mountain valley find Nuñez to be “a being apart” (p.113) from their own
community and so it is Nuñez that is briefly presented as the outsider
before he escapes from the valley. However, the idea that blindness can
be caught without so much as physical contact entertains the absurdity
that, as noted by David Bolt, “the blind are out to violate and infect their
sighted counterparts. The underpinning anxiety […] that to connect
with is to become as one with the bind” (2016, p.79). Additionally, the
threat of Nuñez’s contamination is also imagined through an emphasis
on touch. As noted by Davis (citing Wald), contagion literally means “to
touch together” (2008, p.97) and so the image of the blind is connected
to the idea of unwarranted touch. Wells depicts this through the image
of Nuñez being held against his will, the blind individuals “holding onto
him, touching him with sensitive hands […] moving in upon him quickly,
groping, yet moving rapidly” (p110). It therefore seems that although
there is no immediate biological threat of contagion, there is still a fear of
physical contact with the visually impaired. In a similar vein, Bolt (2016,
p. 68) notes:
Blind characters are often ascribed a sense of touch that is grotesque,
a grope or even a monstrous grip, rather than simply a means of
perception.
He additionally goes on to identify the colloquial connotations of grope
including molestation, stating that “the grope presents more of a violation
than does the touch” and when compared to sight is “far more sinister
than its visual counterpart” (Bolt 2016, p.78). The violation and sexual
connotations of the blind grope are also apparent in Blindness, as a group
of “blind hoodlums” (p.171) take over the asylum and begin demanding
sex from women in exchange for food. The hoodlums “extended avid
hands” (p.170) in an “erotic frenzy of twenty desperate men whose
urgency gave the impression they were blinded by lust” (pp.159-60).
Their behaviour becomes increasingly violent and animalistic as they
“whinnied, stamped their feet on the ground […] jostling each other
like hyenas around a carcass” (p.171) making “grunts […] obscenities”
(p.171) as they “panted like a suffocating pig” (p.172). The touch of
the blind then becomes increasingly perverted and dangerous, with
blindness itself perhaps acting as a metaphor for this moral deprivation.
According to Bolt there is a “customary Western emphasis on the brute
physicality of touch” which “has been positioned in opposition to the
intellect, and assumed to be merely the subjects of mindless pleasures
and pains” (2016, pp.74-75). The use of blindness as a metaphor for this
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