Conclusion: The Shame is (Not) Over

The Conclusion of Writing Shame reflects back on the key discussions of the book: the origins and manifestations of a contemporary ‘shame culture’; the persistence of shame and the challenges that it poses for writers; the formal and generic disruptions involved in the writing of shame; the uses and limitations of shared feelings of shame as a basis for political action or solidarity; the uses of shame as a tool of analysis, within and beyond queer theory and feminism; the fraught relationship between shame, pleasure and spectacle; and above all, the particular imbrication of shame and femininity, of shame and women’s supposed sexual impropriety – the central argument here, that shame’s role in femininity is constitutive, not merely regulatory. In addition, the Conclusion touches briefly on several recent novels and collections of short stories by women authors, revealing therein a continuing preoccupation with questions of desire, sexuality, sexual violence and embodiment, and suggesting that, while shame may not be the central strand, it remains on the edges of all of these considerations of femininity, female desire and women’s bodies within patriarchal cultures.

The Shame of Being a Man: Humiliation and/as Heroism

Chapter 4 discusses recent fiction and autofiction by canonical male authors, considering the relationship between masculinity and shame, and highlighting the persistent association between shame and femininity in works by male authors. The textual analyses of Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal (2001), Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (2010), and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle II: A Man in Love (2009/2014) suggest that, too often, men’s writing of and on shame seeks to disavow that shame, to project it onto female bodies, and/or to make of its confession a kind of heroism. The Roth and Amis novels are read as displacing male shamefulness (particularly, but not only, sexual shame) onto vulnerable female bodies – bodies that are sometimes also racially othered. The reading of Knausgaard then shows how that text, despite evincing an unusual perspicacity on the subject of masculine shame, ultimately transforms its ‘struggle’ with shame into a literary struggle for ‘authenticity’ and leaves intact the association of shamefulness and the feminine. An analysis of Knausgaard’s critical reception considers also how his positioning as (exceptional, paradigmatic, Proustian) Author counters his narrative of shame and failure with one of literary ‘greatness’, remasculinising him in the process.

Cleaving to the Scene of Shame: Stigmatised Childhoods in The End of Alice and Two Girls, Fat and Thin

Chapter 2 discusses two contemporary American writers, A.M. Homes and Mary Gaitskill – whose literary engagements with shame, in relation to sexuality in particular, have been notably provocative and disturbing. The chapter first discusses childhood and/as the scene of shame and considers the idea of the ‘queer child’; it then analyses the unsettling, contradictory admixture of desire, disgust and shame to be found in Homes’s The End of Alice (1996) and Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), both of which present stories of child abuse, both of which resist any straightforwardly redemptive or consolatory conclusion. In these novels, the childhood scene of shame is something that cannot be definitively vanquished – hence the double meaning of ‘cleave’ (to cling to, to separate from) in this chapter’s title. Chapter 2 also considers the movement of shame through and beyond the texts: the self-reflexive emphasis on deviant or unreliable narration; the displacement of shame upon the reader, whose disconcerting complicity is thereby invited; and the unease evident in the novels’ reception, regarding the de-feminising implications of female authors writing about apparently ‘shameful’ topics.

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.

‘The Dumb Cunt’s Tale’: Desire, Shame and Self-Narration in Contemporary Autofiction

Chapter 3 develops arguments from earlier in Writing Shame around the inextricability of femininity and shame, the non-redemptive literary treatment of shame, the formal disruptions produced in the writing of shame, and the ways in which shame seeps into the contexts and processes of writing, reading and critical reception. It does this via readings of three contemporary, female-authored autofictions with a central focus on (female, heterosexual) desire and with a leaning towards literary experiment: Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) and Katherine Angel’s Unmastered (2012). All three texts are discussed as performing and reflecting on acts of self-exposure and states of vulnerability – while also, sometimes, turning that humiliation outwards. All three are read also as complicating the confessional mode via their generic mixing of fiction, memoir, essay and theory. More broadly, the chapter asks what the relationship might be between self-abasement and self-advertisement, and how these texts might work to reveal the structural – not merely personal – nature of shame, as far as women are concerned.

Forgetting and Remembering Lesbian Pulp: Shame, Recuperation and Queer History

Chapter 1 begins with Michael Warner’s question, ‘What will we do with our shame?’, and proceeds to consider, and to critique, the revisiting of shame in much recent queer theory – a revisiting that generally seeks to mine that affect for its positive political potential. The chapter assesses the uses and limitations of ‘queer shame’, via a consideration, first, of contemporary queer theory, and second, of the recent republication – and implied ‘recuperation’ – of the formerly shameful sub-genre of mid-century lesbian pulp fiction. Through readings of Ann Bannon’s Women in the Shadows (1959/2002) and Della Martin’s Twilight Girl (1961/2006), the chapter focuses particularly on questions concerning the (in)visibility and (un)intelligibility of gender and race, and matters of performance and ‘passing’. It shows how, in both novels, non-whiteness becomes a site of both fascination and shame, functioning indeed as both an intensifier of queer shame and a mirror of/analogy for that shame, in what might be viewed as a troubling case of shame appropriation.