We almost always regard the blush as a purely involuntary reaction incapable of being summoned at will, and therefore as a sign of authenticity. Yet this straightforward understanding is defied by the little-known case of María Riquelme, a seventeenth-century actor legendary in her day for the ability to blush on stage. As early modern writings on cosmetics reveal, a double bind existed for the women who applied rouge to appeal to male fantasies of female passivity only to be accused of lacking natural shame. The ambiguous semiotics of the feminine blush likewise allowed it to signify the virtues of humility and bashfulness but, at the same, the vices of lewdness or sexual arousal. Riquelme’s meteoric fame as a blushing ingénue—and the difficulty in ascertaining whether her ability was truly performative, a genuine response to the content of her scenes, or even an apocryphal legend—unsettles not just the male desire for natural shame but scholarship of the Renaissance that has often emphasized self-fashioning at the expense of sincerer emotions. Insofar as it disrupts early modern psychological and physiological science, moreover, this talk shows how Riquelme’s case was symptomatic of fundamental anxieties around moral corruption in the theater, unease about changing conceptions of race and gender roles, and an increasingly blurred distinction between truth and fiction in early modern drama.
