The Face of Physiology

In Jane Eyre (1847), there is a rare comic interlude when Rochester, disguised as a gypsy woman, reads the fortunes of his party guests in their faces. In Jane he finds „the eye [...] favourable [...] the mouth [...] propitious [he sees] no enemy to a fortunate issue but in the brow; and that brow professes to say, – “I can live alone”‟. 2 The great importance of facial features and expressions for judgements of character in the nineteenth century has been well-documented. The work of Mary Cowling and others has shown the enduring power of physiognomy and related traditions, phrenology and pathognomy, for the representation and reading of character in literature and the visual arts. 3 Popular treatises and handbooks on the subject appear through the end of the century. 4 Many assumptions about the relationship between external attributes and intellectual and moral capacity persist within the new human sciences, anthropology, ethnology and criminology, with their emphasis on racial, aberrant or degenerate social types. Indeed, such typologies not only endure, but proliferate in the last quarter of the century, underpinned by more precise methods of recording and measuring. Craniometries, nasologies and so forth, gained new legitimacy and purchase through the application of precision instruments. Racial types were marked by facial angles and cranial distances that differed by no more than a millimetre. 5 Photography was enlisted to map and classify facial features across the empire and at home. 6

and window to the soul, the face became a device of self-registration, proving that the play of mind and body was no more than a stage-set concealing a mechanism.  3 classical sculpture as well as on the simplified and abstract schemes of Charles Le Brun and Peter Camper for reducing the face to a few lines, or the outline of a silhouette. 9 Bell is critical of classical aesthetics in which human beauty is based on static form and outward appearance. He urges an understanding of the bodily processes beneath the skin for accurate depiction of human feelings.
Observing a man in fear, for example, (see fig. 2) Bell first remarks that his eyebrows are elevated, his eyes wide open, and his steps hesitating; but then Bell moves under the surface to observe the internal correlates of outward expression: there is a spasm on his breast, he cannot breathe freely, the chest is elevated, the muscles in his neck and shoulders are all in action, his breathing is short and rapid, there is a grasping and a convulsive motion of his lips, a tremor The feeling of fear is approached here as a problem of reflex physiology. How is fear produced within the body? How are the movements in the heart, lungs and limbs, coordinated with those of the face? Bell  covering for them, and it is brutal" (40). Bell"s hierarchy was partly based on an ancient tradition of writings on the soul, which divided affective states into the lower appetites and passions, rooted in bodily needs and worldly cravings, and the higher affections, which partook in some measure of the divine. 10 Bell described the emotions as "conditions of the mind" rather than the body. We can see this revised physiognomy of expression employed to powerful effect in novels. In Jane Eyre, Brontë makes light of Lavaterian revelations of character in the fortuneteller"s physiognomic deductions. Jane is later saved from death by the pastor St.
John Rivers and his sisters, who disregard her beggarly manner, and her "aspect in the last degree ghastly, wild, and weather-beaten", and extend Christian sympathy.  13 In contrast with Bell"s concern to separate man from the animals by means of the emotions, Darwin argued that the prototypes for the highest feelings dwelt in lower creatures. In (1871), he speculated about the origins of religious feelings in savages by comparing them to a dog"s worshipful behaviour towards its human master. 14 Darwin constructed continuities not only between every human feeling and animal emotions, but often also between human rational behaviour and animal reason. Dogs, savages and Victorians (not always in that order) existed on a continuum guaranteed by evolutionary theory. Indeed, animals were in fact better at expressing the noblest emotions than human adults, for as Darwin remarked: "man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs, so plainly as does a dog, when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master" (10). In his 1872 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin extended his argument for the evolutionary origins of human behaviour by identifying emotional expressions as vestiges of physiological modifications that had once given competitive advantage (see fig. 4). Considering the emotion of fear as embodied in a cat, Darwin suggested that the widely-opened eyes enabled it to see as well as possible in all directions, useful to a creature under threat; while the raised hair and exposed teeth made the animal seem more terrifying to its enemy (125-8).

Descent of Man
Darwin"s evolutionary account of expression has usually been presented in sharp opposition to Bell repeatedly to the latter"s detailed physiological descriptions, and inserting some of Bell"s text and drawings into his own book. Incorporating the work of established authorities was a typical practice of Darwin"s. Methodological or theoretical differences were usually glossed over with polite, respectful acknowledgement.
If we put the question of evolution and its implications for religion aside for a enabling him to modify the image somewhat. 18 Darwin did not completely accept the French galvanist"s interpretation of emotion as a form of mechanism, but he used Duchenne"s instrumental technology to raise questions about the role of reflex action and volition in emotional displays. 19 In one striking plate (see fig. 6 nervous impulses that acted directly on the muscular system, unmediated in most cases by the intellect or will. Emotional impulses were closely associated with the sensorimotor activity prevailing among the lower animals, that is, with automatic or  how character was increasingly defined as an inner moral quality, beneath the surface of ranks and titles, outward appearance, manners, and even language. As such, it grew increasingly difficult to read. 28 The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica who was allegedly the first to employ the device later known as the lie detector, in order to "penetrate into the most secret recesses of the mind of the criminal". 33 Lombroso"s device (see fig. 8) was composed of a volumetric glove: a large gutta-percha mitt, placed on the hand, hermetically sealed at the wrist, and then filled with air. It was attached to a registration device which recorded oscillations in blood pressure. After talking to the subject on indifferent topics, Lombroso would suddenly mention the crime, or place a photograph of the victim unexpectedly before his eyes.
Lombroso"s lie detector, also known as the polygraph, originated as an instrument for diagnosing heart disease, and was part of the battery of graphic recording devices that had been developed from the 1840s onward, in close connection with reflex physiology, to measure the inner movements of the body. 34 The instruments had been initially used on animals, such as the famous inquiries into animal electricity that  impersonal and dispassionate (see fig. 9).
According to a brief notice in the British  Some critics of this apparently remorseless and inhuman machine did indeed associate the face of physiology with that of crime, especially in the controversies over vivisection, vaccination and gynaecology. 37 They criticised experiments or procedures that were conducted without regard for inner character or feeling, and denigrated the image of the experimenter as a masterful manipulator of instruments and bodies. The use of graphic instruments in medical diagnostics, increasingly prevalent in the last quarter of the century, was also resisted on the grounds that it undermined the physician"s essential qualifications of good character and sympathy towards the patient. 38 We have seen how Darwin separated inner feeling from outward expression, focusing exclusively on the latter. Whether this was degrading to human nature or to the norms of sympathy that governed moral intercourse depended upon what implications one drew from the physiology of expression. Darwin had emphasised the importance of sympathy as an instinct, strengthened by exercise, education, and habit, in the moral nature of man. The flow of fellow-feeling toward others beyond the family circle, to strangers, the poor and unfortunate, even to animals, was crucial to the evolutionary history and future progress of human society. 39 The moral integrity of physiologists, advanced in the debates surrounding animal experimentation and laboratory-based medicine, rested largely on their claims to control this feeling precisely. Unlike the overly sentimental public who criticised their practices, men of science could manage their own bodily mechanism, check the flow of sympathy when inside the laboratory or at a patient"s bedside, and then re-open their hearts in the company of friends, loved ones, or the family dog. 40 Darwin became an honorary member of the Physiological Society and a figurehead of the movement that sought to defend the practice of experimental physiology from its critics. 41 This was not because of his experimental practice, but because of his public character. Much of the authority of science toward the end of the Victorian period did not rest on mechanical methods and impersonal techniques, but rather on an image of the scientific practitioner as a gentleman and genius. 42