Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth Century English Novel and the Blush

Abstract

In Telling Complexions Mary Ann O'Farrell explores frequent use of the 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 body and body's place in culture. In process, she plots a trajectory for nineteenth-century novel's shift from practices of manners to mode of self-consciousness. Although blush was used to tell 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 swoon, scar, and blunder. Providing unique and creative insights into constructedness of body and its semiotic play in literature and in culture, Telling Complexions includes parallel examples of blush in contemporary culture and describes ways that textualized bodies are sometimes imagined to resist constraints imposed by such construction.