MSU faculty member’s book examines Victorian women writers’ use of science to challenge social constructs

STARKVILLE, Miss.— Mississippi State English faculty member Shalyn Claggett’s new work focuses on the subversive ways women writers of the Victorian era used popular scientific rhetoric—associated with the now-debunked theory of phrenology—to challenge socially constructed forms of power and gender inequality. 

The 2023 SUNY Press publication “Equal Natures: Popular Brain Science and Victorian Women’s Writing” was released [May 1].

“Victorian women writers leveraged phrenology’s premise—the study of cranial shape to indicate mental abilities—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,” said Claggett.  

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.

Claggett said, “Similar to phrenology, developments in noninvasive imaging technology like PET and fMRI scans promise direct access to our innate psychology. We might do well to revisit nineteenth-century considerations of the social implications of a truly legible mind, because in the very near future, it may be within our grasp.”

Claggett has published numerous journal articles throughout her career and is the co-editor, with Lara Karpenko of Carroll University, of “Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age.” She serves as the Department of English’s director of graduate studies and teaches classes on nineteenth-century British literature, literary theory, and science and literature. 

She earned her bachelor’s degree at Truman State University and her master’s and doctoral degree at Vanderbilt University. 

Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English is online at www.english.msstate.edu.

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