What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (34 page)

SEVENTEEN

What Makes Characters Blush?

‘No, read it yourself,’ cried Catherine, whose second thoughts were clearer. ‘I do not know what I was thinking of’ (blushing again that she had blushed before) . . .

Northanger Abbey
, II. x

In Austen’s novels, a person can be made to blush by someone else’s failure to do so. In
Sense and Sensibility
, Elinor Dashwood is engaged in confidential conversation with Lucy Steele about the latter’s secret engagement to Edward Ferrars and is endeavouring to conceal her own feelings. The suspicious Lucy is testing those feelings: she so values Elinor’s judgement, she says, that if Miss Dashwood were to advise her to give up her engagement, she would do so ‘immediately’ (II. ii). ‘Elinor blushed for the insincerity of Edward’s future wife.’ Elinor can keep from betraying her own love for Edward, but not from exhibiting a kind of vicarious shame at Lucy’s shameless attempts to trick her into self-betrayal.
Blushing for
someone else is usually just a figure of speech, meaning little more than disapproving of them. ‘I blush for you, Tom,’ says Sir Thomas Bertram in
Mansfield Park
, admonishing his elder son for gambling debts that will deprive his brother of his ‘living’ (I. iii). He uses the phrase twice, but it cannot literally be true, given the massive dignity of his address. Elinor Dashwood, however, does physically experience this almost embarrassed response to her companion’s dishonesty. It is a sign that, in this novel of secrets, she cannot keep unexpressed her consciousness of what is really going on. The blush is more evidence of Elinor’s struggle to remain self-possessed – a struggle so invisible to her own sister.

Austen requires her reader to be an interpreter of blushes. For a novelist so reticent about describing her characters’ features and facial expressions, blushing is extraordinarily important. If there is one form of expression that is missing from all those dramatisations of Austen’s novels it is the blush. Weeping is easy for any accomplished performer, but the Austen blush – that most truly involuntary signal of feeling – is almost impossible. Young women had been dependably blushing in novels for decades before Austen began writing: it was a proper sign of modesty and sensibility. In Austen’s novels, however, the blush becomes a challenge to the intuition of other characters, and often the reader too. When, like Elinor, one character blushes for another, it is usually a sign of displeasing insight. In
Northanger Abbey
, Catherine suggests to Henry Tilney that his brother Frederick should cease his ‘attentions’ to Isabella, who is supposedly engaged to Catherine’s brother James (II. iv). Henry Tilney counters that the problem is Isabella’s ‘admission’ of these attentions and it is a palpable hit: ‘Catherine blushed for her friend.’ Isabella is not exactly unblushing herself, but her blushes are beyond Catherine’s understanding. She encourages Catherine to imagine teasing her that she and James Morland were ‘born for each other’: ‘my cheeks would have been as red as your roses’ (I. x). But the provocation and the maidenly response are both imaginary. When Isabella does blush it is from a more deceitful intent. Catherine looks forward to their being ‘sisters’ (on Isabella’s planned marriage to James) and Isabella replies ‘(with a blush)’ that ‘there are more ways than one of our being sisters’ (II. iii). She is thinking of her nascent romance with Frederick Tilney. That blush is there to tell us of her fickleness, but also of Catherine’s lack of comprehension.

Catherine’s eventual blush for her friend is a rush of understanding. Elizabeth Bennet’s blushes for her mother in
Pride and Prejudice
are, we imagine, not the first. Elizabeth literally blushes for her mother when she rudely and stupidly disputes Darcy’s observations about the ‘unvarying society’ of country life (I. ix). Mrs Bennet is so embarrassing because she is immune to embarrassment. Later, at the Netherfield ball, her loud indiscretions bring the blood to Elizabeth’s cheeks again. ‘Elizabeth blushed and blushed again with shame and vexation’ (I. xix). Blushing bespeaks a social awareness that others lack. When Wickham and Lydia arrive unblushingly at Longbourn after their wedding, Elizabeth and Jane do their blushing for them. ‘
She
blushed, and Jane blushed; but the cheeks of the two who caused their confusion, suffered no variation of colour’ (III. ix). We and Elizabeth know that her friend Charlotte remains the clear-eyed person that ever she was from the ‘faint blush’ that occasionally appears as she listens to her husband, Mr Collins (II. v). He says things of which she is ‘ashamed’ precisely because he is not. Elizabeth has to watch her face because the newly married Mrs Collins must keep her true thoughts about her husband to herself.

In his brilliantly single-minded analysis of blushing in the writings of John Keats, Christopher Ricks hazards the thought that the blush is of peculiar interest to writers of the Romantic Age. Citing Charles Darwin’s idea that blushing is a consequence of human ‘self-attention’, he argues that, for the Romantics, ‘self-attention had become the supreme subject and animus for the artist’.
¹
Blushing now deserved ‘serious, wide, and deep scrutiny’. Austen, writing at just the same time as Keats, expects her reader to exercise this scrutiny, for the reasons for blushing can be complex indeed. In
Persuasion
, Lady Russell pretends not to have seen Captain Wentworth in the street in Bath and Anne notices her pretence. ‘Anne sighed and blushed and smiled, in pity and disdain, either at her friend or herself’ (II. vii). Anne’s self-attention is dramatised by the way the sentence stumbles through these different responses and explanations. Such is her confusion of feelings by this stage of the novel that the reason for the blush is almost buried. She blushes in vicarious shame at Lady Russell’s evasive dishonesty, but perhaps also, she thinks, at her own eager perceptiveness, sharpened by her hopes for Captain Wentworth’s affections. Anne has begun to learn the importance of blushing. Earlier in the novel, she had thought herself beyond a blush. When Mrs Croft refers to the fact that Anne is ‘acquainted with’ her brother, she is ‘electrified’ – the only time that Austen ever uses this word. (The OED records the earliest use of ‘electrified’ to mean ‘very excited’ or ‘thrilled’ in 1801: an unusual word is needed for the strong surprise of Anne’s response.) Yet concealment of this response is apparently possible. ‘Anne hoped that she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not’ (I.vi). Blushing is for a young woman.

Yet she has not truly outlived blushing: this is just another of her virtuous self-delusions. In the aftermath of Louisa Musgrove’s fall, Captain Wentworth breaks through his reserve and appeals for her help ‘with a glow, and yet a gentleness, which seemed almost restoring the past’ (I. xii). ‘She coloured deeply.’ She is all too ready to blush. When she is first introduced to Mr Elliot, conscious as he must be of the looks that passed between them at Lyme, we find her ‘blushing and smiling’ (II. ii). Lady Russell hints at his ‘possible attachment’ and ‘the desirableness of the alliance’: Anne ‘only smiled, blushed, and gently shook her head’ (II. v). Blushing is the sign of her reanimation. In fact, she becomes a great blusher. When Captain Wentworth converses with her before the concert in Bath, we find him halting in his talk of Louisa Musgrove’s engagement with ‘some taste of that emotion which was reddening Anne’s cheeks’ (II. viii). Now that she has hope again, the thought of Captain Wentworth’s past flirtation excites her self-consciousness. When they get on to the topic of Lyme she declares her ‘very agreeable’ impressions of the place – ‘with a faint blush at some recollections’. It was at Lyme that Captain Wentworth began to turn to her again. The reader is left to infer the ‘emotion’ and the ‘recollections’ that bring the blood to Anne’s cheeks. The next day she visits Mrs Smith, who suggests that Anne has been in the company of ‘the person who interests you at this present time, more than all the rest of the world put together’ (II. ix). ‘A blush overspread Anne’s cheeks.’ Mrs Smith is thinking of Mr Elliot, so Anne starts to put her right, before she stops, ‘regretting with a deep blush that she had implied so much’. At which Mrs Smith instantly grasps the truth. Blushing cannot lie.

One of the few critics who has written on blushing in Austen’s fiction describes a blush as ‘a truth yielded against one’s well-behaved will’.
²
Yet the truth that a blush yields is not always what an observer presumes. Jane Austen uses blushing to alert us not just to the secret feelings that possess her characters, but also to the habits of misinterpretation that secrecy engenders. When Mrs Jennings, watching Colonel Brandon talking quietly to Elinor Dashwood in the window of her London drawing room, sees that ‘Elinor changed colour’ at something he says, she imagines that she is witnessing a proposal (
Sense and Sensibility
, III. iii). In fact, he is offering to provide a living for Edward Ferrars so that he will be able to marry Lucy Steele, and Elinor’s colouring registers her feelings on being asked to convey the news to him. She is to be the one to tell the man she loves that he will have enough money to marry another woman. Mrs Jennings is observant enough to notice the stir of emotions in Elinor’s face, but wholly mistakes them. Similarly in
Emma
the heroine reognises signs that she blithely misreads. At the party at the Coles, Emma is watching Jane Fairfax when the subject of the piano is mentioned and she sees Jane Fairfax’s ‘blush of consciousness’, followed by the ‘blush of guilt’ when she mentions Colonel Campbell (II. viii). The next day Emma visits the Bateses, where Jane plays the piano while Frank Churchill makes veiled jokes about Weymouth. Emma notes Jane’s ‘deep blush of consciousness’, along with ‘a smile of secret delight’ (II. x). ‘This amiable, upright, perfect Jane Fairfax was apparently cherishing very reprehensible feelings.’ For Emma, these blushes are evidence that Jane Fairfax has an illicit admirer in Mr Dixon; the reader will be able to interpret them better.

Mansfield Park
has the most blushful of Austen’s heroines, not just because Fanny is a modest and sensitive soul, but also because she is governed by feelings at which no one must guess.
³
People think they understand Fanny Price, but no one does. At the opening of Chapter iii of
Mansfield Park
, we find that some five years have passed since the end of the previous chapter, Fanny is ‘about fifteen’ and Mr Norris has died. Edmund is recommending to the reluctant Fanny her new residence, as he imagines, with Mrs Norris, telling her that she has ‘good sense, and a sweet temper, and I am sure you have a grateful heart’. ‘“You are too kind,” said Fanny, colouring at such praise.’ This is our first sign of a new kind of attachment, a sign that is the more important for being unnoticed, or at least uninterpreted, by Edmund. She blushes in acknowledgement that she is no longer a child. When the returning Sir Thomas compliments her on her appearance he raises ‘a fine blush’ (II. i). It is Henry Crawford, that connoisseur of female desires, who notices her ‘soft skin . . . so frequently tinged with a blush’ (II. vi). Her blushes alert him to her sexual attractiveness.

Fanny also blushes because she is good. She ‘colours’ in righteousness in response to some of the Crawfords’ thoughtless jests: when she contradicts Mary Crawford’s opinion of men’s perfunctory letters (I. vi), or listens to her views on the inferiority of parsons (I. ix), or when Henry Crawford talks disparagingly of Mr Rushworth (II. v). The Crawfords should be able to interpret these responses, but often only the reader can know what brings the colour to her cheeks. When Edmund talks to Fanny about his feelings for Mary Crawford, she asks him not to confide in her. ‘The time may come—’ she says, thinking of the possibility of their marriage, and breaking off (II. ix). ‘The colour rushed into her cheeks as she spoke.’ Edmund presses her hand to his lips, utterly failing to understand her response. He thinks she is being delicate: she does not want to hear any of his private reservations about a woman who might end up as his wife. In fact her rush of blood tells us of her pained consciousness that her own love for him is doomed – and that he is entirely oblivious of it. Later, when Edmund says that she will surely learn to love Henry Crawford, Fanny exclaims ‘Oh! never, never, never; he will never succeed with me’ (III. iv). She speaks with a warmth that surprises the unsuspecting Edmund, and when she sees this ‘she blushed at the recollection of herself’.

Sometimes indignation and secret pain combine. When Sir Thomas addresses her on the subject of Crawford’s proposal, he notices her ‘colour rising’ and has to suppress a smile, for he imagines that this is her acknowledgement of pleasure (III. i). Bemused by her rejection of the proposal, he begins to wonder if her affections are engaged elsewhere. He does not finish the thought, and she does not reply: ‘her face was like scarlet’. Sir Thomas chooses to take this deepest of blushes as a sign of her innocence, though he has just come as close as any character ever does to divining the truth. It is a truth that clever Mary Crawford, interpreting every blush wrongly, keeps missing. When she tricks Fanny into choosing to borrow a necklace that was her brother’s gift, she then teases her about suspecting ‘a confederacy between us’ (II. viii). Fanny protests against the thought ‘with the deepest blushes’, allowing Miss Crawford to infer that she does truly relish her brother’s attentions. She is wrong, but why then are Fanny’s blushes so deep? Because she does think that Henry Crawford is up to something, but also because she is having to acknowledge her own sexual allure. At the ball, Mary blunders by busily ‘misinterpreting Fanny’s blushes’ when she talks of her brother, supposing that she is ‘giving her heart a little flutter’ rather than merely embarrassing her (II. x). In the wake of Fanny’s rejection of Henry Crawford’s proposal, Mary Crawford wonders playfully at her apparent ‘indifference’ and asks whether ‘you are so insensible as you profess yourself’ (III. v). ‘There was indeed so deep a blush over Fanny’s face at that moment, as might warrant strong suspicion in a pre-disposed mind.’ Fanny blushes because she is a virtuous girl who finds all this talk of love mortifying – but also because love does govern her every thought. She is not in the least ‘insensible’, though Mary Crawford is simply deluded to take her embarrassment as betokening some unconfessed liking for her brother.