Darwin’s ideas about emotion are known from his published scientific writings [e.g., Darwin, 1872/1998, 1877], which focus primarily on the evolutionary origins of emotional expressions. The present paper offers an analysis of a personal document – Darwin’s memorial of his daughter Annie, who died at age 10 [Darwin, 1989] – which reveals additional elements of Darwin’s view of emotion. Analysis of the text of the memorial indicates that Darwin did not employ rhetorical strategies conveying objectivity as outlined by Gergen [1994]. Darwin’s rhetorical decision to locate himself in the memorial as a writer and observer in relation to his daughter Annie allowed him to emphasize social functions of emotion and to delineate an implicitly relational perspective on emotion. The memorial demonstrates the value of considering the child in social encounters as the unit of analysis, showing that emotion is accorded meaning in relational contexts, integrating multiple expressive channels in emotional action, and accounting for ways that emotion helps convey the individuality of a child in her social world. Darwin’s style in the text of the memorial enabled a perspective of embodied participation that permits finely detailed observation, yet locates the observer’s point of view, and represents the relational complexity of observations even when the observer himself is involved.

Keywords:
Charles Darwin, Emotion, Emotional development, Objectivity, Scientific discourse
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2004
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