Lombroso and Ferrero complained that the Italian authorities refused to let criminologists study actual convicts. But thanks to one Madame Tarnowsky, the authors had available to them a collection of photographs of Russian and French female criminals. They thought nothing of making an assessment merely on the basis of looking at them. “Louise C.,” whose “habits were vagabond and unruly,” “threw her dolls in the gutter, lifted up her skirts in the street.” Although she was only nine years old, Lombroso and Ferrero concluded that “she offers the exact type of the born criminal.” “Her physiognomy is Mongolian, her jaws and cheek-bones are immense; the frontal sinuses strong, the nose flat, with a prognathous under-jaw, asymmetry of face, and above all, precocity and virility of expression. She looks like a grown woman—nay, a man.”92 “Contrarily to criminals,” Lombroso and Ferrero wrote, “these women are relatively, if not generally, beautiful.” “Some of the photographs are quite pretty,” they conceded: “This absence of ill-favourdness and want of typical criminal characteristics will militate with many against our contention that prostitutes are after all equivalents of criminals, and possess the same qualities in an exaggerated form. But in addition to the fact that true female criminals are much less ugly than their male companions, we have in prostitutes women of great youth, in whom the beauté du diable, with its freshness, plumpness, and absence of wrinkles, disguises and conceals the betraying anomalies.”93
The lack of visible stigmata was, by no means, thought to be evidence of a lack of criminality. On the contrary, an absence of pathology was itself considered a cause for suspicion: “It is incontestable that female offenders seem almost normal when compared to the male criminal, with his wealth of anomalous features.”94 This puzzled Lombroso. It was an undoubted fact, he wrote, “that atavistically [the female] is nearer to her origin than the male, and ought consequently to abound more in anomalies.” And yet “an extensive study of criminal women has shown us that all the degenerative signs … are lessened in them; they “seem to escape … from the atavistic laws of degeneration.”95 Lombroso and Ferrero suggested that prostitutes were obliged to hide their abnormalities with cosmetics and wigs. Furthermore, even if external anomalies were rare in prostitutes, internal ones, “such as overlapping teeth, a divided palate, &c.,” were not.96 Such disguises could not be maintained forever, however: “And when youth vanishes, the jaws, the cheek-bones, hidden by adipose tissue, emerge, salient angles stand out, and the face grows virile, uglier than a man’s; wrinkles deepen into the likeness of scars, and the countenance, once attractive, exhibits the full degenerate type which early grace had concealed.”97 For positivist criminology, woman was a suspect category.
Lombroso and Ferrero proposed a number of theses in an attempt to explain “the rarity of the type” in women: sexual selection; the absence of stigmata “throughout the whole zoological scale”; women’s “conservative tendency … in all questions of social order due to the immobility of the ovule compared to the zoosperm”; their lesser exposure to “the varying conditions of time and space in [the] environment” compared to men; and a less active cerebral cortex “particularly in the psychical centres.”98 The authors concluded that the crimes that women did specialize in, such as adultery, swindling, and prostitution, required an attractive appearance that prohibited “the development of repulsive facial characteristics.”99 Lombroso and Ferrero’s preferred explanation for the lack of the criminal type in women, however, was atavism. Their account returned women to a period of human prehistory when there was supposedly less differentiation between the sexes. What was normal for men became criminal in women. Prostitutes were considered even less evolved than normal women, possessing characteristics such as small cranial capacities, narrow foreheads, left-handedness, and prehensile feet.100 Although female born criminals were less common than the males, they were considered “more ferocious.” Havelock Ellis preempted the objection that prostitution was more of a vice than a crime by asserting that from an “anthropological point of view” it was impossible to demarcate between the two forms of deviancy: “While criminal women correspond on the whole to the class of occasional criminals, in whom the brand of criminality is but faintly seen, prostitutes sometimes correspond more closely to the class of instinctive criminals. Thus their sensory obtuseness has been shown to be often extreme, and it is scarcely necessary to show that their psychical sensitiveness is equally obtuse.”101
“Women’s preference for strong scents,” Albrecht asserted, “is to be explained only by the fact that they do not smell as keenly and therefore endure strong odors better.”102 Criminals were thought to have an inferior sensibility compared to law-abiding citizens. Lombroso invoked a hierarchy to conceptualize the problem, claiming that sensibility was highest in con artists but lowest in robbers. Criminals were more likely to be sensitive to the effects of metals and magnets and have acute eyesight. Garofalo pointed to the widespread practice of tattooing among criminals as evidence of their relative insensitivity to pain. Because “the normal woman is naturally less sensitive to pain,” wrote Lombroso and Ferrero, women would possess less compassion— “the offspring of sensitiveness”—compared to men.103 Women were also assumed to be less sensitive to pain compared to men because of the burdens of childbearing. Women’s cruelty was a consequence not only of their weakness, according to Albrecht, but also of their higher pain thresholds. Other deleterious consequences followed from this: “Compared to that of men the morality of women is also inferior. They know only one honor, honor of sex. This inferior morality, too, comes from their lesser sensibility and intelligence, for also in the latter respect women are inferior. The highest plane of intelligence, genius, is completely lacking among women.”104 Francis Galton confirmed women’s inferior sensory powers, claiming to have found that “as a rule that men have more delicate powers of discrimination than women”: “The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I understand are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and the like.” He reasoned that if “the sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest of merchants would lead to their being always employed; but as the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be the true one.” “Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table,” he concluded, and bizarrely, added that they were considered to be “far from successful makers of tea and coffee.”105
Lombroso had conducted experiments on the “threshold of sensibility” to pain in 1867, using the electrodes of an induction coil. He and four male colleagues held the electrodes to various parts of their bodies, including their gums, nipples, tongues, lips, eyelids, soles of the feet, and the glans of the penis. Having previously used the device to deliver electrotherapy to his patients, Lombroso reported that the induction coil produced sensations such as a “series of hot pricks,” “scalding pain,” and pains like a “knife blade that passes through the joint.”106 The skin’s thickness was proposed to mediate the experience of pain, which in turn was assumed to correlate with a person’s intelligence. The mentally ill were alleged to be less sensitive to pain: “the demented, pellagroids, and apathetic melancholiacs presented diminished sensibility, erethismic melancholiacs presented increased sensibility.”107 The female body’s alleged relative insensitivity to pain was in turn proposed as an explanation of why women had poor powers of sensory discrimination compared to men. Lombroso regarded most women as “frigid.”108 Salvatore Ottolenghi attributed women’s insensitivity to pain to their increased vitality and longevity.
Physiological investigations—such as delivering electric shocks to the hand, tongue, nose, breasts, and female genitalia as in the so-called “Sensitivity Test”—was designed to empirically establish women’s insensitivity to pain.109 This research had some significant consequences. When their measurements were found to be greater than those taken from men, women were compared to children and were thus redefined as being “immature.”110 “What terrific criminals would children be if they had strong pa
ssions, muscular strength, and sufficient intelligence,” asserted Lombroso and Ferrero, “and if, moreover, their evil tendencies were exasperated by a morbid psychical activity! And women are big children.”111 Women were thought to possess “many traits in common with children,” including jealousy and a deficient moral sense. They were also considered “inclined to vengeances of a refined cruelty.” Like children, female offenders were occasionally allowed to serve their sentences at home. The child was a “natural criminal,” according to the recapitulationist logic. Women were also compared to sexually lascivious “savages.” Women would “seek relief in evil deeds,” the authors concluded, if their inherent “bad qualities” were intensified by “morbid activity of the psychical centres”: “when piety and maternal sentiments are wanting, and in their place are strong passions and intensely erotic tendencies, much muscular strength and a superior intelligence for the conception and execution of evil, it is clear that the innocuous semi-criminal present in the normal woman must be transformed into a born criminal more terrible than any man.”112
Having abandoned the search for physical stigmata of crime, criminology’s investigation of female sensation led to a search for ordinarily invisible signs of crime within the body. From sensibility it was but a short step to sensitivity and from there to feelings and emotion. The study of blushing was a significant moment in the history of scientific study of emotion and a pivotal moment in criminology’s turn to physiology. The history of shame in the nineteenth century begins with Thomas Henry Burgess’s 1839 work, The Physiology or Mechanism of Blushing, which described blushing as a God-given “moral restraint,” a mechanism to “control the individual from violating the laws of morality.”113 For Henry Mayhew, writing in 1862, while shame was “an educated sentiment … as thoroughly the result of training as is a sense of decency and even virtue … the main characteristic of civilized woman,” it was “utterly unawakened in the ruder forms of female nature… . Many of the wretched girls seen in our jails have, we verily believe, never had the sentiment educated in them, living almost the same barbarous life as they would, had they been born in the interior of Africa.”114 Gender was inescapably entangled with race, class, and mental incapacity.
In her 1866 article, “Criminal Women,” for the Cornhill Magazine, Mrs. M. E. Owen declared that a criminal man was “not so vile as a bad woman.” Her anthropological metaphor was a bridge to Darwin’s own reconceptualization of shame: “Women of this stamp are generally so bold and unblushing in crime, so indifferent to right and wrong, so lost to all sense of shame, so destitute of the instincts of womanhood, that they be more justly compared to wild beasts than to women… . Criminal women, as a class, are found to be more uncivilized than the savage, more degraded than the slave, less true to all natural and womanly instincts than the untutored squaw of a North American Indian tribe.”115Although Darwin considered blushing to have been caused by shyness, shame, and modesty, his aim was to establish a continuity of emotion between man and animals. “Many a person has blushed intensely when accused of some crime,” he wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, “though completely innocent of it.”116 “A man reflecting on a crime committed in solitude, and stung by his conscience, does not blush; yet he will blush under the vivid recollection of a detected fault, or of one committed in the presence of others, the degree of blushing being closely related to the feeling of regard for those who have detected, witnessed, or suspected his fault.”117
Although he conceptualized blushing as an involuntary biological mechanism, Darwin considered it to be a vestigial and useless artifact. For Lombroso, that criminals did not blush was an indication of their dangerousness; its absence signified “a dishonest and savage life.”118 Lacking normal affective capacities, their displays of inappropriate emotions such as pleasure at another person’s suffering were further evidence of their degeneration. The inability to blush was also thought to be impaired among the insane. Havelock Ellis, Charles Féré, and G. E. Partridge regarded blushing as an “erethism” of sex and the origin of shame. “Inability to blush has always been considered the accompaniment of crime and shamelessness,” wrote Ellis. “Blushing is also very rare among idiots and savages; the Spaniards used to say of the South American Indians: ‘How can one trust men who do not know how to blush?’”119
According to Darwin, emotions had been produced by natural selection, and facial expressions of those emotions were remnants of once serviceable habits: “Every sudden emotion, including astonishment, quickens the action of the heart, and with it the respiration. Now we can breathe, as Gratiolet remarks and as appears to me to be the case, much more quietly through the open mouth than through the nostrils. Therefore, when we wish to listen intently to any sound, we either stop breathing, or breathe as quietly as possible, by opening our mouths, at the same time keeping our bodies motionless.”120 Darwin had been particularly impressed by the electrical experiments reported by Duchenne de Boulogne in his The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (1862). Duchenne applied electrodes to different parts of the face in an attempt to simulate emotional expression.
What had made these investigations practicable was the prior historical construction of emotion as a biological phenomena.121 The naturalization of the emotions made it possible to consider them as measurable entities, distinct from “the passions.” By the mid-nineteenth century it was perfectly reasonable to think that emotions could be measured via the effect that they were reputed to have on the body. The origins of instrument-generated graphic representations of emotions can be traced to the mid-1860s, when the French physiologist Claude Bernard applied Étienne-Jules Marey’s new cardiograph to record the heart’s actions during emotional episodes.122 Based on Ludwig’s kymograph, Marey’s sphygmograph was one of the first instruments to translate a subjective feeling into a graphical trace.123 Bernard proposed that the slightest emotion produced a reflex impression in the heart that was “imperceptible to all, except for the physiologist” and his instrument.124 Distinguishing between feigned and sincere emotions, Bernard suggested that only the latter would activate the involuntary physiological mechanisms necessary to produce a distinguishable and characteristic graphical recording.
A sustained program of research on the emotions began in the early 1880s when the Italian physiologist Angelo Mosso initiated a mechanistic, quantitative, and instrument-based approach to the study of emotions.125 Mosso recorded the minute effects of induced emotions on laboratory animals and designed new instruments for determining the effects of emotion on the circulation. One of Mosso’s experimental subjects was Michel Bertino, a thirty-seven-year-old man with a twenty mm gap in his skull.126 Mosso’s experimental technique involved rebuking Bertino while the registering apparatus inscribed blood volume changes in his brain. Mosso construed the resultant “cerebral autographs” as inscriptions produced by the brain: “See how the brain writes when it guides the pen itself.”127
Étienne-Jules Marey’s “polygraph taken out of its box and provided with the exploration device in a shell for the pulsation of the heart.” From Jules É. Marey, Mémoire sur la pulsation du coeur (1875), p. 33, fig. 16.
Mosso’s work appealed to Lombroso because it had the potential to render visible the criminal’s dangerousness. Particularly important was the instrument’s promise to record even “those emotions that are not depicted on the face.”128 Criminology enthusiastically embraced physiological instruments, because by illuminating the dark recesses of the body they promised to undertake the work of demarcating criminals from the insane.129 Tamburini proposed that a “true psychometer” could enable comparisons between the mentally ill, and quantify the degree of alteration of the principal nervous centers. The sphygmic curves of the mad were believed to have a characteristic shape. Because the insane were thought to have less marked vascular reactions compared to intelligent subjects, instruments might aid in the detection of feigned mental illness. Lombroso thought that the instruments might be able to
identify the particular physiological states that might enable an individual to commit a particular criminal act.
Criminology’s authority came to depend on measurement devices. A well-appointed laboratory might list among its stock the following instruments: baristesiometer, campimeter, clinometer, craniometer, dynamometer, ergograph, esthesiometer, goniometer, Hipp’s chronoscope, olfactometer, the Schlitteninductorium, spirometer, tachyanthropometer, thermesthesiometer.130 In spite of all this hardware, the turn to instrumentation did not produce the definitive empirical results the criminologists had hoped. But scientific instruments were not just expressions of the extension of the criminological gaze into hitherto unseen spaces; they were also tools for the fashioning of a scientific identity for criminal anthropology. These specialized techniques for reading the body furnished criminal anthropology with a “corporeal literacy that made possible an exegesis and a diagnosis.”131 An ability to manipulate scientific instruments and to gather data systematically was a crucial aspect of the construction and maintenance of scientific authority.132 Like criminological texts, which presented table after table of data and heaped anecdote upon anecdote, criminology laboratories also amassed large quantities of fetishized scientific instruments. Lombroso’s descriptions of esoteric scientific instruments were not restricted to his scientific texts; they also occupied a privileged place in his more explicitly popular texts. Readers were given instructions on how to make their own instruments and make investigations with them. The tachyanthropometer, for example, was designed, as Lombroso put it, to make “the practice of anthropometry very easy, even to people who are entire strangers to the science.”133
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