The bridal
veil is used, to take a few instances, in China, Burmah, Corea,
Russia, Bulgaria, Manchuria, and Persia, and in all these cases
it conceals the face entirely." (E. Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_,
pp. 328 et seq.)
Alexander Walker, writing in 1846, remarks: "Among old-fashioned
people, of whom a good example may be found in old country people
of the middle class in England, it is indecent to be seen with
the head unclothed; such a woman is terrified at the chance of
being seen In that condition, and if intruded on at that time,
she shrieks with terror, and flies to conceal herself." (A.
Walker, _Beauty_, p. 15.) This fear of being seen with the head
uncovered exists still, M. Van Gennep informs me, in some regions
of France, as in Brittany.
So far it has only been necessary to refer incidentally to the connection
of modesty with clothing. I have sought to emphasize the unquestionable,
but often forgotten, fact that modesty is in its origin independent of
clothing, that physiological modesty takes precedence of anatomical
modesty, and that the primary factors of modesty were certainly developed
long before the discovery of either ornament or garments. The rise of
clothing probably had its first psychical basis on an emotion of modesty
already compositely formed of the elements we have traced. Both the main
elementary factors, it must be noted, must naturally tend to develop and
unite in a more complex, though--it may well be--much less intense,
emotion.
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