Getting Under Our Skin: The Cultural and Social History of Vermin by Lisa T. Sarasohn

Author:Lisa T. Sarasohn [Sarasohn, Lisa T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, social history, Medical, Public Health, nature, General, science, Natural History, Technology & Engineering, Agriculture
ISBN: 9781421441382
Google: 3f1AEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: JHU Press
Published: 2021-09-21T23:57:49.343264+00:00

The actions of the flea may be disgusting and bloody, says the author, but that does not stop him from wishing to become metamorphosed into a flea, and “wandering under the dress, up the legs, I will quickly bestir myself to those places which I choose!” If the maid scorns him when he becomes a man once again, the poet boasts, he will once again assume the form of a flea, and “Whether by Prayers, or by force I’ll have her. Then she’ll prefer nothing to having me as her own companion.”

The flea man in “Elegia de Pulce” threatens rape; flea bites and ravishment are parallel acts, and in both the maid is subjugated by means of a flea. But somehow, in the lustful imagination of the perpetrator, she will come to love her assaulter. Similarly, in Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, the personified vice, Pride, proclaims,

I am like to Ovid’s flea, I can creep into every corner of a wench; sometimes like a perriwig I sit upon her brow; next, like a necklace I hang about her neck; then, like a fan of feathers, I kiss her lips; and then, turning myself to a wrought smock [i.e., an embroidered petticoat], do what I list. But fie, what a smell is here! I’ll not speak a word more for a King’s ransom, unless the ground be perfumed and covered with cloth of arras.49

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