The Criminal Body by David Horn

Author:David Horn [Horn, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415947299
Google: hzPNlQnnkGUC
Publisher: Psychology Press
Published: 2003-01-15T05:59:44+00:00

II. The Natural History of the Blush

Attention to blushing gained a new seriousness with the publication in 1872 of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, but the blush had already been a topic of both literary and scientific interest.15 Like pain (Chapter 4), the blush was part of a conversation about what it meant to be human, and about the contradictory effects of being or becoming civilized. This was a conversation that had everything to do with race, imperialism, and the power of scientists and others to manipulate bodies.

For some time, blushing had served as a link between the surface of the body and interior states, the visible sign of a conscience. As Janet Browne remarks, in the mid-nineteenth century it was imagined that only blushing could prove that men and women had a conscience: “Only the hot flush of embarrassment could establish that people had the ability to reflect upon themselves and their behavior, were alive to their situation, could feel self-conscious in the literal sense of that term. Completely bypassing the will, and surfacing despite all our efforts to subdue it, blushing was seen to be a direct manifestation of our innermost thoughts and feelings. It was a window to the soul far more revealing than those other windows, the eyes.”16

But the blush became an object of scientific scrutiny as well with the publication of Thomas Henry Burgess’ The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing in 1839.17 For the physician Burgess (d. 1865), blushing was interesting as an example of “an involuntary act of the mind upon the vital organs and their several functions.”18 In what Browne identifies as a natural theological argument, Burgess claimed that blushing was both uniquely human and had been designed by the creator in “order that the soul might have sovereign power of displaying in the cheeks the various internal emotions of the moral feelings.”19

Yet modernity had brought with it an acquired sensibility that Burgess likened to a diseased state; examples included young men who were “sensitive, timid and abashed in society.”20 Refinement and civilization had “perverted the original intent” of blushing, such that it was now “difficult to judge whether the blush be from an impulse of shame, or merely from a sensibility that is overwrought.”21 Civilization was marked by the “uncalled-for blush,” due to an “irritability of the sensorium arising from an over refinement, and want of early education.”22 By contrast, the blush of the unrefined savage was authentic, as well as more easily legible:

Who ever heard of an American savage blushing from morbid sensibility? and yet is he on this account the less liable to the impulse of shame or disgrace, according to his own views or interpretations of such feelings? No! the change of colour in him is a genuine example of moral instinct.23

By contrast, Burgess did assert the inability of the “congenital idiot” to blush, not because of a somatic (vasomotor) defect, but because of his lack of reasoning power.24

Burgess also confronted the claim made

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