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.

Page 233 of 267 · 20 per page

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  In the evening he used to send me to bed early: even before nine o’clock, though Vernon always let me stay up with him reading till eleven or twelve o’clock. One night I went up to my bedroom on the next floor, but returned almost at once to get a book and have a read in bed, which was a rare treat to me. I was afraid to go into the sitting-room; but crept into the dining-room where there were a few books, though not so interesting as those in the parlour; the door between the two rooms was ajar. Suddenly I heard my father say: “He’s a little Fenian.” “Fenian”, repeated Vernon in amazement, “really, Governor, I don’t believe he knows the meaning of the word; he’s only just eleven, you must remember.” “I tell you” broke in my father, “he talked of James Stephen, the Fenian Head-Centre, today with wild admiration. He’s a Fenian alright, but how did he catch it?” “I’m sure I don’t know”, replied Vernon, “he reads a great deal and is very quick: I’ll find out about it.” “No, no!” said my father, “the thing is to cure him: he must go to some school in England, that’ll cure him.” I waited to hear no more but got my book and crept upstairs; so because I loved the Fenian Head-Centre I must be a Fenian. “How stupid Father is”, was my summing up, but England tempted me, England—life was opening out. It was at the Royal School in the summer after my sex-experiences with Strangways and Howard that I first began to notice dress. A boy in the sixth form named Milman had taken a liking to me and though he was five years older than I was, he often went with Howard and myself for walks. He was a stickler for dress, said that no one but “cads” (a name I learned from him for the first time) and common folk would wear a made-up tie: he gave me one of his scarves and showed me how to make a running lover’s knot in it. On another occasion he told me that only “cads” would wear trowsers frayed or repaired. Was it Milman’s talk that made me self-conscious or my sex-awakening through Howard and Strangways? T couldn’t say; but at this time I had a curious and prolonged experience. My brother Vernon hearing me once complain of my dress, got me three suits of clothes, one in black with an Eton jacket for best and a tall hat and the others in tweeds: he gave me shirts, too, and ties, and I began to take great care of my appearance. At our evening parties the girls and young women (Vernon’s friends) were kinder to me than ever and I found myself wondering whether I really looked “nice” as they said.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  2. Its not being eaten uncooked shows us that we must not believe that Jesus is a mere man. Also, its not being cooked with water shows that we must not believe that Jesus was conceived or born like other men. Again, because they ate it cooked with fire, we must believe that the Incarnation of the Word and the consecration of His Body are worked by the power of the Holy Ghost. 3. They were commanded to eat the head of the lamb with the feet and the purtenance. From that we must believe that in this Sacrament, Christ is contained and received whole and undivided, with Godhead, Body, and Soul. (2) The second part of this type is the three accompaniments with which they were wont to eat the lamb: 1, wild lettuce; 2, unleavened bread; 3, the lamb’s blood. The wild lettuce signifies sorrow for sin; the unleavened bread signifies a pure intention with good works; the lamb’s blood signifies the memory and imitation of our Lord’s Passion, by which things the faithful soul ought to be ready. 1. St. Gregory says, ‘The wild lettuce is very bitter, and the flesh of the Paschal lamb is to be eaten with this, because we ought to have very great sorrow for our sins when we receive the Body of our Lord, that the bitterness of penance may take away all love of a sinful life.’ 2. St. Paul tells us not to feast with the old leaven, that is, in the corruption of pride, which is against God; nor with the leaven of malice, which is against our neighbour; nor with the leaven of wickedness, which is against ourselves; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth, that is, in freedom from sin and in the truth of good works; so that we may strive always to live in newness of life, without any deceitfulness of the olden leaven. St. Gregory says, ‘He eats unleavened bread who does good works without that corruption of vain-glory which comes from the leaven of malice.’ ‘He eats bread without the leaven of malice who does works of mercy without admixture of sin, taking care not to gain wrongly what in a sense he gives rightly. This is the sacrifice of praise about which Scripture speaks. He offers a sacrifice of praise with leaven who brings to the Lord a sacrifice of that which he has gained by robbery in the leaven of wickedness.’ Now, the soul that ate leavened bread in the forbidden time had to perish from Israel. To eat leavened bread thus is to take delight in any filthiness of sin which we commit in ourselves.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 189 ff.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own. I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I 'pretensions' to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has 'pitted' himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn't do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not. Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to 'carry that line,' as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation.

• From Speak, Memory (1966)

  Around eight in the evening, the hall would house an accumulation of greatcoats and overshoes. In a committee room, next to the library, at a long baize-covered table (where those beautifully pointed pencils had been laid out), my father and his colleagues would gather to discuss some phase of their opposition to the Tsar. Above the hubbub of voices, a tall clock in a dark corner would break into Westminster chimes; and beyond the committee room were mysterious depths—storerooms, a winding staircase, a pantry of sorts—where my cousin Yuri and I used to pause with drawn pistols on our way to Texas and where one night the police placed a fat, blear-eyed spy who went laboriously down on his knees before our librarian, Lyudmila Borisovna Grinberg, when discovered. But how on earth could I discuss all this with schoolteachers? 5The reactionary press never ceased to attack my father’s party, and I had got quite used to the more or less vulgar cartoons which appeared from time to time—my father and Milyukov handing over Saint Russia on a plate to World Jewry and that sort of thing. But one day, in the winter of 1911 I believe, the most powerful of the Rightist newspapers employed a shady journalist to concoct a scurrilous piece containing insinuations that my father could not let pass. Since the well-known rascality of the actual author of the article made him “non-duelable” (neduelesposobnïy, as the Russian dueling code had it), my father called out the somewhat less disreputable editor of the paper in which the article had appeared. A Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety. It took the editor several days to make up his mind whether or not to accept the challenge. On the last of these days, a Monday, I went, as usual, to school. In consequence of my not reading the newspapers, I was absolutely ignorant of the whole thing. Sometime during the day I became aware that a magazine opened at a certain page was passing from hand to hand and causing titters. A well-timed swoop put me in possession of what proved to be the latest copy of a cheap weekly containing a lurid account of my father’s challenge, with idiotic comments on the choice of weapons he had offered his foe. Sly digs were taken at his having reverted to a feudal custom that he had criticized in his own writings. There was also a good deal about the number of his servants and the number of his suits. I found out that he had chosen for second his brother-in-law, Admiral Kolomeytsev, a hero of the Japanese war. During the battle of Tsushima, this uncle of mine, then holding the rank of captain, had managed to bring his destroyer alongside the burning flagship and save the naval commander-in-chief.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  Then stealing up into the alcove where the princess was fast asleep, he got into bed to her without ceremony, re- gardless of her high birth and the obligations he was under to her, and without having in the first instance ob- tained her consent. The first intimation she had of his arrival was to find herself in his arms ; but being- astrons: woman she broke loose from his grasp, and, demanding who he was, made such good use of her hands and nails that he tried to stuff the quilt into her mouth for fear she should cry out. But he never could accomplish his purpose, for as she found that he was doing his best to dishonour her, she did her best to defend herself, and called out to her lady of honour, an aged and very pru- dent woman, who slept in the same room, and she has- tened in her shift to her mistress's aid. The gentleman, finding he was discovered, was so much afraid of being recognized that he hurried away through his trap-door as fast as he could, no less over- come at the plight in which he returned from his enter- prise than he had been keen-set and confident when he entered upon it. The candle was still burning on the table before his mirror, which showed his face all scratched and bitten, and the blood streaming from it over his fine shirt. " Thou art rightly served, per- nicious beauty ! " he said, apostrophising his own lacer- ated visage. " Thy vain promises set upon an impossi- ble enterprise, and one which, far from increasing my good fortune, will, perhaps, bring upon me a world of trouble. What will become of me if she knows that I have committed this folly in violation of my promise .'' The least that can happen to me will be to be banished from her presence. Why did I employ fraud to steal what my birth and my good looks might have obtained for me by lawful ways } Could I expect to make myself 38 THE HEPTAMERON OF THE INnel 4 master of her heart by violence ? Ought I not have waited till love put me in possession of it in recompense for my patience and my long service ? For without love all the merits and power of man are nothing."

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  A. The first way of eating the Body of our Lord is the sacramental way only. Bad Christians eat in this way. Being in mortal sin, and thus receiving with polluted lips the adorable Body of Jesus, they shut up their souls by their uncleanness and their hardness, as if with mud and stone, against the inflowing of the virtue of His goodness. These eat and do not eat. They eat, indeed, because they receive the Lord’s Body sacramentally; and yet they do not eat, because they do not receive the spiritual virtue of the Sacrament, that is, salvation of soul. St. Gregory says, ‘In sinners and unworthy receivers there are indeed the true Flesh and the true Blood of Christ, that is, by presence and essence, but not with life-giving power.’ St. Augustin says, ‘He who is without Christ eats not His Flesh nor drinks His Blood; and if he daily receive the Sacrament of so great a thing, he receives it to judgment. He is without Christ who turns his heart away from Him and gives it up to sin. Such a one may be called wretched indeed, because so great a good as this comes to him often, and he neither receives nor perceives any spiritual gain.’ R. There are three kinds of persons among those who receive sacramentally only: (1) the malicious; (2) the deceitful; (3) the presumptuous. The first receive the Lord’s Body with a will to go on in sin. The second are hypocrites, who, seeming outwardly good and being inwardly bad, yet come to the Altar as if they were in a state of grace. The third are those who are bad in the highest degree, and yet dare presumptuously to go to Communion. We will consider the first two kinds in this Meditation, and the presumptuous in the next. (1) The first kind of bad communicants is the malicious. These draw near to God with their lips by receiving the Holy Sacrament, but their hearts are far from Him by their will to sin. Three great evils follow them: a, deepening of their sin; b, further separation from the grace of Christ; c, condemnation to unending punishment. a. St. Augustin says, ‘Because they have a will to go on sinning, I assert that they are darkened and not purified by receiving the Holy Eucharist.’ b. The longer they cherish their bad thoughts the worse they grow, and the more they are separated by them from God. c. St. Ambrose says in terrible words, ‘He is unworthy who comes to the Holy Eucharist with an indevout mind. He who abides in a will to sin is guilty of the Body and Blood of the Lord; that is, he shall be punished as if he had slain Christ.’

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  These two opposite classes of affection seem to be direct and elementary endowments of our nature. Associationists would have it that they are, on the other hand, secondary phenomena arising from a rapid computation of the sensible pleasures or pains to which our prosperous or debased personal predicament is likely to lead, the sum of the represented pleasures forming the self-satisfaction, and the sum of the represented pains forming the opposite feeling of shame. No doubt, when we are self-satisfied, we do fondly rehearse all possible rewards for our desert, and when in a fit of self-despair we forebode evil. But the mere expectation of reward is not the self-satisfaction, and the mere apprehension of the evil is not the self-despair, for there is a certain average tone of self-feeling which each one of us carries about with him, and which is independent of the objective reasons we may have for satisfaction or discontent. That is, a very meanly-conditioned man may abound in unfaltering conceit, and one whose success in life is secure and who is esteemed by all may remain diffident of his powers to the end. One may say, however, that the normal provocative of self-feeling is one's actual success or failure, and the good or bad actual position one holds in the world. "He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, and said what a good boy am I." A man with a broadly extended empirical Ego, with powers that have uniformly brought him success, with place and wealth and friends and fame, is not likely to be visited by the morbid diffidences and doubts about himself which he had when he was a boy. "Is not this great Babylon, which I have planted?" [262] Whereas he who has made one blunder after another, and still lies in middle life among the failures at the foot of the hill, is liable to grow all sicklied o'er with self-distrust, and to shrink from trials with which his powers can really cope. The emotions themselves of self-satisfaction and abasement are of a unique sort, each as worthy to be classed as a primitive emotional species as are, for example, rage or pain. Each has its own peculiar physiognomical expression. In self-satisfaction the extensor muscles are innervated, the eye is strong and glorious, the gait rolling and elastic, the nostril dilated, and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  One day my father sent for me and I went with a petty officer to his vessel in the harbor: my right ear had bled on to my collar. As soon as my father noticed it and saw the older scars, he got angry and took me back to the school and told Mrs. Frost what he thought of her, and her punishments. Immediately afterwards, it seems to me I was sent to live with my eldest brother Vernon, ten years older than myself, who was in lodgings with friends in Galway while going to the College. There I spent the next five years, which passed leaving a blank. I learned nothing in those years except how to play “tig”, “hide and seek”, “footer” and ball. I was merely a healthy, strong, little animal without an ache or pain or trace of thought. Then I remember an interlude at Belfast where Vernon and I lodged with an old Methodist who used to force me to go to church with him and drew on a little black skullcap during the Service, which filled me with shame and made me hate him. There is a period in life when every thing peculiar or individual, excites dislike and is in itself an offense. I learned here to “mitch” and lie simply to avoid school and to play, till my brother found I was coughing and having sent for a doctor, was informed that I had congestion of the lungs; the truth being that I played all day and never came home for dinner, seldom indeed before seven o’clock, when I knew Vernon would be back. I mention this incident because, while confined to the house, I discovered under the old Methodist’s bed, a set of doctor’s books with colored plates of the insides and the pudenda of men and women. I devoured all the volumes and bits of knowledge from them stuck to me for many a year. But curiously enough the main sex fact was not revealed to me then; but in talks a little later with boys of my own age. I learned nothing in Belfast but rules of games and athletics. My brother Vernon used to go to a gymnasium every evening and exercise and box. To my astonishment he was not among the best; so while he was boxing I began practicing this and that, drawing myself up till my chin was above the bar, and repeating this till one evening Vernon found I could do it thirty times running: his praise made me proud.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  There could be no such thing as objective journalism. Agee opened the book by wondering out loud how a Harvard-educated, middle-class man like himself could write about poor whites without turning them into objects of pity or disgust. He did not want to be a mere gawker. How could he “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of ‘honest journalism’”? Was it possible to convey the “cruel radiance of what is”? Probably not. 57 So Agee experimented with different strategies, offering detailed descriptions of material objects: shoes, overalls, the sparse arrangement of furnishings in the tenant's home. With a meticulous attention to detail, he tried in words to imitate the camera’s “ice-cold” vision. In another of his departures from conventional reporting, he interspersed what he imagined were the unspoken thoughts of the poor tenant with the uncensored insults he had heard from the landlord. Inside the mind of the tenant, he voiced disbelief: how did he get “trapped,” how did he become “beyond help, beyond hope”? He gave his subjects real feelings, descriptive laments. The landlord’s cruelty comes through his laughter over Agee’s enjoyment of the tenants’ “home cooking.” The landlord curses a poor cropper as a “dirty son-of-a-bitch” who had bragged that he hadn’t bought his family a bar of soap in five years. A woman in one of the tenant families was, in the landlord’s words, the “worst whore” in this part of this country—second only to her mother. The whole bunch were, to the owner, “the lowest trash you can find.” 58 There was a method to Agee’s madness. In this strangely introspective, deeply disturbing narrative, the author tries to force readers to look beyond conventional ways of seeing the poor. Instead of blaming them, he asks his audience to acknowledge their own complicity. The poor are not dull or slow- witted, he insists; they have merely internalized a kind of “anesthesia,” which numbs them against the “shame and insult of discomforts, insecurities, and inferiorities.” The southern middle class deserves the greater portion of shame, and especially those who excused their own callous indifference with the line, “They are ‘used’ to it.” 59 Despite its subsequent literary success, Agee’s unsettling text reached few readers in 1941. For its part, Odum’s work came under attack for speaking above (rather than to) the poor tenant farmer. One of Odum’s most outspoken critics was the Vanderbilt University English professor and poet Donald Davidson, who was also hostile to the TVA, which he saw as evidence of northern meddling. As one of the contributors to I’ll Take My Stand, Davidson defended the old agrarian ideal of the South.

• From My Life and Loves, Vol. 1 (of 4) (1922)

  He was very quick and throwing his head aside, escaped the full force of the blow; still the seam of the new ball grazed his cheek-bone and broke the skin: everyone stood amazed: only people who know the strength of English conventions can realise the sensation. Jones himself did not know what to do but took out his handkerchief to mop the blood, the skin being just broken. As for me, I walked away by myself. I had broken the supreme law of our schoolboy honor: never to give away our dissensions to a master, still less to boys and masters from another school; I had sinned in public, too, and before everyone; I’d be universally condemned. The truth is, I was desperate, dreadfully unhappy, for since the breakdown of the fags’ revolt the lower boys had drawn away from me and the older boys never spoke to me if they could help it and then it was always as “Pat.” I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters. However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it. The Mathematical Master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story. “I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school”, was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and “the little people” which had been taught us by our nurses and though only half believed in; yet enriched and glorified life,—all this was lost to me. My head in especial, was full of stories of Banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English. “I wish I had known that you were being fagged”, Stackpole said when he had heard all, “I can easily remedy that”, and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags’ list and wrote in my name in the First Mathematical Division. “There”, he said with a smile, “you are now in the Upper School where you belong. I think”, he added, “I had better go and tell the Doctor what I’ve done. Don’t be down-hearted, Harris”, he added, “it’ll all come right.”

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  there was no one, great or small, but was bent on taking part in this hunt. The poor friars, seeing such a multi- tude coming after them, hid themselves each on his island, as Adam did from the sight of God when he had eaten the apple. Half dead with shame and the fear of punishment, they were caught and led away prisoners, amid the jeers and hootings of men and women. " These good fathers," said one, " preach chastity to us and want to foul our wives." " They dare not touch money," said the husband, "but they are ready enough to handle women's thighs, which are far more dangerous." " They are sepulchres," said others, " whitened without, but full of rottenness within." " By their fruits you shall know the nature of these trees." In short, all the passages of Scripture against hypocrites were cast in the teeth of the poor prisoners. At, last the warden came to the rescue. They were given up to him at his request, upon his assuring the magistrate that he would punish them more severely than secular justice itself could do, and that, by way of reparation to the offended parties, they should say as many masses and prayers as might be de- sired. As he was a worthy man, they were chaptered in such a manner that they never afterwards passed over the river without crossing themselves, and beseeching God to keep them out of all temptation. If this boatwoman had the wit to trick two such bad men, what should they do who have seen and read of so many fine examples } If women who know nothing, who scarcely hear two good sermons in a year, and have no time to think of anything but earning their bread, do yet carefully guard their chastity, what ought not others of their sex to do who, having their livelihood secured, have nothing to do but to read the Holy Scrip- tures, hear sermons, and exercise themselves in all sorts 46 THE HEPTAMERON OP THE [Hove/ s of virtues ? This is the test by which it is known that the heart is truly virtuous, for the more simple and un- enlightened the individual, the greater are the works of God's spirit. Unhappy the lady who does not carefully preserve the treasure which does her so much honour when well kept, and so much dishonour when she keeps it ill ! " It strikes me, Geburon," said Longarine, " that it does not need much virtue to refuse a Cordelier. On the contrary, I should rather think it impossible to love such people." " Those who are not accustomed to have such lovers as you have," replied Geburon, " do not think so con- temptuously of Cordeliers. They are well-made, strap- ping fellows, can talk like angels, and are for the most part importunate as devils. Accordingly, the grisettes who escape out of their hands may fairly be called virtuous."

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  Their animal heat has evaporated; the feelings that accompanied them are so lacking in the recall, or so different from those we now enjoy, that no judgment of identity can be decisively cast. Resemblance among the parts of a continuum of feelings (especially bodily feelings) experienced along with things widely different in all other regards, thus constitutes the real and verifiable 'personal identity' which we feel. There is no other identity than this in the 'stream' of subjective consciousness which we described in the last chapter. Its parts differ, but under all their differences they are knit in these two ways; and if either way of knitting disappears, the sense of unity departs. If a man wakes up some fine day unable to recall any of his past experiences, so that he has to learn his biography afresh, or if he only recalls the facts of it in a cold abstract way as things that he is sure once happened; or if, without this loss of memory, his bodily and spiritual habits all change during the night, each organ giving a different tone, and the act of thought becoming aware of itself in a different way; he feels, and he says, that he is a changed person. He disowns his former me, gives himself a new name, identifies his present life with nothing from out of the older time. Such cases are not rare in mental pathology; but, as we still have some reasoning to do, we had better give no concrete account of them until the end of the chapter. This description of personal identity will be recognized by the instructed reader as the ordinary doctrine professed by the empirical school. Associationists in England and France, Herbartians in Germany, all describe the Self as an aggregate of which each part, as to its being, is a separate fact. So far so good, then; thus much is true whatever farther things may be true; and it is to the imperishable glory of Hume and Herbart and their successors to have taken so much of the meaning of personal identity out of the clouds and made of the Self an empirical and verifiable thing. But in leaving the matter here, and saying that this sum of passing things is all, these writers have neglected certain more subtle aspects of the Unity of Consciousness, to which we next must turn. Our recent simile of the herd of cattle will help us.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  Chute explains that Reuben Bean’s immaturity comes from social disadvantages; he “was at a childish level, not in his intelligence but in his emotional development.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 169. Chute also said in another interview that the minimum wage produces genuine male rage and that women were better able to endure than men. See “Chute’s Book Is a Real American Classic,” [Norwalk, CT] Hour, February 21, 1985. 14. Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina (New York: Plume, 1992), 12, 22–24, 69, 80–81, 91, 98–99, 123. 15. Ibid., 102. Chute also talked about the shame of using food stamps. “But in the little stores they were kind of mean to us. Food stamps, you know, ugh. They come right out with it. I got to the point where I didn’t want to go to the store anymore, I was so embarrassed. I really dreaded going. There was a lot of times when Michael and I were eligible for food stamps that we didn’t go, because I felt so humiliated by it.” See Lesser and Chute, “An Interview with Carolyn Chute,” 169. 16. Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina, 309. 17. For his July Fourth speech, see William Jefferson Clinton, “What Today Means to Me,” Pittsburgh Post Gazette, July 4, 1993. 18. Ibid. On Clinton standing up to his stepfather, see Ron Fournier, “Early Lessons Serve Him Well,” Beaver County [PA] Times, January 20, 1993. On The Man from Hope film, see David M. Timmerman, “1992 Presidential Candidate Films: The Contrasting Narratives of George Bush and Bill Clinton,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 364–73, esp. 367. 19. Mike Feinsilber, “But Others Say, ‘You’re No Thomas Jefferson,’” Prescott [AZ] Courier, January 17, 1993. 20. On describing Clinton as a poor sharecropper, see Todd S. Purdum, “If Kennedy’s Musical Was ‘Camelot,’ What’s Clinton’s?,” New York Times, January 17, 1993. See AP photograph of Clinton with the mule George in Centralia, Illinois, July 21, 1992, in Brian Resnick, “Campaign Flashback: Bill Clinton in Summer ’92,” National Journal; and Josh O’Bryant, “Well-Known Democratic Mule of Walker Dies,” Walker County [GA] Messenger, May 14, 2008. 21. Roy Reed, “Clinton Country: Despite Its Image as a Redneck Dogpatch, Arkansas Has Long Been a Breeding Ground of Progressive Politics,” New York Times Magazine, September 6, 1992; Peter Applebome, “Suddenly Arkansas’s Being Noticed, but a First Glance Can Be Misleading,” New York Times, September 26, 1992; Hank Harvey, “Arkansas Needs Clinton’s Candidacy,” Toledo Blade, October 4, 1992; Molly Ivins, “Clinton Still a Kid from Arkansas,” [Wilmington, NC] Star-News, July 15, 2004; Randall Bennett Woods, J. William Fulbright, Vietnam, and the Search for a Cold War Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 280. 22.

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  12 Dorothy Allison displayed just as much of an interest in class as Chute. She tells the story of difficult and sometimes violent relationships between men and women. Her female characters are less likely victims, swept up in circumstances, in the manner of Chute’s female Beans; Allison’s women have more material resources and greater support from their family members. But both writers depict emotionally stunted poor white men and recognize that everyday burdens fall more heavily on their women. 13 In Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, young Anne “Bone” Boatwright endures physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother’s second husband, Daddy Glen Waddell. In the town of Greenville, South Carolina, as it is for the Beans of Egypt, Maine, the Boatwrights are despised. Daddy Glen’s festering hatred of Bone comes from deeply lodged feelings of humiliation. He comes from a middle-class family, and he is the one member who never amounted to anything. He is a manual laborer and longs for a home like those of his brothers, one a dentist, the other a lawyer. “Nothing I do goes right,” he grouses. “I put my hand in the honey jar and it comes out shit.” He is jealous of Earle Boatwright’s prowess with women too. Unlike the Beans, though, the Boatwright men tend to be affectionate and protective of the women and children in their extended family. 14 Allison is fascinated by the thin line that separates the stepfather’s family from the mother’s; they might have more money, but they’re shallow and cruel. Her cousins whisper that their car is like “nigger trash.” Like Chute’s Pomerleaus, they feel compelled to snub those below them. It is shame that keeps the class system in place. 15 By the end of the novel, Bone frees herself from Glen, and in the process loses out to him when her psychically damaged mother decides to abandon the family and take off for California with him. In running away, her mother repeats the strategy of crackers a century earlier: to flee and start over somewhere else. Ruminating on her mother’s life—pregnant at fifteen, wed then widowed at seventeen, and married a second time to Glen by twenty-one—Bone wonders whether she herself is equipped to make more sensible decisions. She won’t condemn her mother, because she doesn’t know for certain that she will be able to avoid some of the same mistakes. 16 The lesson here is that the choices people make are both class- and gender- charged.

• From The Hours (1998)

  She does not move. She finds the window of the old woman, with its three ceramic statuettes (invisible from so far down). The old woman must be at home, she hardly ever goes out. Clarissa has an urge to shout up to her, as if she were some sort of family member; as if she should be informed. Clarissa puts off, at least for another minute or two, the inevitable next act. She remains with Richard, touching his shoulder. She feels (and is astonished at herself ) slightly embarrassed by what has happened. She wonders why she doesn’t weep. She is aware of the sound of her own breathing. She is aware of the slippers still on Richard’s feet, of the sky reflected in the growing puddle of blood. It ends here, then, on a pallet of concrete, under the clotheslines, amid shards of glass. She runs her hand, gently, down from his shoulder along the frail curve of his back. Guiltily, as if she is doing something forbidden, she leans over and rests her forehead against his spine while it is still, in some way, his; while he is still in some way Richard Worthington Brown. She can smell the stale flannel of the robe, the winey sharpness of his unbathed flesh. She would like to speak to him, but can’t. She simply rests her head, lightly, against his back. If she were able to speak she would say something—she can’t tell what, exactly—about how he has had the courage to create, and how, perhaps more important, he has had the courage to love singularly, over the decades, against all reason. She would talk to him about how she herself, Clarissa, loved him in return, loved him enormously, but left him on a street corner over thirty years ago (and, really, what else could she have done?). She would confess to her desire for a relatively ordinary life (neither more nor less than what most people desire), and to how much she wanted him to come to her party and exhibit his devotion in front of her guests. She would ask his forgiveness for shying away, on what would prove to be the day of his death, from kissing him on the lips, and for telling herself she did so only for the sake of his health. Mrs. Brown The candles are lit. The song is sung. Dan, blowing the candles out, sprays a few tiny droplets of clear spittle onto the icing’s smooth surface. Laura applauds and, after a moment, Richie does, too. “Happy birthday, darling,” she says. A spasm of fury rises unexpectedly, catches in her throat. He is coarse, gross, stupid; he has sprayed spit onto the cake. She herself is trapped here forever, posing as a wife. She must get through this night, and then tomorrow morning, and then another night here, in these rooms, with nowhere else to go. She must please; she must continue.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Because you are a noble yourself! Your father is a great gentleman and you are a princess. A chasm separates you from the rest of us, who do not belong to your circle of ruling families...' Yes, Tom, we feel nobility and distance and we should not try to live where we are not known and we are not known know how to assess, for we shall have nothing but humiliations from it, and we shall be found ridiculously proud. Yes, – everyone found me ridiculously haughty. I wasn't told, but I felt it every hour and I suffered from it too. Ha! In a country where cake is eaten with a knife, and where princes speak false German, and where it is conspicuous as a love affair for a gentleman to meet a lady picks up the fan, it's easy to seem arrogant in a country like this, Tom! acclimate? No, with people without dignity, morals, ambition, distinction and rigor, with people who are unruly, rude and sloppy, with people who are at the same time lazy and frivolous, thick-blooded and superficial … with such people I cannot and would not acclimate never can, as surely as I am your sister! Eva Ewers did it... good! But an Ewers isn't a Buddenbrook, and then she'll have her husband who's good for something in life. But how did I have it? Think Thomas, start over and remember! I came from here, from this house, where something matters, where one stirs and has goals, to Permaneder, who retired with my dowry ... ha, it was real, it was truly distinctive, but that was the only good thing about it. What next? A child is to come! How happy I was! It would have paid me for everything! What happens? it dies It's dead. That wasn't Permaneder's fault, beware, no. He had done what he could and even didn't go to the inn for two or three days, forbid! But it was part of it, Thomas. It didn't make me any happier, you can imagine. I endured and did not grumble. I walked around alone and misunderstood and denounced as arrogant and said to myself: You gave him your vows for life. He's a little clumsy and lazy, and has betrayed your hopes; but he means well and his heart is pure. And then I had to experience this and saw him in this disgusting moment. Then I found out: he understands me so well and knows how to respect me so much better than the others that he calls a word after me, a word that none of your storage workers would throw at a dog! And then I saw that nothing was holding me and that it would have been a shame to stay.

• From Heptaméron (1559)

  little distance ; and no sooner had be taken his departure than his wife sent for her gallant. They had hardly been half an hour together, when the husband came and knocked loudly at the door. The wife, knowing but too well who it was, told her lover, who was so astounded that he could have wished he was still in his mother's womb. But while he was swearing, and confounding her and the intrigue which had brought him into such a perilous scrape, she told him not to be uneasy, for she would get him off without its costing him anything ; and that all he had to do was to dress himself as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the husband kept knocking, and calling to his wife as loud as he could bawl, but she pretended not to know him. "Why don't you get up," she cried to the people of the house, "and go and silence those who are making such a noise .'' Is this a proper time to come to honest people's houses .-' If my husband were here he would make you know better." The husband hear- ing her voice, shouted louder than ever : " Let me in, wife ; do you mean to keep me at the door till day- light?" At last, when she saw that her lover was ready to slip out, " Oh, is that you, husband } " she said ; " I am so glad you are come ! I was full of a dream I had that gave me the greatest pleasure I ever felt in my life. I thought you had recovered the sight of your eye." Here she opened the door, and catching her husband round the neck, kissed him, clapped one hand on his sound eye, and asked him if he did not see better than usual. Whilst the husband was thus blindfolded the gallant made his escape. The husband guessed how it was, but said, " I will watch you no more, wife. I thought to deceive you, but it is I who have been the dupe, and you have put the cunningest trick upon me that ever First day. \ QUEEN OF NAVARRE. 4^ was invented. God mend you ! for it passes the act of man to bring back a wicked woman from her evil ways by any means short of putting her to death. But since the regard I have had for you has not availed to make you behave better, perhaps the contempt with which I shall henceforth look upon you will touch you more, and have a more wholesome effect." Therefore he went away, leaving her in great confusion. At last, however, he was prevailed upon, by the solicitations of relations and friends, and by the tears and excuses of his wife, to cohabit with her again.* "■&'

• From White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (2016)

  He saw something familiar in the tone of the Clinton bashing, and it had to do with his being seen as white trash. Reagan press aide David Gergen and the effusive speechwriter Peggy Noonan saw their President Reagan as a transcendent father figure, partaking of the family feeling inspired by a British king. To Reagan’s admirers, Clinton was unworthy, an impostor whose upbringing besmirched the office: the prince had been replaced by the pauper. 27 To Maxwell’s mind, Clinton’s earthiness, his southernness, was seen as being bred into him from his mother, Virginia. She had published a memoir, and her story was grim: her mother was a drug addict, her childhood was one of deprivation, and she was married four times. Her appearance borrowed from trailer trash: “skunk stripe in her hair, elaborate makeup, colorful outfits and racing form in hand.” (Traces of Tammy Faye hung about her.) In the eyes of his enemies, said Maxwell, Clinton was his mother’s son, a kind of bastard breed that fell short of representing the right “pedigree for a U.S. president.” 28 By the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Clinton’s enemies were primed to portray the flawed president as a character in a Tennessee Williams play. “Slick Willie” had finally been caught in a tawdry sexual escapade suited to a trailer park—he had befouled the Oval Office. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr claimed that his official investigation was not about sex, but about perjury and the abuse of power, yet his final report mentioned sex five hundred times. Harper’s Magazine contributing editor Jack Hitt claimed that Starr was intent on writing a “dirty book,” recording (and relishing) every trashy detail of a sad soap opera. President Clinton’s legal team countered that Starr’s sole purpose was to embarrass the president. This was white trash outing on the grand national stage. Impeachable offenses demanded the “gravest wrongs” against the Constitution, or “serious assaults on the integrity of the process of government,” if they were to rise to the standard of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” By recording every salacious detail, Starr was trying to equate high crimes with low-class lewdness. 29 Conservatives were apoplectic at the thought that Clinton’s misdeeds could be compared with those of Thomas Jefferson—the DNA of the third president’s male line was tested the same year as the Lewinsky story broke. Science could now determine that the master of Monticello (or at least a Jefferson male with regular access to her—and who else could that be?) fathered the children of the Monticello slave Sally Hemings, the much younger half sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  Was this journey here from Munich necessary, together with Erika, so that to less sensible people than me and you it might almost appear as if you never wanted to return to your husband...?" "I don't want that either!... Never...!" exclaimed Frau Permaneder, raising her head with a jerk, looking wildly into her mother's face with tears in her eyes, and then just as suddenly hid her face in the folds of her dress again. The consul ignored this exclamation. "- Well," she began in a raised voice, slowly turning her head from side to side... "but now that you're here, it's good. For now you will be able to ease your heart and tell me everything, and then let us see how, with love, forbearance, and deliberation, the damage can be repaired." "Never!" Tony said again. "Never!" But then she told the story, and although you couldn't understand every word, for she was speaking into the consul's ruffled skirt, and her account was explosive and torn with exclamations of extreme indignation, it was clear that it was quite simply this facts existed. Around midnight between the 24th and 25th of the current month, Madame Permaneder, who had been suffering from disturbances of the stomach nerves during the day and had found rest very late, was awakened from a light slumber. A persistent noise at the head of the stairs had been to blame, a badly suppressed, mysterious noise, in which one could distinguish the creaking of the steps, a coughing giggle, stifled words of defense, and very strange growling and groaning noises . . . one could not for a moment be in doubt about the nature of this noise. Frau Permaneder hadn't caught any of it as soon as her senses were still drowsy, when she had already realized it, when she had already felt the blood drain from her cheeks and flow to her heart, which contracted and with heavy, oppressive blows. For a long, cruel minute she had lain dazed, paralyzed on the pillows; but then, when this shameless noise did not stop, she turned on the light with trembling hands, left the bed full of despair, rage and disgust, opened the door and was in slippers, the light in her hand, near the front hurried up the stairs: that dead-straight "ladder to heaven" that led from the front door straight up to the first floor. And there, on the upper steps of this very ladder to heaven, had I got out of bed in anger and disgust, threw open the door and in my slippers, light in hand, hurried forward to near the stairs: that dead-straight "ladder to heaven" that led from the front door straight up to the first floor.

• From Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901)

  The man in front of him, Hans Hermann Kilian, was a short, brown man with greasy hair and broad shoulders. He wanted to be an officer and was so inspired by camaraderie that he did not abandon even Johann Buddenbrook, whom he did not like. He even pointed his index finger to where to start... And Hanno stared at it and began to read. With a trembling voice and furrowed brows and lips, he read of the golden age that had first sprouted and cultivated loyalty and justice without avenger, of free will, without the rule of law. "Punishment and fear were absent," he said in Latin. 'Neither were threatening words read upon affixed tablets of bronze, nor did the pleading company shrink from the face of their judge...' He read with a tortured and disgusted expression on his face, reading badly and incoherently with will, deliberately neglecting individual ties which were penciled in Kilian's book spoke erroneous verses, faltered and worked his way forward with difficulty, always aware that the Ordinary would discover everything and pounce on him ... The thieving pleasure, seeing the open book in front of him made his skin tingle; but he was full of repugnance and cheated as badly as possible on purpose just to make the cheating less mean. Then he fell silent, and there was a stillness in which he dared not look up. This silence was terrible; he was convinced that Dr. Mantelsack had seen everything, and his lips were quite white. Finally the Ordinary sighed and said: 'O Buddenbrook, si tacuisses ! You'll excuse the classic you for once!... Do you know what you did? You've dragged beauty into the dust, you've behaved like a vandal, like a barbarian, you're an amused creature, Buddenbrook, you can tell by the look of your nose! When I am wondering whether you were coughing all this time or whether you were uttering lofty verses, I incline more to the former view. Timm has developed little rhythmic feeling, but compared to you he's a genius, a rhapsode... Sit down, wretched man. You have learned, of course, you have learned. I can't give you a bad reference. You must have tried your best... Look, don't people tell you that you're musical, that you play the piano? How is that possible?... Well, it is good, sit down, you may have been industrious, it is good.” He wrote a satisfactory note in his paperback and Hanno Buddenbrook sat down. As it had been before with the rhapsodist Timm, so it was now. He couldn't help but feel genuinely struck by the praise that had been contained in Doctor Mantelsack's words. At that moment he was seriously of the opinion that he was a somewhat untalented but diligent student who had come out of the matter relatively with honors, and he clearly felt that all his classmates, not excluding Hans Hermann Kilian, held the same view.