Introduction: The Endurance of Shame and its Transformation in Modern Britain

Abstract

This book is the continuation of a thesis that we began to sketch in a previous volume entitled Cultures of Shame: Exploring Crime and Morality in Britain, 1600–1900 published in 2010. This was fuelled by unease with many conventional theoretical approaches to both shame and guilt. Using micro-histories, we tried to to engage with the assumption that guilt is a product of modernity that largely replaces shame, or at least alters it sufficiently to hide its presence. In this book we followed this logic into the twentieth century and have been surprised to discover that shame is both alive and surprisingly well. Far from being a dated and anachronistic emotion, shame has actually been able to flourish with several of the mechanisms of modernity. The modern public sphere provided opportunities for individuals to be shamed in new public arenas far away from the communities of earlier times. Shame became a staple of the mass media as sensationalism and entertainment as individuals could engage with the shame of those they had never met. In the twentieth century shame even found itself making a comeback through its reappearance in revisionist penal ideas. Its power was also evident in the century’s construction of anti-shame, a conscious psychological buffer against shame targeted upon individuals in the public sphere.