ABSTRACT
SO FAR I HAVE FOCUSED PREDOMINANTLY on how the Sensory faculties of sight and sound organize interior life. Dickinson and Freud draw largely on vision and hearing to mediate between inner dwelling and inner mind. These two writers of the interior each depend upon eye and ear to transform the mundane space of living into the contemplative space of writing. Yet interiority is not fashioned by the “higher” senses alone. As Keller and Proust demonstrate, the “lower” senses also play a central role in the production of one's inner thoughts, dreams, and memories. Keller, left blind and deaf from an early childhood fever, did not need vision or hearing either to enter into language or to apprehend her surroundings. She relied primarily on touch, and secondarily on smell, to orient both mind and body. Requiring neither eye nor ear to develop a talent for introspection, Keller instead built a complex inner life around hand and nose, her two dominant organs of sense perception.
