Feeling Heads: Phrenology and Emotion in the United States, 1820-1850

Abstract

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of phrenology to the United States. First developed in Europe by Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim, phrenology was the theory that the mental characteristics of an individual were reflected in the shape of their brain and skull. Phrenologists believed that the brain was divided into numerous organs which were each responsible for a different mental faculty, roughly two-thirds of which were controlled what would today be regarded as emotions. By mid-century it had become a popular science within the United States, with numerous supporters and a vast array of publications on the topic. Despite this, phrenology has been largely absent in histories of emotion of this period, and histories of phrenology have rarely explicitly addressed how emotion was understood within the framework of the science. This thesis analyses how emotions were conceptualised within phrenology, and through this the role phrenologists believed emotion played in individual life and nineteenth-century American society. The early nineteenth century saw widespread socio-political change in the United States. The expansion of suffrage to all white men meant the ability to participate in formal political processes became more explicitly drawn along the lines of race and gender, and the question of what role women and non-whites were to play in American society became a pressing concern. As a professedly empirical science, phrenology had the potential to both reinforce and dispute these boundaries by making comparisons between white and non-white, and male and female brains. Examining phrenological books, periodicals and lectures shows that these comparisons often highlighted the prevalence or lack of certain emotions across race and gender lines, focusing particularly on the sentiments—the group of organs seen by phrenologists to be responsible for higher, moral emotions. Phrenological texts make clear the central role emotion was seen to play in maintaining the American republic, and the potential for emotions to act as a marker for inclusion or exclusion from it.