Shame, Unearthed
The babies’ baptisms entitled them to a funeral mass under canon law but perhaps the baptism cleansing of their ‘original sin’ was not enough to also wipe away the shameful nature of their conception. - Dan Barry.
The ongoing scandal of the mistreatment of unwed Irish mothers and their children in the mother-and-baby home in Tuam, County Galway is the focus of the New York Times special report ‘The Lost Children of Tuam’ by Dan Barry. The report explains how Catherine Corless, an amateur historian, revealed in 2016 that the church and state had been complicit in the disposal of 796 babies’ and children’s bodies in a septic system between 1925 and 1961 on the Home’s grounds. Harrowing evidence has since become the talk of Ireland and whilst many people have expressed shock and outrage, others would rather forget.
‘The Lost Children of Tuam’ contemplates the compact between the living and the dead whilst grappling with the social, cultural and political effects of shame. Informed by recent affect theory studies this essay will examine how ‘The Lost Children of Tuam’ reveals shame as an intensely feared, physically felt emotion that can be ‘caught’ through contact and is performed by its subjects. The essay will also contemplate whether, following the Tuam revelation, of which its details are undoubtedly abhorrent, shame can work productively as a means to grapple with how Ireland commemorates these women and children.
In the story of the Tuam mother-and-baby home, shame appears as a contagious emotion, permeating the Home’s building and infecting the lives of the women and children it imprisoned. Institutions like this one operated from the 18th to the late 20th century in Ireland, intended as alleged ports of salvation for disgraced women who should atone for their mortal sins. The stories of survivors reveal the homes were run more like punishment prisons by the Bon Secour sisters.
Corless recalls how the Home’s children were treated in the local school she attended as a girl: “I never remember them really being taught… they were just there…teachers threatened to place rowdy students beside the home babies. Parents warned children that if they were bad they’d go straight to “the home””. Sara Ahmed’s approach to emotions reveals more about this ‘sticky’ quality of shame. She draws on David Hume who, in the 18th century, suggested “others enter into the same humour, and catch the sentiment, by a contagion of natural-sympathy… the flame spreads through the whole circle and the most sullenly and remorse are often caught”. Hume’s statement is perhaps the earliest stages of affect theory explored by Gibbs: “Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another” Unlike structuralist thinking which prioritises the linguistic, to think about affect means to place emphasis on bodies and the intensities that charge them.
In the Tuam Home, even though the babies were baptised as a matter of routine, there remained the hint of sulphur about them…the children who live within the home seemed to be a different species altogether: sallow, sickly - segregated. Percy Gamble Kammererer sheds light on how the ‘illegitimate child’ is disadvantaged in life even before birth: “Born into a situation made difficult by the attitude of society his chances of normal development are mines and his opportunity for physical well-being lessened.”
The parents of the other children were anxious about them catching gastroenteritis, meningitis, tuberculosis and other diseases that led to the deaths of so many ‘Home Babies’. More to the point however, it was the widely believed notion that shame was hereditary that had segregated these children in the first place. “They were the children of the Devil… we learned this in school.” Kevin O’Dwyer, 67, informs Barry.
The dominant ideology declared innocent children as representative of the most dangerous fallen spirit in the Catholic Faith; they were shunned into the margins of society, neglected concern or affection and constantly in danger of catching a life-threatening disease. In this Ireland, disease was shame’s similitude; deadly once ‘caught’ or inherited.
To cast off a young girl to a prison-like institution like the one in Tuam seems unimaginable in the society we know today. Irish myself, knowing of women in my family, only a few generations above, who were sent to ‘homes’, I am personally disturbed by the hand-in-glove relationship between the dominant church and the fledging state that facilitated such cruelty.
Sadly, it comes as no surprise; the Catholic Church has a track record of abuse and exploitation. Sexual abuse scandals and subsequent coverups; the apparent coercion of unmarried mothers to surrender their children for adoption to wealthy Catholic Americans to name but a few. I am more dismayed however, by the individual families’ complicity and it is this that engenders such intense national shame.
To try and make sense of this history, the toxic mix of Catholic dogma and Victorian morality that made up the ideological discourse of the day must be acknowledged. It meant unmarried mothers and their offspring were widely despised. ‘Illegitimate’ pregnancies could dishonour an entire family, and even the local pastor. They could jeopardise inheritance plans and lead the impregnated woman to live a life of guilt-ridden solitude. Solely blaming the church and/or state is perhaps too simple; this process relied on the complicity of all societal parts; that is, the parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts of these vulnerable women.
Jennifer Biddle suggests “'contact' shame may be just as painfully experienced, and equally identity delineating, as a direct shame response. Indeed, that the two are so closely related (it seems to me, confused as they are from childhood on), is what makes shame so powerful and so social an emotion … it is also the parents' inability to see themselves as separate from the infant, and not only the infant's transitivism, that gives rise to shame… at once ashamed on behalf of the child (as witness) and on behalf of themselves (as a parent, they can never be simply a witness, both introjecting and projecting themselves in and on the body and activities of the child).”
A parent learning their unwed daughter was pregnant would ignite such an extreme response because it was their shame. Whether it was consensual sex or not that had led to the pregnancy, the girl would assume entire responsibility since she was believed to have seduced the man and/or be mentally unstable. As Kammerer argues, “regardless of the attitude of society towards her, there can be no doubt but that she represents a direct cost to the community, that she is prevented from much that the more fortunate women is enabled to accomplish, and that she constitutes in many instances a source of moral contamination in the environment in which she lives”.
Shame threatened the social ties that so often were the lifeline of these Irish communities who had survived the Great Famine in the late 19th century, the Irish War of Independence between 1919 and 1921, and the struggle that followed. The threat of familial shame was integral to the the mother-and-baby home operation and should not be seen as an exclusive by-product.
The childhood scene of shame is crucial to understanding how shame is learned. Biddle explains “the brief flash of the ‘contempt/disgust' face—accompanied or not by the verb 'yuck' or other equally non-appreciative noises— nostrils flared, nose squished up, lips sneering, eyes widened or the turning away of the face altogether. The infant perceives by this that logically, if the other is disgusted, the self must be repugnant, that the self, in short, has failed… parental shame is mimicked, introjected and displayed again by the child who may re-infest the parent. A certain identity—identificatory cycle of symbiosis and mimesis is engendered even as it is broken in shame.” The woman may not have felt shame when conceiving the child, but the parental shame response to the pregnancy is what will have engendered shameful feelings.
Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Image: The New York Times.
As for the ‘home babies’, the shame they learned from the Bon Secour sisters and wider community, can still be observed in their habits and manners of speech years later. According to Crimp, shame is simultaneously identity defining and identity erasing; a shame-prone person is someone who has been shamed and it is difficult to detach oneself from the ‘childhood scene of shame’. The behaviour of mother-and-baby home survivors reveal how the physical manifestations of shame can be detected years after the shame-learning event. Physically, most experiences of shame make you want to disappear, to hide away, to cover yourself.
When Catherine Corless discovered her mother, Kathleen, had been born in a mother-and-baby home, her everyday self-depreciating behaviour began to make sense. Kathleen kept the circumstances of her birth a secret her whole life “She was ashamed to tell us” Catherine explains, “they all have a kind of low self-esteem… they feel inadequate. They feel a bit inferior to other people. It mirrored, really, the way my mother was.”
If shame produces feelings of wanting to hide away, in the case of the Tuam scandal this also meant a desire to hide the truth. On Corless’ journey to discover what really happened, minimal photographs of the Home and lost records of its inhabitants were far too convenient for a community reluctant to revisit a shameful past. In March 201,7 Corless appeared on The Late Late Show to tell the story on live television. That month, the Mother and Baby Home Commission reported that “significant quantities of human remains” had been discovered on the grounds of the Tuam home”. The mystery remains: why had the Catholic nuns decided to bury the bodies in such a way? Purely for financial reasons? Were they ashamed of just how many births - in some years above 50% - resulted in deaths before age 3? “The entire matter should be forgotten and put behind us” some have said. Others, such as Prime Minister Enda Kenny, believe Irish society should “not just hide away the dead bodies of tiny human beings.” Addressing the Irish legislation he said “We dug deep and we dug deeper still to bury our compassion, to bury out mercy and bury our humanity itself”.
In burying shame, self expression - a vital ingredient for survival - is suppressed by means of repression and supplementation. The performative nature of shame is what puts the self on display, illuminates our attachment to one another, tells us what is valuable. Catherine Corless’ has become somewhat of a “contact zone” for the mother-and-baby home survivors. She receives constant phone calls from the people born in the homes and their family members. P.J Haverty, a retired mechanic, has visited Corless. He told her how he was trapped in the Tuam home after the dismissal of his mother whilst she demanded every week for five years to be given back her child. He is one of many who is working through the shame, that had burdened his entire life, productively, by telling his story. Narrative, as the strategy for survival, at the Corless kitchen table or in the case of Dan Barry’s New York Times special report, works with and through shame so to create conditions for ‘moving on’.
Story is the emotional strategy for surviving painful histories. As Dina Georgis points out, “nothing sets the conditions better for making insights into the affective undercurrents of the dilemmas of belonging and the complexities of subject formation than do stories… In stories we imagine our safety, resist threats and construct the terms of community. Stories offer consolation to hard to digest experience or social conflict. In so doing, they teach us how individuals or groups are negotiating difficulty.”
In March 2017 Bishop Brendan Leahy told the Citizens’ Assembly that they in the church “hang our heads in shame” over the Tuam babies revelation, whilst the Bon Secour sisters have made no comment on the matter, only reiterated their support for the Mother-and-Baby Home commission. Now the truth has emerged, many believe it is time for the church to officially confess its role in the mistreatment of unwed Irish mothers and their children in Tuam, and in the many other mother-and-baby homes across Ireland. After far too long, will shame be a necessary ingredient in provoking a discourse in Ireland that can create the conditions for change?
Dan Barry’s The Lost Children of Tuam is available to read on The New York Times website here.
Since this essay was written, the Irish government announced that it would introduce legislation in October 2018 to facilitate a full excavation of the mass grave and site, and for forensic DNA testing to be carried out on the remains.
In October 2019, The National University of Ireland, Galway, will launch ‘The Tuam Oral History Project’ - a multidisciplinary, survivor-led project that gives a platform to the voices of the Tuam Home survivors and will live as a public, educational resource for generations to come.
References
Barry, Dan. “The Lost Children of Tuam.” The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2017, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/28/world/europe/tuam-ireland-babies-children.html.
Gold, Tanya. “Survivors of Ireland's Mother and Baby Scandal Deserve Justice | Tanya Gold.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 9 Mar. 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/09/survivors-ireland-mother-baby-scandal-justice-tuam.
Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects” The Affect Theory Reader, 2009DOI: 10.1215/9780822393047-001
Kammerer, Percy Gamble. “Unmarried Mother, a Study of Five Hundred Cases”. Nabu Press, 2010.
Crimp, Douglas. “Mario Montez, For Shame.” Regarding Sedgewick: Essays on Queer Culture and Critical Theory, Edited by Stephen M. Barber and David L. Clark, 2002, doi:10.4324/9780203951002.
Probyn, Elspeth. “Everyday Shame.” Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 2-3, 2004, 328–349., doi:10.1080/0950238042000201545.
Biddle, Jennifer. “Shame”, Australian Feminist Studies, 1997, 227-239, DOI: 10.1080/08164649.1997.9994862
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession, 1991. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25595469.
Georgis, Dina. “Thinking Past Pride: Queer Arab Shame In Bareed Mista3Jil.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 45, no. 02, 2013, 239. DOI:10.1017/s0020743813000056.
Duffy, Rónán. “Catholic Bishop: 'We Hang Our Heads in Shame' over Tuam Mass Grave.” TheJournal.ie, 5 May 2017, www.thejournal.ie/tuam-citizens-assembly-3272080-Mar2017/.
