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III.
The Blush the Sanction of Modesty--The Phenomena of Blushing--Influences
Which Modify the Aptitude to Blush--Darkness, Concealment
of the Face, Etc.
It is impossible to contemplate this series of phenomena,
so radically persistent whatever its changes of form, and
so constant throughout every stage of civilization, without
feeling that, although modesty cannot properly be called an
instinct, there must be some physiological basis to support
it. Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism
of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings,
the blush. All the allied emotional forms of fear--shame,
bashfulness, timidity--are to some extent upheld by this mechanism,
but such is especially the case with the emotion we are now
concerned with.[64] The blush is the sanction of modesty.
The blush is, indeed, only a part, almost, perhaps, an accidental
part, of the organic turmoil with which it is associated.
Partridge, who has studied the phenomena of blushing in one
hundred and twenty cases (_Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1897),
finds that the following are the general symptoms: tremors
near the waist, weakness in the limbs, pressure, trembling,
warmth, weight or beating in the chest, warm wave from feet
upward, quivering of heart, stoppage and then rapid beating
of heart, coldness all over followed by heat, dizziness, tingling
of toes and fingers, numbness, something rising in throat,
smarting of eyes, singing in ears, prickling sensations of
face, and pressure inside head. Partridge considers that the
disturbance is primarily central, a change in the cerebral
circulation, and that the actual redness of the surface comes
late in the nerve storm, and is really but a small part of
it.
There has been some discussion as to why, and indeed how far,
blushing is confined to the face. Henle (_Ueber das Erroethen_)
thought that we blush in the face because all nervous phenomena
produced by mental states appear first in the face, owing
to the anatomical arrangement of the nerves of the body. Darwin
(_Expression of the Emotions_) argued that attention to a
part tends to produce capillary activity in the part, and
that the face has been the chief object of attention. It has
also been argued, on the other hand, that the blush is the
vestigial remains of a general erethism of sex, in which shame
originated; that the blush was thus once more widely diffused,
and is so still among the women of some lower races, its limitation
to the face being due to sexual selection and the enhanced
beauty thus achieved. Fere once had occasion to examine, when
completely nude, a boy of thirteen whose sexual organs were
deformed; when accused of masturbation he became covered by
a blush which spread uniformly over his face, neck, body and
limbs, before and behind, except only the hands and feet.
Fere asks whether such a universal blush is more common than
we imagine, or whether the state of nudity favors its manifestation.
(_Comptes Rendus, Societe de Biologie_, April 1, 1905.) It
may be added that Partridge mentions one case in which the
hands blushed.
The sexual relationships of blushing are unquestionable. It
occurs chiefly in women; it attains its chief intensity at
puberty and during adolescence; its most common occasion is
some more or less sexual suggestion; among one hundred and
sixty-two occasions of blushing enumerated by Partridge, by
far the most frequent cause was teasing, usually about the
other sex. "An erection," it has been said, "is
a blushing of the penis." Stanley Hall seems to suggest
that the sexual blush is a vicarious genital flushing of blood,
diverted from the genital sphere by an inhibition of fear,
just as, in girls, giggling is also very frequently a vicarious
outlet of shame; the sexual blush would thus be the outcome
of an ancestral sex-fear; it is as an irradiation of sexual
erethism that the blush may contain an element of pleasure.[65]
Bloch remarks that the blush is sexual, because reddening
of the face, as well as of the genitals, is an accompaniment
of sexual emotion (_Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia
Sexualis_, Teil II, p. 39). "Do you not think,"
a correspondent writes, "that the sexual blush, at least,
really represents a vaso-relaxor effect quite the same as
erection? The embarrassment which arises is due to a perception
of this fact under circumstances which are felt to be unsuited
for such a condition. There may arise the fear of awakening
disgust by the exhibition of a state which is out of place.
I have noticed that such a blush is produced when a sufficiently
young and susceptible woman is pumped full of compliments.
This blush seems accompanied by pleasure which does not always
change to fear or disgust, but is felt to be attractive. When
discomfort arises, most women say that they feel this because
'it looks as if they had no control over themselves.' When
they feel that there is no need for control, they no longer
feel fear, and the relaxor effect has a wider field of operation,
producing a general rosiness, erection of spinal sexual organs,
etc. Such a blush would thus be a partial sexual equivalent,
and allow of the inhibition of other sexual effects, through
the warning it gives, and the fear aroused, as well as being
in itself a slight outlet of relaxor energy. When the relationships
of the persons concerned allow freedom to the special sexual
stimuli, as in marriage, blushing does not occur so often,
and when it does it has not so often the consequent of fear."
There can be no doubt that the blush is sexually attractive.
The blush is the expression of an impulse to concealment and
flight, which tends automatically to arouse in the beholder
the corresponding impulse of pursuit, so that the central
situation of courtship is at once presented. Women are more
or less conscious of this, as well as men, and this recognition
is an added source of embarrassment when it cannot become
a source of pleasure. The ancient use of rouge testifies to
the beauty of the blush, and Darwin stated that, in Turkish
slave-markets, the girls who readily blushed fetched the highest
prices. To evoke a blush, even by producing embarrassment,
is very commonly a cause of masculine gratification.
Savages, both men and women, blush even beneath a dusky skin
(for the phenomenon of blushing among different races, see
Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, Bd. I, pp. 149-150),
and it is possible that natural selection, as well as sexual
selection, has been favorable to the development of the blush.
It is scarcely an accident that, as has been often observed,
criminals, or the antisocial element of the community--whether
by the habits of their lives or by congenital abnormality--blush
less easily than normal persons. Kroner (_Das koerperliche
Gefuehl_, 1887, p. 130) remarks: "The origin of a specific
connection between shame and blushing is the work of a _social
selection_. It is certainly an immediate advantage for a man
not to blush; indirectly, however, it is a disadvantage, because
in other ways he will be known as shameless, and on that account,
as a rule, he will be shut out from propagation. This social
selection will be specially exercised on the female sex, and
on this account, women blush to a greater extent, and more
readily, than men."
The importance of the blush, and the emotional confusion behind
it, as the sanction of modesty is shown by the significant
fact that, by lulling emotional confusion, it is possible
to inhibit the sense of modesty. In other words, we are here
in the presence of a fear--to a large extent a sex-fear--impelling
to concealment, and dreading self-attention; this fear naturally
disappears, even though its ostensible cause remains, when
it becomes apparent that there is no reason for fear.
That is the reason why nakedness in itself has nothing to
do with modesty or immodesty; it is the conditions under which
the nakedness occurs which determine whether or not modesty
will be roused. If none of the factors of modesty are violated,
if no embarrassing self-attention is excited, if there is
a consciousness of perfect propriety alike in the subject
and in the spectator, nakedness is entirely compatible with
the most scrupulous modesty. A. Duval, a pupil of Ingres,
tells that a female model was once quietly posing, completely
nude, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Suddenly she screamed and
ran to cover herself with her garments. She had seen a workman
on the roof gazing inquisitively at her through a skylight.[66]
And Paola Lombroso describes how a lady, a diplomatist's wife,
who went to a gathering where she found herself the only woman
in evening dress, felt, to her own surprise, such sudden shame
that she could not keep back her tears.
It thus comes about that the emotion of modesty necessarily
depends on the feelings of the people around. The absence
of the emotion by no means signifies immodesty, provided that
the reactions of modesty are at once set in motion under the
stress of a spectator's eye that is seen to be lustful, inquisitive,
or reproachful. This is proved to be the case among primitive
peoples everywhere. The Japanese woman, naked as in daily
life she sometimes is, remains unconcerned because she excites
no disagreeable attention, but the inquisitive and unmannerly
European's eye at once causes her to feel confusion. Stratz,
a physician, and one, moreover, who had long lived among the
Javanese who frequently go naked, found that naked Japanese
women felt no embarrassment in his presence.
It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain
the curious influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations
of modesty, as many lovers have discovered, and as we may
notice in our cities after dark. This influence of darkness
in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient observation. Burton,
in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, quotes from Dandinus the saying
"_Nox facit impudentes_," directly associating this
with blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote
in the sixteenth century that, "it is commonly said of
women, that they will do in the dark what they would not do
in the light." It is true that the immodesty of a large
city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption
of prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually
nearer to the threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected
by this influence. But it is an influence to which the most
modest women are, at all events in some degree, susceptible.
It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always more her
real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this
is part of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.
"Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of
the primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may
be said (the life of Southern Europe and of American society
of to-day illustrates this point abundantly) that she is,
in a sense, a night-being, for the activity, physical and
moral, of modern women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the
nocturnal intellectualities of society) in this direction
is remarkable. Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary
day-labor as rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her
existence, her evening and night life being the true side
of her activities" (A.F. Chamberlain, "Work and
Rest," _Popular Science Monthly_, March, 1902). Giessler,
who has studied the general influence of darkness on human
psychic life, reaches conclusions which harmonize with these
(C.M. Giessler, "Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit auf das
Seelenleben des Menschen," _Vierteljahrsschrift fuer
wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1904, pp. 255-279). I have
not been able to see Giessler's paper, but, according to a
summary of it, he comes to the result that in the dark the
soul's activities are nearer to its motor pole than to its
sensitive pole, and that there is a tendency for phenomena
belonging to the early period of development to be prominent,
motor memory functioning more than representative memory,
attention more than apperception, imagination more than logical
thinking, egoistic more than altruistic morals.
It is curious to note that short-sightedness, naturally, though
illogically, tends to exert the same influence as darkness
in this respect; I am assured by short-sighted persons of
both sexes that they are much more liable to the emotions
of shyness and modesty with their glasses than without them;
such persons with difficulty realize that they are not so
dim to others as others are to them. To be in the company
of a blind person seems also to be a protection against shyness.[67]
It is interesting to learn that congenitally blind children
are as sensitive to appearances as normal children, and blush
as readily.[68] This would seem to be due to the fact that
the habitually blind have permanently adjusted their mental
focus to that of normal persons, and react in the same manner
as normal persons; blindness is not for them, as it is for
the short-sighted without their glasses, a temporary and relative,
almost unconscious refuge from clear vision.
It is, of course, not as the mere cloak of a possible blush
that darkness gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed
self-realization, such conscious self-realization being always
a source of fears, and the blush their definite symbol and
visible climax. It is to the blush that we must attribute
a curious complementary relationship between the face and
the sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty. The
women of some African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked,
cover the face with the hand under the influence of modesty.
Martial long since observed (Lib. iii, LXVIII) that when an
innocent girl looks at the penis she gazes through her fingers.
Where, as among many Mohammedan peoples, the face is the chief
focus of modesty, the exposure of the rest of the body, including
sometimes even the sacro-pubic region, and certainly the legs
and thighs, often becomes a matter of indifference.[69]
This concealment of the face is more than a convention; it
has a psychological basis. We may observe among ourselves
the well-marked feminine tendency to hide the face in order
to cloak a possible blush, and to hide the eyes as a method
of lulling self-consciousness, a method fabulously attributed
to the ostrich with the same end of concealment.[70] A woman
who is shy with her lover will sometimes experience little
or no difficulty in showing any part of her person provided
she may cover her face. When, in gynecological practice, examination
of the sexual organs is necessary, women frequently find evident
satisfaction in concealing the face with the hands, although
not the slightest attention is being directed toward the face,
and when an unsophisticated woman is betrayed into a confession
which affects her modesty she is apt to turn her back to her
interlocutor. "When the face of woman is covered,"
it has been said, "her heart is bared," and the
Catholic Church has recognized this psychological truth by
arranging that in the confessional the penitent's face shall
not be visible. The gay and innocent freedom of southern women
during Carnival is due not entirely to the permitted license
of the season or the concealment of identity, but to the mask
that hides the face. In England, during Queen Elizabeth's
reign and at the Restoration, it was possible for respectable
women to be present at the theatre, even during the performance
of the most free-spoken plays, because they wore masks. The
fan has often subserved a similar end.[71]
All such facts serve to show that, though the forms of modesty
may change, it is yet a very radical constituent of human
nature in all stages of civilization, and that it is, to a
large extent, maintained by the mechanism of blushing.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Melinaud ("Pourquoi Rougit-on?" _Revue des
Deux Mondes_, 1 Octobre, 1893) points out that blushing is
always associated with fear, and indicates, in the various
conditions under which it may arise,--modesty, timidity, confusion,--that
we have something to conceal which we fear may be discovered.
"All the evidence," Partridge states, "seems
to point to the conclusion that the mental state underlying
blushing belongs to the fear family. The presence of the feeling
of dread, the palpitation of the heart, the impulse to escape,
to hide, the shock, all confirms this view."
[65] G. Stanley Hall, "A Study of Fears," _American
Journal Psychology_, 1897.
[66] Men are also very sensitive to any such inquisitiveness
on the part of the opposite sex. To this cause, perhaps, and
possibly, also, to the fear of causing disgust, may be ascribed
the objection of men to undress before women artists and women
doctors. I am told there is often difficulty in getting men
to pose nude to women artists. Sir Jonathan Hutchinson was
compelled, some years ago, to exclude lady members of the
medical profession from the instructive demonstrations at
his museum, "on account of the unwillingness of male
patients to undress before them." A similar unwillingness
is not found among women patients, but it must be remembered
that, while women are accustomed to men as doctors, men (in
England) are not yet accustomed to women as doctors.
[67] "I am acquainted with the case of a shy man,"
writes Dr. Harry Campbell, in his interesting study of "Morbid
Shyness" (_British Medical Journal_, September 26, 1896),
"who will make himself quite at home in the house of
a blind person, and help himself to wine with the utmost confidence,
whereas if a member of the family, who can see, comes into
the room, all his old shyness returns, and he wishes himself
far away."
[68] Stanley Hall ("Showing Off and Bashfulness,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1903), quotes Dr. Anagnos, of
the Perkins Institute for the Blind, to this effect.
[69] Thus, Sonnini, in the eighteenth century, noted that
the country women in Egypt only wore a single garment, open
from the armpits to the knees on each side, so that it revealed
the body at every movement; "but this troubles the women
little, provided the face is not exposed." (_Voyage dans
la Haute et Basse Egypte_, 1779, vol. i, p, 289.) When Casanova
was at Constantinople, the Comte de Bonneval, a convert to
Islam, assured him that he was mistaken in trying to see a
woman's face when he might easily obtain greater favors from
her. "The most reserved of Turkish women," the Comte
assured him, "only carries her modesty in her face, and
as soon as her veil is on she is sure that she will never
blush at anything." (_Memoires_, vol. i, p. 429.)
[70] It is worth noting that this impulse is rooted in the
natural instinctive acts and ideas of childhood. Stanley Hall,
dealing with the "Early Sense of Self," in the report
already mentioned, refers to the eyes as perhaps even more
than the hands, feet, and mouth, "the centres of that
kind of self-consciousness which is always mindful of how
the self appears to others," and proceeds to mention
"the very common impression of young children that if
the eyes are covered or closed they cannot be seen. Some think
the entire body thus vanishes from sight of others; some,
that the head also ceases to be visible; and a still higher
form of this curious psychosis is that, when they are closed,
the soul cannot be seen." (_American Journal of Psychology_,
vol. ix, No. 3, 1898.) The instinctive and unreasoned character
of this act is further shown by its occurrence in idiots.
Naecke mentions that he once had occasion to examine the abdomen
of an idiot, who, thereupon, attempted to draw down his shirt
with the left hand, while with the right he covered his eyes.
[71] Cf. Stanley Hall and T. Smith, "Showing Off and
Bashfulness," _American Journal of Psychology_, June,
1903.
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