His depiction of shame intersects in remarkable ways with later attempts to assimilate the history of shame into the history of homosexuality. This groundbreaking and empowering book examines the impact of growing up and surviving as a gay man in a society still learning to accept all identities. An ancillary aim is to trace Godwin’s depiction of male shame in Fleetwood to the literature of sensibility in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly the Man of Feeling at his most ashamed state, which this writer exploited for his own literary and cultural objectives. And just as gender is the result of certain mannerisms and acts of cloaking, shame is another performative forged, as it were, by and through a continuous process of accepting and resisting the social roles assigned to us.

There is something about The Velvet Rage that feels almost as though Alan Downs is sitting down to an intimate chat with you, exploring the seemingly common themes amongst gay men’s lives that are influenced and often impacted from the effects of toxic shame and inauthenticity. The principal point of this argument is that Godwin’s Fleetwood should be read as a queer novel not simply because it chronicles a bad marriage and the failure of heterosexual love to fully flourish and solidify normative bonds, but because the three-volume structure of Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling circles back on itself, ouroboros-like, in keeping with the cyclicity of male shame. Book Review: The Velvet Rage Dr Alan Downs, PhD.

The velvet rage by alan downs