The Body of Shame: Women’s Embodied Shame in the Short Fiction of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore

Abstract This article addresses the intricate and complex nature of the shame affect as it is employed in a selection of short stories by Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. Shame is often the central affect behind narrative construction and development. It formulates relationships and shapes women’s physical and psychological identities across the individual, familial, and cultural phases of subjective trans/formation. While Munro’s narratives scrutinize the wide range of shifting, ambiguous, contradictory, and embodied shame, Moore’s stories make of shame an essential and vital element in a comic, postmodern approach to such issues as love, marriage, motherhood, identity, etc. Through their investigation of the complex dynamics and mechanics of shame, Munro and Moore demonstrate that shame and the social construct of femininity are unequivocally “imbricated,” evidencing the instrumental role of shame in controlling and structuring female bodies and identities in modern societies.