"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by Michael Newton

"Savage Girls and Wild Boys" could be seen as one of those bait-and-switch "cultural histories" academics write nowadays. (Newton teaches at University College London.) Such books promise marvel-filled true stories and original research about some intriguing subject but deliver a bookish survey of the literature and potted analysis about What It Means to Us with the obligatory clucking over previous ages' attitudes toward race, class, etc. Newton's book has a bit of that. He's only clapped eyes on one wild child -- a Ugandan boy, who at age 3 fled the hut where his father had murdered his mother and lived in the bush with a family of monkeys for three years -- and then only glimpsed the kid across the room in a London church. He tried to learn more about Ivan, the Russian boy, but the authorities stonewalled him. It's frustrating that, given the existence today of actual former feral children, so much of Newton's book concerns accounts written hundreds of years ago.

How much, after all, can we credit contemporary reports of Peter the Wild Boy, discovered roaming the forests of Hanover, England, in 1725, when a year later the same observers were abuzz with the news that a woman had "given birth to a warren of rabbits"? Fortunately, Newton is a supple, intelligent writer, more an essayist than a scholar -- and frankly, a lot of the European men of science drawn to cases like Peter's are nearly as outlandish and colorful as the feral children themselves.

One, a "keen philosopher" named Sir Kenelm Digby, fed his wife snake venom "in the belief that it would preserve her beauty," thereby killing her. Caspar Hauser's patrons and chroniclers included a German jurist with literary ambitions who wrote lurid popular accounts of sensational trials and an English earl whose choleric amateur scientist father apprenticed him to a blacksmith in lieu of educating him and tested a hypothesis about combustion by setting 80-foot flames around a wooden house full of his friends. Intellectuals of the time seemingly believed anything they were told -- that orangutans could be taught to speak and that Eskimos were covered with hair and worshipped fire, for example.

These thinkers all saw in feral children an opportunity to examine "essential humanity deprived of all inherited knowledge" and untainted by the "corruption" that supposedly accompanies exposure to civilization. Some believed, more or less along the lines of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs and French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that a "wild, untamable and free" youth would bring out man's innate nobility. Others saw this "state of nature" as one of "vacuity and barbarism, an empty, ugly and unmeaning condition of entrapment."

Caspar Hauser's keepers believed that he "lived for a time in the light of direct and unmediated experience. If natural feelings created truthfulness, then ... Hauser existed absolutely truthfully: his unnatural life made him completely natural." Hauser's acute sensitivity, one of his more Romantic associates thought, put him among "an elite of feeling, distinct from the leaden sensibilities of ordinary citizens."

But, as the more recent and better documented cases suggest, children are stunted and numbed by a life of isolation, not liberated or fine-tuned emotionally. At best, those kids who grow up in the wilderness are fast runners and have, for a while, better night vision, but they strike most of those who encounter them as "curiously empty." They tend to die young, as well. There is something dense about Rousseau's idea that the original and pure human condition is one of solitary bliss. (And that's not the stupidest of his ideas, either.) It is surely in the nature of human beings to be social, and to be shaped by the societies we inhabit. In paraphrasing the 19th century anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Newton writes, "a wild, solitary individual tells us nothing more about human nature than a wild, solitary bee would tell us of the habits of bees."

Nevertheless, our own era abounds in those who insist that environment -- which is really just an abstract term for other people and the way they behave -- has little effect on the kind of human beings we turn out to be; genes are everything, or close to it. In their own way, these biological determinists adhere to an idea of "human nature" that's as simplistic as Rousseau's, however much they condemn his concept of the human being as a blank slate. The handful of crushed lives described in the histories of feral children, or for that matter in the histories of severely abused people of any kind, demonstrate how easily our own humanity can be nearly erased by terrible circumstances.

Newton ends "Savage Girls and Wild Boys" by challenging the notion that it is language that makes us human. Even these children, he observes, deprived of language and emotionally stifled, can awaken a protective if unrequited love in others. Therefore, "there is indeed an essence that makes us human -- though every practical attempt to define that essence ends in failure." Perhaps, but animals can elicit a similar kind of love, and from his own book we learn that animals have been known to bestow the care and nurturing upon human young that we have neglected to give ourselves. That's what makes the Capitoline Wolf such an uncanny sight. If the fiercest of canines, that formidable predator, can sometimes surprise us with its gentleness, then why should we, the most malleable of creatures, ever stop believing we can be better than we are?

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