Kevin MacDonald, Ph.D.

CSULB, Department of Psychology

Genie

The world of feral children

By T. M. Luhrmann
The Times Literary Supplement
29 January 2002

Loneliness, Michael Newton tells us in this intriguing book, is the crucial experience of our culture and perhaps, he implies, of human nature. We want freedom and independence desperately, and just as desperately we fear abandonment. And so the child who grows up with the animals Mowgli or Tarzan in fiction, the feral child in scientific literature fascinates us, because such a child seems so lonely and yet to need no other people. Newton says that he was trying to write a dissertation on Victorian ghost stories when he saw Truffauts LEnfant Sauvage , a beautiful, haunting film about the relationship between a young physician and the speechless wild child he tried to educate. Then, in a house in Ireland, a beautiful, ramshackle, irresponsible Georgian house, beneath the mountain and close to the sea, a district social worker told him about a young boy kept, almost from birth, in a henhouse never learning language, never having much human contact, never receiving love a silent, strange, nightmarish world. Newton was caught.

Many myths tell of a child abandoned to the wilds who becomes a hero: Moses, Romulus, Oedipus, Karna. This book presents what we know of the history of those real children who stumbled out of isolation and into social life. They are remarkable stories, not only in their own right, but also because they embody the central romance of their age. In revolutionary France, the romance was about moral freedom. A Parisian naturalist who observed the wild child of Aveyron, crouched in a room, rocking to and fro, his eyes wandering restlessly, incapable of meeting another persons gaze, wrote sadly about the toll that civilization might take on the boys Rousseaust happiness. The path of your education will be sprinkled with your tears; and when your pristine soul turns again towards the azure vaults of the sky ... how many unknown passions will trouble your young heart! A young doctor, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, indebted to a philosopher who believed that human freedom could be realized only within society, set out to attach the boy (whom he called Victor) to other people.

In this he succeeded, and Itards memoir of the relationship has moments of great poignancy. But he failed, he thought, because he was unable to teach the boy to speak. Victor eventually acquired several words, and he had from early on a gestural system that enabled him to express his wants, but he was never able to do more. And yet Itard felt that he understood justice.

At first, not comprehending property, Victor stole without compunction. Itard punished him, and the stealing stopped. One day, curious about whether Victor only feared punishment, Itard punished him without a reason, and the boy struggled hard and bit him. What this moment showed to him, Newton claims, was that Victor possessed an innate human sense, a fiery and courageous desire for justice. In an instant, he had shown to Itard an unquenchable human heart.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the romance was childhood innocence. This was the era of Mowgli, wolf-child of the Imperial Indian forests, and throughout India there were stories of children abandoned at birth and raised in the forest by animals who suckled them and adopted them as their own. In 1920, the Reverand J. A. L. Singh, missionary to tribal peoples about eighty miles south of Calcutta, came on a village terrified of some ghosts living nearby in a wolf den. Singh waited with his men to exorcise these demons, and saw that they were in fact little girls despite their matted hair and brilliant, bestial eyes. He dug them out and took them back to an orphanage, where he named them Kamala and Amala, washed them, and fed them on milk which they lapped out of bowls, like dogs.

The two girls showed little interest in other people until Amala died. (Six days into the illness, they began to excrete thick red worms, each about six inches long, and many of them alive.) Then Kamala slowly began to respond to Mrs Singh, in particular, who rubbed her body and held her. Kamala slowly began to acquire words, and to urinate in the bathroom (at least while the Singhs were present). She lost nocturnal security and became wary of the dark. And then, eight years later, she died. But she had lived to prove the natural sinlessness of the uncorrupted child. Bishop Pakenhan-Walsh described Kamala thus: there was no malice, nor was there any fear ... nor, so far as I could ascertain, was there any trace of pride or of jealousy .... this fact seems to me to have a very pertinent bearing on the consideration of what we mean by Original Sin. By the late twentieth century, the romance was scientific. In 1970, a family aid centre discovered a child who had been isolated for thirteen years. She had lived in the back room of a suburban house, naked, strapped to a potty chair, beaten by her father, abandoned by her frightened mother. In the hospital, she stole, spat, masturbated continually, and she could not speak. This silence seemed to offer a rare opportunity to test new theories of human nature. Noam Chomsky had argued that grammar was an innate biological property of human beings, that beneath the surface of apparently separate languages was a universal structure. If Genie (the name the child was given) was not brain-damaged and still could not learn language, then this supposedly innate characteris tic could be disrupted. Another linguist, Eric Lennenberg, argued that humans had biologically a critical period for language acquisition, roughly between the ages of two and thirteen. If Genie could learn to speak, this theory would also be at risk. She didn't. She acquired a huge vocabulary, and could describe events that happened before she learned to speak: Father hit arm. Big wood. Genie cry .... Not spit. Father. Hit face .... But she could not use grammatical structure beyond this simple level. It is still not clear what this proved. She may have been caught outside the critical period; she may have had brain damage. In any event, the experiments stopped. Genie could not live by herself, and with her still unsocial behaviour, she could not live with a family either. She moved from foster care to adult care homes, as legal battles over who could house her and who could talk to her brought her education to an end.

The fact that Genie is famous for not learning to speak, rather than for learning to use language as richly as she did, reveals what is most disturbing about these stories. These are accounts of trauma and attachment failures, recognizably human individuals whose bodies, minds and souls seem profoundly stunted by their isolation. Newton badly wants to maintain the romance of these figures, but he shys away from the awfulness of their lives. We learn here that the human spark survives under appalling conditions and that communication is more complex and structured more gesture-driven than what we might recognize as language. We also learn by default how very much humans need each other.