Touch and sociability [ Communication ]
… Touch In The Miser Married (1813), Catherine Hutton’s heroine, Charlotte Montgomery, notes: ‘Dancing introduces a kind of familiarity that would be quite inadmissible in a drawing room. When a gentleman solicits the honour of your hand, it is not a figure of speech; your hand really belongs to him, for the time; and if he persists in taking it a little after the time, it would be very ill-natured to withdraw it – unless one did not like him. For my part … men and women. Her comment should encourage reflection on the conditions under which this experience of touch had this kind of intensity: was it the slightly forbidden element of this touch – the tentative extension of the formal privilege …
Conduct | Conventions | Dance | Gender | Kissing | Propriety | Touch
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