'Sex in mind': The gendered brain in nineteenth-century literature and mental sciences (Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Thomas Hardy)

Victorian authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy created fictions in dynamic conversation with the prevailing ideas of mental science. They did not merely inject scientific ideas into their texts; they merged the findings of phrenology, neurology, psychology, and other sciences into their own vision of how the brain functions. In analyzing these authors' distinct views and the nineteenth-century scientific community's understanding of mental processes, it is evident that the primary common denominator is the notion that mental functions are inherently, biologically gendered. Brontë's focus on the potential threats to the female brain space and the thoughts contained therein highlights her specific concern about women's need to retain mental boundaries. The ideal of psychological romance comes with its dangers, she maintains, that are the result of the female brain's naturally permeable quality, and its tendency towards empathetic consciousness. As part of an attempt to scientize the psychology of his characters, Collins looks to Victorian-era medical knowledge to explain the physiological causes and treatments of brain ailments. Showing a fascination with the pathological mind, he creates narratives that explore mental maladies across the spectrum from minor irritation to fatal insanity. Collins' work points to an increasing nineteenth-century fixation on aberrant brain function and the desire of both scientists and the culture at-large to create diagnostic categories that systematically incorporate gender. Hardy explores the potential casualties of relationships that attempt to share mental spaces through tragic depictions of the clashing of gendered minds. With support from both evolutionary theories and physiological psychology, Hardy's novels show the dangers of excessive male reason and the risks of overwhelming female emotion. Each of these novelists, like many of their contemporaries, creates a biological basis for their characters' behaviors through a confirmation of the gender-determined function of the brain that was also present in scientific findings. For Victorian authors, realism involved more than a revealing account of the inner psyche. It also meant demonstrating the material connection between mind and body, and accurately portraying the effects of gendered physiology.