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.
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. 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. 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.