Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

With the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 the quest to know what and why and how it was to be human, moved, with dramatic speed, to center stage. As Heschel noted in Who is Man?: “A theory about the stars never becomes a part of the being of the stars … we become what we think of ourselves” (1965: 7). The need to establish, to interrogate, to know, the boundary between self and other, in a time of bewildering social change – needs that were no strangers to nineteenth-century fiction and its explorations of identity – intensified, for places for drawing that boundary had suddenly opened up. Man had, practically overnight, become a fully paid-up member of the animal economy, and lines of distinction had urgently to be drawn between self and newly conceived other.The possibility that the body might offer a fleshly index to the mind gained scientific credibility in the nineteenth century. It first found expression in physiognomy, which, underpinned by mind/body dualism, conceived of the body as material envelope to the ethereal soul. The idea of reading the soul through the face was not new; what was novel was the systematic precision that it received from its founding father Johann Caspar Lavater, whose Essays on Physiognomy: For the Promotion of the Knowledge and Love of Mankind appeared between 1775 and 1777 and was translated into English in 1789 (see Dames 2004 ... log in or subscribe to read full text