Romantic transformations of shame in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Abstract

This dissertation explores various theories of shame in post-Freudian self-psychology, emotion theory, and Biblical theology and uses these ideas to complicate critical assumptions about subjectivity in the Romantic period. The dissertation argues that the emotion of shame enables positive self-formation and builds intimate, intersubjective experience despite how shame threatens the self with its isolating, self-defeating reality. Since Romantic poets, in particular William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, typically produce poetry aimed at exalting a solitary, empowered self, what purpose does shame, which is both interpersonal and self-denigrating, serve in these poems? Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Barrett Browning use shame as a way to reconsider the Romantic claim that self-construction is a solitary process. They find advantages to self-denigration because they acknowledge that identity, community, or intimacy form as the self undergoes a shame experience. For these poets, shame creates the very identity it seeks to destroy; the emotion breeds the intimacy and interdependence on others that characterize the intersubjective reality of human selfhood. For Wordsworth, shame is a mode of empowerment comparable to the sublime. <italic>The Prelude</italic> (1799--1806), A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags, and Shame on this Faithless Heart, are three poems that produce individuals who depend upon and enjoy the shame experience in sublime moments. For Coleridge, shame fosters the humility and repentance needed for a religious subjectivity. The Eolian Harp and Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement model a way to mobilize shame to achieve spiritual and social benefits. Barrett Browning shows how shame creates intimacy in L. E. L.'s Last Question, <italic>Aurora Leigh</italic>, and various courtship letters. Uncovering shame's uses in Romantic poetry unsettles the dominant models of identity formation in the period by proving that individuals understand themselves best when they see themselves through the eyes of the other. Shame, as arguably the most important affect in intersubjective psychoanalysis, alerts us to a new way of considering the relationship between emotion and subjectivity.