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With the notable exceptions of D. W. Harding and Bernard Paris, most critics of Jane Austen have not focused on the emotional content and concern with affect in her novels, preferring to concentrate either on her technical manipulations of tone and structure or on her moral thematics. This is particularly true of Pride and Prejudice, a novel which Austen herself referred to [as quoted in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others, edited by R.W. Chapman, 2nd edition (1979)] as possibly "rather too light, and bright, and sparkling" (Letters 299). Given that concern with appearing ridiculous is a major issue in the novel, however, the very nature of Austen's disclaimer invites one to look beneath the sprightliness of the performance. In doing so, one discerns not only the psychological acuity of her insights into the emotional dynamics of shame but also her sociological perceptiveness about the way a culture reinforces feelings of shame as a means of maintaining its hierarchies and control. .
One prominent clinician, Helen Block Lewis, offers this general description of the phenomenology of shame [in "Introduction: Shame--the `Sleeper' in Psychopathology," The Role of Shame in Symptom Formation , edited by Lewis (1987)]: "In shame, hostility against the self is experienced in the passive mode. The self feels not in control but overwhelmed and paralyzed by the hostility directed against it. One could `crawl through a hole' or `sink through the floor' or `die' with shame. The self feels small, helpless, and childish." Shame is a feeling of disgust, displeasure or embarrassment about some quality of the self, occurring typically at a moment of uncovering and exposure. It is connected with feelings of low self-esteem, and in some cases it may produce depression. Pride, identified with positive feelings about the self, is at the opposite pole of what the psychiatrist Donald Nathanson terms "the shame/pride axis.
