The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America, and: Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American (review)

In quite different ways, Thomas Cooley and Robert Reid-Pharr examine an entrenched preoccupation of nineteenth-century America—the house and household—or the bourgeois domestic sphere and the political and social circumstances that make its sanctity both necessary and impossible. Cooley concerns himself with the recurrent trope of the "house divided" and the pre-Freudian psychological model upon which this trope was based, while Reid-Pharr exposes the compulsory, if complex, relationship between domesticity and a nascent African American subjectivity.

Cooley's text is the longer of the two, by nearly one hundred fifty pages, though his goal is perhaps the simpler: to illustrate how a variety of narratives from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries share what he calls "faculty psychology," and to show how, and why, this heavily racialized and gendered view of mental function began to lose its hold in American culture after 1850. In the process, Cooley pays particular attention to the American romance—from Poe, Hawthorne, and others—arguing that its form is intimately linked to faculty psychology. Because of this link, Cooley suggests, romance as a critical term might be separated from the gothic and given credit for its own "cultural and political complexities" often overlooked by earlier critics.

Cooley envisions his study as a partial response to Toni Morrison's appeal, at the conclusion of Playing in the Dark, for more sustained scholarly investigation of what she calls the "Africanist presence" in American literature. According to Cooley, faculty psychology's understanding of the mind as a compartmentalized group of separately functioning powers was deeply dependent upon racial and sexual hierarchies for coherence. Mental faculties assumed to be of a higher nature, for example, were associated with whiteness and maleness, while presumably more primitive mental powers were Africanized and feminized. Indeed, Cooley suggests, one major reason the Victorian United States was so fraught with racialism and "sexualism" was because these concepts had been built in, as it were, to the national psyche.

Cooley's book is divided into ten full-length chapters and includes a substantial preface, introduction, and epilogue, which alone might give some sense of the scope of his analysis. His introduction and first two chapters trace the historical contours of faculty psychology, while chapters 3 and 4 examine its racial associations through close readings of texts as varied as Thomas R. Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner, Hegel's Philosophy of History, and Melville's Moby-Dick. In chapter 5, Cooley turns to gender, offering convincing analyses of Emerson, Thoreau, and the assumed maleness of a transcendentalist "pure" intellect. Cooley also devotes one chapter each to Harriet Beecher Stowe, particularly her Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Frederick Douglass. By the final third of the book, however, when he turns his attention to the disintegration of faculty psychology in the face of Darwinism, the meticulous detail of his argument becomes somewhat wearisome, if no less persuasive. Cooley insists upon attending as much to the "individual whole" of each closely read text as to the "collection of parts" that is his overall analysis, eclipsing some of the book's larger claims and insights by the weight of individual readings.

Reid-Pharr, by contrast, takes pains not to "belabor" his points, resulting in a much more succinct, and ultimately more satisfying, piece of scholarship. Beginning his brief introduction with the (in some quarters) heretical suggestion that Phillis Wheatley's African origins "should not be enough to secure her status as the originator of the Black American literary tradition" (4), Reid-Pharr goes on to argue that the reason Wheatley cannot securely...