Abstract
Episodes of shame are central events in Mary McCarthy’s two autobiographical works, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) and How I Grew (1987). McCarthy’s narratives deepen our understanding of shame, a painful moral emotion and sanction of conscience that has often puzzled theoretical reflection. The value of her autobiographies for understanding shame lies in three areas. McCarthy’s first-person narrative examines sources of shame with much greater specificity and detail than theoretical accounts, with attention to recurring patterns and her long-term development. Second, in her assessment of shame McCarthy distinguishes between genuine moral shame and false shame by clarifying the proper grounds for self-esteem and self-respect. And third, her autobiographies provide insights into the healing process by which shame may be surmounted and self-esteem recovered. In these three ways McCarthy’s explorations of shame illuminate the workings of conscience in autobiography.
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Notes
See Gerhart Piers and Milton Singer, Cuilt and Shame (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1953) p. 11: ‘Whereas guilt is generated whenever a boundary … is touched or transgressed, shame occurs when a goal … is not being reached. It thus indicates a real “shortcoming.” Guilt anxiety accompanies transgression; shame, failure.’
Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1958) pp. 27–28.
McCarthy’s forward to the first edition of The Company She Keeps (1942) quoted in Doris Grumbach, The Company She Kept (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1967) p. 92.
Erik Erikson, ‘Autonomy v. Shame and Doubt’ (from Childhood and Society) in Herbert Morris, ed., Guilt and Shame (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1971) p. 156.
Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason, Facing Shame: Families in Recovery (New York: Norton, 1986) p. 39.
Paul John Eakin, in Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), has also interpreted McCarthy’s grandmother as an alter-ego. However, Eakin focuses on the common bereavement at Tess’ death: The grandmother would function as a surrogate for Mary herself. She would be a Mary who consciously experienced the loss of Tess, a Mary who loved the mother and who was genuinely bereaved by her death, as opposed to the six-year-old girl for whom the event of loss was wrapped in a blackout of sickness and repression …. To this extent the biographical facts about the grandmother would operate as an autobiographical fiction designed to recover the missing event of McCarthy’s own life story’ (pp. 53–4). Augusta plays a crucial role both in this regard and also, in my interpretation, as a vehicle for McCarthy to explore the dynamics of shame.
For a good historical overview of how philosophers have interpreted shame, see Nathan Rotenstreich, ‘On Shame’, Review of Metaphysics 19 (1965) 55–86.
Donald Capps, ‘The Parabolic Event in Religious Autobiography’, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 4 (n.s.) (1983) 34.
Augustine, Confessions, translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961) p. 207 (Book X, ch. 2).
See William Dusinberre, Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980).
McCarthy’s letter to William Jovanovich, August 16, 1979, quoted in Carol Gelderman, Mary McCarthy: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) p. 347.
John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) p. 444. See also p. 484: ‘In general, guilt, resentment and indignation involve the concept of right, whereas shame, contempt, and derision appeal to the concept of goodness.’
See J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of a Mediterranean Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966).
See also Peter Berger, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor’, in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, Christina Hoff Sommers, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) pp. 415–26.
Gabrielle Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) p. 131.
See Gershen Kaufman, Shame: The Power of Caring (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, Inc., 1980) chapter 3: ‘Defending Strategies Against Shame.’
For an analysis of Cordelia’s shame see Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’ in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Cavell also interprets Gloucester’s shamelessness as an attempt to deny his shame about his bastard son.
Arnold Isenberg, ‘Natural Pride and Natural Shame’, in Aesthetics and the Theory of Criticism: Selected Essays of Arnold Isenberg (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1973) p. 230.
Joan Didion, ‘On Self-respect’, in Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, ed. Christina Hoff Sommers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) pp. 411–12.
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© 1992 John D. Barbour
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Barbour, J.D. (1992). Shame in the Autobiographies of Mary McCarthy. In: The Conscience of the Autobiographer. Studies in Literature and Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371088_7
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