In Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes teaches us that one feeling often leads to another. Specifically, feeling itself – the experience and display of affect – produces the (decidedly mixed) feeling of shame. The melancholic attitude adopted by Dr Matthew O'Connor resembles the downwards pose of shame, a repeated physical trope in Nightwood. As a sign of feeling, O'Connor's pose is both a marker and producer of shame that must be cast off to avoid yet further humiliation. As imagined by the doctor, Nora Flood's hysterical reaction to the loss of her lover, Robin Vote, is an embarrassing yet strangely pleasing spectacle. Nora's sense of shame in this scene derives from the knowledge that although such emotional ‘stage-tricks’ involve a theatrical performance and perhaps even a clichéd representation of feminised grief, they are, nonetheless, significantly and complexly affecting.