Pearl, Sharrona Hyla (Author)
Harvard University
Harrington, Anne
Edition Details: Advisor: Harrington, Anne
Physical Details: 387 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation examines the development and application of physiognomy---the study of facial characteristics and their relationship to personality traits--- in nineteenth century England. With the work of Johan Caspar Lavater (1741- 1801) in the late eighteenth century, physiognomy shifted from an elite set of esoteric ideas to a widely practiced and understood language of observation and communication. Set in the context of nineteenth century urbanization, this study suggests that the speed and ease with which physiognomical judgements were made offered a way to deal with crisis of urban anonymity at a glance. Based on instinct and intuition, Lavaterian physiognomy was accessible to, and applied by, members of all classes of English society. Combining the methodology of the history of ideas with a cultural studies sensibility, this work chronicles a practice central to nineteenth century life, revealing as much about the physiognomists as physiognomy itself. Drawing on published monographs and journal articles, as well as diaries, novels, works of art, and costuming and makeup techniques, this study examines five distinct, if overlapping, forms of physiognomic practice. Each type of physiognomy demonstrates the relationship between cultural experiences and the development of physiognomical ideas, breaking down the barrier between elite and lay forms of knowledge. Initially designed by Lavater as a way to mediate social prestige, polite and professional physiognomy soon became a widely used diagnostic technique which I have called pocket physiognomy. As a communication device, physiognomy was a way not just to get but also to give character information. Portrait painters and actors used performance physiognomy in their representations, while caricaturists applied political physiognomy to construct identifiable faces for the assimilating Jews and Irish in England. Photographic physiognomy is examined through the pictures of Victorian asylum doctor Hugh Welch Diamond. Diamond negotiated the tension, present in each type of physiognomy, between identification of individual or group traits by expanding the range of meaningful physiognomic signs. Drawing on both medical and artistic techniques, Diamond structured his images to focus not only on facial characteristic but external cues such as clothing and hair styles to make visible the invisible human interior.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 66/11 (2006): 4162. UMI pub. no. 3194443.
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