Wild Child

   

The "wild child" of the forest has long been a staple of myth and folklore, and thus also of magical fiction ranging from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book to Wild Boy by Jill Dawson (for young adult readers) and Alice Hoffman's Second Nature (for adults). Though some historical tales of actual wild children have turned out to be hoaxes, others have been well documented and the occasional case, surprisingly, still arises today, such as this recent account of a boy living with wolves in central Russia.

Perhaps the most famous historical feral child was Victor, the Wild Boy of Avignon, discovered on a mountainside in France in the early 19th century. His teacher, Jean–Marc–Gaspard Itard, wrote an extraordinary account of his six years with the boy — a document which inspired Francoise Truffaut's film The Wild Child and Mordicai Gerstein's wonderful novel The Wild Boy. In an essay for The Horn Book magazine, Gerstein wrote: "Itard's reports not only provide the best documentation we have of a feral child, but also one of the most thoughtful, beautifully written, and moving accounts of a teacher pupil relationship, which has as its object nothing less than learning to be a human being (or at least what Itard, as a man of his time, thought a human being to be). . .. Itard's ambition to have Victor speak ultimately failed, but even if he had succeeded, he could never know Victor better or be more truly, deeply engaged with him than those evenings, early on, when they sat together as Victor loved to, with the boy's face buried in the man's hands. But the more Itard taught Victor, the more civilized he became, the more the distance between them grew." (You'll find Gerstein's full essay here; scroll to the bottom of the page.)

In India in the 1920s two small girls were discovered living in the wild among a pack of wolves. They were captured (their "wolf mother" shot) and taken into an orphanage run by a missionary, Reverend Joseph Singh. Singh attempted to teach the girls to speak, walk upright, and behave like humans, not as wolves — with limited success. His diaries can be read online here, and are fascinating if occasionally horrifying. Several works of fiction were inspired by this story, but the ones I particularly recommend are Jane Yolen's novel Children of the Wolf and Karen Russell's story "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" (in her collection of the same title).

For more about wild children I recommend Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children by Michael Newton. You also might be interested in my article in the JoMA archives: Lost and Found: The Orphaned Hero in Myth, Folklore, and Fantasy. There's a reading list of recommended fiction on page 3 of the article.

Art credits: The drawing at the top of this post is by Tang Sin Yun; you can see more of the artist's work here. The second drawing is by Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling.

Comments

[Maureen McQ]

Feral children are fascinating. Feral children actually show us what we think we are, socially, culturally. And children like Genie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) ) seem to end up more as pawns. They're such complicated mirrors.