Shame Essay, Research Paper

What Cause People to Have Shame?

What is shame? According to the New International Webster s Pocket Dictionary of the English Language shame means, a painful feeling caused by a sense of guilt, unworthiness, impropriety, etc. Another definition is a person or thing causing disgrace or humiliation. I m going to use the first definition in this paper. There are a lot of thing that causes people to be ashamed. When shame shows up in people s lives it causes people to be unhappy, hide things from others, and to feel guilty about things.

Shame causes people to be unhappy. In the story The Necklace

Mathilde was a poor woman and she married and poor man. Mathilde was unhappy with her life because she wasn t living the life that she wanted to live. She wanted expensive things like large, silent anterooms, decorated with oriental tapestries and lighted by high bronze floor lamps, with two elegant valets in short culottes dozing in large armchairs under the effects of forced-air heaters (Manupassant 4). She also wanted large drawing rooms draped in the most expensive silks, with fine end tables on which were placed knickknacks of inestimable value (Manupassant 4). The last thing she wanted was the perfume of dainty private rooms, which were designed only for intimate tete-a-tetes with the closest friends, which make her the envy of all the other women. Like we discussed in class, if she was so unhappy with the way she was living then why come she didn t marry a rich man and then she would have the things that she dreamed of. Her shame over material things that she wanted made her unhappy. Also In The House on Mango Street there was this little girl and her parents they lived in a apartment that wasn t worth living in. The girl was unhappy with the place she had to live. She wanted to live in a house with a back yard and a house that wasn t tore up but in perfect condition. She wanted what we call the ideal house. In tell she will have her ideal house it s just takes time.

Shame cause people to feel guilty. Guilt is a feeling of blameworthiness for having committed a crime or wrong (Webster 223). In The Necklace Mathilde was a shame of the clothes that she had. Her husband and herself were invited to a dinner party, but she refused to go because she wanted a new dress. He finally gave in and got her a new dress. After she got that she still refused to go because she didn t have any jewelry to wear so she borrowed from her friend. She went to the dance and had a good time. On the way back home she lost the necklace. Shame made here feel guilty because she had lost something that didn t belong to here. In The House on Mango Street the girl felt guilty to tell people where she stayed because of the condition of the house. The girl was ashamed of were she stayed that it made her unhappy to even have to go there everyday. In First Confession Jackie felt guilty having gone to confession to confess his sins. He thought that he was a really bad person. He told the priest that he didn t like his grandmother and her wanted her dead and that he had tried to kill his sister with a bread-knife under the table.

Shame causes people to hide things from others. In The Necklace Mathilde borrowed a necklace from one of her friends and on the way home from the dinner party she loses it. Instead of telling her friend that she lost she hid it from here. So she had to borrow money from people to go buy another necklace. At the end of the story she runs into her friend that she borrowed the necklace from and to come to find out the necklace wasn t even real. When you hide things from others you re not hurting them you re hurting yourself. If she had told her friend that she lost her necklace then she wouldn t have had to go through the turmoil that she went through. In other words she should have been honest with her friend. She was so shame that she had lost her friend s necklace that she wanted to hide it from here so that she wouldn t think that she was a careless person

In conclusion, shame can affect us in many ways. In this paper I talked about how shame causes people to be unhappy, to feel guilty, and to hide things from others.