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  • Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences
  • Tamar Heller (bio)
Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences, by Rachel Malane; pp. xiv + 229. Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature No. 22. New York and London: Peter Lang, 2005, $67.95, £37.00.

My students always look amazed when I tell them about Edward Clarke's argument, in his 1873 book Sex in Education, that going to college shrinks women's ovaries, causing in consequence the decline of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Thanks to the work of feminist scholars in the last few decades, we have learned much about the troubling complicity of nineteenth-century science with attempts to limit women's entrance into higher education and the professions. In recent years, too, critics have increasingly examined the influence of scientific discourses about gender in the Victorian period on literary representations. Rachel Malane's Sex in Mind: The Gendered Brain in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Mental Sciences, is one such effort to trace how three Victorian writers—Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy—responded to contemporary medical and scientific theories about essential differences between the brains of men and women.

Malane's first chapter surveys nineteenth-century scientific theories of the "gendered brain." While not groundbreaking in its discoveries, this chapter usefully summarizes nineteenth-century perspectives on the topic; it would be valuable in both graduate and undergraduate courses, helping students see how "cultural beliefs about sexual difference often polluted scientific findings" (55). Beginning her discussion with early-nineteenth-century phrenology—which, while not explicitly focused on gender, nonetheless spurred efforts to classify mental differences between the sexes—Malane proceeds to such branches of science as craniology (which used brain weight and measurements to determine intelligence) and evolutionary theory. Malane clearly summarizes the complicated connections Victorian scientists made between women's nerves, brains, and reproductive systems—connections that encouraged doctors like Clarke to assert that women's mental exertions would drain vital energy from their wombs. Additionally, Malane shows how scientific theories "supported the notion that female brains are more susceptible to a pathological loss of control" (43), as in hysteria.

While Malane's summary of Victorian-era scientific theories on gender is valuable, her subsequent exploration of the connections between these ideas and the work of novelists is less surefooted. Her readings of novels by Brontë, Collins, and Hardy contain useful insights, but are not always persuasive; in general, she downplays ambiguities and complexities in the fiction. Malane's chapter on Brontë, for instance, offers illuminating readings of individual texts within an unconvincing theoretical framework in which she claims that Brontë sees a "concrete, biological" basis for her heroines' actions (69). It is true that Brontë was influenced by nineteenth-century [End Page 687] phrenology, as witnessed by frequent references to phrenological theory in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853)—references usefully discussed here. Malane also shows compellingly that Brontë's novels abound with images of female minds threatened by male invasion, revealing a clear "connection between sharing brain space and making oneself sexually vulnerable" (90): recall Rochester's claim to Jane Eyre that "Your mind is my treasure." Still, to show that Brontë represented male power through images of men colonizing or invading women's minds is not to prove that Brontë sees a biological basis for women's vulnerability to male domination. Malane also overlooks moments where female characters either assert their inherent equality with men or, indeed, prove they can act more rationally than men.

Malane's readings of Collins's and Hardy's novels are more convincing. For one thing, the novels that Malane examines most closely—Collins's Heart and Science (1883) and Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)—reflect the late-nineteenth-century tendency to read relations between the sexes in terms of biological determinism. Malane's discussion of Heart and Science usefully shows how the novel opposes the male world of science to the female world of feeling. In the figure of Mrs Gallilee, the proto-New Woman patroness of the novel's villain, the vivisectionist Dr Benjulia, Collins portrays the perversion of feminine "heart" when a...

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