Nature without nurture
Brian Masters
SAVAGE GIRLS AND WILD BOYS: A HISTORY OF FERAL CHILDREN by Michael Newton Faber, £12.99, pp. 192, ISBN 0571201393 Here in fact are two subjects which evoke similar responses. On the one hand are those grotesquely abused children, mercifully very few, who are for wicked or misguided reasons locked up by their parents in tool-sheds or attics for years on end. Typical of these is Genie, the 13-yearold girl from a Los Angeles suburb who, when discovered in 1970, had been kept naked and chained to a potty-chair for 12 years, unable to move, seeing people only when food was shovelled into her face so that she could not chew, incapable of speech or communion, a piteous creature
reduced to a bent, grubby freak. Her father had wanted to protect her from the evil of this world.
On the other hand are those children who by happenstance find themselves living in the forest with animals and birds (only a couple of years ago a Muscovite child, Ivan, was found living with a pack of wild dogs, of which he was the pack-leader and they his protection and warmth). Their most celebrated representative is Victor — the Wild Boy of Aveyron — captured in 1800 in a state of rhapsodic primitiveness, having survived on roots and berries and prey for up to seven years, unable to speak or relate to his captors, fierce in his independence, biting and hissing to defend himself.
At first blush, they could scarcely be more different, Genie ruthlessly imprisoned, Victor glorious in his freedom; Genie taken from a dark dungeon, Victor plunged into one. But they have in common their oddness and apartness from human experience; both had been deprived of human contact and had therefore not evolved that acknowledgment of reciprocity which is the source of all social life from politeness to love; they existed only in themselves, as innocently egocentric as a newborn. They were tantalisingly locked in their silence. And each offered wonderful opportunities for analysis and philosophic pondering. The scientists and carers pounced, studying the poor children to distraction, until they grew up and ceased to be so fascinating,
Mr Newton is concerned not to examine them anew (there are perfectly adequate books on both, as well as on the other cases to which he alludes), but to test our responses to them. They evoke what he calls 'rescue fantasies', the unfocused notion that we can, given the chance, compensate for their incomplete lives by our love and attention. The people who cared for them, both in 19th-century France and 20th-century America, did so for splendidly noble reasons, wanting to do good, needing to open doors; in that sense the relationships between the children and their rescuers were love stories, as Newton points out very clearly. The love petered out when the children reached maturity because that kind of love requires a helpless, disadvantaged object, capable mostly of receiving (which, to be fair, Newton does not point out — he may disagree).
They also excite our unquenchable thirst for knowledge, the need to find out what a pre-human condition may be like and thereby learn more about what it is to be human. The wild child allows a glimpse into 'philosophical complexity', and at the same time affords the possibility for us to see ourselves as strange and new, in the same way as we are perceived by boys like Victor, and thence to question whether we are really so much better off than he is. The fans of Rousseau flocked to see this living specimen of the 'noble savage',
unsullied by the impurities of civilisation. In fact Victor was pretty obviously autistic, as is shown by his relentless rocking to and fro, his frantic running about, his sleeplessness, his gigantic selfishness, his passion for order, his avoidance of a direct glance, his untouchability and so on; this is probably why he had been abandoned in the first place. Of course the Romantics knew nothing of autism — how they would have been disappointed.
It does not take long to work out that the moral vacuity of the Savage Girl of California and the Wild Boy of Aveyron must indicate that morality is acquired, not innate, and that at least is a lesson worth learning. But the bigger problem is the responsibility of the rescuers. If with all the love that you lavish and all the experimentation you devote, your attempt to change fate nevertheless fails, you might be left with at best abject frustration, at worst some sort of guilt. Genie is still alive, in a home for helpless adults, and undoubtedly she is better off than when she was imprisoned; she is still not, however, quite 'human'. As for Victor, he never recaptured the happiness he had known before he was rescued. One is bound to ask, as the psychiatrist does to the audience at the very end of Peter Shaffer's play Equus, what, when you remove the essence and shape of somebody's life, do you replace it with? Is interference always justified?
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