The Descent of Man and Visual Culture

This post on The Descent of Man began with a very simple observation: there are pictures in this book, and in On the Origin of Species there are not. This led to questions: Why is that? And why these pictures? What are they accomplishing (or attempting to) within Darwin’s argument, and how does this relate to, or deviate from, the work that his words achieve toward the same end? My first thought was how Darwin speaks so often throughout about those who love to “ornament”—male birds turn themselves into pleasing pictures in order to charm females, women likewise bedeck themselves in order to attract men—but even though one could extend the chain to say (and there is apparently a large body of scholarship on this very topic) that Darwin likewise “ornaments” his prose in order to seduce readers engaged with a growing visual culture, he also seems reluctant to take that method of seduction as far as, I imagine, he could.

I hope that those who drew these pictures would pardon my saying so now, but the images in Descent of Man are not masterful works of art, unlike so many other nineteenth-century scientific illustrations which are, in their own right (Chris and Sarah must be experts on this subject by now). What I'm interested in is what their non-artiness might actually be doing here, and how it serves Darwin. Rather than finished works, these illustrations are sketches, and perhaps because of that they carry a greater onus of proof; they do not become wrapped up in the elaborate and fanciful, entranced with their own beauty. They are very much in line, rather, with Darwin’s self-presentation throughout The Descent, as what Beth calls a “modest” scientist. These are modest images, but they make their point all the more powerfully because of it. This is, I think, fittingly demonstrated by Emer’s comparison of her responses to Audubon’s and Darwin’s verbal descriptions of birds; Darwin’s prose fascinates for her in a way that Audubon’s ornithological biographies do not, precisely because Audubon’s far more flamboyant images often outstrip his words; his status as wonderful artist casts a looming shadow over his credibility as scientific observer. How can he serve two masters? As Emer says, for her, “particularly where size and color were concerned, the engravings were the more satisfying source of information.” Verbal descriptions of plumage become less urgent, or even desirable, when a picture can do so well what an excess of language cannot: the old adage begs to be dredged up here, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This is not what Darwin wants to happen, and I think he is careful, then, to avoid the aggrandized image.

Darwin is not the illustrator (making his distinction as “author,” and also as scientist, all the more clear) nor does he consistently use one illustrator who might threaten to vie with him for attention; he does not associate himself closely with anyone else in the way that, for instance, Tenniel and Carroll comprise an artistic unit. The original cover design given to us in our edition simply notes below the title that this book comes “With illustrations.” The texts given on the page “By The Same Author” also are sure to inform readers right away which of Darwin’s books do and don’t have pictures, and, for A Monograph of the Cirrepedia, even the enticement of coming “with numerous illustrations.” Here we see that the majority of Darwin’s published works—a surprise to me—actually featured images, and yet that connotation of the word “with” is so important here, as it constructs the text as primary and the pictures as supplementary (unlike an Audubon whose words were destined to the periphery of his drawings) while making it evident that their presence is something that nineteenth-century readers would absolutely want to know. Yet it intrigues me that Origin of Species stands as a unique instance of being picture-less (because of the fact that it was rushed to the press?) and I’m wondering if this gave Darwin the impetus to write differently, more imagistically maybe, than he otherwise would have. It’s my opinion that Origin contains more beautiful turns of phrase, or finer word-portraits, than Descent of Man does, although this could easily be for other reasons altogether.

However, in Descent of Man, we see Darwin as a compiler of images from many different locations and individuals, just as he takes his facts from a range of sources to show how widely spread and reasonable his views are. Images are constructed as simply another kind of fact, not to be let too far afield—or elevated above—the scientific work in which they’re found. But, all this said about distracting or dangerous pictures, I see no reason that Darwin couldn’t have done without them altogether, as he did in Origin, unless they were designed to serve a significant function within his “proof.” After all, as Darwin tells us in his preface to the second edition, more illustrations were added and “four of the old drawings replaced by better ones, done from life by Mr T.W. Wood,” and so as much as we’ve talked about the way that Darwin carefully re-crafted his sentences in various editions of his work, he apparently put that same attention into visual elements. Darwin mixes these new drawings from Wood with those of a score of others. His decisions to pick and choose implicitly convey that even across the boundaries of individual authors and illustrators, across myriad texts, pictures, and stylistic nuances, his theories can still be clearly seen as true. And so we have the figure on page 27, in which Darwin combines one image of a human embryo “from Ecker” with another of a dog embryo “from Bischoff” to show the similarities between them, telling the reader on the previous page that they are “carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy” (26).

It is in such moments of juxtaposition that images achieve for Darwin what words alone may not be able to, since the subjects he chooses are ones that are seldom easily or commonly seen, noting “some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo,” let alone an actual embryo (26). So, too, we have the human ear (fig. 2, page 32) where Darwin shows “the projecting point” that is a link to monkeys (again, most people have probably not attentively examined the inside of ears, partly because their positioning makes it so difficult to see inside one’s own, even with a mirror). And on page 34 (fig. 3) when faced with a drawing of an orangutan fetus, it is just not possible for rational readers to deny the similarity between it and a human infant. While Darwin slyly notes that his reason for including this figure is “shewing the form of the ear at this early age,” the viewer can see, without Darwin’s saying it, that the similarity between human and orangutan extends beyond the ear and to the shape of the infant’s entire cranium and face.

Moreover, Darwin is sure to point out that this is an “exact copy of a photograph” (34). In the “By the Same Author” page, Darwin’s publishers also specified the type of illustration, photographic being worthy of distinct appellation for the reader. The photograph would have a novelistic appeal as still a recent technology, and even viewed as more properly “scientific”—or objective—than a drawing (although, of course, it was subject to its own stylistic manipulations—the aesthetic repositioning of Civil War corpses comes to mind). So even though Darwin does not have photos here, it is helpful to him to align his images with that technology, noting throughout the text the means by which he acquired each illustration, frequently, as with the orangutan, remarking that if it’s not a photograph, it’s the next best thing.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin’s images prove the validity of his words, and direct the reader back to them (in order to find the answer “Why does this orangutan look so much like my own baby?”) not like Audubon’s that strut and flaunt. But Audubon never had as much to prove. So, too, Darwin’s modest collection of pictures become more credible in their quickly-jotted ‘roughness’ than many of those too-beautiful scientific illustrations, suggesting that someone who thinks too much about the composition of an image may have become distracted from the task of unraveling the composition of nature, and humanity, itself. So while it strikes me that these images may have felt initially less important in comparison to others we closely analyzed in class, like Tenniel’s in Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass, or, of course, Audubon’s, it’s for this reason that I think they’re all the more compelling. Maybe it’s when we don’t consciously think about them as images that they’ve most succeeded; if we didn’t allude to and study them as their own separate entity, perhaps this is exactly what Darwin wanted: not for pictures to fly off the page, but to stay safely put in his argument, a natural extension of his thought rather than an artistic “Other” that threatens to engulf and capsize the text.