Conclusion

Abstract

The importance of shame in Chaucer’s texts makes him an important but complicated interlocutor in contemporary discourse on ethics and affects, where it seems undeniable that shame has entered a period of ascendency. In theory broadly defined, there is growing enthusiasm about the fact that “shame purifies our bad consciousness, offering salvation from the tyranny and prison of the self. It opens a door, pointing the way to spiritual health and realization of the world beyond egoism.”¹ Even as they recognize the peculiar agony of shame—or perhaps in part because of this agony—“many theorists,” observes Ruth Leys, “find shame is a better affect than guilt to think with”; shame “serves at the limit as a site of resistance to cultural norms of identity” while guilt has become “shame’s other, the carrier of bad, negative, and destructive implications.”² In practice, shame thrives in a context where images are the primary cultural medium, and especially where the mechanisms of commodification shape every aspect of public and private life.