Late-nineteenth-century physiognomy and the visualization of deviance and the visualization of deviance

In Wilde’s, Stoker’s and Stevenson’s time, photographies quickly came to be used for detecting and charting deviants. The pursuit of the crimi-nal Hyde is so difficult because “he had never been photographed.” (24) While the vampire hunters differ as widely in their description of Drac-ula as those that have encountered Hyde, they are quick to find a label for him: “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of an imper-fectly formed mind.”⁵³⁷ This assessment of Dracula is not made by the scientist Van Helsing, but by Mina Harker, the amateur. This indicates the degree to which, by the late 1890s, atavism and criminal anthropolo-gism have come to pervade the popular discourse on degeneration.

Scientists like Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso fuelled the fear of an evolution working backwards with theories of degeneration, connecting criminal behaviour and biological traits. Their works were part of a wider discourse on degeneration that presented a large range of biological and social explanations for what they had identified as regression in civili-zation, linking sexual, racial, psychological and even aesthetic deviance and identifying them as a sign of cultural decline.⁵³⁸ In line with this, Van Helsing claims that Dracula possesses only “a child-brain” and thus  

teenth-century camera obscura the inaugural optical instrument triggering a long evolution towards the cinematograph. While optical instruments like the phenakisti-scope, the zootrope, the diorama or the stereoscope would all account for the nine-teenth-century obsession with visual perception, they cannot be considered imme-diate precursors of cinema: “there is a tendency to conflate all optical devices in the nineteenth century as equally implicated in a vague collective drive to higher and higher standards of verisimilitude. Such an approach often ignores the conceptual and historical singularities of each device.” (Crary 1992: 26, 110)

537 D 296; cf. for example Halberstam 1995: 89 and Kelly Hurley, “Science and the Gothic,” The Victorian Gothic, eds. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Edinburgh:

EUP, 2012) 170-85: 172.

538 Cf. Scholz 2003: 5. Tennyson, one of the most widely read poets of his time, amalga-mated that fear into one line of poetry: “Reel back into the beast, and be no more?”

(Cf. Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Idylls of the King (1859-85): “The Last Tournament,”

Tennyson: A Selected Edition, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Routledge, 2014) 920-41: 924, l. 125) For a discussion of Hyde, Dracula and Dorian as urban Gothic mons-ters see ch. 3.3.

will not stand any chance against “our man-brains”. Dracula is a speci-men of “the true criminal who seems predestinate to crime.” (294) Applying Lombrosian reasoning, Van Helsing considers criminal be-haviour as neither being socially conditioned nor the result of self-deter-mination or free choice but the effect of biological predestination. Simi-larly, Jonathan’s initial description of Dracula’s “very marked physio-gnomy” could be taken right out of one of Lombroso’s text books:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. [...] For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. (23f)

Neither Jonathan nor Mina is a scientist like Van Helsing or Dr. Seward.

The fact that they present these assessments of Dracula proves to what high degree the pseudo-sciences of the day have influenced people’s per-ception. The well-read but primitive, age-old but child-like aristocrat has been identified both as a ‘child of his time’ as well as a paradigmatically Gothic figure, representing “the presence of the past in the present.”⁵³⁹

Similarly, the Victorian gentleman Jekyll’s split-off Hyde, who is not only “particularly wicked-looking” but “particularly small” (22), has been discussed as the paradigmatic representation of racial degenera-tion.⁵⁴⁰ Dorian Gray, Jekyll & Hyde and Dracula negotiate the belief that these sciences have in common: that internal character can be read from external signs of the body.⁵⁴¹ The notion that a character can be read from someone’s outward appearance became a major part of the medical  

539 Victoria Margree and Bryony Randall, “Fin-de-Siècle Gothic,” Smith and Hughes 2012: 217-33: 220; cf. Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Map-ping History’s Nightmares (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

540 Cf. for example Halberstam 1995: 77: “Hyde’s deformity depends at least partly upon racist conceptions of the degeneration of the species.”

541 Physiognomical reading determines characters’ reasoning in many now-canonical novels of the time, for example in Jane Eyre (1847): reading the facial features and ex-pressions of both Mr. Rochester and St. John is crucial for Jane’s formation of opin-ion and when she discovers the mad Bertha Mason, she finds her with “a smile both acrid and desolate.” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), ed. Richard J. Dunn, 3rd ed.

(New York and London: Norton, 2001) 250)

discourse already in the late-eighteenth century when the Swiss theo-logian Johann Kaspar Lavater published his studies Von der Physiogno-mik and Physiognomische Fragmente (1772, 1775-8).⁵⁴² With his proposi-tion that external features of the body correspond to internal ones – ulti-mately a character’s nature – Lavater took up a tradition that can be traced back as far as Aristotle’s claim that body and soul are mutually interdependent. Lavater’s works influenced many theories of the time, producing a new discourse on reading the body. Lavater ultimately displays what Foucault has called the essentialist Will to Knowledge: the firm belief that everything which appears is informed by a profound truth that can be found out as soon as one has learned how to read the signs and ascribe meaning to them. Indeed, the body is inhabited by a soul for which it serves as a signifier. Lavater’s physiognomy thus rep-resents the Victorian idea of the body as a site for the soul that Foucault has diagnosed.

In Dorian Gray, Lord Henry’s rhetorics are deeply influenced by physiognomic reasoning, too. The first maxim he utters in the novel is upon first seeing the extraordinarily good-looking young man in Basil’s painting: he speculates upon the model being not much of a thinker because intellect “destroys the harmony of any face [...]. Look at the suc-cessful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!” (9) Lavaterian physiognomy considers a ‘roman’ nose and a well-developed forehead as signs of high learning.⁵⁴³ Like Dracula, Wilde’s novel is crammed with physiognomers: When Jim Vane tries to talk Sibyl into leaving Dorian, she claims: “If you only saw him, you would think him the most wonderful person in the world.” Similarly, Basil is sure that “[s]in is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face. It cannot be concealed.” (117)

542 “Physiognomik ist die Wissenschaft, den Charakter (nicht die zufälligen Schicksale) des Menschen im weitläufigsten Verstande an seinem Aeußerlichen zu erkennen.”

(Johann Caspar Lavater, Von der Physiognomik (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1772) 7)

543 Cf. Robert Mighall, “Introduction,” Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Rob-ert Mighall (London: Penguin, 2000) ix-xxxiv: xxi; physiognomy is methodically close to another pseudo-science, phrenology: developed by the Viennese scientist Franz Joseph Gall in the late eighteenth century, this theory charts the propensities of a person’s character through studying the shape of the head.

Echoing Lord Henry’s definition of ideal beauty devoid of any intellectual depth,⁵⁴⁴ the film director Josef von Sternberg notes on his model of a film actor in 1955: “The actor is the opposite of a scarecrow – it is his function to attract. The easiest way to attract is to be beautiful.

[…] it is, perhaps, superfluous for a handsome person to think deeply.

Fortunately, the ability of an actor to think is not subjected to the same strain as his appearance.”⁵⁴⁵ Von Sternberg here displays a view on film acting recurring throughout the first decades of film. Especially the early writings that juxtapose silent film and theatre acting are deeply physio-gnomical.

Dwelling in deviant bodies, Dracula, Hyde (and in some respect Dorian, too) seem to be solitaires unable to enter into interaction with others and society, much like Frankenstein’s creature. On the following pages, I am going to discuss this state as paradigmatically filmic, com-paring the three figures to film actors. As shown above, earlier physio-gnomically infused discourses of the body have relied on and con-tributed to the medium of photography. Since the Renaissance, the hu-man body has been the most frequently represented object in any art.⁵⁴⁶ At the end of the nineteenth century, a new art form made the represen-tation of the human body possible. Early twentieth-century arguments around film as an art form needed to take into account the way in which film represents bodies.