NEGATIVE SELF-CONSCIOUS MORAL EMOTIONS IN CONSTRUCTING VICTORIAN MORAL IDENTITY (A CORPUS-BASED STUDY)

Abstract

The study has been conducted within the research of emotion facilitators for the transition of ideologies. The paper maintains the hypothesis that a newly rising ideology of VICTORIAN MORALITY was grounded on the emotional zeal of the waning ideology of RELIGION. The ideological transition yielded the change in the structure of the personal identity of Victorians that resulted in the priority transfer from religious identity to moral identity. The departure from the identified religiosity and the bias to individualism favoured the rise of the guilt-oriented culture that propagated personal responsibility for moral perpetration in the face of legislative power. A machine-based qualitative content analysis exhibited a significant linkage of the linguoideologeme guilt to the ideologemes of CRIME & PUNISHMENT as observed in the co-occurrence network charts generated with the help of KH Coder. Inasmuch as guilt was giving its way in solidarity cultivation, the emotional experience of shame and embarrassment, associated with introjected religion internalization and public exposure, retrieved the function of commonality keeping. Attributed to dispositional flaw or gauche in meeting the public expectations, shame and embarrassment triggered the feeling of liability in the face of the society. The co-occurrence analysis of the linguoideologemes shame and embarrassment evinced the suggestive linkage to the emotional experience schemas representing self-deprecating and adaptive action tendencies of the Victorian moral identity.