II. 1. 1 From Assimilation Shame to Shamelessness
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-kennedy-542672.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)
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 third-person 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 real-life 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.)
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.