Visceral culture: Blushing and the legibility of whiteness in eighteenth-century British portraiture

Art History

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2004, Pages 563-592

  Rosenthal, Angela ^a  

^a DARTMOUTH COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 32644463599     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2004.00438.x     Document Type: Review

References (152)

1. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey [1768], ed. Paul Goring, London, 2001, 88.
2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk 10, lines 243ff, trans. Rolfe Humphries, Bloomington, 1955, 241-2.
3. Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting, 1830-1908, Cambridge, 1990, 24f.
4. Michele Aaron, ed., The Body's Perilous Pleasure: Dangerous Desire and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh, 1999, 2.
5. Alison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2001, esp. 1-13;
6. David Marshall, 'Forgetting Theater', in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau and Mary Shelley, Chicago, 1988, 105-134;
7. Hans Reiss, 'The Rise of Aesthetics from Baumgarten to Humboldt', in H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1997, 658-80;
8. David Marshall, 'Shaftesbury and Addison: Criticism and the Public Taste', in Nisbet and Rawson, eds, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 1997, 633-57.
9. Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, Ithaca and London, 1999, 3.
10. Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, 3;
11. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, 1994, 23.
12. W.J.T. Mitchell, in 'Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture', Journal of Visual Culture, 1:2, 2002, n. 15, attends to the visual and haptical ('un-mediated vision is not a pure optical affair, but a coordination of optical and tactile information').
13. Martin Jay, in 'Cultural Relativism and the Visual Turn', Journal of Visual Culture, 1:3, 2003, 276, calls into question the hierarchy of senses.
14. Conway, Private Interests, 7;
15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1981, 26.
16. W.J.T. Mitchell, 'What Do Pictures Really Want?' in October, 77, Summer 1996, 71-82.
17. See also Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists, and the Body, London and New York, 1996;
18. Deborah Cherry, 'Troubling Presence: Body, Sound and Space in Installation Art of the mid-1990s', Revue d'art canadienne, 25: 1-2, 1998, 12-30. esp. 26-7;
19. Michele Aaron, The Body's Perilous Pleasure.
20. On feminist criticism and Derrida's concept of ocularcentrism, see Martin Jay, 'Phallogocularcentrism: Derrida and Irigaray', in Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley, 1993, 493-542.
21. On Pygmalion representations in art, see Oskar Bätschmann, 'Pygmalion als Betrachter: Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts', in Wolfgang Kemp, ed., Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, Cologne, 1985, 183-224;
22. Mechthild Schneider, 'Pygmalion - Mythos des schöpferischen Künstlers: Zur Aktualität eines Themas in der französischen Kunst von Falconet bis Rodin', Pantheon, 45, 1987, 111-23;
23. Mary D. Sheriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France, Chicago and London, 2004, chaps 4 and 5.
24. Herder employed the myth of Pygmalion to differentiate between visual and haptical reception, privileging the enduring and slow process of touch over the quick idea gained by the sense of sight. Johann Gottfried Herder, 'Einige Wahrnehmungen über From und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume', in Schriften zur Philosophie, Literature, Kunst und Altertum 1774-1787, 10 vols, 4th edn, ed. Martin Bollacher, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, vol. 4.
25. George Barne, describing the voyage of John Locke, 4:57; quoted in Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca, 1995, 51.
26. Beholding one such performance by Emma Hart, Goethe stated 'that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes. He sees what thousands of artists would have liked to express realized before him in movements and surprising transformations', in Italian Journey, 1786-1788, trans. W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Ayer, London, 1970, 208.
27. On Emma Hart, see Ulrike Ittershagen, Lady Hamiltons Attitüden, Mainz, 1999.
28. Among the numerous publications here, see especially: Hans-Joachim Kunst, Der Afrikaner in der europäischen Kunst, Bad Godesberg, 1967;
29. E.C. Parry, The Image of the Indian and the Biack Man in American Art 1590-1900, New York, 1974;
30. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, 4 vols, New York, 1976-86.
31. On the use of the term 'race', see Henry Louis Gates, Jr, 'Race', Writing and Difference, in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds, Women, 'Race' and Writing, London and New York, 1994;
32. for important new studies on 'race' in relation to eighteenth-century visual culture, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, New York, 1996;
33. David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century, Ithaca, 2002;
34. Geoff Quilley and Kay Dian Kriz, eds, An Economy of Colour: Visual Culture and the Atlantic World, 1660-1830, Manchester, New York, 2003;
35. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century, London and New York, 2003, 11-15;
36. Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 2003.
37. See Roxann Wheeler's investigation into the meaning of religious and racial identification in fiction: The Complexion of Desire: Racial Ideology and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Novels', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:3, 1999, 309-332;
38. Wheeler's The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture, Philadelphia, 2000.
39. See also Deirdre Colman, 'Janet Schaw and the Complexions of Empire', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2, 2003, 169-93.
40. Richard Dyer, 'White', Screen, 1988, 46;
41. Richard Dyer, White, London and New York, 1997.
42. The lack of inquiry regarding whiteness in the age of Enlightenment is, to me, particularly surprising, given its emerging systematic racial and thus racist discourses, and given the cult of Neo-classicism and early Romanticism which, for the visual arts, can almost be described as an outright fetishization of the white body towards an utter erasure of skin-colour pigmentation. On this, see Angela Rosenthal, 'Die Kunst des Errötens: Zur Kosmetik rassischer Differenz', in Das Subjekt und die Anderen: Interkulturalität und Geschlechterdifferenz vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Herbert Uerlings, Karl Hölz and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Berlin, Bielefeld and Munich, 2001, 95-117.
43. W.E.B. Du Bois, 'The Souls of White Folks', Dark-water, New York, 1920, esp. 111-13.
44. James Baldwin, 'On being "White" . and Other Lies', in Essence, April 1984, 90-92;
45. bell hooks, 'Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination', in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Boston, 1992, 165-78.
46. For an excellent discussion of whiteness studies as emerging out of a long tradition of 'Black thought about white people and whiteness', see David Roediger, ed., Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, New York and Toronto, 1998, xi and esp. 3-26.
47. For the growing literature on whiteness, see also, among others, the following essays and anthologies containing further references: Peter Erickson, 'Profiles in Whiteness', Stanford Humanities Review, 3:1, Winter 1993, 98-111;
48. Peter Erickson, 'Seeing White', Transition, 67, 1995, 166-85;
49. Maurice Berger, White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness, New York, 1999;
50. Chris J. Cuomo and Kim Q. Hall, eds, Whiteness: Feminist Philosophical Reflections, Lanham, 1999;
51. Birgit Brander Rasmussen, et al., eds, The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, Durham and London, 2001.
52. Ruth Frankenberg, 'Introduction: Local Whitenesses, Localizing Whiteness', in Displaying Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Durham and London, 1997,1-33.
53. A number of studies have addressed the blush in literature. On 'modest blushing', see the chapter in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel, Chicago, 1991;
54. Mary Ann O'Farrell, Telling Complexion: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Blush, Durham, 1997;
55. Ditmar Skrotzki, Die Gebärde des Errötens im Werk Heinrich von Kleists, Marburg, 1971.
56. On anthropological debates, see Vieda Skultans, 'Bodily Madness and the Spread of the Blush', in John Blacking, ed., The Anthropology of the Body, London and New York, 1977, 145-60.
57. for emerging colonial discourses, see Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narrative, Baltimore, 1995, chap. 5;
58. Tassie Gwilliam, 'Cosmetic Poetics: Coloring Faces in the Eighteenth-Century', in Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke, eds, Bodies and Text in the Eighteenth Century, Stanford, 1994, 144-59.
59. Paul Kaplan, 'Titian's "Laura Dianti" and the Origin of the Motif of the Black Page in Portraiture', Antichità Viva, 21:4, 1982, 10-18.
60. See also Jane Fair Bestor, 'Titian's Portrait of Laura Eustochia: The Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page', Renaissance Studies, 17:4, 2003, 628-73.
61. David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art, Athens, 1987, 21-36;
62. Hall, Things of Darkness, 240-53;
63. Gerlinde Volland, '"Gepletschte Nasen", "schwülstiger Mund" und ein zu kleines Hirn: Über den Beitrag von ästhetischen Kriterien zu den aufkommenden Rassenlehren und zum " wissenschaftlichen" Sexismus im 18. Jahrhundert', in Einsprüche: Multidisziplinäre Beiträge zur Frauenforschung, Dortmund, 1993, 127-61, esp. 149f.;
64. Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting, Durham, 1999, 36.
65. On the representation of white women with black pages, see Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks, 21-36;
66. Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power, 27-55;
67. David Bindman, '"A Voluptuous Alliance Between Africa and Europe": Hogarth's Africans', in Bernadette Fort and Angela Rosenthal, eds, The Other Hogarth: Aesthetics of Difference, Princeton, 2001, 260-9.
68. Helen Weston has pointed out that the verb denigration derives, originally, from 'denigerate' meaning 'to make blacker'. Weston, 'Representing the Right to Represent: The Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representatiobe of the Colonies by A.-L. Girodet', in RES, 26, Autumn 1994, 83-99, 83 n. 6.
69. Van Dyck's painting is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Recent studies on skin and 'incarnation' emerged especially from European (visual) cultural historians: George Didi-Huberman, The Figurative Incarnation of the Sentence (Notes on the Autographic Skin)', Journal: A Contemporary Art Magazine, Spring 1987, 67-70;
70. Claudia Benthien, Haut: Literaturegeschichte, Körperbilder, Grenzdiskurse, Hamburg, 1999
71. (Skin: On the Cultural Border Between the Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlap, New York, 2002);
72. Daniela Bohde, Haut, Fleisch und Farbe. Körperlichkeit und Materialität in den Gemälden Tizians, Emsdetten and Berlin, 2002;
73. Mechtild Fend, 'Inkarnat oder Haut? Die Körperoberfläche als Schauplatz der Malerei bei Rubens und Ingres', in Pygmalions Werkstatt: Die Erschaffung des Menschen im Atelier von der Renaissance bis zum Surrealismus, ed. Helmut Friedel, Cologne and Munich, 2001, 71-9;
74. Ulrike Zeuch, ed., Haut Zwischen 1500 und 1800: Verborgen im Buch-Verborgen im Körper, Wolfenbüttel and Wiesbaden, 2003.
75. On the intersection of race, skin and cosmetics see Gwilliam, 'Cosmetic Poetics';
76. Rosenthal, 'Die Kunst des Errötens', 107-110.
77. Bindman, '"A Voluptuous Alliance"'
78. The technical examinations of the canvases have been undertaken by Rica Jones at Tate Britain: see Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 1700-1760, ed. Elizabeth Einberg, London, 1997, 26.
79. On Ramsay, see Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, ed. John Ingamells, London and New Haven, 1999, 8, cats 20 and 435,
80. Alastair Smart, Allan Ramsay: Painter, Essayist and Man of the Enlightenment, New Haven, 1992.
81. On the notion of layered skin, see Daniel Turner, De Morbis Cutaneis: A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin: In Two Parts with a Short Appendix Concerning the Efficacy of Local Remedies, and the Manner of their Operations, London, 1736, v-vi.
82. Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory and Psychoanalysis, London, 1991, 54-5: The veil serves 'to ensure that there is a depth which lurks behind the surface of things'.
83. Oliver Goldsmith, A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, vol. 1, London, 1774, 375.
84. See also Uvedale Price's Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiul, London, 1796 (1810).
85. On the skin as manifestation of the soul in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imagining the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, 1993, 38.
86. Frédéric Ogée, The Flesh of Theory: Erotics of Hogarth's Line', in Fort and Rosenthal, eds, The Other Hogarth, 62-75.
87. Bindman has observed that the anatomical threads of Hogarth's cutis resemble the hatched lines by which tonal gradation is produced in print-making. David Bindman, Hogarth and his Times: Serious Comedy, Berkeley, 1997, 172-3.
88. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson, New Haven, 1997, 88. Hogarth also emphasizes the transparency of the skin of white women (90).
89. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, 89.
90. On Hogarth's drawing illustrating the network of the skin, see Bindman, Hogarth and his Times, 172f.
91. André Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts in England, London, 1755, 45: The English painters are naturally good colourists.'
92. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, English edn London, 1787
93. quoted in Winthorp Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812, Chapel Hill, 1968, 458.
94. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, 217-18 (Quoting John Donne);
95. Volland, '"Gepletschte Nasen"', 150.
96. 'Notes on Painting', in Diderot on Art, vol. 1, trans. John Goodman, London and New Haven, 1995, 201;
97. Benthien, Haut: Literaturgeschichte, Körperbilder, Grenzdiskurse, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1999, 120-1;
98. Fend, 'Inkarnat oder Haut?', Cologne and Munich, 2001, 71.
99. Reynolds's painting was subsequently praised by one commentator for the 'very engaging sensible countenance', and the 'extremely delicate, blooming and transparent' complexion. David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, New Haven, 2000, cat. 327.
100. Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians: Eighteenth-Century Portraiture and Society, London, 1990, 124.
101. The painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy summer exhibition in 1794. Shawe-Taylor, The Georgians, 160, comments on the symbolism of the illuminated chest by reference to Cesare Ripa's allegorical figure of Purity.
102. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 198ff;
103. Benthien, Haut, 102.
104. Deirdre Coleman, 'Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women's Protest writing in the 1790s', English Literary History, 61, Summer, 1994, 341-62;
105. see also David Bindman, '"Am I not a Man and a Brother": British Art and Slavery in the Eighteenth Century', Res, 26, 1994, 68-82.
106. Coleman, 'Conspicuous Consumption', 355.
107. Edward Long, Candid Reflections upon the Judgment lately Awarded by the Court of the King's Bench, London, 1772, 48-9.
108. Clara Reeve, Plans of Education, with Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers: In a Series of Letters between Mrs. Darnford and her Friends (1792), New York, 1974, 90-1; emphasis added. Coleman, 'Conspicuous Consumption', 357.
109. On the female embodiment of Englishness, see Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race, esp. 19-21, and for the term 'island race', see Wilson's chap. 2;
110. see also Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human, esp. 135-50, 240.
111. Frantz Fanon, 'The Fact of Blackness', in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, New York, 1967, 109-140;
112. for the expression 'looked into blackness' see David R. Roediger, 'White Looks: Hairy Apes, True Stories and Limbaugh's Laughs', in Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader, New York and London, 1997, 35-46.
113. Stuart Hall ('The After-life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?' in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, London and Seattle, 1996, 12-37, 20) speaks succinctly of the '"epidermalization" of the racial look'.
114. See also Kaja Silverman, 'Fanon and the Black Male Bodily Ego', in Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 27-31, who describes Fanon's text as 'the "interpellation" into negritude of the dark-skinned male subject'.
115. am grateful to Darby English for discussing Fanon with me and for encouraging me to think about the psychic process of racialized subjectivity. On the relationship between subject formation and colonial identity, see Henry Louis Gates, 'Critical Fanonism', Critical Inquiry, 17:3, Spring 1991, 458.
116. Charles Bell, The Anatomy of Expression (1806), 3rd edn, London, 1844 ('Blush assorts well with youthful and with effeminate features', 96);
117. Alexander Morison, Outlines of Mental Diseases, Edinburgh, 1824;
118. Thomas Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing (1828), 2nd edn, London, 1839;
119. Charles Darwin, 'Blushing', in Introduction to the Science of Sociology, eds Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Chicago, 1921, 365-70;
120. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals (1872), ed. Paul Ekman, 3rd edn, New York and Oxford, 1998.
121. See also Jakob Henle, Über das Erröthen, Breslau, 1882.
122. Vieda Skultans, 'Bodily Madness', 153.
123. Bell, The Anatomy of Expression, 1844, 95, 96, describes blushing, this 'token of sensibility in the variation of colour', as 'an indication of the mind'. These musings echo the speculations found in Johann Jacob Bodmer's epic verse Inkel und Yariko (1756).
124. Burgess, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, 31;
125. Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions, 318;
126. O'Farrell, Telling Complexion, 84.
127. This perverted attitude had its echo in the colonial context of the West Indian slave trade. Relating the reports to him from a traveller from the West Indies, Samuel Taylor Coleridge noted in his diary regarding whipping that, 'the Negroes often console themselves in their cruel punishments, that their wounds will become white.' The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 4 vols, ed. K. Coburn (1805; London, 1957-), 2:2604
128. Perhaps it is ironic that Ariosto compared blushing itself to a mask: 'Because shame threatens the soul that is revealed to us by means of facial expression, blood rushes to the face to cover it.' See Werner L. Gundesheimer, 'Renaissance Concepts of Shame and Pocaterra's Dialoghi Della Vergogna', Renaissance Quarterly, 47:1, 1994, 34-56. esp. 47.
129. Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts, 48f. Rouquet initiates his comments with the following words: 'Let us not forget an art, which as yet is only in its infancy in England, the barbarous art of daubing one's cheeks.'
130. Rouquet, The Present State of the Arts, 48. In J. Bell, ed., Belle assemblée: or, Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine, London, 1806-, vol. 1, 1806, 119, we read: 'A French woman may use her rouge in order to relieve the sallow hue of her sun-burnt face, and to brighten a complexion which has seldom any rose to boast. But surely an English woman, whose beauty is the praise and admiration of the world, and the pride and boast of her countrymen, can little need, in any case, to resort to so wretched an expedient of increasing it.'
131. On this picture, see Melissa Hyde, 'The "Makeup" of the Marquise: Boucher's Portrait of Pompadour at her Toilette', Art Bulletin, 82:3, September 2003, 453-75;
132. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, 'Pompadour's touch: difference in representation', Representations, 73, 2001, 54-88.
133. See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, 'Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity', Representations, 20, 1987, 77-87.
134. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context, London and New York, 1995, 209.
135. Neville Williams, Powder and Paint: A History of the Englishwoman's Toilet: Elizabeth I-Elizabeth II, London, 1957, 66;
136. Corson, Fashions in Makeup, 230;
137. for Blumenbach's first use of the term 'Caucasian', see Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of the Modern Science, Boston, 1993, 129.
138. Nell Irvin Painter, 'The Caucasian', lecture presented in the session on Human Variety and Cultural Difference, at the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies convention, University of California, Los Angeles, August 2003.
139. For Blumenbach's concept of the term 'race', see Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870, Durham, 1997, 70-3. As Zantop shows (87f), Christoph Meiners tried to prove the superiority of the Germans as the fairest of them all 'die Hellsten unter den Hellen', which Zantop describes as a kind of 'Snow White' syndrome.
140. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Fictions of Modesty, 74) states that 'a dark skin, like a mask, threatened to obscure vital truth about a person';
141. On rouge as camouflage of lost innocence, see Roy Porter, 'Making Faces: Physiognomy and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England', Études anglaises, 37:4, 1985, 385-96. esp. 389;
142. Samuel Jackson Pratt, The New Cosmetic, or, The Triumph of Beauty, London, 1790; the comedy was authored under a synonym Courtney Melmouth.
143. Pratt, The New Cosmetic, 30;
144. Norman O. Brown, Love's Body, New York, 1966, 134: 'The erection is in the head, as in the case of virginal blushing.'
145. See also O'Farrell, Telling Complexion, 145, n. 6.
146. A blush and an erection clearly share a somewhat involuntary nature. The one, moreover, might evoke the other. Moreover, in her Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Fanny Hill tirelessly describes a white man's erection as 'a column of the whitest ivory, beautifully streaked with blue veins, and carrying, fully capped, a head of the liveliest vermilion', and ekphrasis that resembles the white women in the paintings described above. John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Wagner, London, 1985, 83.
147. In a talk entitled 'The Colour Crimson' (at the conference Rethinking Regency Representation, National Portrait Gallery, London, 17-18 October 2003), Marcia Pointon, in reference to Fanny Hill's descriptions, argued that the suggestive crimson in Thomas Lawrence's dashing portrait of Andrew Reid helped to stabilize British masculinity through its reference to both the battlefield and the bedroom.
148. Through the blush a subject defines itself in relation to its surface, thus visualizes the skin-ego, which seeks to maintain the cohesion of the psyche. On the skin-ego, see Didier Anzieu, Das Haut Ich, trans. Meinhart Korte and Marie-Hélène Lebourdais-Weiss, 3rd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1992;
149. see also Didier Anzieu, 'La peau de l'autre, marque du destin', Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, 30, 1984, 55-68.
150. Didier Anzieu, Le Penser: Du Moipeau au Moi-pensant, Paris, 1994;
151. Kaja Silverman, 'The Bodily Ego', 9-37;
152. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has described shame (and by extension its carnal visualization in the blush) as located between theatricality and absorption, and as deriving from and aiming towards sociability. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 'Shame and Performativity: Henry James's New York Edition Prefaces', in David McWhirter, ed., Henry James's New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship, Stanford, 1995, 206-239, 212.