“A woman’s flush of triumph lit her eyes”: Hardy, Darwin, and the Blush

Abstract

Thomas Hardy’s third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, began appearing in serial form in September 1872; Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals was published in November of the same year. Darwin provides a detailed study of the blush, which he views as unique to human animals; Hardy’s novel offers a virtual typology of blushing. The three principal characters, Elfride, Stephen and Knight, blush or flush with pique, triumph, jealousy, perplexity, mortification, vexation, embarrassment, anger, gladness, and shame; their faces become red, vivid scarlet, an angry colour, vermillion, crimson, lily-white, pale, livid, cold, heated, and bright. Drawing on Darwin’s work, this paper asks what Hardy might have meant by a “flush of triumph”, and in particular, how a physical response (“flush”) relates to the mental one (“triumph”): whether one causes the other, is a function of the other, or a constituent part of the other. It then seeks to situate that discussion in regard to Havelock Ellis’s remark in 1883 that Hardy was “only willing to recognize the psychical element in its physical correlative”.