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

In this well-researched book, Julia Douthwaite provides a sweeping overview of the changing popular perceptions of human perfectibility and progress in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as portrayed in literature. Beginning with accounts of failed attempts to civilize three famous "wild children" in the eighteenth century, Douthwaite investigates a variety of French literary sources to reveal changing, and often ambivalent, attitudes toward Enlightenment science and the related notions of progress, the power of reason, and potential for human improvement. She emphasizes further writings on education, utopian schemes, and popular accounts of experiments on human subjects.

For those interested in the literary record alone, this book offers ample opportunities for reflection and discussion. Likewise, those interested in tracing the development of Enlightenment views on education will find much to consider. Douthwaite artfully traces the growing pessimism in France toward perfectibility and scientific progress (exacerbated by the tumultuous events surrounding the French Revolution). Considering the sociopolitical picture, she also points out the contradictions inherent in affirming human independence while requiring that individual freedom be sublimated to the body politic. Finally, she indicates the sharp gender distinctions present in discussions of that period regarding educational methods and actualizing the potential of the individual.

Of particular interest is Douthwaite's attempt to characterize science through the literature. The subject of human behavior (like other areas of investigation that later became known as the social sciences) generated theories that were among the least quantifiable and the least capable of replication. Douthwaite illustrates vividly the challenges of sustaining the optimistic Enlightenment perspective on the triumph of science and reason, particularly when addressing this subject of investigation. For historians of science, Douthwaite's emphasis on how science was perceived in popular literature is a valuable addition to the more traditional research into scientific activity in the Enlightenment, which typically focuses on the growing professionalism of the scientific community and the debates over mathematical versus organic approaches to understanding nature.

In describing the increasing uneasiness about scientific attempts to perfect human beings, Douthwaite notes that scientific work in general was then beginning to become more opaque to the general public. Science was moving beyond the salon and beyond popular demonstration. For the general public, science was seen as increasingly withdrawn from the social purview (and moral accountability), moving into more secretive, and potentially sinister, arenas. Over the course of this period, the "professional" scientist, equipped with sophisticated apparatus and capable of manipulating nature, was more and more seen as suspect.

One wonders, however, if the author does not draw too sharp a contrast here between the scientific professional and the amateur. After all, the professionalism of science was still very much in its infancy at this time and procedures for validating facts were little removed from the "expert witnessing by credible gentlemen" that Steven Shapin so carefully described in his research on seventeenth-century science.

Additionally, despite growing public skepticism about the utility of "scientific" solutions—particularly as they pertained to the regeneration of human beings—the fact remains that there was much optimism among those seriously engaged in scientific activities that science could, indeed, yield much that was valuable. In this regard, one must qualify Douthwaite's assertion that it was simply a "symptom of wishful thinking" to claim that science was "democratized" by institutions like the École Polytechnique. Such a view overlooks the democratizing effect within the École of bringing a varied group of serious practitioners of science together for the purpose of enhancing the understanding of science and its practical applications. The École Polytechnique promoted useful interchange (among the faculty, and between faculty and students), established career paths for "scientists," and encouraged the use of argumentation to replace deference to authority...