Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century English Novel and the Blush

by Mary Ann O'Farrell

In Telling Complexions Mary Ann O’Farrell explores the frequent use of "the blush" in Victorian novels as a sign of characters’ inner emotions and desires. Through lively and textured readings of works by such writers as Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and Henry James, O’Farrell illuminates literature’s relation to the body and the body’s place in culture. In the process, she plots a trajectory for the nineteenth-century novel’s shift from the practices of manners to the mode of self-consciousness.
Although the blush was used to tell the truth of character and body, O’Farrell shows how it is actually undermined as a stable indicator of character in novels such as Pride and Prejudice , Persuasion , North and South , and David Copperfield . She reveals how these writers then moved on in search of other bodily indicators of mortification and desire, among them the swoon, the scar, and the blunder. Providing unique and creative insights into the constructedness of the body and its semiotic play in literature and in culture, Telling Complexions includes parallel examples of the blush in contemporary culture and describes ways that textualized bodies are sometimes imagined to resist the constraints imposed by such construction.

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 1997

Reviews

[Ygraine]

useful on austen and gaskell to me personally, i LOVE austen's erotics of mortification and am v interested in the double nature of the blush, esp the idea that "expressive individualism is a fantasy in support of an organic social mechanics, and that its prized sign-the blush- may mark less the body's betrayal and assertion of a unique and powerful self than its surrender to the needs and determinations of a larger inorganic corpus".

[Georgie]

2.5
gets steadily less convincing. end notes are too long and subsequently too messy -- the notes don't branch out from the main text (i.e. like a root); instead they seem totally isolated. i think this might really be responsible for the weakening argument throughout

[Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

V necessary JP reading! Pretty old school but interesting.

[Yvonne O'Connor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a critical theory about the use of the blush in 19th century fiction. By looking at Austen, Gaskell, Dickens, James and other authors of the time, she reveals the evolution of the blush from something that betrays the blushee, to a more calculated devise that defines social mores.

This should be a text in any college curriculum on Victorian Literature. The author deftly applies the techniques used by Barthes and others to look at the use of the blush in a number of books of the period. What would seem a casual aside turns into a calculated way to convey a social message or the hidden desires of the blushee.