Giana Simankov
Ms. Giombetti
American Lit. A Block
8 February 2023
Shame Is Bigger Than You Can Imagine Feeling shame and guilt from a mistake you made can take a toll on your physical and mostly mental well being. We see this in “ The price of Shame” ted talk by Monica Lewsinsky and in the novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthrone. They both demonstrate this by showing how both girls, Hester and Monica experience public shame, having a lack of empathy from others and the amplification of shame from their mistakes. In both The Scarlet Letter and the Ted Talk, society shows how shame can make you feel like an outsider in a big community. Hester and Monica both made a mistake and were both publicly shamed for it. Moncia was in the eye of social media where people reposted and shared posts about her. Everytime she opened her phone or her computer she would see a post about people shaming
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Instead of standing by you and helping you through it you get humiliated instead. Before her affair, Monica Lewinsky was living a very private life and after people found out they started to know her name and her face and it was not in a good way, “ I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide” ( Ted Talk), people from all over the world were posting and talking about how horrible of a person she was.In The Scarlet Letter, the whole town of Salem was gathered around to watch Hester on the scaffold, “ A throng of bearded men, in sad colored garments and gray, steeple crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others barehanded” ( Hawthorne 33). All of these people shamed Hester in public because of something that they believed was wrong. Very few people had any sympathy for Hester or thought of her feelings.Both Monica and Hester needed at least one person by their side but instead society was against them and made them feel sad and