The universal recognizability of the human smile: Strategies of photographic display in Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
The subject of emotional expression was immensely popular throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. In his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin offered a controversial perspective on the topic. Of the various contemporary approaches to understanding expression, Darwin’s was the first widely-read study to suggest that the complex human expressions traditionally believed to differentiate us from non-human animals are, in fact, proof of our descent from a common ancestor. While Darwin did not believe emotional expression to be exclusively human, he argued that a distinctly human state of self-awareness allows us to orient our will toward the restraint of expressive actions. For him, the evolution of expression in humans is best chronicled as the gradual attenuation of expressive signs. Through practice and repetition, he claimed, the habit of wilfully inhibiting expressions was inherited, and so became an inborn tendency distinctive of humankind.
Expression is the only book by Darwin to contain photographs. It was also one of the first photographically illustrated scientific books to attract a wide audience. The volume, which includes thirty-two photographs and twenty-one original woodcuts, was popular amongst both scientific and lay audiences. Given that Darwin was not a trained artist nor photographer, he was fundamentally dependent on others to illustrate Expression. The book reproduced pictures by five photographers, including the Scottish psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne, the London studio photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and the French neurologist Dr. Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne. Published by John Murray shortly after The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), the well-known and controversial text in which Darwin proposed that humans share a common ancestor with apes, Expression was highly anticipated by men of science and the general public alike. While the premise of Darwin’s theory was certainly provocative, the promise of seeing photographs likely made the book all the more popular.
In this paper, I explore the visual strategies Darwin deployed to construct and support his argument that the universal recognizability of human expressions reveals man’s connection to a primordial ancestor shared with non-human animals. More specifically, I examine how the presentation of photographs in Expression drew upon popular modes of nineteenth-century photographic display familiar to Darwin’s Victorian readers. Further, I expand to consider how Expression was embedded in broader nineteenth-century debates about epistemology and scientific truth.
Location: Zoom
Link: https://yorku.zoom.us/j/99203776500?pwd=MXlobHlKd01Tdng4ZyttVUFVQmpBQT09