Welcome to the fourth installment of the In A Sense series. These blogposts are linked with the In A Sense tactile exhibit currently on display in the Dalnavert Museum Visitor’s Center. For additional resources, follow the links at the bottom of this post. To see the full exhibit, drop by the museum or book a tour through our website.
Warning: Briefly discusses germ theory and the impact the privileging of sight over touch had for disabled persons and those in the blind community.
Throughout the Victorian era, views on touch were in a state of flux. At the beginning of the era, many people did not pay close attention to the sense, instead thinking that sight and sound were the main ways humans conceptualized reality. “Yet as the contributions to this special issue emphasize, understanding of the tactile sense became crucial to the ways in which the Victorians conceived of reality, and touch — increasingly delineated as both a passive and active sense — became imbued with new social, psychological, and emotional resonances.” As new psychological and physiological treatises were developed, touch took on fame as a complex sense through which people could not only understand the world but embrace it. Children learned through touch with object lessons, scientific discoveries were based around tactility, and the awareness of bodily movement such as exercise and fidgeting were noticed and explicitly discussed. At the same time, scientific theories concerning germs were growing, specifically the understanding that disease could be passed on through surfaces and touch. These theories impacted certain groups more than others due to classist and ableist beliefs that differentiated people based on perceived cleanliness and “correct” bodies.
One of the main groups affected by tactile inquiry were those in the blind community. The rise of technologies like the photograph put an emphasis on visuals, privileging sight over other senses. Yet, scholars and blind activists pushed against this idea by advocating for the necessity of touch in everyday interactions with the world. Psychologist Alexander Bain said that
“Touch is an intellectual sense of a far higher order [than taste or smell]. It is not merely a knowledge-giving sense, as they all are, but a source of ideas and conceptions of the kind that remain in the intellect and embrace the outer world.”
By labelling touch as a sense that bridged the mind-body divide seen in earlier philosophy, Bain helped to move touch into a new category of scientific inquiry. “This is not least in relation to shifting sensory hierarchies, and in response to changing ideas around the role of touch in disease and contagion. Each contributor [within European discursion] also suggests the variant disciplinary regimes and concerns that began to adhere around blind people’s touch.” Experiences of people in blind and partially sighted communities were put under new scrutiny because they used touch in ways outside the sighted norm. Unfortunately, this scrutiny was often linked to negative beliefs that labelled blind people’s touch as diseased due to early beliefs around germ theory.
Engraving: ‘Monster Soup…’ by William Heath. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0
Part of the scrutiny that surrounded touch had to do with shifting perspectives on movement itself which went beyond germ theory and psychological inquiry. If you have ever watched a well-researched Regency-era film, you may have noticed the way that characters hold themselves up in company. They rarely fidget or move more than they have to, adhering to a specific set of social rules. These rules and fashions dictated the way bodies moved, separating parts of people’s lives into domestic spaces where they could move more freely and public spaces which were more socially regulated. By the Victorian era, however, these social rules were shifting. As professor Karen Chase has detailed: “the physicality of fidgeting also took on new qualities, and was more clearly visible, in Victorian culture. [There was] a new regime of attentiveness to bodily dispositions and the uneasy borderland between voluntary and involuntary action.” Movement and touch were no longer taboo subjects which were ignored in polite company but actively discussed and used. Psychologists and enthusiasts even sought to chart “the circuits of random movements of the human frame” which would have been social blaspheme in previous generations.
Photo taken from Vintage Everyday
There was more freedom in the ways people were allowed to move and interact but it must be noted that these movements were not passive. The constant discussion of movement could be extremely frustrating for people who had to use touch for things like walking with a cane or involuntary fidgeting -- people who just wanted to get on with their lives. Simultaneously, this same discussion could be extremely helpful for certain artistic movements. The fact that touch was being held in a higher regard especially helped the rise of handicrafts.
“Touch is the force which masters, as well as in turn requires mastering.”
This disciplining of hand-made goods led to the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, and other Victorian design staples, all because skilled touch was being used and noticed. In these ways, touch defined Victorian spaces, from the way people moved, to the art and buildings they created and moved within, to the questions they were pursuing intellectually. Not bad for a supposedly underrated sense.
Articles and Books:
Gallagher, Catherine. The Body Economic https://archive.org/details/bodyeconomiclife0000gall/page/n13/mode/2up?view=theater&q=sight
Hardy, Barbara. Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction. https://archive.org/details/formsoffeelingin0000hard
The Language of the Senses https://archive.org/details/languageofsenses0000mcsw_g4w4
Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference (2013) file:///C:/Users/Alexa/Downloads/ntn-1465-tilley.html
Tactile Exhibits and Research:
https://sites.udel.edu/materialmatters/2016/02/24/making-sense-experiential-exhibits-in-england/
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/3061/htm
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8144&context=etd
https://www.craftingcommunities.net/learn
https://omekas.library.uvic.ca/s/crafting/page/about
For more go to https://www.friendsofdalnavert.ca/stroke