The Dialectic of Shame: Representation in the MetaNarrative of Salman Rushdie's Shame

I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my "male" plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and 'female' side.

--Salman Rushdie, Shame

This passage from Salman Rushdie's third novel has been pivotal in most analyses of the novel, and indeed will also prove important to mine, if more peripherally. Shame is probably the least written-about of all of Rushdie's novels, and when they did write about it, many critics have centered their argument around his treatment of women, hence the importance of the passage quoted above. Opinions have varied, ranging from charges that his treatment is misogynist (Ahmad 144, 148; Cundy 52) to praise for his emancipatory vision (Needham). Within this range we find readings of "ambivalent" feminism (Hai 16-50) and, more complexly, "critical-therefore-emanicipatory because of its ambivalence" ones (Levinson; Mufti ¹ ). In this paper I too take up a feminist reading, but attempt to approach it from yet another angle, one that ultimately allows for most of these interpretations but frames them according to a different question, that of representation or mediation. I wish to show that both Shame the novel, as well as "shame" the concept as it is articulated in the novel, are conceptualizations of a dialectic of representation, and as such necessarily engage a feminist dialectic. Ultimately, I argue that the novel formulates a critique of the domination of women not through the women represented, but through the representation of these women.