Abstract
This book explores Chaucer’s representation of the primary emotions of penitence, shame and guilt, in order to contextualize his engagement with late medieval penitential theology in the light of modern theories of shame and affect. By focusing on the emotions and psychology of penitence, I show that the central questions and problems underlying medieval debates about contrition and confession, from Augustine1 to Wyclif, shape even Chaucer’s secular texts, such as the House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and his tales of pagan antiquity and romance. In all of these texts, and in The Canterbury Tales as a whole, Chaucer dramatizes an inverse relation between the shame a person feels, or is subject to, and the possibility of representing his or her moral culpability, either in narrative or in confessional terms: shame pervades Chaucer’s texts but guilt is largely invisible, inaccessible, or resistant to full disclosure. In tracing Chaucer’s treatment of shame and guilt, therefore, this book shows how the ethics of affect lie at the heart of Chaucer’s poetics, alongside a profound skepticism about the possibility of making a full and honest confession.
The malice of the act was base and I loved it—that is to say I loved my own undoing, I loved the evil in me—not the thing for which I did the evil, simply the evil: my soul was depraved and hurled itself down from security in You into utter destruction, seeking no profit from wickedness but only to be wicked.
—St. Augustine, Confessions
Shame is the feeling of an original fall not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have “fallen” into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of others in order to be what I am.
—Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness
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Notes
Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 3.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 374.
Mary Braswell, The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages (London: Associated University Press, 1983), p. 13.
See also Jerry Root, Space to Speke: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature, American University Series II: Romance Languages and Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (New York: Vintage-Random House, 1980), 1:61–62. Root (Space to Speke) uses a Foucauldian model of analysis in his study of confession as language of self-construction; but cf. Karma Lochrie’s critique of Foucault’s treatment of confession and the medieval period in general in Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 14–24; see also Carolyn Dinshaw’s critique of Foucault’s “nostalgia” for the medieval in Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities Pre and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 191–206.
Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 16–22.
“Sixteen Points,” in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, pp. 27, 21. On the difference and relationship between Wycliffism and Lollardy, see Andrew Cole, Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
See also Alcuin Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 237.
On the distinction between peccata levia and crimina in Augustine, see Peter Brown, “The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,” in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 41–43 [41–59].
See Rosemarie Potz McGerr’s insightful comparison of Augustine’s and Chaucer’s “Retractions” in “Retraction and Memory: Retrospective Structure in the Canterbury Tales, ” Comparative Literature 37.2 (1985): 97–113. On Augustine and Chaucer generally, see also Sherron E. Knopp, “Augustinian Poetic Theory and the Chaucerian Imagination,” in The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, ed. James M. Dean and Christian Zacher (Newark, OH: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 91–107.
On the idea of contraries in Chaucer generally, see Chauncey Wood, “Speech, the Principle of Contraries, and Chaucer’s Tales of the Manciple and the Parson,” Mediaevalia 6 (1980): 209–22,
and Helen Cooper, “The Frame,” in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, 2 vols., ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel (Rochester, NY: Brewer, 2002), 1:1–22.
On the the binary mastery/submission in Chaucer, see Jill Mann’s discussion of “the surrender of maistrie” in Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 70–99.
On the motif of word versus deed in Chaucer, see Paul Beekman Taylor, “Peynted Confessiouns: Bocaccio and Chaucer,” Comparative Literature 34.2 (1982): 116–29.
On the opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian principles at the end of The Canterbury Tales, see Ann W. Astell, “Nietzsche, Chaucer, and the Sacrifice of Art,” The Chaucer Review 39.3 (2005): 323–40.
Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 8–9.
On the role of reading in the text, see Laurel Amtower, “Authorizing the Reader in Chaucer’s House of Fame,” Philological Quarterly 79.3 (2000): 273–91.
I borrow this phrase from the introduction by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson to their coedited volume on the early modern “emotional universe,” Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 1. On the idea that emotions are language- and culture-specific, see also Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions Across Language and Cultures: Diversity and Universals, Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction Series (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univerisity Press, 1999).
Gabrielle Taylor, Shame, Pride, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. (Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. 1966; New York: Washington Square-Pocket Books, 1992), p. 384.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 91.
Francis Broucek, “Shame and its Relationship to Early Narcissistic Developments,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 63 (1982): 369 [369–78].
David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks, Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 91.
Freud’s neglect of shame is well documented by Francis Broucek, Shame and the Self (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 11–24 and 108–15.
Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–1974), 7:69–143.
Francis Broucek, “Shame and its Relationship to Early Narcissistic Developments,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 63 (1982): 369 [369–78].
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 500 [496–522]. In Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1953), Gerhard Piers and Milton B. Singer argue that shame is a more productive and healthier emotion for self-development than guilt (p. 32). In On Shame and the Search for Identity (London: Routledge, 1958), Helen Merrell Lynd theorizes shame and its connection to the self in terms of the experience of exposure “of peculiarly sensitive, intimate, vulnerable aspects of the self,” while she connects guilt, conceptually and etymologically, to the idea of debt incurred by voluntary action (p. 27). For similar theoretical discussions of shame in psychology, see also Helen Block Lewis, Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (New York: International University Press, 1971); Broucek, Shame and the Self;
Gershen Kaufman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-Based Syndromes (London: Routledge, 1993);
Benjamin Kilbourne, Disappearing Persons: Shame and Appearance, SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002);
Donald Nathanson, The Many Faces of Shame (New York: Guilford Press, 1987);
Andrew Morrison, The Culture of Shame (London and Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1986); and Shame: The Underside of Nacissism (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic, 1989).
Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. 20/21 Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 128. But cf. Patricia Clare Ingham’s criticisms of Ruth Leys’s work on trauma studies in connection with Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde in “Chaucer’s Haunted Aesthetics: Mimesis and Trauma in Troilus and Criseyde ” (College English 72.3 [2010]: 226–47). Ingham does not address the issue of shame, but she challenges Leys’s evaluation of “mimetic” and “anti-mimetic” representations of trauma.
Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition, 4 vols. (New York, 2008), 2:359.
Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369–418, at 373.
June Tangney makes this point explicitly, and argues in favour of guilt’s positive ethical potential on the basis of an impressive amount and range of clinical data. Ref lecting on decades of clinical studies, Tangney observes that “shame-prone individuals appear relatively more likely to blame others (as well as themselves) for negative events, more prone to a seething, bitter, resentful kind of anger and hostility, and less able to empathize with others in general. Guilt, on the other hand, may not be that bad after all. Guilt-prone individuals appear better able to empathize with others and to accept responsibility for negative interpersonal events. They are relatively less prone to anger than their shame-prone peers—but when angry, these individuals appear more likely to express their anger in a fairly direct … manner” (June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing, Shame and Guilt, Emotions and Social Behaviour Series [New York: Guilford, 2004], p. 3).
James Gilligan, “Shame, Guilt and Violence,” Social Research 70 (2003): 1154. Gilligan’s work with prison inmates has led him to produce some powerful arguments on the differences between shame and guilt, and about the connection between shame and violence. In short, Gilligan argues “that the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behaviour is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame and humiliation—a feeling that is painful and can even be intolerable and overwhelming—and replace it with its opposite, the feeling of pride” (1154).
Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 207.
William Ian Miller, Humiliation and Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 84.
Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society, ed. J. G. Peristiany (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 24.
Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Honour and Shame, p. 29. Compare Pitt-Rivers’s observations of Andalusian society with more recent work on inner-city gangs. Sociologist Elijah Anderson discusses the culture of gang violence in Philadelphia: “the street culture has evolved a “code of the street,” which amounts to a set of informal rules … of behavior organized around a desperate search for respect, that governs public social relations, especially violence … At the heart of the code is the issue of respect—loosely defined as being treated “right” or being granted one’s … proper due, or the deference one deserves … [R]espect is viewed as almost an external entity, one that is hard-won but easily lost—and so must constantly be guarded” (Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City [New York: W.W. Norton, 1999], p. 33). Further on, Anderson notes that there “is a general sense that very little respect is to be had, and therefore everyone competes to get what affirmation he can from what is available. The resulting craving for respect gives people thin skins and short fuses” (p.75). The aptness of Pitt-Rivers’s discussion of Mediterranean shame culture for what Anderson describes here is remarkable, and suggests indeed that “what is called shame represents a universal human capacity that everywhere reveals its generic core” (Epstein, qtd. in Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005], p. 30).
R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word (Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, 1983), p. 239.
Mary Douglas, “Foreword,” in The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss. Trans. W.D. Halls (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. vii.
Felicity Riddy, “Engendering Pity in the Franklin’s Tale,” in Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 53–70.
See also Jill Mann’s critical response to Riddy, in Feminizing Chaucer, rev. ed., Chaucer Studies 30 (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 152–73.
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle Sullens. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 14 (Binghamton, NY: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, SUNY, 1983), lns 1–12.
William Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (Berkeley: Athlone, 1975), 20. 284–87.
On the “psychology of despair,” see Lee Patterson, “Chaucerian Confession: Penitential Literature and the Pardoner,” Medievalia et Humanistica 7 (1976): 153–73.
See Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 55.
Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 13.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, gen. ed. Thomas Gilby O. P., 60 vols. (London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 23 [1a2ae 22–48].
I am indebted to Robert Miner’s commentary for my reading of Aquinas here and throughout. See Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009); see especially Miner’s discussion of Aquinas’s distinction between affections and passions (pp. 35–38).
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things. John Trevisa’s Translation of De proprietatibus rerum: A Critical Text, 3 vols., ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 3:96.
Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), p. 7.
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© 2012 Anne McTaggart
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McTaggart, A. (2012). Shame and Guilt, Now and Then. In: Shame and Guilt in Chaucer. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137039521_1
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