[49] Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes of Central Australia_, p. 683.
[50] J.R. Forster, _Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World_,
1728, p. 395.
[51] Westermarck (_History of Human Marriage_, Ch. IX) ably sets forth
this argument, with his usual wealth of illustration.
Crawley (_Mystic
Rose_, p. 135) seeks to qualify this conclusion by arguing that tattooing,
etc., of the sex organs is not for ornament but for the purpose of
magically insulating the organs, and is practically a permanent amulet or
charm.
[52] _Iliad_, II, 262. Waitz gives instances (_Anthropology_, p. 301)
showing that nakedness is sometimes a mark of submission.
[53] The Celtic races, in their days of developed barbarism, seem to have
been relatively free from the idea of proprietorship in women, and it was
probably among the Irish (as we learn from the seventeenth century
_Itinerary_ of Fynes Moryson) that the habit of nakedness was longest
preserved among the upper social class women of Western Europe.
[54] A.B. Ellis, _Tshi-Speaking Peoples_, p. 280.
[55] Burnet, _Life and Death of Rochester_, p. 110.
[56] _L'Année Sociologique_, seventh year, 1904, p. 439.
[57] Tallemont des Réaux, who began to write his _Historiettes_ in 1657,
says of the Marquise de Rambouillet: "Elle est un peu trop délicate ... on
n'oscrait prononcer le mot de _cul_. Cela va dans l'excès." Half a century
later, in England, Mandeville, in the Remarks appended to his _Fable of
the Bees_, refers to the almost prudish modesty inculcated on children
from their earliest years.
[58] In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes
prudery, which is defined by Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, Fifth ed., p.
125) as "codified sexual morality." Prudery is fossilized modesty, and no
longer reacts vitally. True modesty, in an intelligent civilized person,
is instinctively affected by motives and circumstances, responding
sensitively to its relationships.
[59] _Memoires de Madame d'Epinay_, Part I, Ch. V.
Thirty years earlier,
Mandeville had written, in England, that "the modesty of women is the
result of custom and education."
[60] Goncourt, _Histoire de la Société Française pendant le Directoire_,
p. 422. Clothes became so gauze-like, and receded to such an extent from
the limbs, that for a time the chemise was discarded as an awkward and
antiquated garment.
[61] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1901, Heft 2, p. 179.
[62] In the rural districts of Hanover, Pastor Grashoff states, "even when
natural necessities are performed with the greatest possible freedom,
there is no offence to modesty, in rural opinion." But he makes a
statement which is both contradictory and false, when he adds that
"modesty is, to the country man in general, a foreign idea."
(_Geschlechtlich-Sittliche Verhältnisse im Deutsche Reiche_, vol. ii, p.
45.)
[63] It is frequently stated that prostitutes are devoid of modesty, but
this is incorrect; they possess a partial and diminished modesty which,
for a considerable period still remains genuine (see e.g., Reuss, _La
Prostitution_, p. 58). Lombroso and Ferrero (_La Donna_, p. 540) refer to
the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as
often greater than that of respectable women. Again, Callari states
("Prostituzione in Sicilia," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1903, p. 205),
that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose
themselves naked in the practice of their profession.
Aretino long since
remarked (in _La Pippa_) that no women so detest gratuitous _décolletage_
as prostitutes. When prostitutes do not possess modesty, they frequently
simulate it, and Ferriani remarks (in his _Delinquenti Minorenni_) that of
ninety-seven minors (mostly females) accused of offences against public
decency, seventy-five simulated a modesty which, in his opinion, they were
entirely without.
III.
The Blush the Sanction of Modesty--The Phenomena of Blushing--Influences
Which Modify the Aptitude to Blush--Darkness, Concealment of the Face,
Etc.
It is impossible to contemplate this series of phenomena, so radically
persistent whatever its changes of form, and so constant throughout every
stage of civilization, without feeling that, although modesty cannot
properly be called an instinct, there must be some physiological basis to
support it. Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism
of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings, the blush. All
the allied emotional forms of fear--shame, bashfulness, timidity--are to
some extent upheld by this mechanism, but such is especially the case with
the emotion we are now concerned with.[64] The blush is the sanction of
modesty.
The blush is, indeed, only a part, almost, perhaps, an accidental
part, of the organic turmoil with which it is associated.
Partridge, who has studied the phenomena of blushing in one
hundred and twenty cases (_Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1897),
finds that the following are the general symptoms: tremors near
the waist, weakness in the limbs, pressure, trembling, warmth,
weight or beating in the chest, warm wave from feet upward,
quivering of heart, stoppage and then rapid beating of heart,
coldness all over followed by heat, dizziness, tingling of toes
and fingers, numbness, something rising in throat, smarting of
eyes, singing in ears, prickling sensations of face, and pressure
inside head. Partridge considers that the disturbance is
primarily central, a change in the cerebral circulation, and that
the actual redness of the surface comes late in the nerve storm,
and is really but a small part of it.
There has been some discussion as to why, and indeed how far,
blushing is confined to the face. Henle (_Ueber das Erröthen_)
thought that we blush in the face because all nervous phenomena
produced by mental states appear first in the face, owing to the
anatomical arrangement of the nerves of the body.
Darwin
(_Expression of the Emotions_) argued that attention to a part
tends to produce capillary activity in the part, and that the
face has been the chief object of attention. It has also been
argued, on the other hand, that the blush is the vestigial
remains of a general erethism of sex, in which shame originated;
that the blush was thus once more widely diffused, and is so
still among the women of some lower races, its limitation to the
face being due to sexual selection and the enhanced beauty thus
achieved. Féré once had occasion to examine, when completely
nude, a boy of thirteen whose sexual organs were deformed; when
accused of masturbation he became covered by a blush which spread
uniformly over his face, neck, body and limbs, before and behind,
except only the hands and feet. Féré asks whether such a
universal blush is more common than we imagine, or whether the
state of nudity favors its manifestation. (_Comptes Rendus,
Société de Biologie_, April 1, 1905.) It may be added that
Partridge mentions one case in which the hands blushed.
The sexual relationships of blushing are unquestionable.
It occurs chiefly
in women; it attains its chief intensity at puberty and during
adolescence; its most common occasion is some more or less sexual
suggestion; among one hundred and sixty-two occasions of blushing
enumerated by Partridge, by far the most frequent cause was teasing,
usually about the other sex. "An erection," it has been said, "is a
blushing of the penis." Stanley Hall seems to suggest that the sexual
blush is a vicarious genital flushing of blood, diverted from the genital
sphere by an inhibition of fear, just as, in girls, giggling is also very
frequently a vicarious outlet of shame; the sexual blush would thus be the
outcome of an ancestral sex-fear; it is as an irradiation of sexual
erethism that the blush may contain an element of pleasure.[65]
Bloch remarks that the blush is sexual, because reddening of the
face, as well as of the genitals, is an accompaniment of sexual
emotion (_Beiträge zur Ætiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Teil
II, p. 39). "Do you not think," a correspondent writes, "that
the sexual blush, at least, really represents a vaso-relaxor
effect quite the same as erection? The embarrassment which arises
is due to a perception of this fact under circumstances which are
felt to be unsuited for such a condition. There may arise the
fear of awakening disgust by the exhibition of a state which is
out of place. I have noticed that such a blush is produced when a
sufficiently young and susceptible woman is pumped full of
compliments. This blush seems accompanied by pleasure which does
not always change to fear or disgust, but is felt to be
attractive. When discomfort arises, most women say that they feel
this because 'it looks as if they had no control over
themselves.' When they feel that there is no need for control,
they no longer feel fear, and the relaxor effect has a wider
field of operation, producing a general rosiness, erection of
spinal sexual organs, etc. Such a blush would thus be a partial
sexual equivalent, and allow of the inhibition of other sexual
effects, through the warning it gives, and the fear aroused, as
well as being in itself a slight outlet of relaxor energy. When
the relationships of the persons concerned allow freedom to the
special sexual stimuli, as in marriage, blushing does not occur
so often, and when it does it has not so often the consequent of
fear."
There can be no doubt that the blush is sexually attractive. The
blush is the expression of an impulse to concealment and flight,
which tends automatically to arouse in the beholder the
corresponding impulse of pursuit, so that the central situation
of courtship is at once presented. Women are more or less
conscious of this, as well as men, and this recognition is an
added source of embarrassment when it cannot become a source of
pleasure. The ancient use of rouge testifies to the beauty of the
blush, and Darwin stated that, in Turkish slave-markets, the
girls who readily blushed fetched the highest prices. To evoke a
blush, even by producing embarrassment, is very commonly a cause
of masculine gratification.
Savages, both men and women, blush even beneath a dusky skin (for
the phenomenon of blushing among different races, see Waitz,
_Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, Bd. I, pp. 149-150), and it is
possible that natural selection, as well as sexual selection, has
been favorable to the development of the blush. It is scarcely an
accident that, as has been often observed, criminals, or the
antisocial element of the community--whether by the habits of
their lives or by congenital abnormality--blush less easily than
normal persons. Kroner (_Das körperliche Gefühl_, 1887, p. 130)
remarks: "The origin of a specific connection between shame and
blushing is the work of a _social selection_. It is certainly an
immediate advantage for a man not to blush; indirectly, however,
it is a disadvantage, because in other ways he will be known as
shameless, and on that account, as a rule, he will be shut out
from propagation. This social selection will be specially
exercised on the female sex, and on this account, women blush to
a greater extent, and more readily, than men."
The importance of the blush, and the emotional confusion behind it, as the
sanction of modesty is shown by the significant fact that, by lulling
emotional confusion, it is possible to inhibit the sense of modesty. In
other words, we are here in the presence of a fear--to a large extent a
sex-fear--impelling to concealment, and dreading self-attention; this fear
naturally disappears, even though its ostensible cause remains, when it
becomes apparent that there is no reason for fear.
That is the reason why nakedness in itself has nothing to do with modesty
or immodesty; it is the conditions under which the nakedness occurs which
determine whether or not modesty will be roused. If none of the factors of
modesty are violated, if no embarrassing self-attention is excited, if
there is a consciousness of perfect propriety alike in the subject and in
the spectator, nakedness is entirely compatible with the most scrupulous
modesty. A. Duval, a pupil of Ingres, tells that a female model was once
quietly posing, completely nude, at the École des Beaux Arts. Suddenly she
screamed and ran to cover herself with her garments. She had seen a
workman on the roof gazing inquisitively at her through a skylight.[66]
And Paola Lombroso describes how a lady, a diplomatist's wife, who went to
a gathering where she found herself the only woman in evening dress, felt,
to her own surprise, such sudden shame that she could not keep back her
tears.
It thus comes about that the emotion of modesty necessarily depends on
the feelings of the people around. The absence of the emotion by no means
signifies immodesty, provided that the reactions of modesty are at once
set in motion under the stress of a spectator's eye that is seen to be
lustful, inquisitive, or reproachful. This is proved to be the case among
primitive peoples everywhere. The Japanese woman, naked as in daily life
she sometimes is, remains unconcerned because she excites no disagreeable
attention, but the inquisitive and unmannerly European's eye at once
causes her to feel confusion. Stratz, a physician, and one, moreover, who
had long lived among the Javanese who frequently go naked, found that
naked Japanese women felt no embarrassment in his presence.
It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain the curious
influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations of modesty, as
many lovers have discovered, and as we may notice in our cities after
dark. This influence of darkness in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient
observation. Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, quotes from Dandinus
the saying "_Nox facit impudentes_," directly associating this with
blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote in the sixteenth
century that, "it is commonly said of women, that they will do in the dark
what they would not do in the light." It is true that the immodesty of a
large city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption of
prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually nearer to the
threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected by this influence. But
it is an influence to which the most modest women are, at all events in
some degree, susceptible. It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always
more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this is part
of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.
"Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the
primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may be said
(the life of Southern Europe and of American society of to-day
illustrates this point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a
night-being, for the activity, physical and moral, of modern
women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the nocturnal intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable.
Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day-labor as
rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her
evening and night life being the true side of her activities"
(A.F. Chamberlain, "Work and Rest," _Popular Science Monthly_,
March, 1902). Giessler, who has studied the general influence of
darkness on human psychic life, reaches conclusions which
harmonize with these (C.M. Giessler, "Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit
auf das Seelenleben des Menschen,"
_Vierteljahrsschrift für
wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1904, pp. 255-279).
I have not
been able to see Giessler's paper, but, according to a summary of
it, he comes to the result that in the dark the soul's activities
are nearer to its motor pole than to its sensitive pole, and that
there is a tendency for phenomena belonging to the early period
of development to be prominent, motor memory functioning more
than representative memory, attention more than apperception,
imagination more than logical thinking, egoistic more than
altruistic morals.
It is curious to note that short-sightedness, naturally, though
illogically, tends to exert the same influence as darkness in this
respect; I am assured by short-sighted persons of both sexes that they are
much more liable to the emotions of shyness and modesty with their glasses
than without them; such persons with difficulty realize that they are not
so dim to others as others are to them. To be in the company of a blind
person seems also to be a protection against shyness.[67] It is
interesting to learn that congenitally blind children are as sensitive to
appearances as normal children, and blush as readily.[68] This would seem
to be due to the fact that the habitually blind have permanently adjusted
their mental focus to that of normal persons, and react in the same manner
as normal persons; blindness is not for them, as it is for the
short-sighted without their glasses, a temporary and relative, almost
unconscious refuge from clear vision.
It is, of course, not as the mere cloak of a possible blush that darkness
gives courage; it is because it lulls detailed self-realization, such
conscious self-realization being always a source of fears, and the blush
their definite symbol and visible climax. It is to the blush that we must
attribute a curious complementary relationship between the face and the
sacro-pubic region as centres of anatomical modesty. The women of some
African tribes who go naked, Emin Bey remarked, cover the face with the
hand under the influence of modesty. Martial long since observed (Lib.
iii, LXVIII) that when an innocent girl looks at the penis she gazes
through her fingers. Where, as among many Mohammedan peoples, the face is
the chief focus of modesty, the exposure of the rest of the body,
including sometimes even the sacro-pubic region, and certainly the legs
and thighs, often becomes a matter of indifference.[69]
This concealment of the face is more than a convention; it has a
psychological basis. We may observe among ourselves the well-marked
feminine tendency to hide the face in order to cloak a possible blush, and
to hide the eyes as a method of lulling self-consciousness, a method
fabulously attributed to the ostrich with the same end of concealment.[70]
A woman who is shy with her lover will sometimes experience little or no
difficulty in showing any part of her person provided she may cover her
face. When, in gynecological practice, examination of the sexual organs is
necessary, women frequently find evident satisfaction in concealing the
face with the hands, although not the slightest attention is being
directed toward the face, and when an unsophisticated woman is betrayed
into a confession which affects her modesty she is apt to turn her back to
her interlocutor. "When the face of woman is covered,"
it has been said,
"her heart is bared," and the Catholic Church has recognized this
psychological truth by arranging that in the confessional the penitent's
face shall not be visible. The gay and innocent freedom of southern women
during Carnival is due not entirely to the permitted license of the season
or the concealment of identity, but to the mask that hides the face. In
England, during Queen Elizabeth's reign and at the Restoration, it was
possible for respectable women to be present at the theatre, even during
the performance of the most free-spoken plays, because they wore masks.
The fan has often subserved a similar end.[71]
All such facts serve to show that, though the forms of modesty may change,
it is yet a very radical constituent of human nature in all stages of
civilization, and that it is, to a large extent, maintained by the
mechanism of blushing.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] Melinaud ("Pourquoi Rougit-on?" _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1 Octobre,
1893) points out that blushing is always associated with fear, and
indicates, in the various conditions under which it may arise,--modesty,
timidity, confusion,--that we have something to conceal which we fear may
be discovered. "All the evidence," Partridge states,
"seems to point to
the conclusion that the mental state underlying blushing belongs to the
fear family. The presence of the feeling of dread, the palpitation of the
heart, the impulse to escape, to hide, the shock, all confirms this view."
[65] G. Stanley Hall, "A Study of Fears," _American Journal Psychology_,