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The work of Charlotte Brontë intersects with two fundamental elements in nineteenth-century psychological thought: the practice of moral management and the pseudo-science of phrenology. Both derive from the larger theory of faculty psychology, and both connect the dangers of imaginative daydreaming and reverie with the threat of insanity.1 Recent criticism emphasizes the role of phrenology and/or traditional faculty psychology in Brontë's novels and in her philosophy.2 While the critical alliance of her novels with the tenets of these theories is illuminating, I contend that it is ultimately misleading. These critics tend to sustain the traditional Victorian binaries that put self-control in conflict with imaginative states.3 Brontë's writings depict her inversion of the theories typically espoused by nineteenth-century psychologists, who instigated a materialist reanimation of Descartes's metaphysics in the form of a binary set up between the waking, rational mind and the imaginatively induced derivatives of sleep, such as somnambulism, trance, and waking dreams. Brontë shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and becomes ultimately devastating to the self, depicting instead the moral basis of a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.
The children of the Brontë household, in addition to writing numerous, fantastic stories and poems, were quite familiar with current theoretical discourse.4 As Sally Shuttleworth successfully shows in her book Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996), this discourse was accessible to them through a variety of mediums. Patrick Brontë, Brontë's father, fastidiously implemented Thomas John Graham's Modern Domestic Medicine (1827) into the daily ritual and fabric of the Haworth household. Shuttleworth describes how Graham's work "held the place of secular Bible" for Brontë's father, and
[v]irtually every page of this work has been annotated by the Reverend Brontë, offering a moving testimonial to the rigid regimen which governed the life of the household. Patrick records not only his family's physical ailments and the remedies employed, but also his preoccupation with the threat of nervous disease and insanity. (10-11)
In addition to the family's knowledge of the Graham text and their subscription to Blackwood's Magazine, the family also utilized the library holdings of the Keighly Mechanics' Institute, which was "primarily devoted to the natural sciences and philosophy" (Shuttleworth 26).5 Phrenology manuals and...