You will notice, however, that some ambiguities are never resolved (“I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of ambiguities, this marvellous atmosphere of untruth,” Cheever says in his journals)—ambiguities in the matter of sexuality, ambiguities elsewhere. Always another rock with its subterranean communities to overturn and consider. Always the lie that tells a deeper truth. Always a cache so secreted away as to be invisible. The writer under forty who thinks he knows himself is arrogant indeed. It’s in this climate of individuation that we find the opportunity for the psychic density of indirection, in which our foibles, seeded in the mulch of youth, begin to express themselves in correlatives, as we are driven to get them down, until we have said what we’re here to say and are left instead with quiet and the stir of time past: “Now I’m undressing to go to bed, and my fatigue is so overwhelming that I am undressing with the haste of a lover.”
Phrenological Whitman
Nathaniel Mackey
REGARDED AS A PSEUDOSCIENCE nowadays and subject to parody and caricature, phrenology was “the science of mind” in the United States during the nineteenth century. It was taken seriously by a great number of people and Walt Whitman was one of those people; Fowler & Wells was a phrenological business whose Phrenological Cabinet he visited frequently in New York. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman includes the phrenologist among those he describes as “the lawgivers of poets”: “The sailor and traveler … the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” He reiterates this in “Song of the Answerer”: “The builder, geometer, chemist, anatomist, phrenologist, artist, all these underlie the maker of poems.” In “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” he asks:
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America?
Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men?
Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
Earlier in the poem, he praises mechanics and farmers, particularly “the freshness and candor of their physiognomy, the copiousness and decision of their phrenology.” Phrenological terms, terms such as “Amativeness,” “Adhesiveness” and “Combativeness” that were used to describe the phrenological faculties, are scattered throughout this and other poems.
Phrenology portrayed the brain as divided into different faculties that controlled the various aspects of personality. “Adhesiveness” was its name for the propensity for friendship and camaraderie, “Amativeness” its name for romantic, sexual love, “Philoprogenitiveness” its name for the love of offspring, and so on. There was disagreement among the different versions of phrenology as to how many faculties there were, the number ranging from thirty-five to ninety-six, but phrenological nomenclature pertaining to the faculties contributed significantly to the vocabulary of Whitman’s poems. In “Mediums,” regarding future Americans, truly fulfilled Americans, he proclaims: “They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive, / They shall be complete women and men.” “Adhesiveness” became Whitman’s favorite phrenological term. In “Song of the Open Road,” he writes: “Here is adhesiveness.” And in “So Long!”: “I announce adhesiveness, I say it shall be limitless unloosen’d.” “A Song of Joys” doesn’t explicitly name the phrenological faculties, but the joys that it catalogs are each related to a specific phrenological “organ” and, taken together, constitute a model of phrenological well-being. The poem was inspired by one of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological manuals, The New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology.
The documentation of Whitman’s interest in phrenology dates back to 1846. An article on phrenology that he clipped from an issue of American Review that year has been found among his papers. In November of that year, while he was editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, he wrote a review of several phrenological manuals, a review in which he announced: “Breasting the waves of detraction, as a ship dashes sea-waves, Phrenology, it must now be confessed by all men who have open eyes, has at last gained a position, and a firm one, among the sciences.” Four months later, in March 1847, he wrote an article called “Something about Physiology and Phrenology” in which he praised the leading proselytizers of phrenology in the United States, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler and Samuel Wells: “Among the most persevering workers in phrenology in this country, must certainly be reckoned the two Fowlers and Mr. Wells.” Whitman was not alone in his interest in phrenology. It was an interest he shared with most if not all of the writers and thinkers of his day, including Edgar Allan Poe, Horace Mann and Ralph Waldo Emerson, as phrenology played an important role in various movements for self-improvement and social reform. Its basic precept was appealingly simple: the faculties within the brain display their degree of development by protrusions on the cranium, bumps on the head. Hence the other name it was known by, “Bumpology.” Phrenologists would read, as they put it, the bumps on a client’s head, particular bumps corresponding to particular faculties. The head was thought to offer a map of the client’s mind and personality. Whitman had his bumps read by Lorenzo Fowler in July 1849.
Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, who were to become publishers of the second edition of Leaves of Grass in August 1856, transformed phrenology into a business enterprise during the 1830s. Orson Fowler became interested in phrenology early in the decade while he was a student at Amherst. In Vermont in 1834 he gave his first lecture on phrenology and during the next few years, with his brother Lorenzo, he made a number of lecture tours around the country. In 1838 he set up an office in Philadelphia called the Phrenological Museum (also called the Phrenological Cabinet and the Phrenological Depot) and began to publish the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, which would eventually publish some of Whitman’s own reviews of Leaves of Grass. This was a year after his brother had set up the New York Phrenological Rooms on Broadway in Manhattan. In 1842 the two of them joined forces when Orson moved from Philadelphia to New York; there they established, with their brother-in-law Samuel Wells, who was married to their sister Charlotte, the Phrenological Cabinet that Whitman grew fond of visiting. Speaking of his return from New Orleans in 1848, Whitman wrote in one of his reminiscences: “One of the choice places of New York to me then was the ‘Phrenological Cabinet’ of Fowler & Wells, Nassau Street near Beekman.” It was there that he had his bumps read by Lorenzo Fowler and he kept the chart all his life. It was published five times: in the Brooklyn Daily Times in September 1855, in the first, second and third editions of Leaves of Grass, and posthumously by his literary executors, to whom Whitman had given it during the last year of his life, in a book called Regarding Walt Whitman.
Whitman published and republished his chart to credential himself; it was, according to phrenological opinion on the subject, a poet’s chart. Wells and the Fowlers were interested, as were others, in the poetic personality and the making of the poet, and in the American Phrenological Journal they featured articles on the phrenological characteristics of poets. These articles stressed the balanced, well-rounded character of the poet, the equitable development of the poet’s faculties and the manifestation of this equitability on the poet’s head. The expression “well-rounded” had to do with the phrenological belief that the best head is a round head, a head whose bumps are equally developed and distributed. Whitman’s chart describes his head as “large and rounded in every direction” and he offered it as evidence of his poetic qualifications. He makes his own case for the poet’s well-roundedness in the 1855 preface when he writes: “The poet is the equable man.” This, by then, was a phrenological commonplace. An article published in The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science in 1846, for example, argued:
Good Taste consists in the appropriate manifestation of each and all of the faculties in their proper season and degree; and this can only take place from persons in
whom they are so balanced that there is no tendency for any one of them unduly to assume the mastery. When such a mind is prompted by some high theme to its fullest action, each organ contributes to the emotion of the moment and words are uttered in such condensed meaning, that a single sentence will touch every fibre of the heart, or, what is the same thing, arouse every faculty of the hearer. The power is known as Inspiration, and the medium in which it is conveyed is called Poetry.
The power of poetry resides in an equitable development of the faculties; the mind should be a democratic ensemble in which no single faculty dominates. This idea is central to Whitman’s sense of himself as poet and to his sense of the American poet’s democratic vocation.
Phrenology’s attention to cranial manifestation of mind, its postulation of a tangible, tactile availability of mental attributes, epitomized a physiological accent which had obvious impact on Whitman’s work. In one of the Fowler & Wells publications we find the following: “Poets require the highest order of both temperament and development. Poetry depends more on the physiology than the phrenology. It consists in a spiritual ecstasy which can be better felt than described. Not one in many thousands of those who write verses has the first inspiration of true poetry.” Whitman’s long song of bodily exuberance and appetitive touch tends at times, in ways that this formulation would have ratified, toward a hypersensitivity of a convulsive sort, bordering on ecstatic susceptibility: “You villain touch! what are you doing? … my breath is tight in its throat; / Unclench your floodgates! you are too much for me.” Likewise, his emphasis on bodily health and development was in keeping with the practical phrenology of such as Wells and the Fowlers, who were in the forefront of influential movements for social and individual reform. They not only advocated change in such areas as education and criminology but were proponents of vegetarianism, water cures and the like. They conducted a campaign against tight clothing and rigid posture whose influence can be seen in the famous photograph of Whitman published in the early editions of Leaves of Grass. This too was a self-credentialing move; his relaxed pose and his unbuttoned shirt show him to be phrenologically correct.
Walt Whitman. 1867. The Granger Collection, New York.
A significantly commercial undertaking, practical phrenology marketed the idea that a person could change his or her character; bumps, like muscles, could be made bigger or smaller through more or less exercise. A belief in the changeability or, even, perfectability of personality was crucial to phrenology’s program of self-improvement and social reform, a program whose commercial as well as ideological aspects we find Whitman very much in the thick of. Fowler & Wells sold and distributed the first edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman published himself, and then published the second edition the following year. Whitman had had an earlier connection with them; he worked as a bookseller in 1850 and 1851, and very prominent on his shelves were books published by Fowler & Wells. He reviewed Leaves of Grass anonymously, as previously mentioned, in their American Phrenological Journal, and for several months in 1855 and 1856 he wrote a series of articles called “New York Dissected” for another publication of theirs, Life Illustrated. His call, in Leaves of Grass, for a reformation of poetry and for poetry as a means of reformation partook of and took its place within a reformist atmosphere in which phrenology played a central part.
Before it could sponsor reform in the United States phrenology itself had to undergo a reform of sorts, revision, in its migration from its place of origin, Europe. Under the name cranioscopy, phrenology was developed by the German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who began experimenting with it in the late 1700s and lecturing in the early 1800s; his book On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts was published in French in 1825 and in English in 1835. He advanced four basic principles: 1) the moral and intellectual dispositions are innate; 2) their manifestation depends on organization; 3) the brain is exclusively the organ of mind; 4) the brain is composed of as many particular and independent organs as there are fundamental powers of the mind. Gall raised, as a kind of corollary, a question: “How far [does] the inspection of the form of the head, or cranium, present a means of ascertaining the existence or absence, and the degree of development, of certain cerebral parts; and consequently the presence or absence, the weakness or energy of certain functions?” This question occupied a peripheral position in Gall’s original formulations but it was seized upon by later phrenologists and vigorously promoted in a series of revisions that popularized phrenology and brought it to the United States. No longer a question but a central tenet, an assertion, it became known as the doctrine of the skull.
It was Gall’s assistant, Johann Caspar Spurzheim, who began to popularize cranioscopy, changing its name to phrenology and coining the phrase “phrenology, the science of mind.” He formulated four basic tenets as well, though they’re significantly different from Gall’s, especially in their incorporation of the doctrine of the skull as a central principle: 1) the brain is the organ of the mind; 2) the mind is a plurality of faculties, each springing from a distinct brain organ; 3) in the same person, larger organs show more energy, smaller organs show less; 4) the size and form of the skull are determined by the brain. The doctrine of the skull, thanks to Spurzheim, became canonical wisdom for phrenologists and their followers. John Davies, in Phrenology: Fad and Science, characterizes the difference in outlook between Gall and Spurzheim, a difference which makes it clear why Spurzheim’s revision of Gall lent itself to the democratic ethic phrenology became bound up with in the United States:
Gall accepted the existence of evil in the world, and particularly of evil propensities in mankind, even labeling one region of the brain “Murder.” The great majority of men, he thought, were composed of mediocrities, and he emphasized the creative role of genius and its destined function to command; his science would be the instrument by which the elite could govern effectively and rationally the mass of mankind. In keeping with the aristocratic clientele with which he had been associated, his was neither a democratic nor a liberal creed.
Spurzheim, on the other hand, deliberately omitted from his categories all faculties which were inherently evil; on the contrary, all were intrinsically good and only from the abuse of them could evil result. Mankind was created potentially good, and in contrast to Gall’s cynical pessimism, Spurzheim looked forward to the perfection of the race by the aid of phrenology.
Spurzheim brought a sense of mission to phrenology. He learned English in six months in order to make a lecture tour of Great Britain in 1814. He published a book on his and Gall’s findings, The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, Founded on an Anatomical and Physiological Examination of the Nervous System in General, and of the Brain in Particular, which was harshly critiqued by the Edinburgh Review, occasioning a trip to Edinburgh to answer his critics. It was in Edinburgh, where he stayed for seven months, that one of the later proselytizers of phrenology heard him speak. Spurzheim eventually visited the United States, embarking on a lengthy lecture tour in August 1832, in the course of which, three months later, he died. He was given an elaborate funeral at Harvard and was buried in Boston, his death contributing considerably to the popularization of phrenology in the U.S.
George Combe was a Scotsman who heard Spurzheim speak in Edinburgh and became a vigorous crusader for phrenology. (In his novel The War of the End of the World, Mario Vargas Llosa merges Combe with Gall; one of the characters, a Scottish phrenologist named Gall, goes to South America and inspires peasant revolts.) Combe was looking for a way out of Calvinism and later said that “phrenology conferred on me the first internal peace of mind that I experienced.” He and his brother formed a phrenological society and began publishing the Phrenological Journal in 1823. In 1828 he published a book that became very influential, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects, a book that Emerson called “the best sermon I’ve read for some time.” Combe toured and lectured in the United States from 1838 to 1840, further incre
asing phrenology’s popularity. Thomas and Grace Leahey comment in Psychology’s Occult Doubles: “To Gall’s physiology Spurzheim wedded philosophy and Combe wedded reform. It only remained for Americans to wed this ménage à trois to business.” Practical phrenologists like Wells and the Fowlers took up and marketed Spurzheim and Combe’s idea that phrenology was the key to reform and self-improvement. It was a somewhat self-reflexive idea; phrenology itself had been the object of reform, “improved” by Spurzheim’s revision of Gall.
Phrenology in the United States, in Whitman’s text as well as outside it, became entwined with nationalist feelings and millenarian hopes. The Fowlers wrote in their American Phrenological Journal in 1849: “Our present desire is this—to PHRENOLOGIZE OUR NATION, for thereby it will REFORM THE WORLD. No evil exists in society but it sternly yet calmly rebukes, and points out a more excellent way. No reform, no proposed good, but it strenuously enforces. It is the very ‘Head and Front’ of that new and happy order of things now so rapidly superseding the old misery-inflicting institutions of society.” Their optimism rested on an analogy between mental development and muscular development that they resorted to again and again. Like muscles, bumps put the degree of development of particular faculties on display; they also, again like muscles, make it possible to increase development through exercise. Phrenology thereby offered a way both to know oneself and to change oneself. “The organs,” Orson Fowler wrote, “can be enlarged or diminished … even in adults. The exercise of particular mental faculties, causes the exercise, and consequent enlargement, of corresponding portions of the brain. Man is not compelled to carry all his faults, excesses, and defects to the grave.”
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