Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I can see it would sort ill with Apollo, Tatler and GQ—but I expect newsagents get used to the strangest combinations of taste. They have to look on patiently while kids thumb through Men Only and Penthouse and end up buying the Beano and the Bucks Fizz fan mag. I saw someone the other day buy the Spanking Times and the Amateur Yachtsman, for instance …’ ‘That’s not so odd—and isn’t a spanker some sort of rope or something?’ ‘A sail, I believe—as in the limerick which ends “haul up the top sheet and spanker”.’ The train moved a few yards out of Queensway station and then stopped abruptly. ‘Could you ever get into spanking?’ James asked in the selfconscious silence that ensued. I was obliged to live up to it. ‘Not in a serious way. I put our young friend over my knee from time to time, but …’ In fact, drunk one night and recalling an evening when I had been picked up by a Polish workman who got me to whip his ass with his thick leather belt, I had made Arthur half kneel, half lie over the corner of the bed and given him several strokes of my old webbing corps-belt from school. I knew he would have let me go on, but excited though I was I dropped it. ‘I just can’t see the point of it,’ complained James. ‘Does Arthur actually like it?’ ‘I think he does rather. I mean it gives him a hard-on, and all that.’ The man beyond James looked up in a bothered way as the train started again. With James I often reverted to the flaunted deviancy we practised at Oxford, queening along the Cornmarket among the common people (as we more or less ironically called them), passing archly audible comments on boys from the town who took our fancy: ‘Quite go for that’, ‘Don’t think much of yours, dear’, ‘Get the buns on that’. James had worked up a cult of an overweight black youth, with a central gold tooth and a monstrous, lolling member. ‘What’s he really like?’ he asked, as we hammered into Lancaster Gate and the racket of the train spaced out and slowed. ‘I mean, is he a nice sort of person?’ ‘He is, actually, very nice, I think.’ I felt entirely penned in by not being able to speak of all the things that made the set-up so strange, and which, depriving Arthur of initiative, made him a non-social being. ‘Very nice in bed, certainly.’ James and I both saw how crass this comment was. ‘But what happens when you go out? I assume you’ve tired of each other’s company sufficiently to go to the pub or the flicks or whatever.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  James felt that my mother at least should be told, but I was fiercely against it. She was due in town shortly to restock the deep freeze with exquiseria unavailable in Hampshire, and to buy new clothes to fit her ever-expanding figure. When she rang to fix the routine lunch in Harrods (it had to be on the spot so as to minimise the loss of spending time) I told her I would be going to stay with Johnny Carver in Scotland that week—though in fact I had not seen Johnny since the day of his crassly youthful wedding two years before. My mother said I sounded odd, and I said I had just come from the dentist—a lie nearer to the truth. It took something of an effort to look at myself in the mirror which usually gave me such quick, uncomplicated pleasure. As I stood washing my face with extreme gentleness, even the fronds of the sponge seeming rough on my puffed and tender skin, I found it took that kind of mastery to meet my eye in the shaving-mirror that I had needed, as a child, to look at certain pictures not manifestly horrible in themselves but subtly repulsive or awesome through some accretion of mood. My grandfather had at Marden a portrait of his aunt, Lady Sybil Gossett, by Glyn Philpot. It showed an ivory-faced society woman, of the kind perplexingly referred to as ‘a famous beauty’, with bobbed fair hair and large, lugubrious eyes. She wore a misty pale blue frock, cut very low at the bosom, and sat back in a little chair beside a tub of mauve hyacinths. Her melancholy, so intense it seemed almost depraved, and the vulgar sensuality of the colour scheme, were deeply terrible to me as a child, and I could not bear being alone in the dining-room where she hung. It was a family joke that I was ‘snubbing Sybil’ by having always to eat with my back to her, and I was not unpleased to be the victim of so abnormal and aesthetic an emotion. At times I would steel myself and look. It was just like now, keeping my eyes fixed there until the spirit-lamp of rationality guttered, my gaze flicked away in fear. James had said humorously that I wouldn’t like having my beauty spoiled, and though it could all be remedied I found my injured appearance unbearable. My vanity, which was so constitutional that it had virtually ceased to be vanity, was shown up for what it was; I bit Phil’s head off when he blandly suggested that I didn’t look too bad. For a while I became the sort of person that someone like me would never look at.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Mary is no damsel afloat the winds of fate. The romantic heroine is a passive character, actively suffering the whims of Fortune. Mary is lust incarnate, the driving force in her own destiny. When she reaches the age at which a respectable girl might be contemplating the marriage market, she careens headfirst into a life of sexual abandonment. Most ancient literature emphasizes the lust of the male customer. The Life of Mary foregrounds the sexual aggression of this antiheroine. The story deliberately isolates Mary’s will as the true agent of her sexual depravity. She says she was poor—making barely enough to survive by selling the flax she could spin. (And with the mention of spinning, Mary evokes a symbol of female chastity as old as Penelope.) Despite her generosity, Mary is a prostitute. In the ancient Mediterranean, promiscuity—sexual availability, dishonor—was the essence of prostitution. The Roman lawyer Ulpian, in a legal definition of prostitution, claimed that sexual promiscuity was the decisive criterion of the prostitute, even more fundamental than venality. There is no reason to believe that the author of this Life had read his Ulpian; rather, both are pushing the definition of prostitution by imagining the liminal case of a woman who did not accept payment. For Ulpian shame and prostitution merge at the horizon of his conservative worldview; for the Christian author, prostitution becomes, in the figure of Mary, pure sin.70 While Mary is living her debased life in Alexandria, she sees a crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men running toward the sea. They are destined for Jerusalem, travelers to a holy feast. She has an urge to go with them but lacks money for the fare. Her motives are less than pure. “I wanted to go away with them in order to have a great many lovers, ready to serve my passions.” Mary throws down her distaff and approaches a group of youths who seem a likely mark for her ambitions. Waiting to board, she unlooses a torrent of shameless words that communicate her intentions. “Tongue cannot speak, ear cannot hear the things that happened on the journey, what acts I forced upon the wretched youths, against their will.” She stows on board, confident of passage: “I have a body, and they will take that as my sailing fare.” What could be a clearer inversion of the romance? All the romances are tales of travel, of movement at sea; the heroine of the romance is moved by the force of necessity, taken captive by pirates against her will. Mary has set sail willingly, and corrupted herself with the crew out of her own lust. She has coerced men into sin. What the heroine of romance suffered unwillingly as a test of her chastity, for Mary is an event that she engineered and during which her shamelessness reached new depths. Mary is the pirate.71

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Adultery was an act of theft, violation of another man’s legitimate control of female sexuality. It was horrifi c, but principally as an aff ront to society. Adultery was a public crime because the state was charged to maintain good order, not because it was the steward of sexual morality per se. At least in the more developed corridors of the empire, women convicted of adultery were not stoned in fi ts of righ teous vengeance. Rather, a condemned adulteress was forced by law to renounce the stola, the garment of feminine modesty, and don the toga, the traditional dress of the Roman man . . . and the Roman prostitute.  Th e strict code of honor and shame was used to scare girls into submis- sion, but it was not as retrograde as many later iterations of the Mediterra- nean syndrome. It was a disgrace to suff er sexual violation, but Roman so- ciety did not blame rape victims. Although sexual crimes were legally formulated in terms of status, at least from the age of Augustus, consent was fundamental. Certain signs of refusal— screams, physical resistance— might be required. Some worried that this allowance opened the fl oodgates by providing a disguise for sin. Lucretia’s extraordinary virtue was revealed by the fact that she had the excuse of violence and refused to tender it. W hen Leucippe’s mother discovered her daughter on the brink of losing her virginity to Clitophon, she lamented that her daughter was ruined, espe- cially because it was a voluntary encounter: “at least a disaster which comes about through force is not shameful.”  When sex with a decent woman was not an open provocation of another man, attitudes might be less exacting. One of the fi nest repre sen ta tions of quiet indulgence occurs at the end of the fi fth book of Leucippe and Clito- phon. Th e young “widow” Melite falls passionately in love with Clitophon, yet he artfully avoids physical consummation of their engagement. When Melite’s husband turns up alive, she makes one last eff ort to take Clitophon to bed. Th e seduction scene was the deliberate inverse of Leucippe’s heroic re sis tance against Th ersander, Melite’s husband. Melite’s speech is the cri de coeur of a desperate young wife infatuated with another man. Clitophon’s  FROM SHAME TO SIN response is tender. “Something human moved me, and I truly feared the god Eros too. . . . Th is would have to be reckoned not so much intercourse as a cure for an ailing soul. . . . Everything happened by the will of Eros.” In the dramatic fi nal act, Melite would indeed fi nd herself charged with adultery.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Shame was expressed as aischynē— an act which brought dishonor on the actor, or the emotional experience of moral failure. Aidōs drew closer to the individual’s “sense of shame,” both positively, in the proper respect for others’ opinions that evoked honorable behavior (similar to the Latin pudor), or negatively as the embarrassment that follows upon misconduct. In Greek the more concrete states of honor and dishonor were expressed by timē and atimia, respectively. Th e triumph of Christian sexual morality was, as far as these terms are concerned, linguistically neutral. Th e vocabulary of sin was as familiar to pre- Christian moralities (especially Sto- icism) as it was to ecclesiastical authorities. Dio Chrysostom, for instance, could refer to the unlawful violation of women and boys as “sins.” And  FROM SHAME TO SIN Christian authors will exuberantly deploy the language, and sanctions, of “shame” in their campaign to repress sin.  If the argument suggested by the title, From Shame to Sin, is not about linguistic transformation, neither is it about a shift from external social judg- ment to an internal, psychologizing morality (such a book might be called From Shame to Guilt). It is true that, by our period, “sin,” in both Latin and Greek, has the full sense of “moral transgression,” with a strong sense of culpability that must necessarily look inward for a blameworthy faculty. But the mistake would be to imagine that the cluster of terms governing the idea of “shame” was somehow exclusively external. Shame, in the Greco- Roman culture of the high empire, shuttled between external judgment and internal aff ect; its very nature lay in the inseparable connection between the two. Robert Kaster’s defi nition of pudor perfectly captures its essence: “a dis plea sure with oneself caused by vulnerability to just criticism of a so- cially diminishing sort.” In other words, shame was an emotion or emo- tional state experienced by an individual because of the potentially valid disapproval of the moral community. For instance, a Latin encyclopedist of the high empire recorded a phi los o pher’s defi nition of pudor and aischynē alike as “fear of justifi ed reproach.” Shame, in the Roman Empire, was nec- essarily an interpersonal concept, dependent on the potential judgment of the moral community.  Th e demands of honor and shame also varied in the expectations they placed on the individual, according to the individual’s place within the moral community. Herein lies the internal logic of shame as a moral sanction. Shame is not only a regulative emotion that mediates between the individ- ual’s self- surveillance and the community’s power to render moral judg- ment; shame governs the moral expectations immanent in the structure of the moral community itself.

• From Untrue (2018)

  The next time she went home to see her parents, Virginia, no doubt fascinated and thrilled by her experience, told her mother all about it. Her mother, whom Virginia described as “just horrified,” called the school. According to an archived note about her call to the university, Virginia’s mother did not so much object to the questions as she did to the way they were framed, along the lines of: “Lots of young women your age are sexually active. When did you first…” “And I didn’t go to that school again!” Virginia told us as we sat together, eating fruit salad in her living room. She reenrolled, at her parents’ wishes, in a nearby Catholic college and lived at home until graduation. We laughed again. Our laughter underscored our surprise at how unrecognizable the world was only half a century ago. Virginia still believed, when I interviewed her, that premarital sex was a bad idea. Her daughters in the room didn’t agree; neither did Virginia’s grandchildren, presumably. My, how things have changed, our laughter said. And yet. Had they really? We have a sense that we simply get more liberated in a straight march forward through time. And we are wrong. Virginia’s mother had been a vaudeville performer, it turns out, and had played in an all-girl band. But as a mother, Virginia explained, she had become a stickler for table manners and later the guardian of her daughter’s virtue. “My mom had a much more interesting life than I did! But there was no trace of vaudeville left in her by the time I came around,” Virginia told me with a chuckle. Maybe not that Virginia, or anyone else for that matter, could see. But “the vaudeville” was in there, like it is in all of us—the parts that biology and evolution built, the wants and the wildness that have been tamed, constrained, and repackaged, if you will, as Virginia’s mother had been. When Virginia was young, living in a World War II landscape without young men around, she and her girlfriends played “ridiculous games.” “We’d get a Pepsi after school—it was a nickel. And then we’d just [joke] around. We’d say things like ‘You’ve had my husband, and I’ll never speak to you again!’” They played out the dramas they saw and heard, the stories around them. The naïve, observant Catholic girls were observant in other ways too. That was a long time ago. It was also just yesterday, and tomorrow. We have never been wholly innocent. It seems reasonable to hope that, one day, we will not automatically and unthinkingly judge ourselves guilty, or will at least develop the capacity to absolve ourselves of sin. Author’s Note

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Between us we enacted a secret charade, a charade whose very subject was ‘secrecy’. The sober, maroon-spined notebooks, drink-stained, rubbed and buckled, took up part of the very special shelf where the Firbank books were, those pocket-sized first editions with their gilt lettering or torn wrappers wrapped again in cellophane. Now that I was reading them myself I looked at them with more interest— Caprice, Vainglory, Inclinations , though not, alas, The Flower Beneath the Foot —and patted their backs encouragingly. Along from them the current volume of the diary was neatly in place, history already although only half-filled. Fairly a professional now at reading other people’s private bits and pieces, I settled down with my mug of coffee to find out what had been going on. Reading Charles’s journal I could be confident that nothing in it, however boring on the one hand or touching on the other, could ever implicate me; whereas in James’s there was the uneasy excitement of some certain entanglement and my eye would skip down the page in search of myself. He had that elegant, artnouveau kind of writing which many architects still use on plans, and the Ws were very strong and conspicuous, like a pair of brick-hods side by side. How annoying it was when he was going on about Rheingold or Parsifal: Wagner and I shared an abbreviation, which cropped up pretty often—though in general it was possible to tell which of us he meant. I discovered that he was hopelessly behind, and realised that I would find no clues here to last night’s events. The latest entry was from several weeks before: ‘To Corry 6.30. The boy Phil, W’s new thing, was in the showers. Fantastic body, disappointing little dick. Still, felt quite a pang for it—smiled at him, but he looked straight through me. Humiliation! I had made such an effort when we met to be charming, but now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Perhaps all lovers resent such old friends, who know things that they don’t? Either that, or they really court them. But again it was that terrible feeling that no one ever notices me or remembers me.’ I felt a mixture of shame and cruel pleasure in this, that my little Philibuster was not giving anyone else a foothold on his hard, soap-slippery self-possession. And the unvoiced envy, vainly denied in the disparagement of Phil’s cock, came through good and clear. I worked back to the evening of Billy Budd with a masochistic sense that I wouldn’t come out of it well, though I was sure there would be very beautiful and insightful stuff about the music. It began: ‘ Billy Budd —box—Beckwiths—bloody! Not the music, but W. impossible. What poor Ld B thought I don’t know—he, of course, urbane & charming, tho’ at moments somehow steely & abstracted: one wdn’t want to be on the wrong side of him, & so one becomes faintly sycophantic (but that I’m not sure he likes either).

• From Untrue (2018)

  Wyatt, a minister’s granddaughter who had studied deportment, traveled to Europe, and had every privilege as an upper-middle-class girl growing up in Los Angeles’s newly integrated Leimert Park, may have seemed an unlikely candidate for a career in groundbreaking sex research. And she encountered plenty of obstacles in the form of respectability politics once she decided to devote her career to the study of sex—everything from HIV transmission to sexual abuse and intimate partner sexual coercion to the legacy of US slavery and rape, which she analyzes in her book Stolen Women. “Can’t we just tell people you’re a teacher?” her mother once asked. Wyatt is indeed today a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA’s school of medicine. But she cannot forget, she told a reporter several years ago, the time she sat in a hotel lobby in Cleveland, dressed in an emerald green dress with a Peter Pan collar, wedding band on her finger, waiting for her husband so they could set out for a wedding. Two white men walked out of the hotel bar, looked her over, and said, “She must cost at least a hundred dollars.” Controlling images that black women cannot escape did not stop Wyatt; they set her ambition and her work ablaze, igniting a prolific career of insight, resistance, and accomplishment. But we might wonder how much more she and other women could do if they could reclaim their time and all the energy sapped from them by pushing back against bias. June Dobbs Butts, another African American sex researcher, took a different path to change the way we think about women and sex. Dobbs Butts was the daughter of one of Atlanta’s most respected black political influencers, and she was eventually the aunt of Atlanta’s first black mayor. Her family lived in the same neighborhood as Martin Luther King Jr., who was a friend of Dobbs when they were in high school and college. All six Dobbs sisters attended Spelman College—most eventually pursued advanced degrees. But their father still frequently expressed disappointment that he didn’t have a son. It stuck with her, and in one interview she recounted the way when his grandson was born, the whole family made a trek at her father’s behest as if to visit the baby Jesus. In contrast, the birth of a girl was considered ho-hum. It was a lesson about being female that Dobbs Butts never forgot.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Mr. Moon and Mr. Kamiyama knew how to cultivate their disciples to be loyal and well disciplined. Members of the core leadership were trained to follow orders without question or hesitation. Once I had become totally indoctrinated, all I wanted to do was to follow my central figure’s instructions. I was so committed that my new identity completely suppressed the real me. Whenever I look back now, I am amazed at how I was manipulated and how I learned to manipulate others “in the name of God.” I can also see very clearly that the higher I rose in the hierarchy, the more corrupted I became: Moon was making us over in his image. Once he actually told the leaders that if we remained faithful and carried out our missions well, we would each be President of our own country one day. We too would have Mercedes Benz automobiles, personal secretaries, and bodyguards. By this point, I was encouraged to decide what country I might like to run when Unificationism took over the world. I learned how to present the introductory lectures of the Divine Principle within the first three months of my membership. By that time, I had recruited two more people, who became my “spiritual children,” and was instructed to drop out of school, quit my job, and move into the center. My hair was cut short and I started to wear a suit and tie. At the suggestion of a senior member, I had done a 40-day “indemnity condition”—giving up my friends and family for forty days, not seeing them or communicating with them in any way. This is a practice used by several cults and in particular about the two years Mormon ‘missionaries’ are kept from their families. I donated my bank account to the center and would have given my car, except that my parents had the title. I had to abandon my Chilean foster child because I had no way to earn money to send to her. I was asked to sacrifice my “Isaac.” The Moonies reminded me of the Biblical story of Abraham and how God asked him to sacrifice his beloved son. I was told my creative writing, especially my poetry, was my “Isaac.” I dutifully threw out everything I had written—some four hundred pieces. Of course, Isaac never actually had to be sacrificed, but the Moonies manipulated me. They got my cult self to throw out a large stack of papers that my authentic self spent countless hours on, over many years. Work that I had nurtured as if it were nurturing like a child. I put my poems into the garbage can while my superiors watched. The psychological effect was powerful.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I never tell my family when they come to visit about the enema room. I do not tell them what I do every morning with the plastic glove, or about the catheter and the tube in my penis, or the fact that I can’t ever make it hard again. I hide all that from them and talk about the other, more pleasant things, the things they want to hear. I ask Mom to bring me Sunrise at Campobello , the play about the life of Franklin Roosevelt—the great crisis he had gone through when he had been stricken with polio and the comeback he had made, becoming governor, then president of the United States. There are things I am going through here that I know she will never understand. I feel like a big clumsy puppet with all his strings cut. I learn to balance and twist in the chair so no one can tell how much of me does not feel or move anymore. I find it easy to hide from most of them what I am going through. All of us are like this. No one wants too many people to know how much of him has really died in the war. At first I felt that the wound was very interesting. I saw it almost as an adventure. But now it is not an adventure any longer. I see it more and more as a terrible thing that I will have to live with for the rest of my life. Nobody wants to know that I can’t fuck anymore. I will never go up to them and tell them I have this big yellow rubber thing sticking in my penis, attached to the rubber bag on the side of my leg. I am afraid of letting them know how lonely and scared I have become thinking about this wound. It is like some kind of numb twilight zone to me. I am angry and want to kill everyone—all the volunteers and the priests and the pretty girls with the tight short skirts. I am twenty-one and the whole thing is shot, done forever. There is no real healing left anymore, everything that is going to heal has healed already and now I am left with the corpse, the living dead man, the man with the numb legs, the man in the wheelchair, the Easter Seal boy, the cripple, the sexlessman, the sexlessman, the man with the numb dick, the man who can’t make children, the man who can’t stand, the man who can’t walk, the angry lonely man, the bitter man with the nightmares, the murder man, the man who cries in the shower. In one big bang they have taken it all from me, in one clean sweep, and now I am in this place around all the others like me, and though I keep trying not to feel sorry for myself, I want to cry. There is no shortcut around this thing.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  The code of female sexual morality was summarized by one word, modesty—pudicitia in Latin, sōphrosynē in Greek. For a woman, the “single ornament, the noblest beauty, unravaged by age, the highest honor,” was pudicitia. A man perfectly blessed by the gods was given a wife with fertility and pudicitia. If sexual modesty was a monopolistic virtue, it was nevertheless one that allowed surprising nuance and refinement. For women, pudicitia or sōphrosynē implied both an objective fact and a subjective mode of being; it was a state of body and a state of mind. Fundamentally, pudicitia was the corporal integrity of the free woman, untouched until marriage, vouchsafed for one man within marriage. Sexual modesty was inextricably fused with status, and pudicitia often appears alongside libertas as its inseparable adjunct. Nevertheless, pudicitia was a social rather than a strictly legal concept, and it could, exceptionally, even be predicated of slaves. In a vast and highly stratified slave system, where slaves were delicately intertwined with the life of the free family, pudicitia was a powerful and imprecise enough concept that some of its mystique might devolve even on the lowest members of the household; but the deeper truth was that, for slaves, access to honor depended on the discretion of the master.36 An ancient woman lived every moment engaged in a high-stakes game of suspicious observation. “The one glory of woman is pudicitia, and therefore it is incumbent upon her to be, and to seem, chaste.” In the words of a Christian author, “A woman’s reputation for sexual modesty is a fragile thing, like a precious flower that breaks in the soft breeze and is ruined by the light wind.” There were “so many” potential signs of immodesty; her dress, her gait, her voice, her face all acted as external projections of her internal state. The woman’s “only protection” was never to become the cause of any gossip. To guard against the attentions of other men, the Roman matron should dress only so nice as to avoid uncleanness, she should always be chaperoned in public, she should walk with her eyes down and risk rudeness rather than immodesty in her greetings, and she should blush when addressed.37

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  ing or praying, when solitary or surrounded by the crowd, so that he never sees himself in secret in such a way that he would blush to be seen by others, and fi nally so that the eye from which there is no fl ight will never catch him in anything which he would wish to be hidden from human sight.” Here the notion of the sexual being, constantly before the face of God, receives its purest expression. It might seem a fair mea sure of the distance traveled, that we have departed from a civilization whose prime virtue was the wondrously indeterminate command of moderation and have arrived in a civilization where the frequency of involuntary discharge has become a matter of punctilious surveillance. Th e sedimentation of ascetic energy into monastic rules and institutions is, to be sure, one legacy of Christian sexual morality. But this is only one trajectory in the tumultuous fi nal centuries of late antiquity. Around the time the two ascetics of the Spiritual Meadow left the civilized “world” to escape its temptations, a man in the Frankish territories of northern Gaul was succumbing to the power of eros. In the telling of Gregory of Tours, this man, a priest, was “much too attached to the life of luxury, a lover of women, abandoned to gluttony, fornication, and every iniquity.” He eventually fell in love with a certain woman and “often copulated with her, in the manner of a whore.” He cropped her hair, dressed her as a man, and led her to another town where they could live “without suspicion of adultery.” But she was “a freeborn woman, descended from honorable stock. When, after some time, her relations discovered what had passed, they rushed forth to avenge the dishonor brought upon their line. Th ey found the priest and clamped him in irons, but the woman they fl ayed alive.” A bishop named Aetherius pitied the priest and ransomed him from their custody, employ-ing him in the cathedral school and sponsoring his moral rehabilitation. But like a “dog to his vomit,” the priest returned to his sin and tried to seduce the mother of a boy under his tutelage. She, “being a woman of sexual modesty,” informed her husband, whose clan promptly subjected the priest “to excruciating torments” and would have killed him but for the intervention once more of the compassionate bishop. Such tales thrust us into a world that is far less familiar than the settled landscape of cities and ascetic retreats of the eastern Mediterranean. What is so conspicuously absent from the dramas reported by Gregory of Tours is any strong sense of the state, of a public power that acts as the communal arbiter of legitimate violence in the sexual arena. To be sure, private force had always played a role in the  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  After the death of Haninah comes his daughter’s escape from the brothel, and this episode is surely to be read in light of all that has preceded it in this intricate, contrapuntal structure. Th e arrangement suggests two insights. First, harlotry is a meta phor for idolatry. Second, in the parallel episode, the rabbis learn that the Torah will save them from iniquity. When Rabbi Meir comes to test the chastity of his sister- in- law, she tells him that the “manner of women is upon her.” Obviously this ruse compares to the epileptic fi ts or fi ctitious diseases of the other heroines— the “devices of virtue” that are the heroine’s only defense. But this device is something more specifi c, more resonant. Th e virgin tells her prospective customer that she is menstruating. She evades him, in other words, by trying to observe niddah, the ritual separation of a woman commanded by the Torah. Elsewhere in the Talmudim, women use this prohibition to their advantage, even postponing the mikveh to avoid sex. Th e daughter of Haninah here uses her claim to ritual impurity as her device of virtue. She obeys the Torah, and just as the Torah came to the rescue of the rabbis walking past the brothel, the Torah will watch over her, in the brothel. Rabbi Meir is convinced of her purity, and he eff ects her release. Th e Bavli this time does not proclaim openly that the Torah will protect its adherents— perhaps because its parchment has been symbolically burned— but it is effi cacious nonetheless. Th is story ends with a twist. Rabbi Meir rescues his sister- in- law, and then the Romans begin to hunt for him. Walking down the street, he met Romans in hot pursuit. With nowhere else to escape, the Talmud reports, he darted into a nearby brothel, because no one would suspect Rabbi Meir of entering a brothel. Or, the Talmud relates, according to an alternative account, he saw pagans cooking food, dipped a fi nger in it, and pretended to eat. In this epilogue, a farrago of all that has preceded, it is the pretense of harlotry, both literal and meta phorical, that has secured his salvation from the Romans. It is possible to fl irt with sin, or rather to be encompassed about by it, and yet to follow the Torah and enter the next life. Th at is the whole message of the tractate Avodah Zarah— how the faithful may endure in the midst of a hostile culture. Th e creative spirits who wove this tale from such varied threads refashioned the symbols of romance— the virgin’s body and the haunt of shame— into a statement about the boundaries between their community and the contaminations of the outside world. Structurally the  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  dine and prepare for venery. When they retire to a private room, the monk removes his helmet. She sees the face of her uncle and goes stiff with terror. “I cannot bring myself to look upon you, sir, seeing what a shameful thing I have done. How can I pray to God, now that I have befouled myself in this stench and mud?” He convinces her that God will forgive her sin, and she repents. Th ey return to their former life together, in austere holiness, and passersby would come at night to hear her sobbing prayers of penitence. Th e author of Mary’s story has summoned the atmospherics of romance throughout this tale of sin and redemption. Th e romantic elements are not mere “motifs,” decorative ornaments to impress the author’s erudition upon his audience. Th ey are integral to the meaning of the story and add considerably to the psychological drama. Mary is created in the image of a romantic heroine, to accentuate the fact that she experiences the one cata-clysm that cannot befall a romantic heroine. Moreover, the most distinctive element in the story is Mary’s self- relegation to a brothel. Her fl ight is a psychologically compelling reaction to the blunt paralysis of sexual shame. By willfully submitting to the life of prostitution as a penalty for her sexual delinquency, Mary is acting under the traditional rules of honor and shame. Her uncle, Abraham, resurrects her from this social death by presenting a supervenient logic of sexual morality or ga nized around sin and righ teousness. Th e subgenre culminates in what is indisputably its fi nest expression, the Life of Mary of Egypt. Her story is the latest of the four main examples, hav- R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  ing its origins around AD 600. It was destined to become the most pop u lar scion of the family. It is, aesthetically, the most accomplished of the penance narratives, and it is no exaggeration to say that this Life is a real mea-sure of the distance traveled in the passage from a classical to a Christian sexual culture. Th e Life of Mary of Egypt is, like Leucippe and Clitophon, a quintessential text, a mature and representative expression of a wider culture, fi lled with its “struggles and harmonies.” Mary’s story is set within the frame narrative of a monk from Jerusalem, Zosimas. Th is monk experiences an overly satisfi ed spiritual pride— until he meets Mary. As he treks the desert beyond the River Jordan, he glimpses a “shadowy image of the human body,” a naked woman blackened by the sun who runs from him. It is Mary.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  I never tell my family when they come to visit about the enema room. I do not tell them what I do every morning with the plastic glove, or about the catheter and the tube in my penis, or the fact that I can’t ever make it hard again. I hide all that from them and talk about the other, more pleasant things, the things they want to hear. I ask Mom to bring me *Sunrise at Campobello*, the play about the life of Franklin Roosevelt—the great crisis he had gone through when he had been stricken with polio and the comeback he had made, becoming governor, then president of the United States. There are things I am going through here that I know she will never understand.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  THE TRIUMPH AND DISINTEGRATION OF THE FREE WILLThe sack of Rome by a Visigothic army in AD 410 was a profound moral and mental shock; in its aftermath, confusion and recrimination quickly followed. Among the most visceral horrors of the experience was that the immemorial adjunct of war, sexual violence against women, was visited on the eternal city. The rape of wives and virgin daughters was a bitter tragedy; the rape of nuns was, for many, unambiguous proof that the Christian God was uninterested in Roman fortunes. Such a dark insult to Roman honor demanded a reckoning. The crisis of AD 410 was the proximate cause for the composition of Augustine’s magnum opus, The City of God. The issue of sexual violence called forth some of the most astonishing, and indelicate, passages of the entire Augustinian oeuvre. In the defense of his religion, the bishop of Hippo put on trial a whole cluster of deep and usually implicit assumptions about the nature of female sexual honor, as old as the hills of Rome. He insisted that female purity was a mental, intentional, and not an objective, physical state. “One can only assent or refuse with his mind. Who of sound sense would believe that someone who has been seized and forced to use his flesh to slake the lust of someone else has lost his sexual honor?” To console the wounded pride of Rome in the aftermath of defeat, he attacked Roman values at their core. He insisted, in short, that sin, rather than shame, provided the only real scale of sexual values.59

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  “COME ON KIDS , let’s go!” The next morning we wake to the sound of Cookie hollering. I hurry Rosie and Norman to dress and shoo them both to the car as Cookie stands with her hands on her hips. “What time of year is it?” she says. “You know the drill.” We realize we’re on our way to get registered for school. I have no problem finding clothes big enough to camouflage how skinny I am from the administrators—by now, all my clothes are baggy. I pull my hair back into a ponytail that gathers at the bald spot, tucking the gray pieces under the black hair to hide them from the school attendants’ view. Cookie starts the car and sets off toward the back roads. It only takes five minutes to register me for my first year of high school in Centereach. After the secretary informs us that we arrived late to register and they’ve already given physicals, they tell me to report to the nurse’s office on the first day of school. This I make note to “forget,” or I’ll be faced with questions about my bag-of-bones build. When Cookie and I walk back outside, I put my head down to avoid being seen with her and her car, even though there are no schoolmates around. I have yet to say a word to her since she’s returned to us. While Cookie walks Norman next door to register him at the middle school, Rosie and I sit in the car. “We won’t be on the same bus anymore, will we?” she says. “No, but you’re going to love third grade. You’ll learn multiplication and division and how to write Rosie in pretty script letters. Isn’t it exciting?” When her separation anxiety is still visible, I promise her I’ll help her with all of her science projects. “Maybe we’ll even build a volcano out of mud!” I tell her. “Yeah . . .” she muses, then stops and looks up at me. “You don’t have to pay for mud, do you?” “No, sweetie. You don’t.” She nods and stares out the window watching for Cookie and Norman. My eyes well with tears. At seven years old, Rosie has come to understand that we’re poor. We head home and wait a few hours before going school clothes shopping. Once dusk falls, Cookie flags us back into the car and we head out in search of Salvation Army bins. We know it will take a few dives in these Dumpsters to find enough clothes for all three of us, and we’re familiar with Cookie’s shopping spree strategy: First she pulls the passenger side of the car next to the Dumpster opening. Then, with the window open, I climb on the seat and stick my head through the hole to look down into the Dumpster.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  and sets off toward the back roads. It only takes five minutes to register me for my first year of high school in Centereach. After the secretary informs us that we arrived late to register and they’ve already given physicals, they tell me to report to the nurse’s office on the first day of school. This I make note to “forget,” or I’ll be faced with questions about my bag-of-bones build. When Cookie and I walk back outside, I put my head down to avoid being seen with her and her car, even though there are no schoolmates around. I have yet to say a word to her since she’s returned to us. While Cookie walks Norman next door to register him at the middle school, Rosie and I sit in the car. “We won’t be on the same bus anymore, will we?” she says. “No, but you’re going to love third grade. You’ll learn multiplication and division and how to write Rosie in pretty script letters. Isn’t it exciting?” When her separation anxiety is still visible, I promise her I’ll help her with all of her science projects. “Maybe we’ll even build a volcano out of mud!” I tell her. “Yeah . . .” she muses, then stops and looks up at me. “You don’t have to pay for mud, do you?” “No, sweetie. You don’t.” She nods and stares out the window watching for Cookie and Norman. My eyes well with tears. At seven years old, Rosie has come to understand that we’re poor. We head home and wait a few hours before going school clothes shopping. Once dusk falls, Cookie flags us back into the car and we head out in search of Salvation Army bins. We know it will take a few dives in these Dumpsters to find enough clothes for all three of us, and we’re familiar with Cookie’s shopping spree strategy: First she pulls the passenger side of the car next to the Dumpster opening. Then, with the window open, I climb on the seat and stick my head through the hole to look down into the Dumpster. Once my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, if I see more clothes than garbage and useless debris, I step on the window ledge and squeeze myself through the sloped metal opening in the bin to get inside. I begin throwing clothes out through the hole and into the car. Using the car’s dome light to see, the kids and Cookie root through the clothes to pick out the ones we could possibly use. I locate a pair of jeans and a plaid skirt for Rosie. “Gi!” she cries. “Look, this pink shirt still has the tags on it!” “It’s brand-new for you to wear on the first day!” For Norman, I fold a nice pair of corduroys and a couple turtlenecks into a

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  If the girl’s re sis tance is “hearty,” Clinias warns not to use “force, because she is not yet persuaded.” But “as soon as her will begins to weaken, act your role in this play, lest your drama fail to reach its conclusion.” Th e theatrical meta phor is clever, for the astute reader will realize that Clinias does not know exactly what sort of drama he has been cast in. His assump- tions about the will— as a murky and pliable thing— contradict the social grammar of female respectability and of the romance in general.  Before the fi rst two books are fi nished, Achilles Tatius off ers even more smirking refl ections on the protocols of romantic virginity. When Leucippe proved willing to submit to the sexual advances of Clitophon, her virginity was saved, as it were, against her will, through the last- minute intervention of her mother, who was alerted by a dream. On discovering her daughter in a compromising situation, Leucippe’s mother off ers a doleful speech. She regrets leaving a war zone to come to Tyre, because Leucippe seemed ready to lose her chastity willfully. “Would that you had been outraged by a con- quering Th racian, for at least corruption by coercion carries no shame!” Th is, of course, is not true, at least not in romance, which is a whole genre built on the need of respectable women to preserve their physical integrity against violent incursions. Leucippe strikes back against her mother’s dia- tribe with a canny defense that makes equally dubious use of romantic protocols. “Impugn not my virginity, mother . . . for this I know is true: no one has done dishonor to my maidenhood.” In defense of herself Leucippe turns the deepest premise of the romance, the heroine’s chastity, into a mere technicality. Achilles has inverted the basic tension between internal purity and external endangerment to create a heroine who is internally compro- mised but externally safeguarded. Leucippe states her wish that there was some sort of virginity test to prove her innocence— a wish that is fulfi lled at the novel’s climax.  After the failed seduction, Leucippe’s virginal resolve is steeled, and she even refuses future opportunities to sleep with Clitophon. Leucippe does not so much develop as a character, as the story itself returns to conven- tional order. She becomes a romantic heroine to fi t. Th e romance builds toward the fi nal and gravest threat to her chastity, the gruesome scene in which her master, Th ersander, attempts to rape her. Although the setting is ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  a private encounter between a master and his slave, the elements of the scene are perfectly homologous with the escapes of Anthia and Tarsia from the public brothel.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  monk disguises himself in “worldly apparel” and goes to her. In early Christian and Jewish adaptations of the romance, the rescuer invading the brothel must dress as a Roman soldier; in those legends, to pass into the brothel is fi guratively to step into the secular world, a world identifi ed with the ruling power. In the age of Serapion, there was no clear- cut divide between the social order and the Christian church. Th ere was only the city— symbol of sin and civilization— and the ascetic who entered it as an outsider. And unlike the chaste girls of romance whose corporal integrity is miraculously preserved in the brothel, Th ais has, quite fl agrantly, long since lost her physical purity. When Serapion meets Th ais, he sees a bed and out of shame inquires about fi nding another, less visible place for their assignation. She assures him that the bed is secluded and adds, “If it is God you fear, the one who knows our secrets will see us wherever we go.” Th e monk is struck and asks if she knows of God. She confesses that she was baptized as a child but she never learned Christian teaching. She fell at the monk’s feet. “I know there R O M A N C E I N T H E L AT E C L A S S I C A L WO R L D  Table 1 Serapion and Th ais Early Version Elaborated Version Includes prologue No Yes Th ais Not named Named Place Village of Egypt Alexandria Cause of prostitution Unstated Mother prostituted her Encounter Fortuitous Inspired by divine foresight to fi nd her Prompt to penance Hears prayers Believes in God and shamed Includes Antony? No Yes Ending Immured Immured, in grim detail is repentance for sinners, but by my wickedness I have exceeded the mea-sure of forgiveness which can be off ered.” He assures her that there is salvation, even for her. She gathered her worldly wealth and burned it “in the middle of the city.” Th ais symbolizes a society superfi cially baptized but not reordered to strive for God— a reasonable likeness of the post- Th eodosian world. As in the primitive version of the tale, Serapion leads the penitent prostitute to a female monastery. Th ais is immured in a small cell with a hole just wide enough for food to be passed in. But in the refi ned version, the bare details of her enclosure and penance have become a grotesque portrait of human debasement. Th e cell is dark. Serapion seals it with lead himself. When Th