Modern Wild Children and Narratives of Scientific Progress

Raised by wolves, left in “the state of nature,” or otherwise separated from human society, so-called wild children came into being as a scientific category in eighteenth-century Europe. From Napoleonic France to 1990s America, natural philosophers and human scientists used wild children as sites of ostensibly origin-free knowledge. The iterative temporality of both wild child discovery and case-based scientific research facilitated the universalization of knowledge generated from atypical circumstances. This temporal pattern was particularly visible in representations of two modern wild children, Victor and Genie, whose cases were connected by François Truffaut’s 1970 film The Wild Child ( L’Enfant sauvage ). Researchers used representations of the past, including Truffaut’s film, to narrate what they understood as their scientific and ethical advancement relative to previous discoveries. Understanding these narratives provides a new perspective on how scientists have used history to validate knowledge claims.