The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America (review)

This exploration of faculty psychology by a specialist in American literature suggests the sometimes challenging differences in the ways historians and literary critics investigate the same topic, as well as the insights that one group may gain from the other. As his subtitle suggests, Thomas Cooley is especially interested in uncovering the inherent racism and sexism of supposedly scientific metaphors of the mind, and in demonstrating how they explain the "family resemblances" of a diverse group of well-known nineteenth-century Americans. Parts of his project, such as his discussion of figures like Frederick Douglas, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, will interest historians; others, such as his exploration of the persistence of nineteenth-century themes in the work of Toni Morrison, may not.

Revelatory of Cooley's approach is the explication of his title. The ivory leg is the prosthesis worn by Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, a man obsessed with a desire for revenge. While not totally insane, Ahab has let his emotions overpower his intellect; he has abandoned the cool, sane world of men for the fevered, irrational world of the "feminine" and the "savage" (p. 87). The ebony cabinet appeared in a never-published manuscript by Nathanial Hawthorne; holding forgotten or repressed memories, it became, Cooley argues, "a sort of compartmentalized Africa of the mind where the thoughts and desires were segregated into black and white, fair and foul by the colonializing will" (p. 83) The ivory leg and the ebony cabinet were intended to evoke powerful nineteenth-century images of race and gender, sanity and madness. They also captured faculty psychology's conception of the mind as a set of closely connected rooms or boxes. Madness came when the connections were severed, the body maimed, the house divided. Although after 1865 a more "functional," evolutionary psychology began to emerge and eventually to dominate, vestiges of early nineteenth-century faculty psychology (especially in its powerful literary manifestations) have persisted to the present—or so Cooley argues.

In support of these large generalizations, Cooley offers specific examples from an extraordinary number of texts. These range from novels and poetry to phrenological writings and political tracts. Cooley treats historical and literary narratives in similar fashion, for all offer "true" stories, he asserts (p. 2). He moves comfortably back and forth among events and writings of the 1820s, the 1890s, and the twentieth century. For example, a short chapter called "The Prisoner of Omelas" discusses Frederick Douglass, William James, Huck Finn, Uncle Tom, Dorothea Dix, and the journals of one Horace Hosmer (among others), before ending with an analysis of a short story by Ursula Le Guin. His epilogue links Emily Dickinson and William James; it finds traces of the "back to Africa" theme in T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcus Garvey, Ralph Ellison, and Saul Bellow. For historians, who tend toward more linear organizational schemes and constrained chronologies, the result is a dizzying ride among some of the darker chambers of American culture.

Overall, specialists in the history of psychiatry and psychology may find Cooley's sweep too bold and his text too little engaged with their own works on his subject to be useful to them. His linkage of highly disparate cultural artifacts sometimes seems forced. Those interested in nineteenth-century literature as a source for their work and teaching, however, will benefit from this book. Despite the extraordinary number of texts referenced, its intellectual and emotional center is the powerful work of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville, about whom Cooley has astute things to say. In addition, although aspects of his reading of authors such as Mrs. Packard seem a bit naïve, his serious engagement with their language opens up a number of classic nineteenth-century psychiatric texts in...