Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale

When I became a man, I put away childish things.

King James Bible

He would rather lie down with the animals than stand up with the men.

Franz Kafka

Timothy Treadwell has quickly become the stuff of (American) legend, inspiring several books and short films, as well as a feature-length documentary by Werner Herzog, entitled Grizzly Man (2005). Treadwell’s is the story of an individual who lived with Alaskan wild bears for thirteen summers, until his and a companion’s death by a bear in 2003. The narrative arc recalls other stories of young men who shun civilization and seek a more authentic existence in the wild. Early incarnations include real-life figures such as Daniel Boone to more recent ones such as Alex McCandless (in Jon Krakauer’s and now Sean Penn’s Into the Wild).¹ Beyond a fascination with the psychic dilemmas and desires that shape the unique contours of these lives, lies a collective, cultural uncertainty and controversy regarding the place of wilderness in (North American) life and different styles of masculinity, all constituted in relation to Nature as Other.

What is missing from discussions of Timothy Treadwell’s story thus far—especially its discursive constructions in Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), Treadwell’s own autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1996), and Nick Jans’s bestselling The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (2005)—is the centrality of childhood and so-called childlike or childish behaviors and longings to its ideological meanings, including the texts’ understandings of Treadwell’s demise. Most obviously, the adult Timothy positions himself as a boy-child. Herzog’s Grizzly Man, for example, contains “films within a film” by another director, namely, a large amount of video footage that Timothy Treadwell himself shot, narrated, and intended for use in his advocacy work on behalf of Alaskan bears.² In this footage, Treadwell projects a child-like persona, conveyed in part by his abundant energy (when he is being chased by “Timmy the fox,” the mood is breathless, buoyant, and joyous); by his “Prince Valiant” haircut (which, as one friend recalls, utterly disguises his receding hairline); by his diet of peanut butter sandwiches, candy bars, and Coke; and by the presence of his childhood teddy bear as tent-mate. His narration casts him as a boy surviving alone on a grand adventure, a young hero who has animals as his closest friends: “Now let the expedition continue. Now it’s off with Timmy the Fox. We’ve got to find Banjo—he’s missing!” Further, the audiences for his films were primarily schoolchildren. During the winter, Treadwell—dubbed “a Pied Piper in a children’s crusade” by Jans (23)—used images and segments from these films in presentations he designed to educate children about the risks grizzlies face from diminished wild habitat and poaching, gleaned from the life he shared with them.

While the audience, then, for much of his filmmaking is clearly children, Grizzly Man’s mainly adult viewers can simply write Treadwell himself off as “infantile,” criticizing moments such as the one where his narration slips into a child’s intonation and pitch. After filming a grizzly rearing up and scratching his back against a tree, Treadwell goes up to the spot, measures the bear’s size with his own body by way of comparison, and with a deep intake of breath, drawn out vowels, and a breathless intonation, asserts, “Oh he’s a big bear. He’s a very big bear. A very big bear. . . . He’s a big bear.” Because Timothy fashions himself in his films and in his non-fiction autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1997), as someone who is essentially acting out a familiar fantasy ascribed to children—living in communion with wild animals, the bears and the foxes whom he knows “by name”—Treadwell’s story is clearly a feral tale, a genre of children’s literature in which a childhood lived in the wild figures prominently.³

Feral tales have mythic and folkloric roots worldwide, depicting children raised by animals or as the offspring of animals (Romulus and...