About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (review)

The study of human appearance is as old as the oldest written culture. Babylonian physiognomies tell us that. But that such physiognomies, now translated into the vocabulary of twenty-first-century evidence-based medicine, still claim to provide a means of reading the interiority of the body from examining its external presentation (either fixed or fleeting) seems bizarre. Yet the undoubted success of such approaches to capture our twenty-first-century imagination is unquestioned. Paul Ekman's claim to be able to read our moral choices in our facial expressions has become the stuff of popular culture, seen evenings on television. Sharrona Pearl, now at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, presents a history of why, at least in the British context, the continuities of physiognomy remain so powerful. Based on her 2005 Harvard dissertation, here revised and expanded, this study documents the integration of the ancient art of the reading of faces into "modern" science in the age of Darwin.

Pearl's work builds elegantly on the extensive and expansive literature of the history of physiognomy and phrenology in Great Britain and moves beyond many of these earlier studies by basing much of her presentation in the more complex questions of visualization, social context, and the scientific claims of nineteenth-century physiognomy. Indebted to Chris Otter's The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision, 1800-1910 (2008), Pearl looks at the Victorian claim for being able to read and represent the readable human being in medical science, the theater, art, and photography in the nineteenth century.

In this way Pearl's work is quite parallel to the theory outlined in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's book Staring: How We Look (2009), which looks at how the disabled control their environment by using the notion of staring in a productive manner. Like Garland-Thomson, Pearl is fascinated with the varieties by which society represents seeing. Her chapter on Hugh W. Diamond and the origins of psychiatric photography is certainly the most sophisticated integration of this major figure into British physiognomic thought yet written. Diamond's views seem to summarize Pearl's own approach as she ends the book with a critique of Paul Ekman's contemporary physiognomy by evoking Diamond. Pearl's claim is that the science of physiognomy as espoused by Diamond demanded not only the examination of the fixed and mobile features but also most centrally the social context of the individual as read through the iconography of the time. For Pearl any reading of the interiority of the individual is a response to that social context. This is the key to Diamond's claim that seeing a photograph of one as disheveled or "mad" has a curative function.

Pearl extrapolates this into a broader claim about late-nineteenth-century psychology, including that of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, that seems to stress the absolute link between the internal and external state. Freud, of course, having been trained (at least in part) by one of the greatest photographic physiognomists of the day, the Parisian neurologist J. M. Charcot, radically rejects the claims of "looking" at the analysand, placing the analyst's chair so that neither could see one another. Yet the link between external manifestations (symptoms) and interior forces (drives) as well as the "reality principle" that forms the superego remain central to the claims of psychoanalysis.

In this study Pearl focuses solely on Great Britain and the rise of physiognomy in the first age of biology, the latter half of the nineteenth century. In doing so she misses much of the continental connection and the American particularism of this development, at least until she gets to Ekman and the rise of physiognomic theory in the twentieth century. This leaves much for further scholars to explore. At least one, Giada Carraro, in her 2009 Bolognese dissertation "Attraverso l'obiettivo: Il potere terapeutico della fotografia tra arte e psicologia," moves from Diamond to...