Shame leads to knowledge

Shame is disruptive, disorienting, painful. It comes upon us suddenly—most devastatingly from without, most painfully from within. It makes us feel exposed, vulnerable, self-conscious. It makes us feel excluded, disqualified, unworthy. It makes us want to flee, hide, die. Shame spreads rapidly: We feel shame whenever we witness, talk, read, or think about it. Shame inundates, overwhelms, mortifies. It makes us feel isolated, alienated, estranged. Shame patrols the boundaries between self and others: It tells us what is not appropriate, not legal, not right. Shame is paradoxical: It violates yet protects individual integrity. Although shame floods us with feeling, it heightens our mental faculties and can lead to self-knowledge.

Literature Humanities affords numerous examples of how shame relates to our identity. In the Garden of Eden, Eve and Adam eat the fruit, learn they are naked, cover themselves, and hide from God. Their attempts to conceal themselves reveal their transgression, and God exiles them. Shame relates broadly to human identity and guilt more narrowly to human action, yet the myth does not correlate self-knowledge with shame and knowledge of the world’s norms with guilt. Transgression leads to both self-knowledge (their nudity) and knowledge of the external world (their nudity’s impropriety and their action’s wrongfulness). But this knowledge separates. Once aware of themselves and of the world outside themselves, they lose their spontaneous, unmediated relationship to self, world, and God.

Moments of shame and identity appear elsewhere on the Lit Hum syllabus. Embracing the heroic code, Hektor returns to battle because “I would feel deep shame/ before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,/ if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting” (Iliad 6:441-3). When Oedipus discovers that he has unknowingly killed his father and slept with his mother, bringing pollution to the land, he blinds himself: “I do not know with what eyes I could look/ upon my father when I die and go/ under the earth, nor yet my wretched mother/ . . . Would the sight of children, bred as mine gladden me?” (Oedipus ll. 1372-76). A drunken Alcibiades confesses to his companions, “Socrates is the only man in the world who has made me feel shame ... My whole life has become one constant effort to escape from him and keep away, but when I see him, I feel deeply ashamed, because I’m doing nothing about my way of life, though I have agreed with him that I should” (Symposium, 216B-C). Upon rereading Mr. Darcy’s letter, Elizabeth Bennet “grew absolutely ashamed of herself” and admits: “... vanity, not love, has been my folly. —Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself” (Pride and Prejudice, Bk 2, Chpt 13).

Yet shame at one’s identity can lead to violence. Raskolnikov commits murder to prove his identity as a super-man, above good and evil. He wants to find out “whether I was a louse like all the rest, or a man? Would I be able to step over, or not!” (Crime and Punishment, Part 5, Chpt. 4). After murdering the pawnbroker and her meek sister Lizaveta, however, Raskolnikov confronts shame’s paradox: His extreme alienation reminds him of his deep connection to others.

Literature shows us that guilt follows a script: transgression, punishment, repentance, reincorporation into community. But shame has no script. It unleashes emotions so powerful that we want to stop them at any cost. Spiraling out of control, it can mortify us and lead to suicide. By making us feel small or impotent, it can lead to acts of aggression. Yet, as Alcibiades and Elizabeth Bennet realize, it can force us to examine ourselves and our relationships with others, acknowledge our prejudices and ignorance, and perhaps change our habitual ways of looking at and being in the world. By galvanizing our emotions and intellects, shame forces us to examine ourselves, our values, and our actions. Like great books, shame can lead us to know ourselves, to exercise our moral imaginations, to see the world with new eyes. In short, shame offers us possibility along with pain: to change ourselves and perhaps our world.

The author is associate adjunct professor of Slavic languages, associate dean of Alumni Education, and president of the International Dostoevsky Society.