Shame as Narrative Strategy : Prose by Scottish Writers

Shame as Narrative Strategy—
Prose by Scottish Writers
Laura Hird, Jackie Kay,
A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith
Dissertation
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades
des Doktors der Philosophie
an der Universität Konstanz, Fachbereich Literaturwissenschaft,
vorgelegt von
Katharina Metz
Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 23. Juli 2009
Referentin: Prof. Dr. Silvia Mergenthal (Konstanz)
Referentin: Prof. Dr. Ingrid Hotz-Davies (Tübingen)
Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS)
URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-128358
URL: http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/volltexte/2011/12835/
Deutschsprachige Zusammenfassung 5
I. Shame and Narrative
I.1 The Rehabilitation of Shame in Psychoanalysis and Psychology 7
I.2 Shame in Literary Studies 9
I.3 Prose by Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith and the Discussion
of Literary Shame 13
II. Facts and Fiction
II.1. Psychoanalytic Definitions of Shame Affect Groups 19
II.1.1 From Assimilation Shame to Shamelessness 24
II.2. Literary Representations of Shame Affect Groups 28
II.2.1 Assimilation Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental I—‘Astrid’ 29
II.2.1.1 Existential Shame: A.L. Kennedy, Looking for the Possible Dance 37
II.2.1.2 Competence Shame: Jackie Kay, Trumpet I—‘Colman’ 43
II.2.1.3 Ideality Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental II—‘Eve’ 49
II.2.1.4 Dependence Shame: Ali Smith, Like I—‘Amy’ 55
II.2.2 Intimacy Shame: Jackie Kay, Trumpet II—‘Millie and Colman’ 68
II.2.2.1 Traumatic Shame: A.L. Kennedy, “The moving house” 79
II.2.3 Conscience or Moral Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental III—‘Magnus’ 85
II.2.3.1 Shame-Guilt Dilemma: A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need 89
II.2.4 Group Shame: Laura Hird, Born Free I—‘Joni, Jake and Victor’ 106
II.2.4.1 Scotland and Shame: Ali Smith, Like II—‘Ash’ 121
II.2.5 Shamelessness 135
II.2.5.1 Ali Smith, The Accidental IV—‘Michael’ 137
II.2.5.2 Jackie Kay, Trumpet III—‘Sophie’ 142
II.2.5.3 Laura Hird, Born Free II—‘Angela’ 147
III. Summary
III.1 Shame in the Literature of Contemporary Scottish Women Authors 155
III.2 Shame in Narratives by Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith 156
IV. Perspectives on Emotion and Literature
IV.1 Recent Discussion of Emotions in the Humanities 159
IV.2 Shame Transference from the Literary Text to the Reader—an Exemplary
Affect-theoretical Approach 166
IV.2.1 Recapitulation of Narrative Forms of Literary Shame 166
IV.2.2 Two Ways to Evoke Reader Shame, and their Presumed Evolutionary
Psychological Foundation 168
V. Corpus and Bibliography
V.1 List of Literary Texts Discussed in Shame as Narrative Strategy 177
V.2 Bibliography 179
Deutschsprachige Zusammenfassung
Im Kern ist die vorliegende Untersuchung zu “Scham als narrative Strategie” eine
Untersuchung verschiedener Schamaffekte in Romanen und Kurzgeschichten von
Autorinnen der schottischen Gegenwartsliteratur. Die seit 1990 entstandenen Texte
von Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A. L. Kennedy und Ali Smith bilden ein in seiner Vielfalt
und Präsenz herausragendes Korpus literarischer Schamnarrative. Die behandelten
Texte schildern eine große Bandbreite von Schamerlebnissen, Schamgefühlen und
Schamreaktionen; da sie dies sowohl aus weiblicher wie auch aus männlicher
Perspektive tun, decken sie ein sehr großes Spektrum möglicher Schamszenarien ab.
Der Aspekt der Scham hat in Bezug auf die hier behandelten Texte in der Forschungsliteratur bislang noch keine Erwähnung gefunden, weswegen sich der Hauptteil der
Arbeit diesem Desiderat widmet.
Das Einleitungskapitel “Shame and Narrative” führt kurz in den Forschungsstand der Schamtheorie in der Psychoanalyse und der Psychologie einerseits und der
Literaturwissenschaften andererseits ein. Daneben bietet es einen Überblick über
bisherige Untersuchungen der im Rahmen der vorliegenden Studie diskutierten
Prosatexte. Um eine systematische Untersuchung der literarischen Repräsentationen
von Scham zu ermöglichen und die Diskussion zu erleichtern, wurden auf aktuellen
psychoanalytischen Untersuchungen basierend Schamaffektgruppen ausgearbeitet.
Der erste Teil des zweiten Kapitels “Facts and Fiction” stellt die gängigen
psychoanalytischen Definitionen von Scham vor und führt in die später herangezogenen Schamaffektgruppen ein. Danach folgen die einzelnen Literaturdiskussionen. Sie besprechen jeden Schamaffekt exemplarisch an einem der Texte;
lediglich in Bezug auf das Phänomen der Schamlosigkeit werden drei Texte
miteinander verglichen. Gegenstand der Interpretation ist aber nicht nur die
inhaltliche Darstellung, sondern auch die formale Präsentation dieses flüchtigen
Affekts.
Die reale Kommunikationsstruktur der Scham weist eine gewisse zeitliche
und psychologische Distanz zum eigentlichen Schamerlebnis auf, die eine (Selbst-)
Konfrontation mit dem Gefühl überhaupt erst möglich macht. Auf narrativer Ebene
werden daher die Aspekte der Zeitlichkeit, der Chronologie der Ereignisse,
Distanzierungsmechanismen im Bereich der Erzählperspektive und Perspektivwechsel
untersucht. Ziel ist dabei ein Vergleich real-psychologischer und literarischer
Strategien in der Schamerzählung.
Scham ist trotz ihrer Tendenz, sich zu verstecken, ein enorm sozialer Affekt,
sowohl in ihrer Funktion als auch in ihrer Wirkung. Ihre Funktion besteht ganz
allgemein in der Einhaltung von Normen und deren Wiederherstellung nach
Normverletzungen. Ihre subjektiv wahrgenommene, prinzipiell negative Wirkung
erstreckt sich jedoch nicht nur auf das beschämte Subjekt selbst. Als Grundformen der
Reaktion auf die Beschämung Dritter sind denkbar: a) Mit-Scham (in dem Fall, dass
der Andere sich spürbar schämt) oder b) stellvertretende Scham (falls eine feststellbare
Schamreaktion des Anderen entfällt). Ein dritter und letzter Teilaspekt der Literaturdiskussion sind mögliche Leserreaktionen auf literarische Schilderungen von Scham.
Auch hier gilt das Interesse den Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschieden zwischen realer
und literarischer Scham. Die Ergebnisse der Literaturdiskussion werden in einem
“Summary” zusammengefasst.
Im Anschluss an den Hauptteil der Studie folgt ein Ausblick auf aktuelle
Forschungsarbeiten zu Literatur und Emotionen. Im Kapitel “Perspectives on Emotion
and Literature” werden verschiedene affekttheoretische Perspektiven angeboten. Diese
können bei der Beantwortung der Frage behilflich sein, ob Scham nicht eines der
seltenen Beispiele für die mögliche direkte Übertragung eines literarischen Gefühls auf
den Leser ist.
6
I. Shame and Narrative
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to
the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and
did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. / And the eyes of
them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig
leaves together, and made themselves aprons. (Genesis 3, 7-8)
The first thing Adam and Eve got out of the tree of knowledge was shame, not wisdom.
Despite this prominent position in human history, the subject has only been examined
in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology and philosophy for about 30
years, and even shorter in cultural and literary studies. This thesis joins a slowly but
steadily growing number of studies that combine the two fields and apply
contemporary psychoanalytic and psychological shame research to literary interpretations. Within the realm of English speaking literature, a number of readings
informed by shame research have been produced over the past years, and these
readings have covered a wide range of authors from John Keats (Ricks 1974) and
Herman Melville (Adamson 1997) to Toni Morrison (Bouson 2000) and William
Shakespeare (Fernie 2002). The first part of the following introduction provides a small
survey of the current psychoanalytic evaluation of shame and its effect on the
humanities. The second and the third parts introduce the literary shame discourse as
well as the corpus of narrative texts and some of the main questions raised. Finally an
outlook will provide a survey of recent emotion theories and literature, and an
alternative perspective on affect theoretical aspects of shame as narrative strategy.
I. 1 The Rehabilitation of Shame in Psychoanalysis and Psychology
What do we talk about when we talk about shame? Do we talk about being embarrassed for greeting a stranger we mistook for somebody we know? Or do we talk about
the feeling of not being loved by the one who means everything to us? Do we talk
about your reaction one morning when a painter was watching through the window as
we stepped out of the shower? Do we talk about how it feels to be humiliated in front
of our colleagues at work, or do we talk about our colleagues’ feelings when our boss
humiliates us in front of them? All of this is what we talk about when we talk about
shame, and the list of possible shame situations, events, and triggers inducing shame
could continue endlessly. Prominent as it seems, the affect was almost unrecognised in
scientific discussion until the second half of the 20th century. The recurrence of shame
as an independent affect,1 i.e. not intrinsically connected to guilt, is primarily a North
1
In the context of this study, the term shame affect is meant to include as many
aspects of an emotional response as possible. It covers both unconscious and consciously
tangible shame reactions, shame feelings and shame responses.
American phenomenon. The revision of Freud’s psychoanalysis from the 1960s on has
brought up, among many other things, a differentiated view of shame affects. “Freud’s
theory of neurosis never carefully differentiated guilt from shame, so that when guilt
came permanently to the fore in his theoretical writings, shame was neglected”
(Harder 1995, p. 368). Recent psychoanalytical research has acknowledged the
psychological relevance of a whole range of feelings and functions assigned to the
shame affect. From uneasiness and embarrassment to crushing humiliation, the entire
realm of shame is supposed to affect considerably more areas of both individual and
group psychology than guilt. Very generally speaking, guilt refers to one’s actions,
while shame refers to one’s self, although in fact the two affects often interrelate (cf.
Wurmser 1981, pp. 27; 39). The all-encompassing nature of shame makes the resultant
feelings at the same time unavoidable and undesirable, for the experience of shame is
negative as a matter of principle (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 18). Among its positive functions
are the stimulation of the formation of the self-system (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 14) and its
outstanding role for identity formation (cf. Kaufman 1989, p. 5). The primary source of
shame is norm violation. It refers to conventions, moral and social norms, and laws.
The feeling of shame can prevent the individual’s private sphere from being violated,
but it also possesses warning and punishing functions that are directed against the
individual in order to ensure the cultural stability of society (cf. Wurmser 1981, p. 48;
Roos 2000, p. 264). Shame is both the self’s acceptance of a norm and a confession of
its violation—more or less independent of the individual’s intellectual convictions (cf.
Landweer 1999, p. 37). The fact that shame is not conscious can turn the affect into a
potential instrument of societal power and suppression. In terms of control, shame is
an equally appropriate agent since it can be experienced both in public and in private,
witnessed and unobserved, with or without others involved (cf. Kaufman 1989, p. 6).
In this respect, shame also develops its most gender specific functions. Even
though the shame affect itself is not gendered in terms of being a primarily male or
female emotion, men and women are supposed to react differently to experiences of
shame. While female shame shows a tendency towards self-related passivity, male
shame tends to develop into other-related, active, and occasionally aggressive defence
reactions (cf. Marks 2007, p.101; Lewis 1992). As a consequence, a considerable
number of scholars have suggested that shame is also a means of patriarchal control
(cf. Bartky 1990; Lehtinen 1998; Sedgwick 2003; with respect to the disciplining aspect
of the novel of conduct, cf. Schabert 1997).
When considered from this perspective, shame appears indeed ubiquitous, as
if “shame [were] everywhere” (Lewis 1992, p. 2) and as if we lived ‘in an atmosphere of
shame’ that ‘reigns the world’ (Marks 2007, pp. 13; 102). The humanities reacted to
this newfound access to psychological and societal (dys)functions to an extent that
suggests a literal turn ‘from guilt to shame.’ In her study with that very title, Ruth Leys
sees a sort of jack-of-all-trades at work:
8
[M]any theorists find shame a better affect than guilt to think with. Donald
Nathanson believes you can do better self theory with shame than with guilt;
Bernard Williams believes you can do better moral theory with shame than with
guilt; Eve Sedgwick believes that […] you can do better queer theory with shame
than with guilt; Giorgio Agamben thinks that you can do better survivor testimony
theory with shame than with guilt; Elspeth Probyn thinks that you can do better
gender and cultural studies with shame rather than guilt; psychiatrists and therapists
think you can do better trauma theory with shame than with guilt; and so on.
(Leys 2007, p. 124)
I. 2 Shame in Literary Studies
But that’s not all there is to say: one might want to add to Ruth Leys’s fair observation
that many literary scholars prefer to focus on shame rather than guilt. In fact, the vital
tension that arises from the ambivalence of shame’s ubiquity, its undesirability and the
inherent tendency to hide (oneself, the feeling itself, or the cause of that feeling), which
leads to shame’s proverbial aim of disappearance (cf. Wurmser 1981, p. 84), would
seem ideally suited to literary representations—and thus to literary interpretation. It
would be a shame indeed to ignore this aspect, especially since there are almost as
many different possible shame readings as there are shame feelings.
Joseph Adamson, the author of Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye (1997)
focuses on the negative, active-aggressive shame-rage of the male protagonists in his
readings of Moby Dick, Pierre and Billy Budd. Ewan Fernie (2002), by contrast,
examines the positive functions of shame with regard to both sexes in Shakespeare’s
tragedies Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Corolianus, while
Christopher Ricks (1974) suggests that embarrassment is the (equally positive
connoted) presumed energetic force behind John Keats’ poetic writings. In her study
Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison (2000)
J. Brooks Bouson discusses the traumatic shame experiences among Black Americans.
There are other studies to add, e.g. Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature
(2004), which attests the Elizabethan era a particular obsession with shame, and David
Ellis, Shakespeare’s Practical Jokes: An Introduction to the Comic in his Work (2007),
which deals among other things with the shame-liberating force of laughter.
Despite not dealing with an English author, Deborah Martinsen’s discussion
of ‘Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure’ in her study Surprised by Shame (2003)
is to be mentioned here for its methodological focus. As many other scholars she refers
to recent shame theories from the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology,
and psychology. Her concrete text analysis is based on a rather general perception of
the connection between lying and shame in the means of the dynamics of concealment
and exposure. What is interesting, though, is that Martinsen is one of the very few who
pay special attention to the narrative background of literary shame and its effects on
9
the reader. With respect to the outstanding presence of liars in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s
work, she assumes that
by positioning readers as witnesses of exposed shame, Dostoevsky makes us
experience our post-lapsarian heritage, thereby dramatizing his social, political, and
metaphysical message of human interconnection. By creating and exposing his liars,
whose narcissistic stories manifest their shame, Dostoevsky reveals fiction’s
function not only to expose but possibly also to save readers as he affords us ethical
awareness and thus the impetus to change. (Martinsen 2003, p. XIV)
Although Martinsen uses the term of “shame as narrative strategy,” she neither elaborates on its exact forms nor on its concrete ways of function. ‘Strategy’ is merely used in
the means of a ‘strategic use’ of shame in order to re-establish and support moral and
social order. Such a moral(ising) function of shame narrative plays only a minor role in
the literature of contemporary Scottish women authors, which will be discussed in this
study. The exposure of a shamed subject to the judging eye of the audience is not their
main aim; only in connection to shameless characters this strategic use of shame might
be at stake. Therefore, Martinsen’s position will be referred to again in Ch. II. 2. 5 on
Shamelessness.
Reader reaction is also a subject matter in J. Brooks Bouson’s study of Toni
Morrison’s novels. This study of the interrelation between racism and shame is based
on recent psychoanalytical and psychological shame and trauma theories. Bouson’s
concept of shame concentrates on the connection between racism and traumatic
shame, and she only discusses shame affects related to this particular type of shame.
The emotional demands on the reader for being forced “into uncomfortable
confrontations with the dirty business of racism” (Bouson 2000, p. x) are repeatedly
stressed. Like Martinsen, though, Bouson does not analyse the exact narrative forms of
the novels and their supposed functioning. The study assumes reader attachment to
the point of vicarious shame feelings, but the mechanism behind this reaction is not
investigated.2
In the introduction to Melville and the Evil Eye, Joseph Adamson provides by
far the most elaborate introduction to contemporary psychoanalytical shame theories.
He focuses on the interrelations between shame-proneness and shame-rage, and
between idealisation and grandiosity. His analysis of Herman Melville’s novels works
mainly text-immanent without reference to an assumed reader response to the shame
narratives, or their textual construction. By contrast, Adamson refers extensively to
‘the private Melville’ (Adamson 1997, p. 21). The autobiographical relation between
literary shame and the actual or presumed strong shame disposition of the author
2
Given a North-American white audience, feelings of guilt as a reaction to
Morrison’s minute descriptions of violent racism and shame-rage among Afro-Americans
appear in fact more likely.
10
occurs in Martinsen’s and Bouson’s studies alike, and it also appears in Christopher
Ricks’ approach to Keats and Embarrassment.3
Written in 1974, Ricks stands out among the other studies quoted here since
he predates recent psychoanalytical shame theories. His only theoretical reference is
Charles Darwin’s observations on blushing as a means of human distinction from
other animals. Furthermore, he operates with different terminology, discussing the
correlation between embarrassment and indignation instead of shame and anger. To
Ricks, embarrassment is both synonymous with the 19th century, and for England.
Keats’ poetry is ‘full of blushes,’ and the text analysis is to discuss blushing and
embarrassment not only as “sensation and imagining of life,” but also in the means of a
“moral and social matter,” and with regard to “Keats the man.” (Ricks 1974, p. 20) For
that purpose Ricks reads Keats’ poetry in turn with his private correspondence for the
meaning of embarrassment.
Ewan Fernie, finally, argues against the “dominant contemporary view,
fostered by psychotherapy,” that shame was “a disease to be cured.” (Fernie 2002, p. 1)
His phenomenological text analysis attempts to employ a somewhat ‘objective,’
historiographic view upon shame in Shakespeare. To Fernie, Shakespeare offers a more
positive notion of shame than recent shame theory supports. Shame is an “ethical
wake-up call,” (ibid., p. 6) a concept interpreted against the background of
philosophical and sociologist studies.
The small choice of studies, their thematic focus and methods already depicts
the wide range of affects, feelings and emotional dispositions that can be subsumed
under the term of ‘shame.’ Furthermore it shows that authors and interpreters alike
mostly concentrate on few aspects of the shame affect in its literary representation. In
its very early conceptual state, this study was meant to discuss 20 novels and short
stories from 10 different volumes of altogether eight different contemporary Scottish
women authors with respect to intimacy and traumatic shame. This particular
literature was chosen for personal interest; the thematic focus developed slowly and
with regard to the complete works of the respective writers. In addition to the
remaining four, these were Janice Galloway, Meg Henderson, Margaret Livesey, Zoë
Strachan (for a discussion of the latter’s novel Spin Cycle cf. my reading in Metz 2005).
Evidently, both the size of the corpus and the phenomenological focus has
been altered radically since. Instead of discussing one singled out aspect in a very
broad context, the study offers now a broad phenomenological discussion on a clear 3
Autobiographical aspects are not considered in this study. First of all, shame is
neither seldom nor uncommon. Each and every individual experiences shame all through his
or her lifetime. Second, to try and trace back particular forms of literary shame to the
authors’ individual shame history is rather limiting than enriching the possibilities of interpretation.
11
cut basis. The literary texts have suggested this orientation; they cover more or less any
major shame affect as defined by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists. The choice of
texts reacts to this multitude of perspectives on the shame affect. Furthermore the
novels and short stories in question represent both male and female shame
experiences, which was also a reason for their selection into my corpus. The forms and
functions of shame as narrative strategy are by no means limited to the literature of
contemporary Scottish Women authors. Any reader of fiction and any viewer of drama
will have her or his own private corpus of shame narratives. Reader reactions to
literary shame are as individual as shame reactions in real life. I even suspect that
almost any literature in any time has its own shame narratives with a particular set of
narrative strategies and textual forms that communicate this affect literally. In an
accumulation and broad representation, though, as it can be observed in the literature
of contemporary Scottish women authors, shame as a narrative strategy is a rare
phenomenon.
In the introductory part to the main section, detailed definitions of shame
affect groups are formulated; for the time being they should only be mentioned briefly.
The fictional accounts discussed do present a wide range of shame affects such as
assimilation shame (the feeling for not meeting the prevalent norms and expectations
of a group or a society), ideality shame (the feeling of discrepancy between ideal and
self ), and dependence shame (the feeling to be at someone’s mercy) and, of course,
said intimacy and traumatic shame (the reaction to the violation of physical or
psychological boundaries of the self ).
They present a number of shameless figures, but hardly any shame-free
characters. Contrary to the first impression, shame does not have an exclusively
negative connotation in the literature discussed, although its negative functions
prevail. The authors rather represent the inherent ambiguity of the shame affect,
bringing to the foreground the exclusively negative experience of shame. Furthermore,
the choice of authors suggests both a gender and a national shame discourse. The
bottom line is, though, that a number of texts do in fact deal with shame in relation to
gender differences and the implied imbalance of power, yet the overall impression is
that contemporary Scottish women authors rather present the full scale of shame
scenes, both for female and male characters. Some literary accounts even present
figures that experience and react to their shame feelings decidedly not according to
commonly perceived gender tendencies.
12
I. 3 Prose by Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith and the
Discussion of Literary Shame
Laura Hird’s Born Free (1997) describes the almost prototypically male shame defence
reactions of a female alcoholic; by contrast, her husband’s shame is passive and selfdepreciative. Joss Moody in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998)—a woman who lived her life
as a man—is remembered by his wife as showing textbook examples of male shame
reactions. The choice of texts thus presents a multitude of perspectives on the shame
affect, as they represent many different types of gender specific shame experiences
(with the exception of male homosexual shame).
As for the connection between Scotland in its different manifestations
(topographically, linguistically and socio-culturally) and shame, these texts illustrate
equally diverse results. Only a few texts present such a connection, although the
history of the country, its opposition to England, and its religious and economic makeup offer a number of potential shame triggers. These are recognised, yet they do not
play as dominant a role as might be expected. Only one text, Like (1997) by Ali Smith,
is ultimately discussed with regard to the shame-inducing potential of Scotland,
though this discussion references a number of texts by the other authors. To a certain
extent, the interpretation at hand thus developed in a direction that was contrary to my
original intentions and it may appear to contradict a large number of discussions that
regard the works of these authors as closely connected to their gender and / or national
affiliation (cf. Whyte 1995; Gifford / McMillan 1997; Craig 1999; Christianson /
Lumsden 2000; March 2002; Bell 2004; Carruthers / Goldie / Renfrew 2004;
McGonigal /Stirling 2006; Mitchell 2008). Many of these critical interpretations of the
work of contemporary Scottish women authors have nonetheless paid great attention
to its stylistic and thematic particularities. As for the authors discussed in this study,
the works of Jackie Kay and A.L. Kennedy are indeed widely discussed, while studies
on Ali Smith’s prose are somewhat rare; Laura Hird finally is recognised only
sporadically. The following paragraph provides a small survey of the interpretative
work on the novels and stories discussed in this thesis and its respective focus.
The discussion of Jackie Kay’s Trumpet developed around three major aspects.
First and most prominently, the novel’s discourse of gender constructions, sexual
identity and self-determination is analysed. The gender-theoretical readings of the past
five years are somewhat based on more general approaches on the construction of
identity in Jackie Kay’s work (e.g. Lumsden 2000a). In her study on theoretical and
literary perspectives of gender-bending, Eveline Kilian (2004) discusses the interrelation and interdependencies between gender theories by Michel Foucault, Paul
Ricœur, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis, and the presentation of sexual and
gender identities in contemporary British literature. Kilian discusses Trumpet next to
Patricia Duncker’s novel James Miranda Barry in terms of ‘masquerade and passing.’
13
She focuses on the novels’ presentations of alternative concepts of living, and their
break with the heterosexual dogmas of sex, gender and sexual orientation. Angela Walz
(2005) chooses a rather different focus on the same subject. As part of her study on the
(in)comprehensibility of narrative voices in contemporary British fiction, she discusses
the transgender subject of Trumpet with regard to non-linearity, fragmentation and
dissonance both on the formal and the content level. Walz also connects gender and
sexual identity to Blackness as it is presented in the novel. Tracy Hargreaves (2003)
also recognises a close connection between sexual and social identities, both in the
main character, Joss Moody, but also in his son Coleman. Blackness, especially British
or Scottish Blackness, is indeed another central aspect of Trumpet interpretations.4
Susanne Hagemann (2003) analyses homosexuality and blackness in Jackie
Kay and Naomi Mitchison in terms of speech-act theory. Peter Clanfield (2002)
discusses Kay’s work in the general context of contemporary black Scottishness, and so
does Andrene Taylor (2007). Other studies connect questions of social, regional and
racial identity to the realm of music. Jazz music does not only play a prominent role in
Trumpet but also in Kay’s poetry; she also wrote an autobiography of Jazz singer Bessie
Smith (Jackie Kay: Bessie Smith. London 1997). Lars Eckstein (2006) discusses music as
metaphor of being, while Tracey Walters (2007) examines the aesthetic strategies of
music and metafiction in Black British writing. Carole Jones (2004) connects jazz,
diaspora and the construction of Scottish Blackness as concept of alternative families.
The notion of black, or African diaspora in Scotland also builds the basis of Sarah
McClellan’s study (2005) on “The nation of mother and child in the work of Jackie
Kay,” and Alan Rice (2003) writes about white and black fascination with African
Americans in contemporary Black British fiction.5
A.L. Kennedy’s prose is often discussed in close connection to her ‘identity’ as Scottish
woman writer—to her own regret, as it occasionally appears (Mitchell 2008). Nonetheless, Looking for the Possible Dance is rich in representations of contemporary life in
Scotland and Scottish identity in Great Britain. Cairns Craig (1999) discusses the novel
rather briefly to this respect, while Kaye Mitchell (2008) presents her own and other
readings extensively in her monograph on Kennedy and her work. Fiona Oliver (1996)
reads the novel in the context of ‘self-debasement of Scotland’s Post-Colonial Bodies,’
while Eluned Summers-Bremner (2004) interprets Looking for the Possible Dance and
Everything You Need along the lines of ‘the paradox of the national in A.L. Kennedy.’
4
Other studies on gender and identity in Trumpet are: Anderson 2000; Gerberding
2002; Rose 2003; Rodríguez Gonzáles 2007; Williams 2005; Mergenthal 2008.
5
One of the most recent articles on Trumpet is yet to be published, Nadine Böhm
(2009) on the novel’s staging of hermeneutical ethics.
14
Sarah Dunnigan (2000) writes about the narrative structure of the novels, the temporal
framework of the former and the high complexity of the latter, in her discussion of
Kennedy’s longer fiction. Glenda Norquay (2005) interprets Looking for the Possible
Dance and Everything You Need in terms of the political and social significance of the
individual life, next to the texts’ constructions. Cristie March (2002) concentrates
largely on aspects of physicality and interpersonal relations in the texts of A.L.
Kennedy, but she also comments on the antagonism between Kennedy’s fear to be
pigeonholed as ‘feminist’ and the actual and indisputably feminist content of her
novels. Helen Stoddart (2007) also discusses dysfunctional interpersonal relations in
Looking for the Possible Dance and Everything You Need, though on the level of
articulation in terms of ‘tongues of bone.’ As most other interpreters, she also pays
attention to the narrative construction of the texts, their ellipses and unchronological
order. Mathilda Slabbert (2006) finally concentrates in her study on Inventions and
Transformations on mythification and re-mythification in Everything You Need.
Ali Smith’s novels and short story collections are considerably less present in literary
studies. She is often discussed in connection to Jackie Kay, as for instance in Kirsty
Williams (2006) on social and sexual diversity in contemporary Scottish writing.
Williams also discusses the narrative techniques employed in Like, and so does Kathrin
Gerbe (2007). Mark Currie (2007) finally discovers a key to the Philosophy of Time in
The Accidental.
Laura Hird is the least discussed of all four writers. Alison Lumsden (2000b) briefly
introduces Hird and her first collection of short stories. Lumsden’s interpretation
brings to the foreground the bleak atmosphere Hird’s prose evokes and mentions its
unapologetic tone.
Beside the amount of research that has already been done on Hird, Kay, Kennedy and
Smith, shame is only—if ever—mentioned occasionally. The first aim of this study is
therefore a phenomenological interpretation of different shame affects as they are
discussed in Born Free, Trumpet, Looking for the Possible Dance, in the short story “The
moving house,” in Everything You Need, The Accidental and Like. The choice and discussion of these texts, and the omission of other texts by the same and other authors
implies first of all the exemplary character of these works, although there are, without a
doubt, a large number of texts that might be discussed with comparable results.
A second, formal aspect is also of great interest: how is this affect, which in
itself is rather shy, described? As mentioned above, shame is not an agreeable affect. It
is annoying at best, and the shamed subject’s first impulse is to hide. Shame
experiences remain rather unpronounced, and if they are communicated they often lie
way in the past (cf. Landweer 1999, pp. 51sq.; Probyn 2005). This would suggest that
15
the dominant narrative perspective is characterised by distance, either in the form of a
past-tense account or a third person narrative. The literary texts examined in this
study, though, all provide different sorts of postmodern narrative structures, including
multiperspective, temporal changes and ellipses. The formal examination of the novels
and short stories therefore pays special attention to the construction of the literary
shame narrative. The question is not only how the shame event is narrated, but also
when and by whom. In addition to the text-based analysis, clinical examples from Léon
Wurmser’s comprehensive shame study The Mask of Shame (1981) are consulted for
the formal nature of real-life shame narratives. Commonalities and differences
between literary and real-life shame narratives are examined in order to find out
whether literary texts mimic real-life shame narration from the perspective of the
shame subject or whether they rather engage the perspective of a shame witness by
dealing with the shame event from an outward, descriptive level.
At this point a last aspect comes into play. As shown briefly with the example
of my colleagues’ feelings in the face of my public humiliation, shame has the
extraordinary quality of a profoundly empathic emotion. It can be as painful to see
somebody else being shamed as being shamed oneself. Empathic shame is therefore a
vicarious emotion which can be felt on behalf of another individual—independent
from the shamed subject’s own feelings. In case the other is ashamed, the witness feels
co-shame; in case the other is not (recognisably) ashamed, the witness feels vicarious
shame (cf. Landweer 1999). The question that somehow suggests itself is: how does a
reader possibly react to the literary shame scenes she or he observes (‘reader’ as in the
ideal reader who reads and appraises the literary situation against the background of
Western, Judeo-Christian culture and society)? Two major perspectives upon a literary
shame event are imaginable. Either from an exterior position, in which the reader is
installed as a shame witness, or from an interior position from within the literary
character’s shame disposition or shame theory as Silvan S. Tomkins calls it: “Shame
theory is one such source of great power and generality in activating shame, in alerting
the individual to the possibility or immanence of shame and in providing standardized
strategies for minimizing shame” (Tomkins 1995, p. 165).6 The third aim of the interpretation at hand is therefore to examine whether the literary shame narrative
facilitates vicarious reader emotions in the form of co-shame with, or vicarious shame
for the literary character. An alternative possibility, which will also be taken into
6
Ingrid Hotz-Davies has pointed out the possible connection between Elizabeth
Bennet’s strong shame theory in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and the reader’s appraisal
of the novel’s shame events (cf. Hotz-Davies 2007, p. 200sqq.). At this point, the terminological haziness of Deborah Martinsen’s Dostoevsky study becomes apparent, since she
remarks with regard to Pride and Prejudice, “unlike Austen, Dostoevsky uses shame as a
narrative strategy.” (Martinsen 2003, p. 22)
16
consideration, is that the corresponding narrative strategies rather impose a textimmanent, foreign shame theory upon the reader, which remains independent from
her or his own shame theory.
The next chapter will provide a survey of contemporary psychoanalytic
definitions of shame. This will be followed by an outline of the various shame affect
groups that have been designed for the literary discussion and then the respective
interpretations themselves.
17
II. Facts and Fiction
II. 1 Psychoanalytic Definitions of Shame Affect Groups
The following survey of psychoanalytic definitions of shame affects, shame feelings and
shame reactions will present representative research material from the last three
decades.7 The introduction to the different approaches is followed by the groupings
designed for the organisation of this study’s literary discussion. One major aim of the
earlier approaches towards the long ignored shame affect was to prove its enormous
relevance and wide range. While the realms of shame forms, shame feelings and shame
reactions are interwoven, clear-cut definitions are avoided for the benefit of a broad
application of the term. More recent psychological texts attempt to distinguish between
particular shame affect groups for a more practical application without ignoring the
important fact of interdependence between different forms, feelings and reactions.
In The Mask of Shame (1981) Léon Wurmser sees any type of shame initially based on
its positive effect as “guardian protecting the core of integrity” and as “prevention of
actually being shamed” by violated private or societal values (1981, p. 48). Besides the
recognition of shame’s purpose as ‘guarantee of the cultural stability of society,’8
though, this and other studies by Gershen Kaufman (1989), Michael Lewis (1992),
Micha Hilgers (2006) and Stephan Marks (2007) focus primarily on outweighing the
negative potential of the affect. This is ever present, even as part of the most (self)protective and preventive positive function. The constructive and the destructive
aspects of shame are intrinsically connected (cf. Hilgers 2006, pp. 14sq.). When shame
anxiety, for instance, is “triggered by a milder type of rejection,” this happens in order
to warn the self, “lest a more intense one reach traumatic proportions” (Wurmser 1981,
p. 50). It seems consequent that especially in shamelessness, the total absence of the
affect points directly to its positive dimension, proving both its socio-cultural
relevance and its inevitability. Habitual shamelessness does not lead to freedom from
shame, neither in the form of “brazen, arrogant loss of pudor, of shame as attitude” nor
in the form of “value privation,” that is “the fight against values in general” (ibid.,
p. 258).
Wurmser draws the conclusion that shamelessness “can be understood
primarily as a reaction formation against shame. In the typical ‘return of the
7
Compared to the vast number of publications on the subject, the basis for the
phenomenological organisation of the literary discussion may appear meagre. The major
criteria for the choice of reference were the studies’ validity and their applicability to the
literary discussion; however, this selection does represent a common consensus of opinion
regarding the effects of the shame affect as it is generally found in publications on the subject.
8
Cf. Roos 2000, p. 264.
19
repressed,’ shame merely appears displaced.” (ibid., p. 264)9 It is important to note,
though, that there are no positive shame feelings. Positive and negative shame effects
may intermingle to a various extent, yet in the end shame feelings are always a
distracting and excruciating experience (cf. Landweer 1999, p. 2). This is reflected in
scientific studies, which mostly concentrate on the pathologic potential of shame. It is
also reflected in the literary texts discussed in this study, which recognise shame’s
positive effects only in relation to norm-violating shamelessness. My discussion of
literary texts also concentrates primarily on the negative sides of shame, thus reacting
to the overall tendency in scientific and artistic confrontations with shame and
shaming. Only the last part of this chapter deals with the positively connoted
regulatory forces of shame with respect to shamelessness.
On a very general level, Wurmser works with three phenomenological types of
shame. He differentiates between shame anxiety, shame affect proper and shame as
character attitude:
There is anxiety about something impending—shame anxiety; a reaction about
something that has already occurred—shame affect in the narrower sense; and a
character attitude that should prevent the other two—a shame attitude, shame as
reaction formation, Schamhaftigkeit in German, pudeur in French.
(Wurmser 1981, p. 49)
The purpose of shame anxiety lies in the protection of the self from shame feelings and
the possible avoidance of imminent shame situations. Shame affect proper, by contrast,
marks the realm of the actual shame experience, the resultant shame feelings and first
order shame reactions of an immediate kind and of a short duration. Shame as attitude
is of a more enduring nature and may assume “the typical stereotyped, compulsive
quality of a neurotic symptom, appearing without due regard for external reality”
(ibid.). As part of the three shame types, affective states may occur such as
“embarrassment, shyness, humiliation, inferiority feelings and low self-esteem, a sense
of degradation, and narcissistic mortification” (ibid., p. 51). Intrinsically connected to
these feelings are shame reactions that Wurmser subsumes as ‘shame’s aim:’
Shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be, most simply, in the form of hiding; most
radically, in the form of dissolution (suicide); most mythically, in the form of a
change into another shape, an animal or a stone; most archaically in the form of
freezing into complete paralysis and stupor; most frequently, in the form of forgetting parts of one’s life and one’s self; and at its most differentiated, in the form of
changing one’s character. (ibid., p. 84)
9
The term ‘reaction formation’ is used in the Freudian meaning as “a specific and
very important defense that ‘consists of the replacement in conscious awareness of a painful
idea or feeling by its opposite.’” (Wurmser 1981, p. 84, quoting from Burness E.
Moore/Bernard D. Fine, A Glossary of Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts, 1968, p. 30)
20
Besides the initially protective effect of ‘shame’s aim’ (protecting the self from
further shaming), its more drastic forms point directly to the negative, dissocial and
potentially pathological reaction pattern of a shamed subject.
With regard to the concrete content of shame affects, Wurmser works without
clear-cut definitions—primarily in order to prove the ‘paramount clinical significance
of shame’ (ibid., p. 27) not only in its observable and expressible forms, but also in its
veiled forms: “Shame in its typical features is complex and variable, a range of closely
related affects rather than one simple, clearly delimited one” (ibid., p. 17).
Nevertheless, several general types of shame feelings can be differentiated:
The content of the affect of shame—what one is ashamed for or about—clusters
around several issues: (1) I am weak, I am failing in competition; (2) I am dirty,
messy, the content of my self is looked at with disdain and disgust; (3) I am defective, I have shortcomings in physical and mental makeup; (4) I have lost control
over my body functions and my feelings; (5) I am sexually excited about suffering,
degradation, and distress; (6) watching and self-exposing are dangerous activities
and may be punished: Contempt is a very important part of the shame affect. (ibid.,
pp. 27sq.)
These criteria may be rather circumscriptive, yet with respect to both real-life and
literary shame scenes, they illustrate the relevance of subjectivity in the experience of
shame. The shamed subject’s self-awareness and self-experience is at least as important
as any objectively observable reasons for his or her shame feelings. This is particularly
relevant with regard to shame feelings that are induced by internalised or introjected
real or assumed shame triggers: “An extended and exaggerated sense of shame or guilt
remains in relation to one’s images of external objects or as they become parts of the
self (as they are internalized, introjected)” (ibid., p. 44).
Gershen Kaufman also argues in The Psychology of the Self in favour of the self
against the ‘mistaken assumption’ that “shame requires the presence of another person.
[…] This assumption, which is fundamental to formulations of personality and
culture, is in error because shame can be an entirely internal experience with no one
else present” (Kaufman 1989, p. 6). Kaufman’s study is largely based on the affect
theory of Silvan S. Tomkins.10 He agrees with Wurmser on the initially positive effects
10
The major difference between Tomkins’ approach and that of other late twentiethcentury studies in shame is the assumption that the shame affect is innate, not acquired. The
debate on innate vs. acquired shame affects has a long history, most prominently held in the
Elias-Duerr controversy. With regard to the literary discussion, I decided to leave this
particular aspect aside, since the artistic discourse is independent of the question of the
biological or cultural basis of the affect. Besides, the strict dichotomy, or opposition, of the
two concepts appears inadequate. Tomkins for instance assumes that the basis of the shame
affect is innate, its individual form, though, develops according to the socio-cultural imprint
of the subject.
21
of shame and further substantiates its “vital role in the development of conscience” and
the “necessary self-correction” that the affect motivates (cf. ibid., p. 5). On the positive
side, “no other affect is more central to identity formation;” on the negative side,
though, “no other affect is more disturbing to the self” (ibid.). In the end, Kaufman
strives for the rehabilitation of a positively connoted shame concept since it is “the
experiential ground from which conscience and identity spring” (ibid., p. 7). With
respect to the phenomenology of the shame affect and its primarily negative effects,
Kaufman stresses the wide scope of shame just as Wurmser does. The general
connection between shame and identity formation is of primary importance to the
definition of actual shame feelings:
Because shame is central to conscience, indignity, identity, and disturbances in selffunctioning, this affect is the source of low self-esteem, poor self-concept or body
image, self-doubt and insecurity, and diminished self-confidence (ibid., p. 5).
To a large extent, this supports and supplements Wurmser’s assumptions on the
subjective emotional experience of shame, adding an outside perspective on the
terminological level. Kaufman further differentiates between variants of shame:
Variants of shame become manifest in a broad range of interpersonal contexts.
A variety of inner states have been distinguished, given different labels, and so
mistakenly conceived as distinctly different: discouragement, self-consciousness,
embarrassment, shyness, shame, and guilt. […] Discouragement is actually shame
about temporary defeat. Self-consciousness is the self exposed in shame, the self
scrutinizing the self. Embarrassment is shame before any type of audience. Shyness
is shame in the presence of a stranger. Shame is loss of face, honor, or dignity, a
sense of failure. Guilt is shame about moral transgression, immorality shame. These
are the coassembled inner states that become organized around shame as their
principal affect (ibid., p. 22).11
Kaufman thus stresses the role of the self in the shame affect way beyond the realm of
social norm violation, either in the form of self-consciousness, self-awareness or selfexposition.
Michael Lewis shares this perspective on the distinctive role of the self in the
emergence of the shame affect in Shame—The Exposed Self (1992). He also refers to
Silvan S. Tomkins, next to Carroll Izard and H.B. Lewis,12 presuming that “shame
11
The listing of ‘shame’ as a variant of ‘shame’ is irritating only at first sight. There is
a gradual difference in intensity between the individual variants, with embarrassment and
shyness as weaker forms and (proper) shame and guilt as more severe types of one and the
same affect.
12
Carroll E. Izard, Human Emotions. New York 1977; Helen Block Lewis, Shame and
Guilt in Neurosis. New York 1971; Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, and Consciousness: Vol.
2. The Negative Affects. New York 1963. Though relevant within the field, Izard and Lewis will
22
becomes a heightened consciousness of the self, an unusual and distinct form of selfperception” (Lewis 1992, p. 32). It is “a state of self-devaluation that can, but does not
have to, emanate from ‘out there’” (ibid.). In agreement with Wurmser, Lewis calls it
‘impossible’ to “define the state of shame by compiling a list either of a set of unique
behaviors, or of a unique set of stimuli likely to elicit the particular feeling, or some
combination of it.” Nevertheless, “a combination of behaviors and situations offers us a
very powerful matrix in which to define, observe, and study individual differences in
shame” (ibid., p. 33). Summarising approaches ‘from Darwin forward,’ Lewis also
names hiding as “one very important feature of the phenomenology of shame,” next to
distinctly negative feelings such as pain, discomfort and anger. Other features include
the feeling that “one is no good, inadequate, unworthy” and “the fusion of subject and
object.” (ibid., p. 34).
In shame, we become the object as well as the subject of shame. The self system is
caught in a bind in which the ability to act or to continue acting becomes extremely
difficult. Shame disrupts ongoing activity as the self focuses completely on itself, and
the result is confusion: inability to think clearly, inability to talk, and inability to act.
(ibid.)
This ‘powerful matrix’ may indeed take into account the high flexibility and variability
of the shame affect. The combination of shame reactions (hiding, paralysis) and shame
feelings (feeling no good, inadequate, unworthy) into one singular descriptive tool,
though, would make any systematic approach extremely difficult.
Gershen Kaufman, by contrast, does offer a ‘shame profile’ as a ‘diagnostic
tool’ that provides a means of differentiation. For that purpose, he summarises his
results on shame feelings, shame binds (i.e. internalised linkages between affects,
drives or interpersonal needs, and shame) and shame scenes (Kaufman 1989, p. 95).
Although he presents a number of shame affects relevant for the literary texts
discussed in this thesis, his profile of “stages in psychological magnification” appears
unsuitable for the present discussion. First of all, it is organised hierarchically by
placing ‘Character Shame’ at the final stage III, preceded by ‘Body Shame,’
‘Relationship Shame’ and ‘Competence Shame’ at stage II and ‘Affect-Shame Scenes,’
‘Drive-Shame Scenes,’ ‘Interpersonal Need-Shame Scenes’ and ‘Purpose-Shame
Scenes’ at stage I. Stage I is further preceded by the respective shame binds that are
based on shame contents such as ‘Excitement-Shame,’ ‘Anger-Shame,’ ‘Shame-Shame,’
or ‘Sexuality-Shame.’ (ibid., p. 95) An application of this profile to the diagnosis of
shame in literary characters is problematic, since it would ask for a valuation of the
respective shame feelings of literary characters, which is neither the purpose nor the
aim of this interpretation. To be able to “trace any current manifestation of shame back
not be quoted further on directly. Tomkins is quoted from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s
compilation of his works (Tomkins 1995).
23
to its formative influences, to its actual governing scenes” (ibid., p. 94) sounds
tempting, yet the obligatory link between certain shame feelings and what Kaufman
calls ‘higher-order shame scene dimensions’ (ibid., p. 93) appears somehow contradictory to the complexity and variability of the affect, especially with respect to magnification. Finally, the attempt to trace shame feelings, which are exclusively part of a
narrative construction, back to some supposed actual governing scene is bound to end
in mere speculation that would go way beyond the text. In the majority of cases,
sufficient textual clues are given with regard to the underlying shame scenes or initial
experiences. In the rare undecidable case of Like by Ali Smith, several possible shame
scenes and affects will be discussed (cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 4 and 2. 4. 1).
II. 1. 1 From Assimilation Shame to Shamelessness
Two recent German publications (Hilgers 2006; Marks 2007) present some of the most
practical definitions and listings of shame affect groups. They contain any of the
abovementioned shame feelings and vary only slightly from author to author. Being at
the same time definite and differentiated, they offer a tool to control the sometimes
uncontrollable subject of shame without cutting short its inherent flexibility. These
approaches are particularly appropriate for a literary discussion of shame, because both
authors deal with the respective shame feelings and shame reactions separately. While
most texts do present an underlying shame scene at some point or another, the
emotional experiences of their characters and their reaction patterns are never
explicitly ascribed to shame. Defining the shame affect as such first is constitutive for
any further interpretation of a figure’s psychological and behavioural make-up.
For the purpose of literary interpretation, both authors’ groupings have been
combined with respect to the shame affects found in the literary texts. None of the
major shame affect groups have been omitted, but some formerly independent groups
have been subsumed into a more comprehensive arrangement. So-called ‘assimilation
shame’ as defined by Stephan Marks, for instance, includes a number of sub-groupings
that are defined separately by Micha Hilgers. Besides the need for differentiation,
though, one has to keep in mind that the boundaries between shame variants can
become blurred; several shame affects can respond to a singular shame scene, and the
subjective evaluation of that scene can diverge vastly (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 26). Lastly,
the literary discussions treat the most prominent or presumably most effective shame
affects in the literary figures, based on the textual representation and my admittedly
very subjective evaluation. In addition, four out of five novels are discussed with
respect to two, three or even four different shame affects. The respective interpretations concentrate on different characters within one text, which shows that shame
24
affects are not only highly variable within the individual, but they are indeed
characterised by sociality and do not stand apart.13
In Scham—Die Tabuisierte Emotion (2007) Stephan Marks defines assimilation
shame as one major shame affect group. Directed towards the outside, this self-related
shame affect is oriented towards the gaze of the other and the expected appraisal of the
individual’s environment. Assimilation shame occurs when the prevalent norms and
expectations of a group or a society are not met. Marks gives a large number of
possible triggers, including impolite and inadequate social behaviour, lack of education, losing, inconsequence, psychological problems, social weakness, low status,
poverty, helplessness, dependence, unemployment, inadequate emotions, and
affiliation with a discriminated social, ethnic or religious group (cf. Marks 2007,
pp. 17sq.). This rather global definition still recalls the encompasssing shame
definitions presented by Wurmser, Kaufman and Lewis. In order to achieve a more
differentiated order within this important shame group, complementary groupings by
Hilgers 2006 have been added.
The latter differentiates between existential shame, competence shame,
ideality shame and dependence shame (cf. Hilgers 2006, pp. 25sq.). These variants
represent the four sub-groups of assimilation shame that will be employed in this
study:
Existential shame is Hilger’s expression for the feeling to be unwanted in
principle or to be stigmatised. It occurs e.g. in unwanted children or children who do
not have the ‘right’ sex. Existential shame is also the feeling of being ignored, of being
inexistent or of being unloved, for instance when parents do not react on any verbal or
nonverbal self-expression of their child. This shame group also includes body shame
for the experience of a principally negative or flawed physicality as opposed to
momentary intimacy shame (cf. ibid., p. 25).
Competence shame occurs when the subjective competence experience is
interrupted and failure becomes (publicly) visible. It describes the feeling of being
incompetent, of not meeting the expectations of the social or professional environment, and it is also the name for loss of control of ego-functions such as crying or
shouting in the adult (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 25).
Ideality shame is the shame for the discrepancy between ideal and self. It is
connected to both our self-image and our presumed social image. It may also occur
with regard to culpability. In that special case, the person does not only feel guilty for
the incorrect behaviour; he/she also feels ashamed for acting culpably in the given
situation (‘why does it happen to me of all people?’). This shame feeling often relates to
a discrepancy between ego ideal and self (cf. ibid., p. 26).
13
The subtitle of Hilge Landweer’s study on Scham und Macht (1999) reads Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Sozialität eines Gefühls.
25
Dependence shame finally relates to the dependence on others, including the
unwanted ending of relations. Love interest and not responded love are possible
triggers, but also the admiration of and subjectively experienced dependence on others
(cf. ibid.).
Other forms such as body shame, which is listed individually in Marks
(cf. Marks 2007, pp. 18sqq.), were included in the respective sub-groupings as shown
in the definition of existential shame. Body shame also relates primarily to societal
(physical) norms communicated through gazes and external appraisal. Its widespread
triggers usually relate to one or several other shame affects next to body shame. Illness,
deviant physical appearance, obesity and age, for instance, can lead to existential
shame. Supposedly too big or too small primary or secondary sexual characteristics
may trigger competence shame. The ‘wrong’ skin colour often leads to group shame,
which represents another shame affect group. The loss of body control, impotence or
frigidity is also closely connected to intimacy shame, which constitutes another group
with traumatic shame.
Very generally, intimacy shame protects the private sphere (cf. ibid., p. 14).
Beside its preventive side, it reacts to the violation of physical or psychological
boundaries of the self, for instance in case of an attack or exposition. Intimacy shame
includes body shame that does not relate to a generally negative experience of
physicality, as in existential shame (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 25).
Traumatic shame is connected to intimacy shame: In case the private sphere
was violated in an extreme or brutal way, for instance during sexual abuse or rape,
intimacy shame can turn into traumatic shame (cf. Marks 2007, p. 14).
The next shame group, conscience-moral shame, which includes shame-guilt
dilemmas, is slightly different since it necessarily relates to the subject’s actions, which
is not true in any of the other cases.
Conscience or moral shame indicates the violation of one’s conscience, for
instance in the case of disrespectful behaviour, the refusal to help or the damage of
others. One major difference to feelings of ideality shame is that conscience or moral
shame is very often linked to feelings of guilt for the shame inducing behaviour (cf.
ibid., pp. 34sq.).
The shame-guilt dilemma is closely related to conscience or moral shame. As
opposed to the latter case, the interrelation of shame and guilt feelings becomes an
unsolvable intrasystemic conflict: Shame or guilt prevail alternately, the avoidance of
the one leads inevitably to the other (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 26).
Group shame refers to another individual of the same (perceived, alleged or
actual) group, e.g. when a family member suffers from mental illness. Group shame
can be felt for an illicit or disabled child, but it also can occur for members of one’s
own ethnic group or nation (cf. Marks 2007, 25sq.).
26
One subgroup to group shame, empathic shame, has not been included into
this grouping since it hardly occurs in the literary texts discussed here; as to possible
reader reactions, though, it plays a decisive role. This aspect will be discussed
throughout the readings, and especially in the very last chapter of this study.
Empathic shame is, according to Marks, the shame that we feel with somebody
whose shaming we witness. Shame feelings of a humiliated individual are conveyed to
the shame witness through a kind of ‘psychic contagion.’ Empathic shame is decisive
for the cohabitation of a group or a society, for it enables sympathy, solidarity and
friendship (ibid., p. 27). The possibility of experiencing an affect on the behalf of
another person, even instead of another person,14 marks one of the most distinct
characteristics of shame. Due to the high contagion of the affect, it can be as shameful
to witness shaming as to be shamed directly. Empathic shame has many different
names, ranging from witness shame and to-be-ashamed-for-somebody-else to ‘shamehumiliation in response to shame-humiliation of the other,’15 Mit-Scham or stellvertretende Scham. These last two expressions are especially important within the
context of this thesis. The differentiation of empathic or witness shame into co-shame
and vicarious shame goes back to Hilge Landweer’s study Scham und Macht.16 While
co-shame is witness shame for a tangibly shamed subject, vicarious shame is felt in lieu
of the actual shame subject due to its actual or perceived shamelessness. The shame
reactions of presumably empathic readers develop along this differentiation too, just
like empathic shame does in real life. It is possible to imagine shame feelings with and
for a literary character.17
14
“[Scham] ist ansteckend: Zeuge von Schamerlebnissen anderer zu werden, kann
im Betrachter Scham auslösen und zwar in genau demselben Grad wie im eigentlichen Subjekt der Beschämung. Es ist sogar möglich, sich für andere, an ihrer Stelle zu schämen.”
(Hotz-Davies 2007, p. 187)
15
Tomkins 1995, p. 156. Tomkins offers yet another classification that might be
interesting with respect to feelings of shame for a literary character, “shame humiliation from
vicarious sources (empathy and identification)” (ibid., p. 159).
16
Cf. Landweer 1999, p. 5 and Ch. VI., “Scham als Sympathiegefühl?” For a
discussion of vicarious shame and guilt in the context of group identity and reputation,
cf. Lickel 2005.
17
It is important to note that the study at hand and its readings are exemplary and
by no means exclusive. While I found an entire landscape of shame in the prose of
contemporary Scottish women authors, other readers will discover exactly the same in Jane
Austen’s work. The opening scene of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for instance is a
great example for the possible simultaneity of shame feelings for and with a fictional character.
The awkwardly dressed and clumsily behaving ‘Charbovari’ has big potential to evoke
empathic shame, since his uneasiness is very tangible right from the start. On the other hand,
his public denunciation by the schoolmaster who makes him conjugate ‘ridiculus sum’ may
27
II. 2. Literary Representations of Shame Affect Groups
In the following chapters, literary representations of the different shame affect groups
are discussed with regard to the psychoanalytic definitions of their ‘real life’ counterparts. Each reading contains information on the nature and the presentation of the
shame affect, whether it appears only in the form of shame feelings and shame
reactions or whether there is a tangible shame scene presented. In this context, the
position of the respective shame events within the text is of special interest, as are of
course the narrative forms employed in the shame narration. One of the central
questions is how literary shame narratives deal with ‘shame’s aim,’ or with the secretive
tendencies of the affect. With respect to ‘real life’ shame narration, Hilge Landweer
(1999) has stated that there is basically no present tense shame narration in the first
person since such a self-referential confession of the actual experience of shame simply
contradicts its physical, centripetal character.18 The formulation of the sentence “I am
so ashamed” is therefore either retrospective or purposeful, depending on whether or
not it is intended to shame others.19 Leaving aside the fact that literary narratives are
always retrospective by nature, the usage of third person perspective or past tense in
the narration of the actual shame scene would correspond much more to the real life
mode of articulation than a first person present tense narration.
Lastly, possible empathic reader shame reactions are made in the form of
either co-shame with or vicarious shame for the literary character.20 As the definition
of empathic shame shows, it is possible to feel this vicarious emotion as the witness of
a shame event. The literary discussion will attempt to outline the formal conditions
regarding content that might enable such an affect-transference from the originally
shamed subject to the witness in the literary realm.
cause intense feelings of vicarious shame, since Charles Bovary appears motionless and eager
to fulfill this task the best he can.
18
“Leiblich ist Scham durch zentripetale Richtungen charakterisiert, vor allem durch
die Blockierung des Bewegungsimpulses, verschwinden zu wollen (im Boden versinken zu
wollen) und dadurch, angesichts des (möglichen oder tatsächlichen) Entdecktwerdens den
Blick senken zu müssen.” (Landweer 1999, p. 125)
19
“Die öffentliche Artikulation der eigenen Befindlichkeit verbirgt die eindeutig auf
andere gerichtete Beschämungsabsicht in dem Maße, wie es ihr faktisch gelingt, die anderen
öffentlich bloßzustellen. […] Phänomenal läßt sich nur konstatieren, daß öffentliche
Schambekenntnisse niemals unmittelbarer Gefühlsausdruck sein können, da dies den leiblichen Richtungen der Scham widerspräche.” (Landweer 1999, pp. 51sq.)
20
With respect to possible reader reactions, many of the possible nuances of shame
feelings will be taken into account, ranging from uneasiness and embarrassment to proper
shame feelings.
28
II. 2. 1 Assimilation Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental I—‘Astrid’
In the context of the following literary discussion, assimilation shame refers to a
general imbalance between the self and the prevalent norms and expectations of a
group or a society, which cannot be traced back to one of the more specific sub-groups.
A literary example for assimilation shame can be found in Ali Smith’s The Accidental.
Ali Smith’s third novel The Accidental (2005) tells the story of “a beguiling stranger
called Amber [who] appears at the door [of ] the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart
family one hot summer” (as the blurb reads). The chapters of the text present the
alternating accounts of the four family members—the writer Eve, her second husband
Michael, a university teacher, and her children Astrid and Magnus—all written in free
indirect discourse. The chapters on the four protagonists are interrupted by smaller
diary entries written in the first person. Before any of the three main parts of the novel,
‘The beginning’ (pp. 7-105), ‘The middle’ (pp. 109-211) and ‘The end’ (pp. 215-303), a
person who calls herself Alhambra tells about her ‘larger-than-life’ existence:
Hello.
I am Alhambra, named for the place of my conception.
Believe me. Everything is meant.
From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want.
From my father: how to disappear, how to not exist. (p. 3)21
As much as the invitation ‘Believe me. Everything is meant’ naturally makes the
reader suspicious of the first person narrator—which is intensified by her confession
to the ‘uses of mystery’—the prospect of disappearance or even non-existence
strangely withdraws the figure Alhambra from her exposed narrative position as soon
as she was positioned there. Even more confusing is the fact that the character whose
beginning we presumably just witnessed is called Alhambra, not Amber as throughout
the rest of the novel. In the closing chapter, though, the reference to Alhambra occurs
again (with cross-references to both the Alhambra in Spain and one of the homonymous cinemas), thus making her existence undecidably ambivalent for the reader:
I was born. And all that. My mother and my father. And so on. Never mind that.
Imagine the most beautiful palace. […] Carved in the palace walls, the words: no
conqueror but God.
It’s real! It’s in Spain. Book early, it’s time-allocated. […] The people who
built cinemas gave some cinemas its name. Like the one I was conceived in. Now
we’re back at the beginning.
Heaven on earth. Alhambra. […] Got a light? See? Careful. I’m everything
you ever dreamed. (p. 306)
21
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, The Accidental. London
2005.
29
Amber, or Alhambra, is indeed at the same time physical and mysterious,
present and not real; she is externally, accidentally happening to the Smart family, and
she internally brings up the best and the worst in all of them. Amber enters the scene
precisely when shame is about to become paramount to any single member of the
Smart family. Astrid and Magnus, Eve and Michael are, almost independent from each
other, about to dissolve into their individual perceived and /or actual shame scenes. As
Magnus puts it:
Everybody at this table is in broken pieces which won’t go together, pieces which are
nothing to do with each other, like they all come from different jigsaws, all muddled
together into the one box by some assistant who couldn’t care less in a charity shop
or wherever the place is that old jigsaws go to die. Except jigsaws don’t die. (p. 138)
Astrid fights against assimilation shame for having her last name altered into that of
her mother’s second husband. She is bullied for being different from her friends at
school, which all comes on top of the beginning of her adolescence. Her brother
Magnus suffers from intense conscience and moral shame for being indirectly
responsible for the suicide of a fellow pupil. He e-mailed her photo around the school
server in a montage with the body of a porn actress (for a discussion of his account, cf.
Ch. II. 2. 3). Eve, the mother, has writer’s block which reacts to a deeper sense of
ideality shame she feels for the vast discrepancy between her ideal (self-)image and her
true self (cf. Ch. 2. 3. 1). Michael, lastly, is just about to put his private and professional
life at risk exactly because he is not ashamed of his actions, because he is shameless. He
notoriously betrays his wife, and every year he chooses one of his students for ‘tuition,’
which includes sexual contact until graduation (cf. Ch. II. 2. 5).
The hybrid narrative form of free indirect discourse stresses the inner conflicts
of the protagonists between an inner and an outer perspective.22 The use of a seemingly
objective 3rd person perspective to depict the subjective (self-)perception of each
character reveals their expected and partly introjected outside appraisals, which
occasionally stand “without due regard for external reality” (Wurmser 1981, p. 49).
Among other aspects, the narrative construction of The Accidental proves the potential
of this particular narrative form to capture both the subjective and objective elements
of a literary figure’s shame scene all at once. It contains an inherent juxtaposition of the
character’s self-image, his or her expectations of external reactions, and their actual
forms. This narrative form thus depicts the full range of subjective shame experiences
and feelings, the figure’s perceived shame scene and the partly diverging objective
nature of the shame incident. Additionally, the protagonists’ own accounts also
complete their respective characterisations. This is especially true of Astrid’s
22
Free indirect discourse is a “narrated monologue presenting the character’s
mental discourse in the grammatical tense and person of the narrator’s discourse” (Keen
2006, p. 219).
30
perspective, as a strong sense of embarrassment and shame for the (initial)
shamelessness of her stepfather occurs long before he feels the shame himself.
Astrid’s account opens the main part of the novel. While pondering the sound
of her name, “Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.” (p. 7), she
soon reveals a strong sense of deviancy stemming from her family situation. Her
mother divorced her father Adam Berenski and remarried. Now, Michael’s “second
name is stuck on the end of her first name and she has no say about it at all. […] He’s
such a wankstain” (p. 20). Astrid suffers from a very literal identity crisis that is both
connected to her altered last name and to the general exposure she experiences for her
mother’s popularity as a writer. She feels “weird and unlike everybody is supposed to
be,” (p. 12) and she is bullied at school. She ‘loses’ her mobile phone after she received
messages like “THINK UR SMART ASTRID SMART. U R A LOSER . UR NEW NAME = ARS-TIT.
FACE LIKE COWS ARS 3 HA HA U R LESBIAN U R WEIRDO ” (p. 24). On top of the unhappiness with her family situation and her outsider position at school she feels helpless
boredom and hatred for the holiday place the Smart family went to. Everything in their
holiday house is ‘substandard,’ such as the clock radio, the bed and the carpet. The
entire place is an “ultimate,” “unhygienic dump” (pp. 8; 10).
For Astrid, all this adds up to a strong shame theory that lets her assume the
general hostility of her environment.23 This shame theory goes along with reactions of
defiance and spite, which serve, according to Léon Wurmser, “as a particularly
important defense against underlying shame” (Wurmser 1981, p. 271):
There are some […] notable ways of using affects to deal with shame.
One is spite and defiance, another kind of reversal of affect. Instead of being
paralyzed by anxiety, one brazenly and defiantly confronts an encroaching, intrusive
environment. Spite can be seen as a last-ditch defense, a defense of the integrity of
the self, perhaps protecting the last vestige of autonomy […]. Before turning into a
false self in enforced submission, one opposes […]. (ibid., p. 198)
Astrid indeed struggles against what she perceives as her ‘false self’ and strongly
opposes the person she perceives responsible for her ‘enforced submission’ to a new
family name. Astrid regards Michael with contempt, though this antipathy
concentrates exclusively on his person and his position in the family, not on his
actions. (Astrid does not know that Michael compulsively betrays her mother, and that
he does so with students from his department. Her dislike is therefore primarily selfrelated.) Thoughts like “he is humming that Beyoncé song. He thinks he is so now, i.e.
he is completely embarrassing” (p. 19) are without a doubt adolescent, and Michael
senses Astrid’s refusal. He indeed ascribes it entirely to childish ‘obnoxiousness.’ “He
23
“Shame theory is one such source of great power and generality in activating
shame, in alerting the individual to the possibility or immanence of shame and in providing
standardized strategies for minimizing shame.” (Tomkins 1995, p. 165)
31
smiled at Astrid too. She gave him a murderous look and scraped a plate. Good for her!
Obnoxious little creep. He laughed out loud. Astrid glared at him and left the room.
Both Eve’s children needed therapy” (p. 58).
Very generally, adolescent defence mechanisms can be linked to shame
feelings for not conforming to social or physical standards:
Adolescence is a developmental epoch during which there is a rapid magnification
of shame. It is a time of profound, unsettling changes. […] All of these changes call
attention to the self and expose it to the view. […] Self-consciousness and shyness
are present well before adolescence, but inevitably become heightened during this
particular developmental phase. The affect of shame accounts for many disturbances
of self-functioning that now appear: awkwardness, clumsiness, the retreat inward to
reduce visibility, frequent or unexpected rages, and other affective eruptions. The
sense of feeling on-stage before a watching audience, common in adolescence, is a
consequence of shame affect. (Kaufman 1989, p. 43)
Astrid’s defiance, in fact, is an effort to fend off her specific assimilation shame for
being ‘unlike everybody is supposed to be.’ On top of the common adolescent feelings
of unwanted exposure, she stands out unwillingly due to her new name, and the
reactions of her bullies seem to prove any shame anxiety right.
The only thing Astrid really seems to enjoy is her new video camera and
“taping dawns. There is nothing else to do here” (p. 8). Astrid is fascinated by anything
visual. She literally sees everything around her through a lens, installing a more or less
constant distance between herself and the rest of her family. The physicality and
vulnerability of the eye particularly occupy her mind. Watching her taped dawns, she
ponders the possible connections between the beginning of things and the ability to
see:
All there is when you look at it [the dawn] on the camera screen is the view of outside getting more visible. So does this mean that the beginning is something to do
with being able to see? […] Possibly the real beginning is when you are just forming
into a person and for the first time the soft stuff that makes your eyes is actually
made, formed, inside the hard stuff that becomes your head i.e. your skull. […] Like
the play she saw with the man in it whose eyes were gouged out, […] he had his
hands up at his face and he took them away, his hands were full of red stuff, it was
all around his eye sockets. It was insane. […] It was quite good though. […] Like
when Michael and her mother made her go to the other tragedy that was completely
insane about the woman who loses it and kills her children, […] the mother has
given them poisoned clothes etc. to give to the princess their father is marrying
instead of her […]. Her eyes melt in their sockets and she comes out in a rash like if
terrorists dropped spores on the Tube. (pp. 8sq.)24
24
Cf. pp. 25sq., where Astrid tries to find out whether it really takes only “twentyeight seconds of looking straight into the sun to make a person go blind.”
32
The drama about the Smarts’ lives does not reach Shakespearean or
Euripidean dimensions, but the connections between familial constellations, betrayal
and shame that Smith draws here are virulent throughout the novel. Although the
melting of the princess’ eyes in their sockets is, as opposed to the gouging out of the
eyes in Oedipus, no standard element of Medea, the combination of shame, rage,
narcissistic anxiety and the (feared or wished for) loss of eyesight is one pathological
shame cluster repeatedly discussed in literature.25 From a strictly psychoanalytic point
of view, scopophilia and scopophobia, the desire and the anxiety to see or be seen, are
central to the shame affect.26 When Astrid finds Amber sitting in their living room and
she observes the stranger, she experiences the typical shame of being caught looking.27
Less than a foot away from Astrid’s face the girl, the woman, whatever, has opened
one eye and is looking straight at her with it. […] It is weird to look at someone. It is
weird when they look back at you. It is really weird to be caught looking. (p. 21)
A short time later, Astrid realises that they had eye contact before. Their relationship
thus starts from a point that is both shame- and interest-laden for Astrid. The
connection to the realm of her anxieties is clear, though the reason for her anxiety is
not as contaminated as with the rest of her potential shame triggers. While the rest of
the family is already unnerved by the omnipresence of her camera (cf. p. 89, and
below), Amber positions herself in a positive frame to gain access to Astrid.
Astrid, through her camera lens, which has a very good long range, has seen her.
[…] It was far away, there was someone sitting on the roof of a car, a white car […].
She seemed to have binoculars or some sort of camera […]. Funny that she was
watching the only other person awake, who almost seemed, typical and ironic, to be
watching her back […]. Something has definitely i.e. begun (p. 35)
Soon after Amber appears unknown, unannounced and uninvited at the Smarts’
house, Astrid starts to drop her guard. Her mother Eve describes the instant effect of
Amber’s presence in the self-questionnaire of her account:
When was the last time Eve had seen Astrid like that, like someone had tickled her into
submission? God knew. […]
25
“It was constant with my own experience to find shame concepts central in much
literature – […] in nearly all the Greek tragedies, and […] in many of Shakespeare’s plays”
(Wurmser 1981, p. 3). For a psychoanalytic reading of shame in Euripides’ Medea cf. Lansky
2005.
26
“I consider the […] ‘looking and spying at oneself’—the clear drive character of
self-observation, basically the scopophilic nature of the superego activity—to be one of the
decisive elements in the structure of shame. […] The element of exposure and watching is
indispensable.” (Wurmser 1981, pp. 77sq.)
27
Cf. Wurmser 1981, p. 28.
33
Where had that strange air of celebration come from? Tonight there had been
no yelling about Astrid obsessively filming the various courses of dinner because
tonight Astrid’s camera was who knew where and Astrid was acting like a civilized
being again. (p. 89)
Very generally, The Accidental definitely has ‘something to do with being able to see,’
as Astrid puts it. Amber enables the entire family to see, or rather to recognise
themselves and not least the shame they are struggling with. In the end, when she is
gone again as suddenly as she once appeared, she remains a blurred memory, mysteriously deleted from any (cinematic) evidence: “There was no dawn footage of Amber.
There was nothing. It was as if Amber had deleted herself, or was never there in the
first place and Astrid had just imagined it” (p. 225). What remains are the persisting
effects of her visit, although Amber does not cause the shame herself. She merely helps
Astrid and Magnus to overcome it, and she pushes Eve and Michael to recognise their
shame in the first place. Amber marks a caesura in each character’s individual life and
in their life as a family. The effect of her presence moves between construction,
destruction, and reconstruction. While she stays with the Smart family, she establishes
a new coherence both within the family and within the individual characters. In order
to do so, Amber does not simply readjust their respective self-image, self-esteem and
respect for each other. Right from the start, the abandonment of old habits and objects
they have grown fond of is part of her therapy. The first to experience this drastic cure
is Astrid:
It is a beautiful summer afternoon, like perpetual summers used to be in the old
days, before Astrid was born.
Then Amber drops the camera over the bridge.
Astrid watches it fall through the air. She hears her own voice, remote and faraway, then she hears the plastic-sounding noise of her camera as it hits the tarmac. It
sounds so small. She sees the truck wheel hit it and send it spinning under the
wheels of the car behind it on the inside lane, braking it into all the pieces which
scatter all over the road. […]
Come on, Amber says. […]
It is unbelievable.
It is insane. (p. 118)
To some extent, Amber puts Astrid into just another shame situation the moment the
latter’s trust is absolute. The immediacy of this unforeseeable action, the helplessness
with which Astrid has to witness the end of her ‘substitutional eye’ and Amber’s harsh
crossing of possessive and (metaphorically speaking) physical boundaries disturbs the
idyllic scenery. Idealistically speaking, though, Amber tries to free Astrid not only
from her reality filter, but also from any materialist idea of friendship. Astrid must
realise that her camera does not decide whether Amber is still interested in her (as she
is afraid it does): “What use will Astrid be to Amber now, now that she can’t record
34
anything important?” (p. 119) Amber thus shows Astrid that it is herself who is
interesting, not what she owns or what her parents do. The camera episode somehow
prefigures Amber’s even more radical strategy to free the entire family from the ballast
of their old life. When “Amber is away for the day” to “sort something out” (pp. 125;
132), Astrid imagines her on a vendetta against her bullies Lorna Rose, Rebecca Callow
and Zelda Howe while she actually empties the Smarts’ entire house.28 In Astrid’s
fantasy Amber takes revenge for the bullying before she finds out where her father
Adam Berenski is. Astrid seeks the solution of her shame in the dissolution of those
who shame her and the discovery of the person who might reinstall her old self and
her social integrity once again. Amber’s approach, though, is different. Other people
do not need to change, but rather Astrid needs to gain a new perspective on herself.
Stripping the whole family bare of any physical reminder of the past, she opens the
chance for an alternative future. Except for an answering machine, everything is taken,
including Astrid father’s letters and his photo. These were two of the biggest and most
private objects of value she had kept in her room. She once found them in her mother’s
desk and took them without noticing, and “she keeps them now inside a sock inside
another sock inside the zip-up pocket inside the holdall under her bed at home”
(p. 124). When this treasure is lost, though, it turns out that Amber’s therapy was
successful:
The astonishing thing is, she doesn’t need her father’s letters any more. They
weren’t proof of anything really. It doesn’t matter that they’re gone. In fact it is a
relief not to always have to be thinking about them or wondering what the story was
or is. Her father could be anything, or anywhere, is what Amber said. (p. 232)
This relief and the emancipation from the past are persisting effects of Amber; even
though she is ‘in the past,’ “it’s not Amber that’s over” (ibid.). Astrid carries her
within; the memory of Amber even gives her the strength to confront her schoolmates
next time they try to shame her in public:
The first time Lorna Rose dared to give her the you’re a weirdo look in the middle of
that English class, Astrid, instead of ignoring it or freaking out about it, stood up
out of her seat […], walked along the desks right to where Lorna was sitting and
stood in front her desk looking at her and Lorna was laughing like she was scared
[…] and Astrid […] said, low under her breath so only Lorna could hear, I’m
watching you. […] Since then they haven’t done anything to her, in fact Lorna Rose
and Zelda and Rebecca have all made a kind of almost embarrassing effort at being
friendly and Zelda keeps phoning her up at home […]. (p. 231)
28
The scene is prefigured fantastically by the last Amber/Alhambra account before it
is actually discovered, “The house empties itself” (cf. p. 211).
35
The mechanism in this particular scene illustrates a common defence against
shame, best described by Léon Wurmser as ‘to turn the tables,’ or to ‘turn passive into
active.’ “A number of defensive efforts for coping with shame emerge: turning passive
into active by showing another person as ridiculous and contemptible instead of
oneself” (Wurmser 1981, p. 28).29 While turning the tables in its strict sense is a
defence mechanism that does not touch upon the actual shame experience, Astrid
manages to turn the entire social situation at school to her benefit.
Meeting Amber resulted in the end of Astrid’s acute shame in her position as
outsider. She gained new self-esteem and is able to fend off perpetual shame scenes
such as the one described above by replacing the ‘ignoring it or freaking out about it’
constructively. Amber introduced Astrid with a very different type of norm. Although
Amber was definitely ‘unlike everybody is supposed to be,’ people accepted her
instantaneously—not only the Smart family, but also the supposedly inapproachable
village people (cf. pp. 11; 144). With this successful non-conformity, she provided
Astrid with a lasting alternative identification model. Being different from the other
girls is no longer bad in her view; the shaming has lost its basis.
The accidental Amber will remain both an episode of one summer holiday
and an important landmark in Astrid’s life. With her help, shame and its effects are
overcome to give way to a new start.
With Amber’s question at the very end of the novel, “Got a light? See?” the
wheel turns full circle as it includes the reader into Astrid’s initial idea that “the
beginning is something to do with being able to see.” Among the numerous possible
readings of this novel, the present interpretation sees this work as a multifaceted shame
narration. With regard to Astrid’s character, the narrative form of free indirect
discourse with its fair balance of inside and outside perspectives facilitates access to the
mind of the twelve-year-old protagonist. The story provides a comprehensive insight
into Astrid’s underlying shame scene and into her shame theory. Thanks to the free
indirect discourse and the positive connotation of the character, she is viewed in a way
that is neither patronising nor pitiful. The overall impression of her assimilation
shame, though, remains connected to her age and the general shame proneness of the
adolescent. In this respect the construction of Astrid’s shame narration is hardly
bound to evoke empathic reader shame, despite the genuine depiction of what it means
to the self when a group’s norms or rules are not obeyed. Furthermore, with respect to
29
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 111; 197sq. See also Hilgers 2006 on counter-transference
shame, pp. 100sqq.; 198; and Marks 2007 (Ch. 3: ‘Pride goes after a fall,’ on attacking, pp. 7994, esp. 91sq.). For a literary discussion of the phenomenon, cf. Adamson 1997 on Melville. In
Ch. 5, ‘Turning the Tables,’ Adamson draws upon the connections between the mechanisms
of said turning and other counter-shaming tactics such as warding off feared shame by
shaming others and contempt (1997, pp. 175-210).
36
Astrid the main interest of the novel lies within the solution of an already established
shame scene. While Michael’s shaming, for instance, takes place ‘while we are
watching,’ Astrid’s acute shame experiences remain in the past and are not renewed.
II. 2. 1. 1 Existential Shame: A. L. Kennedy, Looking for the Possible Dance
Existential shame is the feeling of being unwanted or stigmatised, such as the shame
experienced by unwanted children or children who do not have the ‘right’ sex. This
shame group also includes body shame caused by the experience of a principally
negative or flawed physicality. Furthermore, existential shame is the feeling of being
ignored or being inexistent, such as when parents do not react to the verbal or
nonverbal self-expressions of their children (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 25). This encompassing shame affect is described in an episode of A. L. Kennedy’s novel Looking for the
Possible Dance.
Most critics of Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) give special attention to a
particular subplot that deals with the encounter of the novel’s main character,
Margaret, with a severely disabled boy on a train to London.30 This episode lends a
degree of structure to the altogether rather unstructured text of the novel, which
constantly moves between different levels of memory, perspective and time. The
subplot is divided into five parts, which are written in third person present tense and
broken up by passages of dialogue. It does not stand in any direct relation to the rest of
the text, apart from the fact that Margaret travels to London in order to become
sufficiently detached from her private and professional problems at home in Glasgow
(which are, nonetheless, not connected to the place in any particular way). Due to the
temporal congruency of the interjected story, which opposes the overall construction
of the text, the train journey appears as a closed sub-narrative.31 Moreover, the
30
Cf. Gifford 1997; Dunnigan 2000; Tew 2003; Norquay 2005. Cf. Mitchell 2008,
who reads some of these as interpretations of the physical, emotional and social
condemnation to ‘speechlessness’ [Tew] and comments on the ‘formation and dissolution of
identity,’ [Norquay] p. 153. Although none of the commentators refer explicitly to shame, the
present discussion will also try to point out to what extent it was partly recognised yet not
named.
31
Cf. Dunnigan: “Kennedy’s first novel, Looking for the Possible Dance, […]
exemplifies a characteristic narratological device: the ‘expandable’ temporal framework. […]
[T]he instability of tense […] renders the past and present lives of characters in intimate
proximity. Two different narratives are worked through with those of identity and desire. The
train journey from Glasgow to London undertaken by Margaret […] cuts a clear, linear
narrative line. The motif of the journey […] lends it an overall pattern of circularity.” (2000,
p. 145)
37
travelling episode seems by far the most emotionally charged part of the entire novel;
more so than the death of Margaret’s father, her on-and-off relationship with her fiancé
Colin, or her troublesome work life. Meeting young James confronts Margaret and the
reader with the close-knit web of shame and counter-shame (in order to turn negative
into positive, to ‘turn the tables,’ cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 28; 111; 197sq.), and of coshame and vicarious shame that characterises the dealings of his caretakers and the
reactions of his environment. The discontinuity of the account, though, does not
mimic the psychological structure of real shame narration, unlike many of the literary
examples discussed here. Just like the actual affect, it crops up immediately and
intensely.32 Therefore, the ‘James’ episode rather mimics the structure of unexpected
real shame witnesssing, a strategy that resembles the use of shame narration in short
stories (cf. Ch. II. 2. 2. 1). The fact that this episode is rather independent from the rest
of the plot makes the parallel plausible. Instead of presenting a figure’s shame feelings
and her shame theory in detail, as seen in the example of Astrid in The Accidental,
shorter texts work instead with immediately arising and generally comprehensible
shame scenes. To that extent, Looking for the Possible Dance is a singular example of
this narrative strategy within the context of a full-length novel; it is also one of the few
literary texts that deal with empathic shame feelings on the textual level. Margaret
possibly experiences both, co-shame with the disabled boy and vicarious shame for the
unfair and shame-inducing behaviour of his caretakers. Right from the start, James is
introduced as a source of disagreeableness:
The train seems to hang by the platform for longer than it should.
Spinning fields of various grains and leaf are again pounding by Margaret’s
head and speed is obviously gathered somewhere when the reason for their delay
presents itself. Lifted waist high by a staggering guard, a boy appears. A boy or
perhaps a man, his face seems older than his body. His hands wave gently and his
head rests at a slightly peculiar angle. His face looks anxious, strange. […] Two
women, walking behind, close in with an assortment of cushions and belts, packing
them round a body which remains patient, not entirely still. He is arranged like a
basket of flowers, a limb display.
‘This is James. I hope you don’t mind. We have a reservation. […]’
A hand takes hold of Margaret’s elbow, its thumb bent round impossibly.
32
Cf. Landweer, who writes that shame is characterised by “Plötzlichkeit, Heftigkeit
und eine – im Vergleich etwa zur Trauer – verhältnismäßig kurze Dauer.” (1999, p. 42)
Nevertheless, suddenness and intensity are only two developmental attributes of the shame
affect. It can also be refreshed in memory (“als Gefühl in der Erinnerung aktualisierbar,”
Landweer 1999, p. 123), and experiences of extreme, continuous and/or traumatic shame
may lead to lingering, enduring effects, cf. Lewis 1992, pp. 186-217.
38
‘Don’t annoy the lady. It’s a long journey, we mustn’t annoy each other on the
way.’ (pp. 55sq.)33
The same impossibility that describes James’ thumb seems to surround his entire
appearance. The objectifying characterisation of James as ‘reason for their delay,’ his
body ‘remaining patient, not entirely still’ while being ‘arranged like a basket of
flowers, a limb display’ is opposed by his anxious facial expression and the tenderness
of the gentle waving of his hands. The strong contrast between the almost antiseptic
handling of James by his caretakers and their total ignorance of his emotional self and
his actual thoughts and feelings is the central theme of this episode. James’s mother
Irene and ‘Auntie’ May constantly apologise for James’s sheer existence and any of his
actions. They openly show their contempt, and their opinion of him probably contains
a large amount of introjected prejudices and negative expectations towards disabled
people. When James eats, for instance, they call him ‘disgusting’ in front of Margaret
(p. 68). She generally does not react to their comments (or at least the text does not
provide any concrete reactions), which makes the sense of uneasiness and embarrassment of the situation even more perceptible. Irene and May’s deprecating comments are
mostly left hanging; only James comments in one of his characteristic notes that he is
“FEDUP” with them (p. 69).
Because of their own shame about James’s illness and its physical evidence,
they are extremely patronising and eager to control him, if not suppress him:34
‘Don’t annoy the lady.’ (p. 56)
‘He’s saying sorry, aren’t you James?’ (ibid.)
‘Answer the lady, don’t be rude.’ (ibid.)
‘James Watt, you will never, ever be given one of those things again. That was a treat.
And now you’ve spoiled it.’ (p. 68)
‘Don’t annoy Miss Hamilton, now. I’m sure she’s had enough of you.’ (p. 156)
James is being talked about in the third person, and Margaret is also told to “just ignore him if he gives you any nonsense. He wants attention” (p. 57). In his presence,
May informs their new acquaintance that James’s mother, Irene,
was disappointed. Wanted a girl, you see. And the other thing, of course. The man
just upped and left her. His father. Just upped and left. She says things she doesn’t
mean, sometimes. Doesn’t she, James. (p. 69)
33
Original quotations here and following from A. L. Kennedy, Looking for the
Possible Dance. London 1993.
34
Cf. Marks 2007, p. 26, on disability of a family member as a source of group
shame, which presumably applies to those two characters.
39
This small passage alone shows that James suffers from severe, multi-layered
existential shaming: for being unwanted as a boy, for his physical deviance from the
norm, and for the negation of his emotional self. He therefore meets a number of
conditions that Hilgers formulated for the evocation of this particular type of shame.35
The women’s behaviour, by contrast, is clearly determined by an attempt to turn the
tables; their shame over James’s condition, the mother’s numerous disappointments
and their (actual or assumed) captivity in the situation leads to their aggressive turn on
James: ‘You’re such a plaster sometimes, I don’t know’ (p. 69). Both their accusations
and their attempts to distance themselves from the boy produce a suffocating
atmosphere. Their continuous shaming may result from James’s physical paralysis, but
figuratively it also causes an extreme emotional stifling of the entire family. On his
part, though, James tries to counteract his mother and his aunt’s inescapable and
overwhelming shame by behaving as rebelliously as his body permits. His
unwillingness to give into submission shows in his equally limited, yet revealing
written dialogue with Margaret. James is by no means the incapable, unlovable thing
his caretakers make of him; he is “NOT A KID” (p. 70). His generous usage of
swearwords is proof both of his wide awareness of the injustice he experiences and of
his deep unhappiness and anger about it. Furthermore, it shows him in a perfectly
normal light as a young man who has friends and a definite sense of home and
belonging. He is anything but an object that has to be ‘arranged.’ James strives for selfassertion. In response to Margaret’s question as to whether he can be himself with her,
his literally yelled answer is “FUC WON HUNNER PERCEN MEEEEEE ” (p. 191).36
The fact that James is not only physically at the mercy of his relatives, but that
his mental and psychological subjection to their endless shaming weighs even more,
only becomes apparent through the scarce but telling insights into his mind, and
therefore into his self. While they are written in dialogue, the narration of his shame is
exclusively (and characteristically) written in the third person. The juxtaposition of the
35
Cf. Wurmser and his description of central shame contents: “I am dirty, messy, the
content of my self is looked at with disdain and disgust; […] I am defective, I have
shortcomings in physical and mental makeup; […] I have lost control over my body functions
and my feelings.” (Wurmser 1981, pp. 27sq.) See also Tomkins who recognises “work, love,
the body, the self as major objects of investment of interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy as a
major source of shame-humiliation.” (Tomkins 1995, p. 150)
36
Cf. Norquay 2005, who draws a general connection between questions of the self
and subjectivity in Kennedy’s texts: “Kennedy’s fiction consistently engages with the question
of what this triumphant claim might mean: the possibility of becoming ‘one hundred percent’
a self within the complicated dynamics of subjectivity” (pp. 143sq.). In this regard, Norquay
also connects Kennedy’s narrative strategies to her ‘exploration of selfhood’: “Intersections of
past and present, presence and absence, intrinsic to Kennedy’s thematic exploration of
selfhood, also shape her narrative strategies” (p. 149).
40
two narrative perspectives shows once more the distinguished role of an outer
perspective in the literary shame narration.
While he starts the conversation with a bold “FUC OF ,” which Margaret
replies with “I see,” the tone soon turns more conciliable: “JAMS OK – ‘Yes.’ – ? – ‘OK.’
– OK” (p. 57). Margaret’s interest turns towards James the person, instead of the image
of him created by Irene and May. Her good-natured sense of humour, “‘I hope you
don’t snore, James Watt.’ – James waves a hand and smiles […].” (p. 70) helps to
console James and ease the tension once the women have left for the buffet car.37
Margaret soon discovers that James’s mind is in decidedly better condition than his
body, and she gives him space to express his own wishes and ideas:
‘[…] Why are you going south?’
D ON K NOW
D ON WA N T TO
STAY
G L A S G OW
I HAV E F R I E N D S (p. 70)
I M SE C R ET
‘You’re secret. How do you mean?’
NOWON NOWS
NOB ODY
‘What don’t they know?’
M E (p. 106)
In contrast to James’s mother and aunt, Margaret seems a lot more capable of recognising the active mind underneath the inactive body. They end up playing noughts and
crosses, “because they are both happy playing games, knowing they are both capable of
deeper and greater things, but knowing they can’t be bothered with them now.” (p.
106) The sense of justice and respect with which Margaret meets James is immediately
frustrated as soon as Irene and May reappear. A short phase of thawing ends with
another ice age:
37
The compensatory force of humour is described by Wurmser, quoting a patient:
“‘Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.’” (1981, p. 103) Lewis similarly
writes, “Laughter also is a mechanism by which acknowledged shame can be reduced or
eliminated” (1992, p. 130). According to Serge Tisseron, humour is outstanding amongst all
adaptation strategies to shame. On the one hand, it conserves the shame feeling and does not
suppress it like other forms of adaptation do; on the other hand, it finds an expression for this
feeling that makes it communicable and reconciles the subject with itself. It is a means of
distancing that takes place primarily in the realm of language: “Parmi les divers mécanismes
d’adaption à la honte, l’humour occupe une place particulière. D’une parte, il conserve tel
quel le sentiment de honte qui n’est pas fui comme dans les autres formes d’adaption; mais
d’autre part, il trouve à ce sentiment une expression qui, à la fois, le communique à des tiers
et réconcilie le sujet lui-même. [Il est] une distanciation qui s’appuie essentiellement sur les
pouvoirs du langage.” (Tisseron 1992, p. 119)
41
‘I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to be so long away. James kept you entertained?’
[…]
‘Really, I’m fine. We had a nice time. James was great. Very interesting.’
May smiles, understanding, ‘Work with them, do you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The handicapped.’
‘No, no. I mean, sometimes groups came to the place where I worked. We had
good access. I mean, they’re only people. No, I don’t work with them.’
Irene speaks without dipping her magazine.
‘We don’t work with them, either, dear. We just have them with us, day and
night.’ (p. 157)
Margaret’s uncomprehending reaction once again exposes the entire landscape of
shame that is at stake. To May and Irene, it is out of the question that anyone would
ever want to spend their time with someone like James, unless it is their job or their
fate. Irene’s last sentence is both a sign of her self-experience of utter defeat and
another slap in the face of James who is after all present during this conversation.
The episode ends sadly. As long as James is still in possession of pen and
paper, he urges Margaret to “WRIT,” which she naturally promises to, and tells her that
he is “SAD” and that he will miss her (pp. 156sq.). When May clears the table before
they leave the train, “his games of noughts and crosses, conversations, observations,
brief asides, are folded into the carrier bag reserved for rubbish and scraps. He eases
his head round to Margaret, hands clasped close to his chest” (p. 168).
James’s desperation is obvious, yet his caretakers remain blind to any needs
other than his physical ones. They also violate his intimacy in front of Margaret, thus
adding intimacy shame on top of everything else: “you can bet he’ll need changing” (p.
169). Margaret offers her address, but since they refuse, “That’s very nice of you dear,
but you mustn’t,” (ibid.) she slips the piece of paper into James’s hand before he is
carried off the train. When Margaret waves him goodbye, ‘a hand struggles out of the
blanket to wave back, letting a piece of paper fall and blow along the platform out of
sight.’ (p. 170)
This definite end, not only of the James episode on the train, but also of any further
contact between the two, the hopelessness and frustration James must feel the moment
Margaret’s address slips from his fingers, is bound to evoke an empathic reaction in the
reader. I assume, though, that this and other reader reactions to this short narrative
stand in direct relation to the close-knit web of shaming, its defence reactions and
feelings of co-shame and vicarious shame. In the case of James, feelings of empathic
co-shame are possible, an emotion equivalent to the assumed feelings of the
protagonist Margaret. The discussion of the attitude towards disabled people in society
already produces a general sense of involvement; and this feeling is further supported
42
by the individual confrontation with James’s severe existential shame and the utterly
frustrating implication that it will continue without end.38
In the case of James’s caretakers, feelings of anger towards their insensitive and
cruel behaviour may go along with a sense of vicarious shame for their apparent
shamelessness and their violation of James’s psychological and physical boundaries.38
II. 2. 1. 2 Competence Shame: Jackie Kay, Trumpet I—‘Colman’
Competence shame occurs when the subjective competence experience is interrupted
and failure becomes (publicly) visible or in the case of a loss of control of egofunctions such as crying or shouting in an adult (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 25). For a literary
representation of competence shame, the discussion moves on to Jackie Kay’s Trumpet.
In Jackie Kay’s first novel Trumpet (1998) competence shame lies at the core of
a seemingly more prominent shame scenario, which evolves from the discovery of the
Jazz trumpet player Joss Moody’s female sex after his death.39 In a subsequent chapter,
the novel is also discussed with respect to the intimacy shame that evolves for his wife
after his death, when tabloids, paparazzi and former friends turn towards her and start
to scrutinise and denounce her marital life (cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 2). Joss Moody’s adoptive
son Colman is also deeply afflicted by this intimacy shame, especially since he did not
know about his father’s biological sex. Unlike his mother, who never experienced any
shame for her non-conforming marriage, Colman is a highly shame prone figure. The
shame Colman feels after his father’s death thus refers to a different, deeper shame that
he already carries within himself at the time of the exposure. Joss Moody’s son suffers
from a long-evolved inferiority complex for being average in his looks and talents, as
opposed to his famous and successful father. His constant fear of failure for not
meeting his father’s standards results in a strong competence shame.40 The according
shame theory tells him that the female sex of his father only “puts the tin lid on it”
38
By definition, literary studies rarely address the critic’s emotional reception of the
text. Gifford and Dunnigan, though, call the James episode a ‘touching encounter,’ (Gifford
1997, p. 618) and an “encounter [that] is deeply moving but resists any sentimentalising
assumptions or simplification. […] The connection, rare in James’s life, ends when Margaret’s
address is blown [away]. Communication is won, only to end ironically in loss.” (Dunnigan
2000, p. 146) The episode’s empathic potential is very apparent in both readings. Given the
outstanding role of manifold shame affects in the text, they may be proof of empathic reader
shame, even if they do not touch upon the subject explicitly.
39
For a discussion of the novel that focuses on the issue of gender, cf. King 2001 and
Mergenthal 2008.
40
Cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 200. In general, Hilgers’s clinical examples of competence
shame rather refer to physical or mental loss of control and the insufficient knowledge of a
foreign language in the case of migration (cf. pp. 27; 59; 97; 117; 121; 320).
43
(Trumpet, p. 57)41. As a child, Colman “fucking worshipped” Joss (p. 49), and he
desperately longed for his fatherly, male acceptance:
He’d hold my hand in the street for people to see. Father and son out and about in
the street. People that didn’t know I was adopted said things like, ‘You’re your
father’s spitting image, you are.’ What I wanted when I was a kid was to look like my
father. You could write a list of things after his name. Good-looking. Talented.
Charismatic. (p. 45)
Colman’s self-descriptions speak of a boy who never lived up to the glorious image of
his father. After the shocking revelation of Joss’s real sex, Colman loses himself in selfhatred for his (supposed) shortcomings, imagining his environment’s deprecation:42
It was alright, it was, being Joss Moody’s son. Only when I became Colman Moody
did everything start to become a total fucking drag. It’s a tall order when you are
expected to be somebody just because your father is somebody. The children of
famous people aren’t allowed to be talentless, ordinary fuckwits like me. […] I
mean, what am I? […] Colman Moody, son of Joss Moody, the famous trumpet
player. You know the one. The one who pretended to be a man and fetched up a
woman in his death. Conned his own son. That boy must have been thick. Two
planks. Colman Moody the guy who didn’t do nothing. (p. 46)
With regard to the general role of fathers in the shame socialisation of children,
Michael Lewis writes:
In fact, the role of fathers in their children’s lives increases over time. Fathers are
particularly important in the intergenerational struggle over shame. […] Fathers,
through their behavior and action, provide both a model and an ally for their sons.
[…] Fathers and sons have their own negotiation around shame. Since their axis is
shame-anger [via male-male aggression], their interactions are more likely to be
around anger, and it is the shame-anger problem that needs to be solved. When they
are successful in negotiating the shame-anger-shame axis, their relationship across
the life span is ensured. When they are not successful, the son must separate himself
from both parents. (Lewis 1992, p. 192)43
This proved obviously true for Colman and Joss, because “when I left home, I got on
better with the old man” (p. 165).
41
Original quotations here and following from Jackie Kay, Trumpet. London 1998.
Throughout the novel, whether it is Colman meeting his friends (Brady on p. 69;
Sammy on p. 195), the musician Big Red McCall crying for his old companion Joss (pp.
144sqq.), or the vox populi in a ‘letters to the editor’ collection (p. 159sq.), the actual reactions
are much more positive than the assumed ones, with the glaring exception of the tabloids.
43
Martinsen discusses father-son relations in her shame interpretation of
Dostoevsky’s novels as well, though strictly from within the literary frame and without
reference to the general psychological role of shame in intergenerational relations
(cf. Martinsen 2003, pp. 52sqq.; 116sqq.; 207sqq.).
42
44
In the course of the chapter C OVER STORY (pp. 45-72), Colman’s ubiquitous
feelings of embarrassment and shame seem to culminate in the disastrous moment
when he finds out about his father’s biological sex. His characterisation oscillates
between that of an aggressive, swearing, spiteful young man who is full of self-pity and
accusations against his environment and a fundamentally disoriented person who lost
one of the very few constants in his life. Although his feelings towards himself and his
family were always very mixed, he longed for his father’s attention and respect:
I was a traditional boy in an untraditional house. I was always going about the place
freaked out and embarrassed. My parents were not like other people’s parents. […]
I liked the dark corners of sulking. I liked sliding along the walls of our house
in a state of chronic depression. I liked counting the blackheads of my acne. I didn’t
care. I was in my own world. I pretended I didn’t give a flying fuck what my father
thought of me. But I did. I suppose I wanted him to be proud of me as a man, as a
black man. […]
Jesus. It’s embarrassing, that’s the worst of it. Pricks saying, Really, Cole,
didn’t you know? Bastards asking me questions. I’m so fucking embarrassed I could
emigrate. (pp. 46-49)
The intensity of Colman’s emotion contradicts his own description of it as ‘embarrassment.’ It is very unlikely that the memory or, as given here, the pure imagination of
an encounter like ‘Really, Cole, didn’t you know?’ would evoke embarrassment, and
the desperate wish to ‘emigrate,’ i.e. to disappear, to hide, also speaks for shame.44 This
atmosphere of helpless shame rage is further intensified by interjections written in
spoken children’s language on pages 49, 64, and 68. They depict Colman’s past pride
for his father, his loving and unquestioned adoration and his vulnerability:
I goes in my father’s bedroom. I am six years old. I opens their wardrobe. My daddy
keeps his trumpet in here. I opens the big silver box, and there it is, all shiny inside. I
touched it. I did touch it. Then I strokes it like I’ve seen my father do and it purrs.
(p. 49)
That’s my daddy. The one with the orange tie. See. See, standing next to the man with
the big drum. He is My Daddy. […] My daddy finish and people clap. Clap, clap, clap. I
stands on my chair and claps too. I have on a sailor suit. I just gets it. My mummy
says, Sit down, Colman. But my daddy comes and picks me up, swings me up, swings
me in the air, high, high, through all the big smiles. Then sits me on his big shoulders.
Says, All right, wee man. (p. 64)
He is sitting on the edge of my bed, my daddy. […] He gives me a spoon of medicine. I
open my mouth wide and wait for the spoon to be put in my mouth and wait for my
daddy to say, Brave boy. […] He pats my head. Strokes my head. Hair just like mine,
44
For the differences between shame and embarrassment (‘Peinlichkeit’) cf. Landweer 1999, pp. 123sq.
45
he says. Then he pulls my cover right up to my chin, says, Coorie in, son, Coorie in.
(p. 68)
These passages stand in powerful contrast to Colman’s present spitefulness. His
childhood memories do not ridicule his younger self’s adoration and love, though;
rather they sharpen the reader’s senses of the real extent of Colman’s loss and the
degree of his self-degradation. Colman internalised an imaginary, perceived third
person perspective on himself that has no real equivalent. His negative self-perception
alone creates an atmosphere of lingering shame.45 There is no evidence that either his
father or his mother despised him. On the contrary, they appear rather patient and
supportive, even during his adolescence when Colman was “surly, sullen, selfish,
shameless. It’s true. I was a total animal” (p. 165). Though what stuck in Colman’s
head are Joss’s rare comments like “moany wee shite,” (p. 65) that seem to support his
self-deprecation.
With respect to the depiction of Millie Moody’s intimacy shame, (real) thirdperson perspectives play a large role in completing her homogenous first-person
account. In her case, the resulting hybrid narrative form of complementing inner and
outer perspectives creates a clear and comprehensible image of the character’s shame
experience. The overall construction of Colman’s account implies comparable effects,
although the juxtaposition of voices and perspectives is less clear-cut. In a way, his
narrative depicts the character’s psychological structure, the inner conflicts between
Colman’s self-perception, the introjection of imagined outer perspectives and his
environment’s actual opinions. Colman thus shows some definite narcissistic character
traits, like the shameless tabloid journalist Sophie Stones, who tries to exploit him for a
sensational book on Joss Moody (cf. Ch. II. 2. 5).46 While the chapter C OVER STORY
45
Cf. Andrews, who points out the comparable effect of real and imagined scorn:
“Feelings of shame may be elicited in response to real or imagined maltreatment by, or scorn
of, others, and the ensuing humiliated fury may lead to feelings of guilty self-blame and selfhatred. In such situations, the self is seen as unworthy and deserving of misfortune.” (1998, p.
187) Wurmser also ascribes the same effects to outside and introjected shaming: “The object
pole can become part of the self, where one is no longer ashamed only because others would
see and condemn him, but because his own conscience disapproves. […] The expectations,
criticism, and punishment inherent in shame are now vested in the conscious and
unconscious parts of the conscience—the superego—instead of the outside world.” (Wurmser
1981, p. 45)
46
20th century psychoanalysis closely connects narcissistic disorder and shame
proneness. Cf. Wurmser, who refers to Kohut (1971, p. 181): “Kohut rightly rejects the
explanation of shame as a ‘reaction of an ego that has failed to fulfill the (perhaps unrealistic)
demands and expectations of a strong ego ideal.’ He adds, ‘Many shame-prone individuals do
not possess strong ideals, but most of them are exhibitionistic people who are driven by their
ambitions; i.e. their characteristic psychic imbalance (experienced as shame) is due to a
46
is written in the first person, it already contains large amounts of introjected criticism.
In the chapter INTERVIEW EXCLUSIVE, it turns out that this first-person narrative is
primarily what Colman angrily dictates into Sophie Stones’s tape recorder. In the
course of this chapter, the narrative perspective changes from first person to a free
indirect discourse of both Colman and Sophie (p. 120), thus providing a semidistanced perspective on both characters and their relationship to one another. In
addition, genuine third-person perspectives (i.e. not his own, externalised selfperception) starkly contrast those other two accounts and cast an even more different
light on Colman’s character. The Funeral Director, for instance, describes Colman’s
outer appearance as “tall, dark, graceful, with shiny black hair cut into a very definite
shape. He was dressed very casually in modern clothes” (p. 113). Colman obviously left
the awkward looks of his adolescence behind, but although he is “vain as fuck now” (p.
61), his good looks do nothing for his self-esteem: “He stops to look in the mirror at
himself. He can never decide if he is good-looking or ugly as shit. There are two
Colman Moodys in the mirror: the boy with the glasses from the past; and the man
now” (p. 181).
Colman’s free indirect discourse provides a calmer, yet not less negative
picture of himself. While his first-person account is full of his momentary rage over
being ‘conned’ by his father, the other, more distanced perspective describes some of
Colman’s reappearing, prevailing shame scenarios. These relate primarily to his
professional and financial unsuccessfulness. His working career is unsteady. He
changes his jobs every so often and the position he liked best was as a courier on a
motorbike, because “people found him frightening. He found himself frightening” (p.
137). The power and brutality he exuded in his biker’s outfit and the environment’s
reaction to that were “quite a discovery” (p. 138). This speaks of a deep desire to exude
physical strength, to become active, to leave his lingering feelings of weakness and
powerlessness behind. In a way, Colman longs to ‘turn the tables,’ to intimidate others
instead of feeling overpowered himself. Yet he appears caught in his haplessness. The
description of his “ground-floor flat in Tottenham, north-east London” (p. 180)
literally oozes frustration. Even though Joss already paid half of the mortgage, the
instalments ruin Colman while the place falls apart: “His father told him he’d have to
learn to manage his money and not do crazy things with it. But Colman has never
learned to manage money. His father stopped giving him handouts. Told him it clearly
wasn’t helping him. He’d need to stand on his own feet” (p. 180). In this case,
competence shame mixes with dependence shame for not being able to manage his
life—not to speak of being successful the way Joss was. As a result, Colman reacts to
flooding of the ego with unneutralized exhibitionism and not to a relative ego weakness vis-àvis an overly strong system of ideals.’ He goes on relating this narcissistic defeat not only to
‘searing shame,’ but also to envy and narcissistic rage.” (1981, p. 154)
47
poor and needy people with an almost physical antipathy, as if he feared contagion. A
beggar at the tube station brings up all sorts of ‘barking thoughts,’ “the exact opposite
way of thinking to his upbringing” (p. 185):
The sight of the broken man […] infuriates him. It grates, seeing people broken like
this. He is repulsed; doesn’t feel any pity or mercy. Just raging fucking irritation.
Doesn’t want it in his face. The sight of it, in his face. His mother and his father
were always sympathetic to poor people, to people with no money or power but,
even as a boy, he wasn’t. (ibid.)
Besides Colman’s almost compulsive counteracting of his parents’ ideals and standards, this can also be read as a contemptuous defence reaction against someone who
possibly embodies his greatest fears of social decline.
Colman’s character seems rather bound to evoke sympathy, as opposed to
empathy. His shame lies primarily within his very particular familial constellation,
although his characterisation also refers to shame-inducing situations in public
space—especially with regard to his skin colour (e.g. p. 188). He always seems to come
off worse than his parents. They led an unusual yet successful life, they had an even
more unusual yet equally successful love life and they tried to give him the best
education they could. Thinking ‘the exact opposite way of thinking to his upbringing’
unluckily conforms to his unsuccessful work and private life. In a kind of self-fulfilling
prophecy, Colman seems to prove that he really is the ‘talentless fuckwit’ he accuses
himself of being. In the end, though, his father’s secret sex might show him that even
this seemingly impeccable man had his shortcomings, and this may have possibly been
the secret of his parents’ love. His self-related shame feelings are only partly
comprehensible, and the underlying sentiment of self-pity prevents any further
empathic reader reactions.47
Within the outer frame of Trumpet the story of Colman starts with his apparent
shame-rage, caused by the hurtful exposure of his father’s intimacy, written in the first
person. With the change of perspective to a more self-distanced free indirect discourse,
insights and conclusions about the underlying shame scene, i.e. Colman’s competence
shame, become visible. His possible emancipation from his current and his latent
shame feelings, though, are written in the third person. In the very last chapter of the
novel, SHARES (p. 278), Millie and Colman meet again in the Scottish seaside village
where she fled to avoid public attention. Described as ‘the woman’ and ‘he,’ the
intimacy and integrity of the two shamed figures appears re-established, and the reader
is kept at a distance to the extent that he or she can only assume that the man who “was
47
I cannot rule out the possibility that a male reader will react differently to
Colman’s shame. The aspect of self-pity as a blocker of empathy (or empathic shame) will be
discussed below in connection with the case of Nathan Staples in A. L. Kennedy’s Everything
You Need (cf. Ch. II. 2. 3. 1).
48
walking towards her,” who “moved so like his father” is Colman on his way to
reconcile with his mother, perhaps overcoming his shame for once.
II. 2. 1. 3 Ideality Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental II—‘Eve’
Ideality shame is the shame for the discrepancy between ideal and self. It may also
occur with respect to culpability. In that case, the person does not only feel guilty for
the incorrect behaviour, but he/she also feels ashamed for acting culpably in the given
situation (‘why does it happen to me of all people?’). This shame feeling often relates to
a discrepancy between ego ideal and self (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 26).
For the discussion of ideality shame the interpretation returns to Ali Smith’s
third novel The Accidental (2005), which was already discussed with regard to the
assimilation shame of its girl protagonist Astrid (Ch. II. 2. 1). As already mentioned,
the mother of the Smart family, Eve, is caught in her own individual virulent shame
scene just like all other three family members. Hers is a deep shame inspired by the
discrepancy between ideal and self and momentarily triggered by her paralysing
writer’s block. Underneath her acute shame for not being able to act according to her
own expectations as well as those of her environment lies a more general ideality
shame that dates back to the time of the untimely death of her mother.
‘The accidental’ Amber enters the scene when Eve is most disoriented,
questioning her overall professional and personal makeup. At the beginning, Eve
thinks that Amber “was something to do with Michael,” that “she was clearly his latest
student” (p. 80),48 which means she assumes Amber to be his lover. Eve both admires
and loathes Amber’s chutzpah to show up at their holiday home. Contrary to Michael’s
assumption his wife knows all about his numerous affairs. While she waited one day in
his office, she had to realise that any of the dozens of postcards pinned to the wall were
“from some girl he’d been fucking” (p. 96). Her most prominent character trait—selfcontrol—lets her keep that secret knowledge to herself. In the end, it makes Michael’s
adultery even more shameful for him and lets his character appear even more deficient
(cf. Ch. II. 2. 5). By the very end of the novel, he has to realise that “she had always
known, known all along, and it had made no difference to her” (p. 269). Interestingly,
Amber’s outstanding quality for Eve is ‘truthfulness’ (p. 98)—an assumption that is
ridiculed on numerous occasions. Amber’s bizarre story about the ‘old self’ she left
behind after killing a small child in a car accident is only one example. Her suggestive
question, “Do you believe me?” (p. 101) can only be answered with no.
Between the first and the second part of the novel, the first-person narrator of
the first chapter reappears, yet her presence here seems even more miraculous and
48
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, The Accidental. London
2005.
49
confusing than it did in the beginning. In a breathtaking pseudologia phantastica this
‘I’ relates his-/her-/itself to numerous historical or fictional incidents and public
figures of the 20th century.49 Yet the ‘truthfulness’ Eve sees in Amber is perhaps the
other woman’s truthfulness to herself—something Eve strives for but achieves only on
the sleek surface of the successful writer, not within. Afflicted by her writing
inhibition, she sees not only her professional but also her private self at stake. In the
sleepless first night after Amber’s arrival, Eve questions herself in the style of the mock
interviews she invented for her successful books on people who died in World War II.
Its effect is self-referentially described as “you can answer [your question] from the
answers already given” (p. 85). From the answers already given the reader is led stepby-step towards Eve’s underlying shame scene, thus learning her strong shame theory.
Starting from her most recent shame feelings, shame expectations and avoidance
strategies, she moves towards her more profound, underlying shame scenes. Amber
MacDonald, who intrigues Eve with her Scottish origin, triggers this intensive selfanalysis. To Eve, everything Scottish is positive but also mysterious. Her mother, who
died when she was only 15, was Scottish, and Eve’s answer to the question “What was
Scotland to Eve?” shows that Scotland, its music and its languages were both a source of
homesickness and a mental refuge (pp. 93sq.). The early loss of her mother seems to
coincide with the fact that Eve hasn’t been to Scotland for years although she loves the
country. Amber’s Scottishness is therefore anything but accidental. It leads Eve back to
her self, the true self behind all her self-control. Being “measured and calm” is a core
attitude that Eve carries like a mantra (cf. pp. 91; 93; 95sq.). The shame that eats at her
is multifaceted. As already pointed out, Eve’s most recent shame feelings concern her
writing in general and her self-conscious refusal to write her new book:
Every night at six she came out of the shed, went back into the main house and
changed, and ate as if a day’s work had been done and everybody’s summer wasn’t
wasted in a Norfolk hell-hole. […]
How and where was the book? Please don’t ask this. […]
Was Eve, for instance, tired of making up afterlives for people who were in
reality dead and gone? Eve chose not to answer this question. […]
Was it anything to do with that ‘mendacious glorified peddled’ review just
quoted? Eve chose not to answer that question. […]
Did Eve have a subject for her new unbegun book yet? No. (pp. 84sq.)
By questioning herself, she is quite clear about her reluctant feelings towards her work
and about her avoidance strategies. Nevertheless, Eve confronts herself with minor
feelings of guilt for ‘wasting everybody’s summer’ rather than the fact that she is no
49
The, admittedly slightly dated, expression pseudologia phantastica first appeared in
Anton Delbrück, Die pathologische Lüge und die psychisch abnormen Schwindler. Stuttgart
1891.
50
longer convinced about the concept of the so-called Genuine Article series.50 Shamed
by a negative review, and feeling guilty for not writing the book she promised to the
publisher, Eve “watched a woodlouse climb out of a crack in the floor and then back
down into it again. She had wanted with all her heart at that moment to be a woodlouse with a woodlouse’s responsibilities, a woodlouse’s talents” (p. 85). The literal
paralysis of writer’s block might only accidentally resemble a shame effect; Eve’s hiding
in the shed, her wish to disappear and even her fantasy of turning into an insect,
though, are definitive shame characteristics.51
According to Wurmser’s definition of ‘shame’s aim,’ the aim of Eve’s
momentary shame is simple hiding. Her past and suppressed lingering shame, though,
is of a more differentiated kind. It stems mostly from the early loss of her mother at the
age of 15. Her father who already lived with “his ‘other’ family” (p. 94) in the USA, was
unconcerned and distanced when he made her sort out and give away her mother’s
belongings. Eve’s utter self-control dates back to this time:
Be calm, fifteen-year-old Eve told herself, packing the Scottish L P s into a cardboard
box full of cardigans. Look, just look. An L P in its sleeve was very thin, wasn’t much
thicker than a slice of processed cheese. There was snow on the top of the
mountains on the front of one of the L P s. It’s just snow on a mountain, she told
50
This easier-to-handle, action-related affect serves as a screen against the more
fundamental confrontation with her entire professional persona. Cf. Wurmser 1981, p. 81:
“guilt is often a screen affect, a defense against shame.” A.L. Kennedy describes this mechanism exemplarily in Everything You Need with the character Nathan (cf. Ch. II. 2. 3. 1).
51
Cf. Wurmser: “Shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be, most simply, in the
form of hiding; […] most mythically, in the form of a change into another shape, an animal or
a stone” (1981, p. 84). One of the clinical cases he discusses in his study illustrates the
mechanisms of the ‘ideality façade’ Eve has erected around her self: “[Blanche] felt she had no
real feelings, that she was a phony, a fake, that she showed a mask of sweetness and
conformity and constantly attempted to please people. Yet underneath she felt she hid a
monster. If people knew her hideous self, she would be isolated forever. She experienced this
split between real self and façade as an increasing freezing up of all her facial expressions into
a terrible grimace, rigid as stone, killing in its frightfulness.” (p. 238) Another case also
discussed by Wurmser illustrates a possible initial motivation behind Eve’s strong selfcontrol: “The ideal [Olga] had for herself as well as for others was godlike—to be complete,
perfect, and in total control. […] One command of this ideal was to be so perfect, good, and
free of anger that she would finally be accepted by her father […]. Only by despising herself as
she really was was she able to justify his rejection and to overcome it by emulating an ideal
self-image. She had not given up the hope of undoing her defeat in the competition for his
love, though he had been dead for many years: the hope that he would return and accept her
if only she was a good girl—if, in other words, she personified such an ideal.” (pp. 223sq.) The
textual information allows the linkage between Eve’s ideality shame and her unwitting
attempt to win her father’s love by acting according to his norms. Whether this is true or not
makes no difference to the factual presence of her ideality shame scene.
51
herself as she slid the record down between the side of the box and the empty folded
clothes. It’s just a two-dimensional picture of a place I’ve never seen. Measured and
calm. (pp. 94sq.)
In order to shield herself against her sadness and her seemingly inadequate mourning,
Eve took a mask to cover what she assumed to be shameful feelings. She became ‘steely,
disdainful, not-crying,’ and when Eve is now “moved nearly to tears by her fifteenyear-old self,” that old self is not sympathetic: “Grow up, for fuck sake, Eve (15)
snorted at Eve (42)” (p. 95). Eve has lived since then behind a ‘mask of shame,’52 which
was further reinforced by her first husband’s betrayal with “‘Sonja’ from ‘Personnel’ at
the ‘Alliance’” (ibid.), as Eve seems to quote Adam Berenski’s confession at the time.
After the divorce and her remarriage, her second husband betrays her as well. Eve
chooses to ignore this rather than risk the repeated public shaming of just another
divorce. All of these incidents made her snort, “a little Scottish snort of noise through
her nose” (p. 93), just as Amber does. When Eve tries, she finds that “she could still
snort, and exactly like that girl in the garden had earlier tonight” (p. 96). This small
sign of her Scottish roots seems both to surprise and console her. And even if it is only
a snort, the smallest of possible affective reactions, it nonetheless indicates a
resurfacing self-awareness. Eve’s son Magnus describes Amber’s effect on his mother
from an outside perspective, yet to him it appears pathetic, rather than positive:
He looks at his mother instead, who is telling Amber about when she was a girl
again. His mother has been twittering all evening like one of those little birds that
people who live in Mediterranean countries keep in cages outside their windows,
the songbirds that start singing when the sun hits their cages in the afternoon or in
the early evening. (p. 137)
To him, Eve appears “broken” (p. 138), like a “small bird blinded by sunlight into
forgetting it’s still in the cage” (p. 137). Magnus is embarrassed by his mother’s
behaviour, although hers is not very different from his own, or Astrid’s, or Michael’s
reaction to Amber. As he puts it, “it is Amber who makes things okay” (p. 139). But as
Astrid’s example has already shown, before ‘making things okay’ there is destruction.
Just as Amber dropped Astrid’s camera off the bridge, she manages to put Eve into a
state of anger she hardly ever allowed herself before. When Amber calls Eve “an
excellent fake […]. Very well done. Top of the class. A-plus” (p. 183), she somehow
exteriorises Eve’s self-doubts and self-suspicion. Freed from that self-centeredness and
the need for self-control, Eve literally enjoys her anger and its liberating force:
52
Cf. Wurmser, who sees a mask-like expression and behaviour as synonymous with
severe shame: “The picture [the patient] presented was of a frozen, pale mask—expressionless, staring, mute. She was crushed by her sense of shame.” (Wurmser 1981, p. 1)
52
Eve roamed the moonlit garden shocked at herself and at how very fine it felt to be
this angry, smoking only half a cigarette, to keep the fen mosquitoes off, well, that
was her excuse. And what kind of life was it, where she needed an excuse to smoke
even half a cigarette? […] The girl had taken her by the hand, then called her a fake.
Was Eve a fake? […] Her heart was beating like mad. Eve Smart had a mad heart.
That sounded good. It sounded extraordinary. It sounded like a heart that belonged
to a different person altogether. (p. 184)
The development of Eve’s character is triggered both by the example of Amber’s
‘truthfulness’ (her deep inherent integrity with her self) and her open disinterest in
Eve’s fake self (which also lies at the core of Michael’s change of self ). Amber gets
aggressively annoyed with what she interprets as Eve’s demonstrations of patiently
suffering discontent and her private mythology. Like a kind of oracle she wonders,
You’ve been lucky.
You’ve been blessed.
You’ve been educated, more than you understand. […]
You’ve always had a safe place to sleep and good things to eat, all your life.
So what is it you could possibly want to know about yourself ? (p. 182)
When Eve opens up and tells the younger woman how she met her first husband, how
she acted completely against her principles to get to know him, Amber rants, “Jesus
fucking wept, all these endless endless fucking endless selfish fucking histories […]. I
ought to punch you in the effing ucking stomach […]. That’d give you a real fucking
story to tell” (p. 196). Eve’s therapy is as rough as Astrid’s, who was, when her camera
smashed on the tarmac of a motorway, also stripped bare of some sort of ‘reality filter.’
Mother and daughter also respond in similar ways to Amber’s treatment. The
accidental guest provides Astrid with an alternative role model that is both not norm
conforming and socially acceptable in that she is different from others yet completely
amiable. Eve, by contrast, has to learn that self-control, patient suffering and the
concealing of any genuine affective shame reaction (as to the death of her mother, the
adultery of her husbands or her unwillingness to keep writing the same type of book
over and over again) does not prevent her from future shame experiences. Rather, it
inevitably seems to lead to ever-new ones. When Eve goes to London to meet her
publisher she takes up Amber’s way of swearing, though quietly: “Effing ucking ha ha
ha, Eve thought.” (p. 197) Her ironic and witty way of avoiding any clear statements
also resembles Amber.
[Y]ou just said April would be fine [to finish the new book].
It depends on the erosion of the Gulf Stream, of course, and how the relevant
weather fronts perform, Eve said.
What? Amanda said faintly.
Whether April will be fine, Eve said. (p. 199)
53
Ironically, Amber herself will be one of the first victims of Eve’s newfound
self-esteem. One evening she goes too far and kisses Eve on the mouth:
Eve was moved beyond believe by the kiss. The place beyond believe was terrifying.
There, everything was different, as if she had been gifted with a new kind of vision
[…]. (p. 202)
In what can also be read as a homophobic or self-deceptive reaction, Eve asks Amber
to go for good. On the other hand, she also (re)gains full control over the situation and
over herself, her needs and her interests. For the first time, Amber’s wit does not seem
to work. Confronted with the ‘new Eve,’ she appears helpless and even childish in her
talking back:
Goodbye, she said.
Eh? Amber said.
It’s time, Eve said. Goodbye.
Where are you going? Amber said.
I’m not going anywhere, Eve said. […]
That’s true, at last. You’re going nowhere, Amber said.
Meaning? Eve said.
You’re a dead person, Amber said.
Get out of my house, Eve said.
It’s not your house, Amber said. You’re only the tenant.
Get out of the house I’m renting, Eve said. (p. 203)
The immediate result of this exchange is that Eve receives a black eye (cf. p. 244); in the
long run, though, it shows that she keeps on carrying Amber positively within her just
as Astrid does. Attracted by an advert wondering, “Q: Is there life after death? A: Why
wait to find out? Take a gap year. Live now.” (p. 286), Eve proves Amber (and herself)
that she is not a dead person going nowhere. She books a world tour and travels for
months until she finally reaches America. In an act of liberation, she flings her mobile
phone over the edge of the Grand Canyon, “for luck,” just as Astrid threw hers into the
school bin to stop being bullied. Moving closer to the place where her father used to
live with his second family, she imagines her parents “together at last, smil[ing] and
wav[ing] goodbye like they were on holiday somewhere nice, like they were having the
time of their lives and like their special relayed televised message to her had reached its
end” (p. 292). The ideational reconciliation of her parents goes along with Eve’s
reconciliation with the “Eve just like Eve was now” (p. 294). While her need to find and
accept her original self echoes the way her daughter overcomes her shame to a large
extent, it counterpoints the old-new dichotomy in Magnus and Michael’s personal
development through the course of the novel.
Their respective shame scenes make a fundamental reorientation necessary
while Eve had to make ends meet: “What was happy? What was an ending? She had
been refusing real happiness for years and she had been avoiding real endings for just
54
as long” (p. 295). Sitting outside her father’s deserted house she imagines all the Eves
she could have been, depending on what might have gone differently in her life.
Realising that “the Eve who had never met Adam Berenski [was] unimaginable”
(p. 294) and that her two children are equally part of her real self, she can put an end to
her fear of shortcomings. In a final scene she involuntarily becomes part of a bizarre
reproduction of the situation when Amber first arrived at their Norfolk holiday home.
When Eve knocks at her door, a neighbour of her father initially thinks she is the new
domestic help. The way in which Amber was able to get involved so easily and quickly
thus becomes apparent, as nobody asked but rather they simply assumed who she was.
Eve immerses herself in a similar situation until the real help appears, a behaviour that
is absolutely unlike her old self. Her immunity against the meanness of the neighbour,
who rudely refuses her a cup of coffee, depicts what we might call ‘the Amber within.’
Eve regains a new integrity that heals the old shame as much as it fends off potentially
new ones.
As regards Eve’s character, the narrative form of free indirect discourse is able
to depict both the ideal self-image she carries like a mask (‘calm and measured’) and
her gradual loss of control and her frustration about that. In the course of Eve’s selfinquiry, which adds another level of inside/outside perspective to the in itself already
hybrid form, both her acute shame and her underlying shame scenes become apparent.
As in Astrid’s characterisation, though, the main interest of the novel lies in the
resolution of the previously suffered shame. Eve’s shame scene is comprehensible, yet
within the overall construction of the novel it is primarily Michael’s shamelessness that
is bound to evoke empathic reader emotions.
II. 2. 1. 4 Dependence Shame: Ali Smith, Like I—‘Amy’
Dependence shame relates to the dependence on others, including the unwanted
ending of relations. Possible triggers of dependence shame include love interest and
unrequited love as well as the admiration of and subjectively experienced dependence
on others (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 26). A literary representation of dependence shame can
be found in Ali Smith’s novel Like.
In my introduction to the different shame groupings I briefly mentioned possible
interactions of two or more different shame affects with reference to Ali Smith’s novel
Like (1997). It is one of the rare undecidable cases in which several shame scenes and
affects could possibly be discussed—only possibly, since the initial shame scene is
entirely omitted from the narrative. Smith’s first novel is, among other things, an
example of the lingering, ongoing effects of a past underlying shame experience. The
blank space around the initial event imitates a common psychological defence mechanism against intense shame experiences, repression (cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 9; 82; 84).
55
However, the nature of the original shame experience can be interpreted as either
dependence or ideality shame. The psychological makeup of the protagonist Amy thus
partly resembles Eve, whose ideality shame was the subject of the preceding chapter.
Unlike Eve, though, Amy’s ideality shame does not act on its own but is closely interwoven with the effects of dependence shame.53 In addition to Amy’s presumed shame,
the following interpretation will also pay due attention to the shame affects that may
afflict her parents as they are closely related to the shame affects Amy might suffer
from.
The narrative structure of Like is characterised by a non-chronological order of
events, the use of multiple perspectives, free indirect discourse and alternating hybrid
narrative forms. Any of these stylistic markers are significant for literary shame
narration; most of the novels and stories discussed in this study contain two or three of
them. What is outstanding about Like is that all of these narrative strategies are used in
one text. With the addition of unreliable narrative voices, ellipses and an open ending,
Like represents one of the most suspense-laden and opaque texts discussed. The actual
nature of the events and their chronology are only revealed gradually, and some
questions remain unanswered until the end. The first of two major parts, “AMY,”
which is written in free indirect discourse, tells the story from the perspective of the
main protagonist Amy Shone and her 8-year-old daughter Kate. The perspective of
Patricia, Amy’s mother, is interjected in a similar way, and this is further supplemented
by a third-person account from the perspective of David, Amy’s father. The second
part of the novel, “ASH,” presents the complementary first-person perspective of
Amy’s one-time friend Aisling McCarthy. The protagonists’ names are meaningful. For
Amy, her name is like a spell, “a surname like that will haunt your life. Everything
becomes something you did better then, before, in the shining days. But not if you
don’t let it” (p. 4).54 Her daughter Kate, by contrast, loves her name, because “Kate
Shone is like the words from a story […]. Kate Shone. She shone for the whole night”
(pp. 4sq.). When Ash receives a letter from Amy that outlines all the different
meanings of Ash, ash, ashling and Aisling, including literary quotations, she leaves her
old life behind in order to find her (cf. pp. 223sq.).
Given the fact that names are often subject to word-games in Ali Smith’s
55
texts, and that the second part lies chronologically before the first, the chapter titles
already point to the realm of shame: ASHAMY. On the surface, shame is most openly
53
In the course of this interpretation, alternative shame scenes are discussed as well,
including intimacy shame and moral/conscience shame. They may or may not add to Amy’s
ideality and dependence shame, which remains undecidable.
54
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, Like. London 1997.
55
In The Accidental, the girl Astrid plays both with her name and the name of their
visitor, Amber. Her name, in addition, also appears in estranged form and context as
Alhambra.
56
discussed in the characterisation of Ash. Her retrospective first-person account
presents a differentiated memory of past shame events and her subjective shame
experiences. This is combined with a description of Ash’s active and conscious shame
defence, which presents a very rounded, closed process of shame awareness and its
overcoming (Ash’s account is discussed in the chapter on Shame and Scotland, Ch. II.
2. 4. 1).
Even though Ash does not turn out to be as reliable as she appears at the
beginning, her account is comprehensible and genuine with regard to her shame
history. This is fundamentally different in Amy’s case.56 She is the actual main character of the novel, given her over-proportional presence in both parts of the text. As
opposed to Ash, though, this figure is characterised as detached and intangible.
Paradoxically, Amy’s (self-)characterisation appears quite clear-cut at first.
Driven by said low self-esteem and depressed moods, her daughter seems to be the
only reason for her to keep going: “She mustn’t be late for Kate. This has got to stop.”
(p. 4) On the first couple of pages, Amy is presented as a smart woman who stays
behind her possibilities due to unsupportive conditions. She is an illiterate single mom
who moves from place to place, working in poorly paid positions. She and her
daughter Kate live in the damp basements and caravans by her working places. Yet
what starts as a working-class woman’s brave struggle against the inescapable, unfolds
into an intellectual’s struggle against her (perhaps equally inescapable) self and past.
Many observations of Amy’s life in a small Scottish seaside town are ambivalent. In her
present precarious situation they make as much sense with respect to her past as they
would to a Cambridge Doctor of English Literature, though the outcome is
fundamentally different of course. The above quoted remark on her name for instance
(“a surname like that will haunt your life. […] But not if you don’t let it” ibid.) is
comprehensible on its own, leaving the impression of a down-to-earth, street-wise and
disillusioned sense of humour. Yet her professional and familial past, especially the
history of her successful überparents, gives her comment an entirely different flavour.
The desire ‘not to let this surname haunt your life’ appears at the very core of her
character change, which is so fundamental that it seems almost incredible that the
Amy of the first part and the Amy of the second part are one and the same person.57
What divided Amy’s life in such starkly contrasting parts, what split her into an old
56
Cf. Williams, who points in that direction: “In Like, words are either something
intangible with no fixed meaning, or they provide individuals with powerful access to their
emotions. In the second half of the novel, Amy and Ash mirror these theories of language,
Amy assuming the former and Ash the latter role.” (2006, p. 168)
57
Cf. Williams: “Amy is a fractured character, and the Amy that is presented in the
first part of Like is almost utterly at odds with the younger Amy whom Ash recollects.” (2006,
p. 168)
57
and a new part that hardly resemble each other, is left to interpretation.58 ‘Truth’ or ‘the
real story’ remains undecidable and ambiguous; this reading is only one of many
possible versions.
Amy was born as a single child in a Southern English upper-class home; her
parents are occasionally called ‘the brilliant shining Shones’ (p. 130). Amy spent her
childhood at boarding schools, visiting her parental home only for the holidays.
“When Amy was small she used to sleep here. (Whenever I was here, that is, Amy
says.)” (p. 81) For this and other reasons that remain in the dark, she appears a
stranger to her own mother from an early age on:
Amy, this stranger, her daughter, has appeared again out of the nowhere she has
been, bringing the smell of leaves and damp into the house with her as she brushes
lightly past. Amy as a child passes neatly into her head, home for the summer and
standing on the lawn, quietly reciting for all the world as if it is a test, a litany of the
Latin names of all the species of flower she can see. She is standing by the wall of the
walled garden, and already she is staring past the camera as if there is no one behind
it at all. (p. 63)
The novel clearly installs the daughter-parent-relation as one possible root for Amy’s
fundamental psychological upheaval, which turned a promising young academic into a
runaway single mom who cannot read. The explanatory ellipses of the novel, though,
correspond to the general speechlessness that is characteristic of the Shone family and
their interpersonal relationships. An inner dialogue full of ambivalence that is never
spoken out loud sums up Amy’s mother’s deeply felt yet unpronounced resentments
against her daughter:
You’ve come home, and I’ve missed you so very much.
You’ve come home, I always knew you would.
You must never go away again.
You must always know you can confide in us.
You must always know we will be there for you.
You must never be afraid to bring home someone you like, you can always
have the spare room, we are tolerant people, you know that.
You must know how proud we are of you.
You must know.
You have never known.
You have never wanted to know.
You have never loved me.
You have never shown me the slightest respect.
You have made me old.
You have made me ill ever since the moment you were conceived.
58
Cf. Wurmser, who interprets such a fundamental change of character as the most
differentiated form of the hiding shame reaction: “Shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be
[…] at its most differentiated, in the form of changing one’s character.” (1981, p. 84)
58
You think you can come back, just like that.
You think you have changed, but you haven’t, you haven’t changed.
You think you’re different, but you’re just the very same as you ever were.
(pp. 66sq.)
Patricia’s feelings towards her daughter oscillate between love, fear of loss and fear of
refusal, and a constant suspicion of lovelessness, ingratitude and insolence. Hardly any
of these emotions are openly pronounced between Amy and her mother; Patricia’s
subliminal reproaches, though, resurface immediately after eight years without contact
(cf. pp. 72sq.). Perhaps as an answer to this hidden emotional landscape, Amy appears
highly affect-controlled when she sees her mother again. Once she “allows herself to
smile” when Patricia talks about the factual separation from Amy’s father (p. 69), the
ensuing reactions of both women reveal their relationship’s tangly undergrowth, which
consists of remorse, reproach, guilt, shame and affect anxiety: “Now her mother is
blushing like she may at any moment burst into tears; immediately Amy regrets having
said anything that might be construed as nice” (p. 70). This tension dates back to
Amy’s childhood, as Ash describes it:59
Amy, sitting neat and composed, her hands in her lap, her hair long and coiled and
her face empty […]. Her mother […] talking like she did, smiling all the time,
saying anything into the air, turning to come once and leaning over her seat like a
child and saying, what do you think Aisling, of my theory that my dear daughter
Amy, dear to my heart, my only child, was replaced with a changeling not long after
her birth by a race of being that cannot, simply cannot be brought to love its mother,
or even to smile once in a while? (pp. 180sq.)
Patricia’s demonstrative friendliness, her ‘inane smiling’ as Ash puts it (p. 177), which
is also described by Kate when she and Amy first arrive at her grandparents’ house (cf.
pp. 76sq.), stands in stark contrast of Amy’s aloofness. Due to the fundamental
differences between the two women, the change in Amy’s character does not surprise
her mother (as opposed to the reader). On the contrary, Patricia estimates her
daughter’s long absence and her changes as rather typical in their intangibility:
How very like her, closed, cool child that she is, to walk in after eight years of
nothing. […] Unkempt, they both are; their clothes are unkempt, their hair and skin
unkempt. None of this is what you’d expect of Amy. And yet, how like her, to defy
you, to be so unlike herself. (p. 63)
59
Cf. Lewis 1992, p. 155, ‘Parental Shame in the Middle Class: My Child Doesn’t
Love Me.’ Without going too much into detail it can be assumed that Patricia feels shame for
Amy’s distanced behaviour, which in turn causes rage that leads to even more shame.
According to Lewis, this so-called shame-rage spiral in the face of (assumed) puerile
withdrawal of love appears connected to the middle classes.
59
Again, it is left to interpretation whether Amy ever minded her mother’s
resentment. Neither her described childhood reactions nor her attitude towards her
mother as an adult speak clearly of what she actually felt or feels. Nevertheless, a
depreciative and accusatory parental position can lead to strong feelings of guilt and
existential shame.60 While visiting her parents, though, Amy exhibits physical reactions
that clearly connect her psychological state (and also her temporary illiteracy) to her
parents, especially her father:
Halfway down the hall another whitened wall makes a dead end new to her eye; the
other half of the hall and the other rooms must be in her father’s half of the house.
[…] Her hands fall, useless, to her sides. Her clothes are stuck with sudden sweat to
her shoulders and her back. (p. 70)
Amy passes from page to page of tastefully arranged colours; she shuts the book and
sits in the rich smells of the real food tastefully arranged round her. Her throat
closes. I’m not really hungry, thank you, she thinks. I won’t be able to check your
proofs; I have been unable to read now for a long time, she thinks. (p. 73)
Apart from the depiction of Amy’s somatic reactions on being confronted with ‘home’
after a long period of physical and mental absence from her family, these two passages
also show how the juxtaposition and interrelation of perspectives work in the novel.
The first quotation strongly opposes Ash’s image of the ‘old Amy,’ who never sweats
and always smells of fresh linen and soap (cf. pp. 189; 248sq.; 262).61 The second one,
however, adds to Ash’s report about the anorexia nervosa Amy suffered from as a
young girl and her distanced fascination with food during her student years (cf. pp.
263sq.).62 Altogether, Ash’s account in addition to the descriptions of Amy’s thoughts
and reactions leave the impression of a deep psychological disturbance under the veil
of outer control. On numerous occasions Amy’s expression is described as controlled,
polite, and distanced, as if she wore a mask to cover her true thoughts and emotions.
On the one hand this is the epitome of an English stiff upper lip, completing Amy’s
image as an English Rose. On the other hand she once said, as Ash remembers, “I
think you know I’m less of a cliché than you’re inferring, Ash” (p. 263). She thus
60
Cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 25, as above paraphrased for the definition of existential
shame.
61
Cf. Williams, who points out that Ash’s image of Amy is tinged with her secret
love: “The fact that Ash portrays the younger Amy through an exploration of her experience
of loving means that the principal way of understanding the older Amy is through the
resonance of this love.” (2006, p. 168)
62
Wurmser strongly connects anorexia and shame: “Anorexia nervosa has a strong
root in shame: the body is dirty and ugly and should not be seen anymore. All passivity and
receptivity are shame-laden signs of egregious weakness. Eating is equated with sexual
receptivity (vagina=mouth), hence with weakness (=lack of autonomy), penetration, and loss
of control, and is shameful as such.” (1981, p. 207)
60
resembles Eve in The Accidental, and the conclusion suggests that Amy also hides
behind a mask of shame, to quote Léon Wurmser. If that is the case, then her new self
is more or less her liberated old self, freed from all of the societal and professional
obligations she grew up with. Amy’s unwillingness to be ‘sorted out in six quick
sessions’ (p. 73) shows a rather self-conscious refusal of that particular way of living.
She does not want to return to her old self. The shame she felt for breaking with the
norms and conventions of her environment is about to fade—shame of one or the
other kind, which one is irrelevant for the overall effect. Returning home, confronting
her parents, and leaving again makes the regulatory forces of the old shame ineffective.
When Amy first left, it happened unseen and unheard—in other words, it was
shameful (cf. pp. 68; 79). This time, when she decides to return to Scotland with Kate,
it is a confident step back to their independent life. Amy’s parents appear to accept this
decision, too, although in a different manner. While Patricia sends cheques that Amy
returns unopened (p. 128), her father communicates instead with Kate. His loving and
intelligent way with his newfound granddaughter possibly casts a light on his past
relation to Amy. At first, though, he shows intense signs of psychosis that may or may
not be related to the shame he felt for the downfall of his only daughter.
As opposed to Amy and Patricia, who do at least interact despite all of the
inner distances between them, David Shone remains unattainable. He avoids Amy’s
presence, which is deeply frustrating for her. When she asks him for money and a
passport for Kate, she receives what she asks for, but she does not get what she was
maybe hoping for—his attention. He appears as a blank space at the actual centre of
her interest. Later, when she finds out that Kate saw him while they were in England,
she is very excited and eager to find out how he was (cf. p. 107). Communication with
him is even more disturbed than with her mother; he listens to her on the phone, but
he doesn’t say a single word (cf. p. 74). Both parents do not question the fact that Amy
has no birth certificate for Kate, nor are any of the other questions asked that she
expected and was prepared to answer. Again, the air is full of unspoken inner
dialogues: “She sits and waits for the questions. The perfect food across the table
between them grows cold. Then the mother stands up. Well, she says, I don’t know
about you. But I’m quite tired out” (p. 74). Yet while Patricia retires into her own
façade of self-control, David seems to have given that up. Kate’s description of her
grandfather and his part of the house presents the greatest imaginable opposition to
the hotel-like atmosphere of Patricia’s half.
David Shone is what his own wife would probably call ‘unkempt’ (cf. p. 63); he
sleeps, works and eats in his study, which Kate describes as a literal mad professor’s
home:
Books. Nothing but books. […] The room behind the glass is made of books instead
of having walls like a normal room. […] A quite old-looking man is staring at Kate.
He has a beard and he is nearly bald, except for some long bits of hair that hang
61
down one side of his face. He sees her looking at them and sweeps them up over the
top of his head. […] It smells of cigarettes in the room. The table in the middle of it
is messy with books and paper and ashtrays. […] The man is lying with his feet up
on the couch. There is a sheet and blankets crumpled on the floor next to the couch.
[…] On the floor by him, balanced on a pile of uneven books, there is an ashtray full
of smoked cigarettes. […] Kate sits on the dirty rug by the vase. She has already
looked inside the vase, where there are more cigarette ends. […] [H]e says, do you
know, Kathleen, Kate, that even at night, when there is no noise, no noise at all, I
can’t get any sleep? […] Do you know, that when I eat, I can’t taste anything any
more? And at night, when I close my eyes and try to sleep, my ears fill up with the
sound of telephones ringing and a noise like a whole city full of cars all blaring their
horns?
Kate glances up the walls of the high smoky room. I suppose it’s a good thing
that you own all these books then, she says.
The man stares at her. Then he bursts out laughing. (pp. 88-93)
David Shone’s psychosomatic symptoms may be signs of a déformation professionelle.
This would somehow contradict Ash’s sketchy characterisation of him, though, since
she more closely resembles a self-sufficient, calm professional than a nervous wreck
(cf. pp. 176sqq.). His self-neglect and his almost complete withdrawal from his
matrimonial life into the literary world are more likely reactions to an extraordinary
event or circumstance; and his state might be closely linked to his daughter’s years of
absence. The novel does not reveal the social and professional reactions that Amy’s
father was confronted with when his daughter disappeared. His worries, his feelings
and perhaps even his disappointments are not pronounced, not even silently. His
reactions must speak for themselves. After all, they are possible shame reactions to a
private and /or professional group shame, if not to disgrace. To him, Amy was an ideal
daughter before she left. From her childhood on, he had great influence on her, and
their relationship appears much more positive than the mother-daughter-relationship.
David Shone’s quietness is much closer to Amy’s character than Patricia’s controlled
over-the-top gaiety. Back on their holiday trip to Scotland, when Patricia tried to break
down Amy’s reserve in the above-quoted scene, he simply stated, “Amy has no need to
smile if she doesn’t wish to” (p. 181). Scenes and reactions like these leave the
impression of a strong alliance between father and daughter. As a teenager, Amy tried
to impress him by reading all of the books in his library, and she felt that she should
write a book one day that he would have to read:
Amy thinks of her father’s room and she is standing on the wire spiral stair; below
her, her father is reading a book. She knows not to ask him anything while he is
reading. With one finger she is tipping a book out towards herself. It is summer, and
she is reading her way through her father’s books one after the other. She is making
good progress. She is almost a quarter of the way round the room. She is looking
62
forward to saying to him: I have reached the letter J. One day she will write a book
and her father will be made to read it. (p. 107)
On the professional level, Amy was surely a source of pride until her breakout. How
much or little the relation to her parents was affected by her personal problems, such
as her anorexia, is not mentioned. Patricia possibly experienced Amy’s refusal to eat as
‘defiance,’ as cooking and food are her profession. It is much more difficult to imagine
David Shone’s reactions, especially the extent to which he would play along with the
romantic lines like, “[she] had at some point stopped eating altogether, eating being
impure, and had done herself such damage that she didn’t have periods for years, just
like the medieval saints” (pp. 263sq.). In the end, a deep disappointment is imaginable
for his daughter’s flight from the life and the profession they both shared. Another
clearly distancing element between the two may be the existence of an illegitimate
child. Amy provides only rare hints towards her motherhood. One formulation she
uses while talking to her father on the house phone, “I have a child with me, but I have
no birth certificate for her,” appears strangely distanced. When Amy lies in bed that
night she muses,
She has practically given herself away, and nothing has happened. […] Soon the
universe will act, surely soon the moral universe will come into play. It is ironic, she
thinks, I have left all the clues. I have left my prints at the scene of crime, and now I
have practically handed myself over. And there’s nothing. No hand on the shoulder
to say no, or stop, or caught in the act. Nothing but empty middle-class plot,
middle-class dilemma. Nothing is going to happen to me. Nobody is going to say a
word. (pp. 75sq.)
At this point another shame scenario comes into play. Two readings are possible with
respect to the already mentioned alternative cases of disgrace and conscience/ moral
shame Amy might be caught in. With regard to her social background, an illegitimate
pregnancy represents an immense norm-violation (cf. Patricia’s half-hearted
asseveration to be ‘tolerant people,’ p. 67). The fact that Amy raised Kate literally
outside the societal and legal realm would thus represent an even greater faux pas. By
acting against the norms of her social class, which Amy was raised to accept and
successfully emulate, she possibly experienced severe feelings of shame for the disgrace
she caused her environment.63 On the other hand, though, the text provides ambiguous
information that may lead to an entirely different conclusion. Kate may not even be
Amy’s biological daughter, and Amy’s thoughts of ‘giving herself away,’ ‘leaving prints
at the scene of crime’ and ‘practically handing herself over’ can also be read in a nonmetaphorical way. Amongst other passages, one singled-out paragraph is very
63
Hilgers defines disgrace as a form of group shame, in which the loss of the dignity
of an individual or a group damages another individual’s feelings of honour and integrity
(2006, pp. 25sq.).
63
conspicuous: “Say you took a child. Say you just took a child. Go on. Say it” (p. 95).
Amy may have ‘taken’ Kate when she was just born—clearly an illegal act that would
both explain the missing birth certificate and Amy’s fear of discovery. Furthermore, it
would explain Amy’s restlessness and her literal flight from any form of settlement.
The physical differences between mother and daughter are also stressed, with
Amy having dark hair while Kate is light haired (cf. p. 6). Read in connection with the
description of Ash’s light hair, which she inherited from her mother, an even different
aspect surfaces (cf. pp. 171; 320). Retaining the scenario’s ambivalence until the very
end, the possibility is given that Kate is Ash’s daughter. The journalist doing research
on the whereabouts of Aisling McCarthy, whom Amy talks to at the end of the first
part of the novel, talks about “culty [pictures] she did naked and pregnant and all
along before the fuss about Demi Moore doing it” (p. 132). The exact chronology of
events remains unclear, although the second part of the novel definitely lies before the
first one. Ash’s diary starts on “Monday the 6th April 1987” (p. 157), and Kate is born
on the “twentieth of February 1988” (p. 90). In addition to the possibilities that this
time slot offers, it remains unclear whether Ash writes her account before her
pregnancy or how much time lies between the presumed fire and Kate’s birth. Amy’s
strong physical reaction to the sound of Ash’s name, though, speaks of a strong
ongoing effect of both the person and the events connected to her:
I mean […] Aisling McCarthy, the woman’s insubstantial voice says, miles away,
thin and sharp and distorted by lines of electricity, lines of a power which suddenly
pierces Amy so that it is as if her whole body jolts. She stands, and breathes. She says
something, but no sound comes out of her mouth. (p. 131)
Ambivalence characterises all other possible connections between Kate and Ash. When
the mother of one of Kate’s school friends says, “That one gets more like her mother
every day,” Amy thinks, “Yes, she does. She does, she thought. It still took her
unawares, was always a surprise” (p. 14). Here again, two readings are possible. Amy
might be thinking of Kate’s bookishness, which developed despite her anti-literary
education, but she might also be thinking of the Scottish down-to-earthiness, which
Kate develops and which strongly reminds her of Ash. With these two possibilities in
mind, the following passage, which seems unsuspicious in itself, can be understood in
tow different ways: “Amy looks down at [Kate]. Ash all over her. Her face, her hair, her
mouth, her eyes” (p. 151). Since the case is not to be solved, though, I will only quote
one last passage that depicts both Amy’s present and past desire to assure herself of
Kate:
Whose child are you? mm? Kate? Whose girl are you?
Amy leans over Kate, pushes gently alongside her, close to her, breathes into
her ear. Kate stirs. Did you hear me? Whose girl are you, Kate? Whose are you? […]
64
Yours, she says, like she always does, and sighs, swallows in her sleep, curls in
on herself like a shell, an unborn child. (p. 136sq.)
In the end, the novel does not provide any easy answers to the question as to ‘whose
girl Kate is’ or what made Amy change so fundamentally.
On the level of both structure and content, Amy’s story is an account of an
incubating shame. With respect to several points, Amy’s account corresponds to a
typical virulent shame narrative. The first part of Like is written in free indirect
discourse, a narrative style that offers a plurality of perspectives within one form. One
of the central observations of this study is that this particular narrative style is
perfectly suited for shame narrations, since it contains both distancing and
approximating, or empathising, elements. In the texts discussed, there is usually an
equilibrium between the two, providing closeness to the character whenever possible
and distance whenever necessary—especially in the description of the actual shame
event. Kate and Patricia’s accounts are comprehensible and straightforward, since they
contain a high amount of approximating elements. Although Patricia’s outer
appearance and her inner self differ noticeably, for instance, her emotional and
behavioural ambivalence seems coherent. In Amy’s account, on the other hand, the
reader is confronted with an excess of distancing elements that make it highly
mystifying. Despite the depiction of Amy’s thoughts and her emotional and physical
responses, the third-person perspective remains in the foreground.
Numerous possible shame triggers and reactions are recognisable in Amy only
through the perspectives of other characters—namely Kate, Patricia and Ash—
although the pronunciation and definition of an actual shame scene is omitted until
the end. First of all Ash’s account casts a much brighter light onto Amy’s character
than the first part does. Without the knowledge of her ‘old self,’ the possible reasons
for her behaviour would be even more incomprehensible than they remain.64 Amy’s
shame narrative as a whole is an extreme example since the reader never actually
learns about the true nature of the original shame events. What the reader does learn
right from the start, though, are the signs of her shame reactions. Amy’s low selfesteem, her withdrawal from the world and her unsocial behaviour are possible
markers of a strong shame reaction.65 In the course of the novel, Amy’s characteri 64
With respect to the general comprehensibility of the character, one might also
come to the exact opposite conclusion: if Ash is not talking about the ‘old Amy,’ her characterisation in the first part would only appear partly incomprehensible. The psychological
pattern drawn by Ash’s account only adds to the general irritation at first sight. Nevertheless,
since the goal of this interpretation is not to provide a definitive reading of Like, which would
answer all those questions that are not meant to be answered in the first place, it will
concentrate on the enriching effect of Ash’s narrative on Amy’s characterisation.
65
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 51; 84; Kaufman 1989, p. 5.
65
sation allows the presumption that due to an initial event she was deeply disturbed and
is now on her way to recovering and rebuilding herself. As she puts it, “no doubt you
could find me a therapist who’d sort me out in six quick sessions, but I have opted for
the slow way round” (p. 73). Due to the omitted narration of the actual shame
incident(s), though, the actual form of the shame in question remains undecided. One
crucial event is referred to by Amy in the form of a dream that presents her reaction of
shock to a burnt room and by Ash in one of a number of possible versions of the end of
their friendship. What appears in and of itself as an extreme shame-defence reaction is
the most likely trigger for Amy’s shameful breakdown:
Amy opens the door into a place that has been scorched black. […] Everything that
was here in this room before has become rubble, brittle, nothing. […] She can’t
think where she is. She can’t think what it can mean. It is like the inside of her head
has been blasted with the same sudden heat and left porous and buckled, smoke still
hanging, as sky smashes through the soft top of her skull. (p. 34)
At the base of the cairn I used the big books off her desk, the dictionaries, the
primers. I piled them all up against the inside of the door. All the Proust off one
shelf, all the Woolf’s expensive hardback diaries off another, I hefted them across
the room and I threw in some random novels, books I knew she particularly liked.
Hiroshima Mon Amour, A Lover’s Discourse, I splashed petrol up the door, shook the
last of it over them. As I shut the window after me the room and the night exploded
into light. […]
As I ran I heard the buckling windows smash, and I was so pleased with
myself that it was sore when I breathed. I’d burnt the place down before it entered
my head that I might hurt anybody, anybody but Amy, that is. (p. 304)
Whether this book burning ever actually took place remains left in the dark (for the
present reading it will be assumed that it did), but Amy’s subjective feelings are also
left out, with the exception of the abovementioned dream. It is indeed questionable
whether the text deals with shame at all or whether an altogether different form of
psychopathology is described. Ignoring the latter for the sake of argument, several
alternative initial shame events are imaginable. Most likely, the reader is confronted
with multiple assimilation shame, which consists of ideality and dependence shame.
With respect to her private background, Amy possibly suffered from her childhood on
from ideality shame for the reproach and subliminal resentment of her mother, a
famous T V chef, and for desperately wooing her intellectual father’s acceptance. When
Ash sets her room on fire in an act of revenge, Amy possibly experienced dependence
shame for both the unwanted and irreversible ending of their relationship, and for the
dramatic loss of her books. The destruction of her library somehow equals the loss of
the basis of her independent self. Amy’s self-definition is at that time closely linked to
her success as an elite university teacher in the same field as her father. Bereft of what
made her, a sense of ‘having nothing left,’ of ‘being nothing’ is imaginable.
66
Furthermore, the experience of her dependence on the actual literary material
may be at the core of Amy’s illiteracy. The carelessness with which she treats those
books that have ‘survived’ the burning speaks of the deep disturbance she must have
faced and may function as a shame defence reaction:66
[Kate] hooks her heel on the old book propping the table steady under its wonky
leg. The book has a long word in gold on the back. Her A Clit Us. It looks too nice
and old a book to be putting your feet on. (p. 8)
Amy sometimes uses the pages out of books to fill holes in the caravan lining the
roof or the door, or to help light fires on the beach, and when they go to a new place
she wraps the small things that might break in the pages out of books. Kate is always
very careful to hide the books she’s reading from Amy, who might easily just throw
them away. (p. 27)
Alternatively, Amy may suffer from feelings of disgrace or intimacy shame for the
illegitimate pregnancy and birth of her daughter. Or she may suffer from
conscience/moral shame in case she ‘took a child’ illegally to raise it as her own.
Perhaps none of these shame scenarios apply, or perhaps all of them do—Amy herself
is too mystifying and withdrawn to provide any clarification.67
With respect to the main focus of this interpretation, the seclusion of initial
events, motives, actions and emotions depict a slowly revealing, yet not entirely overcome intensive shame. This shame is multifaceted and distributed among several
characters. Most likely the story of Amy Shone describes the effects of a mixture of
ideality shame and dependence shame. Like Eve in The Accidental, Amy has erected a
façade of ideality around an underlying shame scene, which is possibly connected to
her relation ship with her parents. Different factors may have lead to the awareness of a
vast discrepancy between Amy’s self-ideal and her real self. One the one hand, the
destruction of her library may have equalled the total loss of what defined her most in
her own view. Her ‘value’ in the eyes of her father and her entire private and
professional environment seemed diminished at once, her self-ideal destroyed. No
‘brilliant shining Shone’ any longer, Amy’s utter dependence on her surroundings and
her painful devastation over its loss may have surfaced. At the same time, her
friendship with Ash and its abrupt ending may have touched on another ideality and
66
Cf. Ali Smith’s third novel The Accidental (2005), in which the protagonist
Michael, also a doctor of English literature, suffers from reading inhibitions after an intense
experience of shame: “He had been unable to go near the door of a bookshop without feeling
nauseous. He hadn’t even been able to pick up a book without feeling nauseous” (p. 261).
67
Wurmser ascribes the activity of mystification and the state of mysteriousness to
the realm of intense shame: “The two main terms can be defined as follows: to mystify means
‘to bewilder intentionally,’ ‘to involve in mystery or obscurity’; mysteriousness is a state of
being ‘strange, occult, incomprehensible.’” (1981, p. 244)
67
dependence. Perhaps the weight of her unpronounced love collapsed on Amy the
moment Ash took such heated revenge for being omitted from her diaries. The
admittance of homosexual feelings and the emotional dependence on another person
would be incompatible with the self-ideal of the younger Amy.
Although her dominant presence indicates that she is the main character of
both parts of the novel, Amy remains opaque in her emotional alignment. The resulting mystification, the fundamental change in her character between the first and
the second part, and the actual physical and emotional reactions that are described all
point to an intense and enduring shame experience. The textual organisation of Amy’s
shame narrative also reflects her psychological state, as she teeters on the brink of selfawareness and recovery from a drastic and far-reaching experience. The text’s ellipses
and blank spaces refer to the kind of (non-) communication that Ali Smith places at
the core of the protagonists’ dysfunctional interpersonal relationships. However, the
complete omission of the initial event and the partial ignorance of Amy’s feelings
combined with the strong distance tendency towards distance in her free indirect
discourse all prevent empathic emotions of one kind or the other. Despite the
description of virulent shame reactions and the strong sense of uneasiness and
suspicion that the text conveys, the unsolvable suspense and the inaccessibility of the
protagonist’s emotions do not support any empathic shame reaction; in fact, these
elements work against it rather strongly. This shows that the knowledge of the initial
shame scene fundamentally influences the evocation of empathic reader reactions,
whether in the form of milder shame, as in embarrassment or uneasiness, or actual
empathic shame. The knowledge of the symptoms alone, i.e. the character’s shame
feelings and (defence) reactions does not support any emotional comprehensibility of
the literary shame affect.
II. 2. 2 Intimacy Shame: Jackie Kay, Trumpet II—‘Millie and Colman’
Very generally, intimacy shame has the function of protecting the private sphere and it
emerges in response to the violation of physical or psychological boundaries of the self
(cf. Marks 2007, p. 14). Intimacy shame also includes body shame, which is not related
to a generally negative experience of physicality, as in existential shame (cf. Hilgers
2006, p. 25). For a literary representation of intimacy shame, I will return to Jackie
Kay’s first novel Trumpet (1998) and its account of Millie, the wife of Joss Moody, who
was discovered to be a woman after his death.
The first chapter of the novel has the misleading idyllic title HOUSE AND HOME and
it starts with the first-person account of an almost prototypical shame situation:
68
I pull back the curtain an inch and see their heads bent together. I have no idea how
long they have been there […] looking as conspicuous as they please. Each time I
look at the photographs in the papers, I look unreal. […] I feel strange now. […] I
have to get back to our den, and hide myself away from it all. Animals are luckier;
they can bury their heads in sand, hide their heads under their coats, pretend they
have no head at all. (p. 1)68
Many of the phenomena described in this short scene are recognisable as shame
reactions: the hiding of the shamed subject, the wish to be an animal, the awareness of
the gazes and the conspiracy of the shaming crowd, the feeling of being singled out by
a group and self-estrangement. The figure that is speaking is Millicent Moody, the wife
of Joss Moody, one of Britain’s greatest Jazz musicians. When the novel starts he has
just died and been found to be biologically female (a fact the reader only learns on
p. 21). The people Millie is describing are reporters and photographers of the tabloid
press waiting outside her house; any chapter of the novel dealing with her reads
HOUSE AND HOME , like the interior design column of a magazine, ironically
counteracting the hostility of the paparazzi’s siege. In a way, the novel starts with
Millie’s momentarily paramount shame theory, when her shame anxiety is extremely
high. Characteristically, the moment of public exposure itself is not narrated from
Millie’s perspective. Her account begins long after the first scandalous article has been
printed and the initial shame event has passed. Her past, by contrast, appears free from
any intimacy shame connected to her husband’s sex.
Millie has always known Joss’s actual sex. Paradoxically, part of her shame
following the public discovery stems from its factual absence from their marriage. She
has the impression that she should have been ashamed to live that way; the problem is
that she simply was not. She is thus ashamed of having violated norms in the eyes of
others. Her son, on the other hand, did not know about his father being born a woman.
His feelings of shame are different; in part, they are unexpected and piercing, in part
they just seem to crown a long history of personal shame (for the detailed discussion of
Colman’s underlying competence shame, cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 2). When Millie Moody recalls
the days after her husband’s death, their life together, how they met and how their son
came into the family, a film springs to her mind: “There’s a film I watched once, Double
Indemnity, where the guy is telling his story into a tape, dying and breathless. I feel like
him. I haven’t killed anyone. I haven’t done anything wrong. If I was going to make a
tape, I’d make it for Colman.” (p. 1) Although she wants to hide from the eyes of the
reporters and photographers outside her house (and thus from the eyes of the public),
she also wants to explain, to compensate and to repair damage even though she didn’t
cause it willingly. There is a strong sense of guilt beneath her shame, two affects closely
68
Original quotations here and following from Jackie Kay, Trumpet. London 1998.
69
related 69 yet very distinct in their reaction pattern. The inherent passivity of shame and
the active notion of guilt lead to divergent impulses in Millie: the urge to hide from
exposure, to ‘play dead,’ is contrasted with the need to act and to speak up. At first
Millie’s feelings of shame and guilt are strictly related to the public exposure and
discussion of her family’s private life, not to the nature of that life itself. To a certain
extent she refuses the shame that is demanded of her. Millie sees no reason to blame
herself, nor does she see her actions as a form of misbehaviour:
It was our secret. That’s all it was. Lots of people have secrets, don’t they? The world
runs on secrets. What kind of place would the world be without them? Our secret
was harmless. It did not hurt anybody. There must be a mistake we made. A big
mistake; hiding somewhere that I somehow missed. (p. 10)
Her feelings of shame, the network of secrets and lies culminate up to the point where
“I can feel myself coming down with something. Coming down a long way. It is like
walking slowly down endless steps in a dark cellar, round and round. Dizzy. Out of
kilter.” (p. 82) Millie suffers severely from her shame feelings, though they lack any
underlying shame scene (as opposed to her son Colman, whose intimacy shame for the
discovery of his father’s female sex is strongly connected to the underlying competence
shame he felt since early adolescence). She was never ashamed of Joss and herself, and
she never will be. The first-person narrative supports this impression. Even when her
momentary feelings are paralysing and piercing, there is no need for the distance of a
second- or third-person perspective to come to terms with them. Millie also feels guilty
for the shame her son experiences; she doesn’t expect him to “ever speak to [her]
again” (p. 4). Colman has told his mother “he was too ashamed to go out,” (p. 5) and
Millie is similarly appalled by her environment’s reactions:
Our friends in London have turned sour or too curious. I don’t want to see anyone.
Except Colman. I wish I could see Colman. What could I tell him – that his father
and I were in love, that it didn’t matter to us, that we didn’t even think about it after
a while? I didn’t think about it so how could I have kept it from him if it wasn’t in
my mind to keep? (p. 22)
69
The commonalities and differences between shame and guilt have been discussed
at length for decades: “Many differences have been suggested—guilt applies to actions, shame
to the self […]; guilt accrues to voluntary action, shame may be conferred by one’s status,
one’s body, or by another’s actions if one is identified with them” (Tantam 1998, p. 163).
Besides the “complex interweaving of shame and guilt” (Wurmser 1981, p. 39), one might
differentiate between them very generally as follows: “Shame refers to an aspect of the self
that needs to be disavowed, whereas guilt is evoked by a set of actions or omissions that hurt
someone else; shame in a broad sense is self-related, guilt is object-related.” (ibid., p. 27)
70
Millie Moody’s psychological situation is a good example of the negative effect
of shame as an exercise of power.70 The aggressive exposure of her private life in the
tabloids may pretend to act in favour of a restoration of societal norms, but its most
prominent effect is a violation of those norms. The scandalising coverage of Joss’s
death not only touches upon Millie’s intimacy, but it also violently suppresses what
should be her primary emotion at that moment. The imposed shame covers up any
mourning; the most basic rules of reverence are disregarded. When Millie meets an old
acquaintance who does not know about Joss’s death and its circumstances, she realizes
that “[s]he is the first person to make me feel like an ordinary widow, to give me
respect, not prurience” (p. 24).
Scotland becomes Millie’s refuge, her asylum from “cameras and questions”
71
(p. 2). The way she describes being photographed as soon as she enters or leaves her
London home depicts the physical and injuring aspects of her shameful exposure:72
Even here now the sound of cameras, like the assault of a machine-gun, is still
playing inside my head. […] I hear it over music, over the sound of a tap running,
over the kettle’s whistle—the camera’s rapid bullets. Their fingers on the triggers,
70
Cf. Landweer 1999, who presents a detailed philosophical study of the mechanisms surrounding shame and power. Whether there are actually ‘others’ who condemn one’s
actions or one’s person is irrelevant to the ideational dimension of shame as a means of
exercising power: “Das, was man in der Scham vor sich selbst als ‘Machthaber’ identifizieren
kann, ist ein Gedankenkonstrukt: alle die, welche die jeweilige Norm teilen. Es sind die
verallgemeinerten Anderen, aber eben nicht notwendigerweise die faktischen. Wenn man
nicht die Norm selbst als Machthaber oder Befehlsgeber auffassen und ihr damit einen
problematischen ontologischen Status zuweisen will, so kann zwar weiterhin Scham als
Sanktion aufgefaßt werden, aber die sanktionierende Instanz besteht in nichts anderem als in
unterstelltem Konsens, Meinung und Konformität. Die Sanktionen anderer in Interaktionen,
etwa ihre Empörung oder ihr Lachen, können aus sich heraus keine Scham erzwingen. Dieses
Gefühl beruht vielmehr immer auf der Unterstellung der geteilten Norm, auch wenn diese oft
erst durch die sanktionierenden Reaktionen der anderen in Erinnerung gebracht wird.”
(Landweer 1999, pp. 208sq.) With respect to Millie this means that even though the overall
response to Joss’s female biological sex is positive (cf. the chapter L ET T E R S , pp. 159sq.), and
despite the fact that she lived her marriage practically shame-free, the ‘assumption of a shared
norm’ suffices to let her experience the devastating social power of shame.
71
The different roles Scotland can take in relation to shame are discussed in the
introduction to Ch. II. 2. 4. 1 on Scotland and Shame.
72
For the aspect of physicality in shame, see Landweer 1999, especially Ch. II, “Zur
Leiblichkeit der Scham”, pp. 37sqq. Referring to Jean-Paul Sartre, she emphasises the shamed
subject’s freezing into the other’s object, being deprived of the central position in his/her
universe: “Nach Sartre raubt mir der Blick des Anderen durch die Gewißheit des
Gesehenwerdens die zentrale Stellung in meinem Universum; in der Scham erstarre ich zum
Objekt für den Anderen, und nur durch ihn werde ich Teil der Objektivität.” (Landweer 1999,
p. 39)
71
they don’t take them off till they finish the film, till I’ve been shot over and over
again. They stop for the briefest of frantic seconds, reload the cartridge and the start
up again. […] With every snap and flash and whirr, I felt myself, the core of myself,
being eaten away. My soul. […] Joss’s soul has gone and mine has been stolen. It is
as simple and as true as that. (p. 2)
More of these final feelings of loss and a sense of utter hopelessness also come up when
Millie finds out that Colman is working with a tabloid journalist on a book about Joss.
She clears his room in their holiday home in Torr, a desperate reaction to what she
perceives as betrayal: “I start packing all the stuff in his room away. […] It feels as if he
has died as well.” (p. 88)73
As the above quote shows, Millie’s perceived loss of anima goes along with
almost animalistic reactions, such as her attempt to to hide like an ostrich or her
physical response to the attacks of the photographers:
Of course, the minute I am placed in front of that raging white light […] I am no
more myself than a rabbit is itself in front of glaring headlights. The rabbit freezes
and what you see most on the road is fear itself, not a furry rabbit. (p. 3)
Paralysis, petrification, frozen facial expressions and the overall urge to hide without
knowing where are synonymous with shame, and parallels to animal behaviour are
almost intrinsic.74 Kay exteriorises these internal symptoms into the very tangible
situation of being ‘shot’ by paparazzi. The novel’s account of Millie’s story even depicts
the intensive suddenness that is so typical of the shame affect, 75 as the press did not
touch Joss Moody’s family at all during his lifetime.
Shame was not absent from his family life prior to Joss’s death, yet it was
connected to general aspects of gender and racial differences rather than biological sex.
Between Millie and Joss, the moment when he revealed his female body was the most
shameful in that respect. It appears as part of Millie’s memories, which are narrated in
the historical present:
73
For a more detailed discussion of the connection between shame and betrayal, see
the discussion of the journalist’s account in the chapter on Shamelessness (II. 2. 5).
74
“Behaviours related to submission (observed in both humans and other animal
species), such as a strong desire to escape, gaze avoidance, crouch (a tendency to curl up the
body and look down), being frozen to the spot, and so forth, are the same as those seen in
severe states of shame in humans.” (Andrews 1998, p. 182) See also Tomkins’ characterization: “An individual […] can be shamed into not expressing his distress, either in crying or
in verbal complaint. […] He can be shamed into not showing interest or excitement, or into
not showing it too directly or with too great intensity.” (1995, p. 57)
75
“Scham [...] ist gekennzeichnet durch Plötzlichkeit, Heftigkeit” (Landweer 1999, p.
42).
72
His eyes are determined. He looks at me the whole time. An odd look, challenging,
almost aggressive—as if he is saying, ‘I told you so. I told you so.’ […] I’m excited
watching this man undress for me. Underneath his vest are lots of bandages
wrapped round and round his chest. He starts to undo them. I feel a wave of relief:
to think all he is worried about is some scar he has. […] ‘You don’t have to show
me,’ I say. I feel suddenly full of compassion. […] I go towards him to embrace him.
‘I’m not finished,’ he says. He keeps unwrapping endless rolls of bandage. I am still
holding out my hands when the first of his breasts reveals itself to me. Small, firm.
(p. 21)
The reader does not learn how the situation develops after that turning point; the
narration breaks off at the very moment of shame. Millie describes her reactions later
on as first “feeling stupid, then angry. I remember the terrible shock of it all” (p. 35).
Even though the shock she felt back then is depicted by an ellipsis, the form of
retrospective first-person narrative indicates the entire closure of her shame feelings.
The clear description of her past feelings further supports this impression. What is
striking in the situation, though, is an exemplary reaction of shame anxiety. Joss is
afraid to tell Millie in case she reacts with contempt, and he would rather leave her for
good than tell her the truth. When she insists, his emotions change into anger first: “He
gets angry with himself. I can hear him swearing under his breath.” (p. 20) Then they
turn into active aggression. Undressing as slowly and determined as he does in front of
the woman he was courting for weeks is definitely an attempt to ‘turn the tables,’ to
fight his shame by passing it on to another person.
For Joss and Millie’s marital shame scene as a whole, racial and gender differences played a much greater role than his sex, as the reaction of Millie’s mother
shows:
When I told her I was marrying Joss, she said she had nothing against them, but she
didn’t want her own daughter. People should keep to their own, she said. It wasn’t
prejudice, it was common sense, she said. Then she said the word, ‘Darky.’ ‘I don’t
want you marrying a Darky.’ I stopped her before she shamed me further. (p. 27)
Naming Colman after his adoption brought up a similar problem:
Joss and I nearly divorced when it came to naming Colman. Joss wanted Miles; I
wanted Campbell. […] Joss wanted a jazz or a blues name. What about Jelly Roll, I
laughed. Or Howling Wolf, Bird, Muggsy, Fats, Leadbelly. I was bent over double:
Pee Wee. Joss slapped me across my face. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘White people
always laugh at black names.’ I rubbed my cheek. I couldn’t believe it. I just gave
him a look until I saw the first bloom of shame appear on his. We gave up on names
and went to bed. Sex is always better if you argue before. (p. 5)
Scenes from a marriage—down to the complete absence of any other memory of her
husband than that of a man who showed almost stereotyped male shame reactions (cf.
Marks 2007, p. 101; Lewis 1992). The fact that Joss was born as a woman doesn’t really
73
matter; his decision to live as a man was irreversible. The descriptions of Joss’s and
Millie’s marital sex are also free from any sense of shame, be it connected to sex in
general or to the fact that this is a woman having sex with a man in a woman’s body.
Millie recalls a large number of satisfying and fulfilling sexual encounters, as if to paint
a picture of a ‘healthy’ heterosexual marriage that contradicts her environment’s
assumptions of ‘freakishness’ (cf. p. 64). Various members of this environment have
their say in short intermediate chapters entitled PEOPLE . Written partly in the third
person and partly in free indirect discourse, these chapters depict the sometimes
surprised, sometimes shocked and helpless, but always friendly reactions of people like
the Doctor who examined Joss and certified his death (pp. 42sqq.), the Registrar who
filled out the death certificate (pp. 73sqq.) and the Funeral Director who discovered
Joss’s female sex during the burial preparations (pp. 101sqq.). Other PEOPLE are the
Drummer, one of Joss’s band colleagues (pp. 144sqq.), the Moodys one-time Cleaner
(pp. 171sqq.) and Josephine Moore’s Old School Friend (p. 245). Just like the
aforementioned vox populi collection of letters, the people’s voices show that the lurid
reaction of the tabloids is the exception. Prurience is not the primary public interest in
this case, nor is Millie’s shaming a means of re-establishing norms, though some of the
characters do exhibit shame reactions when they discover the truth about Joss.
The doctor, for instance, wrote ‘male’ on Joss’s death certificate first:
When she first saw the breasts (and she thought of them again driving home, how
strange they looked, how preserved they looked) she thought that they weren’t real
breasts at all. At least not women’s breasts. […]. It took her pulling down the pyjama
bottoms for her to be quite certain. […]
She got her red pen out from her doctor’s bag. What she thought of as her
emergency red pen. She crossed ‘male’ out and wrote ‘female’ in her rather bad
doctor’s handwriting. She looked at the word ‘female’ and thought it wasn’t quite
clear enough. She crossed that out, tutting to herself, and printed ‘female’ in large
childish letters. Then she put the medical certificate in the envelope, wondered what
the registrar would make of it, sealed the envelope and closed the door on the dead
woman. (pp. 43sq.)
The doctor’s seemingly cool and rational reaction to the female body of a supposedly
male patient is starkly contrasted by her use of ‘what she thought of as her emergency
red pen.’ This gesture implies a distinct need for control as if she were grasping at a
straw. The boldness of crossing out the sexual attribution twice, using red ink and
printed letters, reflects both shame and a defence against shame.76 Being a woman and
a Briton with a foreign background herself (‘Doctor Krishnamurty’), she would more
76
Cf. Williams 2006 for a discussion of how the doctor’s examination of Joss’s body
represents a form of violation and how by “writing and rewriting Joss’s biological gender, she
removes from Joss his life’s identity and leaves behind a ‘dead woman.’” (p. 162)
74
likely feel empathy for Joss’s (posthumous) intimacy shame rather than embarrassment, prurience or defence, which would be more likely for a male doctor. The corresponding reactions of other male PEOPLE seem to suggest that this is indeed the case.
The registrar who originally comes from Bangladesh (‘Mohammad Nassar Sharif’) acts
sympathetic when Millie comes to his office with the mistaken certificate; the funeral
director (‘Albert Holding’), a white Englishman, exhibits a mixture of embarrassment
and excitement; and ‘Big Red McCall’, a white Scotsman who was the long time
drummer in Joss’s band, “punches his fist into the pillow saying to himself over and
over, ‘I can’t get fucking comfortable’” (p. 151). All of these men’s reactions to this
particular shame scene vary in terms of their frames of reference and their intensity,
and they are clearly related to the characters’ respective personal and socio-cultural
backgrounds.
Among these three additional accounts of shame witnesses, the chapter
PEOPLE : The Registrar (pp. 73-81) plays an outstanding role. It starts with the
doubtful sentence, “The registrar had seen everything” (p. 73). “But,” as the reader
suspects correctly, “Mohammad Nassar Sharif had never in his life seen a medical
certificate where male was crossed out and female entered in red. On the grounds of
pure aesthetics, Mohammad found this last minute change hurtful. The use of the red
pen seemed unnecessarily violent” (p. 77).
The registrar personifies the antithesis of the world Millie wants to flee from.
He is ultimately decent, friendly and sophisticated. To him, Millie “looked just like a
widow” (p. 79), and “[h]e couldn’t read her face. He couldn’t tell if she was
embarrassed or not” (p. 78).77 He is one of the very few characters that give Millie the
respect and understanding she longs for and that she actually has every right to
receive.78 Even though Mohammad finds the circumstances of this registration
intriguing, he controls himself. The registrar’s priority is to give “everyone in his office
[…] a moment of quiet” (p. 75) and to fill out his forms as sophisticated as possible.
Although he confesses to curiosity, he “had learned never to indulge” it (p. 79). He
therefore stays indifferent towards the shameful depths of the story, yet not towards
77
The fact that the registrar is not able to read Millie’s facial expression illustrates
once again the ‘mask of shame.’ The total lack of facial expressions, the numbness and
stiffness of her outer appearance is part of the physical expression of severe shame.
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 1; 3; 197sq.; 234. Tomkins even locates shame primarily in the face,
since the self and all affects manifest themselves in the face, and especially in the eyes. Cf.
Tomkins 1995, pp. 136; 142.
78
“My husband died. I am now a widow. My husband died. I am now a widow. Why
can they not understand how ordinary that is? Many women have become widows.” (p. 205)
75
Millie’s personality.79 The scene between the two of them is of extraordinary
tenderness and humaneness:
He had a problem, he confessed, in deciding what name to put on the death
certificate, given the name Joss Moody was never officially sanctioned anywhere.
The woman leaned forward towards Mr Sharif. She looked at his hands. She looked
out of the window at the sun. A few drops of sweat appeared on her forehead. She
didn’t say anything for a moment. There was total silence between them. The silence
had an unusual quality to it today because the woman’s spirit was so fine.
Mohammad could sit silent with this particular woman in his registrar office for a
year, maybe two. One of his secretaries could simply come in and out with food and
the two of them could sit there like this looking out of the window, watching the
odd bird swoop and swoon before them, or the odd tree tremble. […] That woman
would not take his lovely handwriting for granted. She would be happy she had a
beautiful death certificate. He did not want it spoiled. He said nothing to her. He
dipped his marbled fountain pen in the black Indian ink and wrote the name Joss
Moody on the death certificate. He wrote the date. He paused before he ticked
‘female’ on the death certificate […]. The woman smiled at him. The intimacy
between them had been like love. (pp. 80sq.)
In its total deceleration this passage offers Millie a shame-free seclusion from the
shame-sodden atmosphere of those days. The scene is characterised by Mr Sharif’s
refinement and Millie Moody’s ‘fine spirit.’ As opposed to the doctor, he is in fact
rational, calm and composed when he fills out Joss Moody’s death certificate.
Mohammad Nassar Sharif’s answer to the lingering shame of the whole situation is a
higher degree of ‘civil inattention,’ or as I would call it, friendly ignorance.80 By fully
concentrating on Millie as the mourning widow that she is, his reaction is perfectly
sober and appropriate. The Registrar chapter thus fulfills two important functions. On
the one hand it counteracts the brashness of the media’s reactions to Joss’s death and
its circumstances. Those social norms that were violated for the sake of the ostensible
maintenance of others are reinstalled that way. On the other hand the third-person
description of Millie that is enclosed here does not only complete the overall
impression of her character. The extent of her sophistication and the actual proportion
of her shame at being publicly exposed become apparent through the registrar’s
descriptions, which are conveyed through free indirect discourse. Without these
79
Cf. Ingrid Hotz-Davies, who states that there is no shame in indifference: “In der
Gleichgültigkeit gibt es keine Scham.” (Hotz-Davies 2007, p. 192)
80
The term ‘civil inattention’ goes back to Erving Goffmann, and it describes,
among other things, a means of avoiding shame-inducing scenes with strangers: “What seems
to be involved is that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one
appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen him), while at
the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from him so as to express that he does not
constitute a target of special curiosity or design.” (1963, p. 84)
76
passages it would not be entirely clear how disturbing this experience must be for her.
This small chapter is thus evidently crucial for evoking the reader’s empathic emotions
for Millie’s intimacy shame. The first-person passages of the HOUSE AND HOME
parts and the third-person description in The Registrar add up to one hybrid narrative
perspective on the character of Joss Moody’s wife. Together with the scandalising and
overly shameless account of the tabloid journalist Sophie Stones, the resulting
multidimensional image of Millie further facilitates the affective comprehensibility of
her shame (a detailed discussion of Sophie’s account is given in Ch. II. 2. 5). While
Millie’s account initially presents her acute shame feelings and shame reactions, the
outside perspectives of the other characters, namely the registrar and the journalist,
illustrate the actual content of her shame.
A comparable multiperspective narrative strategy is also applied in Colman’s
narration (the discussion of his intimacy shame is included in this chapter, since it is
closely related to that of his mother). While the chapter C OVER STORY is actually
written in the first person, it already contains large amounts of the introjected external
criticism that Colman expects from his environment. In the chapter INTERVIEW
EXCLUSIVE , that first-person perspective turns out to be the interview narrative
directed at Sophie Stones, the tabloid journalist who tries to exploit Colman for a
sensational book on his father. In the course of the chapter, the narrative perspective
changes from first-person to a free indirect discourse (p. 120). In addition, genuine
third-person perspectives (i.e. not his own, externalised self-perception) provide a
stark contrast to the other two accounts and cast an even more different light on
Colman’s character.81
Intimacy shame affects Colman as much as Millie, perhaps even more so since
he did not know that his father was born a woman. In the shock-influenced, raging
reactions of his son’s first-person accounts at the beginning of the novel, Joss’s body
becomes the main target of the attacks.82 Colman is neither able to grasp the nature of
his parents’ relationship, nor can he imagine his father’s actual physis: “My father had
tits. My father didn’t have a dick. My father had tits. My father had a pussy. My father
didn’t have any balls” (p. 61). Colman’s feelings of shame and disgust mix with his fear
of Joss’s body.83 The effect of the first and only time he sees his father naked, in the
81
The extreme divergence of inner and outer perspectives on the self can cause
shame proneness, especially in relation to narcissism (cf. Wurmser 1981, Ch. 1: Shame, the
Veiled Companion of Narcissism, pp. 16-28). See also Kohut 1971 and Bouson 1989 for the
close connection between narcissism and shame.
82
The details and the possible psychological background of Colman’s unrestrained
rage and self-hatred were already discussed with regard to competence shame in II. 2. 1. 2.
83
Cf. Wurmser: “The two affects of shame and disgust overlap. In metaphorical
derivatives […] disgust becomes almost synonymous with shame (e.g., ‘I am disgusted with
you’ = ‘You should be ashamed’).” (1981, p. 115)
77
funeral parlour, is deeply disturbing and extremely devastating for Colman. In addition
to his extreme physical response at the sight of his father, his wish to disappear is very
prominent, which once again recalls ‘shame’s aim’:
I walked out of that place as fast as I could. […] I was soaked. […] Maybe I could
just melt, I remember thinking, just melt away. (pp. 63sq.)
The day I went to the funeral parlour I still had the remains of a hangover. I puked
in the toilet of the creepy place before I left. […] I was too freaked out. I was scared
shitless. I’ve never been so frightened. (pp. 69sq.)
On top of the grief for the loss of his father, Colman feels bereft of his own self: “I am
cut up. Since my father dies I’ve been walking around, half alive myself, sleepwalking,
with this pain chiselled into my chest. Jagged. Serrated. Nothing makes it disappear”
(p. 67). Due to the incomprehensibility of his parents’ marriage and the actual nature
of their family, Colman feels torn, disintegrated and disconnected from life as he knew
it:84 “I don’t know my father, my mother or myself. I don’t know any of us any more.
He has made us unreal” (p. 60).
Colman’s intimacy shame is of a much more physical nature than that of
his mother. The visual impact of his dead father’s body, his breasts and his female
genitals seem to question Colman’s own social and sexual integrity. In the period
following Joss’s death, these two realms start to intermingle, especially with respect to
Colman’s relationship with Sophie Stones. By tempting Colman to betray his family,
Sophie endangers his social integrity. In return, Colman fantasises about having “fucks
full of cruelty and sleaze” with her, something that he suspects “all tabloid hacks must
like” (p. 140). Colman also has the impression that “his cock seems bigger since his
father died. Bigger and harder. […] There’s more come too since his father died. That’s
weird, but it’s definitely true” (ibid.), as if he could finally overpower his puissant
father not only by having a penis, but also by having an even bigger one than before.
On the other hand, though, reflections on his father’s sexuality are also the surprising
and unexpected place where Colman’s old pride for his father sparks up again:85
My father never got a leg over. Had a hard-on. My father was never tossed off. He
never stuck it up, or rammed it in, never spilt his seed, never had a blow job. What
did he have down his pants? A cunt—is that it? Or did he wear a dildo? Shit. If he
did, he would have rammed it in, I promise you. (p. 169)
84
For a general psychoanalytic reading of disintegration and disconnection in
literary texts, see Bouson 1989, p. 140. With respect to Scottish writer Janice Galloway, see
March 2002, p. 123.
85
Cf. Williams 2006: “It is Colman that undergoes the biggest mind change, moving
from anger and a failure to understand his father’s femaleness to an implied acceptance of
this.” (p. 159)
78
In the end, when Sophie drags Colman into bed in order to keep him in the
book project, he actually and literally wakes up hung over: “He wakes up sweating. He
is lying in bed next to Sophie Stones! Fuck, how did that happen? He can’t remember
anything.” (p. 261) There will be no scandalising book about Joss Moody after that;
Colman finally decides to read his father’s letter (pp. 271sqq.) and goes to see his
mother.
Millie shared Colman’s feelings of disintegration, irritation and disorientation,
though hers were inextricably connected to his collaboration with Sophie Stones: “I
can’t quite believe it. You think you know somebody. You think you know your own
son.” (p. 83) In the end, her implied hope that Colman would come to his senses and
prevent further, even more profound public shaming through a book seems to be
fulfilled. The chapter on Colman’s competence shame shows that his decision against
another scandal and his reconciliation with his mother suggest an overcoming of his
underlying competence shame. The same hope is also implied in the end with regard
to his more acute intimacy shame and that of his mother. Most of all the awareness that
Sophie Stones was stopped and that there is no perpetual shame coming for Millie and
Colman provides a sense of conclusion. With respect to Millie’s perspective, the last
chapter appears not as completely detached from the protagonists as from Colman’s
perspective. While from his point of view the intimacy and integrity of the two
characters, ‘the woman’ and ‘he,’ appear to be re-established through the complete
distance of the third-person perspective, the line “He moved so like his father” (p. 278)
may also be a distant part of the woman’s free indirect discourse. Assuming that this is
Millie meeting Colman in Scotland, this very emotional and almost sentimental line
does not only lead out of the quarrel between mother and son. It directs Millie’s
emotional focus out of the realm of shame and into the realm of reconciliation with
her son, but first of all into the realm of proper mourning.
Due to the depicted narrative structure of Trumpet the description of Millie’s
intimacy shame appears comprehensible and tangible. The parts of the text that are
most likely to evoke empathic reader shame, though, are closely linked to the exposing
and exploiting activities of the press, namely Sophie Stones. She is by far the most
affect-inducing character in the novel, and her shamelessness is bound to evoke
empathic reader feelings of vicarious shame.
II. 2. 2. 1 Traumatic Shame: A. L. Kennedy, “The moving house”
When the private sphere is violated in an extreme or brutal way, such as during sexual
abuse or rape, intimacy shame can turn into traumatic shame (cf. Marks 2007, p. 14).
My discussion of literary representations of traumatic shame will pay special attention
to short stories. There is a remarkable coincidence that shorter narrative forms often
79
address the subject of extreme forms of intimacy shame. As already mentioned in the
chapter on existential shame and the discussion of A. L. Kennedy’s Looking for the
Possible Dance, a short story—or a short subplot within the larger frame of a novel—
narrates shame in a way that installs the readers as proper shame witnesses, instead of
accustoming them to the shame theory of the protagonist in order to evoke feelings of
empathy for (or instead of) the character.86 The immediate effect of the short story,
which somehow imitates the real life experience of seeing someone else being shamed,
is further intensified by this choice of subject. Besides all of the various possible shame
scenes, triggers, feelings and reactions, there is a set of shame contents that are
indisputably and immediately recognisable. These are first of all sexual abuse and rape,
but also other severe forms of abuse, such as the maltreatment of children.
A. L. Kennedy’s short story “The moving house” (1990) deals with sexual
abuse and it provides an exemplary literary depiction of traumatic shame.87 The
narrative perspective of “The moving house” alternates between free indirect discourse
in the present and past tense, the inner monologue of the main character Grace and
direct speech. From the first line on the reader is thrown into an atmosphere of illness,
anxiety, insomnia and recurring nightmares. The present-tense free indirect discourse
of the first paragraph enters Grace’s present physical and psychological state. Beneath
the character’s strong nausea, “Grace drinks and feels the water from the tap and finds
it sweet. That means her mouth is sour. She feels sick,” there is a large amount of stress
and self-distrust, “she doesn’t think she slept. She wouldn’t have slept” (p. 35).88 This
initial sense of great discomfort and disturbance, and the feeling that this character is
caught in a state of emergency, is nurtured and deepened by continuous hints
concerning Grace’s bad physical and psychological state (pp. 36; 38sq.). The disconcerting present-tense account provides a stark contrast to the past-tense descriptions of
the happy childhood Grace spent with her great aunt Ivy. These memories are full of
86
Cf. Norquay, who characterises the effect of Kennedy’s short stories as “the shock
of a brief encounter” (2005, p. 142).
87
Further examples of the narration of traumatic shame are A. L. Kennedy’s
“A Perfect Possession” in Now That You’re Back (1994), which describes the maltreatment of
children in a religious context, and Laura Hird’s “There was a Soldier…” in Nail and other
stories (1997), which describes a sex killing and the rape of a dead body. Even though I do not
see Kennedy as more ‘intense’ or ‘ambitious’ as the other writers discussed here, her writing
does have a distinct tendency to confront the reader with the dark side of life. Cf. Norquay:
“The conviction underlying all her fiction, that it is the writer’s responsibility to confront the
extreme, the painful, the unthinkable. For Kennedy the technical and ethical problematics are
intertwined.” (2005, p. 146)
88
Original quotations here and following from A. L. Kennedy, “The moving house”
in: Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains. London 1990, pp. 35-41.
80
calmness, modesty and innocent beauty—even despite the fact that Grace was quietly
moved to her aunt’s place after her father left the family.
At first it seems as if the early loss of her father is her primary source of grief.
Yet the description of Grace’s earliest memory, which also happens to be the first and
the last memory of her father, is not only full of tenderness and familial intimacy, but it
is also evoked to comfort her, to “keep it away”:
Her father had carried her, up out of bed in his arms, her feet in his jacket pockets,
his shoulder under her head. She remembers the bitter smell of his shirt, warm
breath and his hands beneath and behind her, holding her up. […] She pressed
against it a little, to be sure. Her hand in his was good, surrounded, and Grace fell
asleep by the rise and fall of his chest. (pp. 35sq.)
Circulating around a non-descript ‘it’ and ‘that,’ the core of the story is subject to a
continuous, and always negatively connoted suspense. ‘It’ is to be avoided, not to be
thought of and not to be repeated, whereas ‘that’ must be remembered and brought
back in order to make the present more bearable (the italics are mine):
But the dream is sharp in her mind, as if it had happened again in sleep […]. (p. 35)
Think of something else to keep it away. The first thing you remember: think of
that. (ibid.)
More. You want more of that. Brush your hair and brush your teeth. Quiet, and the
pain won’t come. (p. 36)
Back at the start, the beginning. Remember that. (p. 37)
When her aunt dies, Grace’s life and self change fundamentally. An uncharacteristic
mistrust and bitter irony start seeping into Grace’s judgments: “[S]he’d been expecting
it, because you shouldn’t trust old people, they always die” (p. 37). With the loss of her
aunt Grace appears to lose all of her self-esteem and self-respect at once. Her
disorientation and frustration when she is forced to move back into her mother’s
house coincides with the introduction of another male character, who for the time
being is only called ‘he’ (p. 38). An inner monologue reflects both her self-estimation
and what sounds like an internalised outer perspective, which is presumably ‘his’
perspective.
He was smiling, you saw him, how he smiled. The eyes were closed and the lips were
back from the teeth. A smile looks like that.
Why did you come here, back to your mother? They said you were going
home, but it never was home and you grew up into you somewhere else. […] You’ll
be out on the street, or stuck here for life. Whichever way, you’ll be nothing. You
won’t be anything. (p. 38)
‘Who are you? You’re fuckun nothun.’ (p. 41)
81
Sensitised as such, the introduction of the character ‘Charlie’ two pages before
the end of the story nurtures the suspicion that there is a connection between the lover
of Grace’s mother, her loss of self-esteem after Ivy’s death and her present physical and
psychological state. Her extreme fear to pass his room and the intensity of her body
reactions, “her head spinning […] she bends forward, holding her ache,” once she
managed to walk down the stairs “in stocking feet, don’t slip, don’t stop” (p. 39) make
clear that hers is not an interior problem. Despite the possible double meaning, it was
not her first period that marks the end of her childhood, as one might suspect:
Grace sits on the toilet and the pain seems suddenly fresh. She sees blood, is
sick, cold after. […] She goes to put on her uniform. It has stayed the same, a
children’s thing, it should be that it no longer fits. (p. 38)
Charlie, or Chick, as Grace’s mother calls him, is characterised with only a few
sentences as jovial and seemingly pally but ruthless. Interestingly, the way in which
Kennedy uses Scots in his direct speech strongly supports this impression. Apart from
little markers in the text, such as “wee” (p. 36), there is nothing specifically Scottish in
the story. When Charlie attacks Grace verbally, though, threatening her so she “won
tell,” the sudden occurrence of Scots and the realisation that Grace must have been
sexually abused coincide.
‘Please, Grace. Grace. Fuckun say it. You won tell. You don even think about it.
‘Stupid cunt. Nobody’s gonny believe you. […] See if they do believe you;
they’ll say it was your fault. You. Pretty, Gracie, fuckun you. Just you fuckun sleep on
that. You do not tell.’ (p. 41)
On little more than one page (pp. 40sq.), the text’s atmosphere of pain, fear and
anxiety, the character’s strong instinct to flee—either into her own memory or to
another place (p. 40)—and the realisation of the initial shame event literally collapse
on the reader. At once, all of Grace’s physical symptoms, her tendency to hide and her
attempts to avoid any memory of the incident that caused the great pain89 are
unmistakably linked to the same traumatic shame scene. With regard to the text-reader
relation, the suddenness of the confrontation mirrors real-life shame experience in
general and shame witnessing in particular.90 This immediacy, however, does not
89
Cf. Hilgers, who writes that the majority of trauma patients do not tend to discuss
the subject on their own initiative: “Ein anderer Teil tendiert jedoch ‘im Kontext ihres
traumaassoziierten Vermeidungsverhaltens und von der Art des Traumas abhängiger Schamund Schuldgefühle dazu, die Traumaerfahrung keineswegs spontan [...] zu formulieren.’
(Freyberger und Spitzer 2002, S. 332).” (2006, p. 107)
90
Cf. Landweer, who describes shame feelings as generally characterised by
“Plötzlichkeit, Heftigkeit und eine[r] – im Vergleich etwa zur Trauer – verhältnismäßig
kurze[n] Dauer.” (1999, p. 42)
82
correspond to the description of the actual shame scene. The rape is implicit in the
intense descriptions of Grace’s shame reactions and Charlie’s jovial behaviour on the
crucial evening. The narrative thus spirals around what will remain the blank space of
the underlying scene. To a certain extent this resembles Amy’s shame narrative in Ali
Smith’s Like, yet the major difference between the two stories is that Like contains a
much larger blank space that does not even touch upon the actual nature of the events,
while “The moving house” is quite clear about these events.
The formal structure of the text corresponds to the elliptic construction of the
story. In the last paragraphs, the frequency of changes between narrative perspectives
increases considerably. While Grace’s uneasiness with Charlie is written in dialogue,
“‘So mummy’s out on the town as well, uh huh?’ ‘I’m sorry, it’s late, I was just going
up,’ the one sentence that moves closest to what happened, “Grace was glad it
happened in their room not her own. Not her bed” (p. 40), moves back into the more
distanced free indirect discourse. This change from a present-tense, first-person
account to a more distanced perspective—be it in terms of narrative time or person—
mimics a real-life narration of severe or traumatic shame.91 Grace’s actual shame
experience remains untold (thus respecting her privacy, which has been violated so
severely by the act itself). Her shame reactions, though, are unmistakable and strong
enough to evoke shame witness emotions, even across the missing link (in contrast to
the literally impossible empathic reader emotions for Amy in Like). Charlie’s blackmailing, his malicious attempt to deconstruct Grace’s self in order to turn her feelings
of shame into feelings of guilt (which can be read as an attempt to ‘turn the tables’)92
91
Cf. Landweer 1999, p. 52. In some of his case studies Wurmser presents changes in
narrative perspective that clearly fulfill the function to distance the narrator from the shame
scene. The following example depicts a patient’s narrative while approaching the core of her
shame feelings (the place where the perspective changes is marked by //): “‘People laugh
because I have terrible, terrible things in me that aren’t expressible to anyone I’ve seen—so
terrible that they always cover their faces with blank, gray masks, but underneath there’s
laughter and mockery. […] I’m feelingless. […] I see things and don’t really see them,
because I’m a dead person. I’m an object, not a person. So much of me is dead or was never
born. The real self is too good for me—because of all the fake. Everything I have, see,
understand is fake and worthless. […] // Nothing an individual feels should be expressed; it
should be put away someplace where it can’t be touched. It should not be seen—like
something dormant, that the person should not even feel himself, that it should not in any
way have any contact with the person himself or with the other people.’” (1981, p. 246) In
case of a change from first to second person, the attempt to integrate the addressee into the
shame experience is being added to the effect of distancing: “‘He was the first authority figure;
he made me feel even smaller and would tell on me to everybody. […] // You don’t know
what will happen next, or whether your feet are on the ground. You have no control over what
happens.’” (ibid., p. 220)
92
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 28; 111; 197sq.
83
and her paralysed, disgusted helplessness provide a concise image of the affective
aftermath of sexual abuse, both from the victim’s and the perpetrator’s side:93
‘Please, Grace, don’t. You’re a good girl. Don’t tell her. If you tell her, she’ll be angry.
She’ll be sad. Nobody has to know, Grace, please.’ She could hear that he was crying.
As if he had taken everything now; even the sounds she would make. (pp. 40sq.)
The smell of him close again made her retch.
And in the morning, she could smell him on her and on her bed and in her
sheets with the repeated rosebuds and the matching pillow case. The sheets that
Auntie Ivy bought her in the summer. (p. 41)
Sexual abuse and rape are major sources of shame, as numerous examples from
psychological and psychoanalytic literature show. By creating a highly sensitive
atmosphere and by concluding on an unmistakable shame-inducing event like this,
Kennedy created one of those short stories that are able to evoke empathic reader
emotions in the form of co-shame. Unlike most of the novels discussed in this study,
“The moving house” does not imply that there will be any positive outcome from the
actual shame scene; rather, the last lines of the story maintain an atmosphere of shame
anxiety that afflicts both Grace and the reader: “It’s something to do with a friend,
Grace, and I’m your friend. I’ll be good to you. Don’t worry, honey, the next time, it
won’t hurt.” (p. 41)
The fact that Charlie has the last word in this story is utterly frustrating and
demoralising, and his sly thread to continue Grace’s traumatic shaming is deeply
unsettling. But even if there will be no further abuse, this ending depicts the effect of
Grace’s traumatic experience, or of sexual abuse and rape in general. The shame
persists and lingers within the victim’s self, often for a lifetime.94
93
Cf. Andrews: “In drawing together social-cognitive and biosocial explanations of
the impact of abuse, a common theme is the victims’ view of how they are regarded by the
perpetrator of the abusive act. Ferenczi’s (1932/1949) premise was that the feelings of guilt
and hatred experienced by the perpetrator were introjected by the victim. These insights
relate to a phenomenon noted by Finkelhor (1983) that perpetrators use their power to
manipulate victims’ perceptions of reality, making the victims believe that it is their own fault
that the abuse is happening. A psychodynamic interpretation of these observations might be
that perpetrators of both physical and sexual abuse project their own guilt and other bad
feelings onto their victims, who, in turn, internalize it.” (1998, p. 181)
94
Note the strong connection between sexual abuse, shame and psychopathology in
the aftermath of the experience (cf. Lewis 1992, pp. 11; 171sq., 177; Andrews 1998, p. 178;
Tantam 1998, pp. 169sq.; Wurmser 1981, pp. 1sq.).
84
II. 2. 3 Conscience or Moral Shame: Ali Smith, The Accidental III—‘Magnus’
Conscience or moral shame occurs when someone’s conscience is violated, such as
through disrespectful behaviour, the refusal to help or the damage of others. As
opposed to feelings of ideality shame, conscience or moral shame is very often linked
to feelings of guilt for the shame-inducing behaviour (cf. Marks 2007, pp. 34sq.). For a
study of conscience /moral shame, we will return once again to Ali Smith’s The
Accidental (2005).
At the beginning of the novel, Magnus suffers from the most intense shame feelings
and shame reactions of all the members of the Smart family (cf. the preceding chapters
on The Accidental, II. 2. 1 and 2. 1. 3). While his mother Eve Smart, a London novelist
on her summer holiday in Norfolk, suffers from multifaceted ideality shame and his
twelve-year-old sister Astrid has to fight with a pervading sense of assimilation shame
when they meet their accidental guest Amber MacDonald, Magnus is literally
paralysed by crushing feelings of conscience and moral shame.
Before the holidays began, Magnus was temporarily laid off for copying a
fellow pupil’s head onto the body of a porn actress and sending the picture around the
school e-mail list. Days later, on “just a Tuesday,” the girl killed herself. Now “Magnus
knows there will never be just a Tuesday again” (p. 36)95
Apart from his two ‘accomplices,’ nobody knows that he was the one who
actually composed the collage on the school computer. Magnus’ primary emotion is
guilt for the actual deed, yet this is mixed with shame for his complete lack of moral
decency. In Astrid’s passing descriptions, her brother first appears to be in a state of
adolescent rebellion:
He doesn’t ever have a bath or shower. He doesn’t get up until two in the afternoon
most days and only comes downstairs to bring down dirty dishes, collect his dinner
in the evening and take it back upstairs with him and lock the door again. (pp.
26sq.)
In reality, his strong sense of guilt for his action results temporarily in a severe sense of
shame for his entire person.96 He hides for hours under the duvet, pondering the girl’s
death and his responsibility for it. He believes that she hung herself in the bathroom,
so he avoids the corresponding place in the holiday home the best he can. In addition
to these strong psychological effects, Magnus shows intense physical shame reactions
95
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, The Accidental. London
2005.
96
“Shame refers to an aspect of the self that needs to be disavowed, whereas guilt is
evoked by a set of actions or omissions that hurt someone else; shame in a broad sense is selfrelated, guilt is object-related.” (Wurmser 1981, p. 27)
85
as well. He suffers from blurred vision, near-blackouts and panic attacks, thus showing
syndromes of what Wurmser calls the ‘three modes of estrangement’ in the face of
severe shame:97
The first time it happened was two days after he knew she’d done it. He was
standing, just standing by a bus stop by a tree. […] Above the tree […] the sky got
darker. Then everything got darker. But nothing had changed. The sky was blue.
There were no clouds. There was no change in the air. […] It keeps happening to
him. It is caused by causal effects. He has caused it. He has changed the way the
world is. (p. 41)
He is sweating. He feels across the wall with his hands, feels with his toes for where
the floor turns into the stairs. He opens his eyes a crack when he knows he must be
past the bathroom door. (pp. 46sq.)
The girl’s suicide divides Magnus’ life into a ‘before’ and an ‘after.’ He calls his old self
‘Hologram Boy,’ and he feels that he is watching this self from a distance as if through
a reversed telescope. Unreal as his old self appears, his new self is ‘too much.’ Crushed
by his feelings of shame and guilt, Magnus wants to disappear, to flee from fear of
being exposed as the culprit.98 He detests himself for his past naivety and his
pretentiousness:
[Hologram Boy] is a three-dimensional reproduction of something not really there.
He was never really there. Look at him. He’s lucky. First of all, he doesn’t exist.
That’s lucky. Second, he is so small. He could slip away through a crack in a wood
floor. Third, he is back then, before. The real Magnus is too much. He is all bulk, big
as a beached whale, big as a floundering clumsy giant. […] Hologram Boy could
never even imagine such monstrous proportions. […] Magnus himself is all bad. He
was bad all along although he didn’t know it. (pp. 38sq.)
Fuck off out of here you fake little shit, Magnus says to Hologram Boy. (p. 53)
The main reason for Magnus’ feelings of guilt turning into shame is the sexual arousal
he felt for the pornographic photo he used for the collage—and which he still feels
every time he remembers it: “He is so fucking monstrous” (p. 40). Contempt and selfdisgust seem to flood Magnus; when he imagines writing an apology e-mail to
Catherine Masson, the girl in question, he throws up before his world starts getting
97
“Almost all experiences have […] an ‘as if’ quality: as if strange, remote, not quite
real and not existing; or as if blurred, hazy, confluent, and not separated; or as if scattered,
chaotic, and not connected (the three modes of estrangement).” (Wurmser 1981, p. 209)
98
“There is, besides feared contempt and isolation, another affective component in
shame that follows exposure, anxiety, and the spreading of the affective reaction. It is the wish
to hide, to flee, to ‘cover one’s face,’ ‘to sink into the ground’. […] The ‘aim’ of anxiety in
general is flight, and hiding is a form of flight.” (Wurmser 1981, p. 54)
86
dark again (p. 51).99 His self-depreciation is at its peak when he tries to hang himself
too in the bathroom, but forgets to lock the door: “Meanwhile someone has come into
the bathroom. It is his own fault. […] He is such a failure. He can’t even do this
properly.” (p. 55)
When he reaches this all-time low, when Magnus’s shame feelings have
become too strong for him to bear any longer, Amber steps into his life like ‘an angel.’
She is the first person to whom he tells what happened, that it “was just a joke,” and
“an accident” (ibid.). Magnus breaks down when she offers her help. Actually, she is
“holding very tightly round [him] with both her arms. […] Are you sure now? the
angel who’s holding him says” (pp. 55sq.). Amber possibly saves Magnus’s life on their
first encounter. In the course of the novel she also helps to build up and define that
‘new Magnus’ she helped to prevent from suicide. She does so most prominently in
form of his sexual initiation. While Amber’s relationship to Astrid resembles that of a
friend or older sister, there is already a slight sexual undertone beneath her
relationship to Eve.
Michael, by contrast, hopes to have an affair with her but is constantly
ignored. Her intensive sexual relationship with Magnus appears to be the most powerful antidote against his psychological and physical self-contempt. By moving the centre
of attention to a realm that simply did not exist in Magnus’s life prior to the incident,
the dichotomy between his ‘old’ and ‘new’ self is maintained yet with a different
connotation (for it is hardly possible any longer to return to ‘Hologram Boy’). Every
day, Amber and Magnus have sex in the local church. Paradoxically, this seemingly
shameful act, which certainly violates social and moral norms, is synonymous with
Magnus’s recovery from his most pressing affects of guilt and shame. To a certain
extent, the same mechanism is at work here as the one that allows his mother Eve to
‘waste everyone’s summer’ and feel guilty about it rather than acknowledge her
feelings of guilt and shame for not being able to write. As mentioned above, guilt, but
also minor forms of shame, can serve as a screen against more severe, underlying
shame affects (cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 26; 81). By replacing the unbearable and widely
unacceptable responsibility for the suicide of another person with a transgression of
societal norms that weighs considerably less, Amber distracts Magnus from the
pressure of his underlying shame scene. Instead of feeling crushing shame for his entire
99
There is a close connection between the affects of shame and guilt on the one side
and self-hatred and self-contempt on the other: “It should be noted that just as guilt is often a
screen affect, a defense against shame, so the qualities of self-hatred and self-directed rage are
not rarely defenses against the much more terrifying affect of self-contempt.” (Wurmser 1981,
p. 81) When read in this light, Magnus’s ranting at his old self as Hologram Boy can be seen
as merely a way of controlling those underlying self-directed feelings that literally make him
throw up.
87
personality, Magnus’s emotional focus transforms into a form of guilt for what he does
with Amber, which is much easier to handle.
Can you ever be made innocent again? […] Magnus cannot believe how all right,
how clean again it is possible to feel even after everything awful he knows about
himself, even though supposedly nothing about what Amber is doing, or he is
doing, or they are doing together, is innocent in any way. In fact, the opposite is
true. (p. 152)
Sex is Amber’s cure for Magnus. With regard to Amber’s ‘shame therapy’ for Astrid
and Eve it was pointed out that it contained both the destruction of old habits and love
objects and the reconstruction of the actual self. In Magnus’s case, the destruction had
already taken place before her arrival; there was no more need for it. In retrospect,
Magnus thinks of his extreme psychological state and he “remembers himself that
night, a broken boy on the ground” (p. 148). His entire world appears shattered, and
Amber is part of this splintered reality too:
His mother, broken. Michael, broken. Magnus’s father, his real father, so broken a
piece of the shape of things that, say he were walking past Magnus, his son, sitting in
the corroded bus shelter of this village right now, Magnus wouldn’t recognize him.
He wouldn’t recognize Magnus. Everyone is broken. […] Amber is broken, a
beautiful piece of something glinting broken off the seabed, miraculously washed up
on to the same shore Magnus happens to be. (pp. 148sq.)
This all-embracing brokenness is the exteriorised effect of Magnus’s deed. Once he
tells Amber, “I broke somebody,” but her only response is that she “unbuckles him” (p.
149). “It is Amber who makes things okay” (p. 139), Magnus thinks, which is a clear
sign that her cure works. Sex is meant to heal Magnus’s self-esteem (and to satisfy
Amber too, as she reasons that her actions are not entirely altruistic, p. 252). As a
matter of fact, though, Amber only makes things feel okay; despite the strong
distraction, Magnus’s shame and guilt persist nonetheless. When Amber has left, and
the Smart family returns to their emptied house, his school suspension is lifted and
Magnus “is supposed to be relieved” (p. 238). But the ‘happy ending’ that his mother
sees in his invitation back to school appears to him as unjustified, “something was
wrong with it” (p. 241). On the very last day of the year, he tells Astrid the entire truth
about his role in the suicide of Catherine Masson, “beginning at the beginning” (p.
258). Pronouncing his guilt and shame is a first step to attaining proper relief from the
“stone slab [on] his back” (p. 245). Instinctively, Magnus draws a connection between
the events of the summer, Amber and the cleared-out house, which have had a positive
overall effect: “[I]t was good when we were on holiday this year, he says. […] It was
really good, too, he says, when we got back here and there was like nearly nothing left”
(p. 257). Stripped bare of literally anything that reminded him of Hologram Boy, the
outer conditions were good for Magnus to reconcile with his new self and have a fresh
88
start. He realises, though, that the outer conditions alone cannot ‘make things okay.’ It
is not clear whether he hopes for forgiveness or for simple understanding when he tells
Astrid about, but in the end the act of pronunciation is primary to her actual reaction
to the story.
Many of the narratological aspects of the accounts of Astrid and Eve also apply to
Magnus’s part of the story. The deeply troubling guilt and conscience shame feelings
that he suffers from are presented in a comprehensible and tangible way. Unlike these
other accounts, though, Magnus’s free indirect discourse is not supplemented by the
perspectives of the other characters; due to this concentration on his own focus the
narration’s attention lies largely on his sexual experiences with Amber. Despite all of
the potential shame content of their secret affair and their lovemaking in a church,
their relationship is described in an almost shame-free (but not shameless) fashion. On
the narrative level, the initial conscience /moral shame scene involving Magnus’s
defaming collage and the girl’s suicide is not replaced by this particular shame screen.
In the end, Amber’s cure for Magnus also seems to affect the reader as a means of
distraction from the actual shame scenario. To that extent, Magnus’s character is
bound to evoke the least empathic reader emotions of all the characters in The
Accidental.
II. 2. 3. 1 Shame-Guilt Dilemma: A.L. Kennedy, Everything You Need
The shame-guilt dilemma is closely related to conscience or moral shame. In this case,
though, the interrelation of shame and guilt feelings becomes an unsolvable
intrasystemic conflict. Shame or guilt prevail alternately, and the avoidance of one
leads inevitably to the other (cf. Hilgers 2006, p. 26). For the representation of a
literary shame-guilt dilemma, we will move to one of A.L. Kennedy’s novels,
Everything You Need.
Everything You Need was published in 1999, and it is supposed to be one of the most
ambitious texts by A.L. Kennedy. The novel tells the story of a young writer with the
tellingly innocent name Mary Lamb, who wins a seven-year scholarship from a writers’
community on the remote Southern English Foal Island. After the alleged death of
Mary’s father, her mother left her with two uncles—her mother’s brother and his
partner. But, as the reader soon finds out, her father is still alive. In fact, he is Nathan
Staples, one of the authors living on Foal Island, and he becomes Mary’s tutor for the
duration of her stay. The novel follows Mary and Nathan through these seven years,
telling the story of their living and working together, which is at all times
overshadowed by Nathan’s inability to tell Mary who he actually is. Large parts of the
text are also devoted to Nathan’s own work-in-progress, which is an autobiographical
89
account of his life, his marriage to Mary’s mother Maura and the background of the
family’s drastic break-up: “It was a story that he’d been attempting to write for a
stupidly long time, although stories weren’t really his forte and he didn’t quite know
what he’d do with it when it was finished, or who would care” (p. 63).100 At the end of
the novel he finally hands over this story to Mary; she will learn who he is just as the
reader did, only slightly later.
Very generally, the novel presents a multitude of perspectives. The main
characters’ accounts consist mostly of two perspectives: a past-tense free indirect
discourse set in regular type and a present-tense inner monologue set in italics.
Nathan’s account is also incorporated through the autobiographical narrative, which is
typeset differently using a typewriter face, regular, in italics and bold.
Of the two main characters, Nathan takes up considerably more space than
Mary, both on the level of content and in terms of reader engagement. This may come
as a surprise, since the story of this young woman is highly emotional. When Mary
wins the scholarship she leaves her home and her first love behind, and she looses both
of her uncles in the years 1990 and 1997 respectively. On top of this, she also
experiences uncertainties concerning her father’s existence101 and her first successes
and setbacks as a young writer. But even though Mary’s story is so compelling, the
reader’s empathic reaction to the character of her father is bound to be far greater.102
One major reason for this lies in the multi-layered, complex and virulent
shame-guilt dilemma within which Nathan is caught. His sudden and irrevocable
separation from his wife and his daughter forms the underlying shame scene, and
although this split lies years in the past, it is a continuous trigger for intense feelings of
shame. While the reader is confronted with the protagonist’s shame feelings and shame
reactions right from the beginning of the novel (starting with Nathan’s depressive
mood and his first suicide attempt within the first 25 pages), the description of the
100
Original quotations here and following from A. L. Kennedy, Everything You Need.
London 1999.
101
Nathan’s publisher Jack writes letters to her as her father, trying to make up for
Nathan’s unnerving failure.
102
‘Empathic reaction’ strictly refers to the empathic shame reaction as defined
within the context of this book. Other readings have interpreted Nathan’s predominance as a
sign of his masculine authority: “Even if he were not her actual, biological father, Nathan is
Mary’s ‘mentor’, as though she cannot become a writer, or make a transition into sexual and
emotional adulthood, without his guidance. Nathan is very obviously Byronic, Heathcliffian
in his characterisation and his outsider status and association with the elements lend him a
special kind of masculine power so that his neuroses become strengths in a romantic
context.” (Mitchell 2008, p. 73) Empathy in this context is completely detached from
sympathy, as the discussion of self-pity in Nathan’s account will show later on.
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initial shame event only follows on three pages out of 567 (cf. 263sqq.).103 The fact that
Nathan had “been attempting to write [this story] for a stupidly long time,” that it is
part of Nathan’s autobiographical literary (and therefore self-distanced) account, and
its position way into the text correspond to a real-life narrative of a severe shame
experience that can only be told from a fair distance. Despite the great time lag
between the actual event and its representation in the novel, the lingering feelings of
shame that stem from this particular experience are nevertheless tangible. The
virulence of Nathan’s shame feelings concerning the involuntary end of his marriage is
apparently renewed through memory. Recalling the harsh and uncompromising way in
which Maura forced him to leave the family for good, Nathan’s shocked and paralysed
reactions back then intermingle with his feelings about it in the present:
I wait and rock until there are no more sounds from our room and then I wait more.
I understand that she has gone and I do not expect her to return, I am just waiting, I
don’t know for what.
Please. […]
This isn’t true. None of this is true. Please. […]
I dress and go out through the quiet hotel. The night is clear, at the edge of a
frost, and I’m shivering very deeply, helplessly. I cut over the grass and then trample
across a flower bed, crush out the last of late blooms, I don’t know why.
And I come to the palely blue-painted curl of their swimming pool and
scramble in. […] I work my way past hazy, graded markings from the shallow end to
the deep and then I stand. I can feel the ghost of drowning, closed over my head. (p.
272)
Maura causes crushing shame with her sudden withdrawal of love and affection (and
her open threat accusing Nathan of child abuse if he should ever try to contact her and
Mary again). His symbolic suicide is both an immediate reaction and a prefiguration of
his future attempts to ‘exit his own existence,’ as he puts it (p. 42).
On the other hand, Nathan’s shame ‘landscape’ is closely linked to his feelings
of inadequacy as a father and his inability to tell Mary the truth about his identity; on
the other hand Nathan is astonishingly faithful to Maura—or rather to his ideal image
of her. Despite a deep felt anger for the drastic end of their marriage and her
prohibition of any contact, Nathan still loves Maura and secretly hopes for
reconciliation—a hope that keeps him vulnerable and prone to new shame when he
meets her again. All of his romantic and erotic interest concentrates on her.104 When
his memories occasionally fuel almost compulsive masturbation, this inevitably leads
103
In this regard the structure of the narrative is comparable to that of Amy’s
account in Ali Smith’s Like and to Grace’s account in A. L. Kennedy’s “The moving house.”
104
In this respect I disagree with Mitchell who sees a clear sexual-incestuous
connotation in the relationship between Mary and Nathan (cf. 2008, pp. 80sqq.).
91
to even more shame and remorse, especially with respect to his daughter, for whom he
wishes to be pure and innocent.105
Another prominent source of shame is Nathan’s illness. The shame for his
cancer, though, often works as a kind of screen against his more fundamental feelings
of shame and guilt—best described when Nathan tells Mary about losing his lung and
being ‘in remission’ in order to stop her from questioning his evasive behaviour
(p. 137; the scene will be analysed in detail below).106 The relationship between Nathan
and Mary is full of ambivalence and it is somehow synonymous with the shame-guilt
spiral described in Everything You Need. Nathan feels guilty for not taking care of Mary
as a child, although he knows that this was beyond his influence. Yet although he
craves closeness now that she is finally with him again, he is unable to hold her gaze
and behaves extremely awkwardly, even hostilely. The root of the guilt and shame that
continuously alternate within him lies in his inability, or unwillingness, to tell her who
he really is. This again evokes feelings of shame in Mary, since she cannot understand
his behaviour. Their relationship is therefore characterised by misunderstandings,
unmet expectations and disappointment. They are bound to experience mutual shame
on several occasions, which in one case even leads to an entire year of silence between
the two of them.
As already mentioned, Mary does not get to know that Nathan is her
biological father in the course of the novel. However, the reader learns this at a very
early stage, and this knowledge binds the reader much more to Nathan’s perspective
than to Mary’s (another likely reason why Nathan’s character is able to evoke much
stronger empathic reactions than Mary). Even more so, Mary is—apart from her uncles
and Jonathan—the only one who doesn’t know who Nathan really is. Everybody else
on the island knows, and since she hardly ever moves outside that radius (apart from
occasional trips to London to see her publisher or to see her mother, who also knows
about Nathan being her mentor), the balance of knowledge is highly uneven. On one
occasion Mary shows that she is aware of this, although she cannot comprehend the
problem entirely. Unlike Nathan, she attempts to break the shame-guilt spiral and says,
“I mean, I don’t have to know about you, but now you know every fucking […] thing
about me and I hardly know more about you than your name” (p. 136). Yet as long as
Nathan does not take a step outside the vicious circle of shame-guilt-shame, she is
bound to fail.
105
The details of one ‘fucking awful bastard night in the flat,’ as Nathan calls it
himself (p. 134), and a related scene with Mary (pp. 133sqq.) will be discussed below.
106
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 26; 81. See also the discussion of said mechanism in the
characterisations of Eve and Magnus in Ali Smith’s The Accidental and in the chapters on
ideality shame and conscience/moral shame respectively.
92
Mary necessarily relates Nathan’s strange and distanced behaviour to herself.
She feels “shouted at, or wheedled, or badgered and then sent away again not to write”
(p. 107). Thanks to the use of multiple perspectives the reader is made aware of the
underlying cause of Nathan’s jovial and aloof behaviour, and his actions thus become
evident as multifaceted shame reactions.107 Due to the fact that Mary remains unaware
of this, the immediate result of his reactions is heavily disturbed verbal and non-verbal
communication. There are numerous scenes between the two of them in which
Nathan’s seemingly jovial behaviour deeply disturbs Mary, whereas he actually (re)
acts nervously or defensively—either due to feelings of shame or shame anxiety. This
mechanism is vividly depicted in two particular scenes that also present the narrative
and typographical way in which the communicative positions and perspectives of the
protagonists are organised.
In the first scene Nathan asks Mary what she wrote as her prediction for the
seven years on Foal Island. She answers, “Mary Lamb is a writer,” although she admits
beforehand that she finds it ‘embarrassing’ (p. 92). Nathan’s reaction is disastrous:
Nathan laughed—a sudden, hard crack of sound. He might, conceivably, have
laughed because he was delighted, or pleasantly surprised—he could have been
amused, or astonished, quite as easily as he could have been moved to mock. And he
might have been happy, and perfectly able to tell Mary just what he meant, to erase
any possible offence. But he never got the opportunity.
‘Sorry, I—’
Before he could turn, Mary was leaving, walking away.
I don’t have to be here. I don’t need him. He doesn’t know anything I want to
learn. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck. Him.
His last sight of her was blurred dangerously across by his own front door as
she hauled it shut and sealed him in. The impact of wood against wood flinched
through him, while his thinking clattered and fell.
They both made an effort not to cry and were both not entirely successful.
(pp. 92sq.)
The juxtaposition of both characters’ free indirect discourses, direct speech (which
constitutes the smallest part of the entire scene), Mary’s indirect speech and Nathan’s
self-observations in italics depict the conversational and emotional turmoil in which
the father and daughter are caught.
Nathan’s laughter reconfirms Mary’s self-conscious fear of being ridiculous,
and her shame anxiety proves to be true. Mary’s insecurity about her identity as a
writer, though, corresponds to an entire cluster of insecurities that Nathan suffers
from. He permanently questions his identity as a writer (for writing about “blood, fear
and fucking for the thinking lady” instead of ‘proper’ novels, p. 105), as a man (for
107
The most concise description of possible shame reactions and shame defence
reactions is presented in Marks 2007, Ch. 3, “Hochmut kommt nach dem Fall,” pp. 71-101.
93
being left by his wife) and as a father (for not taking care of Mary and for not avowing
himself )—but this inequality is again perverted by heavily imbalanced knowledge.
Nathan can well imagine the insecurity of a very young writer, even if she doesn’t point
that out explicitly. Mary, on the other hand, has no reason to assume that a successful,
jovial middle-aged writer is driven by crushingly low self-esteem and constant shameanxiety. In this case the offence is not ‘possible,’ but inevitable. Although Nathan is in
the weaker position as a result of his self-concept, the force of the shame-guilt dilemma
he is caught in drags Mary into subjection. Close to the end of the novel the extent of
the whole situation becomes evident when Nathan reveals his seven years’ prediction.
He wrote, “Nathan Staples is still married” (p. 558), a sentence that both reveals the
reason for his nervous laughter and the actual priority he always gave to the fact that
Maura never properly divorced him.
The second exemplary scene in which Nathan gets himself and Mary into an
almost insoluble spiral of guilt and shame has even more far-reaching consequences.
As the length of the chapter suggests, not much is happening in the year 1993 (pp. 261275) due to the fact that the two main protagonists do not speak with each other.
When Mary comes back from her first uncle’s funeral, “She seems calm. Which isn’t
good. I mean, that kind of loss, it should show more. Unless it’s so deep that it can’t” (p.
256). In an attempt to console and help her, Nathan tries to objectify the feelings of
guilt that Mary experienced at the funeral. The mourners only talked about her first
stories being published and how proud Morgan was of her, though she wonders “but
why talk about that? Why act as if it’s made me any different? Why not … oh, I don’t
know” (p. 258). To see their attention focussing on her, rather than on Morgan or
Bryn, seemed inappropriate to her. Nathan mistakes Mary’s feelings of guilt for shame,
but when he realises that his advice to ‘disregard’ others people’s opinions in order to
stay ‘clean’ is completely counterproductive, it is too late: “Shut the fuck up. […] Save
it. Save it, you cunt, you witless, fucking cunt.” (ibid.) In the mechanism described
above, Mary’s self-concept and inherent shame anxiety let her draw the inevitable
conclusion, “I hadn’t realised I went to Morgan’s funeral to have my ego enlarged”
(p. 259). When she asks Nathan to go, his strong reaction is only comprehensible
before the background of extreme shame and guilt:
Having nothing else to do—nothing he could think of—Nathan knelt rather
clumsily in front of Mary’s kitchen table and then cracked his forehead as hard as he
could against its edge. Pain spattered whitely across his closed eyes and guessed he
had bitten his cheek when his mouth began to thicken with the sweet, salt metal of
himself—of the red inadequacy stuttering up his veins.
He waited. Cracked his head again.
And again.
He waited.
He swallowed blood again.
When I bleed, I cry.
94
She didn’t come back to him.
He knew she wasn’t going to. (p. 259)
Sadly echoing the child Mary’s reaction to an injury of her father, “When I bleed she
cries” (p. 147), his self-mutilation is a clear attempt to coax Mary back to that kind of
empathy. When she does not come back to him, he interprets that reaction as total
refusal. What he perceives as withdrawal of affection fills him again with crushing
shame, to a large extent because it reminds him of Maura’s refusal.108 Even though
Mary seems conciliate rather than irate—Sophie tells Nathan that “she isn’t—she does
still talk about you. If you wanted to know what she says …” (p. 274)—he assumes
their silent year to be their destiny:
God, what the fuck do you want from me?
God, enough. Just enough, enough.
I miss her.
[…] Why let me have her near and then take her away? Why only bring her
here to hurt us?
We’ve never done any harm. She’s never done anyone any harm.
This is enough.
Please, God, let it be enough. (p. 275)
Here again, Nathan displaces the actual core of the problem; neither Mary nor he is
subject to some cunning divine plan. His extremely strong shame theory, his shame
anxiety and his defence mechanisms produce these seemingly inescapable and
unbearable situations.
As already seen above, those chapters dealing with Nathan that do not
represent the first-person account of his own novel are written in a very dynamic
hybrid narrative form that alternates between free indirect discourse and italicised
interjections in the first person. Expressions of rage, self-disgust and self-hatred are
mostly limited to the latter, although the other perspectives often support and seldom
oppose Nathan’s self-image. As a result, Nathan is not a positive character. This
becomes even more pronounced as the novel continues and his self-depreciation turns
into self-pity, which is almost as unnerving as his compulsive provocation of ever-new
shame incidents.109
108
Cf. Wurmser for the general connection between shame and the fear of losing
love: “The basic fear in shame is therefore the fear of losing love and eventually the love
object; it is a version of separation anxiety.” (1981, pp. 82sq.)
109
In a very recent discussion of narrative empathy, Suzanne Keen writes about the
empathy-suppressing effect of self-deprecation as a shame reaction that turns into self-pity
(though without actually recognising the connection between the shame affect and the
appropriate reader reaction). Keen chooses Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable from 1935, an
initially highly empathising shame narration, as an example of what she calls ‘ambassadorial
95
In addition to the extensive descriptions of Nathan’s shame feelings and his
shame reactions, the reader’s shame sensitivity is also sharpened in direct proportion
according to Nathan’s strong shame theory. The novel accomplishes this through a
number of what I would call ‘preparatory’ scenes that depict Nathan’s shame
expectations, his shame anxieties and his ‘talent’ at putting himself into ever-new
shame scenes exactly because he is so afraid of being shamed.110 Sensitised as such, two
climactic scenes of shame in the second half of the book can be read exclusively against
the background of the main character’s shame disposition and more or less
independent of the reader’s own shame theory. Such a reading can lead the reader to
strategic empathy’. The passage in question describes the strong verbal abuse the main
character, Bakha, suffers after the toilet sweeper accidentally brushed against a wealthy
member of a higher caste: “Repeatedly abused through violent shouting and cursing, with
which a crowd enthusiastically joins, Bakha reacts with paralysis, fear, dumb humility, and
perspiring inaction. Simple phrases of psycho-narration describe Bakha’s evolving feelings in
six intervals to a scene otherwise comprised of the shouts and insults of the sweeper’s
tormentors.” (2007, p. 484) Both the character’s physical reactions and the alternating inner
and outer perspective illustrate the typical narrative form of literary shame narration that is
bound to evoke a corresponding reader reaction. Keen writes, “This simple description of the
physical symptoms of fear, regret, and mute appeals to a sadistic audience garners an
empathetic response from many readers that I have surveyed (college aged students, reading
the novel in a Postcolonial Literature class).” (ibid.) Yet in the end the author fails to sustain
the empathic effect despite the initial usage of all the ‘right’ strategies: “Anand employs
descriptions of bodily states and simple psycho-narration, in combination with the
alternating passages of dialogue (abusive taunts), to evoke the empathetic reaction. But the
author’s effort to transfer readers’ empathy into an empathic conviction of injustice falters, in
part because a shift in narrative technique. In a subsequent passage, Bakha reflects on the
injustice of his experiences and finally becomes hurt and enraged. […] Bakha’s inner voice
rehearses his experience in quoted monologue, but Anand fails to elicit my students’ empathy
using this technique.” (ibid.) In Keen’s view, the reason why this “over-the-top interior
monologue” literally “backfires” at the character, leaving the readers in “disgrace, frustration,
or even uneasy snickering,” (ibid., p. 485) is time sensitiveness; the novel was written for a
specific audience of English Marxists and Indian intellectuals, not for 21st century college
students. However, there are significant parallels between this inner monologue and Nathan’s
self-denigrating shame reactions (or Colman in Trumpet, to give another example): “Why was
all this fuss? Why was I so humble? I could have struck him! And to think I was so eager to
come to town this morning. Why didn’t I shout to warn the people of my approach? … Not
one of them spoke for me! The cruel crowd! All of them abused, abused, abused.” (ibid.) In
the evident shame context of this passage, the subsequent rage and ranting already mark the
end of the actual shame feeling. Belonging to the group of defence shame reactions, raging
and ranting are therefore bound to evoke ambivalent reader reactions regardless of their
comprehensibility.
110
Cf. Wurmser: “Shame anxiety is specifically self-potentiating and thus especially
prone to traumatic mobilization and loss of control.” (1981, p. 55)
96
feel a remarkable degree of co-shame for Nathan, making Everything You Need the best
example of the way a literary text is able to accustom the reader to a foreign, entirely
immanent shame theory on the basis of which present literary shame events can be
valued.
One typical episode of the preparatory kind describes the already mentioned
‘fucking awful bastard’ night Nathan spends in his London flat. It is a night full of
alcohol and ‘self-abuse,’ as Nathan calls it—“his best available distraction” (p. 119). He
messes up his flat to the point where it is “fast becoming a forensic paradise” (p. 120).
In an interjection in which he imitates the voice of a fictitious policeman called to a
crime scene, Nathan tries to distance himself ironically from what shames him most
deeply:
‘First, Inspector, the bloody living room, where he struggled to open his veins with a
sharpened table. Next the spattered bathroom […]. And finally the bedroom—the dark
blue duvet cover particularly frank in its display of air-dried jism. Here the first shot,
here the second, here the third, and here the characteristic smearing left by hand and
knob-end wiping. Strange that he saw no reason to cover his tracks.’
But why the fuck should I? This is all I’ve got. The least a man can do is leave a
mark.
Jesus, what a mess.
Tired, aching, stupefied with solitude and toxins, he could no longer dodge
that sleek and dogged, inoperable thought.
I don’t want to be this way. Dear God, don’t let me have to keep on being this
way. Please. I’ll do anything. If you’ll only tell me what.
There came, as he’d expected, no particular revelation. (p. 120)
Nathan’s attempts to distance himself from his feelings of shame, his stubborn
insistence on ‘leaving his mark,’ are bound to fail. He is not convinced about ‘that sleek
and dogged, inoperable thought,’ yet he is not ashamed of his actions (which would
lead to guilt), but rather about the way he is, about his entire self. The whole scene,
including Nathan’s masturbatory fantasies, is not exceptionally shame provoking. It
rather leaves a strong sense of loneliness and desperation, and to a large extent it
defines the reader’s impression of Nathan’s emotional state.
In the corresponding scene, Nathan’s proneness to shame (in this case it is a
definite proneness to intimacy shame) creates an atmosphere of intense uneasiness and
embarrassment. Unlike past incidents, Mary breaks the shame-guilt spiral in active
defence, which Nathan fends off by confessing to the minor shameful matter of his
cancer in order to conceal his underlying, more profound shame feelings.
During one of the island’s ritualised Sunday lunches Mary and Nathan are
preparing the desert. Nathan’s renewed sense of shame for the abovementioned
borderline night is triggered by a simple sound:
97
He dug in and realised how utterly obscene the parting flesh of trifle can sound. Not
the sort of thing one’s daughter should have to hear. […] Nathan knew he was
blushing and that he was quite powerless to stop. […] Another spoonful left the
bowl with a wet, post-coital smack. […]
The cream was out of control now—a huge slaver of it landing between two
dishes and spattering.
Jism. On the quilt. Blue quilt. Shins bleeding. That fucking awful bastard night
in the flat.
Your daddy’s lovely hobbies, Mary. Your sad fuck dad. (p. 134)
As Nathan correctly observes, “The subtext, she will not understand” (ibid.). When he
tries to ‘turn the tables’ in order to distract from his shame feelings, to “make it her
fault—pass the buck and be the man” (p. 135), Mary suddenly breaks out. As opposed
to past incidents there is no shame expectation on her part. Although she screams,
‘WHAT’S THE MAT TER WITH ME ?’ she has no presumptions that there is actually
something fundamentally wrong with her; she correctly senses that the problem lies
entirely on Nathan’s side. She concentrates strictly on the most shame-prone part of
her identity and shouts, ‘WHY WON’T YOU LET ME WRITE ?’ (ibid.). Here again, the
fundamental differences in their knowledge about each other make it impossible for
them to talk things out. While Mary can only react to their official or surface
relationship as mentor and trainee, Nathan’s feelings are almost exclusively influenced
by the ‘subtext,’ first by the memory of his transgressions, then by the more global
feelings of inadequacy as Mary’s father and mentor. His reactions are typical shame
reactions, ranging from feeling “absurdly ready to run away” (p. 135) without actually
being able to move, to stammering, “an old, old nervousness” (ibid.), until he finally
sits “on the floor, his back against the table leg. This made things better, this seemed to
let more blood get to his head” (ibid.). In the next room, where the other writers wait
for their trifle, he recognises “the eerie quiet of group embarrassment, of a crowd
forced to overhear what they’d rather not know.” This, by the way, is the only
description of witness shame I found in any of the texts discussed.
Although Nathan is reluctant to tell Mary about his illness, he chooses to tell
her this rather than what is actually at stake: that he is her father: “Somewhere in his
head, a frightened little man was shredding papers and burning books, destroying all
he could find marked Cancer. But he did have to tell her, because she had asked.”
(p. 136) His honesty, though, is only superficial; he knows that what she really needs to
know is who he is, not what he suffers from. By giving away a part of the truth that
doesn’t hurt him too much, Nathan preserves his secret and finally succeeds in turning
the tables. He makes Mary feel guilty for her aggressive move, feeling “like a horse’s
arse. […] He glanced at her—now she was looking at his shiny shoes” (p. 137). Again,
as long as she is not fully in the know, Mary has no chance of breaking the shame-guilt
spiral within which Nathan is caught—and within which she is also caught as well.
98
The first climactic shame episode that is designed to be apprehended and read
from the perspective of Nathan’s strong shame theory describes his attempt to prevent
Mary from falling in love with him. For that purpose he arranges to be caught in the
act with Lynda, the island’s renowned nymphomaniac. The second episode describes
Nathan’s attempt to reconcile with his wife Maura, whom he meets in London. Any of
these scenes are at first glance scenes of intimacy shame, especially since they are full
of explicit descriptions of Nathan’s sexual arousal or contempt, followed by crushing
shame. Nevertheless the actual reason for the reader’s feelings of co-shame with
Nathan lies within the continually built up sensitivity for Nathan’s almost global sense
of, and proneness to shame. Combined with an unnerving shame expectation (which
mimics Nathan’s own shame anxiety) and his compulsive provocation of ever-new
shame situations, the reader reacts to both episodes with intense feelings of co-shame.
The first scenario develops when Nathan accidentally watches Mary in his
bedroom from the outside:
Quickly, smoothly she knelt near his pillow, her hand at the pale angle of open sheet
where he’d left his covers back. His breath furrowed and locked while she leaned
forward, rested her head where his had lain and waited—he knew, waited—until her
skinheat raised his scent from the cloth, until it felt right to ease her fingers between
the sheets, push in deep to the wrist.
No.
Wax-mouthed, he braced himself against the touch of her thinking, the crawl
at him of her wanting the man he wasn’t, couldn’t be: of her taking and crumpling
his quite different colour of love to nothing but the new, grey sweat that covered
him.
No. (p. 345)
The most sensible reaction—which the reader is already craving for by now—would be
to finally tell Mary who he is. Nathan realises that, “Shit. Just, shit. If I’d told her, this
would never have happened. If I’d just fucking said who I was” (p. 346), but again he
doesn’t manage it. Instead he calls his notorious friend and publisher Jack to think up
the (second) best way to let Mary fall out of love again as quickly as possible:
‘You’ll manage this. You’ve got good old Uncle Jack to help you and difficulties of
this sort are my speciality.’
‘Making them, yes.’
‘And then leaving them rapidly. I can be out of a relationship in the time most
men would take to tie their laces. […] Nathan. Lighten up.’
‘Then tell me what to do! […] Please. I’ll lighten up when I’ve got a solution.’
‘Just arrange to be otherwise and rather off-puttingly engaged.’ (pp. 349sq.)
The following scene in Lynda’s house (with whom he will get ‘rather off-puttingly
engaged’) is synonymous with Nathan’s overall tendency to provoke situations of
intense guilt and shame, mostly in order to prevent himself from dealing with his
99
actual shame content (in this case his inadequacy as Mary’s father, which would
become apparent the moment he told her).111 The tension of the situation is further
enhanced by alternating between Nathan’s first-person account in italics, which is
again full of self-incriminations, free indirect discourse and his contemptuous dialogue
with Lynda. There is a stark contrast between his plan—or actually Jack’s plan—and
Nathan’s anxious anticipation and awareness that “I am insane. I am completely off my
fucking head. And this isn’t going to work, I don’t know why I’m even trying it. This will
only make everything worse” (p. 353).
Nathan asked Mary over to Lynda’s house, and when she is due to arrive, he
and his ‘accomplice’ take their positions:
She stood and slipped off her dressing gown before he could speak. Then she turned
to him, revealing the full-frontal view of the traditional, time-dishonoured adultery
kit: basque and matching knickers, stockings with seams at the back. He was
immediately washed with an awful desire to snigger […].
Lynda eyed him flatly. ‘Do you want me in heels, or can we just make do with
this? I really can’t be bothered going to fetch them.’ […]
Shit. I’m not ready for this.
Nathan quietly pictured himself tucked away into a coffin on a furnace-bound
conveyor, helplessly propelled towards destruction.
Anything rather than this.
He shuffled himself to within his arms’ reach of Lynda as his heart and blood
and breath and sweat all betrayed him distractingly. […]
Nathan, mystified, staggered back a little at the slap of sound, but then felt
something he didn’t wish to understand.
Not there. She surely—
The noise of his zip, descending defencelessly. The long lost combination of
breathy warmth and opened chill. A hand clasped at the back of his thigh. […]
And, naturally, the front door opened and there was Mary as, ‘Fuck,’ his
hands flailed out for balance and gripped Lynda’s head with apparent passion,
apparent lust, and his naked eyes (exactly as stupefied as they would have been if
this was in any way real) met his daughter’s face and he could only gape and
whimper, his throat furred up with shame, before she turned and started leaving and
he managed to call, ‘Mary,’ when everything was too late.
Shit […]
111
Cf. Dunnigan, who reads the episode, rather differently, as Nathan’s correction of
Mary’s misled desires: “The daughter erotically (mis)recognises the father. Mary is unaware
of Nathan’s real identity so that only Nathan recognises the transgression and redresses it by
arranging that Mary witness Lynda […] fellating him. Through the prevention of the incest
taboo another is construed in its place: the sexuality of the father is enacted before the
daughter.” (2000, p. 150) In a way, the replacing of one taboo for another, which Dunnigan
interprets in this scene, describes the very mechanism of screen guilt for shame that keeps the
spiral running.
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It was all the way it had to be.
Shit.
A total fuck-up. […]
‘Nathan, you’re crying.’
‘I know.’ (pp. 353-356)
Nathan’s free indirect discourse is full of explicit shame reactions; the typical paralysis
experienced in the moment of shame is especially illustrated by the way he “quietly
pictured himself tucked away into a coffin […], helplessly propelled towards
destruction” and his ‘mystification’. This leads to the conclusion that Nathan’s shame
does not start when Mary enters the room, but rather the entire scene with Lynda is
also extremely shame-laden for him—as it would be for any witness, including the
reader. The compulsiveness of his action is very evident, and the avoidable, yet
inevitable outcome—the ‘total fuck-up’—makes the scene even more uneasy.
Interestingly, this scene provides a clear reference to the shame affect when it says, “his
throat furred up with shame.” Although Nathan’s present-tense inner monologue
would seem to provide a place to formulate this feeling, it is written as part of the
(more distanced) free indirect discourse, which is written in the past tense. This
illustrates once again the virulence and inaccessibility of Nathan’s shame scene. Mary’s
intimacy shame reaction to the situation, by contrast, is clearly described as part of her
present-tense inner monologue. She feels “Embarrassed. Ashamed for myself. More
ashamed for him.” (p. 356) Unlike Nathan she is clear about her own affective
responses, yet nothing can change as long as Nathan continues to conceal his from her.
The incidents that occurred that night are once again subject to discussion at a
publisher’s party in London. Lynda shows up unexpectedly after she moved to
America, and Mary and Nathan have another one of their spiralling dialogues:
‘Nathan, Lynda’s here. Did you know?’ […]
‘Lynda? Lynda Dowding? That Lynda?’
Yes, that Lynda, of course, that Lynda—blowjob Lynda. Not that she actually
blew. Or, for that matter, sucked. And here I am, attempting to even begin to pretend
that there might be another one. I have all the moral fibre of a rusty paper clip.
‘She didn’t tell you she was coming back?’
He couldn’t work out how Mary was feeling about this development:
angry, wounded, jealous, sad? Then again, he wasn’t sure how he felt: shabby,
humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed? He was blushing, he realised, while she was only
serious, almost blank. […]
‘Despite the, uh … appearances, we weren’t close. That, um, evening was out
of character for us both and came’—he tried not to falter at the choice of verb—‘to
nothing. I don’t…’ This was the important bit, though, the point where he’d redeem
himself, say the right and useful thing. ‘I would never have that kind of relationship
with anyone on the island. There are people there I care about … immensely. But
not in that way.’
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Good man, yourself, Nathan Staples. Good man.
He winced up in time to see Mary look away, approaching a smile. ‘I’d hate to
see what you do to the people you do care about in that way.’
‘Now, you-‘ […] ‘I can’t tell you how hideously … I was so …’ She bumped
him with her shoulder. ‘Ashamed.’ He turned again and, this time, faced her.
(pp. 376 sq.)
This passage shows the usual discrepancy between Nathan’s spoken words and his
thoughts and his habitual, or in this case slightly ironic, self-deprecation. It also shows
how little the reader actually gets to know about Mary’s feelings. Just as Nathan is not
able to ‘work out how Mary was feeling,’ the reader’s ability to penetrate the blankness
of her expression—that mask—is similarly limited. She might be wearing the
proverbial mask of shame, although her overall reaction to the memory of the
shameful incident in Lynda’s house seems rather conciliate. The free indirect discourse
attributes Nathan with quite an awareness of his shame; any of his possible feelings—
‘shabby, humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed’—belong to the group of shame affects.
When he finally manages to look Mary straight in the eye, though, it is not entirely
clear whether he speaks out loud that he felt ‘ashamed,’ or whether it is Mary who
completes his sentence. In any case this pronouncement of shame represents yet
another example of screen shame as it fends off the core problem between Mary and
Nathan, which is that he does not tell her the truth about himself.
After being introduced into Nathan’s global shame proneness and its underlying
causes, the reader is well prepared to experience the male protagonist’s final crushing
shame when Nathan seeks reconciliation with his wife Maura.
Unlike the rest of the novel, in which Nathan’s autobiographical account is
exclusively dedicated to incidents in the past, this present-tense narration is part of his
present story. When he finally works up the nerve to call Maura, he thinks: “part of me,
quite a large part of me, wanted to fucking scream W H Y I S T H I S A L L S O E A SY
N OW W H E N F O R P R AC T I C A L LY T W O F U C K I N G D E C A D E S I T
H A S B E E N N OT H I N G B U T F U C K I N G H A R D ? ” (p. 496)
They arrange to go to the cinema, and while Nathan is still contemplating
whether she will come or not and whether she will recognise him, she arrives. His
reaction is absolutely captivating; it completely proves his endless love for her:
‘Nathan?’
She is everything, you know? She is everything.
‘It is you, isn’t it?’
All of my life.
‘I know your face from the … um … magazines. Sometimes.’
She was why it made sense. […]
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Maura leans in quickly, breathes a kiss near my cheek and steps away again
before I understand that she’s truly here, that she’s kissed me, that I have gooseflesh
suddenly.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
She’s here.
‘Nathan, are you all right?’
‘Yes.’
I am quite completely all right. (pp. 499sq.)
Nathan “can only look at Maura in snatches” (p. 500). He is utterly self-conscious, full
of desire for her and feelings of inappropriateness, yet his preserved feelings for her
come alive once again:
This shouldn’t be happening. These aren’t new emotions, they can’t be, they’ve just
kept on fucking growing in their grave like the fucking nails and hair on a fucking
corpse. They are not new and so they cannot make me feel this way. I will not give
them my consent.
But they still take it, anyway. (p. 504)
Nathan even manages to talk with Maura about some of the reasons for his inability to
tell Mary who he is, even though “I don’t want to think about this” (p. 508):
‘[I]n the beginning, when she first came, when we didn’t know each other, I got
scared that I would make her go—that if she knew who I really was, it would make
her go. This way, at least I’ve had a …’ And any sense this ever made dwindles in the
grainy yellow of the street lamps and burns away. (p. 509)
The fact that he is able to open up like this indicates the enormous confidence that
Nathan has in Maura —and in this case it really seems like a cunning divine plan that
this confidence will be utterly betrayed by the end of the evening. (Judging the
situation like that is possibly proof of the author’s involvement with Nathan’s shame
theory.)
When Maura asks Nathan whether he has any objections to coming back to
her house for a drink, “while my whole nervous system hooted and convulsed, I gave
only a wide-eyed shake of my head, my tiniest smile” (p. 505). There is a striking
discrepancy between Nathan’s almost hysterical emotions and his limited actions
throughout the entire scene. While he is in utter turmoil inside, he manages to appear
comparatively calm. Perhaps this seemingly unemotional behaviour leads to Maura’s
verdict that he was ‘harmless, a bit boring,’ as she tells her new partner in a
conversation that her estranged husband accidentally overhears. It is no more than a
laugh and a tiny kiss that cause new crushing, existential shame. Or, as Nathan puts it,
“That’s it, the sound of my death: a small laugh and a stranger’s kiss. How ridiculous”
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(p. 519). As a whole, Nathan misinterprets much of the situation with Maura, including
her possible intentions and motives and his own role for her. He works himself slowly
into a state of extreme emotional, and ultimately sexual, arousal—fanned by Maura’s
physical presence and her drunken kisses. When his want succeeds over his doubts he
is utterly convinced about Maura wanting him too. Yet while she possibly only wants to
prevent her partner from becoming jealous, her comment seems to prove once again
that Nathan’s shame anxiety is indeed true. In the end, he expects to be reduced to a
‘nothing’ (ibid.) rather than arouse any genuine feelings in his wife again. In this case
he obviously cannot think in her favour. Later on Nathan will destroy Maura’s letter of
excuse or explanation in order to protect himself from further harm (p. 545).
In this culminating shame scene, which leads to Nathan’s most serious suicide
attempt, the reader possesses no other perspective than the protagonist’s. Being
accustomed to his shame proneness on the one hand and his extreme fondness and
love for Maura on the other, strong feelings of empathic shame are likely. Due to the
extreme, single-sided emotionality of the scene, the reader’s expectations are also
heavily disappointed by the unhappy ending:
I will listen to the shifting of dirt behind my eyes and will never have felt so unclean,
so utterly unclean, and will listen to the house and the shake of me on the mattress
[…]. And then, because I am nothing, I do not feel and have no words and I can
move to my door and beyond it, crawl those few feet along the landing to sit and
shudder by their wall and listen and listen and listen to their undressing, their
mediocre little dialogue, their shifting and trying to connect and then the beat of
him in her, too fast, the beat of him in her, he is too fast, the beat of him in her, the
beat of him in her, the beat of him.
I don’t know when I slipped from her house and started walking to the Square.
I don’t know how long the journey took. I wanted it to be longer, I’m sure of that. (pp.
519sq.)
After this new severe shame experience, which fatally renews his underlying shame
scene, Nathan goes over the brink of his ‘normal’ shame reactions; he no longer wishes
to disappear, but rather he already feels vanished into ‘nothing.’ The numbness he
experiences, with his senses wide open at the same time—‘and listen and listen and
listen’—emphasises the state of shock he is in as does his lost sense of time and space
when he walks through the night.
When he returns to the island, he plans his last and most serious suicide
attempt. This time he is determined to end not only his life, but also his endless
failings, his feelings of guilt and his compulsive evoking of ever new shame situations.
With respect to Mary Nathan senses that “she knew there was something up. Sweet girl.
Sweet girl to worry. Wish I didn’t worry her. Don’t ever mean to. I won’t do it again.
Enough of that.” (p. 524) Being so fundamentally shamed again by Maura, Nathan
seems convinced that his ‘removal’ is really the only possible way to stop the endless
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and hurtful repetition of guilt and shame within which he is caught. He has no sense of
the endless pain he is about to cause when Mary simultaneously learns that he was her
father and that he was dead.
Nathan finishes the story of his last encounter with Maura “through a day and
its night, writing himself all out” (p. 521). He then proceeds to get systematically
drunk, drifting further and further into the realm of ranting sarcasm and self-pity,
which is presented in the incorrect, flowing italics of his inner monologue:
Stay solid. Act the man. Like usual. Badact. […]
My father told me—born alone, die alone, livealone inbetween. Find one
fucking friend, you’rebloody lucky.
Well, I did, I found him, lliked him, luky me. Looked at himdying.
Sawhimontheslab. Lucky me. Jacky the man my fucking friend. Mr. J. Dowd bastard
Grace. Here is to you, you fuck.
In pishy lager. And in brandy.
And in our favrite. Islay’s finest. Heerstoyou.
Good at dying, aren’twe, Jack?
Yes. About ime nowtoo. About ready.
Yes.
Here’s to me, then, Nathan Staple, who
was not a very good husband and
was not a very good father but
who always fucking wished that he could be.
I did.
Just did.
I just did wish.
To love my people. Only ever wanted that. (p. 526)
In the end, when he is hardly able to walk, he moves outside his house and throws
himself into a carefully installed trap. However, he only manages to hurt himself
severely, and he wakes hours later to the laughter of a magpie, meaning sorrow or
anger, according to an English saying. Nathan once again feels shame for the failure of
this latest suicide attempt—which was actually meant to work, as opposed to his
previous attempts: “Serve you right for playing at it. Next time, make it easy. Take the
booze and then take the pills. Just do it right. Too tired for anything else. Pills and then
fuck it, fuck everything” (p. 528).
Even worse, his dog Eckless had followed him, because he forgot to shut him
in, and so it got trapped too. Being injured, Nathan is not able to free the crying
animal, which results in feelings of extreme guilt:
This is my fault, this is my fucking fault. I should have checked, checked sure he was
safely in the house, shut the fucking gate behind me, just made fucking sure that he
couldn’t get in here, couldn’t follow me. Stupid, self-obsessed fuck. […] Oh God, and
I’ve been shitty to him all this week. […] God, you fucker, why are you doing this to
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me? He’s all I’ve got. And he doesn’t deserve it. And he’s all I had that was really mine.
(p. 530)
Here Nathan once again feels trapped by destiny, misjudging his own responsibility
and his ability to put an end to these feelings—not by killing himself, but by
confronting his true feelings of guilt and shame and thus preventing himself and others
from getting caught in endless, compulsive repetitions.
It is only when he is brought to the hospital, while moving between states of
consciousness and unconsciousness, that he reaches the eagerly anticipated stage of
freedom from shame and guilt:
He was set in his bed empty-headed: for the first time in his life, entirely ignorant of
distressing events in which he had taken part.
He slept relatively well. (p. 533)
Being ‘for the first time in his life […] entirely ignorant of distressing events in which
he had taken part’ gives some of the altogether scarce information about Nathan’s life
and background before the initial shame scene took place. Possibly his failed marriage
could only have such a devastating and prolonged effect because Nathan suffered from
shame proneness before. But the details of his family background and the possible
reasons for his extreme sensitivity to shame remain unclear. What remains is the hope
that with his great remorse for almost killing Eckless and the prospect of Mary’s
positive reaction to Nathan’s story, he will be able to break the shame-guilt-spiral and
find a way to face his anxieties other than with his removal—be it by withdrawing and
avoidance or by suicide.
Everything You Need is definitely among the texts that illustrate the possibility of using
shame, or rather shaming, as a narrative strategy. The way in which the text constructs
an immanent shame theory on the grounds of a character’s underlying shame scenes
shows how a similar literary emotion can essentially be evoked in the reader. This
example also shows that empathic reader shame is not necessarily witness shame (as in
the case of short stories). By valuing shame scenes and shame content according to
another shame theory, empathy really means ‘to feel into someone,’ ‘sich in jemanden
hineinfühlen.’
II. 2. 4 Group Shame: Laura Hird, Born Free I—‘Joni, Jake and Victor’
Group shame refers to another individual of the same (perceived, alleged or actual)
group, such as when a family member suffers from mental illness. Group shame can be
felt for an illicit or disabled child, but it can also be felt for members of one’s own
ethnic group or nation (cf. Marks 2007, 25sq.). For a literary representation of group
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shame we will turn to Laura Hird’s first and only novel up t the present, Born Free
(1999).
In this novel Laura Hird presents four alternating first-person accounts of the
members of the Edinburgh Scott family. The formal organisation of the text thus
resembles The Accidental by Ali Smith, though Hird’s novel is entirely written in
historical present (due to the overall impression of retrospection and introspection,
especially in the accounts of Vic and Jake, which contain remarkable self-distancing
elements that are typically not found in genuine present-tense narrations).112
Seemingly nuclear and representative (hence the name), this family is in fact deeply
dysfunctional. All of the narratives include shame-feelings and shame experiences of
varying intensities. The 14-year-old son, Jake—who is most interested in computers
and masturbation—and his 15-year-old sister Joni—though sharing her brother’s latter
passion, she is eager to lose her virginity before her 16th birthday—confront the reader
with the type of comic embarrassment often found in coming-of-age novels. The
parents’ shame appears to be more fundamental. It is partly grim and brutal, yet it also
contains some comic elements.113 The father, Victor—a name that strongly contradicts
his position as the weakest character in the story—is depressive, neurotic and full of
habitual inferiority complexes. The mother, Angie—who is anything but an angel—is
an alcoholic who is just about to start drinking again after three years of sobriety while
starting an affair with her boss, a fellow alcoholic. Shame for her alcoholism becomes
the underlying group shame scene for all of the other three family members.114 In
addition, they all show a variety of shame reactions and screen shame experiences that
occupy their attention and the reader’s interest for large parts of the novel. The family’s
dysfunctions both cause and result from the family’s multifaceted shame scene, which
has a clear socio-cultural dimension. Hird locates her story unmistakably in Scotland
112
Born Free is also a possible example of the purposeful usage of a present-tense,
first-person shame narration. The wilful presentation of shame contents allows this
perspective, although the tangible shame reactions of all three characters argue against it. The
character of the mother, by contrast, and the description of her shamelessness are clearly
targeted on vicarious reader shame reactions. The purposeful usage of first-person, presenttense narration in the description of shameless behaviour will be discussed in Ch. II. 2. 5.
113
As mentioned above with respect to A. L. Kennedy’s novel Looking for the Possible
Dance, humour is a very adaptive force that helps to compensate for shame, as described by
Wurmser 1981, p. 103; Lewis 1992, p. 130; Tisseron 1992, p. 119.
114
The case studies in Wurmser’s The Mask of Shame show the remarkable role of
alcoholism in the evocation of severe shame experiences both with regard to oneself and to
others. Both clinical and historical examples contain either alcoholism in the patient or an
alcoholic close relative (parent or sibling); cf. “Irene” (1981, pp. 100sqq.); ”Dora” (ibid., pp.
241sqq.); “Beethoven” (ibid., p. 294); “Ibsen” (ibid., p. 300).
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by writing dialogue and inner monologues in written Scots, thus adding national and
religious aspects to her characterisation of shame. She thus goes further than most of
the authors and texts discussed in this thesis; surprisingly (since I expected it to be
entirely different) hardly any of these texts explicitly relate the shame scenes to Scotland (in terms of place, descent, language, education, or other socio-cultural contexts).
While most of these texts take place in Scotland, its functions and meanings for the
literary characters’ respective shame scenes range from mere setting (as in A. L.
Kennedy’s Looking for the Possible Dance) to a refuge from shame elsewhere
experienced (as in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet) to a source of the shame content itself (as in
Ali Smith’s The Accidental, which, as I will show in the subsequent chapter on Shame
and Scotland, presents Scottish descent and Scottish socialisation as actual shame
content). None of the shame scenes described in Born Free are exclusively connected to
Scotland, yet the linguistic implications of the written Scots nevertheless add
enormously to the humiliating and thus shaming effect of both the narrative and the
dialogue (this is comparable to the effect of the direct speech in Scots that A. L.
Kennedy ascribed solely to the sexual abuser in her short story “The moving house,”
cf. Ch. II. 2. 2. 1).
Equal attention is given to all of the four main characters, although Joni, the
family’s daughter, develops the most over the course of the novel and thus appears to
be the main protagonist. With regard to the evocation of empathic shame, however, the
reader’s interest and reactions seem to follow the familial shame-structure. While the
reader’s attention primarily focuses on minor shame-inducing descriptions of
numerous masturbation and sex scenes, the underlying shame for the mother’s utterly
shameless alcoholic misbehaviour remains latent, awaiting its ultimate manifestation
outbreak (cf. Ch. II. 2. 5 for a discussion of Angie’s account).
Joni’s first-person account is that of a pleasure-seeking, heavily bored teenager
who fights both imagined and real threats from her surroundings. Her big-sisterattacks against her younger brother Jake are legion, as are Joni’s fights with her parents,
which are both unnerving and amusing at the same time. There is a narrow line,
though, between the normal madness of adolescence and the real state of emergency
this family is in. While Joni’s idea to phone Childline is indeed funny, because her
father Vic “pulled the duvet off her ’cause she wouldn’t get up” (p. 20),115 the punches
from Angie when she gets ‘off the wagon’ and starts drinking again are surely not. In
its various different forms, shame inhabits many realms of Joni’s emotional life. She is
overwhelmed by her sexuality, shaken by her family life and overcharged by the
demands of a materialistic society. Sometimes she seems brutal and shameless, yet at
other times she appears childlike and hopelessly naïve. Though caught in a web of
115
Original quotations here and following from Laura Hird, Born free. Edinburgh
1999.
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multifaceted shame, Joni does not evoke distinct empathic reader shame. The
numerous masturbation scenes in particular can provoke embarrassment, i.e. mild
forms of shame, but the comic relief usually prevails. Despite the almost aggressive
sexual connotation of her character, Joni is anything but free from shame. She wonders
and worries about her constant ‘X2-ing,’ as she labels it:
I X2 a lot. Sometimes, I think I’m maybe obsessed with it. The magazines say it’s
OK, though. I’d been doing it for about five years before I read it’s normal, you
know, that other people did it too. It must be about the best thing ever invented for
humans. (p. 33)
As I fall asleep I think about all the X2ing I’ve done, heard about, or seen other
people doing today. […] It must mean something. It must be a sign. (p. 39)
Thoughts of hanging myself in the stair, or swallowing all Mum’s pills or cutting my
wrists in the bath, cheer me up slightly. It would be worth it just to get at them. I
end up having to X2 again. I must be a pervert. (p. 107)
The last sentences respectively depict the aforementioned comical turn in the passages
concerning Joni and Jake’s masturbation.
While these minor shame feelings keep both the protagonist and the reader
occupied, they only cover the other, underlying shame complex. This becomes
apparent in a crucial scene in which Angie comes home drunk after a bizarre night out
with Raymond. When he drops her off with the sarcastic words, ‘Kizz the kids for me,’
Angie enters the house with the thought, ‘Kiss them? Kick them more like’ (p. 168).
The moment Angie enters, though, Joni’s perspective takes over. She and her friend
Rosie are alone in the house when:
Mum comes crashing in. Jesus, it looks like her hair’s exploded. […] ‘Are you doing
that for charity, Mum?’ […] I’m only having a laugh. After all, it’s not every day
your mum comes in looking like Ken Dodd’s stalker, but she throws herself onto the
settee and bursts into tears. Rosie doesn’t know where to look. […]
It seems like a good time to go to my room. Rosie escapes, but I get grabbed
on my way out. […]
‘Just admit it. You can’t wait to see the back of me, can you?’
Oh, fuck, she’s stinking of booze. Oh, no.
‘… C AN YOU ?’ she yells, shaking my arm like it’s a tin of hair mousse. Her
drinky breath’s making me boak. […]
‘Just fuck off, Mum. Dinnae make a fool of me, just ‘cause you’re pissed.’
Springing back to life, she wallops me across the jaw. I get a rush of adrenaline
but I’m too stunned to move. […] I make for the door again, […] but she lunges at
me. As I duck, she falls, arse over tit, onto the settee and starts bubbling again. What
a fucking mess.
Rosie’s holding a hairbrush in front of her like a dagger when I go through.
‘She fucking belted me a beauty.’ […]
‘I better go. Is she having a breakdown or something?’
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It’d be better if she was. Less embarrassing. […]
‘My mum’s a cow, but she’d never do that to me. That’s terrible, that. You
should tell someone. […] So is she an alkie, or what? I’ve never seen her like that,’
whispers Rosie.
‘She supposedly stopped when we moved here. That’s how we had to move in
the first place. She turned the whole fucking street against us.’ (pp. 169sqq.)
Rosie’s presence is very important in this scene. She is the text-immanent witness of
Angie’s shameful behaviour. Joni’s past experiences with her mother’s alcoholism, her
loss of control and the violence that goes along with it would renew her shame feelings
with or without a witness.116 The fact that a third person is present in this scene
intensifies its shameful potential per se and with regard to the reader.117 At first, Joni
tries to disguise her embarrassment for Angie’s crazy outer appearance and behaviour
with humour by ‘only having a laugh.’ When she realises, ‘Oh, fuck, she’s stinking of
booze. Oh, no,’ the fragility of her defence becomes apparent. The smell of alcohol on
her mother’s breath evokes strong disgust in Joni, and both the memory of Angie’s
past attacks and her present behaviour provoke shame reactions ranging from
aggressive sarcasm (‘Dinnae make a fool of me, just ‘cause you’re pissed,’ p. 170),
paralysis (‘I get a rush of adrenaline but I’m too stunned to move,’ ibid.) and fear (“I’m
dying for a pee but I’m scared to unlock the door,” p. 171) to contempt (“The front
door slams. Rosie and I jump off the bed. Hopefully, it’s Mum gone up the canal to try
and drown herself, like she used to. Dad used to have to go and rescue her. They’d both
come back soaking,” p. 173).118
In the end, though, Joni quickly regains her emotional detachment from her
mother, as well as her father. When Vic returns home that night, she seems relieved:
“He goes all angry and protective. It’s sort of nice” (p. 174). When he gives Rosie a lift
116
Cf. Landweer 1999, p. 123, where she points out that shame is updateable in
memory, as opposed to embarrassment.
117
Cf. Landweer 1999, Chapter V, on the importance of shame witnesses. According
to her, shame is a feeling that is triggered by a sudden change of perspective upon one’s own
actions or failures that lets them appear problematic. This change is motivated either by the
factual or imagined presence of others, known as shame witnesses, or by the imagination of
possible exposure: “Scham ist ein Gefühl, [das] durch einen plötzlichen Perspektivenwechsel
auf das eigene Handeln oder Unterlassen ausgelöst [wird], der dieses in einem
problematischen Licht erscheinen läßt und entweder durch die faktische oder vorgestellte
Anwesenheit von anderen, den Scham-Zeugen, oder durch die Vorstellung möglicher Entdeckung
ausgelöst wird.” (1999, p. 125) Gershen Kaufman stresses the power of a ‘witness within the
self’: “This assumption [that shame requires the presence of another person] which is
fundamental to formulations of personality and culture, is in error because shame can be an
entirely internal experience with no one else present.” (1989, p. 6)
118
Most of said symptoms and reactions have already been discussed; for a
comprehensive listing cf. Marks 2007, Ch. 3, pp. 71-101.
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home, she immediately “want[s] him to come back” (ibid.), and the actual reason is: “I
suddenly don’t feel safe any more when he’s not here. Not that he stands up to Mum or
anything. She’s just less likely to hit us when she’s got him to batter.” (ibid.) On the one
hand, this comment strangely re-establishes Joni’s mental integrity in an altogether
non-integral, abnormal surrounding. Following its own rules, her seemingly
unemotional, spiteful reaction is somehow logical and ‘normal’ considering what had
happened. On the other hand, this passage also shows that the daughter’s outside
perspective of the parents’ behaviour adds enormously to the reader’s overall sense of
shame. By contradicting Vic and Angie’s first-person accounts through an outside
third-person perspective, Joni and Jake’s accounts elicit feelings of shame for the
parent’s characters rather than for themselves.119 Further examples of this juxtaposition
of perspectives will be provided in my discussion of the parents’ accounts.
Jake’s shame parallels Joni’s. His shame proneness, which similarly stems from
his mother’s alcoholism, is also masked by seemingly shameless behaviour and screen
shame experiences. With respect to ‘self-abuse’ (as Nathan in Everything You Need
would call it) he actually appears less ashamed than Joni, which possibly reflects a
higher societal acceptance of male adolescent masturbation (when his father bursts
into the room one night and surprises him, he responds rather calmly, “Aw, Dad,
knock first, eh?” p. 76). He also experiences ‘normal,’ age-specific insecurities when
confronting members of the opposite sex, just as his sister does. Yet, as mentioned
already, these embarrassment-inducing elements work as screen affects against more
serious forms of shame, both for the literary characters and for the reader.
Embarrassment related to masturbation and adolescent courting are to a certain extent
norm-conforming, while feelings of shame for (domestic) violence, mental cruelty and
female alcoholism are harder to confront and admit. Jake’s group shame for his mother
becomes clear on two separate occasions, which both involve his friend and neighbour
Sean and his family (who function as text-immanent shame witnesses in this case).
The first occasion is closely linked to an incident in which he doesn’t even recognise
his mother as a source of annoyance. Sean’s sister Eva draws their attention to sex
noises emanating from one of the other apartments, assuming it was “that Irish nurse
next door getting screwed” (p. 155). Later on, Jake unwittingly meets Raymond on the
stairs when he gets “too desperate for a wank” to stay with his friends. He only realises
what happened later when Jake, Sean and Eva hear Vic and Angie quarrelling.
‘Listen, it’s the nurse again, listen…’
[…] It sounds more like they’re fighting tonight. You can almost make out
what they’re saying. Fuck, they sound awfie familiar.
119
This is another parallel to the narrative organisation of Smith’s The Accidental.
Cf. also comparable narrative structures in Trumpet by Jackie Kay, Looking for the Possible
Dance by A.L. Kennedy and Like by Ali Smith.
111
‘… boring fucking bastard … bottleless fucking cunt.’
Tell me I’m dreaming, please. Mum can’t burst her way into my safe little
world like this. I pretend there’s something fascinating on the telly. […] Eva looks
totally unimpressed but I’m just desperate to drown them out upstairs. They’ll
realise who it is, any minute. They probably already know but are too embarrassed
to say. Then it suddenly hits me like a train. The most revolting thought I’ve ever
had. If the shouting’s coming from my house, who the fuck was getting shagged up
there the other night? (p. 186)
Written in a first-person, present-tense account—the narrative form least bound to
evoke empathic reader shame feelings—this passage can still cause feelings of coshame with Jake. As opposed to Angie’s family, the reader already learned en passant
‘who was getting shagged up there the other night’ from a conversation between Angie
and Raymond: “‘What about your place? I can fuck you up the arse in Mr. Scott’s bed
again.’ ‘We did that?’ ‘You can’t remember? You were crying out for it last night, you
dirty bitch.’ I don’t doubt him but if I forgot that, I could forget anything” (p. 163).
While Jake is afraid that his friends will discover who is fighting upstairs, the reader
uneasily expects him to realise whom he actually overheard the other night. The boy’s
intimacy shame is expectable and tangible; and the reader’s emotions are connected to
both the advantage in knowledge and the expectation of exposure. Overhearing or
overlooking a parent’s sexual activity is a classic shame scene. Even without the
assumption of a strong shame theory, Jake’s reaction can be easily prefigured; only a
few pages before this scene, though, the reader was introduced to some of his defence
mechanisms against his family-related shame feelings:
I hate showers as I never seem to dry myself properly, so my clothes go on all sticky
and squint. Plus, dirt protects you. The more bacteria there is on your skin, the
harder it is for germs to get into you. Without my layer of filth, I feel like Samson
with a baldy.
Once I’m back through to my bedroom, it’s not quite so bad. Despite constant
nagging from Mum, I refuse to tidy in here. Why make it easier for the rest of them
to find my stuff ? That’s if the combined smell of minging socks, shitey trainers and
a thousand farts clinging to the wallpaper doesn’t put them off coming in here in
the first place. It’s a protective seal, just like my dirt. (p. 181)
What may seem adolescent at first sight can also be read in relation to his shame
anxiety.120 The ‘protective seal’ he installs around himself not only has the function of
fending off his mother in person. The way Jake fights his disgust and contempt for his
120
Cf. Ch. II. 2.1 on Astrid in The Accidental and the general connection between
adolescence and shame.
112
drinking mother with what he knows will cause disgust and contempt in her can also
be read as an act of counter-shaming.121
Although Jake refuses “to let the Mum thing put me on a downer. […] I’ve got
more to worry about than my stupid family” (ibid.), he is in fact full of shame anxiety
and anticipation. From Joni’s perspective the actual sadness behind his reaction to
their mother’s relapse becomes apparent: “He’s a bit deflated when I tell him about
Mum. […] ‘Sure it wasnae your own breath you could smell? You were pretty steaming
last night.’122 ‘Fuck off, Jake. I’m no joking. She fucking punched me… and look, I’m
getting a bruise on my arm where she grabbed me. […] Go and look if you dinnae
believe me.’ But he’s starting to look so upset I know he already does” (p. 173).
Jake is afraid that Angie will “start spoiling everything for us. I couldnae go
through all that again” (ibid.). But unfortunately his shame anxiety proves to be wellfounded. In a second scene in front of Jake’s friend Sean and his family, Jake’s shame for
himself and his mother culminates brutally. Jake is repeatedly attacked both verbally and
physically by the school bully Shug and his ‘henchmen’ (p. 49). The shaming potential of
this only fully unfolds, though, in connection to Jake’s group shame for Angie. In his
attempt to conceal his shame over one of Shug’s violent attacks and his assumed
weakness, he causes an even greater scene of shame involving his mother. One day he
comes home badly beaten up.
Mum’s drinking when I get in, staring at herself in the hall mirror. It’s like she’s
been waiting there to finish me off.
‘For fuck’s sake, Jake!’
When I try to get to my room, she grabs one of my bad arms.
‘Ow, dinnae, I fell down the steps at Wardlaw. Please, Mum, I just want to lie
down.’
121
For the use of contempt as a defense against shame, cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 18; 47;
137; 197. As for the connection between shame and disgust, Wurmser writes: “The two
affects of shame and disgust overlap. But I think there are distinctive features for each. In
shame, the visual elements again are dominant. It is shameful to expose and to look at
dirtiness and weakness in regard to body control and consequently many other physical and
psychic elements. In disgust it is primarily the senses of taste and smell that provide the
inherent physiological experiences. In addition, the things for which one feels disgust cover a
much narrower area, mainly physical products. In metaphorical derivatives, however, disgust
becomes almost synonymous with shame (e.g., “I am disgusted with you” = “You should be
ashamed”).” (1981, p. 115)
122
Joni is already starting to imitate her mother’s drinking habit. Joni’s friend Rosie
is ashamed of the possible parallels between their own drunken behaviour and the way Angie
acts: “‘Jo, see when we’re pissed. You don’t think we’re as bad as your mum, d’you?’ ‘I’m
trying to block it out of my mind.’” (pp. 172sq.) When Jake asks what difference there is
between her drinking and their mother’s, she answers: “I dunno … like … y’know, it’s no like
I’ve got a family to look after. I dinnae do it every day.” (p. 182)
113
‘Don’t give me that. I’m not an idiot. It was these bastards downstairs, eh?’
Only Mum could think that. […]
‘Dinnae lie to me. Tell me, really, Jake, they’re not getting away with it.’
Swallowing her drink, she starts pulling me into the stair. I scream and
struggle, but I feel like I’m going to die from the pain in my ankle. When we get to
Sean’s, I start lashing out my fists but I can barely lift my arms. She cannae, she just
cannae. […]
‘Dinnae answer, please, my mum’s having an eppy, dinnae answer,’ I scream,
but the door is already open. Terry [the mother] looks at Mum, then me. […] Mum
thumps me towards her like a volleyball.
‘D’you want to explain this … the fucking state of this?’
I try to pull her back up the stair, but she’s like a big lump of lead.
‘Please, Terry, shut the door, she’s pissed. Just ignore her.’
‘Will I get the police?’
Mum throws a punch. My life flashes before me as I squeeze myself between
them. Somehow, I manage to get her to the other side of the landing, straining like a
muzzled pit-bull. […]
Oh, Jesus, Sean’s at the door now as well […].
‘Please, Sean, jist shut the door. Please, pal, it’s awright.’
But he stands there frozen. In desperation, I grab the handle myself and slam it
behind us. Mum throws herself onto it and does the breast stroke with her fists.
‘K E E P AWAY F ROM M Y FA M I LY, YOU F E N IA N BA STA R D S !’
I’ve never felt such hate for someone, no even Shug. […] I wish she was dead.
[…]
When she finally comes back up, she acts like nothing’s happened.
‘Poor baby, will I phone the doctor? What’ve they done to you? What have
they done to my baby?’
‘Fuck off, Mum, just fuck off.’
I dinnae want a doctor, I just want to fucking die, I just want her to fucking
die.
‘I only did it ‘cause I love you,’ she wails, trying to cry, trying to pretend she’s
human. (pp. 220sq.)
I quote this passage more or less in full since it depicts Jake’s entire shame landscape.
His feelings of weakness and senselessness for being beaten up by Shug and his friends
add to his embarrassment for his mother’s general state and for her behaviour in this
particular situation. Sean and his mother witness his shame in all its facets—or so at
least he assumes. As pointed out earlier, a witness of one or the other kind is
constitutional for shame, even if the only witness is the self of the shamed subject.
With regard to Sean and Terry, Jake’s shame weighs doubly since he hoped to find
refuge from his home situation with them. He thought, “I’m sick of this. So my family
is a disaster. Who cares? I’ve got a decent family downstairs I can spend time with.” (p.
182) When his severe shame anxiety proves to be well-founded once again, Jake feels
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contempt and rage—two typical shame reactions.123 The last sentence of the passage, “
‘I only did it ‘cause I love you,’ she wails, trying to cry, trying to pretend she’s human,”
is the nadir of the mother-son relationship, both in terms of his respect for her as well
as Angie’s self-respect. From this all-time low, though, Jake manages to move across
the boundaries of his shame. When he goes to see Sean and his family again, he realises
that their actual reaction to what happened is completely different to what he expects.
Instead of rejection he earns sympathy, and in the end they offer to take him along on
their Easter holiday. Encouraged by their unexpected and to him partly
incomprehensible positive reaction he even works up the nerve to tell them about
Shug’s violent attacks. Pronouncing the truth thus disentangles two important layers of
Jake’s shame. With the help of Sean’s family, he thus takes a major step towards
independence from his group shame.
From a narrative point of view, this passage is bound to evoke feelings of
vicarious shame for Angie rather than co-shame for Jake. In this function, it provides a
third-person perspective on her shame-inducing behaviour while simultaneously
concretising Jake’s fear of being ‘finished off,’ of coming out of the frying pan and into
the fire.
While Jake and Joni are able to create their individual refuges and withdraw more or
less successfully from their mother, their father appears far more helpless and weak. In
this regard his first-person account and the third-person perspectives of the other
family members are in agreement. On other occasions the outside perspective shows
that he is not only the magnanimous, good-humoured, suffering family man he claims
to be, but rather he is also fairly neurotic, self-centred and naïve. Altogether, Vic
suffers from feelings of inadequacy and insufficiency, presumably caused by his life
with an alcoholic partner and its effects, namely his clinical depression.
In the second chapter of the novel, Vic is instantly introduced as a shameprone character. He comes across as a neurotic hypochondriac on psychotropics. He
constantly fears a heart attack and when watching television he wonders,
What now? What’s wrong with my eyes? I had a headache the other week as well. I
never get headaches. The doctor’s checked me over several times, you know, the full
works, and says there’s nothing wrong, just keep taking the happy pills. But there is.
There definitely is. (p. 12)
Jake’s perspective shows that everybody is fully aware of Vic’s neurosis, yet they
choose to just ignore it.
123
For the function of anger and rage as shame defense and shame response,
cf. Lewis 1992, pp. 149sqq; Wurmser 1981, pp. 198; 207; Marks 2007, pp. 91sqq.
115
He pulls a strange face. […] then he lets out an ‘oof’ noise and grabs his chest. This
doesn’t alarm me. Dad does it all the time. […] If you just ignore him, he tends to
forget about it after a few minutes. (p. 82)
Two years after they stopped talking to Angie’s sister Vic still expects his sister-in-law
to spy and report on him whenever he eats sweets in the street. He justifies this
neurotic occupation by claiming that “old habits die hard” (p. 9). When the radio plays
“Embarrassment” by Madness, he thinks, “they’re singing about me” (p. 10), and when
Jake and Joni refuse to eat dinner with their parents, he equally neurotically assumes
that “they will both no doubt heat theirs up in the microwave, much later on, when I’m
starting to get peckish again, then take great pleasure in not offering me any” (p. 13).
This assumption is contradicted by Jake’s perspective at a later point: “To shut [Mum]
up, I put some disgusting-looking brown stuff on a plate, shove it in the microwave,
taste a bit, nearly throw up and put the rest in the bin” (p. 17). In short, Vic’s shame
theory is massive.
Right from the start he comes across as demure, almost submissive with a
rather lame sense of humour, which is not cut to oppose the others’ sarcasm and irony.
Vic is unable to deal with Joni’s adolescent behaviour, and he feels genuinely wounded
by her over-the-top comments like “Pervert! You’re disgusting!” (p. 10) In the
aforementioned scene Angie’s strictly opposing perspective concretises the impression
that Vic feels defensive (while also illustrating her growing aggression towards her
husband):
‘I keep telling you, you’re too soft. See if you just belted her, she’d get such a fucking
fright.’ He stands up again and squeezes his shoulder, his useless hippie sensibilities
offended. […] ‘My daughter accuses me of abusing her and I’m supposed to feel
pleased? Jesus, I’m scared to even look at her these days,’ he wails […]. ‘Just ignore
it. How many times do I have to say? All lassies go a bit Exorcist at that age. You
take everything so fucking personally.’ […] How did I ever come to marry such a
big girl’s blouse? (pp. 20sq.)
In the course of the following chapters the reader becomes more and more familiar
with the psychological mechanisms in this marriage. Angie seems to occupy the
traditional, or rather stereotypical masculine position. She snores at night so Vic has to
move onto the settee to get some sleep. Even when sober, Angie is bound to become
aggressive, to physically punish the children and attack her husband in order to solve
problems. Vic, by contrast, does almost anything to please his children, not wanting to
realise that they look upon him with almost the same disdain as his wife does. In order
to prevent further situations of stress, embarrassment and finally shame, he tries to
keep quiet. What this man actually wishes and hopes for is nothing exceptional; he
wants to love and be loved by his children and his wife. The one-dimensional,
pejorative perspectives of the other family members, though, let the reader subscribe
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to their view that he is soft, ‘a big girl’s blouse’ and an embarrassment in his eager-toplease attitude. Instead of sympathy or empathy with his luckless life, feelings of shame
for this ‘weak’ behaviour might prevail. The presumed narrative strategy of shame (or
shaming) becomes very tangible in this example, though in an almost manipulative
sense.
Rather than becoming accustomed to Vic’s shame theory from his perspective, the reader actually becomes accustomed to the others’ deprecatory reactions to
that theory’s effects. This manifests in one of the minor sources of shame afflicting Vic,
which, like the corresponding minor shame contents of his children, serves as a sort of
screen against the more severe underlying group shame. Vic is impotent due to his
medication. He doesn’t miss sex, though, because “it’s one less pressure. I’ve never felt
I was very good at it anyway. I’m all foreplay and no fiveplay. When you come as
quickly as I do, you don’t really have an option” (p. 43). The shame of impotence has
thus only replaced the former shame of ejaculatio praecox. Angie’s adulterous and
heavily sexual relationship with fellow-drinker Raymond can be read as the logical
consequence of an unsatisfied sexual desire that has built up over a certain amount of
time. Insofar as Vic’s anxious assumption that women “just want to be shagged for
hours on end” (p. 44) seems to be true, it reconforms his feelings of guilt for being a
deficient lover in addition to his shame for being betrayed. But as Angie puts it:
“Sooner a frenzied minute than a passionless, predictable 15 of marital banging that I
have to dredge my distant memory for fantasies to enable me to remain awake
throughout. Marital banging, which is, in itself, a distant memory” (p. 121).
Judging the situation like this, though, would involve following Angie’s selfdefensive perspective, as she seeks to fend off her own responsibility for both her
drinking and her adulterous affair. As Vic puts it, “it’s always the same when a
woman’s an alkie. People assume her man must be responsible” (p. 175). Whether
intended or not, the reader can be left with the impression that Vic drives Angie into
drinking again, even though she consciously makes the decision in order to socialise
with Raymond (cf. p. 21). When she is ‘off the wagon,’ she even accuses Vic of
‘depriving her of this for so long’ (cf. p. 56), which is naturally absurd.
Despite this juxtaposition of inner and outer perspectives, Vic’s character
remains one-dimensional in its weakness and insufficiency. Hird does not present any
perspective other than Vic’s strong shame theory and the (equally shame-driven)
contempt of his wife and children. Moreover, Vic’s first-person account itself reflects
the (assumed) opinions of his environment rather than presenting a complementary
insight into his shame-prone, anxious and neurotic self. The reader is thus once again
confronted with a virulently shame-anxious protagonist whose strategies of avoidance
only provoke ever-new shame situations. The major difference between Vic and
Nathan Staples, though, is that the inner and outer perspectives in Everything You Need
are strongly in favour of the character who was caught in a shame-guilt spiral; in Vic’s
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case, on the other hand, the outer perspective almost exclusively works to his
disadvantage. From a psychological point of view, this is highly unusual for a shameprone character, and it results in an entirely shame-neurotic environment.
Feelings of shame for Vic are definitely with feelings of pity. In Chapter Ten,
when Angie drunkenly snores in her bed following her first night out with Raymond
(while Vic has to pick up the equally intoxicated Joni), readers can sense the
inextricable unfairness of Vic’s situation. Joni is sick on the way home, so her father
has to clean up her vomit from the car and the flat. His assumption that “it was
deliberate” (p. 79) may feel habitually neurotic, although his question “How come
everything I touch turns to shit?” (ibid.) appears almost justified, despite its slight taste
of self-pity. Vic finally manages to put Joni to bed, but not without first getting
offended: “‘Stop staring at me like that. You’re giving me the creeps.’ ‘Why do you hate
me, Jo? I’m on your side.’ ‘And other clichés’ (p. 79). The chapter ends with an attempt
to stifle the feelings of embarrassment and disgust that have been provoked by his
experiences that evening, yet Vic’s irony does not provide any relief from a profound
sense of failure: “Angie is snoring through the wall. Fantastic, just fantastic. Jan [the
dog] pees on the hall carpet as I get the duvet out the cupboard. I hum ‘Perfect Day’ to
myself as I go through to the settee” (p. 80).
Unlike Joni and Jake, Vic’s shame does not become apparent in one crucial
scene, but rather it is the fundamental aspect of his characterisation. Nevertheless, the
shame atmosphere intensifies remarkably for him in the final chapters of the novel (Ch.
22-34). This change for the worse runs parallel to his discovery of Angie’s drinking,
her adulterous affair and her aggressive physical and verbal abuse of her family and
neighbours.
Joni’s accusations for ‘always taking her side’ (p. 176) make Vic feel extremely
guilty and he admits to using denial (p. 177) to “keep the family together” (p. 176). Not
willing to realise the shameful truth of her conscious choice, he tries to find an
explanation for Angie’s relapse: “Maybe the anniversary of her dad’s death set her off”
(p. 177). Despite this explanation, contempt, disdain and disgust mix together in Vic’s
conciliatory attitude towards his wife. The night she comes home drunk and beats up
Joni he looks “down at the gaping-mouthed snoring bitch, as I smoke. No wonder I
can’t get it up any more. Generally, I’d turn her onto her side in case she vomits in her
sleep but I don’t bother. At least I get the bed tonight” (p. 177). It almost seems as if the
long-feared and anxiously awaited new evocation of shame for Angie’s drinking elicits
a series of unusual active and aggressive shame defence reactions. Whether his erection
the following morning (his first in more than a year) is also part of this turn towards
the active, must be left open to interpretation. More importantly, when the situation
becomes almost unbearable—with Joni out on her trip to defloration with lorry driver
Rory and grandpa Stewart in the hospital—Vic refers to Angie merely as ‘bitch’ or
simply ‘it,’ and seems very aware of her mental and physical deficiencies:
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Angie barricaded herself, pissed, in the bedroom when she came in last night, so is
probably incapable of answering the phone, or remembering who called if she did.
(p. 208)
I sit, raging, with images of my daughter getting screwed flashing through my head
until it sulks into the room at half-eleven. There’s no point even mentioning Joni,
since the selfish drunken bitch slept through the whole thing, anyway. I try to tell
her about Dad but she’s obviously too preoccupied with where her next drink’s
coming from and blanks me. (pp. 212sq.)
The feel of her arm touching mine sickens me. (p. 247)
I loathe her. (p. 252)
Feelings of contempt and disgust clearly prevail at this stage; nevertheless, Vic tries to
maintain some sense of ‘normality.’ After Angie’s dismissal he listens to her complaints
about her boss, tries to give her advice and even tolerates her buying a “sneaky bottle
of vodka when she’s at the kiosk. Stoli as well. Only the best for my dearest wife”
(p. 244). Later, when he learns that Raymond was her lover, he chastises himself for
letting her laugh “in my bloody face” (p. 250). In the end, when he and Angie seek help
in the Marriage Counselling Service, Vic wonders, “it’s making me feel like I’m
somehow to blame for everything. Is that possible?” (p. 272) Considering his poor selfimage and the intensity of his shame proneness, his own answer to this question can
only be positive. The virulence of Vic’s shame becomes most apparent when he goes to
see his father in the hospital. Stewart realises that something is wrong, but Vic doesn’t
tell in order to protect him:
‘You’re shaking, son. Is everything all right?’ Why can’t I just tell him? He’s the only
person on earth that actually seems to like me … to love me. It would be too like a
confession of my own inadequacy, though. I don’t want him hurt by it as well. (p.
214)
The pretence of protection clearly applies as much to Vic himself as to his father; the
shame is too acute to be pronounced. The sentence, ‘it would be too like a confession
of my own inadequacy,’ also resembles the self-referential passage concerning Jake’s
defence qua dirt. Vic’s own view of himself appears almost too differentiated here,
especially in a passage that depicts his captivity in multifaceted shame affects. Vic is
ashamed not only of Angie’s drinking, but also of not being able to prevent her from
doing so. She shames him not only with her actions, but also with her words. When
she tells him, “Fuck off, Vic” he defiantly thinks, “I’m used to it. This is just the way
people speak to me,” (p. 213) almost as if to calm the reader. At the same time,
119
passages like this can turn the reader against Vic once the impression of self-pity
prevails.124
In the course of the novel, empathic co-shame for Vic and feelings of vicarious
shame for Angie alternate until the latter outweighs the former. In the final sequence of
the text, reader emotions may even turn to pity for both of them. When Vic sleeps with
Angie, she cries but does not reject him. Even though this scene is not physically
violent—as opposed to the hard sex scenes between Raymond and Angie—it illustrates
a strong shift in power:
As I push into her, she lets out a wail. Her arms drop to her sides but still she makes
no sign that she wants me to stop. As I lean down to kiss away the fresh tears, the
only resistance is in her eyes. I pretend not to notice. This isn’t going to take long
anyway. (p. 275)
The novel ultimately concludes with this rather lukewarm success and the reestablishment of marital norms; the future prospects for the Scott family appear to be
little more than depressing (as opposed to the Smart family in Ali Smith’s The
Accidental, who grow stronger as a result of their collapsing shame scenarios). The
family’s biggest source of shame, Angie’s alcoholism, may be temporarily eliminated.
Nevertheless, there is little guarantee that Angie will stay sober for the rest of her life.
In Ch. 32, the purposefulness of her words and actions show that she feels no genuine
regret for her recklessness, her betrayal and her brutality; rather, she stops drinking
and sticks to her marriage merely in order to maintain her standard of living:
I revert to plan B—mock repentance. That usually does the trick. (p. 258)
‘We can get help. I’ve stopped drinking, really. I’ll see someone, whatever you want.’
It’s lies, damned lies but [it] is enough to secure reprieve until he gets
back. (p. 260)
Eyes closed and thinking of England, I try to put my arms around him. (ibid.)
Vic can’t get this and leave me with nothing. If he divorces me, though, that’s what’ll
happen. […] If it was him, rather than me, who looked like the villain, it could be all
so fucking different. Why can’t he hit me? Just fucking once, just smack me in the
gob? It would change everything. (p. 261)
The novel thus ends in frustration with regard to not only its content but also its
narrative strategies. Assuming that a resolution of the characters’ shame is a major
appeal for the continued reading of texts that confront their readers with uneasiness,
embarrassment and shame, Born Free is a real letdown. Despite the narrative form of
124
The same mechanism is recognisable in Nathan in Everything You Need by A. L.
Kennedy, and to a minor extent in Colman in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet. For a detailed discussion
of the empathy-preventing effect of a literary character’s self-pity, cf. Ch. II. 2. 3. 1.
120
present-tense, first-person narration, and despite the one-dimensionality of the
shamed characters, the text conveys an almost inescapable atmosphere of embarrassment and shame. This is related to a very large extent to the shame-inducing effect of
Angie’s shamelessness; on the formal level, though, Victor’s shame theory only
becomes fully tangible through the outside perspectives of the other three characters.
Although the other characters are also capable of evoking empathic reader shame or
embarrassment, the overall effect is comparable to that of Ali Smith’s The Accidental. It
is, after all, the shameless character who inspires most intense vicarious feelings of
shame.
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II. 2. 4. 1 Scotland and Shame: Ali Smith, Like II—‘Ash’
The group shame scenario in Laura Hird’s Born Free is closely linked to the sociocultural background of Scotland; however, unlike the Scott’s group shame experience,
which is exclusively based on their familial structure, Ali Smith’s Like presents
Scottishness, Scottish descent and Scottish socialisation as underlying causes of shame.
Before presenting this argument, however, I will first review the different functions and
meanings of Scotland (in the broadest sense) in the literary shame scenes I have
already discussed.
The Accidental presented Amber MacDonald as a character whose Scottishness
contributed to her overall exotic appeal and made her seem honest and truthful. Not
least due to her Scottish descent she appeared outlandish, archaic and at the same time
consoling and reassuring. Amber’s Scottishness also led Eve back to a long-lost sense
of home and self, as her own mother was Scottish. This return to her own roots stands
at the beginning of her fight against the stifling façade of ideality she built around
herself after her mother’s untimely death. Becoming aware again of her own
Scottishness allows Eve to regain her strength and fight her way out of the tight grip of
shame she had felt for decades. Symbolised by a “little Scottish snort of noise through
her nose” (p. 93).125 Eve rediscovers a different, forgotten mode of articulation. In The
Accidental, Scottishness thus represents a positive form of difference from the
‘quintessentially English’ surroundings, from others’ expectations and, in Eve’s case,
from one’s own exaggerated, idealised self-expectations (ibid.; cf. p. 118). Amber
epitomises Scottishness by combining this sense of both rootedness and nonconformity within herself.
In Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (1998) Scotland functions as a refuge, a place where
Millie Moody (and her son Colman too) can withdraw from the piercing glances of the
press and the public. In the small seaside village of Torr, she is able to be what she
actually is, a mourning widow, while in London, she is nothing more than a scandal
exposed to public shame. For Millie, being in Scotland may not cure her shame, but it
offers a retreat from the self-estrangement she experiences at home. While the
memories of Joss that she associates with this place are painful, this pain is much more
acceptable than the pain inflicted by public exposure. For Colman, being Scottish and
speaking with a Scottish accent are partly linked to assimilation problems when he
moved to London as a child,126 yet with respect to the circumstances of his father’s
death and Colman’s shame scene of intimacy and competence shame, Scotland
125
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, The Accidental. London
2005.
126
“We moved from Glasgow to London when I was seven. […] It was a fucking
nightmare moving down here with that accent.” (Jackie Kay, Trumpet. London 1998, p. 51)
122
ultimately plays a positive role for him as well. He travels to Glasgow to find out about
his father’s past and his own roots as well. There he meets his grandmother for the first
time, and he comes to his senses again and decides against the book on his father. On
the way from Glasgow to Torr, he finally opens the letter from his father, which reveals
an even different story about their descent from Joss’s father. Trumpet thus installs
Scotland as a place of refuge, consolation and reconciliation. As in The Accidental, it is
important for these characters to return (in this case not only mentally but also
physically) to their Scottish roots in order to re-establish themselves as independent of
the (ostensibly) norm-conforming pressure of others. Colman’s decision not to write
the book with Sophie Stones also illustrates the same rootedness and truthfulness that
Amber’s Scottishness signifies in The Accidental.
Looking for the Possible Dance (1993) by A. L. Kennedy is also set in Scotland,
though the characters’ shame is not connected to that place in any remarkable way.
Nevertheless, this and other stories by A. L. Kennedy present Scottish characters in an
English environment surrounded by the same ‘exotism’ that characterises Amber in
Ali Smith’s The Accidental. The main protagonist of A. L. Kennedy’s Looking for the
Possible Dance, Margaret, studies at an English university where she meets her
boyfriend Colin, a fellow Scot (a scenario comparable to that of Like which will be
discussed next):
The only two Scots on an English, English Literature course; they ought to form a
natural pair. […] [I]t must be admitted, they did match very well. Neither of them
managed to dress quite like students. […] There was a formality about them that
some of their fellow students found off-putting. […] Colin in bars or at social
gatherings resembled nothing so much as a thin, plain-clothes policeman or a
skinny Mormon out on a spree. Eventually, someone christened him Elder McCoag.
[…] He could […] skin up in very public places, because he looked far to
respectable to ever be rolling a joint. A Scottish upbringing had some good points.
(p. 38)127
A similar passage can be found in A.L. Kennedy’s short story “Christine” in Now That
You’re Back:
I went to a university in England […]. Scots down south either turn into Rob Roy
McStrathspeyandreel or simply become Glaswegian—no one will understand you, if
you don’t. Rather than smile through a lifetime of simpleton assumptions and kind
enquiries after Sauchiehall Street in the frail hope of one day explaining my
existence, I chose to be English and to disappear.128
127
Original quotations here and following from A. L. Kennedy, Looking for the
Possible Dance. London 1993.
128
A. L. Kennedy, Now That You Are Back. London 1994, p. 15.
123
The second quotation especially draws a connection between the fear of being
ridiculed for being Scottish (‘a lifetime of simpleton assumptions’) and the defensive
avoidance strategy to ‘be English and to disappear,’ which suggests that Scots living in
England naturally expect to feel shame. It can therefore be assumed, that some of A. L.
Kennedy’s characters are prone to shame due to their Scottish descent, at least in a
‘foreign,’ English surrounding. Nathan in Everything You Need, for instance, is the only
Scot living among the English on Foal Island, but there are hardly any hints as to his
family or socio-cultural background that might reveal whether this is a potential cause
of his extreme shame proneness. In other texts, though, Kennedy draws a closer
connection between Scottish education, especially religious education, and shame
proneness. The most striking example is the aforementioned short story “A Perfect
Possession,” in which systematic child abuse is justified by the parents as the abidance
of religious and in fact bigoted principles. The intense and traumatic shame these
parents induce in their child is connected to a specifically Scottish Pietistic background, even though there are no other linguistic or topographical markers that would
necessarily suggest this possibility. Other short stories, like “The role of notable
silences in Scottish history,” draw a distinct connection between Scottish history,
religion and education, or rather knowledge and the lack of it.
In Looking for the Possible Dance, the protagonist Margaret sums up the
“SC OT TISH METHOD (FOR THE PERFECTION OF CHILDREN) ,” from which
she, “like many others, will take the rest of her life to recover.” (p. 15) It contains in
nuce many aspects that reappear in other texts, and the connection between this mock
educational program and the implantation of an enduring underlying shame scene is
very apparent. Just to name a few points: “1. Guilt is good. […] 3. Masturbation is an
abuse of one’s self; sexual intercourse, the abuse of one’s self by others. […] 6. Pain and
fear will teach us to hurt and petrify ourselves, thus circumventing further public
expense. […] 9. God hates us. In word, in thought, in deed we are hateful before God
and we may do no greater good than to hate ourselves.” (pp. 15sq.) A. L. Kennedy thus
deals with another aspect of the relationship between shame and Scottishness, which
also reoccurs in Ali Smith’s Like: the shame-inducing aims and effects of Scottish
Protestantism.129
129
As for the (perceived) aims of Protestant religious education, the aspect of guilt
may be much more prominent than the aspect of shame; since the two realms are closely
related, though, shame is one likely effect of a guilt-inducing religious socialisation. With
regard to the effects of religious history and presence in Scotland, a recent discussion of
Sectarianism in Scotland, edited by T. M. Devine, carries the telling title, Scotland’s Shame?
Bigotry and Sectarianism in Modern Scotland (2000). Prejudice against Catholics in Scotland
(which is hardly recognised outside of Scotland) is a continuous subject of critical selfreflection among Scottish intellectuals and politicians. Cf. for instance a paper on “Religious
discrimination and sectarianism in Scotland: a brief review of evidence (2002-2004)” on the
124
In Ali Smith’s first novel Like (1997), which was already discussed with regard to
ideality shame and dependence shame (cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 4), the shame feelings and
experiences of the protagonist Aisling McCarthy are strongly connected to a distinct
group shame for her Scottish working-class background. Ash’s religious, shameinducing and homophobic education and her guilt- and shame-laden youth as a
lesbian in Inverness are major parts of her shame narrative. These aspects are framed
by the memories of her time in Cambridge and her extraordinary but unhappy
friendship with Amy, which ended in an act of destructive shame-rage. Ash’s
assimilation shame for her sexual orientation and her feelings of group shame for
being an ‘unfeminine, unrefined and uneducated’ Scot are closely linked. Therefore,
both aspects will be discussed with respect to the role Scotland plays in the shame
scene of this particular character.
The second part of the novel, which is entitled “ASH,” instantly establishes
Scotland as the setting of the narrative and the narrator’s place of origin, “land of my
soul and my formation, the Highlands” (p. 158).130 The basic tone of ambivalence that
characterised the first part of the novel is also maintained in this part, although the
connection between this ambivalence and Scotland is new. In Amy’s part of the story,
ambivalence was largely related to her person and thus added enormously to the
incomprehensibility of her motives. Ash’s account, by contrast, appears straightforward and comprehensible besides its ambiguities. Beginning with the words “so I’m
home, and I haven’t a clue where I am” (p. 155), the first chapter introduces the reader
to a number of crucial facts concerning Ash. The narrative form and the alleged
frankness of a diary written from a present-tense first-person perspective, which is
eventually interrupted by occasional memories in the past tense, produce an
immediate intimacy with the character that starkly differs from the distance that
characterises the first half of the novel. In quick succession, Ash reveals that she is
lesbian, that she stole her friend Amy’s diaries to read them, that she was shocked “to
read her version of things” (p. 157) and that the ‘beautiful, romantic and passionate’
story that preceded this breach of trust was “not a story for here, not for small town
Scotland, not then, not ever, never here in the decent, upright, capital of the
Highlands” (p. 158). Imagining the public reactions to a lesbian couple, ‘the scandal,
the curse and the chaos,’ Ash discusses the permanent concealment of her sexual
orientation:
All along I always knew the rules, I knew them innately. I had somehow learned
them even before I knew what the word meant, the silent mouthed word for it that
Web site of the Scottish government: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/
Publications/2005/01/20553/50497.
130
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, Like. London 1997.
125
some kind and anonymous seer had scrawled like a scar on my science folder at
school when I was eleven or twelve. (p. 159)
At the age of fifteen she fell in love for the first time with Donna, a girl from school. In
this “greengage summer” (p. 160), as she calls it, quoting a book and film title, she also
met Amy, “mon âme, my aim, my friend Amy” (p. 157). Her sexual awakening was
thus accompanied by her first glimpses into a world entirely different from hers. While
Amy came from a wealthy, well-educated Southern English family, Ash grew up as a
salesman’s daughter who lost her mother early. She grew up with her two older
brothers and an “old rogue” of a father (ibid.). Several assimilation shame-inducing
factors could have potentially turned Ash into a shame-prone character. She lost her
mother, and her father became involved with changing partners but did not remarry.
Being a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant surrounding is another means of
involuntary distinction from the norm. Yet, as Ash’s ironic and playfully naïve
memories show, that was not her biggest problem. Her girlfriend’s mother “was very
suspicious of me after she found out I was Catholic; I never knew why that should
make her particularly suspicious, there were plenty of better reasons” (p. 209). Finally
and crucially, she is a lesbian who grows up in an extremely conservative environment.
Ash learns to hide from the public eye, but she nonetheless lives her sexuality.
Although she feels the shame for her environment’s attitude towards her emotions and
preferences, she is eager to fight this shame in order to live shame- and guilt-free. The
secrecy of her first love with Donna, though, is not only sweet. The bitterness of their
ever-present fear of being discovered is still tangible in Ash’s narrative:
Was that how it was? That’s how I remember it anyway. Us crammed into secret
places, snatching at each other, trying grimly not to give ourselves away or let
anyone hear. Two years of nowhere to go, of always looking for a place to be. […]
The best place was under the stage in the school hall […], the perfect spacious
comfortable private dark warm place to set about testing the age of innocence in
pure and breathless combining, until Lorraine Burns started going out with Paul
Black and Paul knew about under the stage too. That was the first time we were
nearly caught, […] Donna so scared we’d be found that by the time we got out of
there she was crying with fear, hardly able to breath anything more than a thick
wheeze, and I had bitten the soft inside my lip into a bloody mess. For several days
after that we avoided each other, not speaking to each other when we passed in the
corridor, both so terrified that somehow everybody would suspect, everybody
would know, both, I think, just as terrified that we found each other out, found out
something about ourselves that we really didn’t want to have to know. (pp. 205sq.)
The girls’ experiences with reactions to teenage sexuality in general and homosexuality
in particular result in a strong shame theory. When two of their classmates (girl and
boy) hold hands under the table, the RE teacher ridicules them in front of the entire
class (cf. pp. 208sq.; see also p. 258sq. for another example of religious
126
(mal)education). Ash and Donna had to expect the worst in case they were found out.
Another scene in the prefect’s room seems to prove them right, when friends of Ash
and Donna discuss the case of Martina Navratilova, agreeing that her marriage with
another woman was ‘disgusting’ and ‘the most revolting thing’ (cf. pp. 215sq.).
Although Ash shows intense shame reactions, such as staring, not looking up and
blushing, she stands up to the unanimous opinion of her friends. The way she
describes this, though, contains an inherent distance that reflects the enormous
emotional constraint and ambiguity of the situation. The passage starts with Ash’s
immediate shame reactions to her school-friends’ expressions of homophobia. This is
followed by the self-detached, almost depersonalised experience of her active shame
defence reaction. The past-tense form of this passage supports the assumption that an
all-encompassing narrative of a shame experience demands a certain distance from the
actual event either in terms of time or point of view. The persistent split of the selfcontained voice from Ash’s actual paralysed self conserves the underlying virulence of
the shame that was felt in the past:
I was staring at my book, not looking up from my book and my ears were burning, I
could feel them reddening, and a small voice from somewhere inside my throat
before I could stop it was saying, well, maybe they like each other.
My ears were burning, my whole head was burning with the space I’d made
round myself, but nothing had happened, then I wasn’t sure I’d said anything,
maybe I hadn’t, maybe it hadn’t been me who’d said it, maybe I’d just imagined it
and nobody had said it at all, and Shona said, clear and loud, maybe who likes who,
Ash? […] Maybe the tennis player and her friend, the voice said.
Silence. […] The little sounds of people who are pretending not to listen.
It’s perfectly okay for people to like whoever they want to like, the voice went
on. […]
Yeah, but it’s perfectly disgusting, Shona said. […] [I]t’s really unnatural, eh?
No it’s not, the voice said, and it was coming from me. Not unnatural, I said.
Just unexpected. It’s just a different kind of natural. […]
People aren’t meant to act like that. Otherwise we wouldn’t be made like we
are. It’s not natural. It’s not normal. It’s really sick.
That was Donna.
I shut my book. […] My mouth was smiling, I could feel it. I said I’ll go
outside and get some sun. […]
My hand was shaking so much I couldn’t bring the coffee up to my mouth
without spilling it. (pp. 216-219)
The space Ash ‘had made around herself’ is first of all the distance that appears
between the shamed subject and the others. Independent of her friends’ intentions—as
they are attacking an absent third person and are not aware that there is an actual
127
lesbian present—Ash reacts to their expressions of disgust and contempt with shame.131
As mentioned before, shame is both the self’s acceptance of a norm and a confession of
its violation, which remains more or less independent of the individual’s intellectual
convictions.132 In Ash’s social environment, sexuality—particularly homosexuality—is
a highly shame-laden subject. This is the norm she affectively reacts to. At the same
time, though, her convictions and her self-assertive impulses result in a shame defence
reaction that responds to the shaming comments. By speaking up for what is generally
assumed to be a ‘shameful crowd,’ Ash moves from her individual, hidden shame for
an involuntary norm violation towards identification with a group’s shame. This time,
though, the norm violation happens voluntarily and causes no new shame for her.133
Besides the uneasiness of the situation and Ash’s need to finally leave the room, she is
able to repel her initial shame feelings by turning her passive, quiet suffering into an
active defence.134 Her environment’s reaction to this incident proves the social
virulence of the matter. Ash’s relationship with Donna ends that day because the latter
chooses to stick to their peer group’s conventions (cf. pp. 218; 220sq.). On the other
hand, though, new perspectives arise from Ash’s voluntary norm violation: “A whole
group of people stopped talking to me. A whole other group started” (p. 220).
The situation appears to relax considerably when Ash moves to Cambridge.
She has relationships with both men and women, and she no longer attempts t hide her
relationships with women. None of the deep shame anxieties she felt in Scotland are
ever mentioned again. Still, Ash’s life in England is not shame-free; rather the source of
her shame merely shifts. Back home, the cause of Ash’s assimilation shame was the
conservative Scottish society. In England, her Scottish lower-class origin is the source
of an entirely new group shame that both contradicts and supports her learned selfimage as ‘being different.’ While her outer appearance and her sexual orientation are
no longer a means of distinction, her Scottishness and her lower social and educational
131
Cf. Wurmser: “The two affects of shame and disgust overlap. In metaphorical
derivatives […] disgust becomes almost synonymous with shame (e.g., ‘I am disgusted with
you’ = ‘You should be ashamed’).” (1981, p. 115).
132
Cf. Landweer 1999, p. 37.
133
“Nicht jeder Normverstoß führt dazu, daß man sich schämt. Ein absichtlicher
Normverstoß etwa ist keinesfalls beschämend, sondern eine Provokation. Die Reaktionen auf
diese Provokation können zwar für den Provozierenden beschämend sein, nicht aber der
gewollte Normverstoß selbst. Für die Scham können entsprechend nur Normverstöße, die
nicht in voller Absicht geschehen, als konstitutiv aufgefaßt werden.” (Landweer 1999, p. 38)
134
There is a major difference between what Wurmser describes as ‘turning the
tables’ or ‘turning passive into active,’ and the active and conscious opposition Ash takes
against her friends’ opinions. Ash does not try to make “the other person feel as defeated,
ridiculous, and helplessly furious” as she does (p. 252). She is rather reluctant to feel shame
for her sexuality in the first place; but there is also a remarkable need to persuade people of
the righteousness of homosexual emotions.
128
background suddenly become one, and sometimes the old and the new shame scenes
intertwine. Self-accusations of being ‘unfeminine,’ which stem from an internalisation
of stereotypes from her Inverness past (cf. pp. 171; 180), mix with the judgmental
ignorance of her English environment (cf. pp. 235sq.). Scotland, its people and its
language are thought of as remote and incomprehensible—an attitude that starkly
differs from Amy and her fellow students’ general knowledge of and interest in
cultures, languages and literatures. This lack of knowledge also characterises Amy’s
father David, and it contradicts his overall image as an Oxbridge intellectual. When
Ash shows the Shone family around Inverness and the country, Amy is the only one
who proves some knowledge of Scottish history (cf. pp. 183sqq.). Years later, though, in
her private library, there are “novels piled on novels, English, American, French,
German, everything, everything you could imagine (except Scottish, I don’t remember
anything Scottish)” (p. 245). In this surrounding, Ash feels “rough, coarse, unfeminine,
brave and different” (p. 235). Amy, by contrast, appears to her as “the epitome of
England. […] The south east. The place of learning. […] Amy’s voice sometimes, if a
rose could speak, that’s its voice, clipped, velvet, deep-tinged red. The intonation that
makes things how they are just by saying so, quite, yes, quite” (pp. 229; 235). For Amy
and her friends, Ash’s appeal seems largely based on a certain exotism that is
associated with her regional, social and educational background (cf. pp. 235sqq.;
246).135 Although she only realises this in retrospect—and treats it ironically—her past
self-image, even when reflected by her memories, is strongly influenced by her
environment’s images. Ash often feels uncomfortable and alienated, especially with
Amy:
I was always out of my element in her rooms, fish out of water, bird submerged, John
Wayne, yes, striding towards Helena Bonham Carter in A Room With a View,
walking into things and breaking the crockery in the dining room, arms and legs too
big, stetson knocking a picture frame squint. (p. 246)
Beginning at an early age, Ash develops a shame theory that is largely based on a
discrepancy between ideal femininity and herself. In Scotland, the ideal is that of a
conservative, religious and humble girl; in England it is that of a wealthy, educated and
refined woman. Ash does not live up to either of these ideals; in fact, she rather
despises them both. Yet although her private ideal is entirely different, the discrepancy
between ideal femininity and herself causes repeatedly scenes of shame due to her lack
of alternatives. When Ash enters the alternative scene of underground filmmakers, her
situation fundamentally changes. All of a sudden her real self has the potential of an
135
In this respect, Ash stands in line with the characters in the writings by Ali Smith
and A. L. Kennedy that are outlined above.
129
ideal. A small passage is proof of this other, new side of herself. Ash tells Melanie, the
girl who plays her father’s piano, about the first film in which she starred:
It’s this story about this girl, I said, it’s hard to explain, but she’s beautiful and
charismatic and magical and attractive. Who plays her? Melanie asked. What do you
mean who plays her? I said, giving her a push, she was laughing. (p. 278)
These few lines contain a twofold turn away from Ash’s former shame-theory. On the
one hand, the apparent irony in Melanie’s question as to who played the ‘beautiful and
charismatic and magical and attractive’ girl in the film functions as a counterpoint to
Ash’s (self-) image thus far. On the other hand, there is no insecurity or selfconsciousness in Ash’s joking reaction to Melanie’s question. Outer and inner
appearances become congruent, which was not always the case. By giving up the
normative ideals of both her childhood home and the Oxbridge establishment, Ash
indeed becomes ‘beautiful and charismatic and magical and attractive.’136
This passage also depicts the possible effect of the protagonist’s shame theory
on the reader. These positive attributes are new to Ash’s characterisation. Melanie’s
question, asked in a non-ironic way, would thus correspond to both the character’s and
the reader’s shame expectations. By breaking with these expectations, the end of Ash’s
shame for not corresponding to a traditional ideal of femininity becomes evident.
Despite the distance between Ash’s present life and the shame she felt in the
past concerning her sexuality and her origin, other aspects of her shame experience
still persist, such as Amy’s friendship, her overall behaviour towards Ash and the
latter’s unhappy secret love. There are few situations between them that contain a sense
of present, immediate shame, because they are not described with the usual ironic
distance that is otherwise characteristic of Ash’s narrative. The hurtful and shameful
effects of their relationship unfold unexpectedly due to both the lack of distance in the
account and to Amy’s politeness and correctness. These scenes also contain the highest
empathic reader shame potential for precisely the same reasons.
Amy very likely realises that Ash loves her—perhaps the way she later thinks
‘idly’ of a man, “Angus is in love with me” (p. 50). More than once her shaming is
connected to Ash’s girlfriends. This might mean that Amy is jealous and that she
secretly loves Ash too but remains under the control of social norms instead of giving
into her feelings. However, there is hardly any basis for this interpretation in the text;
Ash is more likely a welcome counterpart in a long-term power game. In retrospect,
she sees this right from the beginning, as she notes that things were “part of the game I
136
This move towards the real away from an ideal that is out of touch with the actual
self strongly resembles the ways in which the protagonists Astrid and Eve in The Accidental
were able to overcome their respective shame feelings.
130
hadn’t even realised I was playing” (p. 227). The purpose of the shameful hidden
offences and mean things Amy says and does is to exercise power over Ash.137
Amy is, for instance, the one who draws Ash’s attention to Donna in the first
place. While Ash is very excited about the friendly banalities they exchange, Amy’s
lapidary comment, “fascinating, you have so much in common” (p. 193), clearly refers
to the supposed provinciality and non-intellectuality of the other two girls. By the end
of the paragraph, Amy is “glinting, removed, polite again” (ibid.), thus presenting an
impermeable surface that makes any reaction impossible. The fact that Ash remains
speechless in the face of this unexpected affront, even in retrospect, shows that the
shaming effect persists. The same pattern appears with regard to Ash’s girlfriend
Simone in Cambridge: “Amy didn’t like Simone […], she called her Simple Simone,
had said how she admired Simone’s touching enthusiasm. Had said how nice it must
be for me to have a twin at last” (p. 287). Even at the level of sentence structure, Ash’s
shiftlessness in the face of Amy’s game of shame and power is still tangible. The
particular shame content relating to her girlfriend is even increased when she reads in
one of Amy’s diaries “how very pretty Simone was” (p. 308), while Ash herself does not
appear a single time.
Amy’s shaming is not limited to Ash’s interpersonal relationships; in the end,
it consumes her entire persona. It includes the very same national and social
stereotypes with which Ash is confronted elsewhere. The intensity of their friendship is
inversely proportional to Amy’s success at university: “As Amy’s rooms got bigger,
though, she would more often choose to ignore me on the street. In her eyes the tiniest
hint of apology at having to do it, then that too would vanish, and so would I” (p. 250).
At this later stage of their friendship, Ash puts herself into shame-provoking situations
just by being herself, while Amy privately still enjoys Ash’s ‘barbarianism’ (cf. p. 291)
and her idiom, “Language, Ash, Amy said, soft, mock-shocked” (p. 293). The exotic
charm of her differentness, though, cannot outweigh the public embarrassment she
obviously represents to Amy.138 Ash would usually “be left standing in the street, one
moment there, the next moment air. Here today, gone today” (p. 251). On rare
occasions, though, she talks back in order to defend herself against Amy’s shame. In
137
For the varied connections between shame and power, see Landweer’s Scham und
Macht (1999), especially chapter VIII, “Soziale Ordnung, Macht und Herrschaft,” and chapter
IX, “Scham als Sanktion”.
138
Conversely, Ash once felt embarrassment for Amy. When they first met, and Ash
went around Inverness with the Shone family, she was embarrassed for their ‘Southernness,’
for their language and their behaviour: “They wandered round it talking in voices so loud
that people looked at them. I pretended I wasn’t with them.” (p. 182) Ash’s vicarious shame
did not lead to any distance between her and Amy, though; the attraction of their otherness
well outweighed it.
131
one scene, she even manages to ‘turn the tables’ and deflect some of the situation’s
awkwardness onto her friend:
Once she was sitting at a table with three other women in the library tearoom; it was
my teabreak, I’d been up in the tower moving volumes from one shelf to another, I
was wearing overalls and my face and hands were smudged with the dirt that comes
off books. I pulled a chair beside her, flopped into it with a loud sigh. Jesus Christ
Amy, I said, would you believe it, the History of Art books are heavier than anything
else, except the newspaper files and the bloody encyclopaedias, I’m at the end of my
rope. What are we doing tonight?
Wrong. The wrong language, the wrong place. The wrongness of it settled
round me as one of them adjusted her seating, one of them pressed a napkin to her
mouth, one of them lifted her cup, another of them waited a moment then carried
on talking as if I wasn’t there. They were discussing the problematic lightness of the
novels of E M Forster. One of them was my friend Amy. I took a moment, took a
breath. So that’s how you pronounce Forster, I said. Like Keets and Yeets, isn’t it.
Kates, Yates. I must get back to my work though. Can’t stay here chatting. Otherwise
who’ll find the books for the likes of you ladies? I pushed my chair back and stood
up, smiled at Amy, nodded goodbye. (ibid.)
The link between Ash’s shame theory and her expectations, the issue of her ‘Northernness’ and its connotations of being unrefined, unfeminine and second-rate and her
unequal friendship with Amy gradually become apparent: “The more important she
became the less we saw each other and the more indecorous, invisible, northern and
androgynous I felt myself becoming” (p. 264).
The purpose of Ash’s diary is in fact to overcome her ongoing grief for the
shame and unhappiness that resulted from her unhappy love for Amy. At the very
beginning, Ash writes, “for once I want my own twist of it. And if you write something
down, it goes away. […] I want rid of it” (pp. 157sq.). In her case, though, script
therapy proves to be ineffectual; near the end of her narrative, Ash realises that the
writing has made her live through her feelings of past shame all over again:
It would be good if you could just hoover your memory out. I thought that writing
this would be like that, that I would write it all down and then I could close the
cover and it’d be over, out. But it’s given me the bad dreams again. […]
Write it in the sand and let the sea smooth it away. Write it on paper then hold
a match to the corner. Write it in a book and shut the cover. Bury it in the garden or
send it through the post to a place that doesn’t exist. (p. 309)
According to Landweer, shame, unlike embarrassment, can be refreshed through
memory (cf. 1999, p. 123). By writing down her story, Ash revives her shame rather
than ‘hoovering it out.’ The lack of stringency near the end of her narrative, the
avoidance of any clear-cut description of the events and the juxtaposition of different
possible versions of what might have happened not only provide a counterpoint to the
132
generally straightforward style of Ash’s account, but also illustrate the virulence of her
feelings of being unloved and unlovable, which are major shame contents.139
When Ash reads Amy’s diaries, she must realise that she is not mentioned
once, as opposed to almost anything else that ever happened in Amy’s life or sprang to
her mind (cf. pp. 305; 307sq.). Ash’s immediate reaction shows the typical disoriented
paralysis of the severely shamed:140
Gaunt and lost. Flapping in the wind like an empty shirt on a line, an empty skin.
Dazed, like a kitten on the edge of a motorway. Everywhere you look, written across
the grey sky or blue sky or black sky above the buildings, written above the shops
where the shop names should be, written on every blank face that passes you in the
street. You are nobody to the one who is everything to you. But that didn’t last long.
Romantic crap. It was soon over. (p. 307)
Ash’s final comment, “Romantic crap. It was soon over” is, of course, implausible
because if that had been the case, writing this diary would have been redundant.
Furthermore, both the comment and her subsequent self-depreciation for writing a
diary leave the impression of a defence reaction, arguably against her remembered and
revived feelings of shame: “The world has no need of this particular life-and-times. At
my level it’s wanking. A long slow circling self-important lot of wank. Though this was
never a diary. Vile idea. And at the same time it is one, vile as it is” (p. 326).141
Assuming that Ash really set fire to Amy’s books and burnt down her entire room, her
life in Cambridge and her friendship with Amy finally end in one last ‘turning the
tables’ reaction, yet of a much more excessive kind than before.142 Near the end, when
Ash starts to suffer from what she feels is only a “waiting half-life” in a “foreign
country,” (pp. 266sq.) she decides to “be the disruptive heroic rebel of a Scot I knew I
139
“In content, basic shame is the pain of feeling unloved and unlovable, reaching
back to very early trauma and recast in the many particular contents of shame: weakness,
defectiveness, dirtiness, masochistic excitement, and falling short in competition. In very
severe shame-proneness this traumatic sense of radical unlovability is present; in more
common neurotic or ‘normal’ shame there only are derivatives of nontraumatic feelings of
such basic shame.” (Wurmser 1981, p. 97)
140
“Shame’s aim is disappearance. This may be, […] most archaically in the form of
freezing into complete paralysis and stupor.” (Wurmser 1981, p. 84)
141
In one of his case studies Wurmser also describes a patient’s contemptuous shame
reactions, a major part of which concerns “her depreciation of her artistic or written products
as worthless junk” is a major part (Wurmser 1981, p. 113).
142
Cf. Williams, who points out the externalising mechanism in Ash’s act of revenge:
“The devastation of finding that her name does not appear in Amy’s seven diaries is supreme.
[…] Ash externalises and objectifies the discovery of her absence by setting fire to Amy’s
things, effectively erasing them, reciprocating Amy’s original act of violence—her denial of
Ash.” (2006, pp. 171sq.)
133
was born to be” (p. 271). At first, this only means that she will displace books in the
library so ‘the likes of’ Amy and her colleagues will not find their books. In the end,
though, reading Amy’s diaries and not being mentioned once is the last straw that
breaks the camel’s back. The memory of her reaction, though, still fills Ash with great
unease and shame:
No. Of course not. That’s not how it was. […]
Caledonian calefaction. Caledonia! stern and wild, nursing the stories of your
precious past, the forming of your mountains when your cold earth boiled and cold
rock thawed and folded and shifted and thrust its new shape raw into the air. I can’t
get no, calefaction.
No. This version of things is simpler, sadder, shameful. It chills me just to
think about it and it makes my face burn. (p. 301)
The connection between Ash’s problematic self-image as a Scot, which appears to
contain a large amount of introjected external appraisal and prejudices, and the shame
(and guilt) for her actions is obvious. It remains unclear whether Ash really set fire to
Amy’s room or whether it was only a revengeful fantasy. The episode’s true relevance
lies in its ability to revive Ash’s past shame feelings. Due to this acute affective state, no
straightforward description of the actual events seems possible, even within Ash’s
altogether moderately distanced and ironic account.143
Aisling McCarthy is one of the few characters discussed whose shame scene is
closely and intrinsically linked to her Scottish social and cultural background. Her part
of the narrative is much less opaque than Amy’s account in the first half of the novel;
the partial decomposition of her narration, though, illustrates the virulence of the
underlying shame scenes of her homosexuality and her unrequited love for Amy. As
my analysis has shown, the passages related to Ash’s most pressing shame experiences—her confrontation with her classmates’ contempt for homosexuals and Amy’s
almost sadistic shaming of her—possess the biggest potential to evoke empathic reader
shame. The first example does so by disrupting Ash’s self-perception, while the second
leaves the reader with Ash’s unanswered and quietly accepted shame. To a certain
extent, the scene in the prefects’ room is read and interpreted from the perspective of
Ash’s shame theory, while Amy’s debasing comments place the reader in the position
of a shame witness.
Besides the enduring sense of shame that is perpetuated by Ash’s memories,
her account offers a clearly positive outlook. Her active defence against her
multifaceted shame affects allows her to strive for freedom from shame, and her
apparent success as an artist is proof of the positive effect of that endeavour. To live
freed of stifling and punishing shame feelings should not be confused with shame 143
This blank space also appears very relevant to Amy’s narrative in the first part of
the novel, cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 4.
134
lessness, though. The final chapter of this section deals with texts in which a literary
character exudes a distinct sense of shamelessness. The characters’ social functions
within these novels and their implications are as much subject to discussion as are the
connections between shamelessness and vicarious shame as empathic reader emotions.
II. 2. 5 Shamelessness
In the introduction to this section I already pointed out that the major focus of
psychological and psychoanalytic shame research is on the negative effects of shame
for the self. Its positive effects in terms of identity formation and its guarantee of norm
adherence are recognised, though they only play a minor role in clinical studies. The
literary discussions in the preceding chapters show that the negative effects of shame
also prevail in literary discourse. In Shame and the Self, Francis Broucek criticises the
fact that
a major part of the Freudian legacy is a general cultural disrespect for shame.
Freud’s failure, and the failure of later psychoanalysts, to recognize shame’s healthy
functions led to the culturally disastrous notion that freedom from shame
(including the sense of shame) is the mark of the healthy society […].
(Broucek 1991, p. 135).
To some extent this criticism may be legitimate; however, it loses a lot of its effect by
ignoring the major difference between freedom from shame and freedom from the
sense of shame. For Stephan Marks, shamelessness and freedom from shame are as
different as day and night. While the latter is clearly positive in that it offers the self a
refuge in which it can drop its guard and be the way it is, shamelessness is merely a
shame defence mechanism and an attempt to ‘get rid’ of shame feelings altogether
(which is naturally hopeless, cf. Marks 2007, pp. 174sqq.).
As Léon Wurmser puts it, “a specific form of […] defense against ideals is
‘shamelessness.’ It can be understood primarily as a reaction formation against shame.
In the typical ‘return of the repressed,’ shame merely appears displaced” (1981, p. 264).
This ‘return of the repressed’ can have very negative effects for both the shameless
subject and its environment. Shameless behaviour leads to the violation of social and
cultural norms as well as the shame feelings of others. As a consequence, parts of
society and other individuals withdraw from the habitually shameless person. In
return,
there is the haunting fear of failure and the specter of lovelessness and emptiness
wherever one chooses to look. Loneliness and a restless search for meaning erupt
whenever the abyss of not loving, of not being loved, and of feeling radically unlovable opens in front of one’s feet—the abyss once again of basic shame. (ibid., p. 263)
135
Half of the texts discussed in this section (with the exception of A. L.
Kennedy’s short story “The moving house”) end in a positive way with the protagonists overcoming their shame. Their freedom from shame scenes, stifling memories
of past shame events and latent shame anxieties appears desirable, and it signifies the
possibility of a conciliatory end to the shame narrative. Three of the novels, though,
present characters whose demonstratively shameless behaviour stands out. Their
characterisation follows the contrasting ‘logic’ of shamelessness as described above; by
the end of the novel, the ‘repressed returns’ in the form of their (re-) surfacing shame
feelings. In all of these three examples, the positive regulatory effect of shame is indeed
brought to the foreground, both with regard to societal and individual norm
adherence. These characters are bound to evoke feelings of shame, both in the
witnesses of their shameful behaviour within the text and in the readers.144 For a
discussion of the literary representation of shamelessness, we will return once more to
Ali Smith’s The Accidental, Jackie Kay’s Trumpet and Laura Hird’s Born Free.
144
The interrelation between shamelessness, exposure and the re-establishment of a
moral and social order is central in Deborah Martinsen’s study Surprised by Shame (2003) on
‘Dostoevsky’s Liars and Narrative Exposure’. Her interpretation of the liar in Dostoevsky’s
work foregrounds the moral and moralising aspect of shameful exposure and its warning
effects on the reader: “Dostoevsky thus uses shame as an instrument of social conscience that
not only expands readers’ moral imaginations but also makes us examine our own collusion
in the status quo. By inducing social shame, Dostoevsky produces social disgust and inspires
social reform. We readers are persuaded to remake ourselves according to the models he
suggests.” (2003, p. 22) However, Martinsen only assumes both the effect of shame narrative
and reader reactions as a given fact without elaborating on either phenomenon’s form and
functions. With regard to Russian literature of the late 19th century, these assumptions may be
correct, if a little one-dimensional. As for the literature discussed in this book, such a distinct
moralising, openly strategic usage of shame—within and across the boundaries of the literary
text—only applies to the shameless characters. The positive ‘pleasurable’ and ‘entertaining’
effect that Martinsen expects from the exposure of the shameless liar (cf. pp. 11; 13) is closely
connected to the regulatory effect of shame. Shame as a subjective experience is always
negative, though; assuming a however defined empathic reader shame response (as Martinsen
naturally does), a positive effect of literary shame is always ambivalent. This ambivalence of
possible reader reactions will be discussed in the present chapter. The potential of empathic
reader shame as ‘negative pleasure’ will be discussed in the outlook chapter at the end of this
book, just like the question why readers go through literary shame empathically, rather than
terminate their reading in order to prevent themselves from negative affect.
136
Ali Smith, The Accidental IV—‘Michael’
Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental (2004) has already been discussed with respect to the
assimilation shame of the Smart family’s daughter Astrid, the ideality shame suffered
by her mother Eve and the conscience/moral shame of Magnus, the son. In each of
these cases, Amber MacDonald, the family’s accidental summer guest, plays a
significant role in the characters’ gradual awareness of themselves and their shame.
Amber subjects Astrid, Eve and Magnus to a form of ‘shame therapy,’ in which the
destruction of old habits and love objects precedes the (re-)construction of their (new)
selves. By overcoming their old shame feelings they are fit to confront past, present and
future shame events; the destructive part is only dropped in Magnus’s case since he is
already sufficiently shattered when Amber finds him. With Magnus, this self-renewal
has a distinctly sexual side, as Amber becomes his first lover.
The role she plays for Eve’s husband and Astrid and Magnus’s stepfather
Michael is equally related to sexual attraction, yet in a completely different manner.
While Magnus, who is on the brink of suicide, hardly consideres getting involved with
a girl when she turns up—and especially not with ‘an older woman’ (p. 153)145—
Michael is chronically adulterous. When Amber turns up at their holiday home, she is
prey for him. As it turns out, he routinely chooses one student in each term for supervision. His criteria are excellent marks and whether they ‘look the type’ (p. 70). Apparently, Dr. Michael Smart, as he likes to refer to himself, has had an affair with one of his
students every term for years. Amber appears at the very moment when he is about to
get involved with his new prospective Philippa. In the beginning, Michael is boastful,
pretentious and calculating. He appears like a caricature of an English professor who
(ab)uses his position (and literature itself) to impress his students and veil his narrow
motives. In short, he is a shameless character. In the self-indulgent descriptions of his
seduction strategy, Michael even gives an excellent example of the purposeful usage of
a (false) shame confession:
He liked to give the little speech about Agape and Eros. […] He liked to describe it,
how he’d been pacing his study, preoccupied, unable to sleep for nights on end
because the witty or clever thing she’d said in the class had revealed him out of
nowhere, as if he had been struck by lightning, that he wanted to take her and have
her right then and there regardless, in front of all others. He liked to tell it like this
then sit hangdog on the chair, not his chair at the desk but one of the chairs they
themselves sat in, ashamed of himself, shaking his head at himself, looking at the
ground. Then the silence. Then the glance up, to see. (pp. 69sq.)
145
Original quotations here and following from Ali Smith, The Accidental. London
2005.
137
These subliminal and partly reckless misogynistic thoughts and actions particularly turn the shaming of Michael, or rather his process of shame awareness, into
one of the very few positive shame scenes in all of the texts discussed in this study. In
his case, shame successfully fulfils its stabilising social role. Amber appears extremely
‘underwhelmed’ by Michael; she ignores him at best (e.g. pp. 77; 163). With her
demonstrative disinterest and her immunity against Michael’s charming routine,
Amber works her very own charm on him, though in an entirely different way than he
desires. His narcissistic self-image becomes deeply disturbed by her refusal. It is
obvious that her presence marks a turning point for his personality. She withdraws
from his access right from the start, both physically and mentally. When Michael sits
on the train on the way back from his London office—and his first sexual encounter
with Philippa—Amber suddenly comes to mind.
He shook his head. He laughed at himself. Struck twice by lightning in one day. He’d
just had a girl. Dr Michael Smart here. Incorrigible. He settled back in his seat,
closed his eyes again and tried to imagine that woman, Amber, sucking him off in
the train toilet.
But it didn’t work.
He actually couldn’t imagine it.
How curious, Dr Michael Smart thought to himself.
He tried again.
He put her down on her knees in front of him at the back of a near-empty
cinema. But all he could see was the shaft of light from the projector above him […].
He put her down in front of him on the floor of a London taxi in winter. All
he could see was how the lights of London streets and traffic coalesced in the
pinpoints of rain on the car window.
Curiouser and curiouser, as the paedophilic mathematician wrote in his book
for children, Dr Michael Smart noted cleverly to himself.
But actually it was a little disturbing that all he could picture her doing was
sitting there, opposite him, on this train. That was possible. (pp. 74sq.)146
What starts out as ‘a little disturbing’ for clever Dr Smart—who is evidently meant to
be by far the most disagreeable character in the entire novel—soon develops into a
proud obsession, followed by his personal and professional fall and an enormous,
collapsing sense of shame. By the end of the summer he has lost his reputation, his job,
his unshakable self-assurance and his wife, if only temporarily. In the case of Michael,
146
There are no hints in the text as to the possible underlying shame scenes or
anxieties that Michael’s shamelessness is to counteract. Since his attitude in this and other
scenes in the first part of the novel strongly resemble what Léon Wurmser describes as the
“Strutting Rooster,” one might follow his derivation of machismo as a screen affect that is
designed tom protect him from shame: “So often machismo is a façade for shame; the affect
defense is that of (pretended) self-confidence and security as antidote against a nagging sense
of unworthiness.” (1981, p. 197)
138
the reader is invited to judge his norm-transgressing, self-obsessed and unnerving
behaviour. The narrative form of the juxtaposed free indirect discourses of the four
family members unveils both the chronic (self-) deception in his life and the true
motives behind all of the pretence (for a discussion of the different functions of the
juxtaposition of inside and outside perspectives in each account, cf. Ch. II. 2. 1, 2. 1. 3
and 2. 3). One sentence that Amber says to Eve might as well apply to Michael: “You’re
an excellent fake” (p. 183).
Magnus, for instance, describes the incentive effect of Amber’s attentionwithdrawal, which also works on Astrid and Eve but is especially effective with
Michael. Amber is “unbelievably rude to Michael. As if I give a monkey’s fuck about
what you think about books. […] Michael looks more determined every time” (pp.
152sq.). In his own rather pathetic words Michael is “shot through the chest. […]
Heart an open flower […] Shock and heat and art had seared off all its skin, then he’d
been metalled over with a new self and six new senses” (p. 161). Yet what he takes as
his total renewal is in fact a last narcissistic high before Michael’s final downfall.
Amber has the ability to make Michael see his character from a completely different
angle:
He was such a sucker.
He knew her turn of head, her hands, her laughter.
He realized that he would never fuck her.
He realized that he would never have her.
He was a very ordinary bloke.
He turned from sand to glass and then he broke. (p. 167)
The situation turns entirely against Michael when he unwittingly overhears Amber and
Magnus having sex in the village church. Although he does not know who is making
love in there, the awareness of “strangers having sex made him want to drown” (p.
175). In a final shameless attempt to fend off his feelings of deficiency he seduces a
cashier girl from the local supermarket. After he “fucked her for fifteen mins (teabreak) in the passenger seat” (ibid.), he breaks down: “Dr. Michael Smart, depraved,
wept for five hours” (p. 176). On the same evening, Amber’s oracular words to Michael
that he is “never going to get the thing you want. Not till you work out what it is you
want” make him furious: “He wasn’t daunted. He’d get what he wanted” (p. 177). In
retrospect, realising that this was also the evening when she found out where he kept
the keys to their London house, “he thought about the wanting her with shame and not
a little wryness” (ibid.). In the end, as these lines already indicate, Michael’s character
fundamentally changes. His jovial narcissism from the beginning is replaced with
shame and ‘not a little wryness’. Outside that village church, Michael experiences the
‘return of the repressed’ for the first time. From this moment on, his originally weak
139
shame theory rapidly increases up until his final social and professional collapse when
he returns to London.
The narrative effect of Michael’s altered shame theory is illustrated most vividly
in Eve’s account, which clearly shows how the different perspectives interrelate in the
novel. Just like Astrid and Michael before her, Eve goes to the village church hoping it
‘might help’ (p. 187). Since her visit follows Michael’s shame experience outside the
church, the reader might anxiously expect her to overhear Amber and her son. To a
large extent, the scene’s shame potential is based on Michael’s shame anxiety
(otherwise the scene might also become comic or erotic if Eve also ignorantly
overhears them). The shameful connotation of the village church thus remains vague
to Eve; it is only fully revealed to the reader: “[The church] didn’t smell spiritual,
whatever spiritual would smell like. It smelt of abuse; it smelt a bit seedy” (p. 189).
While Eve presumably connects these assumptions to the ‘travellers’ the old lady
mentioned when she handed over the church keys (p. 188), the reader clearly ascribes
that certain ‘seediness’ to Amber and Magnus. Besides the slight sense of
embarrassment contained in this passage, its anxious anticipation and the underlying
threat of intimacy shame exclusively relates to Michael’s shame theory. Eve’s
perspective thus unwittingly illustrates the effect of her husband’s shame experience.
Sometimes she does this much more consciously. On another occasion, for
example, Eve realises a change in Michael; in fact, she recognises the destructive effects
of Amber’s ‘therapy’:
He was clearly in love with Amber too, and this time it wasn’t the usual water off the
back of the duck. Instead, the duck, wounded by a hunter and bewildered because
half its head had been shot away, was still tottering about on its webby feet by the
side of the pond. From the one side it looked like a duck usually does. From the
other, it was a different story. (p. 200)
Back from their holiday, Michael is on ‘official leave’ after one of his students reported
him to the department. Altogether there have been seven students who stated that they
have had affairs with him while he tutored them. The other half of the duck’s head thus
had been shot as well. Michael is crushed by the exposure, and his defence is only halfhearted. His old joviality only flickers once when he thinks of Emma-Louise Sackville,
the girl who reported him first, as being “pretty rubbish, she’d just lain there like she
was dead” (p. 263). Otherwise “the new Michael” (p. 271), as he sees himself, has a
considerably lower self-esteem than the old one. He depreciates himself and deeply
internalises the continuously shameful schadenfreude of his colleagues and students,
thus displaying all of the signs of an intensely shamed subject (cf. p. 259).147 Their
perceived malice is ever present to him, as are “the end-of-pier jokes about him, and if
147
Cf. Wurmser 1981 on low self-esteem (p. 51); on self-depreciation (p. 113); on
internalisation (pp. 45sq.).
140
he couldn’t stop coining them himself then presumably everyone else would be doing
it too” (ibid.). Indeed, Michael experiences a drastic shame-cure, the effect of which is
that his “other life, a whole life ago, only half a year ago” (p. 260) no longer seems to
have anything to do with what he does or wants or feels now. On the physical level, he
suffers from what Wurmser would describe as “somatic reactions of extreme shame,”148
which are also transmitted to the objects related to his work and his profession.
Michael suffers for months from a reading inhibition: “[H]e had been unable to go
near the door of a bookshop without feeling nauseous. He hadn’t even been able to
pick up a book without feeling nauseous” (p. 261).149 Avoiding literature and fiction in
particular, he picks up a book on mountaineering the first time he enters a bookshop
again. Reading about the symptoms of hypothermia, he finds that he suffers from most
of them. The immediate sense of hypochondria aside, the similarities between these
symptoms and the symptoms of severe shame are striking:
He definitely felt cold and tired, he felt this all the time. He had definitely had, off
and on this winter, times of numbness in his hands and feet. Yes, there had definitely
been times when he’d shivered. Yes, he had physical and mental lethargy and had
been unable to answer questions or directions. That was true. That was what he felt
like, inside, all the time. (p. 265)
Like Astrid and Magnus, Michael also experiences the end of his “old, unreal life” (p.
260) as “good” and “liberating” (ibid.). In terms of his relationship to his stepchildren,
a ‘happy ending’ appears to be in sight. Close to the end, they honestly care about him
and even nurture him when he feels utterly down. The future prospects for the Smart
family seem promising. Michael starts a new career as a poet, Eve returns home, Astrid
finds new friends and Magnus makes his way through school and then to university.
The accidental Amber remains both an episode of one summer holiday and an
important landmark in their lives. With her help, shame and its effects on all of the
family members are overcome in order to give way to a new start.
In terms of possible empathic reader reactions to The Accidental, the
characterisation of Michael has by far the biggest potential. In the first part of the novel
his character is bound to evoke vicarious shame thanks to his demonstrative
shamelessness, joviality and moral ignorance. As described above, though, while the
story progresses the reader learns to judge according to his continuously intensifying
shame theory. Empathic feelings for Michael may be limited since his shaming appears
justified; as it reestablishes not only a moral but also a legal order since his sexual
148
He defines them as “Turning pale, fainting, dizziness, rigidity of all the muscles”
(Wurmser 1981, p. 83).
149
This aspect is very interesting with regard to the possible connection between
shame and illiteracy in the protagonist Amy in Ali Smith’s other novel under discussion, Like
(cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 4).
141
relationship with a dependant is not a matter of taste. The last passages of Michael’s
account, though, provide a deeper insight into the pangs of conscience that will fuel his
self-doubts in the future. When Astrid, “all long arms and legs,” dances around him,
her question “Really really really really truly truly truly?” and his answer “Would I lie
to you?” (pp. 281sq.) does not answer the question whether Dr. Michael Smart will be
able to permanently distance himself from the ‘cliché that stamped him’ (cf. p. 260). As
useful as the shame caesura appears to be, as it provides the family with a new start, a
constant shame disposition that overshadows his relationship to his stepdaughter is not
desirable. The text thus leaves the reader with a vague sense of possible future shame
that could be induced by the memories of his shameful breakdown or his reoccurring
shamelessness.
The negative atmosphere of averseness to the character does not prevail until
the end of The Accidental. Michael’s defeat and his failure seem justified as a means of
restoring social norms; what appears desirable now is a positive outlook for the
character himself. The following two examples present a different type of shameless
character whose defeat at the end of the novel appears in fact as relief.
Jackie Kay, Trumpet III—‘Sophie’
Jackie Kay’s only novel to date has already been discussed with regard to the intimacy
shame of Millie Moody and her son Colman, the widow and son of the famous
trumpet player Joss Moody who is found to be a woman after his death (cf. Ch. II. 2.
2). Furthermore, an additional discussion has shown that in addition to his actual
feelings of intimacy shame, Colman also suffers from an underlying competence
shame scene (cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 2). Millie and Colman’s intimacy shame is strongly
intensified, if not altogether triggered, by the ruthless exposure of their family in the
tabloid press. The journalist Sophie Stones personifies the threat of further exposure,
since she plans to write a book on Joss Moody together with a revengeful Colman who
did not know about his father’s female sex until his death. Being by far the most
negative character of the entire novel, Sophie Stones also conveys some the strongest
shame feelings.150 For Millie, she embodies the feared and despised tabloids, which
150
Cf. Mergenthal 2008: “Sophie Stones is portrayed throughout as a ruthlessly
exploitative seeker after self-aggrandisement” (p. 4). Williams 2006 agrees with this
characterisation of Sophie Stones and sees her as an embodied critique of British tabloid
journalism and its indeed shameless attitude towards the private sphere of homosexuals:
“Sophie’s eager manipulation of others, from Colman to Joss’s childhood friend, is so overt
and lacking in humility that she is undoubtedly cast in a negative light. She embodies a
critique of tabloid journalism, and, by extension, her role as onlooker and voyeur is a critique
of the tabloidisation of British society writ large. Even though Britain has transvestite
comedians and entertainers who successfully sell to mainstream audiences, tabloid culture
142
precipitated her flight to the Scottish seaside. When Sophie Stones learns about the
case of Joss Moody, she immediately recognises the scandalous potential of the story.
She uses Colman’s anger and fundamental uncertainty to force him into a
denunciation of his father as a ‘transvestite,’ to ‘dish the dirt’: “Anyone can see the
guy’s out for revenge. Don’t blame him.” (p. 127)151 She hopes for ‘Big Money’ (p. 129),
regardless of the fact that what she is doing is “disgusting, I know” (ibid.). With no
visible sense of discretion she is eager to give people what she thinks they want:
This is exactly the kind of stuff that will sell the book. The nineties are obsessed
with sex, infidelity, scandal, sleaze, perverts. […] The government minister who
wanks himself to death with a rope around his neck to achieve the ultimate orgasm.
Love it. The priest who has been screwing half of his worshippers. Love it. The
upper-class English movie star who has been caught having his cock sucked by a
Hollywood prostitute. Love it. The respectable ‘family values’ M P who sucked on the
toe of a bimbo. Love it. All of it. The dirtier the better. […] Lesbian stories are in.
Everyone loves a good story about a famous dyke tennis star or actress or singer.
And this one is the pick of the bunch. The best yet. Lesbians who adopted a son; one
playing mummy, one playing daddy. The big butch frauds. Couldn’t be better.
(pp. 169sq.)
The language she uses is in itself vulgar, aggressive and disparaging in every possible
sense. Yet in contrast to the inner and outer descriptions of Millicent Moody, her
refined character and the almost conservative and traditional nature of her marriage to
Joss, these words take on a great shaming force. The reader’s interest is thus clearly
directed against Sophie Stones and her goals. Millie’s fears of a prolonged, continuous
shaming become even more comprehensible once the true extent of Sophie’s
ruthlessness becomes evident. The idea of Sophie Stones writing her book provokes
sheer dismay; positive feelings for her seem out of question. Some of the effects of the
use of multiple perspectives in Trumpet have already been described in the preceding
chapters on intimacy and competence shame. In Millie’s case, the outer perspectives
generally complement her first-person account, as Sophie reveals that Millie’s anxieties
are indeed justified. In Colman’s case, however, the inner and outer perspectives differ
vastly, and the third-person perspective depicts Sophie in pejorative, or at least very
distant terms. Both Colman and Millie call her “this /that Sophie Stones” (pp. 41; 139),
and May, the old school friend of Joss when he was still Josephine Moore, wonders:
What would Josephine have thought of this young woman writing a book about
her? She did not look the part. She looked all wrong. Sleek and sophisticated,
still thrives on selling us ‘scandalous’ stories about gay couples with children and transvestites
with lesbian lovers.” (p. 158) Without clearly specifying it, this commentator therefore sees
Sophie’s behaviour as a violation of intimacy shame.
151
Original quotations here and following from Jackie Kay, Trumpet. London 1998.
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wearing designer clothes and smile and exuding false charm. The older she has
become, the more adept she is at picking out falseness in people. (p. 249)
Sophie’s self-image as a successful, clever (looking), soon-to-be-rich and powerful
journalist who lives in a “small, slick flat in the city” of London thus starkly contradicts
both the unpleasant impression this narcissistic self-image evokes and the outward
perspectives on her character. Her emphatic self-assertion, though, is full of cracks. In
the first two lines of the chapter MONEY PAGES (pp. 124sqq.) she characteristically
refers to herself in both the first and the third person: “I wake up every morning at
exactly the same time. Sophie Stones has never needed an alarm” (p. 124; other
examples of this first/third person dichotomy are found on pp. 232sqq.). In addition to
the mock reporting tone of the second sentence, this juxtaposition of two narrative
forms indicates that Sophie Stones is a somewhat torn character.152 Sophie is in fact her
own third person, to use an expression Millie coined for the relationship between her
husband and his former female self: “But whenever the name Josephine Moore came
up, he’d say, ‘Leave her alone,’ as if she was somebody else. He always spoke about her
in the third person. She was his third person” (p. 93). As it turns out, Sophie Stones has
had her own share of shame experiences.153 She lives in the (anticipated) shadow of her
sister Sarah, whom she describes as her total opposite. Sarah is “decisive” (p. 124),
intellectually superior (p. 125) and beautiful with thick hair and a slender body (pp.
129; 232). Their parents have apparently always preferred her to Sophie (“Sarah this
and Sarah that”, p. 129)—and so have other people in the past:
[Sarah] nabbed my first boyfriend, Paul Ross. I never forgave her for that. The first.
I’ll never forget that feeling I had when I watched him holding Sarah’s hand walking
down our street. He gave her a look he never gave me. […] It just knocked me out.
I’ve still never seen a look like that on a man’s face for me. (p. 235)
Whether it is worse to have the first boyfriend or the second or third one taken away
by one’s sister remains debatable, but assuming that her sister’s behaviour was
152
Cf. the aforementioned psychoanalytic shame narrations, in which the juxtaposition of different narrative perspectives indicates a virulent conflict and the inability (or
reluctance) of the shamed subject to confront them (Wurmser 1981, pp. 220; 246).
153
Wurmser holds the view that behind a shameless subject there is often an
underlying virulent shame scene: “Since shame is contempt against oneself, the ‘shameless’
cynic may in his core very well be a traumatically humiliated, cruelly shamed person who
originally suffered a profound disregard for the self in its autonomy and now deals with it by
lifelong reversal. In him again narcissistic grandiosity and contemptuousness defend against a
fatal brittleness and woundedness. Narcissistic indulgence by the family may prove to be as
shaming and self-depriving an insult as violent humiliation, leading to the same result:
haughty, cynical arrogance. Why? It bespeaks no less a disdain for the self in its autonomy
than its opposite.” (1981, p. 259)
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sanctioned due to her preferred status in the family, Sophie was possibly further
humiliated by her environment’s acceptance of Sarah’s betrayal. Betrayal, shame and
narcissistic injury are generally closely related:
Integrity, its betrayal, and shame protecting the former and elicited by the latter are
all phenomena involving narcissism. […] In brief, [narcissism] refers to investing
the self with psychological interest, whether of a libidinous or an aggressive nature,
especially if both libido and aggression are given their very broad psychoanalytic
meanings. Narcissism thus means anything pertaining to self-esteem, to the
valuation of the self, high or low, as well as to the sense of entitlement and wish for
power. It may be healthy or pathological, dependent on its extent and on its
compulsiveness, rigidity, and insatiability. […] We have shame protecting integrity
and, as its antithesis, shame evoked by injured or by overweening narcissism.
(Wurmser 1981, p. 48)
Against this background Sophie Stones’s vain, shameless and unscrupulous behaviour
towards the Moodys and their friends and relatives appears in a different light.
Although Sophie loves to see herself in total control (of her body, of other people, etc.),
she compulsively provokes mishap or failure. As opposed to her demonstrative selfassuredness (“The moment is coming, Sophie baby, it’s coming” p. 130), she does not
trust herself. In the course of two sentences she can sound absolutely sure of herself
and utterly insecure to the point of anxiety: “Being plump made me silly and inferior
so I went on a diet and I got thin. But I can’t be too careful: there is always the fat
person, lurking around, waiting for a chance to take me over. If I looked away, she’d be
in there quicker than I could snap my thin fingers” (p. 124). Her contempt for ‘the fat
person’ she once was turns into a general aversion to obesity (or what she assumes to
be obese).
In the chapter ST YLE she describes herself as a ‘savage’ shopper: “I can be
spotted in the changing rooms of classy boutiques with feathers around my mouth and
blood on my face. Shopping is a blood sport. ‘Tally ho!’ I cry to myself when Sophie
sets out on a spree.” (p. 232) Shopping is just another competition she seeks to win,
and when she tries on something, she is “glad at least that I’m size ten—still not as slim
as Sarah—but not obese like the woman next to me, squeezing herself into a size 16
when she is probably a size 22, her Marks and Sparks bloomers riding the crack of her
arse. Poor fat cow.” (ibid.) Sympathy is clearly not the first reader reaction to passages
like this. Since it is actually the ‘poor fat cow’ inside of herself that Sophie despises, the
mechanism of her behaviour becomes clearer and clearer. Her underlying shame scene
has turned her into a character who answers her shame anxieties with aggression; the
journalist shows clear traits of a permanent tendency to ‘turn the tables’ (cf. Wurmser
1981, pp. 28; 111; 197sq.). Sophie Stones is willing to shame others rather than be
shamed herself again—especially because she is still full of insecurities and
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permanently afraid to be ridiculed or made a fool of herself: “Did that sound stupid—
‘Hope you like Thai?’ I mimic the sound of my own voice“ (p. 235).
She is naturally bound to fail, for “what is defended against tends to leak out;
if it is shame that is fought against by shamelessness, it is shame that returns in spectral
form” (Wurmser 1981, p. 262). To fight ‘what leaks out,’ her depressive moods and her
anxieties, she reverts to a whole range of self-indulgent yet ineffective remedies like
shopping: “The minute I even sniff a whiff of depression coming on, or a slight wind of
paranoia I am out in the shops, sometimes before they have even opened their doors.
Shopping staves depression. Definitely.” (p. 234) Hopeless escapes like these, or her
demonstrative ‘relaxing’ program, give Sophie away:
I get into the bath, G & T in one hand, Hello in the other. Bliss. […] I try to act the
part of actresses I’ve seen in foamy baths in the movies, but I can’t manage it. The
water is irritating. I can’t relax. The bubbles are smothering. I jump out and rub
myself viciously. (p. 236)
Despite her compulsive attempts to design her life like the pages of a glossy magazine,
the results are poor, small and unglamorous. In the end, her book is also destined for
failure. Colman draws back after he meets his grandmother Edith in Glasgow: “It’s my
morals. I can’t do it” (p. 259). In a final attempt she tries to manipulate him in the same
way she had always been manipulated by men: “I need to get right under Colman
Moody’s skin. It will not be the first time. Why should I have scruples when men have
been using me for years? As long as it takes to make good copy” (p. 170). But Colman
is no longer “coming along nicely now,” and she will never “crack him” (p. 126), as she
thought she would. After a drunken intermezzo “he wakes up sweating. He is lying in
bed with Sophie Stones! Fuck, how did that happen?” (p. 261) Shameful as this open
contempt for Sophie appears to the reader, it does not stop her. Although Colman
disappears in the middle of the night and leaves an unmistakable note calling
everything off, this fails to make her realise that the book project has come to an
untimely end. To terminate their mutual shaming, she would have to accept this—
which is, naturally, out of question. Her impression is that Colman “is trying to
humiliate me” (p. 265), and due to her general reaction to shame she ignores and
aggressively counteracts it. Factually, though, it is not Colman, of course, who is trying
to humiliate Sophie; rather, she is trying to humiliate him and his family. Her view of
the whole matter is completely deranged due to her narcissistic disorder. Looking over
a draft of the opening chapter of her book, she is convinced that “Colman is bound to
see from this that I’m not going to write the usual Hack book, that I’m not The Ghost
Writer From Hell. I have my sensitivities too. He will probably be flattered by how well
Sophie understands him. […] I’ll miss Colman when we finish this book. Silly Cole
and his stupid note!” (p. 266) Needless to say, what is read from the draft sounds
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exactly like ‘the usual Hack book.’ Sophie Stones’s aggrandised self is soaring high
once again, yet a great disappointment is foreseeable.154
Shame has two very divergent forms in the character of Sophie Stones. On the
one hand there is the underlying shame scene of the character herself, namely her
family’s lifelong neglect, her sister’s betrayal, her physical shortcomings and a long
history of being used by men (all actual or assumed, which is neither provable nor
important). Despite this evident history of shame, feelings of sympathy or empathy for
Sophie Stones simply cannot develop. Her shameless actions, thoughts and openly
articulated motives are too negative to allow an alternative view of the character. The
feelings of shame that Sophie is possibly able to convey are of the same kind as those
evoked by Michael Smart in The Accidental. Her actions, language and attitude towards
other people are bound to provoke empathic reader shame in the form of vicarious
shame. Her will to expose and humiliate Millie and Colman Moody for the sake of a
successful book is as shameful as the negation of her own shame feelings and the
compulsive provocation of ever-new shame scenes. In this respect the possible
reception of her character resembles the unnerving effect of Nathan’s provocation of
new shame events in Everything You Need by A.L. Kennedy (cf. Ch. II. 2. 3. 1). The
major difference between the two characters lies in Nathan’s overt shame proneness
and his multifaceted shame feelings, which would by definition cause co-shame, rather
than vicarious shame. Even though Sophie’s underlying shame scene becomes
apparent and tangible to a remarkable extent, her shame theory is indeed concealed by
her defence mechanisms and her shamelessness. The overall impression of her
character is negative until the very end of the story, and the fact that she is deprived of
her ‘glorious’ future when Colman withdraws from their book project is in fact a relief,
not a cause for pity.
Laura Hird, Born Free II—‘Angela’
For a third and last representation of a shameless literary character, we will once again
return to Laura Hird’s novel Born Free (1999). This text has already been discussed
with regard to the underlying group shame of the father and the two children of the
Scott family. The alcoholism of the mother, Angie, has also been identified as the major
cause of that severe shame.155 Like Michael Smart and Sophie Stones, she is an overtly
154
The same movement towards the final shaming of the shameless character is also
recognisable in The Accidental, in which Michael reacts with stubborn self-assertion when
Amber says that he will never get what he wants.
155
Another great example of an overly shameless alcoholic character is Hannah
Luckraft in A.L. Kennedy’s novel Paradise (London 2004). There are, in fact, a lot of parallels
between the two characters. Like Angie, Hannah exudes the same kind of wilfulness, defence
mechanisms and false romanticism with regard to her drinking. She also causes intense grief
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shameless figure, and both the narrative construction of her character and its possible
effects on the reader closely resemble the previous two cases. In the course of the
preceding discussions of Born Free, the novel’s narrative form alternates between firstperson narratives in the historical present.156 In Angie’s case, the outward perspectives
of the other characters play a special role. Due to her drunkenness and her general
mendacity, her account is unreliable by definition. The perspectives of her husband
and her children provide a stark contrast to her self-descriptions and her self-image;
while simultaneously compensating for her unreliability.
Angie is bound to evoke vicarious reader shame, even though her own
underlying shame scene becomes apparent. Just as in the case of Sophie, the negative
aspects of her behaviour and her defence mechanisms prevail to the point that Angie’s
defeat at the end of Born Free is actually desirable.
The characterisation of Angie is very closely linked to the development of her
drinking habit. In the beginning of the novel she appears to be a rather tense and
discontented woman who nevertheless tries to fulfil her role as a working wife and
mother. Her disdainful attitude towards her husband is evident right from the start, as
is her distanced relationship to her children. The reason behind this inharmonious
family life lies in her history as an alcoholic. Even before she starts drinking again—
which leads to her violent attacks, her general recklessness and her adulterous affair
with fellow drinker Raymond—she is not a pleasant character. In the course of the
novel, though, she develops into what Vic calls “the She-Devil” (p. 213).157 Her
vehement denial of her alcoholism on the one hand, and her willingness to ‘get off the
wagon’ are the reasons for her increasingly disagreeable appearance. Her self-image
illustrates the vast discrepancy between Angie’s inner and outer reality:
I’ve not had a drink since we moved here three years ago, but if I take it easy, I’m
sure I’ll be OK. It’s not like I won’t be able to stop drinking again. I just get so much
grief off the family, it’s easier to avoid it. (p. 21)
As it turns out, she hit her husband and the children and attacked their old neighbours
while she drank, yet to her the others are the actual source of grief: “[M]aybe Vic’s just
and group shame for her family, in her case her parents and her brother. Finally, she also has a
fiercely sexual relationship with a fellow drinker, Robert. The novel’s explicit descriptions of
their drunken sex both illustrate Hannah’s demonstrative shamelessness and provide a
possible cause for vicarious reader shame.
156
The presentation of Angie’s character and her shamelessness might correlate with
the purposeful usage of a first person present tense narration. This purposefulness, though,
only exists within the narrative construction of the text; Angie herself does not confess herself
to shame with the aim to counter-shame her environment.
157
Original quotations here and following from Laura Hird, Born free. Edinburgh
1999.
148
made me neurotic. I’m sure I’ll be fine, I always was. It was them was the problem” (p.
54). The false alcoholic romanticism with which Angie celebrates her first vodka after
three years of abstinence paradoxically contradicts her claim of ‘normality’: “[A]
vodka, amazing. It’s good just to say the word again. […] I am come home” (ibid.).
Once she finds a ‘soulmate’ (p. 60) or rather a drinking partner in Raymond, her
feelings of guilt and shame soon manifest in the form of aggressive behaviour directed
against her husband. Supported by her lover’s similarly perfidious attitude towards his
wife (cf. pp. 59sq.), she asks herself, “how could Vic deprive me of this for so long?”
and pretends “life’s been on pause since I stopped drinking” (pp. 56sq.). Angie does
not appear to be a helpless victim of addiction; rather, she seems to consciously revert
to her old self again:
Vic was honest, dependable, worked hard and all the other Calvinist bullshit. All
Rab [an ex-lover she left for Vic] had to offer me was a huge cock and a filthy mind.
[…] That would have been almost too much in comparison. […] Rab was a drinker,
too. My family were scared we’d encourage each other, just like Raymond and I are
going to. Good old Vic, eh, practically teetotal, lovely family man and about as
exciting as watching concrete. I F U C K I NG HAT E H I M F U C K I NG HAT E H I M. (p.
96)
This passage depicts Angie’s presumed underlying shame scene and her defence
reactions in nuce. She once had a partner, Rab, who was also an alcoholic like she is;
this relationship was not sanctioned by her family and was thus marked as shameful.
Her marriage to Vic, whose character traits are distinctly positive (honest, dependable,
working hard), was thus ill-fated, as it was intended to compensate for Angie’s
deficiency in both her relation to Rab and her alcoholism. The intense hatred she feels
for Vic (‘IFUCKINGHATEHIMFUCKINGHATEHIM ’) resurfaces at the very moment
of her relapse into drinking, which makes it a clear shame defence. The moment she
starts drinking again, she refuses to recognise the fact that there was a problem in the
first place (‘It was them was the problem,’ p. 54). The memory of Rab, who signifies a
declared shame-free zone for Angie (with respect to unlimited indulgence in addiction
and sexuality), and the parallels she recognises in Raymond release an aggressive
defence mechanism. It is directed against both her environment’s prohibitions (against
Rab) back then and the prohibitions she expects against her new shamelessness in the
present. Vic does not shame her actively as a means of wielding power; nevertheless,
she feels suppressed and ‘deprived’ of what makes her feel ‘wonderful, happy and confident’ (cf. p. 56). The wanton wilfulness with which she and Raymond to egg each
other on in their drinking (‘just like Raymond and I are going to’) is an act of revenge
for the prolonged feelings of shame induced by her alcoholism.
Despite this insight into Angie’s reigning shame scene, the effect of her
shamelessness by far prevails. Both Angie’s language and the content of her thoughts
and actions are extremely distancing (to say the least). She acts against societal norms
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in order to achieve ‘freedom from shame’ (cf. p. 93, where she says to Caroline,
‘Freedom. Y’know… you can take my boyfriend but you cannae take my FREED OM .
You don’t have to consult about a dozen other people before you make a decision.’), yet
this proves to be impossible and in the course of the novel she becomes increasingly
unpleasant. The descriptions of her alcohol-fuelled sex with Raymond are sad and
disillusioning despite her claims of the opposite:
‘D’you want to go home with wet knickers again, Mrs Scott?’
Reading my mind, he subjects me to a short, sharp shag, the settling machine
rattling on the desk in syncopation. I don’t orgasm but it doesn’t bother me. If I
concentrate too much on coming during sex, I tend to lose track of what’s going on.
Besides, it’s fodder for a thousand future wanks. Raymond was right, I do like to go
home with wet knickers. These foolish things and all that. (pp. 125sq.)
The mixture of exploitation and betrayal that characterises this ‘love’ and Angie’s
(unwitting) self-contempt turn her freedom from shame into an extraordinary act of
shamelessness. The juxtaposition of the detailed description of Angie and Raymond’s
sexual encounter in his car (p. 167) and her physical abuse of Joni right afterwards (pp.
169sq.) vividly illustrates the monstrosity of her actions (the overall effect of this attack
is discussed with regard to Joni in Ch. II. 2. 4). Equally monstrous is her reply to Vic’s
attempt to talk about her attack with an ashtray, which split his eyebrow:
[Vic:] ‘Thursday, y’know. I don’t want us to fight all the time. It’s no good for
anyone.’
[Angie:] What the fuck did I do on Thursday? What day is this? Saturday? Is
that the night he went fishing? I don’t give a shit he was late. Raymond left early for
a management meeting, I was just pissed off.
‘Aye, Vic. See you later.’ (p. 157)
Unscrupulous, Angie uses and abuses people very consciously for her own purposes.
She is manipulative and eager to reject any responsibility for her actions. Her shamelessness goes along with an extreme and partly hilarious selfishness. Her use of
Caroline, her mentally disturbed friend, as an agony aunt is outrageous:
The last three times she was sectioned, I never visited. Her last two overdoses, she
phoned and asked me to help her do it properly, but I didn’t. When she was being
bullied in the women’s refuge and asked me out for a drink to get it off her chest,
I pretended I was going on holiday. But this is important, this is about me. (p. 91)
When she leaves Caroline again, though, she wonders, “what’s the point in wasting
valuable drinking time and money on a miserable fucker like that?” (p. 99) Angie’s
shamelessness, selfishness and recklessness are clearly fuelled by her enormous
consumption of alcohol. As opposed to Raymond, though, she still possesses at least
some awareness of societal norms. She realises that “the barmaid keeps wiping our
table in a bid to embarrass us into behaving” (p. 126) and that she “looks at us with
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contempt” (p. 127). At an official reception of their employer, she “look[s] at the rest
[of their drinks] in trepidation, knowing that if we consume them, all hell will break
loose” (p. 165). But since she doesn’t want to “seem like a wife” (ibid.), she consciously
resists her residual feelings of shame. Despite (or maybe because of) that, the addictive
spiral of drinking, blackouts, uncontrolled and mischievous behaviour and painful
morning hangovers makes Angie’s wilfulness abhorrent.
Another aspect that distances the reader further from the character is Angie’s
obvious lying. Her lies about Joni’s plans for her birthday and her attempts to convince
Vic that Joni only made up her attack emphasise her unreliability and expose the
underlying purpose of her dishonesty:
D’you think she doesn’t do the same thing with me? Make up stories about you to
turn us against each other? […] I stuck up for you. That’s the difference, I know
when someone’s just being vindictive. (p. 180)
The reader’s awareness of this mendacity plays a distinct role in his/her evaluation of
Angie’s shamelessness—and of the end of the novel. Her overall tendency to refuse any
responsibility for her actions and to ‘turn the tables’ by claiming that ‘it was them was
the problem’ culminates in what first appears as Vic’s victory. Angie stops drinking
when she fears being thrown out. When she and Victor seek help from the Marriage
Counselling Service, his shame anxiety runs high: “It feels like some horrific skeleton is
about to be yanked from my closet. I can’t remember leaving one there but you know
what these folks are like” (p. 269). The naïvety with which he believes Angie’s obvious
lies and his acceptance of responsibility are repeated expressions of inferiority and
shame expectations on his part (cf. the discussion of his account in Ch. II. 2. 4). For the
sake of peace, though, he allows Angie to turn the whole situation around “so it’s left
with me looking like the bastard. To be honest, though, I don’t really care. If that’s
what it takes to have a quiet life, then fine.” (p. 273) Angie, on the other hand,
performs “mock repentance. That usually does the trick.” (p. 259) She still sees herself
in control and knows that “[Vic] wouldn’t be able to live with himself if he knocked
back the chance to give our relationship one last go.” (p. 263) Her stubborn refusal to
recognise her own responsibilities and her belief that she is in total control turns the
very end of the novel into an utter defeat for Angie—and thus into yet another shame
situation to which she might react with aggressive defence. When Vic sleeps with her
(which she cannot refuse after blaming his ‘disinterest’ in her as her only reason for
drinking, cf. pp. 271sq.), she quietly cries and he recognises “resistance in her eyes” (p.
275). This and the fact that he ‘pretends not to notice’ (ibid.) prepare the groundwork
for Angie’s future shameless (re) actions (cf. Ch. II. 2. 4 for a more detailed discussion
of this scene).
In Angie’s case, the reader’s vicarious shame has several possible starting
points. The explicitness of her encounters with Raymond and her paradoxical
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aggression towards her family, whom she betrays, can provoke feelings of shame. For
the rest of the family, sex serves as screen against their more severe group shame, while
Angie’s unlimited sexuality is a primary expression of her wilful desire to violate
societal norms. This is further compounded by the ruthlessness of her exploitative
behaviour towards others and the falseness of her overall attitude. Angie is very
evidently designed to be a negative character without any hope of improvement. As
with Sophie Stones in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, the reader’s primary interest lies in the
end of her problematic behaviour. However, unlike the journalist, who will definitely
not write her book and is therefore stopped in her shamelessness, Angie’s behaviour
only appears to be interrupted. In a different context, the resistance with which she
edures Vic’s penetration would fill the reader with remorse, if not pity. In this case,
though, it is apparent that her opposition remains unchanged. Due to this seemingly
useless investment of time and energy, the reader also feels defeated at the end of the
novel.
All of the shameless characters discussed above potentially evoke empathic reader
shame reactions in the form of vicarious shame, yet the characters fulfil slightly
varying functions in each text. While Angie is fully responsible for both the underlying
and recent shame scenes suffered by the other main protagonists in Born Free, Sophie
Stones and Michael Smart’s shamelessness work on the level of present shame events
that take place during the course of the novel. Sophie Stones’s proposed book on the
scandal of ‘the big butch fraud’ embodies the threat of future intimacy shame for Millie
Moody and her son Colman. Michael Smart’s adulterous affairs with his students
definitely shame his wife, but his behaviour supports rather than cause Eve’s stifling
ideality shame.
What all of these characters have in common, though, is that their shamelessness is not seen in terms of a desirable freedom from shame—the counterexample
of the character Ash in Like illustrates this difference very clearly. In all of the cases
discussed in this chapter, shame strikes back. It does so by what might be called the
‘return of the oppressed,’ rather that that of the repressed. The people who were
initially shamed by the behaviour of these shameless subjects, such as Angie’s husband
Victor, Colman, and the student Emma-Louise Sackville, attempt to resist the
imbalance between their own shame feelings and anxieties and the immorality and
norm-violations of others.
Furthermore, my analysis of The Accidental, Trumpet and Born Free shows
that shameless characters evoke some of the strongest feelings of empathic reader
shame, although this is not the only or the most powerful way of evoking this
particular reader response. Everything You Need and “The moving house” provide
remarkable examples of an equally intense reaction of co-shame with a severely
shamed literary character. A shameless figure is also one of the very few examples of a
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purposeful usage of shame as narrative strategy. In all other cases the presentation of
shame does not target reader shame to the same extent as the presentation of
shamelessness does. Insofar, shamelessness is the only example of a correlation
between particular shame content and desired reader reaction.
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III. Summary
III. 1 Shame in the Literature of Contemporary Scottish Women Authors
This case study of six novels and one short story by the Scottish authors Laura Hird,
Jackie Kay, A. L. Kennedy and Ali Smith shows that shame in its many facets is a
recurring and broadly discussed topic. Several reasons for this thematic accumulation
are possible. The fact that these authors are all female and that they are all linked to
Scotland might suggest a connection between shame and gender or national affiliation.
But, as my analysis has shown, these fictional accounts present female and male shame
experiences to the same degree. Moreover, these texts present a wide range of
divergently gendered shame feelings and shame reactions. Some shame researchers
agree that there are male and female tendencies with respect to more active or passive
shame reactions and more other-related or rather self-related shame feelings (cf. Marks
2007, p. 101; Lewis 1992). The gender aspect of shame, though, is secondary to the fact
that shame itself is neither specifically female nor male. Psychoanalytic case studies, for
instance, do refer to the sex of the according patient; the bottom line, though, is that
there are as many men suffering from severe self-related shame feelings that lead to
passive shame reactions as there are women who show intense active, other-related
shame feelings and reactions. Literary representations of shame similarly present a
broad picture of the relationships between gender and the shame affect. For example,
Angie in Born Free fulfils all of the criteria of a prototypical male shame reaction, while
her husband Vic offers a textbook example of passive, self-related shame feelings,
which are typically seen as feminine.
Concerning the Scottish connotations of literary shame, there is a divergent
connection between Scotland (in terms of topography, language or socio-cultural
background) and the respective shame contents. The representation of Scottish descent
as an actual shame trigger is most explicitly described in Like by Ali Smith; other texts
present the shame-inducing potential of more particular aspects. Laura Hird’s Born
Free and A.L. Kennedy’s short story “The moving house” use the shame-intensifying
effect of colloquial Scots in their depiction of shame events, while Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
briefly touches upon the potentially shame-inducing exoticism of a Scottish accent in
England. The overall tendency in the literary texts discussed in this study is that
Scotland as a place or as a socio-cultural background is prominent in the literary
shame discourse, yet it is seldom a crucial factor. Most of the shame scenes and events
are rather globally translatable (in a Western context, at least). Although most of the
texts are either located in Scotland or contain a distinct connection to the place or to
the people, the shame theme is seldom part of this ideational frame. In the end, the
literary shame discourse found in texts by Hird, Kay, Kennedy and Smith appears to
relate to two circumstances. First of all, as the survey of psychoanalytic shame theories
of the past 30 years shows, shame is everywhere. It is one of the most significant affects
with respect to both the individual formation of the self and to the guarantee of
societal norm-conformity. Shame is literally unavoidable and inescapable. It is always
unpleasant, and it afflicts its victims haphazardly: neither gender nor age, neither
money nor success can prevent an individual from shame experiences. To a certain
extent, shame is great equaliser, even though shame contents vary vastly between men
and women, young and old, rich and poor and success and failure. Shame concerns
everyone, although —or because—it is an awkward subject at best. Second, shame is in
the air. As mentioned in the introduction, during the last years there has been, and still
is, a huge amount of interest in shame in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology,
sociology, philosophy and literary studies. These authors are thus reacting to a
discourse that is virulent in all respects: shame has an individual, societal and scientific
relevance whose full extent has yet to be acknowledged.
As the preceding section has shown, shame narratives, especially in their most
intense forms, definitely have the potential to ‘drag the reader into hell’s mouth.’158
Whether the authors discussed in this thesis intentionally incorporate shame into their
prose in order to evoke the appropriate empathic reader emotions (co-shame or
vicarious shame) is questionable. Nevertheless, the tangible presence of shame does
shape the emotional effect of these texts to a very large extent.
III. 2 Shame in Narratives by Laura Hird, Jackie Kay, A.L. Kennedy and Ali Smith
With respect to the narrative structure and its alleged effects on the reader, there is a
correlation between two major factors. First of all, the higher the intensity of the
described shame scenes (including the shame feelings and shame reactions of the
literary characters), the more the literary representation of shame events resembles
real-life shame narratives. As mentioned above, real-life shame narratives in the first
person are primarily characterised by the anteriority of the actual shame event. As
Landweer (1999) points out, there is basically no present-tense shame narration in the
first person since such a self-referential confession to the actual experience of shame
simply contradicts its physical, centripetal character.159 The formulation of the sentence
“I am so ashamed” is therefore either retrospective or purposeful as a means of
158
A.L. Kennedy once described her intentions as a writer as follows: “I don’t hate
the reader, but I do want to drag them into hell’s mouth—it’s good for them.” (Quoted from
Catherine Tylor, Review of A.L. Kennedy’s Paradise, in: The Independent, 29th August 2004;
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/paradise-by-a-l-kennedy542672.html)
159
“Leiblich ist Scham durch zentripetale Richtungen charakterisiert, vor allem
durch die Blockierung des Bewegungsimpulses, verschwinden zu wollen (im Boden versinken
zu wollen) und dadurch, angesichts des (möglichen oder tatsächlichen) Entdecktwerdens den
Blick senken zu müssen.” (Landweer 1999, p. 125)
156
shaming others.160 Furthermore, psychoanalytic case studies have shown that virulent,
prolonged shame feelings may even lead to a change from first- to second- or thirdperson perspectives in the face of the actual shame content. In the literary texts
discussed in this study, there is a remarkable tendency to use the narrative form of free
indirect discourse, which presents the inner monologue of the protagonist in the
grammatical form of a third-person narrative. Its inherent hybridism of perspectives
appears appropriate to describe both the shame feelings of the character and the shame
event. This narrative form was used in Ali Smith’s The Accidental, in the first part of
Like by the same author, in parts of Jackie Kay’s Trumpet, in A.L. Kennedy’s short story
“The moving house” and in parts of Everything You Need by the same author.
Alternatively, the narrative perspective may vary between third and first person as in
A.L. Kennedy’s Looking for the Possible Dance, or the first-person accounts of multiple
people may be juxtaposed, as in Born Free by Laura Hird.
Second, the texts that describe the most virulent shame affects incorporate the
posterior position of the shame events into their narrative forms. Readers are
confronted with shame feelings and shame reactions of all sorts right from the start,
yet the shame scenes themselves are only described much later. The narrative forms of
these texts are characterised by a considerable distance between the subjects and the
shame experiences; inn other words, they either employ a first-person perspective in
the past tense or they depict the shame scenes from a different perspective altogether.
Finally, the virulence of the shame affect, the narrative forms employed in its depiction
and its position in the text all produce the verisimilitude of empathic reader shame. In
short, the higher the formal similarity between the literary shame narratives and reallife shame narratives, the more likely readers will react with empathic shame. This
effect is clearly illustrated in Everything You Need, where the reader only learns about
the actual content of the protagonist’s underlying shame scene at the end (pp. 263sqq.),
and in “The moving house,” which only concretises the nature of the original shame
events on the last page.
There are also two alternative positions from which empathic reader shame
can develop: the interior and the witness position. In order to attain the interior
position, the reader must be made familiar with the shame disposition of the character
to the extent that she or he appraises the shame event from within the character’s own
shame theory (which may or may not coincide with the reader’s personal shame
theory). The longer prose works discussed in this study primarily employed this
160
“Die öffentliche Artikulation der eigenen Befindlichkeit verbirgt die eindeutig auf
andere gerichtete Beschämungsabsicht in dem Maße, wie es ihr faktisch gelingt, die anderen
öffentlich bloßzustellen. […] Phänomenal läßt sich nur konstatieren, daß öffentliche
Schambekenntnisse niemals unmittelbarer Gefühlsausdruck sein können, da dies den
leiblichen Richtungen der Scham widerspräche.” (Landweer 1999, p. 51sq.)
157
position. The witness position originates from the reader’s own shame theory, and it
has the same immediacy and sudden intensity that characterises real-life shame events.
This position occurs primarily in short stories and embedded narratives.
A third alternative occurs in the case of shameless characters. As my analysis
shows, as soon as an overtly shameless character appears, she or he often evokes the
strongest empathic reader shame in the form of vicarious shame. Even as part of a
longer narrative, this shamelessness is instantly recognisable, it develops immediately
and it does so on the basis of the reader’s own shame theory. This could be observed
with the characters Michael in The Accidental, Sophie in Trumpet and Angie in Born
Free.
158
IV. Perspectives on Emotion and Literature
The aim of this outlook chapter, following the discussion of shame as narrative strategy
in the literature of contemporary Scottish women authors, is twofold. First of all it
seeks to position the present study within the frame of recent affect and emotion
studies that are based on findings from the humanities but which equally refer to other
disciplines such as evolutionary psychology, biology and neurosciences. The field as a
whole is vast and still growing; therefore I will provide a rather linear ‘genealogy’ of
ideas that lead to the alternative approach to shame’s narrative potential. Secondly, an
exemplary discussion from the perspective of a theory of ‘literature as emotional
surrogate’ deals with the already pronounced assumption that shame is an affect that
might be transferred from the literary text to the reader in essentially similar form. As
opposed to the widely accepted a priori statement of the ‘paradox of fiction’ that has
governed the philosophical and literary discussion of emotions for the past 30 years,
the surrogate theory assumes that there is no essential dissimilarity between emotions
aroused by literary stimuli and those aroused by real-world experiences.161 In the
course of the discussion I will give additional reference to alternative recent
approaches that are also cut to elucidate the paths literary emotions might take on their
way from the text to the reader, and why they were not employed in this context.
IV. 1 Recent Discussion of Emotions in the Humanities
In his article for the interdisciplinary Handbook of Emotions (2000), the film and media
scholar Ed S. Tan tries to define the ‘contribution of humanities to the study of
emotion’ (Tan 2000, pp. 116-134). He sees his own and other scholars’ affecttheoretical work in the line of a long tradition as he writes, “the analysis of style in
relation to emotion in the reader or hearer has been the domain of classical rhetoric”
(ibid., p. 125). From Aristotle and Plato on, assumptions have been made upon the
presumed effects of literary and music style, and the emotional responses they cause in
the audience. In the past two decades an increasing number of studies in the
humanities have tried to reveal more of the actual functioning of the emotional
experience of art and its psychological and (neuro-) physiological background.162 At
the same time, neuro and cognitive scientists and psychologists alike grew ever more
161
Both of these accounts, Colin Radford’s theory of paradox (1975) and Katja Mellmann’s surrogate theory (2006a; 2000b), will be introduced below in detail.
162
With regard to the overall subject of this book, research on reader responses to
fiction will primarily be taken into consideration. Ed S. Tan in particular, though, assumes the
general applicability of results from film studies to the realm of literary studies with regard to
issues of reception (cf. Tan 1994a; 1994b; 1996; Tan/Frijda 1999).
159
interested in the ways in which artefacts evoke emotions.163 Leaving aside numeric
details such as the actual percentage of emotions evoked by texts, films, music,
paintings and other forms of art (Tan quotes studies reporting a total of 7%; ibid.,
p. 117), the question is, whether ‘real’ emotions and ‘aesthetic’ emotions are identical
or at least similar, or whether they are entirely different and distinct from each other.
Many studies deal in fact with the (presumed) differences and commonalities between
emotions aroused by real-life events and by cultural artefacts. In 1975, Colin Radford
most prominently articulated the basic philosophical problem especially with the
commonalities with the question: “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna
Karenina ?” (Radford / Weston 1975)164 Radford’s basic argument is that emotional
responses to artefacts are irrational, since a reader reacts emotionally to fictional events
as if they were real events although s / he fully knows about their fictionality. Robert
Yanal summarises the ‘Paradox Set’ at the heart of Radford’s argument in his 1999
study on Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction (simultaneously providing insight into the
sometimes awkward terminology of affect and emotion theories):
The Paradox Set
1. Some people (we’ll call them emoters) on occasion experience emotions toward
characters or situations they take to be fictions.
2. Any person experiences an emotion only if he believes that the object of his
emotion both exists and exhibits at least some of the emotion inducing properties
specific to that emotion.
3. No emoter who takes the object of his emotion to be fiction believes that the
object of his emotion exists and exhibits any emotion inducing properties.
163
In this context, the psychologists Nico Frijda and Klaus R. Scherer certainly play
an outstanding role, not least due to the comprehensiveness of their texts. Frijda paid
particular attention to those emotions induced by film and literature (cf. Frijda 1989;
Tan/Frijda 1999; Frijda [2007]). Scherer most prominently developed the so-called
Component Process Model (C P M) for the valuation and measurement of emotions within
their psychological and physiological framework. His research includes studies on the
emotions induced by music and their measurement (cf. Scherer 2004; Scherer/ Zentner 2001;
Zentner/Grandjean/Scherer 2008).
164
Within the limited context of this study, only a small portion of this vast field can
be presented. For a wider perspective, see the aforementioned article by Ed Tan (2000) and
the introduction to one of the very few anthologies on the subject, Emotion and the Arts by
Mette Hjort and Sue Laver (1997). The latter also provides insight into the different ‘schools’
of emotion theories up until the late 1990s, including the differences and commonalities
between cognitive and social constructivist approaches and the so-called ‘critical paradox’
this opposition causes (Hjort/Laver 1997, pp. 3-19).
160
Propositions 2 and 3 logically imply that emotion toward fiction is an impossibility,
and yet proposition 1 claims emotions toward fiction to be an occasional
occurrence. We thus have yet cannot have emotions toward fiction.
(Yanal 1999, p. 11)
Yanal compares the effect of Radford’s question, and the long lasting discussion that
succeeded it, to the search for solutions of the mind-body problem and the free-will
question, making it one of the central issues of contemporary philosophy (ibid., pp.
ixsq.).165 As opposed to the emotion-eliciting effects of style, though, said paradox is
“not one of the perennial problems of philosophy ‘as old as Plato.’ […] Neither Plato
nor Aristotle incorporates recognition of fictionality in their theories of mimetic art”
(ibid., p. 13). Plato does not breach the issue since he assumes that the audience takes
an appearance for reality, not fiction; the emotional reaction to art is therefore
comparable to the reaction of a mirror image as real.166 Aristotle’s theory by contrast is
largely based on the idea that legends mostly refer to historical events, or that tragic
plays emanate a plausibility that derives from their resemblance to real events.
Reacting emotionally to works of art is therefore not only a reaction to their tragic
inevitability, but also a reaction to their probability.167 For Yanal, a possible solution of
the paradox of emotion and fiction moves along these lines:
We don’t, appearances aside, pity Anna Karenina but pity some actuality that
Tolstoy’s novel implies; we are playing a game of make-believe and our pity isn’t real
pity. Yet each of these explanations accepts the necessity of belief for emotion. (ibid,
p. 159)
Although many a critic has claimed to provide the solution of the paradox of fiction,
any of these are merely suggestions of ‘one possible’ solution. In his insightful article
on “Emotion in Response to Art” (1997), Jerrold Levinson differentiates between not
less than seven main solution types. These are the non-intentionalist solution, the
suspension-of-disbelief solution, the surrogate-object solution, which can be further
165
Radford has repeatedly published on this subject, mostly in response to criticism,
cf. Colin Radford: “Tears and Fiction,” in: Philosophy 52 (1977), 208-213; idem: “The
Essential Anna,” in: Philosophy 54 (1979), 390-394; idem: “Stuffed Tigers: A Reply to H.O.
Mounce,” in: Philosophy 57 (1982), 529-532; idem: “Replies to Three Critics,” in: Philosophy
64 (1989), 93-97. The other voices in this debate are, amongst others, Barrie Paskins: “On
Being Moved by Anna Karenina and Anna Karenina,” in: Philosophy 52 (1977), 344-347; H.O.
Mounce: “Art and Real Life,” in: Philosophy 55 (1980), 183-192; Kendall Walton: “Fearing
Fictions,” in: Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 5-27; idem: Mimesis as Make-Believe.
Cambridge, M A 1990; Peter Lamarque: “How Can We Fear and Pity Fictions?” in: British
Journal of Aesthetics 21/4 (1981), 291-304.
166
The threefold formation of artistic appearance (from God to the craftsman to the
artist) is described in Book X of the Republic.
167
Cf. Aristotle, Poetics IX (1451b).
161
differentiated into three subversions, one in which the surrogate-object is the artefact
itself, another in which the artistic or ideational content of the artefact serves as object.
A third version Levinson calls shadow-object proposal, in which “the objects of
response are real individuals or phenomena from the subject’s life experience, ones
resembling the persons or events of the fiction, and of which the fiction puts the
subject covertly or indirectly in mind” (Levinson 1997, p. 23). These ‘early’ surrogate
theories need to stay in mind with regard to the more recent one presented by Katja
Mellmann.
A fourth option to solve the paradox of fiction is the antijudgmentalist
solution, contested by the surrogate-belief solution. The sixth solution, the irrationalist
solution, refers back to the initiator of the debate, Colin Radford, and finally solution
number seven, the make-believe, or imaginary solution, introduced by Kendall Walton
(1990) and prominently supported by Gregory Currie (1990), provides according to
Levinson “probably the best resolution to the paradox of fiction” (ibid., p. 27).168 The
make-believe solution differentiates between ‘real’ emotions and ‘make-believe’
emotions evoked by artefacts. This second type of emotions feels considerably like the
‘real’ sort, yet it does not have the same motivational and behavioural consequences.
Therefore, readers as well as other consumers of artefacts provide two very
comparable, yet essentially different strands of emotions. Two aspects of the critique of
make-believe emotions in response to fiction point into the direction the discussion
has taken further since 1997:
What makes some philosophers reluctant to accept that our emotional relations
to fictional objects might be of a different stripe from our emotional relations to
objects we take as existent (as the make-believe theory insists) is the sense that,
to the person experiencing them, they seem very much the same—they feel the
same, we might say. But as has been observed, there is more to emotional conditions
than feelings. Cognitive and conative commitments play a role in the identity of
many, though not all, emotions; thus, if those commitments vary, so may the
emotion that is present (ibid.).
The first aspect is the subjective experience of literary induced emotions. The fact that
they feel similar to emotions induced by ‘real’ stimuli appears due to a somewhat hazy
terminology. One might argue that self-assessment of personal feelings is per
definitionem debatable. Taking aside possible effects of purposeful usage (which is
rather unlikely within the realm of reader response), a profound depiction of one’s
own emotional landscape generally demands a fair amount of self-reflection, and
distance to both the event and the emotional experience. Especially with little or no
168
With regard to the further development of this discussion, only the make-believe
solution will be discussed in further detail. For the summaries of the other six proposed
solutions to the paradox of fiction, see Levinson 1997, pp. 23-27.
162
temporal space between the reading experience and the report, aspects of personal and
social communicability of the emotions experienced also affect such statements. In the
case of shame, for instance, self-disclosure during or immediately after the reading is
difficult to valuate, since this particular feeling has an enormously secretive potential,
as was discussed at length in the main part of this study. The circumstance that none of
the subjects reports feelings of embarrassment or shame does not mean that a stimulus
material, i.e. a literary text, did not evoke this type of emotion.
Only very recently, literary scholars attempt to access reader responses
through advanced neuropsychological experimental set-ups. By avoiding the
imponderability of self-assessment, reliable data is to be achieved through the analysis
of eye movements during reading, but also by the usage of neuroscientific methods
such as f MRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).169
The second animadversion on the make-believe theory that became a central
argument in emotion studies is the aspect of ‘cognitive and conative commitment,’ as
Levinson puts it, and its variation between individual emotions. Over the years the
term of ‘interest’ was widely established for the description and discussion of the
driving force behind (textual) perception. In an article from 1986, cognitive scientists
Suzanne Hidi and William Baird brought up “Interestingness—A neglected variable in
discourse processing” (Hidi /Baird 1986).170 In an article on “Story processing as an
emotion episode,” Ed Tan claims the transferability of the term to the realm of literary
reception:
Interest is the dominant emotion in story processing. It lends unity to the episodic
emotional response, and is responsible for a net positive hedonic tone of emotion.
Many emotions in story processing are by themselves unpleasant. The fear and
disgust called forth by a horror thriller or the sorrow produced by a melodramatic
story are bearable, and even sought after, when they occur within an episode
showing some promise of closure—or, in other words, when they are accompanied
by interest. However, interest is not just a byproduct of other emotions. It
strengthens all other emotions. (Tan 1994a, p. 178)
With reference to the aforementioned psychologist Nico Frijda, Tan unfolds an entire
semantic field around the term of interest. The terminological set-up of ‘concern,’
‘appraisal’ and ‘interest’ is still valid, although the usage of the term ‘appraisal’ in
169
In the context of the so-called Cluster of Excellence Languages of Emotion at the
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, several projects currently work within this realm. Two of
these are: Arthur M. Jacobs, Gisela Klann-Delius, Winfried Menninghaus et al. on “Affective
and aesthetic processes involved in reading” and Thomas Jacobsen and Winfried
Menninghaus on “Aesthetic modulation of affective valence: Pleasure in disgust and related
phenomena.” See www.languages-of-emotion.de for more detailed information.
170
One of the authors has recently published another article on the subject only two
years ago, which proves that this term remains topical (cf. Hidi 2006).
163
particular has been subject to alterations since (in case of competing denominations,
these will be clarified and explained within the context of the following discussion).
The basic idea behind these terms is that the arousal of emotions and perception in
general follow comparable mechanisms and are intertwined.171 As for concern, “in
emotion, ‘concerns’ represent what is important to the individual. Stable motives,
standards, and attitudes are instances of concerns. More generally, concerns are
internal representations of preferred states of the world” (ibid.). According to Tan
Frijda goes as far as to call the emotion apparatus a “concern realization system,”
(ibid., with reference to Frijda 1987) in which the maintenance or the re-establishment
of the ‘preferred state of the world’ has first priority. The term of ‘appraisal’ comes into
play during the actual process of an emotion.172 “Different emotions are characterized
by different, even unique, appraisal and action patterns. The result of appraisal is an
appreciation of the situation in terms of its personal significance. It does not have to be
conscious.” (Tan 1994a, p. 168)
At this point precisely the different notions of appraisal manifest which
circulate currently. In the field of psychology, especially in its neuroscientific orientation, the temporal realm covered by the appraisal process grows ever smaller.
Meanwhile, researchers position the sequences of appraisal and reappraisal of an
emotion episode within milliseconds after the occurrence of the stimulus (cf. Scherer
2005). The conclusion that appraisal ‘does not have to be conscious’ almost has been
turned into its opposite; it is assumed now that emotional appraisal in its early and
crucial phases is essentially unconscious. Nevertheless, in different realms of research,
not only within the field of psychology and psychiatry, but also in the humanities,
appraisal is still described with regard to any process of situational evaluation. The
connection to the realm of literature lies again within the cognitive commonalities
between story processing in general, and the arousal of emotions in particular. “Stories
have to be processed cognitively in order to have any effect at all, and emotional effects
are no exception to the rule.” (Tan 1994a, p. 167) This approach is by no means
conflicting the more recent theories of appraisal and the formation of emotions. To
‘process cognitively’ does not mean to ‘process consciously.’ To that extent, earlier
studies such as Frijda’s or Tan’s that use the somewhat ‘dated’ definition of appraisal
can well be read productively in connection to very recent research such as Scherer’s,
171
Meanwhile, psychologists and neuroscientists have approved this approach, or
rather its contraposition. It is now widely assumed that emotion facilitates perception, cf.
Phelps/Ling/Carrasco 2006 who also provide a concise survey of the terrain. For a somewhat
shorter discussion cf. Zeelenberg/ Wagenmakers/Rotteveel 2006. As for the general
integration of emotion and cognition, cf. Gray/Braver/Raichle 2002.
172
For a concise survey of cognitive theories on appraisal up to the early 1990s, cf.
Tan 1994a, p. 167.
164
or other neuroscientific emotion studies that use the term in a much more restricted
manner.
Two aspects of Tan’s appraisal usage are relevant in the context of this chapter.
First of all, his application of the term is somewhat exemplary for studies of emotional
responses to artefacts, especially to literary texts, in the humanities. Secondly, it offers
the connecting point to the concrete affect-theoretical discussion of shame as narrative
strategy that follows in the second part of this chapter. Tan presumes “an intimate
relationship between processes in comprehension, as accounted for by current models
of story understanding on the one hand, and emotion on the other.” (Tan 1994a, p.
169) Based on this presumption, which again relies heavily upon the commonalities
between affective and cognitive processes, Tan develops the so-called emotional
meaning structure of a text, EMS (cf. ibid.).
This structure describes the story’s ‘functional representation in emotion,’ as
opposed to its ‘cognitive representation as modelled in current story understanding
programs,’ (ibid.) i.e. as pronounced via self-assessment. Even more interesting than
the structure itself are the three central appraisal elements that it is composed of:
“relevance, the reality of story events, and the imagined role of the reader in them as
the presence as a witness in the fictional world” (ibid., p. 170). Relevance means the
relevance of story events to concerns of the reader. Once the reader’s concerns are met,
his or her primary interest is a satisfactory closure of the story’s problems and
adversities. The aspect of reality of the story events basically reaches back to Aristotle
once again and his argument of plausibility: emotional responses to fiction are also
responses to the verisimilitude of the events described. The third point of witness
emotion, finally, points both back to results of the main part of this study and thus
towards the next section of this part.173 The bottom line of Tan’s approach is that the
appraisal structures of real-world and fictional events are comparable, and that based
on that, “emotion in story processing can be considered an emotion like all other
emotions in the reality of daily life.” (Tan 1994a, p. 184) At this point, Tan clearly
argues against make-believe theories; moreover, his argument paves the way for the
assumption that the boundaries between literary and reality bound emotions are
173
Recent theories of appraisal and emotional evaluation, such as the so-called
stimulus evaluation check (SE C), also refer heavily to this older model. Sander et al.
differentiate between “four appraisal objectives concerning the major types or classes of
information that an organism needs to adaptively react to a salient event: (1) How relevant is
this event for me? Does it directly affect me or my social reference group? (relevance); (2)
What are the implications or consequences of this event and how do these affect my wellbeing and my immediate or long-term goals? (implications); (3) How well can I cope with or
adjust to these consequences? (coping potential); (4) What is the significance of this event
with respect to my self-concept and to social norms and values (normative significance).”
(Sander/Grandjean/Scherer 2005, p. 319)
165
permeable. This again leads back to the affect-theoretical assumption of the study at
hand. The concluding part returns to the presumption obtained that shame is an affect
that can be transferred from the literary character to the reader in essentially similar
form. For this purpose, Hilge Landweer’s theory of vicarious feelings, co-shame and
vicarious shame, is combined with results of Katja Mellmann’s evolutionary
psychology-based theory of literature as emotional surrogate.
IV. 2
Shame Transference from the Literary Text to the Reader—
an Exemplary Affect-theoretical Approach
At the risk of redundancy, the central ideas and results that led to the assumption that
shame can be transferred from the literary text to the reader are to be re-presented
before the actual application of the surrogate theory to the discussion of reader
response to literary shame.
IV. 2. 1 Recapitulation of Narrative Forms of Literary Shame
Several narrative forms are constitutive for the textual construction of shame narration. Tense, the position of the actual shame event within the text, the narrative
perspective and changes between first person and second or third person narrative,
ellipses and blank spaces contribute in varied combination to the overall shameinducing effect of a literary text. Any of the named characteristics do not only correspond to the particularly secretive nature of the affect itself; literary shame also
mimics the evasive, defensive character of real life shame narration. As for narrative
tense and the positioning of the actual shame incident within the chronology of
events, there is a clear tendency towards retrospective narration and /or towards the
concretion of the ruling shame scene within the second half of the text body. The
distancing presentation of literary shame closely corresponds to its communicative
attributes. Its proverbial ‘aim of disappearance,’ and the shamed subject’s urge to hide
and to avoid the shame inducing content as much as the shame feeling itself is being
transformed to the textual realm. The choice of narrative perspective often also reflects
the evasive nature of shame. As the literary discussion has shown, the reigning shame
incidents are either narrated in first-person past tense or in present tense. In case of the
latter, a change in perspective from first-person to either second or third-person
narrative adds to the characteristic distance. In the context of this study, the rare cases
of first person present tense shame narration, e.g. in parts of Trumpet by Jackie Kay (cf.
Ch. II. 2. 2) or in Born Free by Laura Hird (cf. Ch. II. 2. 4 and II. 2. 5. 3), are read as
historic present, and therefore as retrospective narrative.
Especially Born Free, though, might be an example for the purposeful usage of
first person present tense shame narration. The vehemence and variation of the novel’s
166
characters’ norm-violations might be targeted on the evocation of reader shame, as
discussed with respect to this and other texts’ shameless characters. The importance of
these observations lies within the parallel to the rare cases of first person present tense
shame narration in real life. It is assumed that immediate self-disclosure in the face of
an actual shame experience is necessarily purposeful, since it contradicts any of
shame’s physical or psychological characteristics. The actual paradox of the sentence “I
am so ashamed” in terms of its temporal and its personal perspective is therefore also
valid for the literary realm. As a consequence, the majority of the novels and stories by
contemporary Scottish women authors follow the real-life pattern of shame
narration—an observation that argues against a general purposeful usage of shame as
narrative strategy in order to shame the reader deliberately. In this respect, the
particular narrative form of the free indirect discourse is of special significance. As it
presents the character’s mental discourse in the grammatical tense and person of the
narrator’s discourse, it allows an intrinsic combination of inner and outer perspective
(cf. Keen 2006, p. 219). In the literature discussed, free indirect discourse is noticeably
used as distancing element, which allows the literary figure to objectify his or her
emotional experience in order to be able to communicate it.
Another two narrative features further support the overall impression of a
realistic shame narration, ellipsis and blank space. Both forms of cavity are frequently
used to circumvent or avoid the actual shame event. The example of A.L. Kennedy’s
Everything You Need shows that both the compulsive nature and the shame-inducing
effect of screen shame can be depicted and supported by the repeated usage of ellipses
(cf. Ch. II. 2. 3. 1). The novel’s main character Nathan Staples occupies himself, his
(fictional) environment and the reader with an endless series of minor shame incidents
in order to avoid the reigning shame scene. The elliptic construction of the novel is
intrinsically connected to Nathan’s beating around the bush. Apart from the fact that
narrative form and content are interdependent, they both correspond to real-life
shame narration. Psychological studies show that the more severe the shame
experience, the more reluctant the shamed subject is to actually speak about it at all,
even in retrospect. In its most extreme literary form, the reigning shame scene lingers
within a blank space as depicted exemplarily in Ali Smith’s novel Like (cf. Ch. II. 2. 1. 4
and II. 2. 4. 1). In this particular case, the effect of shame narration remains opaque,
although Like contains almost all narrative characteristics of literary shame. The text
offers an unchronological order of events, multiperspective, free indirect discourse and
alternating hybrid narrative forms as well as unreliable narrative voices, ellipses and an
open ending. The complete omission of the underlying shame scene, though, leads to
both cognitive and emotional incomprehensibility; as the discussion of the novel has
shown, reader shame reactions to this particular shame narrative are rather unlikely,
despite the high shame content of the novel itself. The next section recapitulates those
two ways literature may take to evoke reader shame that were discussed in the main
167
part of this study, followed by an exemplary affect-theoretical discussion of shame
transference from fiction to reality.
IV. 2. 2 Two Ways to Evoke Reader Shame, and their Presumed Evolutionary
Psychological Foundation
Very generally, two equivalent ways to evoke reader shame coexist within the literature
of contemporary Scottish women authors (as far as my corpus covers it). Novels tend
to accustom the reader to the shame disposition of their narrative characters. By taking
over the literary figure’s shame expectations and anxieties, the reader learns to judge
the fictional shame situations and incidents according to the character’s weak or strong
shame theory. The sustainable narrative potential of longer fiction can eventually
support a reader shame reaction almost independent from the actual shame
disposition of the reader, whereas shame reactions to shorter fiction rely much more
on common sense and instantaneously recognisable shame scenes. Consequently, short
stories tend to work with instantaneous, unmistakably clear and strong shame
situations. Compared to the longer fiction, the construction of short stories, their
actual narrative form and its strategic use appear secondary to the immediacy and the
impact of the shame incident.
There is a tendency, though, towards the presentation of physical and psychological shame reactions right from the beginning, while the actual shame event is
described at a later stage—an order that is also found in novels, e.g. Everything You
Need by A. L. Kennedy or Like by Ali Smith, and which stands in close relation to the
use of the aforementioned ellipses and blank spaces. Nevertheless, the length, or rather
shortness, of the stories apparently does not accustom the reader to a text-immanent
shame theory. The suddenness of the reader’s confrontation with the fictional
character’s shame rather parallels real life shame witnessing, which is also
characterised by surprise and unexpectedness.
As it was mentioned briefly in the introductory part of this thesis, empathic
shame is a subgroup to group shame. It hardly occurs in the literary texts discussed in
this study, which does not mean that empathic shame was not discussed in other
literary texts. In this particular context, though, it plays a decisive role with regard to
reader reactions for it prepares the ground for the exceptional emotional transference
from a fictional character to the reader that singles out shame from other emotions.
Empathic shame is, according to Stephan Marks (2007), the shame that we feel with
somebody whose shaming we witness. This can be as shameful as being shamed
oneself. This particular feeling belongs therefore to the vicarious emotions which can
be felt on behalf of another individual—independent from the shamed subject’s own
feeling. In case he or she is ashamed, the witness feels co-shame; in case the other is
not (recognisably) ashamed, the witness feels vicarious shame (cf. Landweer 1999). It is
168
assumed that shame feelings of a humiliated individual are conveyed to the shame
witness through a kind of ‘psychic contagion’ (cf. Marks 2007, p. 27). As a
consequence, one person can literally feel the emotion of the other.174 In everyday
language, empathic shame has many different names in different languages, ranging
from witness shame and to-be-ashamed-for-somebody-else to Mitscham or Fremdschämen.175 Concerning shame as witness emotion, psychoanalytic literature often
concentrates on the therapeutically relevant phenomenon of counter-transference
174
Cf. Marks 2007, pp. 64sq., who refers to recent neurobiological research on the
role of mirror neurons in the transference of emotions between individuals, e.g. Bauer 2005
and Bråten 2007. No research has been done on the transference of particular emotions via
mirror neurons, yet the relevant aspects of the field, such as resonance, emotional contagion
and intuitive understanding in the form of the Theory of Mind, etc., seem perfectly applicable
to the highly contagious affect of shame. In mirror neuron studies, it is assumed that mirror
neurons are activated not only by our fellow citizens’ actual actions and behaviours, but also
by the mere perception of an incident (cf. Bauer 2005, p. 24). This presumption strongly
supports two central aspects of Shame as Narrative Strategy: First of all, reading is one major
way to perceive ‘what is going on in somebody else,’ as we perceive a literary character as
‘somebody else,’ independent of his or her fictionality. Thus, reading about somebody’s
(fictional) actions and emotions may activate the reader’s mirror neurons in precisely the
same way as a real person’s narrative of a past incident and his or her affective memory.
Empathic feelings with the literary character would therefore range within the same
emotional realm as real-life witness emotions. Second, shame’s potential to evoke
substitutional emotions almost as intense as the original feeling —or, in case of vicarious
shame, even stronger ones—might stem to a large degree from mirror neurons and their
functioning in terms of the abovementioned Theory of Mind. Neuroscientists Giacomo
Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese and their colleagues from the University of Parma, Italy, have
argued in numerous publications since 1998 that to see another individual perform an action
activates the same group of neurons in the brain as the activity itself. From the development
of language as a means of communication in humans to empathy as a basis of
intersubjectivity, a large number of social and cultural phenomena have since been discussed
within this context. As a result, mirror neurons are assumed to be constitutive for any kind of
human interaction, based on their potential to support shared hypotheses between
individuals. As the functioning of language and imagination play prominent roles in mirror
neurons studies, the application of this approach to the realm of literary studies seems
particularly appropriate. However, neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons have not been
able to locate single mirror neurons in humans; this may be possible in the future with the
refinement of non-invasive techniques. A literary analysis based on the mere assumption of a
connection between the activity of mirror neurons and empathic reader reactions would
therefore be too speculative, cf. Lauer 2007. For an up-to-date list of research projects and
publications of Rizzolatti, Gallese et al. see
http://www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/english/index.htm.
175
In French, for instance, the expressions ‘honteux pour autrui’ and ‘honte
empathique’ exist, while there is no apparent equivalent for instance in Italian.
169
shame.176 Landweer (1999) by contrast developed an approach towards shame as
empathy, which also defines the two possible types of empathic reader shame, coshame and vicarious shame, as discussed with regard to the concrete literary material
in the main part of this study. In this context Landweer’s theory of shame as empathy
will be presented in greater detail. She differentiates the ‘classic’ form of empathy from
other phenomena of substitutional feelings:
So muß jedenfalls der ‘klassische’ Fall des Mitgefühls, bei dem ich unterstelle, daß
jemand ein bestimmtes Gefühl hat (1), von den Phänomenen unterschieden werden,
bei denen sein faktisches Gefühl gleichgültig für mein Gefühl ist und ich mich
dennoch fühlend auf seine Situation beziehe (2) und darüber hinaus (3) von denen,
bei denen es für die Aktmaterie177 meines Gefühls entscheidend ist, daß der andere
ein Gefühl nach meiner Wahrnehmung gerade nicht (3.1) oder nicht in der
erwarteten Intensität (3.2) hat, das er aber nach meinem Situationsverhältnis haben
müßte oder sogar normativ haben sollte, wie bei allen stellvertretenden Gefühlen.
(Landweer 1999, p. 129)
Transferred to the realm of shame, this supports the assumption that it is possible to
feel shame independent from the actual feeling of the shamed subject; the lack of a
supposedly adequate shame response is even constitutive for feelings of vicarious
shame.178 The empathic potential of shame substantiates further under certain
situational conditions. By generalising the Aristotelian conditions for pity (éleos) in his
Rhetoric,179 Landweer formulates a catalogue of conditions for empathic feelings in the
aforementioned sense:
Nach der Überprüfung der Verallgemeinerbarkeit der bei Aristoteles genannten
Situationsbedingungen für Mitleid können die Merkmale für Sympathiegefühle [...]
176
Cf. Wurmser 1981, pp. 251sq., 274, 281sqq.; Kaufman 1989, p. 172; Jacoby 1991,
pp. 173sqq., Hilgers 2006, pp. 100sqq., 198sq., 279sqq. Another possible reason for the
exclusion of witness shame from wider psychoanalytic or psychological discussions is surely
the fact that this form of shame very rarely becomes pathological—which is also true of
reader emotions. The connection between the intensity of an affect and its endurance as a
reader reaction will be discussed below.
177
The term ‘Aktmaterie’ refers to Max Scheler in Wesen und Formen der Sympathie,
“Das Mitgefühl.” Frankfurt/M. 1948. In terms of emotions it describes what somebody is
affected by, but in terms of empathy, it not only signifies what we ‘feel with’ somebody else,
“das nachgefühlte Gefühl,” but also what we can feel in lieu of somebody else (cf. Landweer
1999, pp. 127; 130).
178
At this point it has to be mentioned that Landweer explicitly denies the
assumption that feelings of empathy are projective in terms of a confusion of one’s own
emotions with those of someone else (cf. pp. 135; 139). Rather, the subject’s independence
from the actual feelings of others stresses the importance of situational conditions and their
comprehensibility.
179
Book II, Chapter 8 [1386a]; Landweer 1999, pp. 130-133.
170
zusammengefaßt werden. Sie sind beschränkt auf bestimmte Personenkreise, und
zwar 1. auf einander Nahestehende, 2. auf Personen, die sich a) in räumlicher Nähe
zueinander befinden, genauer auf Situationen, wo der Mitfühlende die andere
Person sinnlich wahrnehmen kann, oder b) mindestens aber muß ein anschaulicher
Eindruck des fremden Gefühls medial vermittelt sein. Dieser kann selbstverständlich
auch durch entsprechende mündliche oder schriftliche Beschreibung transportiert
werden. 3. sind Sympathiegefühle auch möglich aufgrund beliebiger objektiver
Ähnlichkeiten. (ibid., p. 133)
Especially the criterion of ‘at least’ a ‘mediated vivid depiction of the extrinsic
emotion’ as condition for empathic feelings leads back to the realm of drama, or more
generally to literature. Landweer presumes a general transferability of what we might
call real and fictional empathic stimuli:
Aus dem Beispiel der fiktiven Literatur und Schauspielkunst könnte indirekt
erschlossen werden, daß nicht nur die gefühlsmäßige Reaktion anderer auf Unglück
in den eigenen Gefühlen nachvollzogen werden können (als Mitleid), sondern auch
die ganze Bandbreite der dargestellten Gefühle. Sie werden vom Zuschauer nicht
nur rein registrierend zur Kenntnis genommen, sondern auch meist in
abgeschwächter Form miterlebt. (ibid.)
The connection of the described characteristics of shame affects, including the
categorisation as a proper form of empathy, and the assumption that the reactions of
an audience (or reader) might contain the whole range of emotions presented on stage
(or in a text) lead to two central questions:
1) Is it possible to verify the above stated similarity of literary emotions and
reader reactions?
2) If this is the case, shame in its empathic forms as co-shame and vicarious
shame ought to be among the transferable emotions, given its natural high
pervasiveness and contagion. Is empathic shame, being a proper part of the shame
affect groups and therefore following the same precepts in terms of evocation,
appraisal, physical response and reaction, an example for emotion transference without
decrease?
The discussion of the first question is largely based on the approach of Katja Mellmann
on “Literatur als emotionale Attrappe”, ‘literature as emotional surrogate’ (Mellmann
2006a, 2006b; preparatory work in Mellmann 2002). In her attempt of an evolutionary
psychological solution of the paradox of fiction, she adapts emotion-decoupling
theories (Scherer 1994), research on the evolutionary biology of emotions
(Cosmides / Tooby 2000), and ethological theories on surrogates, especially by Konrad
Lorenz. Mellmann refers to the aforementioned ‘paradox set’ of the seeming
contradiction between being moved by literary characters and fully knowing that both
the character and his or her actions are fictional. Within the context of literature as
171
emotional surrogate, the proposition that ‘emotions for objects logically presuppose
beliefs in the existence and features of those objects’ appears most critical.180
This approach insists on the coercive participation of conviction in the formation of emotional reactions, leaving out examples of spontaneous or not reflected
feelings (cf. Mellmann 2006b, p. 147). Assumptions on make-believe emotions may not
solve the problem either (as discussed above), since the differentiation between real
emotions that lead to “existential endorsement and motivational upshot” (Levinson
1997, p. 26) and imaginary ‘emotions’ that do not lead to such consequences is merely
a conceptual solution that does not explain the actual nature of the feelings at question.
According to Mellmann, the implication of theories of the evolutionary psychology of
emotion might help to solve this dilemma. Separate categories of ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’
emotions for example appear inefficient from an evolutionary point of view:
Levinson stellt keine Hypothesen darüber auf, wie diese neue Kategorie von
Emotionen [i.e. imaginary emotions] beschaffen sein soll und woher sie kommt.
Wollte man dies spaßeshalber einmal für ihn tun, so müßte man eine doppelte
Ausführung all unserer emotionalen Dispositionen annehmen. Jede unserer
Gefühlsreaktionen existiert in unserem psychischen Apparat dann einmal mit,
einmal ohne Reaktionszwang. Eine solche Annahme aber ist […] evolutionär wenig
plausibel. (Mellmann 2006b, p. 149)
The general aim of the notion of literature as emotional surrogate is to identify the
psychological similarities between the effect of real and fictional stimuli, based on the
ethological concept of releasing mechanisms. In a further step, the categorical
similarities between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ emotions are discussed with regard to the
differences between emotions concerning the evolutionary psychological premise of
“Bereichsspezifik” (ibid., p. 150). This means that each emotion has its specific domain
in which it stands for a particular set of reactions. One major reference here is the
work of Klaus R. Scherer who has been working on the neurological background of
emotions for more than two decades.181 In one of his articles on the nature and
function of emotions in information processing and behaviour, he differentiates
between three basic forms of behavioural response: reflex, emotion and what he calls
appropriately modified response. Emotion serves to decouple stimulus and response,
which means that emotions are situated between the perception of an object or event,
and the reaction that follows its appraisal:
An appropriate action tendency as well as the energy to carry it out are prepared as
soon as the stimulus is analyzed, but the motor action pattern is not immediately
released. The latency time can be used to analyze and evaluate the stimulus event as
180
Mellmann 2006b, p. 146, referring to Levinson 1997, pp. 22sq.
For an up-to-date list of recent research projects and publications see
http://www.unige.ch/fapse/emotion/members/scherer/scherer_research.html.
181
172
well as one’s repertoire of reaction or coping alternatives more thoroughly. On the
basis of this additional information, the response can be modified appropriately.
(Scherer 1994, p. 128)
Two aspects of this approach are crucial in the present context: first the latency period
that occurs between the analysis of the stimulus and the reaction; the decoupling
therefore only affects the response, not the release of the emotion itself. The latter
occurs in any case, independent from the result of the re-appraisal in the latency
period. Second, the delayed motor action pattern implies the possibility of an early
ending of an emotional program, for instance in case a supposed source of danger
turns out to be harmless. The same absence of motor action can be expected for
stimuli that turn out to be only fictional.182
A second starting point of the notion of literature as emotional surrogate is
the work of two evolutionary psychologists, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. Their
studies of the (presumed) evolutionary development of emotions and the innate
differentiation between particular emotions complement Scherer’s decoupling theory.
Based on the presupposition that ‘having an emotion’ is always executed along the
lines of stimulus analysis, evaluation and response, Cosmides and Tooby assume that
both the analysis and the evaluation of the stimulus are also specifically organised by
an emotional program. The “coordinated adjustment and entrainment of mechanisms
constitutes a mode of operation for the entire psychological architecture, and serves as
the basis for a precise computational and functional definition of each emotion state”
(Cosmides/Tooby 2000, p. 92).183 Cognitive processes of varying complexity are
included in this psychological concept, such as “fighting, falling in love, escaping
predators, confronting sexual infidelity, experiencing a failure-driven loss in status
182
It is debatable indeed whether Scherer’s theory, which has been developed in
view of very short periods of time, can be applied to processes of an entirely different length.
Up to the present there is no reliable data on long-term appraisal structures like those
involved in the reading process. As discussed earlier, though, the application of appraisal
mechanisms to processes of longer duration, even within the conscious realm of
apperception, points to older appraisal definitions. Both appraisal approaches are combined
here, which is unusual but not implausible.
183
Cosmides and Tooby’s work is occasionally met with suspicion. First of all,
evolutionary psychology necessarily lacks reliable data, as opposed to evolutionary biology
for instance. Based on biological findings, only assumptions can be made. In case of the two
researchers from Santa Barbara, their rather mechanical image of emotional programs
appears problematic, if not disagreeable, to many critics. Personally, I do not favour the idea
of emotional automatism either. This theory does not argue against individual
implementation of emotional programs, though. What is given is a highly differentiated
psychological basis on which individual experience, cultural imprints and social formations
are to be positioned.
173
[and] responding to the death of a family member” (ibid.)184 This inclusive program
reaches far beyond what Mellmann calls the ‘pre-scientific dichotomy of cognition and
emotion.’ (Mellmann 2006b, p. 154) It doesn’t mean either, though, that emotion and
cognition is one and the same thing. The interrelations between both realms of
subjective and intersubjective experiences are rather much more variegated than
generally assumed. With respect to the reaction to literary stimuli, the differentiation
between the releasing mechanism and the latency period and the inclusion of
physiological and cognitive responses into the realm of emotional programs is
essential.
Surrogate effects in human beings depict the pattern of decoupled reflex and
emotional response, best shown in the reaction to the schema of childlike
characteristics (‘Kindchenschema’). The reaction to the sight of a small child or animal
takes place within the realm of release mechanisms. As opposed to reflex reactions in
animals, the human response to a child already takes place in the emotional realm of
evaluation and re-appraisal. The sight of a cute baby or animal therefore rather evokes
the tendency to protect and care than the actual behaviour.185 Yet not only visual and
tangible stimuli (including rounded, colourful or otherwise ‘nice’ objects that also
target this particular response) can trigger a modified emotional response. Acoustic,
olfactory, linguistic and written stimuli evoke emotional responses too.
Tatsächlich aber kommen akustische, haptische, olfaktorische u.a. Reize ebenfalls als
Schlüsselreize bzw. einzelne Komponenten eines komplex strukturierten
Schlüsselreizes in Frage. […] Auch Propositionen (z. B. ‘die Situation ist bedrohlich’) können als Auslöser wirken. Das ist wichtig, wenn wir auch Sprache und
Literatur als mögliche emotionale Attrappen klassifizieren wollen. Und dazu gibt
uns die Tatsache, daß unsere emotionalen Auslöseschemata auch in literarischen
Werken Treffer erzielen können (sonst würden wir nicht auf Literatur emotional
reagieren), Anlaß. (Mellmann 2006b, p. 159)
With regard to the beginning of this chapter and Colin Radford’s question why we are
touched by the fate of Anna Karenina, the answer might be that our emotional
disposition reacts to the imagination of it, as much as it reacts to the schema of
childlike characteristics in animals and objects we only see on a photograph. Any of
these reactions to surrogates take place in the realm of the release mechanism. The
obvious conclusion that fictional stimuli simply do not lead to behavioural responses
once a second appraisal has classified them ‘not real’ does not capture the whole range
184
Interestingly, at least two of these six seemingly random examples are potential
scenes of shame, i.e. confronting sexual infidelity and experiencing a failure-driven loss in
status; if we do not consider ‘falling in love’ equal to ‘being happily in love,’ it is three.
185
Cf. Mellmann 2006b, p. 157, referring to Konrad Lorenz: Vergleichende Verhaltensforschung. Grundlagen der Ethologie. München 1984.
174
of fictionally induced emotional reactions. Katja Mellmann differentiates between
three major types of emotional response. She presents a number of possible reactions
to artefacts: a) the flinching viewer of an enthralling scene in the cinema, b) the
sexually aroused reader of an erotic passage of a novel, and c) the initially highly
involved reader of a melodramatic love story who puts down the book in frustration
when the text gets lost in deviation instead of providing a satisfying solution of the
emotional entanglement (ibid., pp. 161sqq.). With these examples we may differentiate
between different types of emotional programs, according to the adaptive benefit of a)
a radical, b) a partial or c) an altogether omitted modification of response. The first
case is characterised by the drastic change in the emotion process once the relevance
test was negative, i.e. once the thrilling content was re-appraised as ‘only fictional’ and
therefore ‘not dangerous.’ Fright and fear reactions are especially sensible to relevance
tests, since they are highly stressful for the body (ibid., p. 162). Once the stimulus has
been evaluated as not worth a flight reaction, the radical modification of response ends
the emotional program immediately. The film viewer remains seated despite his or her
initially frightful reaction. The second case presents the standard situation of an
equally omitted active response while the physiological epiphenomena maintain. This
means that the reader’s response is only partially modified. Despite the re-appraisal of
the stimulus as ‘not real,’ the aroused feeling is not ended immediately, not least
because this physical response does not stress the body the way fear reactions do.
The third case finally represents the complete absence of modification in
response. Especially in case the reader puts down the book because his or her hope for
closure is disappointed, this active response is part of the specific emotional program.
Of all three examples the case of violated reading expectations has by way the slowest
termination mechanism of all three examples. This particular behavioural response is
characteristic for emotions whose disposition is not strictly stimulus related; once an
emotion is related to a somewhat broader motivational basis, a modification of
response can be omitted. In these special cases, an only cognitive stimulus can lead to
physical response (cf. ibid., p. 165). As a consequence, Mellmann suggests a primary
differentiation between emotion programs depending on the pragmatic relevance of
concrete stimuli instead of the differentiation between ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ stimuli
(ibid., p. 160). Therefore it is not the question whether we do react differently to a real
or a fictional event, but how we respond to the imagination of the fictional event
compared to our response to the real equivalent.
As for the subject of this study, shame may be classified as an emotion
program of the second or the third category. Especially the attributes of not being
strictly stimulus-related but connected to a broader motivational basis and the active
response to a strictly cognitive stimulation apply to shame affects. The interruption of
the reading process for instance, in case the feeling becomes overwhelming and
unbearable, is an example for a positive active response to shame narrative. Other
175
possible physical responses are averting one’s eyes in case of a shorter interruption of
the reading process, blushing and feeling uncomfortable. Though unpleasant,
especially in the case of no response modification, there are no evolutionary
psychological reasons against a prolonged response, since shame is no exclusively
destructive or pathological feeling in itself that automatically harms the body or the
psyche. Both major ways to evoke empathic reader shame—the immediate
confrontation with a shame event as used in short stories, and the familiarisation of the
reader to a fictional shame theory as characteristic for longer fiction—mimic real-life
conditions for the development of co-shame or vicarious shame. In terms of literature
as emotional surrogate, the reaction to the shame stimulus, and the reader response to
the evaluation and re-appraisal of the literary shame scene correspond closely to their
counterparts released by a real shame scene.
From this specific angle it appears that empathic reader shame follows an
emotion program comparable to both real-life empathic shame and shame felt on
behalf of oneself. Complementary to the results of the main part of this thesis, I
conclude that shame is an example for the possible transference of an emotion in
essentially similar form from the literary character to the reader.
176
V. Corpus and Bibliography
V. 1 List of Literary Texts Discussed in Shame as Narrative Strategy
Hird, Laura, Born Free. Edinburgh 1999.
Kay, Jackie, Trumpet. London 1998.
Kennedy, Alison Louise, “The Moving House,” in: Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains.
Short Stories. London 1990, pp. 35-41.
Kennedy, Alison Louise, Looking for the Possible Dance. London 1993.
Kennedy, Alison Louise, Everything You Need. London 1999.
Smith, Ali, Like. London 1997.
Smith, Ali, The Accidental. London 2005.
177
V. 2 Bibliography
Adamson, Joseph (1997): Melville, Shame, and the Evil Eye. New York.
Adamson, Joseph/Clark, Hilary (eds.) (1998): Scenes of Shame. Psychoanalysis, Shame, and
Writing. Albany, NY.
Alfes, Henrike F. (1995): Literatur und Gefühl. Emotionale Aspekte literarischen Schreibens und
Lesens. Opladen.
Allrath, Gaby/Gymnich, Marion (2002): “Feministische Narratologie,” in: Nünning/Nünning
(eds.) 2002, 35-72.
Allrath, Gaby/Surkamp, Carola (2004): “Erzählerische Vermittlung, unzuverlässiges Erzählen,
Multiperspektivität und Bewusstseinsdarstellung,” in: Nünning/Nünning (eds.) 2004,
143-179.
Anderson, Carol/Christianson, Aileen (eds.) (2000): Scottish Women’s Fiction 1920s to 1960s:
Journeys into Being. East Linton.
Anderson, Linda (2000): “Autobiographical Travesties: The Nostalgic Self in Queer Writing,”
in: Alderson, David /Anderson, Linda (eds.): Territories of Desire in Queer Culture:
Refiguring Contemporary Boundaries. Manchester, 68-81.
Andrews, Bernice (1998): “Shame and Childhood Abuse,” in: Gilbert, Paul/Andrews, Bernice
(eds.): Shame. Interpersonal Behaviour, Psychopathology, and Culture. New York/
Oxford, 176-190.
Andriga, Els/Schreier, Margrit (2004): “How Literature Enters Life: An Introduction,”
in: Poetics Today 25 (2), 161-169.
Arana, R. Victoria (ed.) (2007): “Black” British Aesthetics Today. Newcastle upon Tyne.
Astley, Neil (ed.): New Blood. Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1999.
Bacal, Howard A./Newman, Kenneth M. (1990): Theories of Object Relations: Bridges to Self
Psychology. New York.
Bartky, Sandra Lee (1990): Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression, New York.
Bauer, Joachim (2005): Warum ich fühle, was du fühlst. Intuitive Kommunikation und das
Geheimnis der Spiegelneurone. Hamburg.
Bell, Eleanor (ed.) (2004): Scotland in Theory: Reflections on Culture and Literature.
Amsterdam/New York.
Böhm, Nadine (2009): “‘I am leaving myself to you ... You will understand or you won’t.’ Jackie
Kays Trumpet (1998) als Inszenierung hermeneutischer Ethik,” in: Wagner, Hedwig/
Ernst, Christoph/Sparn, Walter (eds.): Kulturhermeneutik—Interdisziplinäre Beiträge
zum Umgang mit kultureller Differenz. München (forthcoming).
Bouson, Brooks J. (1989): The Empathic Reader. A Study of the Narcissistic Character and the
Drama of the Self. Amherst, MA.
Bouson, Brooks J. (2000): Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni
Morrison. Albany, NY.
Bråten, Stein (ed.) (2007): On Being Moved: From Mirror Neurons to Empathy. Amsterdam.
Broucek, Francis J. (1991): Shame and the Self. New York / London.
Brown, Georgia (2004): Redefining Elizabethan Literature. Cambridge.
Carruthers, Gerard/Goldie, David/Renfrew, Alastair (eds.) (2004): Beyond Scotland: New
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