Sally Shuttleworth, in The Mind of the Child, marks the publication of Darwin’s Origins of Species in 1859 as a point in which the view of children as those “on par with the animal kingdom” informs the psychological treatment and literary depictions of children. A shift occurs in theories of child development that previously analogue children to gardens to that of brutes and machines. Medical and religious discourse concerning the moral agency and status of the infant shifts as child-rearing and motherhood become more ‘scientific’ and specialized during the late nineteenth century and a sort of fragmentation of the infant, a separation of the physical, mental, and moral features of the child and discourse of the moral agency of infants wanes. With this project, I aim to uncover the moral imagination of infants in a period in pre-Darwinian America and consider its prevalence or dissolution in contemporary discourse on the moral agency and personhood of infants. Secondary to my project is the exploration of the various medical, philosophical, scientific and religious influences that molded particular conceptions of the infant as rational and moral. Untangling the interwoven threads of religious and philosophical discourse prior to the emergence of the evolutionary thought and scientific child psychology can shed light on alternative ways in which we might conceptualize infants as moral agents and address the problem of agency in general.
