Reading Questions for The Wild Boy of Aveyron by Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard (in HCC Reader) and Truffaut’s The Wild Child

A useful site on Itard: http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/itard.shtml. There are many useful sites on Truffaut.

1. What is the doctrine of innate ideas (3, 4)?

2. The film begins with sounds only from nature—there is no speech for some time.   Why do you think Truffaut made that decision?

3. Why do you think the hunting scene is important? What about the scene of smoking the child out of his hole?

4. What is the effect of the boy’s anxiety as he thrashes in the hay (in the film)?

5. In Paris, what sort of institution does Victor stay in?  

6. What was the condition of Victor’s senses when the medical survey was recorded (5, ff)?

7. What makes Victor an object of curiosity?

8. Is Victor an object of pity (or sympathy)?

9. Write out Itard’s 5 aims in your own words.   What sort of program do they seem to add up to (8)?

10. What is sensibility, and why is it central to the “experiment” on Victor?  

11.   What do Victor’s scars suggest to Itard (7)? Which scar is different? And what is its significance (17)?

12.   What terms in Itard’s description and what film images point to Victor’s likeness to an animal?   What are early signs that Victor is human?

13.   What do you think Victor’s responsiveness to rain, moonlight, snow, rivers,

14.   How would you characterize the music in Truffaut’s film?

15.   What is a “Leyden jar” (11).   And what does Itard do with it?

16.   Victor is a fairly time-intensive child.   How would you describe the set-up of this experiment?

17.   What does “lait” mean (18)?   And why does Itard feel such a sense of satisfaction in getting Victor to articulate it?   Why is Itard disappointed?   What skill gets in the way of Victor’s learning language? What other word does Victor acquire (19)?   How does the next experiment with “lait” work (25)?

18. What is “Sicard’s method of instruction” (21)?   Can you tell from Itard’s description?

19. Describe the progression of Itard’s lessons (21-22).

20. How does Itard use Victor’s fear and why?  Does it work (24)?

21. Paraphrase Itard’s summary of Victor’s condition at the end of his first report.   You can draw on the narrative (26) and on the film.

22. How does Itard characterize the state of nature (26)?

23. How would you characterize the tone of the opening address to Itard’s second report (27).   How would you estimate his achievement or lack of it?

24. What does Itard mean by saying that he is “indebted to the works of Locke and Condillac” (28)?

25. What turns out to be the problem when Victor looks for various items and finds himself unable to reach his room to find them (38-9).

26. Itard uses terms like “creep painfully” and “retrace our steps” (42).   What can you say about the project from these metaphors? Find other metaphors in Itard’s report and see what you can say about them.

27. How would you describe Victor’s emotional progress?

28. Itard describes Victor’s troubling approach to puberty (49).   What would you have suggested for handling this problem?

Discussion Questions for The Wild Boy of Aveyron and The Wild Child

1. Victor was “discovered” toward the end of the 18 th century and lived steadily in human society after 1800.  What does Victor's story (as presented by Itard and Truffaut) suggest about the "enlightenment," the period in which he lived?

2. “[M]an is only what he is made” (Itard, 3).   Apply this statement to Itard’s reports and to the film.   Does it fit?   Explain.   If you believe that people are only what they are made, what sort of responsibility does the family have?   the state?

3. The wild boy was found naked, and it required a lot of effort to get him to wear clothes.   Why are clothes so important?   What is the significance of nakedness? Is it possible to compare clothing and nakedness in this story with the same theme in King Lear? Lear, while tearing off his clothes, says:

“Why, thou wert better in thy grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou owest the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! come unbutton here” (III, iv, 93 ff).

How might “unaccommodated man” be applied in Victor’s context?

4. One might say that the boy of Aveyron had, before his discovery, lived in a “state of nature.”   Characterize the “state of nature” as it is implied in both reports and the film. Compare with the state of nature in Locke.

5. The experiment on Victor seems to ask what it means to be human.   Is the boy a human being when he is found?   Does he become a human being?   If so, what are the signs of his humanity?   Do these accounts of the boy suggest that society is necessary to becoming human?   What does society provide for Victor?   What sacrifice or cost does it exact?   (Remember this discussion when we read Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.)  

6. When Victor is compared to an animal, are the speakers/writers giving animals a bad rap? Or is the comparison a reliable one?

7. What do you make of Victor’s rages and the way Itard handles them?

8. Try writing a review of Truffaut’s film, concentrating on his use of Itard’s reports.   Use your review to discuss the film with other students in the course. (One difference to take into account:   Truffaut omits from the film the development of puberty in Victor.)

9. Some striking features of Truffaut’s film include it’s being made in black and white, the use of the “iris shot” (surrounding material is blacked out leaving only the center filled with an image), and the use of narration to explain what’s happening in the film.   What can you say about Truffaut’s choices in these matters?   How would the film have been different if it had been in color (with rich landscapes and painted interiors), if he had used some other characteristic camera method, or if Itard and Victor had simply been two characters, with no voice explaining the project?

10. Truffaut plays the part of Itard.   Does it make any difference to your interpretation of the film to know that?   What does the scientist have in common with a film director?

10. Could you call this movie a biography?   of “Victor”; of Itard?

11. What are the implications of the relation Itard delineates between increasing needs and the development of the mind?   What does that imply about civilization? (See, for example, item #4 on p. 26).

12. Does the case of the wild boy of Aveyron suggest that there is or is not a social instinct?

13. Victor never really learns to talk.   But he has “considerable accuracy” in registering expressions of “reproach, anger, sadness, contempt and sympathy” (31), and he develops many skills.   How is his progress to be estimated? Do you think Itard’s reports and Truffaut’s film answer this question in the same way?

14. Was it ethical for the various individuals and agencies of government to take Victor out of his wild setting and try to bring him into civilized life?   Would it have been ethical to leave him in his wild state?   How does the film seem to answer this question?   What would you say to someone who said that the effort to civilize Victor made him incompetent to live both in his non-social world and in the world of social relations?

15. Itard speaks of Victor’s openly taking whatever he wants.   Could you compare Victor’s attitude to that implied in Locke’s description of people’s taking whatever they needed from the “commons”?   What do you make of Itard’s response that there was “something touching” about Victor’s attitude toward property, which “brought back to mind the dream of those primitive times when the idea of property was yet to dawn in the human mind” (47)?   Does property seem to having anything to do with group bonds?

16. Itard ends his second report by recommending Victor to scientific attention and “to the protection of the Government” (51). What is the government’s role here?   How does it compare with the family’s role?   Can Victor’s case be generalized to include all children abandoned (or mistreated) by families?

17.   Look up the term “noble savage.”   Does Victor fit the profile?

18.   What about Helen Keller?   How similar or dissimilar is Victor’s situation?

19. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid, a Roman poet of the 1 st-c. BCE tells the story of a sculptor, Pygmalion, who falls in love with his own creation.   If you know this story, do you see any similarities between it and the story of the Wild Child?

20.   When we get to Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, think back to the last paragraph of Itard’s first report (27).