Seán Kennedy and Joseph Valente, eds.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2025. 264 pages.

ISBN: 9781399546911

This strikingly titled volume of essays on the theme of shame in an Irish cultural and political context is a thought-provoking and important collection. The concept of “reckoning” as reassessment and “reckoning” as the problematics of representation is crucial to its explorations. It addresses vital questions: what are the relationships between the representation of shame and specific genres and forms? what is the measure and impact of shame in historical and cultural contexts? what role does gender play? The introduction by the editors, Joseph Valente and Seán Kennedy, is a very fine outlining of, in their words, “the phenomenology of shame” (2). It describes the very subtle, but important, distinction between shame as experienced by differing social identities depending on their relative power and status. Their description of shame as “indignity somaticized” (8) is a profound one.

A very noteworthy feature of the volume is the illuminating and skilful theoretical depth deployed in the essays. The collection is cleverly subdivided into six thematic sections: “Ethnic Shame”; “Religious Shame”; “Biopolitical Shame”; “Shame and Disability”; “Psychoanalytic Shame” and “Shame’s Joyce”. These give a sense of the wide range of material covered. There are essays discussing early modern Irish poetry, the Young Ireland movement, James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses, Susannah Dickey’s Tennis Lessons, Emilie Pine’s Ruth & Pen, Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells, Samuel Beckett’s Not I, Lisa McInerney’s Glorious Heresies, Anu Production’s performance Laundry, Erin Layton’s Magdalen, and Grace Dyas’s We Don’t Know What’s Buried Here. There are also important essays on shame and breastfeeding and the Irish Mother and Baby Homes.

The collection is opened by Sarah McKibben’s “Colonial Emasculation in Early Modern Irish Poetry: From Shame to Humiliation”. This is a very fine piece which highlights the gender dynamics at work in early Irish poetry and their connection to the emergence of the aisling. The close reading of various poems is brilliantly done to demonstrate her argument. Marjorie Howes’s essay “Young Ireland, Slavery and the Gender of Shame” is a fascinating examination of how the issues of slavery and abolitionism intersected with the Young Ireland movement. Some excellent archival material based on contemporary advertisements is powerfully used. The discussion of Frederick Douglass’s visits to Ireland and Great Britain is excellent. The question faced by contemporaries as to the appropriacy of applying the term “slavery” to conditions in Ireland is illuminating and sensitive.

Joyce is the focus in Seán Kennedy’s, Joseph Valente’s and Kezia Whiting’s chapters.  Kennedy’s “Recovering from Catholicism: The Internalisation Problem in Joyce” is a very skilful reinterpretation of Joyce’s response to the process of interpellation imposed by the Catholic Church. It explores Joycean tropes such as epiphany through the work of Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu. It is immensely to its credit that much of the analysis focuses on Stephen Hero which adds an extra dimension to the discussion. While Valente’s “Let us Prey: Clerical Sex Abuse and Catholic Bildung” is a coruscating analysis of the Catholic Church and its methods. This provides the context for a very fine reading of Joyce’s “The Sisters”, and the scholarly disagreements over its interpretation. It is an exceptionally brilliant analysis. Whiting’s, “Flirting with Shame: Performing Narration in Ulysses” is a compelling and insightful essay arguing for parallels between Joyce’s free indirect style and the Freudian super ego. The close reading of the interaction between Bloom’s and Gerty’s gazes on the beach is expertly and skilfully done. There is an apposite emphasis placed on the importance of being seen to a sense of shame that makes this collection an important intervention for Joycean scholars.

In her chapter, Claire Bracken brings a contemporary focus by putting Lisa McInerney’s, Glorious Heresies, Anu Production’s performance Laundry, Erin Layton’s Magdalen, and Grace Dyas’s We Don’t Know What’s Buried Here in conversation. The discussion is comprehensive and authoritative. The comparison of still or moving images of derelict former laundries to theatrical performances taking place in those spaces is very pertinent and goes right to the heart of issues around the limits of the representation of shame. This is furthered by Abby Bender’s wide ranging and historically informed chapter: “Shame and the Breastfeeding Mother in Ireland”. Particularly commendable is the exploration of the issue of breastfeeding in Direct Provision Centres. The essay powerfully places these within the legacy of Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. The findings of the 2021 report from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission are very movingly discussed. This is expanded upon in Eve Watson’s contribution, “The Shame of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes”, an exploration of the 2021 Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes and Certain Related Matters. The essay outlines the reception of the report and the opinion that the report’s “principal failure was deemed to have been its inadequacy in handling and reporting the witness testimonies” (175). The essay’s originality lies in its interpretation of this failure and occlusion within a psychoanalytic context. The argument deploys an excellent explanation of Freud’s and Lacan’s theories of the mechanism and meaning of shame. The essay brilliantly unites the original Final Report with a subsequent Alternative Report. There is also a very informed examination of Lacan’s idea that the concept of shame has diminished and dwindled.

Alison Garden’s “‘you: are you complicit?’: Shame, Trauma and Gender in Susannah Dickey’s Tennis Lessons” explores the issue of shame and sexual violence, and sensitively addresses the valence of the novel’s Northern Ireland context. The essay compellingly addresses the challenges of “writing shame” (120). This is a theme that runs throughout the collection, but it is commendable to have it foregrounded so emphatically here.

The representation of neurodiversity is the focus of Kathleen Costello-Sullivan’s contribution “‘Disability, Embodiment and Shame in Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells”. She very effectively incorporates reviews of the novel into her discussion and her exploration of the novel’s main character, Vivian, is brilliant, sensitive, and genuinely illuminating. This discussion is expanded by Moynagh Sullivan’s brilliant and authoritative essay: “‘that old shame trick’: Mothering, Trauma and Neurodiversity in Emilie Pine’s Ruth & Pen” which expertly unfolds the novel’s formal and thematic dimensions. Considering the influence of Joyce and Woolf on Pine’s novel, Sullivan raises fascinating questions about modernism and the place of difference and neurodivergence.

Alexandra Poulain’s, “‘then die of shame’: Reading Beckett’s Not I with Lacan” argues that the play is “‘a paradoxical performance of shame” (196). The discussion is grounded in Beckett’s own experience of analysis. Very interestingly, it explores Lacan’s “concept of “hontology” (“hontologie”), a portmanteau word which collapses the French words “honte” (shame) and “ontologie”’ (205). The reading offered here genuinely illuminates the play.

The single bibliography for the entire collection is a very useful resource as it demonstrates the widening scholarship on shame in general, and the expanding research in the Irish context. This is a moving and courageous collection. The challenge for the editors was to structure and cross-integrate such a wide range of material. In this they have succeeded admirably.