Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model

Douthwaite, Julia V. Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model. Eighteenth-Century Life 21:2 (1997), 176-202. © Eighteenth-Century Life. Reproduced with permission.

Julia Douthwaite is author of The Wild Girl, Natural Man and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment

The wild man, Homo ferus, does not fit into any definitive category in eighteenth-century thought: for some he is a separate genus of mankind or a monster; for others he is a model of uncorrupted nature, an archetypal primitive. Just as the illustrators of the Encyclopédie gave delirious dimensions to ordinary objects, Enlightenment writers turned children found in the wild into the basis of zoological taxonomies, tales of sin and redemption, schemas of primitive society, or proof of human degradation. Often grouped with other marginal creatures such as deaf-mutes, madmen, savages, and apes, the wild man incarnates the challenge of human diversity for eighteenth-century thinkers. This essay analyzes French and British eighteenth-century representations of feral man, in particular the cases of Peter of Hanover, Marie-Angelique LeBlanc, and Victor of Aveyron,[2] and shows how the wild man became a figure of monstrosity when caught up in contemporary debates about primate speciation, human malleability (degeneration or perfectibility), and female sexuality.

Changing images of the wild man reflect an evolution from speculative, descriptive histoire naturelle de l'homme in the early eighteenth century to experimental sciences de l'homme in the nineteenth.[3] The history of this paradigm shift is complex and contradictory; throughout the period self-proclaimed proponents of the empirical "new science"—many of them medical doctors[4]—attributed physical phenomena to moral causes or animated scientific taxonomies with creatures of myth. Linnaeus' program is symptomatic. While he exemplifies the morphological exactitude of the new science in demystifying monsters of yore as ordinary animals and changelings as merely victims of a physical disease, Hieranosos,[5] he also relies on legend and hearsay in giving names such as "Satyr" and "Troglodyte" to the ape-like creatures in his Systema naturae.

The methodology used to forge a science of man was a matter of contention. For instance, when preparing his treatment of Victor of Aveyron, in 1800, Dr. Jean-Marc Itard dismissed all previous studies of wild children because of the "retarded progress" of the science of man, which was impeded by the "uncertainty of hypothesis" and "armchair" investigations. In turn, later physicians such as Edouard Seguin, advocating a method of "physiological education," would criticize Itard for what they saw as his sensualist overemphasis of the intellect and negligence of the body.[6]

Children found in the wild posed wrenching questions. Perceived as an indeterminate amalgam of humanity and bestiality, the Homines feri defied a central tenet of Enlightenment anthropology: the historical transformation of physical man and woman into moral man and woman, a narrative whose metamorphoses constitute the conjectural history of the human species.[7] Wild children also clouded the classifications of Enlightenment taxonomers, who felt obliged to explain the strangeness of the wild man. Drawing on human and primate morphology, Linnaeus posits the existence of a distinct species, Homo ferus, in his taxonomy; and Monboddo, who focuses on physiology and social habits, sees the wild man as the "missing link" in his proto-evolutionary theories.

Recognizably human yet strangely amoral, the wild man's stunted sociability would elicit many a scheme for improvement through education, and inspire many a paean to civilization's triumph over brute nature. Gradually, however, histories of man's progress from le physique to le moral would give way to theories conflating the two into the physical.[8] Just as medical science began to rely on a distinction between normal and pathological states of the body (diseases and abnormalities), anthropology increasingly drew on material data such as facial angles and brain weights to distinguish Caucasian racial characteristics from supposedly inferior traits (especially Negroid).[9] Consequently, whereas earlier observers had hoped to discover secrets on human origins, the doctors who examined Victor of Aveyron considered him as a pathological case, a patient to be cured or institutionalized.