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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Art of Feeling:
In Flatland A Square explains the "art of feeling" as the primary way that lower-class and Female shapes recognize each other. Through this, Abbott satirizes the snobbery of the educational systems of his time. A Square also incorporates tactile imagery to convey his disdain for this method:
Feeling is, among our Women and lower classes—about our upper classes I shall speak presently—the principal test of recognition, at all events between strangers, and when the question is, not as to the individual, but as to the class [...] though we cannot see angles, we can infer them, and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure of angles.
The tactile imagery A Square uses to describe the "art of feeling" explains how touch is used as one way to distinguish the "real" shapes of other polygons in Flatland. Although A Square is dismissive of “Feeling” as primitive and uneducated, he also makes it clear that most shapes can instinctively do it very well. Interestingly, this is also a moment where the author deliberately alienates the reader from the narrator. It’s difficult enough to imagine “seeing” things in two dimensions, but here A Square tells the reader that their three-dimensional senses wouldn’t be of much use either. Although it seems like he is explaining an unfamiliar process so that they can understand, he is actually telling his audience in “the World of Space” that they couldn’t possibly understand it.
By stating that women and the lower classes primarily rely on feeling for recognition, A Square is implying that women and the “lower classes” are unable to think or “infer” in the same way as other shapes. They can only “Feel.” The narrator later goes on to explain the rarefied processes more socially elevated Shapes are taught to use to “see” each other. “Feeling” is regarded as being beneath them once they have learned these. This division of sensory perception along class and gender lines satirizes the accepted behaviors of the time, where intellectual capabilities and social status were often unjustly correlated by the ruling classes. The wealthy were often considered to be smarter and more educated regardless of the fact that the poor had far less access to education. It is also made clear that A Square thinks that “Females” and the “lower classes” are in fact universally only capable of “Feeling,” regardless of their individual characters or strengths. Thinking is arbitrarily reserved for Shapes with more sides, and "feeling" is for "Females" and Triangles.
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