Beauty and the Brain

In 288 meticulously written, sourced, and illustrated pages, Rachel Walker presents a compelling argument for “recovering” the “once vibrant but now forgotten scientific world” of nineteenth-century American physiognomy and phrenology (14). Walker joins a growing number of historians seeking to understand person, place, and time through practices once considered little more than object lessons in quackery and bad science.21 She brings to light a series of arguments, relationships, and contradictions significant not only for the American historical record, but also for how we assess and value the “sciences” of our present and future.The seriousness with which Walker takes her subject is apparent from the start. In describing physiognomy and phrenology as “popular sciences,” Walker makes one of her main points: “These were not silly pseudosciences that people occasionally discussed at dinner parties. They were pervasive practices that suffused almost every aspect of society, culture, and politics” (6). That last realm is especially important. Fundamentally, this book has less to do with aesthetics and more to do with power. Specifically, Walker is interested in power that enables and constrains those on the periphery and far reaches of citizenship; power that expands and limits; power that challenges and preserves the status quo. In recovering this “once vibrant world,” she also reveals the paradoxical power of popular science. Beauty and the Brain examines science's impact on a young republic noteworthy for its credible ideals and incredible contradiction.The initial chapters set a familiar scene. While introducing modes of physiognomy (chapter 1) and phrenology (chapter 2), Walker emphasizes that in the hands of “elite white intellectuals” both sciences were used to “rationalize existing hierarchies” (14). Readers also encounter a new nation in which the power to observe, organize, and act is intimately involved with surface signifiers, doctrinal flexibility, and belief in human perfectibility. Into these scenes Walker introduces a host of new actors who plan to use physiognomy and phrenology in a host of different ways. And we are reminded that where there is power, there is also resistance.The remaining chapters spotlight that interplay between power and resistance. Through extensive use of well-chosen archives (e.g., family papers; notes, diaries, and letters), Walker explores individuals’ use of physiognomy and phrenology—ranging from Margaret Fuller's and Frederick Douglass's experiences to broader essays on gender, race, feminism, and penal reform. While Walker focuses on the antebellum era, drawing richly from the lives of New Englanders and New Yorkers (City and upstate), her study extends far beyond. This is especially true in the chapters centering race (3 and 6), where Walker examines how the popular sciences were and were not taken up by white and Black women and men living in the south, north, and west. These are especially important chapters for two reasons. First, they introduce stories yet to be fully told. For while the involvement of women in phrenology is now a topic of some historical interest, fully intersectional analysis is rare.22 Secondly, these sections expand and complicate the historical perspective.These are stories of success and failure, progress and oppression, courage and discouragement. In all, the dangers of using the master's tools to build one's home is made readily apparent. With Audre Lorde in mind, Walker demonstrates how constructing a psychic “home” (emerging selfhood) comprised of “rooms” (character, beauty, morality, and intelligence) by using the tools of physiognomy and phrenology also involves replicating the structures and décor (internalized standards) of white, androcentric, American culture.23 Walker provides powerful examples of how women and men, white and BIPOC, faced this dilemma on a daily basis, working toward imperfect solutions while incurring and inflicting damage.In centering this dilemma, Walker is writing about more than the past. She is concerned with the present day. Interestingly, at various points Walker gives the impression that nineteenth-century Americans might have made different choices when it came to understanding self and other. She suggests that the discursive dangers of the popular sciences were apparent and could, or should, have produced a different kind of conversation. “Science is a powerful tool, but it is also a capacious construct with a complicated and problematic history,” Walker writes. “If we want to use it responsibly, we should first reckon with its most unsavory legacies. Only then will we be able to craft more ethical methodologies for analyzing the world and the diverse populations who inhabit it” (201)

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Medicine Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy