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AWoman’sTouch 75 A Woman’s Touch While the senses were typically considered feminine in nature when opposed to male rationality, when considered on their own they could be assigned feminine or masculine connotations.Touch, taste and smell were generally held to be the lower senses and thus were readily linked to the lower sex—women. Similar associations were made between touch, taste, and smell and the lower classes, the lower (non-European) races, and (as we shall see) the lower species.All of these groups were imagined to dedicate themselves to the corporeal comforts of the lower senses—whether these comforts were seen as the plowman’s lunch and rough bedding of a farm worker or the rich spices and silks of an Oriental potentate.The European male elite,by contrast,was deemed to find its fulfillment in more rational satisfactions—such as reading and discoursing—associated with the higher senses of sight and hearing. In the case of women, their association with the senses of touch, taste, and smell reinforced the cultural link between femininity and the body, for these senses were closely tied to intimate bodily experience.The distance senses of sight and hearing,by contrast,were associated with the perception of the external, masculine world. Women’s connection with the lower senses was grounded in the scriptural account of the Fall.In that story,it was Eve who first disobeyed God’s injunction not to eat or even touch the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.This act of disobedience was taken by many as a sign of woman’s inability to restrain her covetous touch and her greedy appetite. Hence, when in the medieval play Jeu d’Adam the serpent tells Eve that the forbidden fruit contains“all knowledge,” the first woman only asks in response, “What does it taste like?” (Burns 1993: 81). Unable to comprehend the intellectual or spiritual significance of the fruit, all sensual Eve can think about are its gustatory attractions. One popular source of information about the gendered nature of perception was provided by the premodern“bestiary of the senses.”In this system the animals traditionally associated with touch (the tortoise and the spider) were typed as feminine, while the animals associated with sight (the eagle and the stag) were thought of as masculine. Forever encased in a shell, the tortoise suggested the quintessential homebody, the woman who never leaves the walls of her house. The tortoise further symbolized wet sensuality and was linked to the planetVenus (held, like the Moon, to be cold and moist in nature).The spider represented woman as housewife, spinning and homemaking, and as temptress, trapping her (male) prey in a silken web of seduction.The former occupation made an approved use of a woman’s touch.The latter employment was viewed with suspicion,when not condemned outright. Classen_Text.indd 75 3/15/12 2:48 PM 76 chapter four A woman did not have to actively employ her sense of touch for her body to constitute a tactile threat to men—the mere fact of its being pleasurably touchable made it seem a peril. In one of Ben Jonson’s plays a “feast of sense” is described in which there are melodies for the ear, perfumes for the nose, and so on, but “for the touch, a ladies waste; which does all the rest excel!” (cited in Kermode 1971: 89). However, if the touch of a woman’s body excelled all other attractions, it also constituted the supreme enticement to sin, “the greatest of all obstacles in the way of salvation” (Power 1995: 8). Evidently, it was a danger requiring formidable safeguards and warnings. Church authorities proclaimed that if only“men could see beneath [women’s skin]”then they would be safe from the temptations of touch, since “how can we desire to embrace such a sack of dung?” (cited by Dalarun 1992: 20). Feminine touch could be seen as constituting a serious threat to masculine dominance—as the image of woman as a deadly spider indicated.The seductive touch of a woman was considered to rob men of their rational powers and even, it was thought, of their sight, the sense most closely allied with reason.The biblical tale that provided an iconic example of the supposed opposition between feminine tactility and masculine visuality was that of Samson and Delilah. In this story Delilah seduces the mighty Samson and, while he is asleep in her lap, disempowers him...

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