The sense of touch and the shaping of the woman artist in the eighteenth century

Annual Copley Lecture

How did eighteenth century science and aesthetics understand the sense of touch? Not only in relation to and by comparison with the other senses, but also in terms of its capacity to ‘make sense’ of objects, the world, the feeling subject’s cognition and emotions? This paper will explore theories and representations of touch, noting its insistent association not only with the female body but with the female body’s power as affect (women’s feelings touch us emotionally) and its power to illustrate affect (women are more susceptible to being touched by emotion). We will explore two cases of ‘touch’ in female art and its representation. First, the rhetoric of touch in and in response to Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740). On 28 June, Samuel Richardson tells Johannes Sinistra, referring to his plans to revise the novel again, ‘I shall retouch Pamela, as I have Opportunity’; Pamela’s distress touches those she encounters in the novel and her readers; hands are powerful agents of control (those who manhandle the heroine) and of liberation (Pamela’s hand-written manuscripts reform her persecutors). Second, the  preoccupation with the  touch of the sculptor, Anne Seymour Damer (1749-1828). Damer’s contemporaries were much preoccupied with the sculptor’s touch, a touch which was imagined to stimulate the senses of the bodies of the women she sculpted and those to whom their bodies were made available (in sculpted form) to be touched (physically and emotionally). Hannah Cowley’s play The Town Before You (1794) makes much of this trope. We will counter this and other examples of visual and verbal satire with an attempt to understand Damer’s own understanding of it articulated in the works themselves and in her correspondence.