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The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment/Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century

Posted on: Sunday, 14 November 2004, 03:00 CST

The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment. By Julia V. Douthwaite. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. xiii + 314 pages.

Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century. By Richard Nash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. x + 216 pages.

Both of these books are concerned with the penetration of civilization by wildness, with literary and extra-literary texts, and with the importance of a popular public sphere for scientific experiments in the eighteenth century. Both discuss the three most well-known cases of wild children in the eighteenth century. Julia V. Douthwaite devotes the greatest share of her discussion to Marie- Anglique Leblanc, who was captured near the village of Songi in 1731, while Richard Nash focuses mostly on Peter of Hanover, who was found near Hameln, Germany, in 1724, then brought to England where the Hanoverian George I was king. Both also discuss Victor of Aveyron, who was finally seized in 1800 (and who was the subject of Franois Truffaut's The Wild Child [1970]). Although the feral children serve as a point of departure in both cases, the authors' concerns subsequently diverge and their arguments pursue different paths before intersecting again in their conclusions, both of which focus on the creature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818).

The directions taken by the inquiries in the two books are accurately indicated by their subtitles: Douthwaite is interested in experiments in pedagogy, Nash in the unclear line between the human and the animal during this period. Specifically, Douthwaite argues that attempts to realize ideas of human perfectibility through isolation or innovative educational schemes, whether in fiction, philosophy, or actuality, produced monsters or at least harmed the subjects of such experiments. Nash contends that in the travel narratives, fictions, and satires that he analyzes, it proves impossible to disentangle the wild man from the citizen or to distinguish the ape from the human. Both authors, finally, are concerned with the ways in which scientific experiments, like printed narratives and satires, are directed toward an audience and participate in a public realm that includes popular culture and entertainment.

Douthwaite's initial chapter considers the extent to which the wild children offered what eighteenth-century thinkers understood as humans in a natural state; observing their growth and socialization therefore might provide insight into human nature. The second chapter treats thought experiments by Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, and Charles Bonnet in which a statue or an automaton is gradually endowed with sensation and the faculties of a human being. Such texts imply the plasticity and even the perfectibility of individual humans. The third concentrates on narratives of the growth and education of solitary children of nature in familiar texts by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as in lesser-known but striking fictional works ranging from the Utopian (John Kirkby's Automathes [1745] and Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu's Elve de la nature [The Man of Nature, 1766]) to the mildly pornographic (Henri Joseph Du Laurens's Imirce [1765]). Almost all of these works involve the manipulation or even imprisonment of the young subjects for most of their first two decades; their growth in isolation is supposed more closely to approach what is natural than does the education of those raised in society. From these fictional cases, the next chapter moves on to consider three cases in which educational theorists (Richard Edgeworth, Thomas Day, Manon Roland) experimented mostly with disastrous results on their own children or wards, as well as two didactic or slightly fictionalized handbooks of pedagogy (by the Edgeworths and Madame de Genlis). After discussing ideas of homme rgnr (regenerate man) in the period of the French Revolution, the final chapter analyzes two "pedagogical dystopias" by women (Maria Edgeworth's Belinda [1787] and Eliza Fenwick's Secresy [1795]) and "scientific dystopias" by two men (Pauliska [1799] by Rvroni Saint- Cyr and the Marquis de Sade's 120 Jours [written 1785], Justine [1791], and Juliette [1797]). The first pair of narratives concerns efforts by Rousseauian tutors to create a "natural" and thus ideal woman; the second set subjects women's bodies to bizarre and cruel scientific experiments.

Moving fluently through these heterogeneous texts and materials from fiction, philosophy, and pedagogical theory and practice in Britain and France, including some works which are little known but fascinating (Imirce and Pauliska among others), Douthwaite makes a number of important arguments. She observes a striking difference in the way the wild children were treated based on gender. Although Marie Anglique entered fully into human language and resided on her own for several decades in French society, she was consistently represented as threatening to revert to animality and even cannibalism; by contrast, the benign potential of Peter and Victor to grow as uncorrupted natural men was generally stressed, even though neither of them ever mastered more than a few monosyllables and both remained wards of institutions or individuals throughout their lives. Douthwaite attends to the ways that experimental schemes of education led to more constraining results for girls and women than for boys and men. It is also significant to note, as Douthwaite does, that although the tutor in Rousseau's Emile (1762) claims only to be letting nature take its course, his educational techniques are manipulative, controlling, and disciplinary, and in this respect, Rousseau's text is prototypical of the experimental pedagogies she considers, from the actual cases of the wild children through most of the fictional and philosophical narratives. The material bears out her argument that experimental attempts to produce a more perfect human by having recourse to a supposedly natural progression outside society typically resulted in botched and even more oppressive lives for the subjects of such schemes.

This reviewer's one reservation concerns the most productive theoretical or historical framework in which to place such a pattern. On a number of occasions in the second half of the book, Douthwaite concludes a section or a discussion with a pronouncement of Joseph de Maistre blaming coercive or disciplinary results of educational experiments with women or children on the materialist, mechanicist philosophies of Enlightenment thinkers and their revolutionary followers in France (see, for example, 133, 163, and 176). But in the absence of another theoretical understanding, to ascribe an authoritative status to Maistre is problematic, because in his reactionary thought, only a brutally repressive monarchy and an infallible papacy possess political legitimacy, and such institutions have themselves been responsible for much coercive and repressive disciplining of men, women, and children. Moreover, some of the materials analyzed do not, on Douthwaite's account of them, conform to Maistre's thesis. It is not revolutionary agitators but counterrevolutionary aristocrats who cause the psychological torture and physical incarceration in a number of these texts, among them secresy and Pauliska. Even in Frankenstein, the arrogant experimenter follows not a materialist but a vitalist philosophy that, as Douthwaite shows, can be ascribed to an earlier, pre- Enlightenment form of thought. Still, Douthwaite's book remains valuable for the materials it brings together and illuminates, for the parallels it explores between scientific and pedagogical experiments, and for the pattern it diagnoses of educational innovations producing painful, unjust, and disciplinary results.

In Nash's book, it is actually the second chapter that focuses on Peter the wild boy. The first revolves around Edward Tyson's Orang- Outang, sive Homo Silvestris (1699), which combines a detailed report on the anatomy of what is now thought to have been a bonobo brought to London a few years earlier with a philological investigation of the meaning and referents of "orang-outang,""homo silvestris,""pygmy,""satyr,""monkey,""ape," and "man," all of which appear in the title or subtitle of the work. This focus allows Nash to explore three major concerns that reappear in most of the following chapters of the book. The first is an interest in the traffic between popular and elite culture, and between scientific experiment and popular entertainment, which he shares with Douthwaite. In addition, Nash observes that satire regularly plays a role in the cultural conversation about what is human and what is not: "satyr" could refer to a hybrid of man and animal, or it could mean a satiric work; "to ape" means to imitate, but also to mock or satirize. Finally, Nash resists making a move that would definitively distinguish scientific from satiric anatomizing, or would assign to their separate spheres the ape, the man of the woods, the civilized human, the wild child, and the satirist or writer of"satyrs." In this, he follows Bruno Latour's recommendation of a "nonmodern" stance that rather than attempting to isolate and purify the human, the animal, and the mechanical acknowledges and tolerates hybrid creatures that result from the inevitable intersections of these categories.

In successive chapters Nash combines analysis of elite or canonical literature with popular or satiric texts (most by the Scriblerians-Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, and John Gay) to explore the arguments and the implications of each about the differences and the overlapping among civilized humans, wild men, ape-men, and apes. The second chapter focuses on a set of pamphlets about Peter that appeared in 1726-27, especially It cannot Rain but it Pours (1726), which Nash argues is by Swift. This work satirizes both sides of a cultural opposition, for example, the popular mob that is fascinated with Peter, but also the court, which is criticized for being as ill-bred as Peter. The following chapter focuses on Crusoe, Selkirk, stories of related solitary figures, and the importance of language and of goats in such stories (and in the representation of satyrs). Chapter 4, on Gulliver, argues that Swift's portrait of the Yahoos draws on conventional depictions of orang-outangs, wild men, and feral children, but also that Gulliver himself must appear to the Houyhnhmns what a wild man was to civilized Europeans of the time. Swift's multivalent satire also implies an equivalence between the nonliterate Houyhnhmns and the "illiterate" (that is, non-English speaking) Germans ruling over England. The fifth chapter traces the increasing respect Samuel Johnson came to feel for James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, despite the latter's idiosyncratic view that orang-outans and humans are members of the same species-a view that may not seem quite as extreme now as it did two hundred years ago. In addition to discussing Frankenstein's creature as a wild child, the final chapter looks at Sir Oran Haut-Ton, an orang-outan who is also a member of Parliament in Thomas Love Peacock's Melincourt (1817), and whose silence is remedied by footnotes which allow Monboddo to argue for his own position; Peacock uses Mondobbo's views to satirize the British political and social system.

Nash has a sharp eye for the multivalence of satire, its ability to undermine both sides in a cultural or social opposition, and for the sustained relation of satire to the discourse of species in the eighteenth century. He also makes appropriate use of theories that are helpful to the argument, making reference to Jrgen Habermas, for example, but revising his formulations to include a popular public sphere that is not characterized as ideally rational. Latour's ideas about hybridity also help illuminate what Nash writes about the frequent crossings of the border between human and nonhuman in this period. Nash's work thus offers a thoughtful, learned, and lively reading of the interweaving of satire and science, high and low culture, and the literature of travel and of politics in thought about what is human and what is not in eighteenth-century Britain.

In their discussions of Frankenstein, both books agree in assigning greater culpability for his crimes to the creature than has been the case in some readings over the last two decades. Whether or not one adopts their position on this issue, they constitute a valuable complementary pair of accomplished works on relations between science and literature and on the boundaries of the human in the early modern period.

Frank Palmeri

University of Miami

Coral Gables, Florida

Copyright Indiana University-Purdue University Summer 2004

Source: Clio

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