From the Wild Side

The figure of the ‘wild child’, though an object of intense intellectual and cultural fascination from the early eighteenth century to the present, nevertheless remains enigmatic and stubbornly ill defined. Nomenclature itself suggests the elusiveness of the phenomenon: where the singular term ‘wild child’ conjures up the image of a long-haired, naked boy moving with animal agility and speed through dense woods, the vision dissolves in the plural. The uncanny, bestialized yet undeniably human being who emerges, or is captured, after years of isolated survival in the wilderness, the figure that François Truffaut so memorably captured in L’Enfant sauvage (1969), cannot be both prototypical and particular at once. And yet Truffaut’s film is based on an actual individual. The mute, malnourished boy who came to be known as Victor of Aveyron was captured in 1800 and the intellectual and cultural excitement occasioned by his discovery marks the culmination of eighteenth-century interest in ‘wild children’. His is certainly the most fully documented case of its kind; the extraordinary efforts to educate Victor undertaken by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard were unprecedented in their duration, systematic scope and pedagogic implications. Everything that made Victor an exceptional ‘wild child’ necessarily complicated the category he was taken to exemplify. But the same might be said of the other well-documented cases of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among them Peter of Hanover, the Wild Girl of Champagne or Kaspar Hauser. What are ‘wild children’ but the sum of cases that have each been taken as instances of the ‘wild child’? What do these cases have in common beyond the remarkable history of cultural reception out of which the singular figure has been created?

Adriana Benzaquén’s study begins with the recognition that the ‘ “wild child” is to a great extent a literary or discursive class or kind’, that narrative and conceptual unity have gradually arisen and been imposed upon a diverse group of individual instances (p. 16). Although not altogether unprecedented, this initial premise allows an approach to the rich philosophical and literary material related to wild children which is freed from the aspiration to adjudicate evidence and competing claims about the historical and medical ‘facts’ at issue in each case. Benzaquén offers the cultural historian an extraordinarily thorough and detailed review of textual sources on wild children, from sketchy accounts of cases going back to the fourteenthcentury ‘boy of Hesse’, through the wealth of philosophical speculation following the discovery of Peter of Hanover in 1724, from the voluminous medical, pedagogical and sociological literature generated around Victor of Aveyron in the nineteenth century to a modern cluster of documents related to the discovery of non-European ‘animal-raised’ children and to the confined child popularly known as ‘Genie’. For the sheer abundance of its sources and its meticulous presentation of the available evidence on each case, Encounters with Wild Children certainly supersedes all previous English-language works in this area and is an invaluable resource for any student of history or literature drawn to the topic.

In her introductory explanation of the choice to retain the term ‘wild child’, Benzaquén reflects upon and rejects three alternatives that in themselves encapsulate the history traced in her book. ‘Feral child’ (adopted by the twentieth-century anthropologist Robert Zingg) derives from Linnaeus’s category ‘Homo ferus’ and so bears with it the long history of scientific efforts to classify the phenomenon of ‘wild children’. Because the Latinized term ‘conveys an aspiration to a certain type of objectivity . . . and the acceptance of a set of assumptions about the proper way to produce knowledge about people’ (p. 17), the term obscures the non-scientific sources that shaped the category from the outset. ‘Savage child’ (from the French ‘enfant sauvage’, as in the ‘Sauvage de l’Aveyron’) evokes the ‘primitive’ or ‘uncivilized’ in a quasi-anthropological sense and bears with it the temptation to view the ‘wild...