wolf-child

wolf-child Interest in whether the essentials of being human are given to us by nature or by nurture has a long pedigree. So does a concern with distinguishing the human from the bestial. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century bc, told the story of twins brought up in isolation as an experiment to determine which language would be spoken ‘naturally’ by a child. One of the foundation myths of Rome, dating at least to the fourth century bc, claims that the twins Romulus and Remus, fathered by Mars, the god of war, were left to die by their wicked uncle, but were suckled by a wolf before being discovered by a herdsman and going on to establish the city of Rome. In Roman culture the wolf was sacred to Mars, and the cave of the she-wolf at the foot of the Palatine hill became a sacred place associated with the festival of the Lupercalia, which concerned fertility and ritual purification and survived until the end of the fifth century ad, when it was transformed into the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.

Romulus and Remus were destined to rule, and the story of their exposure to die is one of many in which the abandoned child comes back from the animal world to show that destiny cannot be averted. The myth did not, however, deal with the wider issue of whether our essential humanity can be lost. But many stories exist of children who spent years living with wild animals before being brought back into human civilization, where they needed to be taught to speak, to walk upright, to wear clothes, and to eat cooked foods. Interest in such events peaked in the eighteenth century; Wild Peter of Hanover was discovered in 1724, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the wolf-boy of Hesse, who lived in the wild for four years before being found in 1344, as the model for his ‘natural man’. Carl Linnaeus included Homo sapiens ferus as a subdivision of Homo sapiens in later editions of his classification of living beings. In 1801 the physician Jean-Marc Itard published the case of the wild boy of Aveyron, later named ‘Victor’, who — as the chosen name suggests — successfully conquered the wildness of his habits and learned to walk and to speak. Itard used Victor to study the development of the senses. The famous case of two girls, Kamala and Amala, who were supposed to have been discovered living with wolves by the Revd Joseph Singh near Midnapore in the 1920s, remains controversial; with the anthropologist Robert Zingg, Singh published Wolf-Children and Feral Man (1942), but the loss of most of Singh's diary has fuelled speculation that although Kamala and Amala may have lived in the wild, they were not in fact raised by wolves. Singh and Zingg claimed that the wolf-children used parts of the body which are no longer used by ‘civilized’ people; for example, Kamala's ears are said to have trembled when she was afraid. Stories of feral children may be a way of accounting for autistic behaviours: Bruno Bettelheim has also argued that these stories show our wish to believe in a beneficent nature which cares for all creatures.

Other animals are alleged to have brought up human children; these include bears, sheep, pigs, cattle, and even leopards. Among fictional accounts, the most famous are Edgar Rice Burroughs' stories of Tarzan, which generated a series of films beginning with Tarzan of the Apes (1918). For sixteen years, Tarzan was played by the Olympic swimming champion Johnny Weissmuller. An English aristocrat brought up by apes to become lord of the jungle, the original Tarzan shows that the natural superiority of the English upper classes even triumphs in the wild; in most of the Tarzan movies, however, he is a simple, gentle, and child-like man baffled by the unnecessary trappings of civilization. Here too, then, the motif of the child raised by animals can be used either to show the victory of human characteristics or to suggest the moral superiority of the animal kingdom.

Helen King