Wolf Girl Research Articles

Wolf Girls and Mechanical Boys: Whiteness and Assimilation in Bruno Bettelheim’s Narratives of Autism

In March of 1959, public intellectual, principal of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School at the University of Chicago, and Jewish concentration camp survivor, Bruno Bettelheim published two articles that presented seemingly disparate narratives of autism. One of these narratives, that of the mechanical boy, has become ubiquitous in discussions of autism history. The other article centered on Bettelheim’s posthumous diagnosis of Kamala, who had been known as the Wolf Girl of Midnapore India due to claims that she was raised by wolves, as autistic. Bettelheim compared Kamala to other “wild” autistic children he had worked with, especially Anna, a Polish Jewish refugee who had spent her earliest years hiding in a dugout from Nazi persecution. This article argues that in order to understand Bettelheim’s portrayal of autism, it is necessary to read the narrative of the mechanical boy alongside Bettelheim’s other narratives of autism. Specifically, it is necessary to read it alongside Bettelheim’s narratives of the autistic child as “wild child/wolf girl,” as well as his comparison between autistic children and some of his fellow concentration camp inmates, who he referred to as “moslems.” While seemingly disparate, these narratives are actually deeply intertwined. These narratives of incurable “wild children” and “moslem” concentration camp inmates served as the necessary contrast to the rehabilitation/assimilation/cure narrative of the mechanical boy. Reading these narratives of autism alongside each other helps uncover the often-elided role of race in shaping professional and public understandings of autism. This article problematizes contemporary and historical formations of autism as a white, middle-class, male “disorder” by making explicit the role of race in the construction of early narratives of autism. This article will also argue that in the late 1950s and the 1960s Bruno Bettelheim used narratives of autism to promote a new model of white technocratic masculinity in the United States. The creation of this new model of white masculinity was bound up with the whitening of Ashkenazi Jewish identity. Bettelheim presented whiteness as something that Ashkenazi Jews in America could achieve through a process of rehabilitation/assimilation/cure that rid them of pathological “Jewish” traits.

The Wolf Girl, The Greeks and the Gods. A Tale of the Persian Wars (T.) Holland, Pp. 209, b/w & colour ills, colour map, London: Walker Books, 2023. Cased, £25. ISBN: 978-104063-9474-0

The Wolf Girl, The Greeks and the Gods. A Tale of the Persian Wars (T.) Holland, Pp. 209, b/w & colour ills, colour map, London: Walker Books, 2023. Cased, £25. ISBN: 978-104063-9474-0

Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and AnimeFrom Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West.

Japanese Mythology in Film: A Semiotic Approach to Reading Japanese Film and AnimeFrom Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West.

From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West by Mayako Murai, and: Japanese Animal-Wife Tales: Narrating Gender Reality in Japanese Folktale Tradition by Fumihiko Kobayashi

From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West by Mayako Murai, and: Japanese Animal-Wife Tales: Narrating Gender Reality in Japanese Folktale Tradition by Fumihiko Kobayashi

They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal

This essay tracks the reception of the story of the Bengali wolf girls, Amala and Kamala, in the American popular media of the 1940s. I argue that the terms of that decade’s debates are taken on some sixty years later when Bhanu Kapil, an Asian American poet, revisits the wolf girls’ story in her third book, Humanimal [a project for future children] . For commentators in the 1940s, animality is the ground condition for bodily health and normality, but it must also be transcended in order to achieve the normative future. Their analyses of the wolf girl Kamala’s failure to transcend her animality demonstrate the American scientists’ conflation of animality, coloniality, and disability. This same failure, however, makes Kamala valuable to contemporary American poetry’s representation of the nonsubject. Kapil’s poetic form counters the triumphant developmental narrative that American scientists hoped to impose on the wolf girl’s story. Instead, Kapil’s deliberately retrogressive text uses Kamala’s animality to make links between different experiences of animalization across colonial and postcolonial time. Rather than restore the wolf girls to lyric subjectivity and normative selfhood, Kapil inscribes a different relation among language, ethics, and species, creating a poetic form that corresponds to their non- or not-just-human being.

Kamala of Midnapore and Arnold Gesell's Wolf Child and Human Child: Reconciling the extraordinary and the normal.

This article examines the reception of the story of Kamala, the wolf girl of Midnapore, in the Anglo-American scientific community. Two aspects of the case are analyzed in detail: the controversy regarding the authenticity of the reports and the meaning of the evidence, and Arnold Gesell's (1941) psychological biography of Kamala, Wolf Child and Human Child. Although most scientists interested in wild children approach them with the expectation that these children might furnish the key to human nature and development, Gesell turned to Kamala for confirmation of a knowledge he already had. Gesell's obsession with Kamala is connected to his conception of development: He advanced an alternative interpretation in maturational terms to counter the prevalent environmentalist interpretation of the wolf girl, and he integrated her radical difference into his theory to prove its claim to be a truly universal account of childhood and growth.

About Ourselves. A Survey or Human Nature From the Zoological Viewpoint. By James G. Needham. With illustrations by William D. Sargent, Speciation. Defense Mechanisms in Plants and Animals. Biological Basis of Social Problems. Regeneration. Biological Symposia, Volume II. Edited by Jaques Cattell, The Varieties of Human Physique. An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology. By W. H. Sheldon with the collaboration of

About Ourselves. A Survey or Human Nature From the Zoological Viewpoint. By James G. Needham. With illustrations by William D. Sargent, Speciation. Defense Mechanisms in Plants and Animals. Biological Basis of Social Problems. Regeneration. Biological Symposia, Volume II. Edited by Jaques Cattell, The Varieties of Human Physique. An Introduction to Constitutional Psychology. By W. H. Sheldon with the collaboration of

Book Review Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl, based on the diary account of a child who was reared by a wolf and who then lived for nine years in the Orphanage of Nidnapore, in the province of Bengal, India . By Arnold Gesell, M.D. 4°, cloth, 107

Book Review Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl, based on the diary account of a child who was reared by a wolf and who then lived for nine years in the Orphanage of Nidnapore, in the province of Bengal, India . By Arnold Gesell, M.D. 4°, cloth, 107

Review of Wolf child and human child: A narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl.

Review of Wolf child and human child: A narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl.

Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of Kamala, the Wolf Girl, Based on the Diary Account of a Child Who Was Reared by a Wolf and Who Then Lived for Nine Years in the Orphanage of Midnapore, in the Province of Bengal, India

Wolf Child and Human Child: Being a Narrative Interpretation of the Life History of Kamala, the Wolf Girl, Based on the Diary Account of a Child Who Was Reared by a Wolf and Who Then Lived for Nine Years in the Orphanage of Midnapore, in the Province of Bengal, India

Wolf child and human child, being a narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl.

Wolf child and human child, being a narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the wolf girl.

Wolf Child and human child--A narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the Wolf Girl.

Wolf Child and human child--A narrative interpretation of the life history of Kamala, the Wolf Girl.