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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