By Amelia Faircloth
Blushing is an uncontrollable physical response to embarrassment, erotic desire, anger, and other emotions, a direct expression of feeling that has made it a popular literary motif for hundreds of years, says author and scholar Valerie Traub.
But in a recent lecture hosted by UC Santa Barbara's Early Modern Center, Traub explained how a bodily function which is shared by all races was denied to literary characters of color throughout the 15th to 18th century early modern literary era.
"The blush has a history, and its meanings change across time," said Traub, an English professor at the University of Michigan. "And over the course of early modernity, blushing is increasingly denied to those with dark skin."
Valerie Traub is a professor of English and Women’s Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. The UCSB Early Modern Center recently hosted Traub to discuss her most recent research on blushing in early modern literature.
At its core, blushing is a natural expression of blood rushing to one's face after an emotional experience. But Traub says there is a social aspect of blushing that is equally important.
Blushing is also an "external sign that needs to be read," she said. A blush puts personal feelings of desire, shame, and embarrassment on public display for a viewer to interpret. "It solicits an interpretation from both blusher and viewer," Traub said.
Because the interpretation of a blush is so vital to its meaning, the act of blushing is often written for white characters where the flush of redness is easy to see, Traub said.
She said the racialization of blushing excluded people of color, not because people of color do not experience the same reaction to lust or embarrassment, but because of their complexion.
"The racialization of blushing depends not on an essential feature of Blackness," Traub said. "But on the inability of the viewer to discern blushing in those with dark complexions." Because a blush is harder to see on darker skin, it is less easy to interpret and so was avoided by writers.
Traub pointed to an example of the blush relying on the literary trope of "fairness" in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
In the famous tragedy, the white character Chiron blushes. As a result, Aron, a Black man, says:
"Why, there's the privilege your beauty bears. Fie treacherous hue, that will betray with blushing. The close enacts and counsels of thy heart."
Chiron's fair skin reveals innermost feelings, something that Aron attributes to Chiron's whiteness, Traub said.
"Even when construed as a mode of compulsive honesty, and self-betrayal, blushing here is essentialized as a constituent feature of whiteness," Traub said.
She further argues that the blush is not the only thing that is racialized in early modern literature. The interpretations of blushing were also reserved for fair-skinned people, she said.
Interpretations of blushing are "ambivalent," and can carry many different meanings, she said, but more often than not, blushing was "pervasively deployed in erotic contexts."
Blushing can express internal emotion outwardly, so writers would use it to display sexual desire. But because white, early moderns imagined blushing in terms of whiteness, people of color were denied a way to show their sexuality, Traub said.
"In denying that Black early moderns had the capacity to blush, white early moderns refuse to imagine Black subjects' capacity to partake in the temporal experience of coming to erotic self-consciousness," Traub said.
A painting entitled “The Nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus” by François-Joseph Navez. In her UCSB lecture, Valerie Traub used the poet Ovid’s story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus as an example of how writers sexualized the blush.
Traub cited Francis Beaumont's adaptation of Ovid's story "Salmacis and Hermaphroditus," as an example of the blush's connection to whiteness and sexuality.
In the story, Salmacis, a narcissistic water nymph, falls desperately in love with a 15-year-old stranger, Hermaphroditus. When Salmacis attempts to seduce him, her "immodest speech" causes Hermaphroditus to blush, Traub said.
"At her loose speech Hermaphroditus blusht: He knew not what love was, but love did shame him. Making him blush, and yet his blush became him."
Due to Hermaphroditus's "ivory skin," the blush shows up so strongly on his skin that he "became" the blush itself, Traub said.
Because he had never experienced love, "Hermaphroditus's blush is his body's betrayal of something he can't quite conceive," Traub explained. The unfamiliar sexual nature of Salmacis's words caused Hermaphroditus to experience feelings of shame and embarrassment.
Looking at the blush through Ovidian texts shows the "white subjectivity" present in the expression of sexual desire, Traub said. As a result, early modern authors could not understand how "Black subjects might navigate and reflexively express the intricacies of sexuality as a mode of human interaction.”
Amelia Faircloth is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.