The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment: a review by Martin S. Staum, University of Calgary, for H-France, November 2002.
The second chapter discusses "animated statue models" by which Condillac, Buffon, and Bonnet portrayed the awakening of a statue, one sense at a time, to full awareness and the capability of thought. The author persuasively argues that such doctrines, based on the refinement of sensibility, could disqualify both women and the socially disadvantaged from full citizenship. Someone with weakened sensibility (women) or lack of the necessary sense experience might be judged incapable of political analysis. However, the general argument assumes that sensationist models viewed humans as automata. Contrary to this claim, Condillac was no materialist and argued that humans could repress their passions, especially through the power of salutary habit formation.[3]
The third chapter discusses Rousseau's Emile, along with the novels of Gaspard Guillard de Beaurieu (Elève de la nature, 1763) and abbé Henry-Joseph Dulaurens (Imirce, 1765). The neglected, posthumously published sequel to Emile recounts the seduction of Sophie and the moralistic abandonment of mother and child by Emile, as if Rousseau were repudiating his entire system. In citing the admittedly manipulative nature of all these systems, the author argues that materialism was at the root of their diabolical nature. Clearly, however, since Rousseau himself was not a materialist, it does not follow that one had to be a materialist to be manipulative. Dulaurens seems more a likely parodist than a disciple of Rousseau. His pornographic novel of the erotic awakening of a couple controlled by a ruthless captor was one of the publications that led a church court to sentence him to life in prison.
In this and later chapters, the author seems to reiterate the view that materialism created the conditions for a horrific Sadean outcome, in line with the older interpretations of Lester Crocker.[4] This argument could be reformulated more convincingly to state that materialists attempted to establish a natural morality. When Sade called their bluff by pointing out that "nature" was no foundation for morality, atrocious behavior could result. It simply will not do, however, to imply that materialists in general, including those who wrote interminably about "virtue," such as Helvétius, d'Holbach, Cabanis, and even Diderot, just paved the way for Sade.[5] These authors were very far from an amoral orientation. Nor did utilitarianism necessarily imply approval of willful torture or experimentation upon human subjects.
Certainly one of the most engaging sections of the work (the fourth chapter) concerns real-life experiments, at least partly inspired by Rousseau. The characters discussed include Richard Lovell Edgeworth as a father, Thomas Day, Manon Roland, Mme. de Genlis (her novel Adèle et Thèodore, 1782), and Edgeworth and his daughter Maria, who co-authored the earnest manual of Practical Education (1798). Edgeworth soon blamed Rousseau's theories for the failure of his son to develop social skills. Thomas Day attempted to inure his adopted daughter, Sabrina Sidney, to fear and pain by firing pistols at her and melting hot wax on her arms. There was also a gendered aspect to the projects of Day and Manon Roland, who viewed the girls in their households as young Sophies, fit only for specifically feminine skills. The novel of the more religious Mme. de Genlis embodied a "panoptic maternal authority" (pp. 149-150). The politically conservative Edgeworths also perpetuated the stereotype of the self-effacing woman and fashioned an educational project that carefully controlled the library and the environment. Douthwaite argues that none of these plans allowed free play to the child's imagination or time for "irrational" diversions (p. 159). The gender bias limiting young women to the aspirations of Rousseau's Sophie seems obvious. Should the inevitability of dire consequences in these educational schemes all be traced to Emile? Educators such as the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi also claimed inspiration from Rousseau. Despite his ferociously precise, timetabled school day, Pestalozzi's signal contribution was an attempt at an atmosphere of emotional security for the child.
The fifth substantive chapter, "Utopian Politics and Dystopian Fictions," evaluates the French revolutionaries' literature of "regeneration" as the individual education plan writ large for the nation. The discussion of the educational proposals of Condorcet and Lepeletier covers familiar ground and presents a rather monolithic view of the Revolution. For Douthwaite, a conviction of individual malleability leads inexorably to social engineering of the worst kind, which in turn leads to the Terror. Aside from the questionable view of revolutionary discourse as a bloc, there are over-generalized claims, such as "(the) revolutionaries learned too late that civic virtue cannot be legislated into existence, and energy cannot be harnessed toward a given goal" (p. 164). There are few enthusiasts these days for severing people's heads in the name of Virtue, but one cannot help thinking that a bit of legislated civic virtue could spare us an Enron or two.
