Conversations with Dorothy Allison by Mae Miller Claxton

Since then, Tomkins’ work has undoubtedly resonated with humanities scholars, such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn, Sally R. Rather, in Tomkins’ work, they discovered that his “formulations startle: for their sharpness and daring, their amplitude, and…descriptive levelheadedness” (4-5). Tomkins’ work, they write, immediately stood out amidst what they call “a sodden landscape of moralistic or maudlin idées reçues” on shame (4). In their introduction, Sedgwick and Frank describe how they stumbled upon Tompkins’ 1962 text Affect, Imagery and Consciousness while “looking for some usable ideas on the topic of shame” (4). In 1995, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank published Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, which reinvigorated the use of Tompkins’ shame theory in the humanities. Theories of shame currently intertwine numerous disciplines-psychology, philosophy, anthropology, gender studies, and literary theory. I investigate how both film directors aimed to reduce the affective power of the novels in adaptation, specifically omitting the crucial component of “shame-interest” regarding the girl’s sexual subjectivity. In particular, I argue that the concept of “shame-interest”- what affect theorist Silvan Tomkins calls shame’s power to engage both our interest and repulsion-evokes an affective shift from shame-interest in the novels to “contempt-disgust” in the films. In this essay, I look to what might make it so difficult to portray “one girl’s real life experiences,” by examining two novels about sexual subjectivity within child abuse, Sapphire’s Push (1996) and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), and their subsequent film adaptations, Lee Daniels’s Precious (2009) and Anjelica Huston’s Bastard Out of Carolina (1996).

The subsequent controversy attracted press attention as the film lingered unaired for weeks, and Huston summed up the irony stating, “American television can handle documentaries on the Holocaust, but apparently not this story of one girl's real life experiences” (Warren Berger). Although TNT produced the film, its network executives ultimately deemed the finished film too “harsh” for television, and they insisted that Huston cut the film’s child molestation and rape scenes. In 1996, Anjelica Huston made her directorial debut with the film Bastard Out of Carolina based on Dorothy Allison’s novel of the same name.

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Conversations with Dorothy Allison by Mae Miller Claxton