Read an Excerpt
Telling Complexions
The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush
By Mary Ann O'Farrell Duke University Press
Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7815-0
CHAPTER 1
Austen's Blush: Pride and Prejudice
In a 1796 letter to her sister Cassandra, Jane Austen reports on the status of her flirtation with a young man Austen biographers have found among the most plausible of Austen's possible love interests. Austen writes first of what she and Tom Lefroy have done together:
You scold me so much in the nice long letter which I have this moment received from you, that I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together. I can expose myself, however, only once more, because he leaves the country soon after next Friday, on which day we are to have a dance at Ashe after all. He is a very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man, I assure you.
That Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen have paid each other public attention constitutes a public exposure the pleasures of which Austen seems about to forgo only with regret. Evidence suggests, as Austen goes on in the letter, that the days remaining them are unlikely to consist of private intimacies:
But as to our having ever met, except at the three last balls, I cannot say much; for he is so excessively laughed at about me at Ashe, that he is ashamed of coming to Steventon, and ran away when we called on Mrs. Lefroy a few days ago. (1)
Austen critics and biographers, always ready to fix Austen in some plain relation to the marriage plot, have been eager to find in Tom Lefroy love lost and long regretted—to identify him as, in Austen's mind, the one that got away. Of Lefroy, John Halperin writes: "The available evidence suggests that he recovered more quickly than she from whatever disappointment there may have been. A major theme ofPersuasion is that woman's love is more enduring than man's; it is likely that Jane Austen never entirely forgot Tom Lefroy." If Austen biographers love the idea of this romance, they use its luster as Lefroy did—as one might, given the chance—to add some romance to stories of youth: "Years later the old Chief Justice told his nephew that he had once been in love with the famous Jane Austen, but 'he qualified his concession by saying that it was a boyish love'" (62-63). Austen's appeal for the older Lefroy seems in part to have been her fame, as his appeal to critics seems to be his success; critics enjoy referring to his status in later life, the appeal of his title being, presumably, the suggestion that its bearer could have been smart enough for Jane Austen.
Austen's discussion of Lefroy's runaway behavior late in his visit prompts recollection of a story told by a character in Hitchcock's Rebecca. When Maxim de Winter abandons without ceremony the tea he has been taking with Mrs. van Hopper, the overbearing American to whom Joan Fontaine plays companion, his departure prompts Mrs. van Hopper to reminisce: "I remember when I was younger there was a well-known writer who used to dart down the back way whenever he saw me coming. I suppose he was in love with me and wasn't quite sure of himself. Well, c'est la vie." The film ensures that Mrs. van Hopper's unselfconscious account of repulsion as attraction is to be read as patently ludicrous by its use of Florence Bates's body, so stout as to seem stoutly armored: the movie wonders who, facing a body like hers or, in a different sense, like Rebecca's even in outline, could be "quite sure of himself." As I mean this parallel to suggest, if only in part, the sure business of "the future Chief Justice of Ireland" (Halperin, 61) may indeed have been, like that of the "well-known writer," ensuring his getaway from what, attracted or repelled, he found daunting. That one is also tempted not to read Lefroy in this way may just be testimony to the evident desire of her readers to make Austen into an Austen heroine; but some empathetic joy in her audible delight in telling this story may also result from the story's familiarity to readers of Austen's novels, from which they have learned that avoidance, separation, awkwardness, and a "general incivility" ought to be understood as "the very essence of love."
Austen's turn to incivility and its associates, embarrassment and confusion, as signs of love is a resort to involuntarity as a basis for the credibility of expressed feelings. The voluntary speech or gesture might forward the lie based in politeness or interest, or, more often the case in Jane Austen, might find itself contained within the strictures of mannerly code. Worldly Charlotte Lucas, explaining Jane Bennet to Elizabeth Bennet, gives shape to the uses of incivility by laying out the limitations of good manners. When Elizabeth rejoices that Jane's "composure of temper and uniform cheerfulness of manner ... would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent" about her feelings for Bingley, Charlotte replies: "It is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark" (21). If Jane Bennet "smile[s] too much" (16), the excess in question inheres in the inability of her smiles, in their frequency and uniformity, to particularize or distinguish themselves or their object; if smiles at Bingley and at Sir William Lucas look alike, so then, bizarrely, do the two men come to resemble one another. Along with her smiles, Jane's "serenity of ... countenance" (197) and the "complacency in her air and manner" (208) act in opposition to felicitous resolution of the marriage plot: Jane is caught in the trap of the good girl who would succeed in the world of courtship; her good manners won't get her a man.
Having used Jane Bennet to outline a provisional opposition between appropriate, well-mannered behavior and the success of the marriage plot, Austen turns to the body as the clearest source of an incivility that is yet recuperable in the world of manners. In its involuntarity, the incivility of the blush—as apparent sign of the body's separable will and of the body's willful intrusion into social order—seems to exempt the blush from the limitations imposed on love in the system of manners, from, that is, the vagaries of the lie or the comprehensiveness of the code. In the plotting of marriages, the involuntary blush exceeds the voluntary smile in uncovering a truth yielded against one's well-behaved will. But the tension between manners and the marriage plot is apparent rather than actual, and Austen's use of the blush facilitates the real work of manners: including the body in social order and teaching it to behave itself in public. So used, the blush in manners arranges bodies in marriageable pairs assigned the exercise of desire in marriage. But in invoking the involuntarity of the body in even its most delicate form, Austen necessarily invokes what about the body is most inimical to manners, what makes manners most vulnerable to disruption. In Pride and Prejudice, she works to make-over the unstable blush; the blush in the novel of manners, legible and reliable index of character, comes to seem almost voluntary in the rigor of its obliged association with moral status; as Austen uses it, the blush enforces mannerly ethics, but it proves nevertheless and of course to be so much linguistic paint.
Pleased as he is with the complexity and interest of the portraits he says Jane Austen paints "without employing any but the commonest of colors," George Henry Lewes is nevertheless dismayed by what he misses in the body of her work: though the reader may be interested, he writes, "the reader's pulse never throbs." While contemptuous of the contempt of "Currer Bell" for Austen even as he quotes it, Lewes would seem to agree with her that in Jane Austen one finds "no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy," for Austen misses, says Lewes in his own voice, "many of the subtle connections between physical and mental organization" (160, 158). Lewes is just one among those who note that Jane Austen "minimizes the bodily dimension." Yet if readers of Pride and Prejudice, as Lewes contends, believe despite everything in the written Elizabeth Bennet as a "flesh-and-blood heroine" (165), it is because, I will argue, they have been convinced by Austen's frequent indications that the colors of that flesh and the blood seen through it are white and pink, that the countenances described in Pride and Prejudice are practiced in blanching and in blushing.
Throughout Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen notes with frequency the blushes and colorings of her characters. Austen's blushes seem sometimes to work as natural and involuntary signals of embarrassment, vexation, or love. Jane Bennet, for example, blushes the warmth of her feelings for Bingley even while verbally denying their strength. ("You doubt me," cried Jane, slightly colouring; "indeed you have no reason. He may live in my memory as the most amiable man of my acquaintance, but that is all" [134].) It may seem to Jane when she blushes—as it may seem to all of us who are self-conscious, when we blush—that her body tells the truth to spite her. The body that blushes so is a body that betrays, even while betraying a truth, a body that involuntarily obtrudes itself on the propriety of Jane's assertion that she has yet this blessing, "nothing" with which "to reproach" the man who has abandoned if not seduced her (134).
Yet social propriety is of course also served by blushes, even by blushes such as these. The blush that reddens the white lie, that unfounds the verbal construct, is a blush that reassures in delivering on the promise implicit in the possibility of embarrassment: legibility. Jane's blush offers Elizabeth the reassuring promise of a feeling self beneath the self-denials of good manners, even if the cost of reassurance demands the expense of sympathetic pain: Elizabeth, reassured, can know what Jane feels; she can know that she has been right in knowing it all along; she can love and praise Jane the more for the ineptitude with which she masks her continuing attachment; better, she can know her sister physically incapable of dissembling. Jane's very body tells despite her the truth of her integrity.
More efficient and more dense in the processes by which they signify in Pride and Prejudice are those blushes blushed for others. For her mother, for example, Elizabeth Bennet "blushed and blushed again" (100). And when Lydia and Wickham return from their wedding, the enthusiastic Lydia and her new husband fail to register the colors evidently appropriate to elopement as occasion. Austen writes of Elizabeth that, receiving the Wickhams in the breakfast room, "She blushed, and Jane blushed; but the cheeks of the two who caused their confusion, suffered no variation of colour" (316). Austen's writing makes and enforces a social and physical law: for her characters, it is as if in this room, at this time, so much blushing must occur; if those responsible for the pressure of its imperatives do not respond to that pressure, response then becomes the social obligation of those who recognize the insistence of its pulse.
Yet how is this sense of obligatory blushing to be reconciled with blushing like Jane's that can be thought to prove something precisely in being involuntary? Elizabeth and Jane cannot blush here, as they might smile somewhere else, willingly, eagerly, appropriately; voluntary coloring requires the assistance of a covert pinch or powdered brush. It seems rather that the bodies of Jane and Elizabeth are written by Austen as thoroughly socialized bodies, bodies so schooled in their obligations that these bodies respond to circumstantial pressure, anticipating or obviating consciousness of obligation. When Elizabeth and Jane blush, their blood tells, as we are told blood will, their knowledge and their socialization, even as it tells the failures of Lydia's socialization, tells what I am unable quite to call Lydia's "innocence." The constraint of my discourse ("unable quite") is the constraint exercised by Austen's narrative on the urge to read as proof of Lydia's innocence Lydia's failure to blush; not blushing, Lydia could be imagined not to know she is supposed to, not to know, that is, the social code by which her actions are read as something less than virtuous. And the rush of blushes to the faces of her sisters might seem to give those faces, after all, a somewhat more knowing look. Schooled and socialized myself in the narrative code by which I know to read Elizabeth as heroine, I have learned to want from her the blush by which I may read virtue and innocence, but I am vexed by its appearance; innocence, after all, is compromised by the knowledge that raises the blush. And yet Elizabeth's blush, duplicitous as it might be in showing a socialized innocence as inevitably curtailed by the knowledge that constitutes socialization, is finally, too, a gesture of reassurance. Like the act of confession, the blush of embarrassment supports and perpetuates the social scheme within the novel and the narrative scheme that is the novel in their promise to offer and control the flirtations of vice and virtue by permitting the fluctuations of red and white.
Austen's notorious flirtation with her readers' abilities to assess vice and virtue in the case of Darcy and Wickham depends on the fluctuations of color between men rather than on one man's cheeks. Describing Wickham's first meeting with Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice, Austen outlines in color "the effect of the meeting." "Both," she writes, "changed colour, one looked white, the other red" (73). Correct assignment of colors to characters (correct reading of somatic signs) has sometimes proven difficult for readers of this passage, especially, perhaps, for first-time readers ignorant (not to say innocent) of the prejudicial knowledge they will come to acquire or less practiced in working the codes by which one recognizes a novel's hero; one need not know at this point in the novel that Darcy's is the righteous, angry blanching, Wickham's the embarrassed blush. When "one looks white, the other red," blood circulateswithin a single social body; one countenance drains of blood, it seems, that the other might register blood's rush. That color in this passage is not specific to character eliminates the distraction of individual subjectivity and evacuates it of significance; readerly ineptitude here serves at the display of the social body: every blush is the blush of the social body, every change in color an indication of its health in giving bashful assent to social obligation. In establishing this circulatory property of embarrassed or righteous blood, Austen creates the circumstantial and systemic obligation that the obliging Jane and equally obliging Elizabeth answer, in the breakfast room, for the unembarrassed newly wed.
Austen describes an unchanged Lydia, returned to the Bennet family circle: "Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless" (315). With Lydia "Lydia still," the good Austen reader is asked to mime the reactions of the good Bennet sisters in being, like Elizabeth, "disgusted," like Jane, "shocked" (315). Indulging with smug piety my disgust and shock as such a reader, I face what my apparent distress signals I want, sadistically, from this scene: I want, it seems, Lydia tamed, abashed, silenced; I want Lydia's "ease" of manner disrupted (317); I want Lydia blushing, Lydia mortified, Lydia stilled. But the sadistic pleasures of good reading will not have to cease in satisfaction since I want what Austen assures me I will never have to have. "It was not to be supposed that time would give Lydia that embarrassment, from which she had been so wholly free at first" (317). Given that Lydia herself seems contentedly married to "dear Wickham" ("he did every thing best in the world" [318]), reader distress apparently for Lydia turns out to be self-motivated, self-interested, compensatory. As an uneducated body, Lydia can seem to possess that "better" contentment Darcy later identifies for Elizabeth: the contentment of ignorance (369). The mortified pity for Lydia that Austen manages to induce is envy at Lydia's ability to escape the somatic coercions of social knowledge with which devoted readers of Jane Austen remain possessed; such pity is the pity of the knowing for themselves. Unlike Lydia—possessed of her own strong and unblushing body ("Oh!" said Lydia stoutly, "I am not afraid; for though I am the youngest, I'm the tallest" [8])—devoted readers of Jane Austen put their devotion to work in a display of the self-consciousness acquired as part of the mannerly inhabitation of social and textual spaces. Decorous comportment within these spaces permits a kind of reciprocal inhabitation: responsive to pressures within the social and textual spaces I inhabit, learning to blush for parts of the social body or the reddening text, I submit my body to inhabitation by them; emptied by circumstance of all that circumstance does not demand, I may answer its dictates with myself, having become—unexpectedly, appropriately—"all amazement" (260), "all politeness" (26), all mortification.
Austen's prognostication for Lydia, though, is finally less a source of disappointment than—again—of reassurance. More or less sadistic in my reading pleasures, perhaps, than I have allowed myself to think, I do not want Lydia to have learned embarrassment; Lydia stilled represents an obstruction to narrative. That Lydia, unembarrassed, is still "untamed, unabashed, wild" permits and encourages the embarrassed pleasures of social circulation. Like Mary Bennet, "impatient for display" (25), I have become perverse in learning to enjoy the flush by which I blush for Lydia still. The text that engenders embarrassment offers and teaches as a pleasure indulgence in mortification's textually modulated pain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Telling Complexions by Mary Ann O'Farrell. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
