By Julia V. Douthwaite
A number of academic experiments didn't tame those feral teenagers through the criteria of the day. After telling their tales, Douthwaite turns to literature that displays on comparable experiments to ideal human matters. Her examples diversity from utopian schemes for revolutionary childrearing to philosophical stories of lively statues, from innovative theories of regenerated males to Gothic stories of scientists run amok. Encompassing thinkers akin to Rousseau, Sade, Defoe, and Mary Shelley, Douthwaite indicates how the Enlightenment conceived of mankind as an infinitely malleable entity, first with optimism, then with apprehension. Exposing the darker aspect of eighteenth-century inspiration, she demonstrates how advances in technological know-how gave upward push to troubling moral issues, as mom and dad, scientists, and politicians attempted to excellent mankind with disastrous results.
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Extra resources for The wild girl, natural man, and the monster : dangerous experiments in the Age of Enlightenment
Sample text
The courtiers’ reactions to Peter reveal their own foibles, not his deficiencies. 41 Although he may be stupid, and “behaveth like a dumb creature,” as one text declares, he “is a Christian like one of us” (It Cannot Rain, 471). Moreover, Peter proves superior to the English, especially to the “modern Men of Mode, who would be thought wise” (Mere Nature, title page). Savagery and degradation are thus projected onto England instead of his feral past, the latter being depicted as a version of the Orson legend of a child raised in the wilderness with a kindly bear-mother.
Called the “shepherd’s beast” (la bête du berger) on the d’Epinay estate, she was henceforth named MarieAngélique Memmie Leblanc. Her predilection for tree climbing and swimming, like her fondness for raw frogs and rabbit blood, was immediately discouraged. Forced to eat the institutional fare, she soon lost her teeth, which together with her fingernails were preserved as curiosities. More serious consequences followed: her once-robust health, weakened by the diet of cooked food and the sedentary lifestyle at the Hôpital (and later at convents in Châlons and Paris), was permanently damaged.
As the author concludes: “Such a plain coarse Piece of Work is a Man in the mere Condition he is born in, just coming out of Nature’s Hand: And, by Consequence, the Improvement of the Soul by Instruction, which we call Educating, is of the highest Importance” (68). By watching Peter struggle with language and complex ideas, “modern men of 23 chapter one Mode” are taught a humbling lesson about humanity’s origins as well as the value of true wisdom: the long, arduous process by which “mere Nature” receives the “help of Art to bring it to perfection of living” (61).
