Jane Austen
and The Riches of Embarrassment (Excerpts)
David
Southward
I was prompted to write this essay when, on
rereading Jane Austen's novels, I began to notice not only how
frequently scenes of embarrassment occur in her work, but how peculiarly
susceptible to embarrassment her characters are.[1] I am not the first to notice
it; Austen's readers have always found endearing her gift for poking
fun at weaknesses we all share, such as the excessive regard for the opinions of
others that induces embarrassment.[2] But Austenian embarrassment takes so many
forms and occurs in so many contexts--it permeates her fiction so
completely--that one longs to account for it in some more satisfying way. I
began with such an account in mind. The "riches" of embarrassment as a resource
for Austen's art, however, are, I now see, finally unaccountable. To
construct a definitive argument from this wealth of material would mean robbing
fictional moments of their local interest and power. I have taken refuge
therefore in some advice once given me by a teacher about how to conceive of my
work as a thinker: you do not "prove" anything by shining a lantern into a dark
cavern, but you make a new space habitable.[3] Embarrassment provides us with a
new way to "inhabit" Austen's work (one in which my students, whose limited
experience includes more than its share of embarrassment, find themselves at
home), a new way to illuminate what we already inhabit. I have written of it in
that spirit.
The first part of the essay surveys the various kinds of
embarrassment in the fiction and the issues these raise. I have drawn freely
upon works of sociology, the only discipline to treat the subject at length,
where I found them clarifying and not too clinical. The second part considers
more closely the defensive measures taken by Austen's heroines to avoid
embarrassment. In these characters' strategic efforts at self-possession and
social grace we can discern Austen's figure for her own art. The point
throughout is not that we can somehow understand embarrassment better by reading
Jane Austen (though it can't hurt); rather, we cannot properly understand
Austen's moral aesthetic without recourse to the meaning, the value, of
embarrassment and its avoidance. The difference between the two is the
difference between a utilitarian cultural criticism, which has its uses, and a
distinctly literary criticism, which is still worth doing.
I.
EMBARRASSMENTS
Miss Price had not been brought up to the trade of coming
out; and had she known in what light this ball was, in general, considered
respecting her, it would very much have lessened her comfort by increasing the
fears she already had, of doing wrong and being looked at.
Mansfield Park,
3:267
I have yet to find a clearer, more succinct definition of
embarrassment than this, Austen's own "doing wrong and being looked at." It
captures the ambiguities of the sensation as well as the basic requirements of
1) some breach of conduct; and 2) some witness to it. The ambiguous "doing
wrong" encompasses both intentional and accidental errors; Fanny worries that
she might break certain rules of propriety of which she is as yet unaware, and
only those who do the "looking at" will be able to judge her. Austen knows how
thoroughly public embarrassment is, as she knows, too, the fussy arbitrariness
of the social mores which regulate it.
The three qualities which set embarrassment apart from its cousins shame, shyness, and modesty are its publicity, its occasional (as opposed to constant) appearance, and its relative triviality.[4] Thus, to clarify by way of example, Henry Tilney embarrasses Catherine Morland by catching her snooping, but he shames her in detecting her shocking suspicions (triviality vs. gravity), and she carries the shame--not the embarrassment, which depends on Henry's presence--back to her room (publicity vs. privacy).[5] As for shyness, Fanny Price of Mansfield Park, Edward Ferrars of Sense and Sensibility, and Captain Benwick of Persuasion are all shy characters, and surely this heightens their sensitivity to embarrassment, but any character is potentially embarrassable, and there can be no such thing as "embarrassed character" (occasion vs. constancy). Likewise modesty: while Austen frequently uses a benign form of embarrassment, the innocent's blush, to point out modesty in favored characters (think of Emma's Jane Fairfax), the wicked are nearly as prone to guilty blushing, and even the modest can't be embarrassed all of the time.[6]
Embarrassment proves to be the great leveler in Austen's fictional worlds. Men and women, young and old, aristocrats and poor relations, reserved and gregarious, virtuous and nefarious: all are susceptible to the "little zigzags" of social discomfort. Patterns do emerge, so that, if pressed, we would probably sketch the embarrassable character as a young woman of modest income, sociable but not chatty, well educated, attentive to custom, and involved in a budding courtship--which tells us little, since this describes the typical Austen heroine. More importantly, Austen regards embarrassment as an all-too-human experience, a rude but necessary reminder of our common origins, a means of facilitating that "gradual, humbling self-enlightenment" which D. W. Harding saw as the cornerstone of Austen's fiction.[7]
One last prefatory point before moving on to the mechanics of embarrassment in the novels. Austen draws upon a number of words to describe what I have been calling embarrassment (including that very word): awkwardness, confusion, mortification, consciousness, and self-consciousness (shame presents a particular problem to which I shall return). These words may indicate slight gradations of feeling, but they are used pretty much interchangeably, so that an attempt to discern their nuances for Austen comes up empty-handed (although mortification and consciousness can also refer to more serious kinds of suffering and penitence). In addition to these terms, blushing, reddening, and coloring generally signify active, physical forms of embarrassment; only rarely do they denote other emotions such as anger.
Austen embarrasses her characters in a variety of ways which, at the risk of sanitizing her rich and delicate comedy, we can roughly categorize. Of relatively minor concern is what we might call bodily embarrassment, those ghastly infractions of decorum to which our physical matter is all too liable. Austen treats bodily contacts and exposures remotely. Perhaps we could include among them Marianne Dashwood's fall and rescue by Willoughby, which shames her into an averted glance (Sense and Sensibility, 1:46), or Fanny Price's blushing at Edmund's mention of the newly apparent "beauty" of her "person" (Mansfield Park, 3:197). But the only real evidence I have found of Austen's exploiting the body's potential for embarrassment is this rather mean-spirited (and oft-quoted) passage in Persuasion: "A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain,--which taste cannot tolerate,--which ridicule will seize" (5:68). For the most part, Austen heeds the lesson of Swift: decent satirists leave the body well enough alone. <!--pagebreak-->On occasion one character intentionally embarrasses another by dropping some unflattering hint or disclosing privileged information--what we generally call teasing. Mrs. Jennings of Sense and Sensibility delights in this, so much so that she instructs her servant to gather intelligence on the movements of Willoughby and Marianne, then publicizes her findings to Marianne's "great confusion" (1:67). Austen appreciates both the good-natured spirit of this interest in young ladies' romances and its ill-mannered invasion of privacy. The tendency toward such jesting soon spreads to Sir John Middleton, whose "nods and winks" to a mortified Elinor (regarding her ostensible beau, Edward Ferrars) inspire Austen to one of those exquisitely ironic sentences for which Sense and Sensibility is not often enough admired: "The letter F--had been likewise invariably brought forward, and found productive of such countless jokes, that its character as the wittiest letter in the alphabet had been long established with Elinor" (1:125). Austen transforms the blandness and tedium of this most vulgar sort of joking, so irksome to Elinor, into the hilarious object of her own more satiric gaze (and the pun on "character" is worth noting).
In the later novels Austen proves less tolerant of teasing. Emma Woodhouse and Frank Churchill all but torture Jane Fairfax with their alphabet games, and Emma's light-hearted humiliation of Miss Bates--a stroke of genius on Austen's part, embarrassing the ostensibly shallow, unembarrassable character--grieves Emma deeply when she considers it from Knightley's (and Austen's) more mature perspective (4:370, 375-6).
Bad breeding produces another form of embarrassing behavior, the faux pas. Characters who inadvertently bring about their confusion in this way are typically too bold for their author's taste. Witness Tom Bertram's momentary sinking as he reflects on Dr. and Mrs. Grant: "'A desperate dull life her's [sic] must be with the doctor,' making a sly face as he spoke towards the chair of the latter, who proving, however, to be close at his elbow, made so instantaneous a change of expression and subject necessary, as Fanny, in spite of everything, could hardly help laughing at" (Mansfield Park, 3:119). The ingenious syntax of this sentence conveys something of the "little zigzags" of embarrassment, the suddenly awkward contortions with which we come to recognize an error.
Mary Crawford meets a similar fate in the chapel at Sotherton, when she learns that Edmund will soon be one of those parsons she has just been abusing. "She looked almost aghast under the new idea she was receiving ... Miss Crawford rallying her spirits, and recovering her complexion, replied only, 'If I had known this before, I would have spoken of the cloth with more respect,' and turned the subject" (Mansfield Park, 3:89). To Mary's credit, she confronts her faux pas with greater dignity than Tom (though she too can only change the subject). What fascinates me about her response is its bald assertion of social artifice: if she had only known better, she would have tailored her expression appropriately. Austen knows that the impudent can feign respect as well as the deferent actually feel it. But Mary's sincere feeling of embarrassment reveals a more complex moral problem: a certain commitment to decorum is deeply ingrained in her; commitment to the principles underlying decorum is not.[8] No other instance so sharply separates embarrassment from shame, attributing to the former an entirely superficial sense of virtue. Tom and Mary threaten to discredit embarrassment as a reaction more to "being looked at" than to "doing wrong." Perhaps for this reason Austen needs the hints of Tom's and Mary's sexual license to forestall their potentially subversive hypocrisy and distinguish their embarrassments from those of Fanny and Edmund.
The problem of how we distinguish the "embarrassment of real sensibility" of a Henry Tilney (Northanger Abbey, 5:241) from Mary Crawford's more politic embarrassment brings me to the more general problem of shame and its relation to embarrassment. In fact, shame is not easily distinguished from embarrassment in Austen's heroines and heroes, because, I would suggest, Austen resists the idea that socially awkward moments arise simply from the failure to comply with the proper forms. Those forms, however trivial, express values which are not trivial, such as charity, generosity, and consideration. The extent to which a character recognizes the value in the form (a measure, really, of her conscience) may determine whether she is embarrassed, ashamed, or confused by that mingling of the two so fruitful for Austen's comic and didactic purposes alike. <!--pagebreak-->We find this moral drama most fully played out in Emma, whose eponymous heroine, not unlike Mary Crawford, seems more concerned about "being looked at" than she is about "doing wrong." She holds a dinner party for the Eltons because she "must not do less than others, or she should be exposed to odious suspicions, and imagined capable of pitiful resentment" (4:290-1). In Emma's mind, the embarrassment of "odious suspicions" far outweighs the shamefulness of her actual resentment, which is itself only an evil when imagined by others. She reacts similarly to Frank Churchill's alphabet antics, as Knightley observes: "He saw that Emma had soon made [the word] out, and found it highly entertaining, though it was something which she judged it proper to appear to censure; for she said, 'Nonsense! for shame!'" (4:348). Fanny Price would simply have "judged it proper ... to censure," and done so. By slipping in the further qualification "to appear" here, Austen draws our attention to Emma's powers of prudent dissembling. For Emma, propriety lies not so much in the censure as in the convincing appearance of it.
Fortunately Austen does not abandon Emma as she does Mary Crawford. Chiefly through the intervention of Knightley, Emma comes to feel the shame in what had previously only embarrassed her. When Knightley hints that she has perhaps failed to pay due attention to Jane Fairfax, Emma responds with a "faint blush" and quickly dispels her confusion with warm invective against Mrs. Elton's (for once superior) social graces (4:286). Later we discover that "Mr. Knightley's words dwelt with her," that she is indeed "conscience-stricken" over her "shameful" behavior (4:291).
Virtually the same narrative sequence follows Emma's ruthless humiliation of Miss Bates: Knightley's charge, Emma's brief embarrassment (this time averted with half-hearted laughter), and a shamed mixture of "anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern" when left to her privacy (4:375-6). If at first "doing wrong and being looked at" by Knightley is only embarrassing to Emma, by the novel's end she learns that her embarrassment stems from a deeper, internal sense of shame, that once the person doing the looking goes away, she is still left to contend with her wrongdoing. In Emma, Austen shows how deeply the roots of both social propriety and Christian morality can sink into one's being--and, once planted there, how impossible they are to disentangle.
The notion of shame also helps us to explain why embarrassment often ensues without any explicit wrongdoing, in Austen's novels as in life. I am thinking particularly of the messiness of courtship and its introductory stages, surely the most fertile soil upon which Austen sows the seed of embarrassment. To understand why this should be so, we might start with the ambiguities bound up in the Latin word for shame, pudor. Originally "the feeling of shame, bashfulness, modesty, decency, honour," pudor soon comes to be used metonymically as "that which causes shame, a disgrace."[9] This transference of meaning from a sensation to its imagined source seems the logical fate of shame, for it captures the spirit of those unbearable moments in which young people first negotiate their attraction to each other: bashfulness feels like a disgrace, feels itself as a disgrace in the eyes of the other, only to breed more intense bashfulness. The fact of one's inexperience, one's innocence, gnaws away at one's incipient self-esteem.[10] The "doing wrong" on these occasions is precisely the occasion itself--or rather the embarrassment it inevitably produces, which when "looked at" gives rise to further embarrassment.
To see this dizzying cycle in action, we need only return to Austen's novels. Consider the scene in Northanger Abbey in which Henry Tilney works up the courage to confess his love to Catherine. Having apologized for his father's unconscionable behavior, the laggard Henry "remained for some minutes most civilly answering all Mrs. Morland's common remarks about the weather and roads," while "the anxious, agitated, happy, feverish Catherine,--said not a word": <!--pagebreak-->After a couple of minutes of unbroken silence, Henry, turning to Catherine for the first time since her mother's entrance, asked her, with sudden alacrity, if Mr. and Mrs. Allen were now at Fullerton? and on developing, from amidst all her perplexity of words in reply, the meaning, which one short syllable would have given, immediately expressed his intention of paying his respects to them, and, with a rising color, asked her if she would have the goodness to show him the way. "You may see the house from this window, sir," was information on Sarah's side, which produced only a bow of acknowledgment from the gentleman, and a silencing nod from her mother.
(5:242-3)
This passage seems to me brilliant in tracing the "little zigzags of embarrassment" in all their confused progression. The tortuous syntax of the first sentence, for instance, conveys something of Catherine's flustered long-windedness, the embarrassed person's not knowing how to get from one end of her sentence to the other. Who can fail to sympathize with the cowardly evasions of small talk, the prolonged agony of "unbroken silence," the "sudden alacrity" with which Henry seizes upon his scheme for getting Catherine alone, and the death-blow dealt him by a little sister's charming (to us) yet fatal innocence? That Henry's characteristic irony fails him here is of course perfectly natural and expected; Austen reveals the vulnerable boy inside the sarcastic wit. As Christopher Ricks suggests, "whimsy is inherently a protection against embarrassment."[11]
Clearly Austen knew intimately the nooks and crannies of courtship embarrassments, for similar scenes abound in her fiction. The complexity of such moments often depends on the characters' lack of information, their efforts to interpret others'--and conceal their own--true feelings. In Sense and Sensibility, when Marianne casually asks Edward about the hair in his ring, he "color[s] very deeply, and giv[es] a momentary glance at Elinor" (1:98). His is a double embarrassment: first, the private shame of having concealed from the Dashwoods his engagement to Lucy Steele; and second, the realization (we know it from his glance) that Elinor suspects him to have pilfered a lock of her hair--a silent acknowledgment of his romantic interest. (Austen dupes the reader into thinking the same, implicating herself in the game of subterfuge.) Elinor indeed looks "conscious," though she preserves both Edward and herself from further discomfort, "affecting to take no notice of what passed, by instantly talking of something else"--a favorite evasive tactic on the part of Austen's characters. Meanwhile Marianne makes her own interpretative error, thinking the hair "a free gift from her sister," and she "severely censure[s] herself" for having exposed the shy lovers and having forced Edward into the face-saving deceit that the hair is not Elinor's but his sister's (1:98-9).
Though Edward remains "particularly grave" for the rest of his visit, the three characters maintain their composure fairly well in smoothing over this social ripple (1:99). We find a far more debilitating embarrassment in Mansfield Park, where Fanny Price must face the lordly Sir Thomas, alone, as he informs her of Mr. Crawford's proposal: "Fanny's colour grew deeper and deeper; and her uncle perceiving that she was embarrassed to a degree that made either speaking or looking up quite impossible, turned away his own eyes, and without any farther pause, proceeded in his account of Mr. Crawford's visit ... Her mind was in too much confusion. She had changed her position, and with her eyes fixed intently on one of the windows, was listening to her uncle, in the utmost perturbation and dismay" (3:313-4). Perhaps because of her intense shyness and introversion, Fanny's mind nearly shuts down when confronted with the mortifying twin prospects of speaking about her own betrothal and refusing the wishes of her imperious uncle. She cannot speak, or even look, only listen and only with effort. Austen alerts us here to the potent effects of eyes in embarrassing situations: Fanny's eyes look down, urging Sir Thomas to turn his away (is he also embarrassed?); finally she fixes hers on a window, though we suspect she does not see anything beyond it. Embarrassed eyes look but do not see; they quickly seek a plausible resting place so that the mind may busy itself with the more urgent matter of recovering some semblance of composure. <!--pagebreak-->Fanny's experience, while exceptional in its extremity, shows us just how serious an obstacle embarrassment can be. The same point is driven home, albeit in a lighter tone, at the end of Pride and Prejudice, when Darcy and Elizabeth recount the progress of their relationship:
[Elizabeth:] "What made you so shy of me, when you first called, and afterwards dined here? Why, especially, when you called, did you look as if you did not care about me?"
"Because you were grave and silent, and gave me no encouragement."
"But I was embarrassed."
"And so was I."
Despite the gaiety of their banter, the lovers touch upon a disturbing fact about embarrassment: it both inheres in and obstructs the machinery of courtship erected by their culture. Elizabeth jokes that the moral of their story will be that Lady Catherine effected their union by disapproving of it (2:381), but the joke is on her, for she is not far from the truth. Darcy and Elizabeth might easily have concealed their feelings forever.[12] For all his arrogant pride and her ironic wit, the two ultimately succumb to the same commonplace strategies of reserve and feigned indifference by which, say, an Elinor Dashwood and an Edward Ferrars protect their less trenchant egos.
Social psychologists and theorists of embarrassment offer some useful ways of defining the stakes in such courtship maneuverings and social interaction in general. Erving Goffman explains embarrassment in terms of a rupture in one's self-presentation, one's identity: "During interaction the individual is expected to possess certain attributes, capacities, and information which, taken together, fit together into a self that is at once coherently unified and appropriate for the occasion ... In [embarrassing encounters] the same fundamental thing occurs: the expressive facts at hand threaten or discredit the assumptions a participant finds he has projected about his identity ... To experience a sudden change in status, as by marriage or promotion, is to acquire a self that other individuals will not fully admit because of their lingering attachment to the old self."[13]
The last point seems especially relevant to the stages of courtship in Austen, as characters undergo a change in status from that of acquaintance to something more. To return to Pride and Prejudice, we see the newly betrothed Elizabeth squirm under the "immediate embarrassment" (2:372) of explaining to her father her prior incivility to and present affection for Darcy. "How earnestly did she then wish that her former opinions had been more reasonable, her expressions more moderate! It would have spared her from explanations and professions which it was exceedingly awkward to give; but they were now necessary, and she assured him with some confusion, of her attachment to Mr. Darcy" (2:376). For Elizabeth the sensation of having discredited her previous identity claims is even keener than for most Austen heroines, for those claims have consisted of cool, reasoned detachment, firmly settled opinions, and imperviousness to the giddy notions of fickle girls. Her sister Lydia falls into the latter category and, as a consequence, is not the least bit embarrassed by her own abrupt change in status, her marriage to Wickham.
By pointing out the necessity of the unified self for effective social interaction, Goffman enables us to broaden our sense of "doing wrong" to include inconsistency, yet another source of embarrassment which Austen exploits. Thus the prim Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park, in order to save his family from "the excessive intimacy" of bringing an outsider into their theatrical scheme (3:153), must openly rescind his indictment of the play and take the role of Anhalt--to his own and Fanny's chagrin. "It is not at all what I like ... No man can like being driven into the appearance of such inconsistency" (3:154). His emphasis on appearance should remind us of Emma's concern with apparent propriety, but more importantly it suggests why a theorist of embarrassment like Goffman focuses on specifically social interaction. Inconsistencies within oneself are, for the most part, readily acceptable and even natural; only when they appear before others do they threaten one's composure. As Charles Darwin says, "the thinking what others think of us" excites a blush.[14] So it is with Edmund, who, despite his rigorously moral conscience, has evidently already accepted his inconsistency by the time he relates it to Fanny. But his own rationalization of the deed--preserving the family (and Miss Crawford's!) honor--doesn't make "being looked at" by Fanny any easier; hence his clumsy attempt to rationalize himself to her as well. He paints the reversal as a merely apparent one masking a real consistency. Edmund negotiates a new role for himself, namely acting in an indecent play opposite the desirable Mary Crawford, by extending his previous role as moral authority, attempting to make seamless what is in fact a glaring stitch in his behavior. <!--pagebreak-->For obvious reasons, Mansfield Park lends itself well to what sociologists call the "dramaturgical model" of social relations. In this scheme, "[e]mbarrassment is the flustering caused by the perception that a flubbed ... performance, a working consensus of identities, cannot, or in any event will not, be repaired in time."[15] Goffman's more refined version suggests that "[e]ach individual has more than one role, but he is saved from role dilemma by 'audience segregation,'" meaning that one avoids the embarrassment of a "flubbed performance" by matching each of one's many roles to the audience for whom it was created.[16] The disastrous return of Sir Thomas Bertram to Mansfield Park dramatizes the problem of "role dilemma"--with an additional, almost extravagant irony: the role-playing of Lovers' Vows presents a truer picture of reality than the everyday role-playing of the young Bertrams before their father. The two theaters confront each other with the most embarrassing (and for some of the players, shameful) consequences.[17]
The openly acknowledged confrontation of role dilemma in Mansfield Park and its strict settlement by an authoritative figure are in fact quite rare in Austen's novels. More typically, the characters scramble to cover up, ignore, or leave the scene of what they perceive to be roles in conflict. Austen portrays the real challenge such a task can pose in Sense and Sensibility, when an unwitting Edward bursts in upon a tete-a-tete between the two women he has in some sense courted. All are stunned; all look "exceedingly foolish" (1:240). But Edward's "embarrassment still exceeded that of the ladies in a proportion, which the case rendered reasonable" (1:241), for without any preparation he enters a stage visible to the audiences he has heretofore managed to segregate. Elinor deftly covers for his brief incapacity--not wishing to give Lucy the satisfaction of an outright exposure--until her "manners [give] some re-assurance to Edward" (1:241). Though Lucy seems "determined to make no contribution to the comfort of the others," it is still in her interest to comply with Elinor's recuperative efforts, if only because her engagement to Edward remains yet a secret.
The scene has a further significance. I would suggest that, because of the strange abruptness with which Edward enters the room and because of the scene's relative lack of importance to the plot, Austen takes this moment to explore the social dynamics--and comic potential--of embarrassment.[18] She seems to sport gleefully with her poor characters, subjecting them to excesses of awkward moments in order to examine their responses. "They were not only all three together, but were together without the relief of any other person," says the narrator (1:241), as if to let us know boastingly that this scenario is the worst imaginable. The idea seems to be that an additional person, one not "in the know," would require the three to sustain a safely superficial level of conversation and would share some of the burden of contributing to it. But of course, in a move of vicious irony, Austen sends them Marianne to disprove their facile logic. The result is a highly wrought verbal irony, unusually self-conscious, even for Austen:
[Marianne:] "The sight of you, Edward, is the only comfort [London] has afforded; and thank Heaven! you are what you always were!"
She paused--no one spoke.
And it gets worse:
[Marianne on Edward:] "He is the most fearful of giving pain, of wounding expectation, and the most incapable of being selfish, of any body I ever saw. Edward, it is so and I will say it. What! are you never to hear yourself praised!"
(1:242, 244)
Austen lays it on thick, compounding Edward's embarrassment of role dilemma with the further embarrassment, not just of public praise, but of praise which others in his presence know to be undue. Few characters in the novels suffer this degree of humiliation, nor does Edward ever quite recover from it. Austen knew how pleasurable it was to read about embarrassment, how costly to live it.[19] <!--pagebreak-->NOTES
1 Jane Austen, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, 3d edn., 5 vols. (1932-4; rprt. Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). All subsequent references to Austen's novels are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by volume number in the series and by page number.
2 For recent treatments of the subject of embarrassment in Jane Austen see Thomas R. Edwards, "Embarrassed by Jane Austen," Raritan 7, 1 (Summer 1987): 62-80; and Mary Ann O'Farrell, "Austen's Blush," Novel 27, 2 (Winter 1994): 125-39. Edwards considers moments of gratuitous embarrassment as lapses in Austen's ability to order life into art; O'Farrell posits an "erotics of embarrassment" in Pride and Prejudice, a pleasure in the involuntary, self-exposing blush, shared by characters and readers alike.
3 The metaphor, if not the wording, is John Hollander's.
4 On the last of these three, see Rom Harre, "Embarrassment: A Conceptual Analysis," in Shyness and Embarrassment: Perspectives from Social Psychology, ed. W. Ray Crozier (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 181-204. For Harre embarrassment usually results from a "trivial breach" of conventions through "no fault" of the embarrassed party, whereas shame indicates a "serious breach" and "fault." Austen, however, tends to ascribe some degree of fault to her embarrassed characters (p. 187).
5 Charles Darwin makes the keen observation that we never blush (i.e., feel embarrassed) but rather feel ashamed before God, since unlike humans God does not associate immoral conduct with physical appearance. (I would add that one's relationship to God is too private, too grave to admit of embarrassment.) The passage is quoted in Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1974), p. 56.
6 Ricks finely describes Keats's handling of both the "blush of innocence" and the "blush of guilt" (p. 57). See also Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991) for the relevant historical background on this subject, especially her chap. 5, "Modest Blushing." O'Farrell's extended discussion of the blush in Pride and Prejudice rightly points out the tension between its involuntarity as a bodily reaction and its expectedness as a conditioned response to bad manners.
7 D. W. Harding, "Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen," in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 166-79, 177.
8 For the best discussion of Mary's insincerity, see Lionel Trilling, "MansField Park," The Opposing Self (1955; rprt. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 181-202.
9 "Pudor," Cassell's Latin Dictionary (New York: Macmillan, 1959). For an account of the word's later development in France, see Yeazell, p. 6 and notes.
10 Ricks rightly points out that "the young person and the blush both embody paradoxes about innocence and guilt" (p. 4).
11 Ricks, p. 189.
12 The concluding sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which praises the Gardiners as "the means of uniting" Darcy and Elizabeth, supports this claim (2:388).
13 Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967), pp. 105-8. <!--pagebreak-->14 Quoted in Ricks, p. 51.
15 Quoted in Harre, p. 187.
16 Goffman, Interaction, p. 108.
17 On the discourse of theatricality in Mansfield Park, see Joseph Litvak, Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992) pp. 1-26.
18 Austen's preference for the surprise encounter as a means of complicating character and plot is surpassed only by that of her successor, Henry James. Both novelists of manners are better at describing characters' complex reactions to sudden change than at conceiving plausible sequences of events leading to change.
19 For this reason I would dispute O'Farrell's contention that "embarrassment is what's erotic" in Austen, that the reader's and the characters' ecstatic pleasures are subversively guaranteed by "the thrill of being known, the frisson of exposure" (pp. 132, 134). To confuse embarrassment with the escape from it (which, granted, is likely to be pleasurable) is to confuse the embarrassed character with the remote reader, to mistake the reader's quite safe and inconsequential "exposure" for the riskier public exposures suffered by characters. Embarrassment itself is one of the less erotic sensations.
