Rewriting the Savage: The Extraordinary Fictions of the "Wild Girl of Champagne".

But for all its problems of generic impurity and invraisemblance, this work is remarkable in its unquestioning acceptance of the girl's human status. In the Histoire d'une jeune fille sauvage, LeBlanc's savagery cornes across as the documented, appropriate foreign customs of a people notoriously resistant (and vulnerable) to captivity. The girl's physical and mental decline in the hands of her captors is crucial to the author's suggestion that this re-education may have been yet another arbitrary act of noble prerogative and forced female socialization rather than the necessary "taming" of a wild beast. Denouncing the fickleness of noble patronage and the financially motivated Catholic sisters assigned to care for the wild girl, the author caustically remarks, "That Prince has undoubtedly received the reward of his charity in the other world; but in this [one] the unhappy LeBlanc received very little advantage from his good intentions" (56-57).

Such moral considerations remain conspicuously absent from "scientific" narratives of the wild girl until much later in the eighteenth century. Carl Linnaeus was the first to describe Marie-Angélique's physical and social abnormalities with the scientific terminology of natural history; he classified her in a taxonomy of human types. In the twelfth edition of his classic Systema naturae (1766), Linnaeus breaks down the genus Homo into two sub-genera: Homo nocturnus and Homo diurnus. Homo nocturnus, otherwise known as the "Troglodyte," refers to the chimpanzees, orangutans, and other anthropoid creatures reportedly sighted by early explorers in Africa and Asia, such as those fantastic creatures represented in Figure 2, which I will discuss below. [42] The other genus of man, Homo diurnus, comprises three species: the normative Homo sapiens, distinguished by its characteristic skin, temperament, and location as European, American, Asian, or African, followed by the inferior Homo monstrosus and Homo ferus. Homo monstrosus embraces a number of hotly debated human anomalies, such as the Patagonian giant, the dwarf of the Alps, and the monorchid Hottentot. Homo ferus, or "feral man," on the other hand, covers a number of unfortunate individuals whose existence was well documented. Distinguished by bestial traits such as muteness, quadruped locomotion, and hairiness, the Homines feri listed by Linnaeus include the wolf-boy of Hesse (juvenis lupinus hessensis), Peter of Hanover (Juvenis hannoveranus), and the wild girl of Champagne (Puella campanica). As befits the pared-down, technical style of this work, designed to demonstrate Linnaeus's innovative system of binominal nomenclature, these children are known only by artificial Latin names, with no mention of their peculiar histories or individual destinies (aside from indicators of sex and place of origin). After all, the function of a taxonomy (what Foucault calls a "disciplinary space of natural beings") is to characterize (and thus reduce individual singularities) and constitute classes. [43] Details would clutter the table.

FIGURE 2: From left to right: “Trogloodyte,” “Lucifer,” “Satyr,” “Pygmee.” From Linnaeus, “Anthropomorpha,” in Amoenitates academicae (Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius, 1763), 6:76. Courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University Libraries of Notre Dame.

The history of the wild girl's inclusion in the Systema naturae is interesting in itself as a reflection on the uncertain authority of eighteenth-century scientific discourse. Although Linnaeus's work achieved lasting fame (some claim it is Sweden's greatest scientific achievement to date) and was one of the most widely cited sources on natural history in eighteenth-century Europe, the author's views are not always consistent. The first edition (1735), published when Linnaeus was twenty-eight, comprises only ten or so folio pages. In it, the young naturalist announces his mission to rid science of legend and superstitions by demystifying the species Paradoxa or monsters. For each of the extraordinary creatures on this list, including the Hydra, the Satyr, the Frog-Fish, and the Phoenix, Linnaeus gives a new Latin name and a simple scientific explanation. For example, the tailed Satyr, he explains, that creature who is "hairy, bearded, with a manlike body, gesticulating much, very fallacious, is a species of monkey, if ever one has been seen." [44] This first edition creates the genus "Anthropomorpha" as a catch-all category for human and human-seeming creatures, including Homo (man, described as European, American, Asiatic, African), Simia (apes, including the "Satyrus"), and Bradypus (sloths). Twenty years later in the tenth edition (1758), when, as Linnaeus's biographer Knut Hagberg writes, "the book had swollen to a vast catalogue of all the plant and animal species known to Linnaeus," we find much that is new, such as the terms Mammalia, Primates, and Homo sapiens, and additional human species. [45] Homo nocturnus or "Troglodyte" (a kind of ape) now accompanies Homo diurnus (that is, Homo sapiens, Homo monstrosus, and Homo ferus), and six examples of "feral man" or wild children are given. The list of feral children grows to nine in the twelfth edition (1766), this time including the wild girl of Champagne or Puella campanica. But in the thirteenth edition (1788), the individual cases of Homines feri disappear, leaving only the generic classification and its normative description: "four-footed, mute, hairy." Clearly, the naturalist was working through his classifications over time, adding and correcting them as his ideas changed and information grew.