A Noble Savage?

MADAME RACAMIER, the elegant French hostess, must have expected some sort of unique, charming ingenu when she invited the wild boy of Aveyron to dinner at her chateau in 1801. Most of Parisian high society would be there, from the future king of Norway to Napoleon's valet de chambre. But of her guests Madame Racamier chose to seat beside her the thirteen-year-old wild boy (called Victor), anticipating an evening of compliments from this new talk of the town. Victor hardly obliged. After devouring his own meal (and part of hers as well), he burgled a dozen desserts and scandalized the guests by racing bare-breasted through the manicured grounds.

As Harlan Lane points out in The Wild Boy of Aveyron, the child who grew up in the woods of central France entered a world of misconceptions when he surfaced in 1800. Philosophers expected him to fulfill Rousseau's ideal of the "Noble Savage," while a new breed of doctors eyed him for a test of behavior modification. So many ogling spectators filled the streets when Victor was first taken to Paris, in fact, that he became victor and began to bite the scores of outstretched hands.

Francois Truffaut's touching film, the Wild Child, has made the subsequent story well-known: a rising doctor, Jean-Marc Itard, took Victor in hand when other specialists gave up and tried unsuccessfully for five taxing years to teach the deaf-mute boy to use language. Apart from Itard's own account of his tribulations, no one has since returned to determine exactly why the wild child experiment failed. This is what Lane, a psychological from Northeastern, sets out to do. And beyond some amusing and touching anecdotes, he has produced much less a narrative history than a highly academic discussion of the psychological, linguistic and social issues involved in Itard's teaching techniques.

Itard's plan was to lead Victor into the world of ideas through the realm of his senses--to make him sensitive to the subtle stimuli of a controlled environment. After modifying Victor's sense of touch with daily baths and focusing his wandering gaze, Itard sought to teach him the connection between the look and feel of objects and their corresponding names. But even at this early stage Itard ran aground. Victor's senses responded only when food was involved: he turned to the sound of walnut being cracked but remained unflinching in the face of a deafening blast. Like many behavioral psychologists after him, Itard managed only to make Victor perform imitations, rather than conceptualize the significance of language and social behavior for their own sakes.

Yet given the abstruse and archaic state of medicine in France before the Revolution, Itard achieved a minor miracle in teaching Victor at all. The foremost doctors of the day were quick to declare Victor a congenital idiot and asked to banks him to the inhuman, rat-infested cubicles which served as the asylums of Paris. "He's not deaf and dumb because he was left in the forest, he was left in the forest because he was deaf and dumb," they said, and one rumor had Victor the illegitimate son of a provincial notaire who cast him into the woods to avoid the social embarrassment of raising a retarded bastard.

Lane has scrutinized the original accounts of Victor's case (his text in parts merely strings together documentary material), and he rejects the idiocy theory. Instead, Lane suggests that Victor became functionally autistic because of his isolation, and he faults Itard--I think rightly--for not providing Victor with more human contact during his training. Victor might have crossed that divide between programmed and self-motivated behavior, Lane argues, if he had discovered through his own initiative society's response to his actions.

This analysis, combined with Itard's step-by-step techniques, makes for a comprehensive and instructive study, particularly for those interested in language development and behavioral psychology. The Wild Boy of Aveyron ends, however, with a lengthy digression on the inspiration Itard's work provided for later educators--from the originators of sign language to Maria Montessori. Largely a name-and date-filled chronology of educational history, this last section detracts from both the narrative and pedagogical impact of the Wild Boy's story.

After half a decade of small advances and continual frustrations, Itard finally gave up on his work with Victor, who lived out his life, still animal-like, under the attentive eye of a Mme. Guerin, in Paris. Given the space Lane allots to "Itard's Legacy," he seems to feel that the young doctor's contribution to the science of education made his project a success. But Itard considered his work with Victor a total failure, preferring to be remembered for his invention of a sign language for the deaf. Bringing the wild child back into society had been the dream of Itard's youth, and one cannot help thinking that he would have spurned all this praise.