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The famous fourteenth-century Castilian story about a Moorish king duped by three swindlers into believing that a dazzling new suit they are supposedly weaving for him is somehow invisible to any person of illegitimate birth was famously retold by Hans Christian Andersen, who basically kept it intact. “The Emperor's New Clothes” illustrates evocative commentary on social life. Denial is a product of individual and collective efforts. Conspiracies of silence are clearly socially patterned as the quintessential public manifestation of denial. Embarrassment, pain, fear, and shame can produce silence. Silence and denial involve active avoidance. The “elephant in the room” is metaphorically evocative of any object or matter of which everyone is definitely aware, yet no one is willing to publicly acknowledge. This book highlights the distinctly generic properties of conspiracies of silence. An overview of the chapters included in it is given in this chapter.

This chapter begins with a reading of the famous description of Charles Bovary’s cap in the early pages of Madame Bovary. Although the moment has been rightly understood as embarrassing for Bovary, this chapter asks if it should be read also as differently embarrassing for the voice that describes it. So great a performance might be taken as an awkward instance of overdoing it. In other words, unpacking the moment of the mistake helps us to see ways in which embarrassment tends to spread not only from character to character but also across formal boundaries (between character and narrator, reader and novel) that we tend to think of as secure. The chapter then moves on to account for a logic of incorporation that helps to demonstrate ways in which the novel not only generates embarrassment, but also needs it at several levels if it is to make the sense that it does.

We present in this chapter our own theory of shame. Shame, we argue, is the subject's painful sense of her own incapacity to live up to, even minimally, the demands consubstantial with one or some of the values she is attached to. This verdict of incapacity captures the distinctive sense in which an individual's identity is shaken in shame. Our theory is also pluralist in the sense that shame can arise as much in connection with the values manifested by an individual's pudeur as with those manifested by his dignity, decency or integrity. We then explain how this account is apt to illuminate some key aspects of shame, such as the distinction between rational and irrational shame, the phenomenology of shame, the distinctively self-relevant character of the evaluation it features and also show how it is apt to distinguish shame from other negative self-reflexive emotions such as self-disappointment, embarrassment and guilt.

This chapter addresses whether embarrassment has a distinct nonverbal display and, by design, gathers similar evidence for amusement and shame. It tests the hypothesis that the nonverbal display of embarrassment is distinct. In Study 1, the nonverbal behaviors associated with individuals' experiences of embarrassment and amusement were compared. The remaining studies determined whether observers could distinguish between the spontaneous displays of embarrassment and (a) amusement (Studies 2 through 5); (b) shame (Study 5); and (c) other emotions with identified displays, including anger, disgust, and enjoyment (Study 5). Analyses showed that both the morphology and dynamic patterns of the behavior associated with embarrassment and amusement were distinct, differentially related to self-reports of emotion, and emotion-like in their onset and duration. The forms and functions of embarrassment are also discussed.

This chapter tests the three hypotheses concerning the relations between facial expressions of emotion and adolescent psychopathology. First, it is expected that externalizing adolescents, who are prone to aggressive and delinquent behavior, show more anger. Second, it is expected that internalizing adolescents, who are prone to anxiety, depression, withdrawn behavior, and somatic complaints, show more fear and sadness. The last hypothesis referred to embarrassment, which is believed to contribute to psychological adjustment by motivating people to avoid social-moral transgressions and to apologize for transgressions that have occurred. The results provide the first evidence for the claim that different adolescent disorders are manifest in distinct facial expressions of emotion. Furthermore, it documented links between adolescent psychopathology and emotional expression even though the measures of emotion and psychopathology came from two sources (the child's teacher and the child) rather than one, and emotional responses were assessed in one brief situation.

This chapter considers embarrassment in Rousseau and the thwarted language—a language incompletely freed from reference and yet dogged by a fictionality inappropriate to the context—that distinguishes the speaker in that predicament. It argues that embarrassment is not a defense only in the sense that it protects the self against a threat. As verbal blockage, it also inhibits the self from embarking on the trajectory of desire; it defends in the French sense of défender: That is, it forbids the self from communicating or carrying out its own latent wishes. That becomes apparent when the role of writing is considered, well known since Starobinski as the route Rousseau takes to circumvent embarrassment.

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.

In the Dutch language a single term (schaamte) can refer to both feelings of shame and of embarrassment. In this chapter we explore the consequences of this difference between the Dutch and English emotion vocabularies for differences in the emotional meaning of the terms shame and schaamte. We found schaamte to be less unpleasant and less potent than shame. In addition, we found a number of emotion components where schaamte was associated more strongly with features that in English would be associated with embarrassment, and that schaamte was more different from the Dutch equivalent of guilt (schuld) than shame would be in the US sample.

This chapter shifts registers to focus on Blackstone's own embarrassment as marking the importance of the Commentaries as a written text, a materialized object that came to symbolize the permanence and reliability of written law. Blackstone's “diffidence,” his deficiencies as an orator, operated as legible affective signs of discomfort with the orally based theatricality of legal practice. Reading Blackstone's expressive body as a text in itself available for scrutiny in the famous libel case Onslow v. Horne (1770) suggests that although Blackstone's “stuttering” affect in Westminster Hall may have seemed to undermine his authority, it instead played a symbolic role in the global dissemination of the print text Commentaries. The inadequacy of his authentic but imperfect performance shifted attention to the perfectible text where Blackstone could perfect his style, if not always his content.

This chapter lays out standard current definitions of shame, including the predominant belief, among psychologists, that shame is a damaging emotion. Some disagreements are noted, and particular attention is paid to the juxtaposition of psychological with sociological views, where differing emphases on the individual experience versus the social value and context are suggestive.