What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved (35 page)

After all the decades of young ladies blushing virtuously in novels, Austen has realised that the blush might interestingly mix ingenuousness with something close to guilt. Marianne Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility
blushes when teased about Willoughby by Mrs Jennings and Sir John Middleton (I. xviii). Edward is present and she cannot disguise her self-consciousness in front of him. Yet her vaunted lack of disguise is also a kind of pride. She blushes again when Edward expresses surprise that she contemplates keeping horses for hunting. She is thinking of being married to Willoughby and is hardly hiding the fact (I. xvii). She ‘colours’ when Mrs Jennings jokes about her trip to Allenham with Willoughby to look at his aunt’s house. Elinor subsequently admonishes Marianne for ‘going all over it’ in its owner’s absence (I. xiii). Marianne refuses to concede that she has acted wrongly, until Elinor mentions the possibility that the house and grounds might one day be hers. ‘She blushed at this hint; but it was even visibly gratifying . . .’ The blush comes not from shame but from an acknowledgement of her desires. Indeed, having agreed that her visit to the house was ‘rather ill-judged’ she proceeds to prattle about all its delightful rooms. A good reader of blushes is being shown the fallacy of Marianne’s code of openness.

The blush, in other words, is a challenge to the reader’s insight.

The most innocent blusher in Austen’s fiction is Catherine Morland. She hardly knows how to blush aright. When she sees Mr Tilney approaching at the dance in the Octagon Room, she acts naturally rather than affectedly, and so has ‘cheeks only a little redder than usual’ (I. viii). Naturally she blushes when she finds herself watched while dancing by ‘a gentleman’, who then whispers something to Henry Tilney (I. x). But this is something wholly different from the self-consciousness of an Isabella Thorpe. Catherine blushes because she thinks the man’s notice must have been attracted by ‘something wrong in her appearance’. She blushes when Henry Tilney compliments her for her ‘good-nature’ though she has not understood what he has said about her charitable interpretation of Frederick Tilney’s motives (II. i). Her blushing is wonderfully uncertain. She blushes when General Tilney suggests that she share his son’s curricle, because she remembers Mr Allen saying that it might not be right for a girl to be alone in such a vehicle with a young man (II. v). But then she decides that General Tilney cannot be recommending something wrong. There is also her ‘blush of mortification’ when the Tilneys’ servant tells her that Miss Tilney is out, ‘with a look which did not quite confirm his words’ (I. xii). She is entirely innocent of the affront that has led Miss Tilney to avoid her. However, innocence finally becomes chastened self-deception. First there is the ‘blush of surprize’ when, fired by Gothic fantasy, she opens the mysterious chest in her room, only to find a bedspread (II. vi). Then there is a more painful consciousness when, investigating Mrs Tilney’s room, she excites Henry’s perplexity by her foolish questions: she ‘blushed deeply’ (II. ix). Blushing is her intelligent awareness of her folly.

The other modest girl who blushes a good deal is Harriet Smith. She is one of the reasons that
Emma
has more blushes any other Austen novel. Her first blush is when she recalls Mrs Martin talking of how good a husband her son would make (I. iv), but thereafter her blushes are responses to Emma’s manipulative suggestions about her charms. She blushes on having Mr Elton’s compliments repeated to her by Emma (I. iv); she blushes when she sits before Mr Elton to have her portrait done (I. vi). When Emma asks her if Mr Martin is really the ‘most agreeable’ man with whom she has ever been in company, our heroine seems almost to require her to blush: ‘You blush, Harriet.—Does any body else occur to you at this moment under such a definition?’ (I. vii) This is the only time in Austen’s novels when one character tells another that he or she is blushing. The observation would usually be unacceptable because it can only deepen the other person’s blushes. Emma sees evidence of dawning ‘love’; we can see evidence of Emma’s coercion. ‘The blush . . . in Austen’s writing can be both a transparent indicator of a character’s feelings, and an agent of misdirection’, writes Katie Halsey in the best analysis of blushing in her novels.
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The blush, in other words, is a challenge to the reader’s insight. Emma’s confidence about Harriet’s blushes is blushingly confirmed by Harriet, who supposes that Emma alone might have guessed at the relationship between Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill – ‘You (blushing as she spoke) who can see into every body’s heart’ (III. xi). It is a complex dramatic irony, for a discerning reader knows that Harriet blushes at the thought that Emma knows of her feelings for Mr Knightley. Emma knows nothing of the kind, suggesting that she might have cared for Frank Churchill. Harriet cries out in surprise, ‘colouring’. This is a pained response and very different from the Harriet Smith blush. Soon, to Emma’s consternation, this is apparent. Emma has to listen to Harriet’s account of Mr Knightley talking to her ‘in a more particular way than he had ever done before, in a very particular way indeed!—(Harriet could not recall it without a blush)’. She blushes with just the pleased consciousness that Emma has taught her.

It takes a good deal to make Emma blush, though she thinks of herself as a connoisseur of blushing. When she considers her sister Isabella’s marriage she reflects that ‘She had given them neither men, nor manners, nor places, that could raise a blush’ (III. vi). It is one of Emma’s little phrases, used when she tells Harriet that her supposedly forthcoming marriage to Mr Elton is ‘an alliance which can never raise a blush in either of us’ (I. ix). Emma would like blushing to be a matter of social pride – you blush at some stooping from your proper status. As she hears Harriet recalling her cutting a ‘plaister’ for Mr Elton, and admits to her own supposedly cunning untruths, she says, ‘I deserve to be under a continual blush all the rest of my life’ (III. iv). She must be made to blush for deeper feelings than this and indeed finds herself having to blush a good deal in the last chapters of the novel. She blushes when admonished by Mr Knightley for her cruelty to Miss Bates (III. vii). When she finds out from Mrs Weston about the Churchill–Fairfax engagement, she is made sensitive to her own past folly in a way that Mrs Weston does not perceive: ‘Emma could not speak the name of Dixon without a little blush’ (III. x). When she thinks of her coldness towards Jane Fairfax, ‘she blushed for the envious feelings which had certainly been, in some measure, the cause’ (III. xii). This is having listened to Mrs Weston’s account of the engagement and the blushing is an entirely private, we might say internal, experience. She experiences ‘a blush of sensibility on Harriet’s account’ when Mr Knightley asks her for her agreement in his recommendation of ‘truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other’ (III. xv). She has accepted the need for sincerity, yet cannot give ‘any sincere explanation’ of that blush. Mr Knightley cannot be told that she blushes to think of Harriet’s feelings for him. Emma blushes when she is rendered helpless. After they have become engaged Mr Knightley begins to talk to her of Harriet Smith. ‘Her cheeks flushed at the name, and she felt afraid of something, though she knew not what’ (III. xviii). What
is
she afraid of? Presumably of Mr Knightley having somehow divined her earlier belief that he might love Harriet Smith. He takes her blush to come from her knowledge of Harriet’s engagement to Robert Martin. That flushing is her consciousness of her own past delusion, and of her misconception about Mr Knightley’s feelings that has led to her own happiness. Now she is a blusher and he is the misinterpreter.

What about men? We register the reanimated attraction, as well as the awkwardness, when Elizabeth and Darcy encounter each other unexpectedly at Pemberley. ‘Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush’ (III. i). This mutual blush is powerful and unusual in Austen’s novels. Elsewhere men do not blush, they ‘colour’. In
Sense and Sensibility
Mrs Dashwood hopes that Willoughby will soon be back from London. ‘He coloured as he replied . . .’ (I. xv). This is guilt that what he is about to say – he has no plans to return – is entirely at odds with his behaviour towards Marianne. When Mrs Dashwood tells him that he is welcome to stay with them, ‘His colour increased’. Edward Ferrars (who has just been on a secret visit to Lucy Steele) responds similarly when Marianne accuses him of being ‘reserved’. ‘“I do not understand you,” replied he, colouring. “Reserved!—how, in what manner? What am I to tell you? What can you suppose?”’ (I. xvii). In this secret-filled novel, ‘colouring’ is the acknowledgement of secrecy. Thus Edward’s reaction when Marianne asks him about the ring with a plait of hair that he is wearing. ‘He coloured very deeply, and giving a momentary glance at Elinor, replied, “Yes; it is my sister’s hair. The setting always casts a different shade on it, you know”’ (I. xviii). It is a lie, but Elinor misinterprets his blush, assuming that the hair is her own.

Men turn red (or white) but are not usually said to blush. When Wickham and Darcy first spot each other, in the company of the Bennet girls, ‘Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red’ (I. xv). Which is which? We infer, I think, that Darcy turns white (righteous indignation) and Wickham turns red (embarrassment, guilt). When Elizabeth rejects his proposal, Mr Darcy turns ‘pale with anger’ (II. xi). When she goes on to speak of his injustice to Wickham, she and we see his ‘heightened colour’. This is anger, but even love does not make men exactly blush. When Captain Wentworth in
Persuasion
encounters Anne in a shop in Bath, he is ‘struck and confused’; ‘he looked quite red’ (II. vii). Mr Knightley turns ‘red with surprise and displeasure’ when Emma complacently tells him that Harriet Smith has refused Robert Martin (I. viii). He suffers a rather different rush of blood when she suggests that his admiration for Jane Fairfax may some day take him ‘by surprise’ (II. xv). ‘Mr. Knightley was hard at work upon the lower buttons of his thick leather gaiters, and either the exertion of getting them together, or some other cause, brought the colour into his face, as he answered.’ Only a narrative so much told from one character’s point of view can manage to be uncertain in this way. His colouring, of course, is because his admiration for Emma is taking him by surprise.

That shared blush in
Pride and Prejudice
is the surest possible sign of mutual love: her blush has spread to him. But Elizabeth goes on blushing after the encounter. ‘She blushed again and again over the perverseness of the meeting’ (III. i). Blushing is the means by which Austen registers Elizabeth’s unadmitted feelings. Elizabeth wishes that she and the Gardiners had left ten minutes sooner – not so that she would have avoided meeting him, but so that she would have avoided the pressure of these feelings. Here the blush is our measure of the inwardness of the character. Elizabeth blushes at thoughts to which only the reader has access. Earlier she colours when Colonel Fitzwilliam says something about not having enough money to marry, but she is blushing at her own speculation, wondering for a second if he is courting her (II. x). In a laboured exchange about what might be called an ‘easy distance’ between two places, she blushes at Mr Darcy’s apparent reference to the distance between Longbourn and Netherfield, as if he has caught her thinking about Jane’s relationship with Bingley (II. ix). In fact Mr Darcy is on the brink of his marriage proposal and must be thinking, with ‘a sort of a smile’, of how far his home is from the Bennets’. Elizabeth does not understand him, while he cannot possibly interpret her blush correctly. He must presume it to be a sign of her pleased consciousness of his attentions, for he draws his chair ‘a little towards her’. That blush is what she feels, not what he sees. The reader inhabits Elizabeth’s mind through her blushes. When she enters the house after the walk on which Mr Darcy has proposed to her a second time, Jane asks her where she has been and Elizabeth says that ‘they had wandered about, till she was beyond her own knowledge’ (III. xvii). ‘She coloured as she spoke’, but apparently without awakening suspicion. That colouring is felt rather than observed, the self-consciousness of a character with whom we share a secret. It appears to be description from the outside, but in fact it is entirely a description from the inside. No one notices but Elizabeth herself.

This is the most complex kind of embarrassment, when one of Austen’s heroines blushes at what she suddenly knows about her own feelings or her own behaviour. When Mrs Weston breaks the news of Jane Fairfax’s engagement to Frank Churchill, Emma asks whether it was secret even from the Campbells and the Dixons. She blushes at her worse-than-folly in supposing that Jane Fairfax was conducting some kind of love affair with Mr Dixon, though Mrs Weston has known nothing of this bizarre hypothesis. This is blushing as self-consciousness, something experienced rather than observed. At the end of the third chapter of
Persuasion
, we find that Anne must walk outside to cool her ‘flushed cheeks’ because Captain Wentworth’s name has been mentioned – but no one else has known or noticed. A little blush in
Northanger Abbey
epitomises Austen’s use of blushing to let us glimpse an inner world. Catherine is worrying about Mr Tilney being too aware of Mrs Allen’s folly as he talks with her, and just at this moment he asks her what she is thinking about. ‘Catherine coloured . . .’ (I. iii). The knowing young man has caught her – and us – in the midst of her unflattering thoughts. Blushing is the most intense experience of self-consciousness, but only the reader – the attentive reader – can know this.