Public Shame Essay

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Public shame is a painful emotion caused by a strong sense of guilt, embarrassment, and unworthiness that affects the community around the person according to the dictionary definition. However, most people refer to public shaming more commonly as a negative or positive result. For ages, public shame has influenced and affected people of all shapes and sizes worldwide. Each one of these people can refer back to that one moment where they were exposed to public humiliation whether it was tripping over a stair or completely blanking on a presentation speech. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Price of Shame” by Monica Lewinsky, and “Is the Internet a Mob without Consequence?” by Nick Bilton all discuss public shame in their …show more content…

Take a look at Hester Prynne from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Hester was made as the outcast of the village when she committed adultery. The women in the village had a few comments themselves when they said, “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead” (Hawthorne 36). These women have already decided that Hester was dead to them and that Hester deserved the punishment of death. They used to be friends with Hester until that one mistake; now Hester is negligible among the village folk unless counting the fact that Hester is the town gossip. Due to public shame, multiple lives were affected in a very much negative way. In addition, “The Price of Shame” by Monica Lewinsky thoroughly demonstrates just how much a single person can be affected. Lewinsky, a young woman who made a small yet big mistake by falling in love with her boss. She even said, “I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and of course, that woman. I was seen by many but actually known by few” (Lewinsky paragraph 10). According to her words, Lewinsky was made as a public example for what not to do. Now, she has to live with her mistake for the rest of her life. Comparing the two sources, both have the similarity of two figures undergoing a huge amount of attention then they had originally planned; that can be pretty overwhelming and it could …show more content…

Hester Prynne went through this tough and dramatic experience during her punishment. The narrator explains Hester’s thoughts when she is standing on the scaffold; “there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object” (Hawthorne 40). In other words, Hester would rather have everyones opinion out in the open but instead she was left to think the worst of that they were thinking- her own mind would create the harsh opinions which just so happened to be her sub conscious speaking for itself. Another example of how public humiliation affects a person personally is when Ms. Sacco was found on social media. Bilton states, “The mob found her Facebook and Instagram accounts and began threatening the same perils on photos she had posted of friends and family. Not satisfied, people began threatening her family directly” (Bilton 5). Total strangers sent death threats to Sacco’s family who had nothing to do with the situation. This is the completely dangerous side of public humiliation which brings out the true dark side in people. Many people think personal shame is person vs. self, but it is also person vs. people. The person who is being humiliated is constantly going through levels and levels of judgement. Personal shame is

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