Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America, by Rachel E. Walker

In 1776, two revolutions unfolded in separate spheres that initially appeared to have little in common. In North America, an independent republic premised on the pursuit of equality and individual liberties was founded despite preserving traditional class, gender and racial hierarchies. Concurrently in Europe, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater was writing his pioneering work on interpreting facial characteristics, the Physiognomische Fragmente. Rachel E. Walker unites these currents in this work, which explores how physiognomy and phrenology shaped conceptions of character, citizenship, beauty, ability and destiny in the early American republic. For Walker, a historian of race, gender and popular science, it is no coincidence that the study of faces and heads rose in popularity just as the United States was finding its feet as a nation. Instead, the presumed link between facial features, cranial contours and personality allowed seemingly objective judgements about people to be made in a context where character was meant to matter more than lineage.

Beauty and the Brain joins works by Cynthia Hamilton and James Poskett to provide a revisionist understanding of disciplines often dismissed as ‘pseudo-sciences’ despite the authority they commanded in their heyday. While these methods of ‘reading’ heads and faces were used in the service of racist and patriarchal ideologies, this emerging scholarship has shown that they cannot be perceived only as ‘tools of oppression’ wielded by white men. Instead, they were also pursued by women and racialised individuals who claimed them to argue for their own merits. Walker’s contribution skilfully resurrects the allure of physiognomy and phrenology as malleable doctrines capable of serving diverse, reformist agendas in nineteenth-century America. By primarily focusing on how phrenology and physiognomy were received by the masses, rather than by professional elites, she shows how the language and assumptions of these disciplines infiltrated public consciousness and shaped popular culture. Walker draws on a range of sources, from novels to phrenological journals to portraits and caricatures, but her most intriguing findings come from archival sources—private correspondence and diaries—particularly by women. Frequent references to physiognomic and phrenological traits in these writings suggest a commonly held belief in the connection between appearance and inner character. Yet as Walker reveals, this acceptance did not necessarily support deterministic understanding of individual abilities.

By focusing on the different uses to which phrenology and physiognomy were put and the diverse groups that employed them, Walker shows that approaches to these fields were as contradictory as the values that shaped the nation. Americans ostensibly believed in self-improvement and equal opportunities, but still denied women, Indigenous Americans and African Americans basic rights. To justify these groups’ subjugation and bondage, biological conceptions of human difference emerged to provide an ‘objective’ basis for discrimination. This conventional history of scientific racism partially explains the rise of physiognomy and phrenology in the nineteenth century but, as Walker demonstrates, it fails to explain why so many women and people of colour were drawn to these disciplines in their own right—not to disparage their features, but to extol them.

To tackle this maze of contradictions, Walker first explains the appeal of both doctrines, which allowed practitioners to evaluate their fellow citizens with very little training or equipment. It then explores their flexibility in practice. Physiognomists may have believed that high foreheads denoted intelligence and phrenologists that bumps at the base of the skull reflected lustfulness, but neither traits nor features were assumed to be fixed. Instead, efforts to improve or reduce particular characteristics could result in an altered personality and appearance. The ‘rules’ of these practices were also indeterminate. Readings were personal and idiosyncratic, and more likely to be based on preconceptions of character than a rigid application of principle.

According to Walker, this flexibility is the key to understanding why physiognomy and phrenology flourished in the early American republic. They could be used to identify good leaders and suitable spouses, as well as the undeserving poor or irredeemable criminals. They promoted self-knowledge and personal development. And above all, they explained why some succeeded while others failed, based on their supposedly natural propensities. For women and African Americans, this provided a means for advocating for their own advancement. Accepting the flawed premise that looks conveyed personality, they scrutinised the portraits of learned women and distinguished African Americans such as Margaret Fuller, Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass for visual proof of their exceptional qualities. Walker is careful to note, however, that there is little evidence that Black women engaged with these disciplines. This was perhaps a consequence of physiognomic manuals imparting a racial bias that correlated Caucasian features with positive traits. Equally, phrenology and physiognomy remained products of a European intellectual tradition that reinforced existing hierarchies within groups as well as between them. Individual women and African Americans may have been drawn to them to ratify their accomplishments, but they did not promote equality except as a distant prospect.

Walker successfully argues that phrenology and physiognomy were influential sciences in the early American republic, infiltrating public consciousness and shaping how people were described for much of the nineteenth century. More might have been added about the growing scepticism that undermined these practices, and their eventual replacement by more deterministic models of race and gender. This would have allowed for some consideration of how Indigenous Americans fit into this otherwise diverse history, as their omission is notable. Instead of a complete rise-and-fall narrative, Walker provides a convincing portrait of physiognomy and phrenology at the height of their popularity. It is a strength of the work that this focus significantly revises our understanding of who these fields were for and how they were used. Beauty and the Brain will not only appeal to historians of science, but to anyone interested in the construction of race and gender in the early American republic and the popular discourses that surrounded them.