A Feral Child and the Fringes of Human Knowledge
The Forbidden Experiment: The Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron by Roger Shattuck, with introduction by Jed Perl (New York Review of Books, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
The Forbidden Experiment is about one of the most fascinating true stories of all time. In 1800, a wild boy was captured in France. He was nearly naked, could not speak, was maybe around twelve or a little older, and lived like an animal. He was insensitive to cold and heat, indifferent to sounds and language, and fond of water, potatoes, and nuts. After a few months, passing through a few different hands, he was sent to Paris, where he fell into the care of a brilliant young doctor, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, and a kind woman, Madame Guérin. Together Itard and Guérin cared for the boy and Itard sought to restore his humanity. They called the boy Victor.
Victor’s circumstances and confusing humanity made him a fit for what was and is considered “the forbidden experiment.” That experiment would be to take a human infant and raise it in the absence of humans and human culture—what would the result be? Such an experiment would potentially answer some of our deepest questions about human nature. Are we born a blank slate or are we born with language? Where would our natural reasoning ability take us? Such an experiment would seem to allow us to distinguish between the aspects of our nature that are cultural or societal or taught and those that are truly natural. The experiment is forbidden because it is unethical. Occasionally, a child emerges—sometimes feral, sometimes the victim of abuse—that allows us to see what the experiment might yield. Victor is perhaps the best example, in part because he was truly feral when he was found and, in part, because Itard studied him so scientifically and put so much time and effort into educating him.
While many hoped that Victor would yield dramatic findings, he remained something of a cipher. Itard and Guérin taught him to wear clothes, use a chamber pot, and do some basic reading and writing. He learned to sleep in a bed, became sensitive to temperature, and he was able to communicate with motions and gestures. He developed emotional responses. Initially, it seemed possible that he would transform from wild man to civilized man. Victor made great progress, but then he stopped progressing. He never learned to speak and he was unable to cope with the challenges of puberty and sexual impulses, when he did not know how to satisfy them. While Itard taught him to pay attention and interpret his surroundings and, perhaps, to have an understanding of justice, Victor never learned pity and may never have transcended an egotism that suits an animal better than a human. He never fully integrated into human society and he could never share his thoughts or reveal his experiences.
What does it all mean? What can we learn from this boy, unable to share his own story in his own time, much less represent himself in the historical record for the benefit of our time? In The Forbidden Experiment, the critic Roger Shattuck mostly presents a historical account of Victor’s life and education, with direct translations from Itard’s reports. But Shattuck also clearly identifies that among the theories about Victor’s inhuman behavior and inability to speak—autistic, developmentally delayed, victim of an unknown injury—Itard’s own conclusions are not only possible, but worth pondering deeply. While many others believed that Itard “trained a true idiot to adapt to society beyond all previous expectations; he believed he had trained a boy whose isolation from society made him act like an idiot” (165). As Shattuck emphasizes, Itard believed isolation made Victor a wild man. The absence of human company, not the presence of an ailment, could be the cause of his inability to speak. We need others in order to be human.
Itard’s efforts and observations constantly point us to seeming boundaries of humanity. Victor never learned to relate to other people as similar to himself. Shattuck writes that “partially because he could not easily conceive of other states of mind outside his own, Victor could not reach a point of view from which other persons’ lives and happiness had reality and importance for him” (151). Can we be human if we cannot recognize the humanity of others? At times, Victor would seem to be melancholy and pondering while looking at a pond or out into nature during a storm, but we have no way of knowing what he was really thinking and if it could even be expressed in words. What was his consciousness like? Did his inability to speak mirror an inability to comprehend the world through language?
Victor never truly assimilated to human company and he continued to behave in ways not recognizable as fully human. We use the term “uncanny valley” to talk about artificial things that make us uncomfortable because they seem too real and nearly human. Victor was human, but he was uncannily like an animal, to the end. Despite the significant progress Itard and Guérin made, as Shattuck puts it, “the Wild Boy’s bestial behavior implied that his mind worked in ways totally unfamiliar to socialized people” (172). Victor’s case raises questions about the distinctions between humans and animals and the importance of certain developmental stages in establishing those distinctions.
The “Wild Boy of Aveyron” is fascinating to every generation, but the New York Review of Books has chosen a good moment for this edition of The Forbidden Experiment. As we seem to be slipping into something of a post-rational and post-scientific era and as we approach the semiquincentennial of the United States, we are due for some reconsideration of the Enlightenment. There are new books out about Kant and Leibniz. Victor and Itard help us revisit Locke and Condillac. Victor also raises the question of the relationship between our humanity and human society, a central question for many Enlightenment figures, including Rousseau.
Shattuck suggests that a case like Victor’s points us back to our deepest human desires, “the desires to destroy and to create” (180). We also wonder what Victor’s life outside society was like because we have “an intermittent yet powerful longing to escape from our lives” (180). We don’t exactly want to be living on roots and nuts and raw potatoes, but Victor “appears to have been utterly unconcerned with power and status, with ego and sex. That eerie moral weightlessness in his story evokes dreams and yearnings familiar to us all” (182). That yearning has made some people wonder if it was right to bring Victor in from the wilderness. Enkidu was socialized to be a companion to Gilgamesh. He lost his connection to the animals, but he had a full life. What did Victor get from it?
Questions about the nature of humanity are timeless, but they are also always timely. Around five hundred years ago, the questions were timely because they helped determine how the peoples in Africa and the Americas would be treated. Different definitions of humanity could yield very different political and social realities. In our time, questions about Artificial Intelligence are closely linked to questions about humanity. What distinguishes humans and human consciousness from other consciousness? Who is deserving of human rights, and why? What parts of humanity, or human society, cannot or should not be outsourced to machines or machine intelligence?
In The Forbidden Experiment, Shattuck also points us to the advancement of knowledge and how that should be linked to humanity. Itard was operating in a time when science and observation were embraced and encouraged. Knowledge was advancing quickly and many barriers were broken down—Itard worked closely with Sicard, who worked with the deaf and mute and did so much to advance sign language. Itard himself founded a medical specialty, “otorhinolaryngology, the study and treatment of ear, nose, and throat” (71). His educational techniques with Victor and with the deaf and mute shaped special education and Montessori education as we know it. Itard’s work even laid a foundation for behavior modification. But men like Sicard and Itard also saw human beings and worked closely and relationally with them. Itard spent years with Victor, hours almost every day, and was emotionally affected by the boy. Shattuck emphasizes the way in which Itard believed in tailoring education to the individual, claiming that Itard’s training for Victor “is only distantly related to behavior modification as a method” because of its emphasis on the individual (113).
The portrait of Itard, dedicated to the advancement of science and concerned with philosophy and also working closely and relationally with individual subjects is more compelling than what we often get today. All too often we get the practitioner, who does not improve the field, or the scientist who does not work much with people. Itard’s efforts reveal ambition, but his work also involved affection. Itard even had an ability to connect the questions about vocal cords and shape training with an individual to the big questions, about humanity. With Itard at the center, no wonder this story was attractive to Roger Shattuck. In the introduction, Jed Perl describes Shattuck as someone, like Lewis Mumford, who believed “that one person can master many subjects, not only art and literature but history, sociology, psychology. They saw these subjects as intimately if not always self-evidently related, each the expression of some larger cultural experience that Mumford and Shattuck had the courage (or was it the audacity?) to try to define” (xv). It may be audacity, but ability to show the ways in which close study points back to deep questions with wide relevancy is the kind of audacity we could use more of today. Hopefully this new edition of The Forbidden Experiment will encourage some people to speak that language.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
