Reading Fe/male Shame: Vocabulary of Guilt in Writings of Annie Ernaux
Keywords:
Shame; Feminism; Gaze; Annie Ernaux; vocabularyAbstract
Erica Johnson and Patricia Moran explain in the introduction to The Female Face of Shame how, "In contrast to guilt, which is evoked by an action or behavior about which one feels badly and for which one might hope to make amends, shame resides so deeply within one's sense of being that it cannot be absolved." The shame assigned to femininity can be located in their bodies, which traverses the individual confines of self and becomes the sprout of familial and cultural contexts.
The male gaze often creates a sense of shame in women, as they internalize the message that their worth is based on their ability to conform to male standards of beauty and desirability. This paper will mainly focus on Annie Ernaux's 'A Girl’s Story' to explore the conditioning of young girls to feel ashamed of their desires.
Annie Ernaux, the first French woman to win a Nobel prize for literature, is often described as the writer of memory, shame and History. Although most of her works carry the theme of shame and class, Ernaux repeatedly points out how she as a young girl would often examine herself through the male gaze and also felt burdened by the “heavy gaze” and “obtrusive stare” of “H”, “pinning her down”, making her feel “guilty of misconduct”. The paper will be analyzing the connection between female shame and male gaze in this novel along with her subsequent emancipation and self-realization later in life.
Ernaux is known for her flat writing style in which she presents the truth as is instead of embellishing it. Considering this writing style, the paper will attempt to examine the lexical shift of the description of the sexual acts and desires from being “rough” and “brutal” to “fading” and “dissolving”. The paper aims to look at 'Shame' from a critical lens and dissect its origins and its consequent and unbalanced shift towards femininity through male mechanisms
References
1. Lewis, Helen Block. The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation. Psychology Press, 1987.
2. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” College English 34, no. 1 (October 1, 1972): 18.https://doi.org/10.2307/375215.
3. Weil, Kari. “French Feminism’s ÉcritureFéminine.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney, 153–71. Cambridge University Press, 2008.https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521807069.008.
4. Cixous, Hélène. 1975. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms, January, 347–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_21.
5. Irigaray, Luce, and Carolyn L. Burke. 1980. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” Signs 6 (1): 69–79. https://doi.org/10.1086/493777.
6. Ernaux, Annie. A Girl’s Story. Seven Stories Press, 2020.
7. Kaufman, Gershen. The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of Shame-based Syndromes. 1989.
8. Tomkins, Silvan S., and Irving E. Alexander. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Duke UP, 1995.
9. McIlvanney, Siobhán. Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins. Liverpool University Press, 2001.
10. Anderson, Linda. “Autobiography and the Feminist Subject.” In The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, edited by Ellen Rooney, 119–35. Cambridge University Press, 2008.https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521807069.006.
11. Lewis, Helen. “Shame and the Narcissistic Personality.” Jan. 1987, psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-98141-003.
12. Millett, Kate. 2016. Sexual Politics. Columbia University Press.
13. Lorde, Audre. 1978. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Crossing Press.
14. Kofman, Sarah. 1985. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings. Ithaca : Cornell University Press.
15. Das, Kamala. “The Kept Woman.” In The Kept Woman and Other Stories. Om Books International, 2010.
16. Johnson, Erica L., and Patricia Moran. The Female Face of Shame. Indiana UP, 2013.
17. Rushdie, Salman. Shame. Random House, 2011.
18. Cook, Blanche Wiesen. 1979. “‘Women Alone Stir My Imagination’: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition.” Signs, July. https://doi.org/10.1086/493659.
19. Bronowski, Jacob. The Identity of Man: By J. Bronowski. 1965.
