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.

摘要

本文认为，羞耻的矛盾性（一种在个人和公众之间，在隐藏与发现之间摇摆的感觉）在护理叙述中得到了有意义的说明。菲利普·罗斯（Philip Roth）的《Patrimony》（1991）和莎拉·李维特（Sarah Leavitt）的图形叙事缠结通过两种截然不同的人体学绘画：阿兹海默氏症，《我的母亲和我》（2012年），从照顾生病和垂死父母的成年子女的角度探讨了羞耻感。罗斯集中精力于软弱，依赖和死亡的经历，以及对男子气概的活力和力量的处理，而莱维特则专注于身份受损或受损的情况下的羞耻感，从而将母亲的精神疾病与自己的女同性恋联系起来。当仔细分析在护理和接受过程中羞耻的复杂机制时，事实证明，羞辱不仅是个人的苦难或内在品质，而且羞耻总是以先前的污名化为食，这种污名会潜意识地影响当前的经历。这两部作品都着眼于羞耻破坏身份的能力。同时，