FERAL INNOCENCE

THE HUMANITARIAN AESTHETIC OF DEMATERIALIZED CHILD LABOR

Taming the Wild Child

Few scenes capture the ascendency of the child as a humanitarian emblem, or the fantasies of domination and submission that animated this event, as dramatically as François Truffaut's rendition of the "rescue" of Victor of Aveyron in his film The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage), released in 1970. Truffaut's film narrates the story of Western humanitarian intervention using a cast of characters from its prehistory — disabled, abandoned children and emissaries of the state medical apparatus — and the fables that orchestrated the encounter between them. The setting is Enlightenment-era France. The film, we are told, is based on a "true story" that "begins in a forest in France in 1798," where a mute, naked, androgynous, and seemingly feral young child (played by Jean-Pierre Cargol, a French Roma nonprofessional actor) is hunted down by a group of villagers with dogs and torches. The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as the child becomes known in the papers, is forcibly transported to Paris, amid a series of escape attempts and violent altercations with his captors, to be studied as a specimen of a "wild child."

The scene in question takes place at the National Institute for Deaf Mutes, where the boy is evaluated by the resident physician, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, played by Truffaut, and Philippe Pinel, a physician at the state asylum at Bicêtre and a significant figure in the history of modern psychiatric medicine. Pinel pronounces the boy an "inferior being, lower than an animal," no different from the "idiots in [his] charge at Bicêtre," citing that the boy appears indifferent to human voices and vocal sounds. Itard, on the other hand, defends the humanity of the "wild boy." He argues that the boy's animallike sensory attunements (he responds to the sound of a nut being cracked behind him) may have developed in response to his abandonment and isolation, and could therefore offer insight into the condition of "an adolescent deprived since childhood of all education because he has lived apart from any individuals of his species." Itard offers to personally undertake the boy's education and care to prevent him from being consigned to Bicêtre in the manner of an animal.

Itard's invocation of "man in the state of nature" partakes of a frequent speculation among philosophers and scientists of the time, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus itemizes ten instances of Homo sapiens ferus, or "feral man," in the thirteenth edition of Systema naturae published in 1788, the most extensive of which are documented cases of "wild children." In this romantic mythography, cognitively and affectively impaired children such as Marie of Champagne, Peter of Hanover, and Victor of Aveyron (for whom the diagnosis of autism has been retrospectively proposed) were considered a species of wild children "raised by wolves," providing evidence of an anterior, innocent condition unsullied by human contact. The next few scenes from Truffaut's film are remarkable as an illustration of how the figure of the child served as a screen for the interlocking scientific and moral sentiments that ignited the therapeutic interventions of the nascent humanitarian state. The wild child is taken to Itard's country estate, where he is inserted into a nuclear family structure, with Itard in the role of the authoritarian father and Itard's housekeeper, Madame Guérin, as an indulgent, kindhearted mother figure. Here, Itard and Madame Guérin undertake a daily regimen of activities designed to civilize the wild boy. They bathe and clean him, straighten his posture and gait, accustom him to gender-appropriate clothing and shoes, teach him table manners, wear down his resistance to living indoors, develop drills to train his memory, and teach him how to read and speak — the biggest challenge of all, to which over thirty minutes of screen time are devoted. Itard trains the boy to respond to his directives using a system of incitements and punishments revolving around the boy's favorite treats, milk and water, so that they gradually become synonymous with Itard's affection for the boy, eliciting tears from the boy when either is withheld.

The brilliance of Truffaut's film lies in its way of amplifying the brutality of these perfectly ordinary scenes of childhood and family life. Itard's efforts to socialize and educate Victor have limited success. The language exercises that he forces Victor to relentlessly practice culminate in fits of frustration, startling acts of violence, and at least one attempted escape on Victor's part. Although the film does not cover this full period, we know from Itard's communiqués with the government that he would relinquish his experiment after five short years, admitting to the boy's "incurable dumbness" — Victor would die at the age of forty, while still in Madame Guérin's care. Truffaut's nostalgic visual aesthetic clings to Itard's romantic vision of the child even as it unravels. The black-and-white photography, reminiscent of early cinema, is punctuated by soft irises, accompanied by harpsichord music, that come to a close on Victor's cherubic face, his eyes gazing out a window toward the distant forests in an expression of longing. But this sentimental portrait of innocence is difficult to reconcile with Victor's violent and unpredictable behavior — the romantic fantasy of the so-called state of nature is shattered in one of the earliest scenes of the film, which features Victor in his forest milieu ruthlessly breaking a hunting dog's jaw.

Itard nevertheless clings grimly to his convictions, determined to redeem Victor's lost idyll using the same technological forces that he blames for the wild child's "fall" into civilization. If Itard falters in his resolve, he never shows it, reserving his doubts for rueful entries in his medical diary that confess the futility of his endeavor — a perpetual internal dialogue that becomes the voice of the film's guilty conscience: "I condemned the sterile curiosity of the men who had wrenched him away from his innocent and happy life." The film concludes on an ambivalent note: Victor has returned home after a pathetic attempt at escape, realizing that he no longer possesses the physical endurance to survive in the wild. It is difficult to resist Madame Guérin's infectious maternal joy, or Itard's renewed resolve to resume Victor's lessons the next day. As Victor ascends the stairs to his bedroom one final time, his enigmatic look backward at Itard — and by extension, at us — catches the spectator red-handed in identifying with Itard's humanitarian mission.

I begin with this reading of...