What is shame? According to the New International Webster's Pocket Dictionary of the English Language shame means, "a painful feeling caused by a sense of guilt, unworthiness, impropriety, etc." Another definition is "a person or thing causing disgrace or humiliation." I'm going to use the first definition in this paper. There are a lot of thing that causes people to be ashamed. When shame shows up in people's lives it causes people to be unhappy, hide things from others, and to feel guilty about things.
             Shame causes people to be unhappy. In the story "The Necklace"
             Mathilde was a poor woman and she married and poor man. Mathilde was unhappy with her life because she wasn't living the life that she wanted to live. She wanted expensive things like "large, silent anterooms, decorated with oriental tapestries and lighted by high bronze floor lamps, with two elegant valets in short culottes dozing in large armchairs under the effects of forced-air heaters"(Manupassant 4). She also wanted "large drawing rooms draped in the most expensive silks, with fine end tables on which were placed knickknacks of inestimable value"(Manupassant 4). The last thing she wanted was "the perfume of dainty private rooms, which were designed only for intimate tete-a-tetes with the closest friends, which make her the envy of all the other women. Like we discussed in class, if she was so unhappy with the way she was living then why come she didn't marry a rich man and then she would have the things that she dreamed of. Her shame over material things that she wanted made her unhappy. Also In "The House on Mango Street" there was this little girl and her parents they lived in a apartment that wasn't worth living in. The girl was unhappy with the place she had to live. She wanted to live in a house with a back yard and a hou
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