Equal Natures by Shalyn Claggett

Equal Natures by Shalyn Claggett

Explores how Victorian women writers used the popular science of phrenology to challenge socially constructed forms of power.

Winner of the 2024 Best Book Award presented by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association

In Equal Natures, Shalyn Claggett argues that Victorian women writers used scientific understandings of the brain to challenge socially constructed forms of power and gender inequality. Focusing on phrenology-the first science of brain localization and the most popular science in nineteenth-century Britain-Claggett shows how these writers leveraged phrenology's premise that the seat of identity is innate rather than acquired to make new claims about women's intellectual abilities and psychological complexity. Whereas male scientists often used phrenology to support racist and colonialist agendas, in the hands of women, an appeal to biology became a tool of subversion. Through historically contextualized analyses of works by Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Harriet Martineau, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot, Equal Natures demonstrates how biology was used to contest conventional understandings of individual identity and interpersonal relations. In doing so, it counters a dominant assumption in feminist theory that essentialism has been the exclusive province of patriarchal values and reactionary political aims.

"Equal Natures blew me away with its intelligence and its genuinely audacious premiseThis is some of the most original thinking I have seen in a long, long time. The caliber of Claggett's scholarship should make this book necessary reading not only for Victorian studies scholars but also for women's and gender studies scholars and historians of medicine." — Carolyn Betensky, author of Feeling for the Poor: Bourgeois Compassion, Social Action, and the Victorian Novel

Shalyn Claggett is Associate Professor of English at Mississippi State University. She is the coeditor (with Lara Karpenko) of Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.