programmes, categorising them as 'easy, constructed and simplistic, and
watched by lazy audiences' (Gorton 2005, 72). And Warhol (2003) argues that one of
the legacies of modernism was its aesthetic and philosophical recoil from feminine
forms of popular culture and its need to distinguish 'authentic' emotions from the
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