Shame figures prominently in Eleanor Oliphant, presenting itself most readily in the embarrassment with which Eleanor ultimately regards loneliness. Throughout the novel, Eleanor repeatedly hides how lonely and isolated she feels, fearing the repercussions of publicly flaunting a feeling that society deems unacceptable to express outside one’s private life. Honeyman emphasizes the shame Eleanor feels toward her loneliness to shed light on society’s tendency to regard pain and sadness—and one’s inability to address and work through these feelings successfully—as personal shortcomings. People are uncomfortable witnessing other people’s sadness, and as a result, individuals in pain are often shamed into silence and secrecy and, subsequently, forced to cope with their sadness in isolation, thereby exacerbating their pain and loneliness. The relief and recovery Eleanor feels once she makes her hurt public through talk therapy and by opening up to new friends like Raymond is evidence of the transformative power of decoupling shame from loneliness and removing the stigma attached to public displays of pain and sadness.
Eleanor’s disillusionment with Johnnie Lomond, a local musician she has a crush on, proves to her how desperately she craves human contact, how infrequently such contact occurs, and how repulsive it is to admit to such things out loud. Eleanor reflects on the shameful connotations attached to loneliness after she returns home from another concert of Johnnie’s and realizes how significantly shame and embarrassment fueled her fantasy romance. For the majority of the novel, Eleanor maintains the position that she is comfortable with her loneliness, but she reaches a breaking point when she goes to see the musician perform at a second concert and realizes that she never really knew him and that her infatuation with him was merely a fantasy she created to imagine a hypothetical way out of her loneliness. After she returns home from the concert, Eleanor undergoes a mental breakdown and becomes suicidal as she finally comes to terms with how not “fine” she is with being lonely and alienated from others.
As Eleanor lies in her apartment in a drunken stupor, she considers how she “ache[s]” for physical contact, observing that “the only time I experience touch is from people whom I am paying, and they are almost always wearing disposable gloves at the time. I’m merely stating the facts.” Eleanor’s observation that the only people who touch her do so while “wearing disposable gloves” refers to the gloves worn by workers in the service industry—hairdressers and nail technicians, for example—but it has a metaphorical dimension, as well. Wearing disposable gloves allows people who touch Eleanor and come into contact with her misery to mimic the act of human connection while still maintaining a protective distance. To Eleanor, disposable gloves represent a barrier that people enact to avoid feeling the hurt, discomfort, and vulnerability that can result from opening oneself up to others. Eleanor seems to suggest that society grooms people to reject and dismiss honesty and vulnerability out of fear that the emotional responses they elicit may be too difficult or too uncomfortable to carry. Eleanor reinforces this point, stating: “if someone asks you how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.” Eleanor’s observation alludes to the title of Honeyman’s novel and underscores its central theme: that it is preferable to hide one’s hurt and pretend everything is “fine” rather than admit to weakness and personal shortcoming and run the risk of making others feel uncomfortable or feeling uncomfortable by the reaction one’s pain prompts in others.
Eleanor continues to speculate on the shame associated with loneliness, comparing it to physical illness to illustrate how repelled society is by pain and suffering. She recalls an older woman she knew at the office when she first started working there. The woman would often be absent from work because she had to care for her sister, who had ovarian cancer. Although caring for her sister consumed much of the woman’s life, she would never mention the cancer explicitly, choosing to speak of this disease “only in the most oblique terms.”
Eleanor remembers the shame this old coworker felt and observes: “these days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.”
By comparing loneliness to cancer, Eleanor sheds light on an extra layer of suffering shame puts on those afflicted with either “illness.” In addition to the psychological pain of loneliness or the physical pain of terminal illness, society forces an additional pain on sufferers when it stigmatizes public, visible expressions of pain. Framing pain as “a shameful, embarrassing thing” implies that individuals are somehow at fault for their suffering and, therefore, should feel guilty and responsible for feeling unhappy or unwell, and for alleviating the burden of their pain onto others by being open about their suffering. Eleanor’s connection between cancer and loneliness also presents the idea that, just as somebody shouldn’t be held responsible for catching a physical illness, so too is mental illness not something for which sufferers are at fault.
Shame stands in the way of recovery because it compels those who suffer to keep their emotions hidden—from others, and from themselves— for fear of upsetting and embarrassing others. Eleanor suffers in the first half of the book because she shuts herself off from others, relying solely on her weekly phone calls with “Mummy” to work through her pain. When Eleanor eventually opens up to others through therapy sessions with Dr. Temple and regular lunch dates with Raymond, however, she begins to regard herself and her past with a new sense of clarity and a perspective she was incapable of gaining on her own.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Shame and the Stigmatization of Pain ThemeTracker
Shame and the Stigmatization of Pain Quotes in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
I have always taken great pride in managing my life alone. I’m a sole survivor—I’m Eleanor Oliphant. I don’t need anyone else—there’s no big hole in my life, no missing part of my own particular puzzle. I am a self-contained entity. That’s what I’ve always told myself, at any rate.
Should I make myself over from the inside out, or work from the outside in? […] Eventually, I decided to start from the outside and work my way in—that’s what often happens in nature, after all. The shedding of skin, rebirth. Animal, birds and insects can provide such useful insights.
Jane Eyre. A strange child, difficult to love. A lonely only child. She’s left to deal with so much pain at such a young age—the aftermath of death, the absence of love. It’s Mr. Rochester who gets burned in the end. I know how that feels. All of it.
Even the circus freak side of my face—my damaged half—was better than the alternative, which would have meant death by fire. I didn’t burn to ashes. I emerged from the flames like a little phoenix. I ran my fingers over the scar tissue, caressing the contours. I didn’t burn, Mummy, I thought. I walked through the fire and I lived. There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.
I smiled at her. Twice in one day, to be the recipient of thanks and warm regard! I would never have suspected that small deeds could elicit such genuine, generous responses. I felt a little glow inside—not a blaze, more like a small, steady candle.
“But you’re not smart, Eleanor. You’re someone who lets people down. Someone who can’t be trusted. Someone who failed. Oh yes, I know exactly what you are. And I know how you’ll end up. Listen, the past isn’t over. The past is a living thing. Those lovely scars of yours—they’re from the past, aren’t they? And yet they still live on your plain little face. Do they still hurt?”
Some people, weak people, fear solitude. What they fail to understand is that there’s something very liberating about it; once you realize you don’t need anyone, you can take care of yourself. That’s the thing: it’s best just to take care of yourself. You can’t protect other people, however hard you try.”
I realized that such small gestures—the way his mother had made me a cup of tea after our meal without asking, remembering that I didn’t take sugar, the way Laura had placed two biscuits on the saucer when she brought me coffee in the salon—such things could mean so much. I wondered how it would feel to perform such simple deeds for other people. I couldn’t remember. I had done such things in the past, tried to be kind, tried to take care, I knew that I had, but that was before. I tried, and I had failed, and all was lost to me afterward. I had no one to blame but myself.
I suppose one of the reasons we’re all able to continue to exist for our allotted span in this green and blue vale of tears is that there is always, however remote it might seem, the possibility of change.
Polly the plant had died that morning. I’m fully aware of how ridiculous that sounds. That plant, though, was the only living link with my childhood, the only constant between life before and after the fire, the only thing, apart from me, that had survived. I’d thought it was indestructible, assumed it would just go on and on, leaves falling off, new ones growing to replace them. I’d neglected my duties these last few weeks, too busy with hospitals and funerals and Facebook to water her regularly. Yet another living thing I’d failed to look after. I wasn’t fit to care for anyone, anything. Too numb to cry, I dropped the plant into the bin, pot, soil and all, and saw that, throughout all these years, it had been clinging on to life only by the slenderest, frailest of roots.
If someone asks how you are, you are meant to say FINE. You are not meant to say that you cried yourself to sleep last night because you hadn’t spoken to another person for two consecutive days. FINE is what you say.
These days, loneliness is the new cancer—a shameful, embarrassing thing, brought upon yourself in some obscure way. A fearful, incurable thing, so horrifying that you dare not mention it; other people don’t want to hear the word spoken aloud for fear that they might too be afflicted, or that it might tempt fate into visiting a similar horror upon them.
As always, Mummy was scary. But the thing was, this time—for the first time ever—she’d actually sounded scared too.
The singer wasn’t ever the point, really; Maria Temple had helped me see that. In my eagerness to change, to connect with someone, I’d focused on the wrong thing, the wrong person. On the charge of being a catastrophic disaster, a failed human being, I was starting to find myself, with Maria’s help, not guilty.
“People inherit all sorts of things from their parents, don’t they—varicose veins, heart disease. Can you inherit badness?”
“In the end, what matters is this: I survived.” I gave him a very small smile. “I survived, Raymond!” I said, knowing I was both lucky and unlucky, and grateful for it.
