Since ancient times, humans have tried to read spiritual or psychological meanings into a person's appearance. Aristotle linked an individual's personality with the animal that person most resembled. For example, someone resembling a fox was thought to have a fox's craftiness.
Chris Rivers, assistant professor of French, has spent a great deal of time thinking about the body's meaning in French literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The culmination of that thought is his 1994 book Face Value: Physiognomical Thought and the Legible Body in Marivaux, Lavater, Balzac, Gautier, and Zola, in which he looks at the influence of the pseudoscience of physiognomy on classic works of French literature. Rivers says physiognomy, which traces character from facial attributes, was widely accepted. It resulted, for example, in a nineteenth-century French guide that allegedly identified criminal tendencies based on physical appearance.
Rivers chose novels in which the laws of physiognomy are central. The most obvious example is in Balzac's La Vieille Fille, or The Old Maid. In this novel, Mademoiselle Cormon, a forty-year-old woman desperate for a child and for a husband, must choose between an effete aristocrat and a robust bourgeois. No student of body types, she mischooses, not recognizing that the aristocrat's deep voice and large nose are physiognomical signals of potency, while the bourgeois's small nose and high voice are sure signs of male impotence, despite his more "manly" manner.
Rivers, who has taught at Mount Holyoke since 1990, may be one of the few professors here who can claim his work took him to hell and back. In 1993, Rivers descended into the bowels of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris to l'Enfer, or hell, the archive in which banned and forbidden books are catalogued. Of interest to Rivers, whose scholarship has led him to consider sexual issues in literature as well as the influence of physical traits, was an obscure subset of erotica, the libertine convent novel of eighteenth-century France. In these novels--constructed around the breaking of cultural taboos and aimed in part at attacking women-controlled religious orders--the convent becomes the fictional playground of sexual excess.
"Representing lesbianism seemed a very popular thing, and the fact that it was limited to the convent allowed the authors to talk about homosexuality, but kept the discussion within well-defined political boundaries," notes Rivers, whose article on the topic was published in 1995 by the Journal of the History of Sexuality.
By taking a hard look at areas scholars have not closely considered before, Rivers is adding to our understanding of the evolution of sexual identities and the changing meaning of the body over time.
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