Introduction: Beginning with Stigma

The Introduction begins by mapping shame’s definitional connections with selfhood – suggesting that, within contemporary Western culture, we organise our (increasingly fractured) sense of self around and through shame, and that the popular cultural realm is marked both by displays of apparent shamelessness and by public acts of shaming, on and offline. After detailing various philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of shame, the Introduction sets out the historical associations between shame, femininity, and women’s perceived sexual impropriety. This apparent imbrication of shame and femininity is employed as the starting point of a stronger argument concerning the constitutive role of shame in the social production of femininity – an argument that will run throughout Writing Shame. The Introduction then documents the existing scholarship on shame’s treatment in literature, noting the tendencies to treat shame as a theme, and to figure the writing of shame as a redemptive or therapeutic act. By contrast, the objectives of Writing Shame are, first, to move beyond thematic analysis to a consideration of questions of form, reception and shame’s unpredictable transmissibility; and second, to investigate literary explorations of shame that resist that redemptive impulse. Finally, the Introduction outlines more precisely the contents of the subsequent chapters.