Week 9: Sensation, Sensibility, and Senses

In the Starr article for this week, art and mental images supposedly derive their power from a mix of sensory images, allowing them to blend/work together, as "texture or temperature contribute fundamentally to taste." (286).  Toward the end of the article, Starr seems to come to the conclusion that the mental image of motion is this mix of other sensory images.  Starr also reminds us that a mental image often activates, though somewhat less intensely, the same brain regions as the actual sensations of such stimuli.

I haven't finished the book, Memoirs of a Women of Pleasure, yet, but the descriptions of Francis Hill's excitement while watching the Madam and, later, Polly engaging in sex reminded me of these two ideas.  That is, she's not experiencing the physical pleasure of sex, only watching.  She also seems to be imagining Pheobe's fingers the first time, while she experiences them the second.  Hill gets a physical pleasure out of watching the Madam. In fact, she feels the need to masturbate to this sight, "following mechanically...Pheobe's manual operation on it" (25).  Her mental image is tactile, but she also has to imagine what her hand has to do (proprioception) to create that feeling she remembers from Pheobe's hand.  When she watches, with Pheobe, Polly and her man, she again becomes excited, leading Pheobe to make her "stand with [her] back towards the door" while "[Pheobe's] busy fingers fell to visit" (32).

Pheobe waits until after this voyeurism to ask Hill "if [she] was still afraid of him [man]?" (33).  At this point, Hill is excited and can barely wait to meet here proposed taker of virginity.  Perhaps this has something to do with the article's note that "imagined odors...may interfere with or alter our perception of actually present tastes" (285).  While the senses are different, it seems the expectation of Hill influenced her perception, then of her sexual encounter with the young man who took her away from the bawdy-house.  She refuses to cry out, even though it hurts, and she convinces herself for the second round that it doesn't hurt as much as it is pleasurable.  Perhaps that's true, but given the description of his size, her smallness, and the pain of losing your virginity in general, I rather doubt it.  The question is, then, to what degree can expectations of an event/situation (associated with a mental image of that event) alter our perceptions of those events when they actually occur?  To what extent is Hill able to fool herself, essentially?  (As she does in the beginning when she refuses to "open [her] eyes to Mrs. Brown's designs" even after being paraded in front of an old man obviously appraising her sexual/physical worth. (16)).