The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (review)

130 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:1 ofa wide range ofideas and texts, but I wonder ifhe might not have written a better book if, instead ofpainting with this broad brush, he had sat himself down to extended explication offewer novels in order to show more than he does at the micro-textual level how his notions of mimesis and knowledge actually and fully play out. John Richetti University ofPennsylvania Julia V. Douthwaite. The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age ofEnlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xiii+314pp. US$19; 13.50UK. ISBN 0-226-1605^4. The Yahoos of the fourth book of Gulliver's TraveL· present an enigma, for it is not certain whether they are the degenerate offspring of European castaways , or autochthonous monsters. Gulliver is never sure how to express this, whether what he has found is a perfect human figure that arouses his horror and astonishment, in all its native nastiness, or its defaced and corrupt descendant, with its sins inscribed on its body. The satire, ifsatire it is, constantly points at the connections between die gestures of these ape-like creatures and the behaviour ofcourtiers, lawyers, and politicians, posing the question ofpriority. Are the beast-like humans the original of humanity, or the repulsive end of it; are the members of civil society the perfection of human nature, or its scandal? Or is there no difference, and is one as bad as the other? And if so, are animals such as horses better than humans? The enigma haunts the eighteendi century. Although various answers are proposed, the problem reappears as intractably as ever in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a hundred years later. Whether the manufactured monster is the gruesome and evil outcome of Victor Frankenstein's mistaken attempt to perfect the human figure, orwhether it is an abused butunattractive example ofprimal innocence, are conjectures the novel airs but cannot resolve. In the course of the century,Julia Douthwaite shows, there were many attempted solutions, falling either side of die gap dividing primitivists from perfectionists . Rousseau is the best known of the primitivists. Believing that each stage of the growth ofcivil society marks a deeper level ofcorruption among its citizens, Rousseau espoused a theory of education that depended on a hermetic seal between the pupil and society. Thus Emile is taught what is important to humanity while remaining ignorant ofwhat would despoil him of his nature. Rousseau's Emile ou l'éducation (1762) was followed by many REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS131 novels about die isolated education ofinnocents, ofwhich die most famous is Bernardin de St Pierre's Paulet Virginie (1788), a creole romance about two young people growing up in the remotest part ofMauritius, absorbing simple lessons oftruth and nature. Beaurieu's L'Élève de la nature (1763), translated into English ten years later as The Man ofNature, follows the same pattern. But in subsequent explorations of solitude as a scene of pedagogy, notably Rousseau's own continuation ofEmile, Emile et Sophie, ou les solitaires (1780), the results are most unsatisfactory. Sophie proves unfaithful to Emile, and he abandons her and their child. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the novelist, raised his own son Richard like Emile, and he turned out wilful, dissipated, and unhappy. It was such an unfortunate experiment that he set to work with his daughter to produce PracticalEducation (1801), which set out the virtues of a large and socially well-adjusted family as the proper sphere ofchildraising. The unhappy effect ofyoung people subjected to solitude is, ofcourse, the theme ofmany Gothic novels, and Eliza Fenwick's Secresy (1795) combines the two genres in order to mount a critique ofRousseau similar to Wollstonecraft's. By this time, there was a strong tradition of novels about education, such as Mme de Genlis's Adèle et Theodore (1782), and Reveroni de St Cyr's Paulùka (1798), which either defend traditional forms ofeducation as necessary methods of improving the young, or expose the horrors of perverse experiments on humans. Rousseau had been preceded by fictional representations ofthe advantages of isolation, notably Robinson Crusoe (1719) and John Kirkby's Automathes (1745), and these likewise moved speculations about human nature...