She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Beauty and the Brain: The Science of Human Nature in Early America, and reported the following:
The short answer to What's on page 99? Not much text. Page 99 has an image that takes up about three-fourths of the page, leaving room for just 6 lines of prose. In those lines, I analyze a fabulous magazine article from 1831, in which an author compares the faces of two fictional women. Aunt Mabel is a kind and virtuous paragon of proper womanhood. Her sister, Aunt Silly, is a classically beautiful but vapid exemplar of frivolous femininity. Aunt Mabel was never “perfectly beautiful,” but she always had the physiognomic indications of a good character. Aunt Silly, by contrast, was born with elegant and symmetrical features. Yet her questionable character eventually caught up to her, imprinting itself on her face and remolding her skin into a “musty parchment.” By recounting this tale, the writer tried to make a simple point: people’s faces disclosed their personalities. This meant that women with bad characters would eventually become ugly, even if they had initially been blessed with all the markers of classic beauty. Virtuous women, by contrast, would always have pleasing—if not perfect—physiognomies. The anecdote is intriguing because it conveys two contradictory notions that simultaneously circulated in early American society. On the one hand, there was this idea that character and intelligence mattered more than beauty. On the other hand, there was also this belief that beauty was, in fact, critically important. Why? Because beauty was the visual manifestation of a person’s inner nature.Follow Rachel Walker on Twitter.
Page 99 has only 6 lines of text. If that’s all they saw, browsers would get an incomplete (and perhaps perplexing) picture of my work. In some ways, though, I think this page effectively conveys three of my book’s major points. First, it shows that early Americans legitimately believed they could discern character from people’s faces. Second, it reveals that when people interpreted each other’s minds and bodies, they did so in gendered ways. Finally, this page analyzes a claim that physiognomists and phrenologists made on a regular basis: that vice could disfigure the human body, while a virtuous life could make even the plainest woman appear pretty. By dramatizing that point, page 99 hints at what made physiognomy and phrenology so appealing to Americans. These were optimistic sciences that emphasized the possibility of self-help and personal improvement.
Beyond the text itself, this page also captures the spirit of my book in another way: it’s dedicated to an image. One of the major claims that I make in this project is that science and visual culture worked together to shape how early Americans evaluated each other’s personalities. By showcasing an image, page 99 indirectly illustrates the centrality of visual culture to the intellectual universe that I unearth in this book. My ultimate goal was to recover a mostly forgotten scientific world—a culture where people thought it entirely ordinary to search each other’s bodies for secrets about human nature and psychology. For modern observers, this physiognomic universe might seem unfamiliar at best (and at worst, a bit ludicrous). For early Americans, though, scrutinizing heads and faces was a normal part of life. More than that, it was an act with social and political consequences.
--Marshal Zeringue
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