Scandal by Arrangement: Institutional Shame in Wollstonecraft's Maria and the Platform Age

Author(s)	Ms. Sudeshna Chakraborty
Country	India
Abstract	Studies of female public shame usually begin with an audience and its feelings. This article begins with the arrangements that decide who is believed, who is exposed and whose reputation can be traded. Reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), it argues that scandal is produced by institutions, not merely circulated by them, through unequal allocations of credibility (Fricker), visibility (Foucault) and circulation (Ahmed). Maria’s confinement, Jemima’s testimony and the trial for criminal conversation show these allocations at work. The article then compares the Lewinsky affair, a juridical case, with the Sacco episode, a commercial one. It proposes institutional shame as a concept for reading scandal as made rather than found.
Keywords	shame, institutions, credibility, Wollstonecraft, Maria, criminal conversation, platforms
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 6, November-December 2026
Published On	2026-11-03
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i06.91147

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