A BRIEF HISTORY OF SHAME
“In olden days a glimpse of stocking was simply shocking. Now, goodness knows, anything goes.” Written in the 1930s, the song says loudly and clearly that shame changes over time. What acts as a source or a trigger for shame affect differs from one era to another.
Glance at a pictorial survey of bathing costumes in our culture. Adorning the beach, fashionable men and women ushered in this century covered in fabric from wrist to ankle, with ruffles and other devices concealing the outline of breasts and genitals. In stark contrast to this standard of public modesty, aquatic nudity—emphasized by smidgens of cleverly placed cloth—has become more rule than exception in our current era. Bodily beauty has always been celebrated; it is the rules of display that have changed. A presentation of self so revealing and devoid of subtlety that it once was a source for shame is now a source of pride.
This observation is not so trivial as it might appear at first glance. We know that there are both learned and innate triggers to every affect. Always will shame be triggered by something that interferes with ongoing positive affect; although certain experiences must inevitably cause such an impediment, others become impediments only because we are so taught. At the most superficial level it is apparent that currently there is little risk an adult will be embarrassed by the intentional public display of nakedness. One impediment to positive affect has been canceled.
Wurmser said it best. Only when the viewing other is held under the spell of fascination are we comfortable being seen naked. For a long time, this kind of interpersonal transaction was universally accepted as the most private of matters. In order for public aquatic nudity to become acceptable there had to be a shift in both the observer and the observed. Now all of us are encouraged by social forces not to turn away but to look at and admire public nakedness. Now the adult observer risks no personal shame for being interested in the public display of nudity. Another impediment to ongoing positive affect has been canceled.
Always there is a partnership, an oscillation between the beholder and the beheld. It is not just the wearer of the bathing suit who has changed—there are more layers to this evolutionary process. If the observer is male, he has been forced to change his understanding of the sexual significance of female nudity. Where once such display implied the imminence of sexual involvement, now it means nothing more than an opportunity for mutual positive regard. Lest he be embarrassed for conspicuous misunderstanding, the attentive male has had to learn yet another set of rules for the control of sexual arousal and the visibility of his erections. Men have not gone lightly into that new world. Manly anger, resentment, sexual slurs, and outraged attempts at seduction—all manifestations of the attack other library of scripts in reaction to shame—have greeted those women pioneering this new frontier of display.
Imagine a graph depicting these changes over time in the relation between shame and public nakedness. I wish to focus your attention on three points of the curve: 1900, when bathing costumes were at their most chaste; 1970, an interim period during which the rules had clearly begun to change; and 1990, when bared bodies were normative and commonplace. A child, growing up in each of these eras, would learn quite different standards. Witnessing a modern beach scene, shock, amazement, revulsion, scorn, the urge to censure, and a wish for civil punishment would flood the mind of one raised in 1900. Confusion and anger would bother our second time traveler, while a contemporary observer might have no negative affect in response to this tableau.
All this is simple enough and really quite obvious. What anybody experiences as the emotion of shame is a complex assemblage of source, physiological phase, a brief cognitive phase brought up in reaction to the affect, and a reactive phase based on some script found in the compass of shame. It is to a far deeper implication that I wish to call your attention.
As long as there have been humans I believe there has been no significant alteration in the pattern of physiological reactions that Tomkins calls the innate affect shame–humiliation. Yet if the sources for shame can change, then the cognitive phase (which is entirely dependent on the history of our own personal experience of the affect) can change and has changed throughout history, and the individual scripts within the reaction patterns I group as the compass of shame must also have undergone constant alteration. Along with their triggers, the styles of withdrawal, deference, avoidance, and contemptuous attack have varied over time. Therefore, the experience of shame—what people actually feel and think and do when embarrassed—has been in a constant state of flux.
Throughout this book I have made the observation that in order for two people to enter into the contract we call psychotherapy they must learn each other’s language for affective experience. Although all of us were born with pretty much the same hardware and firmware, we develop such different forms of software that the resultant complex ideoaffective assemblages veer far away from innate affect. Despite the immense range of our similarities, in the matter of these scripts we are all quite different. The initial phases of any therapeutic enterprise require us to construct a lexicon for affect so we understand each other’s language.
Now I ask you to recognize that the very word shame has represented quite different inner experiences over time. If it is difficult to know exactly what one of our contemporaries means when using emotion labels, it is even more difficult to know what those labels meant in an era characterized by a vastly different realm of daily experience and accumulated history. Affect scripts themselves have history. Just as it is impossible to know the inner world of another person without learning something about the unique experiences that brought that individual to the shared present, it is impossible to understand a script without some regard for its path through time.
The archaeologist of affect faces challenges not unlike any those of other diggers. Lost to us is the technique of interviewing, for our subjects are long dead and buried. Yet entombed with them are scraps of evidence that can be sifted and evaluated for our purposes. From the layout of their homes we can see how people slept; from their recovered costumes we can see how they dressed; and from their writings we can learn how they expressed themselves. From its graphic arts we can see the faces and bodies of a culture and learn something about its habits. All of these shards can be dusted off and assembled to tell us something about the history of shame.
Rather than a sparse harvest, actually we are surfeited with information so fascinating that it could fill several monographs this size. Assisting our search, for instance, is a marvelous work of European learning, a lavishly illustrated four-volume text called A History of Private Life, written originally in French and published in English translation by the Belknap Press of Harvard University. Certainly the group of scholars who compiled data from so many sources were not primarily interested in shame. Yet, as Wurmser (1981, 1987) and Schneider (1977, 1987) have demonstrated so well, it is shame that guards the boundary between public and private. The French study of privacy offers an opportunity to make a number of observations about shame and about pride from the days of Rome and Byzantium, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and from the French Revolution to the beginning of the First World War.
Much as I would like to describe in detail everything I have learned about the history of shame from this and other sources, that is a task better left to the professional historian. I suspect that an adequate rendering of the subject would require a life’s work or several doctoral dissertations. Perhaps this current book will intrigue some young mind enough to power such a project. Here, in these closing chapters of my own book on the nature of shame and pride, I can do no more than sketch what I have gleaned.
Of all the themes that can be traced over a 2500-year span, easiest to study is the cultural attitude toward the naked human body. Greek and Roman statuary, as well as the decorations painted on pottery, often depict men and women unclothed. I know of no large painted vessel (no krater or amphora) from which we can detect evidence that in these cultures embarrassment accompanied the exposure of breasts or the male genital.* There are woodcuts from the Middle Ages showing happy families running naked together through the streets on their way to the communal bath house; the eldest male does, however, wear a loincloth. And, when fully dressed, the 16th-century male would cover his genitals with a codpiece that resembled an erect penis.
With the Renaissance arrives a new sense of modesty, for now the male genital is more likely to be covered and hidden, the female draped to distract attention from her genital region. Medieval ivory carvings show the Christ child fully naked, genitals exposed; from the 17th century on he wears a loincloth. During the 18th century we see an increasing tendency to cover the female breast; over the next hundred or so years any tendency toward nakedness was considered increasingly risqué. Indeed, as civilization moved away from an open and unabashed appreciation of the human body as a source of visual beauty, nakedness came more and more to represent sexuality.
What about sexual intercourse itself? In pagan days people huddled together in close proximity; couples enjoyed intercourse in full view of those who shared their living space. The excavations at Pompeii brought a brothel to light—there would have been no need for it to have been enclosed within walls unless some forms of sex then required privacy. More privacy seems to have been required during Roman days, less during the Middle Ages (when it was not uncommon for couples to couple publicly). Drawings and woodcuts of the latter period show people equally unconcerned about the public nature of human and animal sexual embrace. With the Renaissance came the requirement for more privacy, and an ever-increasing linkage between sex and shame.
Other affects have changed in significance over time. The relation between shame, anger, and dissmell that we identified as part of the attack other script provides another example. In classic Greece or Rome, an insult based on dissmell (designed to produce interpersonal distance and shame) might be tolerated and responded to in kind, rather than taken as a stimulus to anger and fighting. Arguments that raged in the Roman Senate were rarely taken into the streets as deadly combat. A millennium or so later, merely to bump into someone in the medieval town square might occasion a fight to the death. The civil or cultural attitude toward dueling as redress for humiliation has also undergone constant revision over the centuries.
In Table 6 I have noted how each of the eight categories associated with the cognitive phase of shame seems to have been experienced in four eras: classic, medieval, Renaissance, and modern. By no means an authoritative historical survey, it is presented only as an early approximation of what I hope others will flesh out in the future. Casual inspection of this table reveals marked differences in the pattern, the mosaic formed by the elements in each column. I believe that these cultural differences are responsible for the varying expressions of shame known to have occurred during each era. Nevertheless, it is to the more recent evolution of shame that I will later call the most attention.
THE RECENT HISTORY OF SHAME
The Revolution of 1530
All of us who study shame owe much to the work of the Swiss sociologist Norbert Elias, whose masterpiece The History of Manners was completed in 1939 but unavailable in English translation until 1978. As you might expect, his influence has been greatest on European thinkers, whose access to it was not limited by the fact that Elias wrote in German. For an English-speaking audience it is even now new and startling.
Elias was concerned with the evolution of social control, of the ways human behavior is controlled in and by groups, the refinement of control by governments, and the complex system he calls “the civilizing process.” Starting with the patterns of life known to have existed during the Middle Ages, he demonstrates a steady increase in the societal requirement for affect modulation and a lowering of the threshold for shame and delicacy (115). As more and more pieces of previously normal behavior were declared and taught to be triggers for shame, and/or dissmell, and/or disgust, Western civilization moved inexorably to its present form. It was to courtly society that Europeans looked for social leadership; our word “courtesy” reflects this historical train of thought. Thus government, which in feudal days had been based on power and strength amplified by the affect fear, shifted to a system of respect and awe amplified by shame.
Much can be learned, said Elias, by studying books on manners. Ignored by most scholars, they form for him a valuable resource from which to observe this instruction toward delicacy. You will recall my observation that humor travels poorly in both time and space—sometimes we have no idea why people of a particular culture laughed. A corollary of this may be seen in our response to ancient books on manners, for we are so many centuries away from the shifts in morality produced by them that often we are repulsed by the instructions themselves.
From 13th century sources Elias quotes the following injunctions: “When your companions anger you, my son, see that you are not so hot-tempered that you regret it afterwards.” “A man of refinement should not slurp with his spoon in company; this is the way people in court behave who often indulge in unrefined conduct.” “Some people bite a slice and then dunk it in the (communal) dish in a coarse way; refined people reject such bad manners.” “A number of people gnaw a bone and then put it back in the dish—this is a serious offense.” “A man who clears his throat when he eats and one who blows his nose in the tablecloth are both ill-bred, I assure you.” “If a man wipes his nose on his hand at table because he knows no better, then he is a fool, believe me.” People used their hands to take food from the common dish, thus, “It is not decent to poke your fingers into your ears or eyes, as some people do, or to pick your nose while eating. These three habits are bad. (63–64).”
Some years ago a colleague told me that the intellectual discoveries of classical civilization are routinely made by contemporary three-year-olds, that the discoveries we associate with medieval thinking are the spontaneous inventions of the modern seven-year-old, and that the average adolescent of today brings up in class ideas first expressed during the Renaissance. Clearly written for an adult population desirous of bettering its social standing, these 13th-century directives are today nothing more than what any mother now teaches her toddler. This, too, is evidence of a “civilizing process.”
Yet all of these instructions are but a prologue to the real shift. The concept of civility, of modern polite behavior, can be traced with extraordinary precision to a short treatise published in the second quarter of the 16th century.
Written by Erasmus of Rotterdam, first released in 1530 under the title De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (On Civility in Children), it achieved enormous popularity. In the first six years after its publication there were more than 30 reprints. Elias tells us that more than 130 editions may be counted, 13 as late as the 18th century. Two years after its initial publication the first English translation appeared, followed immediately by German, Czech, and French versions. A 1558 Italian adaptation, the Galatea of Giovanni della Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, is even today taught in some American parochial schools. The typeface in which the French adaptation was first issued came to be known as civilité, and all French versions of Erasmus were printed in civilité type until the end of the 18th century. To an extent perhaps unimaginable in our era, this little book literally controlled public behavior for nearly 200 years. And all this for a monograph its author considered the most minor of his works.
Erasmus had grasped the wind of change like a hawk catching a thermal. De Civilitate answered a need it helped create.
Don’t stare, he said. It would be best for you to demonstrate by your look and demeanor that you have “a calm mind and a respectful amiability.” “Not by chance do the ancients say: the seat of the soul is in the eyes.” Elias explains:
Bodily carriage, gestures, dress, facial expressions—this “outward” behavior with which the treatise concerns itself is the expression of the inner, the whole man. Erasmus knows this and on occasion states it explicitly: “Although this outward bodily propriety proceeds from a well-composed mind, nevertheless we sometimes find that, for want of instruction, such grace is lacking in excellent and learned men.” (p. 55–6)
From what behavior did Erasmus make these deductions? Elias summarizes some of these injunctions: There should be no snot on the nostrils, he says somewhat later. “A peasant wipes his nose on his cap and coat, a sausage maker on his arm and elbow. It does not show much propriety to use one’s hand and then wipe it on one’s clothing. It is more decent to take up the snot in a cloth, preferably while turning away. If when blowing the nose with two fingers something falls to the ground, it must be immediately trodden away with the foot. The same applies to spittle” (p. 56). For most of his contemporaries, Erasmus had declared a new threshold for disgust.
If someone offers you liquid from a communal tankard, wipe your mouth before tasting. Food, in this era, is served from communal bowls; plates are rarely found and the fork was unknown. (Look at paintings from this period. Dining tables hold little more than a bowl of food, a saltcellar, a goblet or two, and perhaps a knife. Art copies life.) Make sure, says Erasmus, that your hands are clean when you take meat from the bowl, and place it on a slab of bread. “In good society one does not put both hands into the dish. It is most refined to use only three fingers of the hand. This is one of the distinctions between the upper and lower classes” (p. 57).
Yet Erasmus rejects behavioral controls that are contrary to the realities of biology. Nature requires that the alimentary canal expel its gaseous contents; to withhold a fart, says Erasmus, can lead to illness. Do not be afraid of vomiting if you must; “for it is not vomiting but holding the vomit in your throat that is foul” (58).
A message begins to emerge as one reads Erasmus from our modem perspective. Where once eating was a communal affair, now it moved slowly and steadily to the realm of privacy. Schneider, whose 1976 book Shame, Exposure, and Privacy I have mentioned on several occasions, calls eating one of the central privacies. Today’s diner, whether at restaurant or home, assumes a capsule of perfect privacy into which no one dare intrude without risking censure. (Thus the choreography of waiting table, the elegance of proper food service.) We are bred to eat without bothering others and to allow others the right to dine without interference. All this was unknown before Erasmus.
It is more than eating behavior that is involved here. Erasmus requires precise control of affective expression; indeed, it is this little book that first defines lack of affect modulation as shameworthy. Bump into a medieval citizen in the town square and expect an explosion of affect; “excuse me” became meaningful only after the revolution started by Erasmus.
All communality begins with the free interchange of affect, is mediated by affective resonance, and monitored by the empathic wall. Erasmus pointed out that our true inner affective state can be deduced from our behavior. By codifying, legislating a requirement for the control of affect, by linking dyscontrol to shame, Erasmus creates or at least requires the separateness, the isolation, the insularity, the invisible wall that now exists between one person and another. It seems likely that Greek and Roman society, at its highest, also required affect modulation and also fostered this isolation of one person from another. But somewhere it got lost. As far as Western society is concerned, at least for this current cycle, De Civilitate was the fulcrum around which the change pivoted.
The sharp edges of innate affect, so easily distinguished in infancy but increasingly blurred or rounded during development, are similarly obscured by contamination and admixture with other affects in the course of cultural history. Civility is the glue of society partly because it reduces the clarity, the specificity of display for all affect. Pure, perfect, unadulterated affect is tolerated only in infants. Certainly some version of the empathic wall existed before 1530, some sort of “personal space” associated with the ability to screen out the affect of others. All societies require their members to limit the free expression of affect. But our current view of the relation between affective expression and privacy began with Erasmus. Even the empathic wall changed after 1530.
There is more. Elias points out that Erasmus regarded clothing as “the body of the body. From it we can deduce the attitude of the soul. And then Erasmus gives examples of what manner of dress corresponds to this or that spiritual condition. This is the beginning of the mode of observation that will at a later stage be termed ‘psychological.’ “ (78). “The increased tendency of people to observe themselves and others is one sign of how the whole question of behavior is now taking on a different character: people mold themselves and others more deliberately than in the Middle Ages (79).”
A line of development becomes clear. As courtly behavior drifts into the public at large we see a constant decrease in the threshold for embarrassment. Everywhere this change is called “refinement” or “civilization.” But the affect giving it power and urgency is that of shame informed by dissmell and disgust. Over periods of, say, 50 or 100 years, Elias can show that what was by this process linked to shame next was viewed as merely rational, after which it was considered “hygiene” or sanitary science.
One of the most fascinating examples of this “civilizing process” may be seen in our use of cooked meat. In the Middle Ages the consumption of meat was directly proportional to one’s wealth. The nobility might eat two pounds per person per day because for them the supply of domesticated animals was unlimited; the peasant ate only what could be poached. Elias again:
Another change can be documented more exactly. The manner in which meat is served changes considerably from the Middle Ages to modem times. The curve of this change is very instructive. In the upper class of medieval society, the dead animal or large parts of it are often brought whole to the table. Not only whole fish and whole birds (sometimes with their feathers) but also whole rabbits, lambs, and quarters of veal appear on the table, not to mention the larger venison or the pigs and oxen roasted on the spit.
The animal is carved on the table. This is why the books on manners repeat, up to the seventeenth and sometimes even the eighteenth century, how important it is for a well-bred man to be good at carving meat. (118-19)
Yet by the end of the 17th century it no longer is necessary for an upperclass Frenchman to know how to carve; within a hundred years fashion has changed and only selected joints of meat are carved at the table. Soon it is considered distasteful to bring to the table any piece of meat that evokes the image of what has been killed. What once was a source of visual pleasure now has become a source of disgust. By the 19th century English books of manners discourage the use of the knife, asking polite people to peel an orange with a spoon and wherever possible cut food with the fork. Today, stored out of sight in museums, nearly unsalable either at auction or in art galleries, is the entire genre of “after the hunt” paintings with their vivid and realistic depiction of pheasant, rabbit, deer, and other game strung up to demonstrate the prowess of the hunter.
Elias, writing half a century ago, predicted that this curve of change would continue to a point where increasing numbers of people would eschew meat itself. I suspect he would have been amused that our modem medical science keeps finding increasingly convincing “reasons” to avoid meat. It is no longer considered unusual for someone to renounce the eating of flesh in any form and declare as a vegetarian. The rise in popularity of macrobiotic cooking and other regimens considered by some to be “fad diets” is an exact reflection of the “civilizing process.” And this current era has witnessed an enormous increase in the number of people who are diagnosed as having “eating disorders” because they avoid food of one sort or another or because they evince disgust at their need to eat. Vigilante groups now monitor the use of experimental animals in scientific laboratories, and even as I write there is an increasing outcry against the killing of animals for their fur.
All this is part of a developmental line stretching from the Renaissance to modern times. It involves a radical shift in the nature and importance of shame, with disgust and dissmell acting as increasingly significant triggers and validators of shame. Yet there are more data to scan before we can comprehend the recent evolution of shame. The river of change tries many paths before finding its true bed.
In all of Shakespeare the word “shame” appears in 178 passages; there are 33 uses of “ashamed,” 15 of “shamed” 15 of “shameful.” “Shun” appears in 20 speeches. The words “embarrassment,” “mortification,” and “humiliation” are nowhere in the writing of the Bard of Avon.† The relation between competition and shame is well described, for Shakespeare often uses the word “sport” to indicate both rivalry and ridicule. In A Winter’s Tale, Paulina states that to shun another will cause a feeling like death.
I am unable to find any Shakespearean reference to shame that implies the terrible degree of isolation we take for granted today. In nearly every situation where shame appears, he uses it to indicate embarrassment in the presence of another, rather than a cause for withdrawal. On occasion, one character may suggest that another withdraw in order to heal after a moment of embarrassment. Even the sense of shame as an internal withdrawal, a movement inward into the self, is barely intimated. It is as if people of his era were locked together in a communal embrace, shame operating only to make that embrace uncomfortable.
There are hints of the shift yet to come. Look at this passage from Act 3, Scene 2 of Troilus and Cressida:
CRESSIDA: My lord, I do beseech you, pardon me;
‘Twas not my purpose, thus to beg a kiss:
I am ashamed. O heavens! what have I done?
For this time will I take my leave, my lord.
TROILUS: Your leave, sweet Cressid!. . . . What offends you, lady?
CRESSIDA: Sir, mine own company.
TROILUS: You cannot shun
Yourself.
CRESSIDA: Let me go and try:
I have a kind of self resides with you;
But an unkind self, that itself will leave,
To be another’s fool. I would be gone:
Where is my wit? I know not what I speak.
Here is the confusion that accompanies shame, described so well by Darwin. This passage offers one of those rare examples of an adult shame experience that contains only the innate affect described by Tomkins with no other affects blended in. This is shame as a monitor of love, truly painful amplification of an impediment to positive affect, an impediment to good feelings which continue to be triggered. It is clear that Cressida would have far less pain were she less in love with Troilus. Here, too, is the sense of a split self so normal today in shame—the very idea of “splitting” that has confused a generation of psycho-analysts into thinking that it is a defense mechanism seen only in “borderline” patients. All this shame has been triggered by the exposure of love, a source no less important then than now. I have presented this passage to demonstrate that Cressida, in the throes of shame affect, must ask her beloved Troilus for permission to withdraw in order to compose herself. There are no more than one or two other instances in all of Shakespeare where shame is linked to withdrawal and the experience of personal isolation. The revolution started by Erasmus had not yet reached its peak.
The Road Not Taken
There was another Renaissance genius who wrote about shame. The story of Annibale Pocaterra and his brilliant book Due Dialogi della Vergogna (Two Dialogues on Shame) is one of the most peculiar in literary history. Born in 1562, Pocaterra was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara at 23. Tasso and Montecatini describe him as one of the best poets of the late 16th century; Luzzasco Luzzaschi and Alfonso Fontanelli set to music some of his work as madrigals that were considered masterpieces of this genre. At 30 he wrote the first book on shame, the only scholarly work on shame until that of Darwin nearly 300 years later. A few months later he was dead, this treasure ignored and forgotten.
Only 38 copies of his book are known to exist. One came to me because antiquarian bookseller James Hinz, proprietor of F. Thomas Heller Inc., wrote after reading a newspaper account of my attempt to study every aspect of shame. With the help of Werner Gundersheimer, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, I was able to find Piero Alongi, whose lyrical translation has proved so useful to this work. Using the unequaled resources of the Folger Library along with his own encyclopedic knowledge of the period, Dr. Gundersheimer has established the facts of Pocaterra’s life and placed this discourse in proper context. We have arranged for the publication of the resulting annotated translation so that others may enjoy the work of this remarkable man.
Right away, in the dedication to his patron, Pocaterra tells us that “in the end, shame is an honest thing” (2)‡ a reality of everyday existence and quite worthy of study. A lover’s blush introduces the relation between shame and exposure; as a physician, Pocaterra knew that this required some connection between mind and body. Required by convention to use the language of Aristotle, he debates whether shame is a virtue or a passion. We learn that shame makes us timorous, humble, and contrite, but also causes outrage against the self. Pocaterra hints that shame keeps constant company with all the negative affects.
But when men are attacked by shame, observes Pocaterra, they “would like nothing better than to run and hide from themselves and from the eyes of the world, even if they had to burrow underground to do so” (16). Shame is also described as “fear of infamy” (17), which can lead men to attack their enemy with passion—so it is capable of causing both cowardice and bravery:
Let me repeat once again that nature draws a veil of blood over the face of the ashamed. And let me add to this that, to my knowledge, shame is always accompanied by ire, and that this ire increases the intensity of the fire already burning within man. The ashamed becomes angry at himself in the manner that a man can feel anger against his own self, but also becomes enraged against those who are aware of his faults—even though, under other circumstances, he may love and respect them. This happens because the love we feel for ourselves is more powerful than any other kind of love, the spring from which all other loves, like rivers, run. (34)
Pocaterra sees emotion much as will Tomkins some 350 years later: “Insofar as our feelings are naturally planted within our souls, and insofar as they are among the things which are given us by nature, then, by common agreement, we can neither praise nor fault them” (44). Feelings “are like swords; they are only as good or evil as the end to which they are used” (44). There is an innate and a learned component to all emotion, says this man of the Renaissance. “There must be two shames. One natural and free from awareness; and the other acquired, moved by reason, and led by understanding” (93).
Shame is a teacher because we can learn to avoid what will produce it; shame can therefore protect us from evil. “The shame of children is like a seed which, having sprouted, becomes a small plant in the years of youth, and, at a mature age, it produces the ripe fruits of virtue” (96). Yet “solitude and darkness make man audacious and daring. . . . It is for this reason some say Love should be represented as blind because it makes lovers brazen” (80-81).
Self-love, says Pocaterra, is essential to life—too much shame can interfere with healthy self-love. But “praise often resembles ridicule” (70), and “one who is praised feels shame because he fears that others might believe that he invites this praise and takes too much pleasure in it . . . and thus accuse him of arrogance” (70). He splits shame yet another way:
I think there are two shames, one of which it seems appropriate to term internal and the other external. I call internal shame that confusion and remorse of conscience which usually attack a soul guilty of error even when hidden from the eyes of the world. This shame can be with us even in the deepest woods . . . Those who run from the presence of other people . . . can say along with the poet, “I feel shame with myself of myself”. . . . And then there are many who, having hidden their defects from the eyes of others, believe themselves to be innocent and alone, not knowing that they have their own selves with themselves.
I say that in addition to internal shame, there is external shame which is that whose signs appear on our face, and which is inseparably united to a flash of fire. (76–77)
No one is immune to stage fright, for “we have seen the heat of shame dry up the most plentiful fountains of eloquence” (157). Pocaterra asks “divine shame” to “illuminate with your lantern the darkness of our errors,” to “purge the fog of human defects,” to “spur and push the mind on the road to glory.” “If shame left me, which good thing could remain with me?” (108) “To one who has fallen, feeling shame is a sign of recognition and of a good desire to regain sanity” (122–23). In 1975 Helen Block Lewis claimed that the blush was a signal informing the shaming other that we recognize the error of our ways and wish to be readmitted to society. Nearly 400 years earlier, Annibale Pocaterra said that “blushing can make anyone worthy of pardon” (123).
I try to imagine the course of Western philosophy and culture had not Pocaterra died so young, had he been given the opportunity to write the many books that would have burst forth from his fountain. What if Due Dialogi della Vergogna had gone through as many editions as the De Civilitate Morum Puerilium of Erasmus or the Galatea of della Casa? What if shame had been understood, accepted, respected, rather than increasingly secret and shameful? What would psychoanalysis and the entire mental health movement be today had Freud grown up with an awareness of shame as sophisticated as that of Pocaterra?
But it didn’t work that way. Some accident of fate threw the switch that sent our train rumbling over quite another track. The editor of A History of Private Life sums it up for us:
Between 1500 and 1800 people developed new attitudes toward their own bodies and toward the bodies of others. Where earlier literature on civility emphasized, say, the proper way for a young man to serve food at table, later treatises stress the impropriety of touching or looking at other diners, thereby creating a protected zone around the body. People stopped embracing with wide-open arms; they no longer kissed the hand or foot of a woman they wished to honor, and men stopped prostrating themselves before their ladies. These histrionic demonstrations gave way to discreet, understated gestures. People no longer attempted to cut a figure, to create an appearance, to assert themselves; they behaved properly in order to discourage attention, to pass almost unnoticed. A new modesty emerged, a new concern with hiding certain parts of the body and certain acts. “Cover this breast, which I do not like to see,” says Tartuffe . . . . Newlyweds were no longer put to bed by a crowd of onlookers who returned to greet them the following morning. (Vol. 3,4–5)
Notice the increasing link between shame and the visible. The affect itself turns our eyes away from whatever source had only a moment ago engaged us for the sake of interest or enjoyment. Pocaterra tried to move us to an understanding of shame that focused on inner experience. The rest of society was moving toward better and better control of what could be seen and evaluated by others.
The Development of the Individual Psyche
Our world, the Western world that was Europe and England and became North America, this culture from which we emerged, grew increasingly private and afraid of shame. Rather than only gossip with friends, people began to keep personal diaries. In the past it was thought unsuitable for a man of quality to be alone, except for prayer; by the end of the 17th century a taste for solitude had developed. Woods and parks took on some aspects of what Rousseau would later salute as “nature.”
The rise in importance of solitude, itself a secondary effect of the growing requirement for affect control, brought with it an increasing interest in the development of a personal life. Now people became so fond of being alone that they wished to share their solitude with a dear friend, a teacher, relative, servant, or neighbor—a second self. Thus the modern concept of friendship evolved, and, with it, slowly, a change in our concept of marriage. Only to the extent that one develops an inner life does one wish to share it with an intimate other.
The increasing interest in intimacy and personal relatedness augured the end of arranged marriages. We can accept an assigned companion when there is no expectation of intimacy. The proverb “A rolling stone gathers no moss” indicates that true intimacy appears only in the context of long and meaningful personal association.
Read any competent historical survey of the social institution we call marriage. Medieval society took it for granted that coupling was based on transient attraction. G. Rattray Taylor informs us that Tenth-century ordinances in England stipulated a seven-year period of trial marriage, and that a one-year trial marriage existed in Scotland until the Protestant Reformation of the mid-16th century. Exactly paralleling the development of the individual psyche was the shift toward our contemporary insistence on mutuality and personal fulfillment within marriage. I teach that dating and courtship are the ways we interview candidates for the job of best friend. This is as much a truism today as it would have been an embarrassingly ludicrous statement only a century ago.
The pattern may be seen throughout Western society. Look at Kipling’s oft-quoted but little-examined 19th century injunction, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . you’ll be a Man, my son.” Even today, the macho character will apologize for any high-level display of very dense affect by saying, “I lost it.” Shame began to loom everywhere as a major force operating to control the display of affect. Couples became increasingly private as individuals, increasingly involved as a marital unit, and increasingly sequestered in their sexual behavior. What we take for granted as the generational boundary between parents and children was magnified as parents moved into the private space of their own bedroom, from which children were increasingly excluded. In one era it was taken for granted that children might witness parental intercourse just as they might view the coupling of barnyard animals. By the beginning of the 20th century Freud would state with accuracy that “exposure to the primal scene” was a major psychic trauma capable of producing neurosis.
Elias observes that by the mid-17th century it was no longer acceptable for parents to send their children into the world uneducated to its social mores. Worldly education, the job of socialization itself, moved from the larger community into the family. He suggests that what we take for granted as the nuclear family seems to have developed as the result of this wish to avoid shame and to protect children from shame, dissmell, and disgust. Mother may always have been the primary teacher—but from the 17th century on there was a massive increase in the curricular responsibilities assigned her.
Evidence for the process abounds. Among its other requirements, each time some new source of shame was legislated by custom, it became the responsibility of the family to protect children from the ever-growing opportunities for public embarrassment. Home became the first place where we learned how to live in the world—what to hide and what to show, how much of self to reveal and in what manner.
Humor
So much did we become a society of shame and of affect control mandated through shame that tension around this locus rose constantly. Any historical study of humor, of what was deemed funny in each era, shows the shifting patterns of subjects that came to be viewed as embarrassing. I am a fan of the humorist James Thurber, and a lifelong admirer of his friend E. B. White, famed writer for The New Yorker and one of the great prose stylists of the century. Yet in their astonishingly successful 1929 book Is Sex Necessary?, I can find no single joke that a modern reader would consider funny. Indeed, I suspect that it is full of comments no longer recognizable as jokes because they represent an attempt to integrate into polite intellectual society the then novel, upsetting, and embarrassing theories of Freud that had moved sexuality to the foreground.
The developmental line is clear: First some piece of human activity is declared shameworthy and a source of dissmell or disgust, the population at large approving only slowly of this new source for discomfort. Next, as the behavior comes to be controlled more and more by shame, it is a fit subject for humor. And when society has accepted completely the new balance of shame, exposure, and privacy, there is neither tension nor humor associated with it.
The mid-19th-century rivals Gladstone and Disraeli, always feuding, always attacking each other’s convictions, met once in the lobby of a London theater. “You will die of a pox, sir, or upon the gallows!” said Gladstone. “That depends,” answered Disraeli, “on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.” A century later, Hollywood screen- and songwriter Sylvia Fine is spied on the street shortly after the surgical procedure that had adjusted the shape of her nose. A rival (attacking her both for being Jewish and for the “narcissism” implied by cosmetic surgery) snaps, “Sylvia, darling, I see you have cut off your nose to spite your race.” “Yes,” came the swift answer. “Now I am a thing of beauty and a goy forever.” The two interactions are much the same in form. Only the sources of shame have changed. Shame, the affect of cutting down, becomes a weapon as it is embedded in a complex of ideas and other affects that change its meaning. Directly proportional to the importance of shame in our culture has always been the sheer volume of comedic produce.
The Technological Revolution
There are animals that crawl on the surface of the earth, some that burrow beneath it, others that fly above, and still others that swim. It has been said that until the human, all life forms evolved in the manner called “adaptive radiation,” plants and animals emerging to occupy every ecological niche. Alone of all creatures, we have adapted to these special environments through our technology. It is our inventions that allow us to run faster on the surface, to tunnel underneath, to fly, to sail.
We claim that it is necessity that powers our search for invention. Yet no need creates urgency unless it triggers an affect; the inventions of man and woman always involve affect. By the time of the Industrial Revolution Western culture was deeply involved in two themes involving affect—the control of affective expression and the growing importance of shame. Many (certainly not all) inventions, despite whatever else powered them, came to be evaluated for their worth in these two realms. It turns out that the industries and inventions which appeared after 1800 changed not only the way we live but the way we experience shame. The revolution we associate with Erasmus of Rotterdam was opposed and perhaps ended by the Industrial Revolution.
Two developmental lines may be discerned. On the one hand, shame continued to increase, conquering more and more territory. During the 19th century, those who identified with the ruling classes became proper, prudish, fastidious, and prissy. Our code name for this process was taken from its presentation in England during the reign of Queen Victoria. There was, nevertheless, a Victorian Europe and a Victorian America, lands where the good queen herself did not rule but where social custom was governed by the relation to shame-as-propriety she came to symbolize.
True, there would always be a counter-revolutionary segment of the population that resisted fashion and refused to acknowledge the latest fad in sources for shame. But even these wicked and daring people were children of their environment, full of shames they took for granted. The other line of development was ushered in by technology, and it ripped an ever-widening hole in the fabric of this shame-controlled society.
Consider, as only one example, the phenomenology of lighting the home. Most of us now use candlesticks as decoration. Candles adorn birthday cakes; their warm glow lends special charm to romantic dinners. But the lamps and candles of the past are to the illumination of this current era as a bicycle is to an interstellar rocket. It has been estimated that the cost of illuminating a room with candles to the level we now require of our electric devices would be a thousandfold greater than what it costs today—hundreds of dollars per hour. Progress has turned night into cheap day.
The fear that makes us illuminate our night-time environment to reduce the dangers that can be hidden by the dark has also taken away the sky. Modern children grow up with no sense of the richness and beauty available on a dark night. Inside or outside our homes, the same electricity that put an end to dark corners and vanquished the shadows also destroyed the little nooks of privacy that had only a century or so ago become so important. Shame and privacy always dance together; when one is changed, so must the other follow in step. Privacy, so recently established as a norm, now required more effort.
But no technological advance affected shame and privacy as did the rapidly developing science of photography. Look what the camera did to the concept of the self and to the language of shame. By the middle of the 19th century there was a rapid progression in technique from primitive daguerreotypes that were locked to copper plates, to negatives made on glass that could be transferred and reproduced as paper prints. Before photography, only the wealthy were able to commission portraits, which allowed them to see themselves and to be seen by others. Now the camera offered everybody the ability to study self and others at will.
This matter of being able to observe the self is much more significant than you might realize. It was not until the latter part of the 19th century that full-length mirrors were available at all, and much, much later that their cost decreased to a range that made them universally accessible. As with every other “advance,” the full-length mirror brought with it a new relation to shame. First a luxury, then a statement of vanity, and finally a clearly defined necessity, the mirror allowed everybody greater power and freedom in the presentation of self. But before the mirror was the photograph:
An aid to memory, photographs changed the nature of nostalgia. For the first time a majority of people were able to look at images of dead ancestors and unknown relatives. It became possible to see the youth of people with whom one rubbed elbows daily. The hallmarks of family memory also changed. Symbolic possession of loved ones channeled the emotions. Visual contact became more important than physical contact. The psychological consequences of absence changed. Photographs of the dead attenuated the anguish of loss and alleviated remorse.
The ability to put photographs on postcards improved the distribution of personal images. The millions of photographic portraits shot and religiously preserved in albums established new norms that completely transformed the private scene. They taught people to look at the body, and in particular the hands, in a new way.
Finally, the new technology multiplied images of nudity, now easier to behold than ever before. As early as 1850 a law was passed prohibiting the sale of obscene photos on public streets. After 1880 amateur photographers were able to cut out the professional middleman. Thereafter poses became less elaborate, and all of private life was laid open to the lens, whose appetite for intimate scenes was unlimited. (A History of Private Life, vol. 4, 465)
Where shame had created a new culture of privacy, the camera ripped it asunder. Indeed, as privacy grew more and more important, and as more and more of our society came to be controlled by forces operating behind closed doors, an intense pressure developed around the seen and the unseen.
Ignore, for a moment, the rapid advances in the production and distribution of the printed word that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. Books, newspapers, pamphlets, posters—all of these fostered the immediate distribution of ideas. Ignore, too, the world of radio, which disseminated the written word in its own way and shifted words back to spoken language. (Did you know that until the time of Erasmus people read aloud? Only as shame came to control all expression did it become important to make the written word a synonym for the silent thought.) For most people, words are only a poor substitute for seeing. One picture is worth a thousand words when they are your words and my picture. What I see, I can evaluate myself. Words can be used to hide the truth. We trust what we can see far more than what we read. What you see is what you get.
I believe that photography has done more to change shame than any other force in the history of our society. Again, I have introduced an area of scholarship far too vast for this space. Perhaps it is worthy of study by some future colleague. But at least let me sketch some of the issues involved.
The economic success of photochemistry revitalized the world of optics, as new lenses were developed that allowed us to see and photograph at ever-greater distances. The merger of telescope and camera revolutionized astronomy but also caused a drastic reduction of our terrestrial privacy. Distance alone no longer guaranteed concealment. Even darkness gave way to the flashbulb and then to films and lenses capable of revealing fine detail where the human eye is blind. The speed with which the modem shutter can open and close allows the camera to capture moments so brief that for all practical purposes they did not exist before we could study them at leisure. And a wide range of photomicroscopes allows us to peer into the heart of things so small that they had once “escaped detection.”
Also did we learn to take photographs in rapid sequence, and then to present them in ways that mimicked life itself. The motion picture offered a new level of intrusion because it allowed us to show real life in greater detail than ever before. As film entertainment, it opens door after door as we become an audience seeking ever more “fascinating” secrets.
All movies have two plots—the human interactions we call the “story” and the private world within which that story unfolds. Films take us with equal ease into boardroom, boudoir, or the engine room of a submarine. They show us the terror of trenches and the wastage of war, allow us to spy on the working conferences of master criminals, the inner world of a prison, the bloody tension of an operating room, the very bed where sexual arousal is turned into sexual activity. Films take us where we do not belong and show us what we want to see simply because someone has closed us out or said that we do not belong there. They search for tension that has been created around the issue of what is hidden.
Nevertheless, the motion picture is an extension of the portrait camera. It requires exquisitely careful preparation before the action is to take place, followed by extensive and expensive laboratory work to produce the completed images. None of this is true for television, the next phototechnical development. It has become possible for us to look at nearly anything with a minimum of difficulty—shamelessly.
The movie theater involved the trade of place and privacy for magnification. As long as you were willing to travel to the theater and join a crowd of other observers, you would be able to peep at life enlarged on a 40-foot screen. Every gesture, every nuance of facial expression, was magnified as large as a hillside. Television, however, traded size for access and privacy. With the advent of cable systems and video recording/playback equipment, the small screen can show the same picture over and over until every aspect of it has been engrained on our memory. Where the still photograph allowed children to study some aspects of individuals, television permits them to observe in safety the small details of life previously available only through personal trial and error. No generation in history has ever known as much about the larger world into which it will emerge as that of today’s children.
This technological trail has led to a permanent change in the nature of the shame experience. The photographic techniques pioneered in the 19th century allowed us to study any aspect of ourselves or others capable of being impressed on film in a fraction of a second. We were enabled to look in privacy at the face, the hands, the naked body of anybody who could be photographed. Yet the still camera did not capture the feeling of life as it is lived, life in motion, life with all the movements and sounds that convey so much data about the inner world of another person.
The Australian sociologists Fred and Merrelyn Emery have pointed out that with television any of us can look squarely into the face of another person without flinching. It was the delicacy of affective expression and the nuance of personal revelation hovering around the locus of the face that led Tomkins to comment that shared interocular contact is the most intimate of human activities. Now we can look at the face of another who is there but who is not there to respond to our gaze; this is unilateral “shared” interocular contact! Information previously available only from intimacy is now accessible without the risk of shame.
Honing its skills at home, a generation has grown into adulthood with no fear of visual confrontation, with no sense of shame about staring. Our modern population expects to look at everything, complains when anything is hidden from our view, rewards handsomely its most intrusive and shaming investigative reporters. Much that was once taught by shame is now ignored.
And as we grew more accustomed to seeing people in the movies, on television, and in magazines, we tended to imitate those who were now held up for us as exemplars. Anyone can strive for the muscular body of the trained athlete or the lithe animality of the professional model. Every force in our competitive society urges us to work toward the attainment of goals previously seen as shameworthy. Magazines, books, instructional videotapes, therapists, tutors, all offer courses of study allowing us to be beautiful, seductive, overtly and publicly sexual—all now as matters of pride rather than shame.
“Are you embarrassed to be seen naked on the screen?” I asked an intelligent, gifted actress whose roles usually involve some sort of sexual activity. Laughing softly, sardonically, she replied, “No. You worry more when the producers stop asking.” The simulation of intimacy is this woman’s work, and her personal relation to shame differs from that which we might have found in any other era. Her job is to pretend that neither we nor the camera that has allowed us to spy on her are triggers to shame.
My survey of the relation between shame and technology has concentrated on the revolution in pictorial imagery. Available for study and comment, but ignored for reasons of space, are other changes. Take, for instance, the matter of personal strength and fighting ability. The handgun changed the nature of self-defense by permitting a short, weak, ungainly man to kill someone who might otherwise have demolished him in a fight. Less shame was therefore associated with physical weakness because power might devolve from another source. Here it is the instrumentation for the attack other script that has changed, promoting a shift to scripts within the macho system.
The instrumentation of medicine has changed-the physician invades everything, discusses everything, writes articles about everything. The machines of transport allow us to peer at people anywhere—no matter how remote may be a culture, it is no longer a stranger to us. I could have focused my entire discussion on systems for dissemination of the printed word, which from the moment of its invention allowed the publication of what individuals had seen and thought. The list is endless and nowhere trivial.
I ask you, then, to accept that the rapid advance of technology has been associated with a major change in the nature and significance of shame and of the affects and ideas within which it is embedded. Is it merely a coincidence that Freud introduced psychoanalysis, the art and science of personal revelation, just at the moment in Western history characterized by the greatest tension between the hidden and the shown? Shame itself is an auxiliary to the positive affects that power all sociality. In Cressida’s world, it is a loving affect; as it is embedded today, shame is involved with anger and danger. It is time to turn our attention to the effect of this change on society and on the individuals within it. What happened to Western culture when shame was rendered ineffective as a modulator of affect
*Otto Kiefer’s book Sexual Life in Ancient Rome (1934) provides an excellent source of such information, despite whatever bias was natural to his own era.
†This information is provided by the search modality of the CD ROM version of the Complete Works of Shakespeare (1989). Other Shakespeare sources give slightly different numbers.
‡All quotations are from the Alongi translation manuscript, which is as yet unpublished. I have given page numbers that refer to this typescript and which will be of only relative use to future readers of the final publication.
