SHARDS OF GLASS: Shame and Its Mitigation in Willa Cather’s Work by Nancy L. Boisvert A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Boston College Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences Graduate School October 2020 © Copyright 2020 Nancy L. Boisvert SHARDS OF GLASS: SHAME AND ITS MITIGATION IN WILLA CATHER’S WORK Nancy L. Boisvert Advisor: Dr. Marjorie Howes, Ph.D This work applies current theories of affect to inform an understanding of the role of shame in the process of narration. It begins with a dual-sided hypothesis: experiences of humiliation and its consequence, shame, can initiate and mediate a narrative act, and the narrative process can immediately or over time mitigate and even eliminate the negative feelings of shame. The project particularly draws upon the pioneering affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins to focus upon the life and written works of Willa Cather. It discovers and traces a poetics of shame as it occurs throughout the narratives she produced over a lifetime. It highlights how the Cathers’ forced migration from Virginia to Nebraska resulted in a loss of class and status as well as alterations in family dynamics. These disruptions created the foundations for her perceived humiliations and the shame that motivated her use of recurrent scenes, characters, narrative resolutions and even the very language she chose. This study emphasizes the usefulness of the application of affect studies for literary criticism and cultural studies. TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………………………iv Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………...viii 1.0 Chapter 1 Humiliation, Shame and Narration……….………………….............…...1 1.1 Humiliation is a social act……………….....……...…………………………………..………2 1.2 The ground………………………………………..……………………………………………..……5 1.3 Distinguishing terms: embarrassment, shame, guilt……………..……..…......13 1.4 “Bypassed” or “unacknowledged” Shame and Narration.………………...…..26 1.5 A brief example of applied affect theory: “An Amateur Laborer” ………….37 2.0 Chapter 2:” Wrenches and Jars and Wounding Contacts”…………………....…47 2.1 The shame of interrupted desire……………………………...……………………...….55 3.0 The early fiction: harboring a damaged self in “The Garden Lodge” and “Paul’s Case”……………………………………………..…………………………………..…..…...68 3.1 “The Garden Lodge”…………………….………………………………………………….……69 3.2 “Paul’s Case”……………………………………………….…………………….…………….…..76 3.3 Conflict………………………………………………………………..……………….……….……..86 3.4 Human idealism and human weakness…………………………..…….…….……….93 4.0 Chapter 4: One of Ours: Memory, Invidious Comparison and Shame ……………………………………………………..…………………………....…………..110 4.1 Memory and affect………………………………………………………….………..………..112 4.2 First visit abroad…………………………………………………………….…………..……..116 iv 4.3 Claude……………………………………………………………………………………………….125 4.4 The making of a cynic…………………………………………….…….…….……….…….128 4.5 The cynic’s invidious comparisons……………………………………………...……136 4.6 Mitigated shame………………………………………………………………..………….…..143 4.7 Aftermath………………………………………………………………………….…………......146 5.0 Chapter 5: Vicarious Shame: “The Humiliated Father[s]”……………………149 5.1 Willa Cather and Ethelbert Nevin……………………………………………..……....153 5.2 Enchantment………………………………………………………………………………...…..155 5.3 Disenchantment…………………………………………………………………….…....…...161 5.4 Cather’s early endopsychic struggles with Nevin…..……………………........165 5.5 Reframing memory……………………………………………………………………….…..171 5.6 Going under………………………………………………………………………………....…...178 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………………….199 v PREFACE We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us: ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. --George Bernard Shaw Man and Superman As with all myth . essential truth lies in . the endless returning of the past in the present. --Leon Wurmser The Mask of Shame During the early 1990s, I began an exploration of the entanglements of humiliation, shame and narrative process. The exploration emerged from my fascination with what I saw at play across a large sampling of literary works of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century authors whose lives and letters, fiction and nonfiction I had extensively read for several qualifying exams. 1 Collectively, the extensive notes I’d taken during preparation for these exams offered a map onto which I traced various intersections and connections. Concurrent with the period of time given to reading many, many late -nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century texts, personal life intruded. Our daughter endured a psychotic break following a rape intended as a gift for her sixteenth birthday. My 1 For my major field exam in literature, American Realism and Naturalism, I greatly benefitted from the kind, exemplary guidance of Dr. Christopher P. Wilson. This exam had followed two minor ones: British Mid-Victorian Fictions in Prose and Poetry , directed by Dr. Duhamel and American Autobiography, prepared under the gently firm advice of Dr. Rosemarie Bodenheimer. All lent to the dissertation topic. vi husband, in his prime, suffered an unpredicted kidney failure, followed by dialysis and complications, damaging not only his body but also his self-perceptions. No less heart rending, another daughter struggled in private and public spaces with sexual identity. Wrestling with the conventions of the particular class in which our family was positioned, she debated normative voices and refused to see her evolving self through the judging lenses of homophobic family members and friends. I must admit that my search for a dissertation question was inflected with the close “readings” of my daughters’ and husband’s emotions and behaviors. During the turmoil of these events, and as I searched for the dissertation topic that would merit a committee’s time and sustain my interest, I had read George Johnson’s book, In The Palace of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads ,2 an early and not refined attempt at neurocognitive theory. In this work he collapses the Cartesian distinction between mind and body to argue what is a truism: that an emotional “hurt,” like a shard of glass buried deep within a wound only apparently healed, demanded its expression. Sigmund Freud, had, of course, addressed the return of the repressed, but in developing the field of psychology, Freud subordinated the study of affect to the study of biological drives as motivators. Behaviorism further shelved the study of the affects and emotions. At the time I was searching for a topic for study, I also came across a theorist of affect and human emotion, Silvan S. Tomkins. Tomkins’ work reconsidered affects to be primary motivators of behavior. Without wanting to surrender the gains of Freud’s work, Tomkins brings into sharper focus the interplay between consciousness and 2 George Johnson. In The Palaces of Memory: How We Build the Worlds Inside Our Heads. New Vintage, 1991. vii unconsciousness, between motivational and non-motivational sub-systems as a sort of feedback loop. In a recuperative act, Tomkins moved to posit an ongoing negotiation between a subject and its worlds, a negotiation in which affects mediate what we perceive and how we act. Our perception, he suggests, is not a mirror to nature but a mirror to a mirror in endless feedback loops in which affects intervene. In Tomkins’ words: “The world we perceive is a dream we learn to have from a script we have not written. It is neither our capricious construction nor a gift we inherit without work” (I: 13). His dense work, Affect Imagery Consciousness 3 argues against the primacy of the biological drives as motivators and for the more important contribution of the affects which, through their magnification of the urgency of drives, make the drives seem more vital to human motivation. His complex theories attracted my attention, invited a careful combing of his ideas. The arguments made me pause. Questions arose. A hypothesis was formed. Reading and re-reading began. Tomkins identifies, defines and analyzes how both primary and secondary affects function in humans. Especially resonant for me at that time and now are his observations and ruminations regarding shame, an auxiliary affect important in the role of motivation and scripting. His work led me to others who, applying his groundbreaking theories, offered a lens through which I could better examine the texts that I had chosen from the works read during the exams. These selected texts had been written around the cusp of the twentieth century during a time when overt class mobility, instability, and 3 Silvan S. Tomkins. Affect Imagery Consciousness. Four Volumes. Springer, 1962-91. Vol. I: The Positive Affect (1963). Volume II: The Negative Affects (1963). Volume III: The Negative Affects: Anger and Fear (1991). Volume IV: Cognition Duplication and Transformations of Affects (1993). Springer. Silvan S. Tomkins. Affect Imagery Consciousness: Vols. I and II. Springer: 2008. This reprint is the result of the resurgence and continuing interest in Tomkins’s theories. References to Volumes I and II will be according to the reprint unless otherwise noted. viii duplicity created a multitude of opportunities for exposed misrepresentations and misappropriations. In fact, representations of humiliation populated many of the works of that time. 4 During the mid