Shame and shamelessness in contexts of care and caregiving in Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) and Sarah Leavitt’s Tangles (2012)

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that the ambivalent nature of shame – a feeling that oscillates between the personal and the public, between hiding and uncovering – is meaningfully illuminated in narratives of care. Via drawing on two very different somatographies, Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991) and Sarah Leavitt’s graphic narrative Tangles: Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2012), shame is explored from the perspective of adult children who care for their ill and dying parents. While Roth concentrates on the experiences of weakness, dependency and mortality and what it does to the virility and power associated with manhood, Leavitt focuses on shame within the context of spoilt or damaged identity and thus interconnects her mother’s mental illness and her own lesbianism. While closely analysing the intricate mechanisms of shame in contexts of caregiving and care-receiving, it is demonstrated that shame is not merely a personal affliction or an interior quality, but that shame always feeds itself on previous stigmatisations that subconsciously influence present experiences. Both works focus on shame’s capacity to destroy identity; simultaneously however, they draw the reader’s attention to the ways in which shame constitutes fragile, non-essentialist new identities that counter and question the social imperatives that originally caused the feeling of shame.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• care
• graphic somatography
• dementia
• queerness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Compare for example Psychology Today (2017/4): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/overcoming-destructive-anger/201704/overcoming-the-paralysis-toxic-shame.

2. Within his elaborate stage theory of personal development (later criticised as problematic) Erikson explained that in the second of eight stages all infants pass through a stage that is defined by the poles of autonomy versus shame and doubt. According to Erikson, the (two- to three-year-old) child is characterised by its increasing autonomy in this stage as it learns to/is able to talk, walk and go to the toilet independently. Herman in Patrimony experiences a reversal of this development. The tumour threatens his ability to walk independently, it gets more difficult for him to articulate himself and he loses control over his bowel movements.

3. Herman nursed his father Sender after his stroke but his caretaking looked very differently: ‘Twice a day he lit cigarettes and stuck them in his father’s mouth for him and in the evening he sat beside the bed and read to him from the Yiddish paper’ (Patrimony, 1991: 11). While smoking and reading the paper are still (American) cultural emblems of manhood, bodily care, dealing with faecal matter and putting people to bed is not compatible with Herman’s idea of manhood and thus neither to fatherhood nor to sonship.

4. Tefillin are a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. They are worn by observant adult Jews during weekday morning prayers.

5. The quote reminds the reader who is familiar with Roth’s work of a passage from Everyman in which the protagonist states ‘There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us … Should he ever write an autobiography, he’d call it The Life and Death of a Male Body’ (Roth, 2006: 51–52). Patrimony is this book.

6. Thomas Couser suggested the term somatography to define memoirs that convey the practice of ‘living with, loving, or knowing intimately someone with an odd or anomalous body’ (Couser, 2009: 2). Amelia DeFalco then coined the term ‘graphic somatography’ (DeFalco, 2015: 2) for the comic genre of the graphic caregiving memoir.

7. When Sarah lives in Montréal, she admits that she misses her family horribly but she is very aware of the fact that she cannot leave her life in the city and return to Fredericton because ‘things were different there’ (17). Her contemplations are framed via a visual panel that shows the surface of her desk that exhibits the contrasting view of a heteronormative family portrayal (including husband and wife, two kids and a pet) with different pamphlets from the events she co-organises and takes part in (Gay ride March, Pro Choice Rally …). Thus, the different objects are clearly staged as metonymic representatives of the social realities in the rather suburban Fredericton and urban Montréal.

8. In his monograph Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), sociologist Erving Goffman explores how people who are considered abnormal by society are stigmatised. Stigma means the withholding of complete social acceptance. Being disqualified from full social acceptance results in damaged or spoilt identities. Goffman identifies three types of stigma: stigma of character traits, physical stigma, and stigma of group identity. In his typology both mental disorder and homosexuality belong to the first category.

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Anne Rüggemeier

Dr. Anne Rüggemeier studied Comparative Literature, English and History at Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen (Germany) and at Oxford Brookes University (UK). From 2009–2013 she held a scholarship at the Gießen Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) where she conducted a PhD project on autobiographical writing in contemporary English Literatures (Die relationale Autobiographie, WVT, 2014). In 2014/2015 she received the GCSC Career Development Grant. She is currently situated at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) where she works in the ERC-funded project ‘Lists and Listmaking in Literature and Culture’. She wrote various articles on life writing, multimodality and graphic illness that appeared in The Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels, The Amsterdam Journal of Cultural Narratology and The European Journal of Life Writing and A/B: Autobiography Studies. Her research interests include life writing, narratology, illness narratives, and the field of literature and knowledge.