'Shame makes us creep behind the curtains and stay there.'

(The Green Lady, a work in progress)

I am thinking about shame and its attendant imagery. What image attracts itself to shame? Where does shame hide? My current character, Mrs. Robinson, lives in an environment of acute shame. She is debilitated by it. I’m trying to capture the atmosphere of shame, to chase down the image that attends that feeling. Shame is a habitat of sorts and one implicitly built on blame. Here is the rest of my definition:

There is something sticky about it, like a fly stuck to sugar paper. We cling to it until we can go nowhere without it, our soiled veil. People live all their life stuck to shame, those dingy, clingy curtains. Mrs. Robinson had been living with shame for years, too many to count, but it was not only hers - it was shared - you might even say it was his: everything else was. 

Husband and wife share a culture of shame. Marriage is a soiled veil, those dark curtains. Something has been disappointed: the idea of cleanliness, clean hope. I was speaking today of tragedy and how it works upon its audience. Aristotle’s word —from his Poetics — is ‘catharsis’. Catharsis brings about a kind of cleansing of the emotional palette, a spiritual and emotional purgation. Hope, I’ve always thought, is quite cruel: it leads us on, but when it is dashed, the effect is quite cleansing: astringent, antiseptic. We have to lick off our wounds and start again. I think shame is a state of living without hope, with acute pessimism; a state of constant relinquishment to negative impulses. Shamefulness is a commitment to being lowered by whatever critical gaze we might like to conjure. Mrs. Robinson stands by the window of her darkened room - it is in fact her husbands’s spare room where he keeps all sorts of strange decrepit tools and machinery - and mourns the loss of hope. She covers herself in the mantle of shame: those dark inner thoughts that block out the light. She cannot contemplate life with the curtains open.