| This dissertation examines how some mid-to-late Victorian novels intervene in the
contemporary scientific discourse of their day. Faculty psychology, the prevailing model of the
mind, divided the brain into regions that governed different types of mental tasks, reflective of
the Victorian impulse to categorize, define, and delimit. Fabricated boundaries worked to
separate types of thinking and to disconnect the mind from the body. Once separated, types of
thought and behavior were hierarchized and assigned moral value, lending scientific support to
ideologically constructed systems of power. Those who exhibited morally upright modes of
cognition could be found at the center of power, while those who did not might be able to
develop better thinking habits through programs of moral management. Sometimes, literary
representations of cognition resist these prescriptive efforts, leading to expressions that overlap
divisions between heart and mind, between mind and body, between human and machine, and
between criminal and victim. In transgressing these boundaries, Victorian fiction interrogates
the connections within and among human beings, revealing the symmetry of human cognition.
Main topic: Nineteenth-century British novels, nineteenth-century psychology
Authors/scholars related to the subject: Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Charlotte
Brontë, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Wilkie Collins, Sally Shuttleworth, Alison Winter, Anna
Neill, Patrick Brantlinger
Theories applied: modern system one and two cognitive decision-making theory, historic
phrenology, mesmerism, and spiritualist pre-psychology, feminism, race, and class studies.
Keywords: faculty psychology, British fiction, nineteenth century, enclosure, opium, mesmerism |