CHAPTER ONE
_____________________________________
The Social Life of the
Senses: The Assaults and
Seductions of Modernity
KATE FLINT
The senses are essential to sociability. They help connect us to others, and allow us to participate in communities. At the same time, it is through our senses that communities, in the forms of crowded streets and buildings, and communal activities, can seem to overwhelm us, and challenge our autonomy and individuality in uncomfortable ways. Yet the social life of the senses is not just to be understood in relation to connectivity outside of the self. As nineteenth-century research in physiology and psychology demonstrated and explained, the senses worked actively, in combination with one another, within the individual bodyâcreating, indeed, an important component of what constituted individuality itself.
This chapter explores the concept of the âsocial lifeâ of the senses in three distinct ways. It considers how the senses connected individuals to the environment that surrounded them. The busy thoroughfares of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cities continually stimulated the eye, nose and ear, refusing sensory rest to the perceiver, and making them acutely aware that their own lives were always related to the physical existence of others. Sound and smell have the power to travel intoâand out ofâdwellings and workplaces, eroding the barrier between domestic and public existence. Appealing to the sensory imagination was a powerful tool at the disposal of social commentators. Information received through the senses, moreover, led people to make, both consciously and unconsciously, discriminations and judgments about class, ethnic identity, background, and genderâthe tools through which one apprehends what Raymond Williams termed a âknowable communityâ (Williams 1975: 165), and through which one tries to make sense of what has become the more familiar phenomenon of the crowded, chaotic, contradictory modern world.
The senses work also to connect people to wider, unseen communities than those in which one livesâcommunities composed of networks of production, distribution, and consumption. Merely to hold a book, for example, or to finger the fabric for a new dress, or to drink a cup of tea with sugar is to touch or taste something that has been made and transported by other hands, and in other placesâsometimes very far-away places indeed. Whilst this contact must frequently have been nonconscious, the physical imprint left by human labor was something that was deliberately recalled by thoseâlike John Ruskin, like those who participated in the Arts and Crafts movementâwho repudiated the impersonality of mechanization and the suppression of individuality that mass manufacture brought with it. To draw attention to the engagement of senses in creating, wearing, or eating something is a way of drawing connections between people; to show how the senses may participate in broad and invisible networks.
The senses connect us not just to our present, but to our pasts. Starting from Marxâs insight in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that they are not merely used as organs through which to respond to the present moment, but that they are a potent source of material memories, Susan Stewart has reminded us that âsuch memories are material in the sense that the body carries them somaticallyâthat is, they are registered in our consciousness, or in the case of repression, the unconscious knowledge, of our physical experiencesâ (Stewart 1999: 17). If mid-nineteenth-century physiologists and their popularizers would attribute this to the workings of the ânervous system,â with the âgreat sympathetic nerveâ running down the spine, branching out into other organs, and connecting in the brain, and if modern neuroscientists explain this through the establishment of neural pathways that create habits and associations, the overall concept is the same: that sensory impressions, stored in the body, work together to establish our individual conceptualization of who we are.
Finally, this chapter will consider how the senses may be said to have a busy social life of their own within any individual who is the agent of perception. G. H. Lewes, in The Physiology of Common Life wrote (anticipating William James) of the âvast and powerful stream of sensation belonging to none of the special Senses, but to the System as a wholeâ that constitutes an individualâs experience of life (Lewes [1859] 1860: 49). As he points out, we may be pretty much unconscious of all the demands that are being made on our sensory apparatus at any one time:
FIGURE 1.1: Unloading Tea at the Port of London by William Bazett Murray. The Bridgeman Art Library/Getty Images.
While I am writing these lines the trees are rustling in the summer wind, the birds are twittering among the leaves, and the muffled sounds of carriages rolling over the Dresden streets reach my ear; but because the mind is occupied with trains of thought these sounds are not perceived, until one of them becomes importunate, or my relaxed attention turns towards them.
Lewes [1859] 1860: 40
As we will see throughout this chapter, the obtrusiveness of some aspect of the external world onto an individualâs consciousness is one of the means by which one can be made uncomfortably aware of oneâs embodied existence within it. But what is important to my purpose here is that Lewes was one of a number of influential thinkers whose research on the nature of perception emphasized the mutual imbrication of the senses in a personâs physiological and psychological make-up. Recognizing the importance of sensory collaboration is certainly nothing new, but a cluster of notable thinkers in the Victorian period repeatedly returned to the topic of how, precisely, the senses work in cohort with one another to produce our understanding of the world and ourselves. In what lies ahead, I will be drawing on some of these theorists, whose work bridged physiological research with the developing discipline of psychoanalysis. But I will also be making extensive use of literary texts, for the way in which a writer brings together the workings of the different senses, using language that stimulates the sensory memories and associations that we carry within our own bodies, may be said to constitute a further form of social life: one that is constituted by the imagination of the individual reader, and yet that inescapably links them to other consumers of the same text.
Commentators on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city, whether writing fiction or poetry, or trying to draw as accurate a description as possible in journalism, reports, or travelogues, endlessly commented on the visual plenitude, the mingling of odors pleasant and foulâmore often than not, foulâand the constant clanging, shouting, rattling, barrel-organ-churning sounds of the streets. Artists and photographers, limited to appealing to their audienceâs visual imagination in the first instance, helped chronicle this chaos. Consider, say, Phoebus Levinâs 1864 painting Covent Garden Market (see Figure 1.2). Although the composition and lighting directs the eye to focus on certain groupsâthe bargaining taking place just left of center, the porter with a huge basket of produce on his head on the right of the pictureâthe fact that there is no unifying perspective or clear sight lines mimics, through our viewing practice, the experience of having our attention pulled first in one way, then another, as if we had actually been present. There is plenty of motion, which stops us regarding it in a contemplative wayâunless we focus on the deliberately obscured group of ragged girls on the left-hand side, looking for dropped or discarded fruit or vegetables, and representing those who are more figuratively obscured in society, even as the more respectable woman in front of them, apparently buying a bunch of flowers, appears to be the object of the speculative gaze of the lounging group of men to our right. However, the painting is, necessarily, silent. It invites the spectator to supply the sounds that Charles Dickens wrote of in his essay on Covent Garden Market in Sketches by Boz: âThe pavement is already strewed with decayed cabbage-leaves, broken hay-bands, and all the indescribable litter of a vegetable market; men are shouting, carts backing, horses neighing, boys fighting, basket-women talking, piemen expatiating on the excellence of their pastry, and donkeys brayingâ (Dickens [1836] 1995: 53). We have, moreover, to add in the smells: the overwhelming perfume of flowers remarked on by many visitors on the one hand, and the stench of rotting fruit and vegetablesânot to mention horse and donkey manureâon the other.
At least by the time Levin painted his picture, one of Londonâs most notorious stenches, that produced by the sewer known as the Thames (together with the composite effect of other bad or absent drainage), had significantly improved due to the work of the Metropolitan Board of Works. In the first half of the nineteenth century, even in the most fashionable districts, there were, as Henry Mayhew remarked, citing an 1849 report, âmany faulty places in the sewers which abound in noxious matter, in many instances stopping up the house drains and smelling horriblyâ (Mayhew ([1851] 1851â61, II: 395). Friedrich Engels, visiting England between November 1844 and August 1846, was struck not just by the foul stench that emanated from slops thrown into the streetâand, indeed, by the smells of London street marketsâbut by the âmost revolting and injurious gasesâ emanating from inadequately buried corpses in the pauper burial ground (Engels [1845] 2009: 296). There was a frequent and sickening smell of coal gas as well, especially when the gas mains leaked; leather tanning in Bermondsey was notoriously odiferous (it used dog excrement in its process), and many other small industries emitted fumes and smoke of various kinds. Nor was this olfactory unpleasantness confined to London: it was endemic to all large cities. In Manhattan, sewage and refuse was dumped straight into the rivers, and washed back again. âIn summer, at low tide,â wrote the Health Officer of the Port in 1865â6, âthis filth lies frothing like yeast, setting free ⌠offensive and pernicious gases and insupportable odors ⌠which every breeze ⌠spreads over the islandâ (New York Chamber of Commerce Annual Report 1865â6, quoted in Scobey 2002: 136).
FIGURE 1.2: Covent Garden Market by Phoebus Levin. Museum of London.
Smells were not alone in providing an offensive assault on the human body. As John Picker tells us in Victorian Soundscapes, during the mid century, âstreet sounds also came to be represented as threatening pollutants with noxious effectsâ (Picker 2003: 66), quoting a letter cited in Michael T. Bassâs Street Music in the Metropolisâone of many similar pieces of correspondenceâthat complained of this nuisance that it is âquite as destructive to health, comfort, and quiet, as bad smells, bad drainage, and the proximity of disorderly housesâ (Bass 1864: 88). Other letters specified some of the problems: mock Scotsmen dancing to bagpipes; âItalian organ-grinders, blind men with screeching clarionets, boys with droning hurdy-gurdiesâ (Bass 1864: 59). One can add the cries of street hawkers, or the clatter of carriages, or, for those situated near railway tracks, the âshrieking, roaring, rattlingâ trains that Dickens, in Dombey and Son, represents as whirling along with the triumphant speed of death (Dickens [1848] 2002: 312).
Later, there were the sounds of the internal combustion engineânot just cars, but buses. The Motor-Car Journal reported in July 1908 that in the previous year, 4,362 of Londonâs 8,507 buses had been reported as âunfit for traffic on account of noiseâ (âMotor Traffic in Londonâ 1908: 435)ânoise amplified in narrow streets. In Virginia Woolfâs Mrs Dalloway, the narrator records the general âbellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; ⌠the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overheadâ (Woolf [1925] 2005: 4)âa set of sounds which, representing the inherent life of the bustling city, Clarissa Dalloway finds enlivening, almost comfortingâis sliced into by the sound of a car backfiring, mistakable for âa pistol shotâ (13). This sound is a structural device, joining people together synchronically in their private responses, creating social cohesion through response to an urban sound even though in sociable terms they are strangers to one another. It also links them diachronically. The First World War had left its sensory imprint on peopleâs nervous systems, and the extraordinary demands that it made on the sensesâespecially, in this novel, that of the shell-shocked Septimus Warren-Smithâis something to which Iâll return.
Sensory appeals bind people together in a positive as well as in a negative way: in the sights and sounds and smell of the music hall or opera or theater or circus; in the durbars and pageants of empireâas Tim Barringer, for example, has demonstrated in his analysis of the role that the aural (especially Elgarâs music) played in the staging of the 1911 Delhi Durbar, and in its theatrical representation in London the following year (Barringer 2006). Without discounting for a moment the maddening effects of the cacophony created by street musiciansâone that stimulated a crescendo of rhetorical protest that culminated in the passing, in 1864, of the less than effective Street Music Actâthe thing that stands out in these protests is the way in which they are colored by class anxiety and xenophobia, and by a fear that the privacy of the home (both as a domestic sanctum and as a working space) was being violated by the heterogeneity of the streets outside.
Banding together in a campaign to try and suppress noisy street supporters was one obvious way in which an identifiable social grouping could be formed through a shared reaction to an acoustic environment, but other virtual communities, operating through shared assumptions rather than in any programmatic sense, reacted to the world around them through what were, in effect, class codings, or responses rooted in other ideological biases. Janice Carlisle, in Common Scents, has shown how novelists of the 1860s played on their audienceâs pre-existent associations with what one popular commentator of the time called âambassadors from the material worldâ (Wilson 1856: 18). Drawing, for example, on psychologist Alexander Bainâs discussion of smell in The Senses and the Intellect (1855), she demonstrates how odors associated with laborâwith mills and warehouses or beer brewing or a pastrycookâs kitchenâwere deemed especially offensive (Carlisle 2004: 42). To evoke sensitivity to certain smellsâas does Esther Lyonâs father, in George Eliotâs Felix Holt, when he explains the necessity of the wax candle thatâs burning by saying that his daughter âis so delicately framed that the smell of tallow is loathsome to herâ (Eliot [1866] 1995: 60)âis a concise way of telling an audience about social position and ambition. Other social segments may be quietly damned through their alleged olfactory preferences, as when the increasingly environmentally aware John Ruskin sneered at the âsporting people who have learned to like the smell of gunpowder, sulphur, and gas-tar [the latter two were used to drive rabbits from their warrens] better than that of violets and thymeâ (Ruskin [1872] 1903â12: 436).
For Ruskin, the appeal of the natural world to the senses was necessary and restorative, and perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century writer, he repeatedly urged, and practiced, habits of visual attention. But the natural world could itself be overwhelming in its assault on the senses, even though the demands made by rural scenes might be far less toxic in their oppressiveness than those of the city. In Chapter 19 of Tess of the dâUrbervilles, Thomas Hardy evokes a typical June summer evening, âthe atmosphere being in such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not fiveââa strange statement, that appears to make the objects themselves receptive, rather than acting as the source of stimuli for the human observer. Tess finds herself on the uncultivated edges of the farm garden, which âwas now damp and rank with juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds emitting offensive smellsâweeds whose red and yello...