Nature's Experiments, Society's Closures

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Reproduced from Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour with kind permission of the author.

The Public Broadcasting System's Nova special, The Secret of a Wild Child (1994), tells us in a brief aside that Jean Butler, one of Genie's caretakers, proposed that she would be Anne Sullivan (presumably by implication to Genie's Helen Keller). This, which I think derives from a paragraph in Rymer (1993[22]), is the only reference in the record that suggests such a model for the treatment of Genie, and the physicians who presided over the case brushed aside Jean Butler's attempt to play such a role (she was not a physician researcher but a mere special education teacher). The first book written about Genie — Genie: A Psycholinguistic Story of a Modern-Day 'Wild Child' (Curtiss, 1977[2]) — makes no mention of Sullivan or Keller. Rather, Curtiss, in her book's subtitle, and in her preface, makes explicit the comparison of Genie to the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Victor, and she also highlights and quotes with evident approval, physician / scientist J. Itard's remarks about what he hoped to find out in his work with Victor.

If it were proposed to solve the following problem of metaphysics: to determine what would be the degree of intelligence and the nature of the ideas of an adolescent who, deprived from his childhood of all education, had lived entirely separated from his childhood of all education, had lived entirely separated from individuals of his own species… the mental picture of this adolescent would be of the Wild Boy of Aveyron, and the solution of the problem would consist in exhibiting the extent and cause of his intellectual state. (Itard, 1801[8]/1932, p. 7[10])

The clear emphasis is on what great discoveries may be made, with the education of the feral or isolated child seen primarily an opportunity to reach this end. Curtiss' book, rather more formal than but not unlike Itard's two reports on Victor (Itard, 1801[8], 1807[9]), is a scientific account of Genie's development during the four years when Federal grants provided support, with particular emphasis on language acquisition. Genie: An Abused Child's Flight from Silence (Rymer, 1993[22]) eloquently examines the way in which the imperatives of research, career, competition, and culture hype apparently conspire, sometimes in eerie parallel with Victor's case, to contrive a tragic fable, one Rymer assembles, narrates, and meticulously witnesses, a real world fable as compelling, instructive, and ambiguous as Mary Shelley's fictional one, Frankenstein: or a Modern Prometheus.

We have three cases here: Victor, Helen Keller, and Genie. Wild children are, necessarily, anecdotal: the experiment is indeed forbidden, and so comes about unplanned and usually unobserved, the exceptionally anomalous product of isolation, abuse, disease, or major deficiencies, or some combination of these (in Helen Keller's case alone we have a careful record of what preceded isolation and what occurred during it). But there is a wealth of insight in these cases and some moral instructions as well. Equally, there is much to be gleaned from society's reactions to, and closures, of such cases. There is the excitement, the fascination, of learning what is nature, or natural, as opposed to society's provisions and habituations; but with this the powerful unconscious demand that what is so revealed abet and strengthen "common sense" and current "scientific" views about what is, or is not, natural — And so there is both a sedulous attempt to see only the morally uplifting or theoretically appealing aspects of the data, and a tendency to blot out contrary data either by ignoring it or terminating data collection. There is also the imperative of institutionalized scientific research, which is necessarily difficult to disentangle from the career imperative of particular investigators. Victor made Itard as much as Itard, Victor. Genie made Curtiss as much as, or perhaps rather more than, Curtiss affected Genie. And, as Mark Twain hyperbolically insisted, Anne Sullivan became one person with Helen Keller.

The difference, or at least one difference, was that Anne Sullivan, "Teacher," had no future except in the success of her pupil's miraculous development, not in a scientific understanding or study of her peculiarities and limitations. Helen Keller was Sullivan's twenty-four hour a day life time project, those who briefly replaced her, for example in spelling Harvard lectures into Keller's hand, found the work unbelievably exhausting and tedious. Rymer makes it difficult to avoid the picture of Victor and Genie as invaluable specimens taken by zealous and ambitious researchers, who of course have many other time commitments and perhaps no particular talent as nurturing saviors, and as specimens were discarded when the research, and in Genie's case the grant money as well, stalled. If there is a difference it is that Itard faced the harder case, made better moves, and achieved a happier closure, while the crew who dealt with Genie faced a more intelligent, even gifted, child, and temporarily helped or perhaps allowed Genie to achieve much, only to have this fragile and flawed effort collapse, leaving Genie if anything far worse off than Victor. Keller, a bright normal child, became totally blind and deaf in her eighteen month. After an isolation in which her behavior became increasingly pathological, Sullivan took charge of her toward the end of her seventh year and painstakingly introduced her to finger spelling and through it, language. Keller was to master several languages, attend Harvard, graduate with honors from Radcliffe College, and go on to write fourteen books, countless articles, fund raise and agitate for an extraordinary number of causes, and, surviving Sullivan by thirty years, become an ambassador to the world.