Browsing by Author "Gatlin, Stephen H."

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    William H. Sheldon and the culture of the somatotype
    Gatlin, Stephen H. (Virginia Tech, 1997-03-01)
    The burden of this dissertation is to show that William Sheldon’s somatotype project should be seen as an integral aspect of modernist culture. Sheldon engaged the same problems with modernity and the "Second Industrial Revolution" (urbanization, overpopulation, industrialization, alienation) that confronted modernist poets, novelists, and philosophers. In this I am elaborating Dorothy Ross’s recent metaphor, "modernist impulses in the human sciences" (1994). Both scientists and artists were responding to the social chaos and fragmentation engendered by WWI, by capitalism, and by a science and technology that was often felt to have run amok. Advocacy of eugenics for Anthony Ludovici, William Sheldon, and Aldous Huxley (polemics against "promiscuous breeding", overpopulation, medical and psychological holism, "aristocracy", nobility) was another means of defending conservative values against the onslaught of modernism. The German romantic, holistic, tradition (the "Goethean vision") in the physical and biological sciences that has been treated recently by Ann Harrington (1996) carried reactionary assumptions and priorities that duly influenced British and American constitutionalists. Sheldon’s quest of the somatotype, his attempt to map the human physique scientifically, was, at least in his case, a means of salvaging personality, character, and soul ina way that was consonant with the aims of German holism and hence, to a Significant degree, with the aims of the nazis, who appropriated the tradition for political purposes and propagandized it in their art. Sheldon’s studies in human constitution possessed the same "value-base" (Weingart) as much of German medicine and psychology during the first four decades of this century. Sheldon’s anti-Freudian position was intended to reinculcate a place for moral character and eugenic breeding in psychology. Sheldon insisted that character was a seasoned and hard-won proposition, as opposed to a cheap jettisoning of sexual inhibitions. Sheldon opposed the sexual origin of neurosis and replaced it with a highly disciplined character-building that was consistent with a nineteenth-century masculine ethos.
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    William H. Sheldon's constitutional psychology: the somatotype as fiction
    Gatlin, Stephen H. (Virginia Tech, 1992-04-05)
    In this thesis I argue that William H. Sheldon's somatotypes can be seen as fictional constructions. The traditional notion of idealization in prose fiction intrudes into Sheldon's reading of his somatotypes; the same kind of idealization, based on anthropological stereotyping, that had marked the science, or pseudo-science, of physiognomy. An integral aspect of physiognomy had been biological hierarchy and distinction, which had undergirded both the ancient and the European class systems, and which had provided a palpable benchmark for identifying nobility, heroism, and aristocracy. Sheldon's constitutional psychology, I argue, is a thinly disguised revolt against the falling away of this biological hegemony. The demise of heroism and "Promethean Will" or individuality was, for Sheldon, a matter of nostalgia and alienation. The somatotype studies, while fostering the illusion of detached empiricism, actually allow Sheldon to judge contemporary humanity according to antique (heroic) standards. Sheldon's somatotypes, therefore, are artifactual; to the degree that they express as much about the "temperamene" of their "author" as they do about the somatotypes themselves. In this way, Sheldon constrlcts his subjects. Sheldon's proposed program of "biological humanics", a variety of eugenics, was, in truth, an agenda (a fantasy) for recapturing the glory of the past. It was a scheme to reinvest power, beauty, heroism (primitive splendor), into the physical body; qualities and relationships which had characterized the ancient world, and which had been compromised by the "shopkeeper" and cowardly mentality of modern society.