The Ivory Leg in the Ebony Cabinet

by Cooley, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9781558492844
• ISBN10: 1558492844
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Massachusetts Pr

Summary

From Samuel Morton's collection of Native American skulls to William James's writings on the consciousness of lost limbs, this book examines a startling array of artifacts that reflect nineteenth-century thinking about madness, race, and gender. According to Thomas A. Cooley, what unites these seemingly disconnected cultural fragments is the governing model of "psychology", as it was just then coming to be called, that shaped the American understanding of "mind" before the age of Freud.

Essentially a "faculty" psychology, this model conceived of the human mind as a set of separate roomlike compartments, each with its proper office or capacity. Under this architecture, a healthy mind was characterized by the harmonious interrelation of these faculties; madness, conversely, was believed to occur when the "chambers" of the mind became cut off from one another. In addition, gender and racial qualities were associated with different mental functions: the reasoning intellect took on a "masculine" and "white" valence, while the emotions and appetitive faculties were

Author Biography

Thomas Cooley is professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	xiii
Preface	xv
Introduction Vestiges: Little Shop of Race and Gender	1	(2)
Holmes and the Parkman Murder	3	(2)
And Gentlemen of the Club	5	(2)
Back Brain, Front Brain	7	(5)
Professor Gould Meets the Hottentot Venus	12	(2)
My First Hermaphrodite	14	(2)
A Geography of the Mind	16	(11)
Phrenology and the Roots of Human Motives	17	(4)
Psych 101 in 1825: The Scots Bring Common Sense to America	21	(6)
The House of Madness	27	(17)
The Collocation of the Stones: Sanity as Mental Balance	28	(4)
Foucault's Beast	32	(8)
The Second Test of Madness: Ahab's Ivory Obsession	40	(4)
American Africanism	44	(27)
The Black Messiah of Jerusalem, Va.	47	(4)
The Polygenetic Hypothesis and the Mind of the Savage	51	(4)
Hegel's Africa	55	(5)
Mount Prognathous	60	(5)
Habeas Corpus: Rutherford B. Hayes and the Case of Nancy Farrer	65	(6)
Romancing the Shadow	71	(23)
Colonel Higginson to the Rescue	72	(6)
The Black Imp in White America	78	(4)
The Haunted Mind	82	(3)
The Whale: Male or Female?	85	(6)
The Steeple	91	(3)
Bachelor's Bower: The Fearful Female	94	(21)
Asylum in the Woods	97	(7)
A Refined Disgust	104	(3)
The Pond in the Eye of the Mind	107	(2)
Thoreau's Old Flame	109	(3)
Uncle Tom's Wagon	112	(3)
Mrs. Stowe's Fantasy of the White Black Man	115	(20)
A More Perfect Union	119	(3)
The Black Knight	122	(5)
The White Captive	127	(8)
Frederick Douglass and the Whiteness of Blackness	135	(20)
The Heroic Slave: White Rhetoric, Black Revolution	138	(6)
The Abolitionist from Ohio: Huck Finn Grows Up	144	(4)
Uncle Tom and Aunt Jim	148	(2)
Dementia: The Pit	150	(5)
Out of the Black Depths; Or the Transformation	155	(23)
As the Twig Is Bent	156	(2)
Memory: The Ebony Cabinet	158	(4)
The Hill of Difficulty and the Fall of Man	162	(6)
The Marriage of Head and Heart	168	(5)
Incest, Cannibalism, and Other Improprieties in the New England Home: Fleeing the Coop of Heredity	173	(2)
The Will to Believe	175	(3)
The Prisoner of Omelas	178	(11)
Old Times on the Raft	179	(3)
The River of Consciousness	182	(3)
A Specifical Emotion	185	(4)
Mrs. Packard, Miss Dickinson, and the Purloined Regina	189	(34)
Blackmail	190	(2)
Mrs. Packard's Rebellion	192	(3)
The Unholy Family	195	(2)
A Kiss of Charity	197	(2)
Doctor in a Far Land	199	(3)
My Manly Protector	202	(1)
The Royal Seal	203	(4)
The White Exploit and the Notch Between	207	(3)
Feet of the Bold	210	(2)
Whether It Be Rune	212	(3)
Bain on Pain	215	(4)
The Psychology of Belief	219	(4)
Epilogue Back to Africa	223	(20)
Freeing the Prisoner of Omelas: William James	226	(5)
Return of the Native: From Eliot to Morrison	231	(12)
Abbreviations	243	(4)
Notes	247	(36)
Index	283