Feral and "Wild" Children

Abstract

The term feral children has been taken as applying to those who have endured three very different kinds of childhood experience. In one case, the term covers “children of nature,” that is, those who have lived in a solitary state in the countryside. Closely related to such individuals are those children who have been reared for a while by animals, most notably wolves or bears, though there are also tales of children suckled by gazelle, pigs, sheep, cows, and so on. Yet, the phrase has also been applied to children who have been confined to long periods of isolation within human society, locked up in rooms or dungeons. The common denominator in these tales is the experience of an absolute solitude, the absence of caring human parents, and, very often, the deprivation of language that results from that solitude. As such, for centuries these children have been an object of fascination to philosophers interested in human development, the inception of the political realm, and the origin of language. In more recent times, they have been the subject of study by linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Whether “wild children” have truly existed is a matter of some interest; more important here is what they stand for, the ideas and philosophies they evoke, and the fantasies that their supposed existence nurtures. Outside the English-speaking world, the idea of feral children is especially important in French- and German-language texts. However, this bibliography limits itself to sources in English, including translations of Arabic, Latin, French, and German works. Feral children have been central to a number of literary works, from William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1610–1611) to Thomas Day’s The History of Little Jack (1788), and from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books (1895–1896) to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Authors have in several instances turned true stories of feral children into fiction, as with Jakob Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser (1908), Catherine Mary Tennant’s Peter the Wild Boy (1939), and Jill Dawson’s novel based on the Wild Boy of Aveyron, Wild Boy (2003). Similarly, several excellent films have been produced on the subject, such as François Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (1970), Werner Herzog’s Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (1974), and a number of other successful works, such as Michael Apted’s Nell (1994) or even the Disney-animated classic, The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman 1967). It is beyond the scope of this bibliography to make full mention of these works; however, it is clear that they demonstrate that a fascination with feral children goes beyond the limits of academic discourse.