| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Cooley. The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet: Madness, Race, and Gender in Victorian America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2001. pp. xxvi, 302. $34.95.

In modern science, there are those who think it possible to formulate a theory of everything, one that would explain the universe. Thomas Cooley believes he has discovered such a theory, one pervading late eighteenth and nineteenth-century American society. It is faculty psychology, a sexist, racist concept of the mind that pervaded literature, the arts, and even politics and general culture. Faculty psychology "conceived of the human mind as neatly compartmentalized into separate roomlike seats or powers," each working "with the others according to predetermined patterns of association in the healthy, balanced mind" (p. xvi). Cooley has discovered, he says, "just how far reaching and coherent, not to mention unfounded and wrong-headed, an argument these metaphors actually make, a unity out of multiplicity ... [that] amounts to a national psychology" (pp. xv-xvi). These metaphorical associations "gave the cognitive faculties of the reasoning intellect a 'masculine' and 'white' valence, whereas the feelings and emotions of the appetitive faculties took on a 'feminine' or 'black' valence" (p. xvi). Faculty psychology thus was a social construct that determined how the American elite understood sanity, madness, race, gender, the famous Parkman murder at Harvard, and Captain Ahab's and Henry James, Sr.'s missing legs (upsets of the balance). The most influential expression of faculty psychology was embodied in a popular form of phrenology, which hypothesized geographical division of the brain into various faculties whose power was determinable by the shape of the skull. . . .

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