Honor Dishonorable: Shameful Shame

Author(s): JOHN HOLLANDER

Source: Social Research, Vol. 70, No. 4, Shame (winter 2003), pp. 1061-1074
Published by: The New School
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Honor Dishonorable:

Shameful Shame /

JOHN HOLLANDER

lVLuCH modern sensibility feels that it is a shame that shame

exists. This paradox is seemingly dissolved because the first use of
shame, in an easy, common, colloquial phrase, engages a different
sense of the word from the second one. In "it's a shame that" =

"it's too bad - or to be regretted - that," we seem to be using the

word as if all the issues it raises for the papers in the current issue

of this journal arose from some archaic and obsolete meaning of

the word (consider also, for example, how we say "a heavenly day"
to designate one delightfully of this world, and "it was literally

hell" for a condition that was acutely figuratively so). It is of

course the meanings of shame as the subject of the second clause
that concern our speculation. But the notion that it is indeed
somehow deeply shameful that shame seems to be part of the
human condition is not a trivial one. Cicero declares at one point
that he feels ashamed even to mention shame (pudet etiam loqui de
pudicitia [De legibus 1.19.50- cited by Barton, 2001: 203] ). And yet
this is distinct from a more personal sense of being ashamed that
one may feel - despite all one believes to be the case about self
and society, and so forth - that one is nonetheless feeling shame
in a particular situation. The general case - of the shamefulness
of shame - involves a sense of what we might call moral shamefulness. I shall return to this question later.
To begin, I must observe that in these brief remarks on some

aspects of the language with which we designate and invoke

shame, I shall be primarily concerned with a modest agenda: to
explore the possible interactions between two different concepts
of shame that are both deployed in our common English word of
Germanic origin, but which are often distinguished in other lanSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter 2003)

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1062 SOCIAL RESEARCH

guages. In addition, a few important literary fictions pertaining to

the origins of shame will be considered. But while depending

upon some of the fascinatingly detailed work by anthropologists
and sociologists (and particularly a thinker like Erving Goffman,

in his concern for language as well as for institutional taxonomies), I shall invoke patterns, rather than detailed instances,
of linguistic usage. And along the way, I shall glance at some anal-

ogous complexities in our use of a major candidate for shames

somewhat oblique antithesis, honor.
The first entry for "shame" in the current Oxford English Dic-

tionary (OED) [la] covers the two roughly distinguished

branches of signification of the word defining it as The painful
emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridicu-

lous, or indecorous in one's own conduct or circumstances (or in those of

others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one's own), or of being in
a situation which offends one's sense of modesty or decency. The distinc-

tion covered by the "or" - highlighted in OED [3]: a disgrace, loss

of esteem or reputation - is reflected in several familiar languages.

French, for example, distinguishes between pudeur and honte,

roughly paralleling the Latin pudor and infamia previously noted:
one can speak of rougir de pudeur, blushing with shame, but not except with deliberately heightened rhetorical force based on a
patent extension of meaning - of blushing with dishonor.1 (Consider an instance of this last usage occurs, Edmund Burke 's "As
one of the people, I blush for what has followed" [Burke, 1844:
III.332] . This is a figurative blush of moral shame; here, it does

not mean [a] "I'm ashamed to be one of the people" but more
[b] "I'm ashamed for 'the people' by what some of them have
done, which tempts some of the people even to contemplate say-

ing [a], which could be thought of as a shameful thing to say.)2

Here, one meaning of "shame" (pudeur) is metaphoric for

another (honte).

Honte can in addition designate both a sense of shame and a

cause of shame, in much the same way that English shame seems
so full of grammatical as well as semantic possibilities. The Indo-

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1063

European base of Latin pudor has the meaning of striking as if

with a weapon. Latin opposes pudor on the one hand and infamia,
ignominia, dedecus, etc., on the other: the infamia has of course the

sense of ^tin-fame," or negative fame, rather than "non-fame" or

"obscurity." The associated synonym probrium has its distant root

"something carried or brought before one" and dedecus means

specifically "inappropriateness, indecorousness." The German

Scham - cognate with our shame, has the sense of physical and sex-

ual modesty, and is applied likewise also to objects "of shame," or

genitals in particular. The more general Schand has the more

"public" meanings of disgrace, dishonor, discredit, ignominy,
infamy insult, etc. English kept a cognate of this word, shend, in

some of its extended senses up through the nineteenth century.

Italian, keeps a distinction between Vergogna and the French cognate onta (along with the associated infamia, ignominia, etc. indicating public disgrace: and also, as if by your personal shameful
act you have shamed the entire community (and see below).3 The
single word can also be used not as a noun or a verb, but as an
ejaculation or outcry Svergognar in Italian, or the traditional cry

of "Shame!" from the back benches in Parliament) is clearly one

of "what has just been said is dishonorable," in OED sense [16.a]:
In ejaculatory formulae of imprecation or indignant disapprovai We

might considerate it an allegation of infamy.

Pursuing the precise grammar of "shame" raises more issues.

Acts - or even simply the acknowledgment of such acts - can be
considered shameful, by a disapproving community and its codes,
or by the agent him- or herself. We speak of the agent who suffers

the disapproval as feeling "ashamed" (but no longer use the

almost obsolete reciprocal term to say that said agent was
"beshamed"). But the beshamed agents are also spoken of as
being shameful, as are - with even more resulting complication the causes of the shame. Our modern colloquial "to feel ashamed
at (or of . . .) may seem to designate less intense an emotion than
would, say, "to feel shamed (or, as suggested, be-shamed) by. . . ."
Or - "to feel ashamed at myself for, for example, having amused

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1064 SOCIAL RESEARCH

everyone present with a cheap shot (even though I knew there

was nobody there with discernment and moral sense enough to
recognize it for what it was)": is this an internalized moral shame
rather than merely a guiltlike internalization?
The shaming community - we might refer to them as "the
shamers," and the agent committing the shameful act (who is also

the patient suffering the consequent opprobrium), "the

shamed" - would deny that it had any more control of the definition of shame than it had over some sort of natural law, and that

the shamed had brought shame to him/herself. Whether the

shamers feel they have been shamed themselves, or, if not, seek by

defaming the individual to protect themselves from infection of

the whole community, might be an agenda for some comparative
study. With regard to the shame of pudeur, it is almost as if the sexual parts of the body, like the sexual impulses of human life itself,

shamed the rest of the body and the life, as if those "parts of
shame" (as Alexander Pope refers to them)4 by their very nature
brought shame or dishonor upon the community of the rest of
the body.

That the Germanic word shame probably derives ultimately

from a variant of the Indo-European base meaning "to cover"
(*kem) is not too surprising. It is out of a shameful sort of shame-

fulness that Germanic languages reached out desperately to cover

the nakedness of their bodily terminology with the cloak of Latin-

ity, even to the extent of calling sexual organs pudenda, paralleled

by the use of shame as a noun to designate sexual parts. The Latin

pudenda, "that of which one ought to be or to feel ashamed or,

indeed, ashamed to mention," was primarily medical usage, and
almost always referred to the female genitals. (Pudenda is the
plural form of the neuter pudendum, but with broader use might
it have seemed to be a feminine noun in itself?) "Her/his shame"

= genitals. In the case of Pope's "parts of shame" (above), note

this does not mean either arms or ears of an allegorical figure, or

"parts" of an analyzed concept; for example, the parts of shame

are a subject, a community and its implicit or explicit mandates

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1065

and a particular act by the subject. It means "shameful parts" =

genitals," and hereby performs a kind of reverse allegorization:

instead of concretizing a moral or psychological concept (for

example, by personification), it hid the concrete under the name
of an abstraction.

A brilliant case of this is in the seventeenth-century Andrew

Marvell's lines from "To His Coy Mistress" about what will happen

to them and their sexual natures in the grave: "And your quaint
honour turn to dust, / And into ashes, all my lust" (Marvell, 1984:
24) . But it is not moral abstractions that fall to dust and ashes, but

human bodies, and in this case, sexual parts of bodies, so that

honour (with a pun on "quaint" = cunt) and "lust" (= cock) double as literal abstractions and figurative materialities. Or, again,
consider the frequent nineteenth-century English expression
"cover her shame." Thus the type of figure in classical and Hellenistic sculpture of Venus with one hand covering her crotch and
the other across her breasts is known as the "Venus Pudica." She

would, particularly in the later eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, have been described as "covering her shame." But note

how the phrase is ambiguous: her modesty figuratively covers her

shame and literally makes her hand literally cover her pudenda,
so that the abstract and more narrowed, concrete senses of shame
are simultaneously in operation.5

The primal scene of shame for Western mythology is the

moment in Paradise during which the biblical Adam and Eve feel
shame for the first time. In the Greco-Latin myth of the Golden

Age (adapted from Persian mythology), honor or chastity were

unknown because there was no shame, and no strife of man with
nature, and that which was pleasurable was thereby good.6 In the
Bible, prior to the Fall, Eve and Adam were, in the English of the
King James Version (Genesis 2.25) "both naked, the man and his
wife, and were not ashamed." The Latin vulgate translates this as
"et non erubescebanf = and neither blushed: (rubor = bashfulness,
modesty, as well as shame, disgrace) .

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1066 SOCIAL RESEARCH

The original Hebrew says of them v'foyitbshashu, where the root

is bosh = to be ashamed; but the verb as used in the form called the

Hitpoel means "to be ashamed before one another." Although

the two of them were not yet a community - still "of one flesh" -

their private sexual shame partook of the other sort of communal

shame that we might call infamy.7 Adam and Eve hasten to make

clothing to cover their nakedness (their prior, innocent nudity

had become nakedness with their fallen condition.) It may be
noted that their shame was emphatically not a sense that their act
of disobedience that initiated the fall had been - as we might colloquially say - a shameful one; it is rather with some sense of dramatic irony that Biblical English might say that their act "brought

shame upon them," or Psalm 25.36, clothed with shame (also

quoted in Job) yilVshu-bsheth v'chil'mah ch'limah, in the other
sense that it caused them to feel shame, totally unwarranted in Par-

adise, for the first time. The subsequently ubiquitous metaphor of

a person being clothed with shame, either by his/her own actions

or those of a shaming other has its positive analogue in an innocent one being clothed in honor- John Milton, in his remarkable
extended gloss or midrash on Genesis in Paradise Lost, speaks of
the Unfllen pair of Adam and Eve as being "Godlike erect, with
native Honor clad / In naked majesty. . .(Paradise Lost TV 289-90)
(Milton, 1968: 630) and thereby feeling no shame, there being no
internal apparatus or external social structure to produce such a
feeling. They were not observed, not seen, by any others, Adam
and Eve together, in the prelapsarian condition, constituting a
kind of single self. And there were no others to blame them, to
put shame upon them by discoursing on their condition. And, of
course, there was no infamy, no public disgrace because there was
no public (note here that infamy means bad or negative fame in
Latin, and fama means talk, and hence "reputation." Pudor, bodily
shame, is itself not "modesty" but perhaps the cause of it - shame
is a blocking agent that produces reticence, not the reticence
itself. This might be felt to be a matter more private than the
shame of public disgrace.

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1067

A much earlier fictive account of the aetioloogy of what is con-

demned - by the shamers, the shaming community - as "shamelessness" occurs in a moment in Ovid's Metamorphoses. There the
Propoetides - the daughters of a town on Cyprus - dared to deny

Venus 's divinity, and her anger caused them to prostitute their
bodies and their fame (corpora cum fama primae vulgasse feruntur)
and as their shames ceased and the blood in their faces hardened

(that is, lost ability to blush), with only a small change they were
turned into hard stone (Ovid, 1921: II, 80):

The foul Propoetides dared to refuse

To acknowledge Venus 'divinity;
Because of this, her wrath caused her to make

Them prostitute their bodies and their fame;

And as their shame withdrew, and as the blood

Was hardening in their faces, they were turned

Into hard stone with hardly any change.

[Sunt tarnen obscenae Venerem Propoetides ausae

esse negare deam; pro quo sua numinis ira

corpora cum fama primae vulgasse feruntur,

utque pudor cessit, sanguisque induruit oris,

in rigidum parvo silicem discrimine versae.]

[Metamorphose 10.238-42]

Some of the complexities of the English word shame arise when we

consider this passage. By having shamed the Goddess, they were

caused to behave shamefully in another way: having heaped

infamia on Venus, they lost all pudor (signaled by their inability to

blush) and they turned out to be - as we would say - "shameless."

Much writing about shame is more concerned with socially con-

structed honor/ dishonor than with physiologically evidenced

bodily shame. And yet Ovid's lines somehow subtly connect sexual pudeur and the shaming of something outside of oneself, for

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1068 SOCIAL RESEARCH

it is Venus - not Juno, say - who has been defamed, and perhaps,
by extension, the goddess' cult and the whole community.8

With respect to the matter of the public acknowledgment of

acts that, unacknowledged, might be considered in some ways disgraceful, we might note that sense of shame in public acknowl-

edgment of transgressions and moral faults on the Day of

Atonement, whereas it is probably to be hoped that an allocution
in criminal court in connection with a guilty plea would make the

culprit feel considerable shame.

A more complex moral dimension of shame would seem to be
the reflexive aspect mentioned at the beginning these observations, and I should like to conclude with the matter of shame

being itself shameful. Post-Enlightenment agendas of social

thought from Rousseau on might want to discredit any notions of

naturalness applied to shame, and, indeed, to demonstrate the

use of shaming processes by forces or institutions in society with

something to gain or maintain. And there are modern anthropological studies such as Ruth Benedict's that distinguish in particu-

lar ways between shame and guilt (although modern research in

the structure of various societies might produce a subdiscipline of
Comparative Shame Studies.) But a new kind of moral base was
needed for the postromantic moral imagination to find social
constructions of shame and honor to be shameful and dishonor-

able in themselves. Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence would

claim that to be ashamed of nakedness, of bodies, of sexuality, was

itself a sort of abomination. For them, the notion that physical

nakedness - literally and metaphorically - required a cloak - literally and metaphorically - of fabric or modesty could itself be a
shameful condition of human consciousness. This is of course to

assert that pudeur is somehow honteux or, in German, that Scham is

in itself schndlich. And here again we note how our single English

word makes the paradox even stronger, and reminds us once

again of its continuing force. That the English word shame makes
a full, simple rhyme with blame, fame and its connected antitheti-

cal verb, defame (not to speak of the associated name, lame maim;

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1069

and as for game, seemingly antithetical to these, it might seem a

glib parody of social research to assert that to shame is to play a

social game, etc.)

.The one instance I can think of that characterizes shame as

being ashamed of itself comes from a poetic - rather than the

philosophical - tradition of personifying virtues, vices, inner states,

and spiritual conditions. In this instance, in the narrative of

Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590), we come upon a complex
underworld (The Cave of Mammon), in one part of which we find
figures of Pain, Strife, Revenge, Hate, Jealousy, etc., and among

them "Shame his ugly face did hide from living eye" (II.7.22)
(Spenser, 1981: 285). Not only is the allegorical figure of Shame
ashamed of himself, but he hides his face in a child's gesture of

embarrassment. He is not a shamer, but a typical case of the

shamed. And yet it is not to say, as in the instance under discussion
here, that Shame brings shame on humanity by existing at all.9

But it is rather in an important early formulation of the aetiology of shame that the notion in question arises. That shame can
be shameful occurs in some lines from Milton's Paradise Lost on a

conception of the primal scene of shame in Western mythology.

In Book IV, 312-19 o Paradise Lost, Milton represents the state of

Unfllen humanity, living in Paradise in a condition beyond

(because prior - rather than merely previous - to) technology,
society, speculative inquiry, even Nature construed as something
other than human, other than an object of human manipulation.
In describing the nakedness of Adam and Eve
Nor those mysterious parts were then concealed,
Then was not guilty shame: dishonest shame
Of nature's works, honor dishonorable,
Sin-bred, how have ye troubled all mankind
With shows instead, mere show of seeming pure,
And banished from man's life his happiest life,
Simplicity and spotless innocence.
So passed they naked on . . ." (Milton, 1968: 632)

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1070 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Milton is so caught up in his admiration of prelapsarian humanity that he cries out "honor dishonorable!" in disgust at what has

become of us. He speaks of it as "guilty shame." This is not so

much an anticipatory move as if to confound the distinction
famously made by Ruth Benedict between shame and guilt as
manifested in different cultures: Milton's dense grammar asserts
that the shame itself is culpable, as well as being shame felt at the

knowledge of one's guilt, and shame that is the product of guilty

agency generally. (Later in the poem, when Adam and Eve,

ashamed of their sexual organs, contrive the first clothing,10
Adam hopes that some broad leaves "may cover round / Those
middle parts, that this new comer, Shame, / There sit not, and
reproach us as unclean" [Milton, 1667: 9.1096-8] - shame as a
"newcomer" is felt to be an intruder. Yet Milton's point is that it is

they who have opened the gate to him.)

Shame's obliquely antithetical condition is called by that

equally complex word "honor," which can mean chastity, probity,
fidelity to obligation, what is defined by some institutional code.

The word and its related adjective "honest" (the Latin has a sense
of adorning, decorating the honore with honor) can suggest a
strange sort of internalization of reputation, as if in a reversal of
the childhood mantra "names can break my bones like stick and
stones and hurt me by bruising my honor," and a host of other
things. In modern English - say, from 1550 through World War
One - it is easy to think of honoras gendered: the male "honor" of
battle, business, and the codes of groups and associations of various sizes, and the female "honor" of chastity; the first as vertical,
the second, horizontal. (When until fairly recently to marry a
woman one had slept with or impregnated was "to make an honest woman of her," it was not that she would subsequently desist
from lying, cheating or stealing, but simply that she would be, by

virtue of being married, chaste.)11 In any case, the nature of

honor entails a community that defines it, and when it is
impugned or denied to exist, a matter of infamia, ignominia,
rather than pudor itself.

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1071

Still, "female" Aowor can function just as shame does in applying

to something almost physical. Alexander Pope's line, from "The

Rape of the Lock" (II, 107) (1717), about a young woman at a

fancy ball risking that she might "stain her honour, or her new

brocade" (Pope, 1963: 225), brilliantly implies that the

metaphoric "stain" on an immaterial "honor" seems to be no
worse, in the kind of aristocratic society being satirized in the
poem, than a material stain on (an admittedly costly) dress. And
he thereby distinguishes between honor = reputation, on the one
hand, and an internal virtue of chastity. Pope makes an analogous
kind of joke about erotic shame earlier in the poem (I, 143) when

the heroine, putting on makeup before her mirror "Sees by

degrees a purer blush arise" (Pope, 1963: 222); one would think
that the artificial blush or rouge would be less "pure" than a "nat-

ural" one. But in a made-up cheek there is no sense of modesty

being threatened by possible shame that would suffuse the

unpainted one. (Burke's use of "blush" cited earlier might be con-

sidered, in Pope's metaphor of relative corruption, "purer"

because metaphorical, as far from an artificial blush as the latter

from a natural one.) Blushing is a sign that some form of armor

against feeling ashamed may be under assault. But an artificial
blush, a false sign of this kind, is itself a token of shamelessness,
and thereby shameful.12

The relation between an authentic "inner" virtue or psychological state and the inauthenticity, in many situations, of the mere
outward show of it, is an old issue for moral discourse. But this

poet's sensitivity to the ironies generated by the very terms com-

mon language would unthinkingly use (in this case, "purer", etc.)
lead back ultimately into some of the hidden intricacies in our

language of shame and some expressions of it.

Notes

!But see Barton (2001: 223-30 and passim) for a detailed and enlight-

ening discussion of these questions. Questions of shame in classical

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1072 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Greek culture and society were brilliantly discussed by Bernard Williams
(Williams, 1993).

2David Bromwich, in conversation, paraphrases it, "I blush for what

they have done because alas and inseparably I am also one of them."
Oddish, with German, Hebrew, and some Slavic vocabulary, has variants of both Scham and Schand, but also importantly of the Hebrew

cherpa and bosh (for which see below). The disposition of concepts
among them is somewhat complicated, and I am grateful for the following from Professor Benjamin Harshav of Yale:

The stronger Biblical word is cherpa. In Yiddish: "a kharpe un a

shande" (1 Hebrew and 1 Germanic.) . . . [In Yiddish] "a bushe" is
usually for sexual transgressions, a stain on the family. The term
"a charp' is for something that must not be done: you ought to be
ashamed of yourself, not sexual. But the boundaries are not strict.

"A shande un a charpe" is to shame someone for socially unacceptable behavior, a financial or political transgression.
4Pope is here parodying Spenser in "The Alley" (1727):
Her [Malice] dugs were mark'd by ev'ry Collier's hand,
Her mouth was black as bull-dogs at the stall:
She scratched, bit, and spar'd ne lace ne band,
And bitch and rogue her answer was to all;
Nay, e'en the parts of shame by name would call. . .

(Pope, 1963: 11).

5The OED article on shame also cites Joyce's Ulysses: "And with loving
pencil you shaded my eyes, my bosom and my shame."
bAnd see the gloss on Genesis 2.25 in the Geneva Bible (1560): "For
before sinne entred, all things were honest and comely." And Rashi's

commentary on Genesis associates "knowing what modesty meant"

with ability to distinguish between good and evil = innocence (Rashi,
n.d.: 12).
7The notion of a "community" here might be discussed both as spectators and defamers.

8It is typical of Ovid's art that this account is used to introduce the
story of Pygmalion. He was a young man of the island who concluded
from these women that Nature had corrupted the female mind, refused
to marry and lived alone, carved his ivory maiden, fell in love with it and

then, thanks to Venus, who could give pleasures as well as take revenge,

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HONOR DISHONORABLE 1073

the statue came alive for him. Upon being kissed, the now-living woman
felt the kisses and blushed, looking up to see the sky and her lover for
the first time (. . .oscula virgo / sensit et erubuit timidumque ad lumina lumen /

attollens pariter cum caelo vidit amantem. " - 11. 292-94). The cycle of the

shameful Propoetides becoming unblushing stone followed by the

unashamed statue becoming a blushing human, to the joy of her
creator. And one must note that Ovid plays in this tale with the cen-

tral distinction between being considered culpably "shameless" and

being acknowledged to be blamelessly "unashamed."

9 Shame is a word that occurs often and in several senses in the course

of Spenser's long moral allegory. Very often, its relations to other moral
concepts are graphically represented. For example, in a kind of court
masque processional celebrating a distinctly sadomasochist kind of sexuality, a golden figure of Cupid passes by, and

Behinde him was Reproch, Repentance, Shame;

Reproch the first, Shame next, Repent behind:
Repentance feeble, sorrowfull, and lame:
Reproch despightfull, carelesse, and vnkind;
Shame most ill fauourd, bestiali, and blind:
Shame lowrd, Repentance sigh'd, Reproch did scould;
Reproch sharpe stings, Repentance whips entwind,
Shame burning brond-yrons in her hand did hold:
All three to each vnlike, yet all made in one mould

(III.12.24) (Spenser, 1981: 556).

See also the maiden called Shamefastness in II.9.40-43 (Spenser,

1981: 322).
10I have previously discussed this question, and Milton's treatment of
it in Paradise Lost in particular, in Hollander (1999).
nSee William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words (1951: 218-49)
on the interaction of several different senses of "honest" in Shake-

spearean English as deployed in Othello.

uOne may recall how the Latin rubor ("redness, blush") gets extended
to mean bashfulness, modesty, etc. See earlier in this essay and, in particular, Barton (2001: 223-30).
References

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