The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  The last sentence is particularly important, since presumably Daumer is speaking from firsthand experience. Does he mean that Feuerbach told him so directly, or told others, or is he only referring to the published Mémoire (Memorandum, see pp. 29ff.), which does indeed use one of Kaspar Hauser’s dreams as a proof of his memory of having lived in a castle?

  In any event Kaspar Hauser s dreams are a rich resource for the historian and the psychologist. I believe they are genuine and that they point to early memories of a life very different from the one he was forced to lead in this dungeon.

  Appendix 5

  Wolf Children

  According to legend the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were wild, or feral, or wolf children. Why is the legend of wolf children such an old one, and so persistent? What is the essential power of this story, and what is the appeal of the myth that lies behind it? The issues go deep, and although the answer may not tell us much about the real nature of wolves, it certainly reveals something of human fantasies about wolves and the fascination with a figure such as Kaspar Hauser.

  Arnold Gesell, in a review written during World War II of the Singh-Zingg book (to be discussed in this appendix), said that in thinking about the topic of wolf children, “Profound prejudices are stirred if not awakened. We shun instinctively too close identification with lupus or even canis familiaris. Nevertheless, in these days of inhuman warfare, we may have reason to temper with a trace of humility, our sense of superiority over the wolf species.”

  In the 1940s the American public was startled to read about the one case of a wolf child reported in the literature that was assumed to be entirely authentic, and the only firsthand account by one of the major players.

  The Reverend J. A. L. Singh lived in India, in a village some seventy-five miles southwest of Calcutta, where he and his wife ran an orphanage. One day in October 1920 he was out hunting with friends, when he heard from some villagers that they were terrified of two ghosts that lived in the woods near the village. They lived inside an enormous termite mound—I have seen such mounds in India as high as eight feet—and came out in the evening. Singh built a platform in some trees nearby and waited. Here is what happened in his own words:

  The same Saturday, October 9, 1920, evening, long before dusk, at about 4:30 or 5:00 P.M., we stealthily boarded the machan [platform] and anxiously waited there for an hour or so. All of a sudden, a grown-up wolf came out from one of the holes [it was a white-ant mound as high as a two-storied building, rising from the ground in the shape of a Hindu temple. Round about, there were seven holes, afterwards found to be seven tunnels leading to the main hollow at the bottom of the mound], which was very smooth on account of their constant egress and ingress. This animal was followed by another one of the same size and kind. The second one was followed by a third, closely followed by two cubs one after the other. The holes did not permit two together.

  Close after the cubs came the ghost—a hideous-looking being—hand, foot, and body like a human being; but the head was a big ball of something covering the shoulders and the upper portion of the bust, leaving only a sharp contour of the face visible, and it was a human. Close at its heels there came another awful creature exactly like the first, but smaller in size. Their eyes were bright and piercing, unlike human eyes. I at once came to the conclusion that these were human beings.

  The first ghost appeared on the ground up to its bust, and placing its elbows on the edge of the hole looked this side and that side, and jumped out. It looked all round the place from the mouth of the hole before it leaped out to follow the cubs. It was followed by another tiny ghost of the same kind, behaving in the same manner. Both of them ran on all fours…. The white-ant mount in the jungle was about seven miles away from the village Godamuri. We brought the men straight to the spot; half of us boarded the machan, but I remained with them to instruct them to cut out a door in the particular white-ant mound on the seventeenth of October, 1920, Sunday, at about 9:00 A.M. …

  October 17, 1920. After a few strokes of the spade and shovel, one of the wolves came out hurriedly and ran for his life into the jungle. The second appeared quickly, frightened for his life, and followed the footsteps of the former. A third appeared. It shot out like lightning on the surface of the plain and made for the diggers. It flew in again. Out it came instantly to chase the diggers—howling, racing about restlessly, scratching the ground furiously, and gnashing its teeth. It would not budge out of the place.

  I had a great mind to capture it, because I guessed from its whole bearing on the spot that it must have been the mother wolf, whose nature was so ferocious and affection so sublime. It struck me with wonder. I was simply amazed to think that an animal had such a noble feeling surpassing even that of mankind—the highest form of creation—to bestow all the love and affection of a fond and ideal mother on these peculiar beings, which surely once had been brought in by her (or by the other two grown-up wolves who appeared before her) as food for the cubs. Whoever these peculiar beings, and whatever they might be, certainly they were not their cubs. To permit them to live and be nurtured by them (wolves) in this fashion is divine. I failed to realize the import of the circumstances and became dumb and inert. In the meantime, the men pierced her through with arrows, and she fell dead. A terrible sight!

  After the mother wolf was killed, it was an easy job. When the door was cut out, the whole temple fell all round, very fortunately leaving the central cave open to the sky, without disturbing the hollow inside. The cave was a hollow in the shape of the bottom of a kettle. It was plain and smooth, as if cemented. The place was so neat that not even a piece of bone was visible anywhere, much less any evidence of their droppings and other uncleanliness. The cave had a peculiar smell, peculiar to the wolves—that was all. There had lived the wolf family. The two cubs and the other two hideous beings were there in one corner, all four clutching together in a monkey-ball. It was really a task to separate them from one another. The ghosts were more ferocious than the cubs, making faces, showing teeth, making for us when too much disturbed, and running back to reform the monkey-ball.

  Singh called the two girls, one of whom he estimated to be only about a year and a half and the other about eight, Amala and Kamala. He took them back to his orphanage in order to reclaim them for “humanity and for Christianity.” He failed. Amala died a year later, and Kamala lived until she was about seventeen. Amala never spoke. Kamala, barely. Singh kept a diary of his attempts to deferalize the children, and it was this book that was published in the United States by Harper in 1942, as Wolf Children and Feral Man by J. A. L. Singh and R. M. Zingg.1 The case had already been written about in 1941 by no less an authority on child development than Arnold Gesell, professor of pediatrics at Yale University, in his book Wolf Child and Human Child (also published by Harper).

  Nevertheless, many scientists expressed extreme skepticism about the authenticity of the story, or at least of the story of the children’s capture. After all, there was only the Reverend Singh’s word for it. No other witnesses ever surfaced, and attempts to trace his companions on the hunt were in vain.

  The case for skepticism was put most forcefully, but also charmingly, by Ashley Montagu, who wrote: “With all the good will in the world … we cannot accept the story of the discovery of the wolf-children and their presumed rearing by wolves as true.” He went on to say that even though “emotionally I am in favor of the Singh-Zingg and Co. story, as a scientist, I cannot accept it.”

  An American professor of sociology, William F. Ogburn, and the renowned Indian scholar Nirmal K. Bose (who had once been Gandhi’s secretary), wrote a long account of their attempts in India to verify the account, calling it “On the Trail of the Wolf-Children.”2 Ogburn and Bose wrote their account because “if their most precise and detailed account was disproved, then less credence would be placed in other stories of wolf-children and the probability of their being fantasies and myths would be great; and much less attention would need to be given to th
em. Great gains in science have resulted from destroying error as well as by adding knowledge” (ibid., p. 127).

  But it does not follow that we should pay no attention to the underlying fascination. Myth, or fantasy, the story is an important one.

  What they discovered is that “the police and census records of 1920 showed no village of the name of Godamuri…. Thus the net result of our joint enquiry was that the village of Godamuri could not be traced anywhere, and that none of the people interviewed, had ever heard of any event of this kind” (ibid., p. 173). They were skeptical, too, of Singh’s motives: “The effect of his story of the rescue of the children from wolves and of his success in humanizing Kamala appears to have brought him recognition as a missionary and possibly to have brought in some money” (ibid., p. 191).

  Nevertheless, in 1977 Charles Maclean, an English novelist and historian, went on a similar mission, and at the end of a book that essentially merely retells Singh’s story in different words, claims (on the last page) that

  we eventually succeeded in finding Godamuri, which had changed its name—as Indian villages sometimes do—to Ghorabandha…. From Ghorabandha we then drove south-east for six or seven miles (in accordance with Singh’s sketch map) to the Santal village of Denganalia, where the older people well remembered how the wolf children were captured in the forest near-by a long time ago. One old man, Las Marandi, had actually taken part in the hunt as a boy of sixteen and testified that the Reverend Singh, whom he was able to describe quite clearly, along with two Europeans … and Dibakar Bhanj Deo, had been present on the machan at the time of the rescue.

  In support of the authenticity of this discovery, he notes that “the Santals appeared uninterested in the information they passed on; there was no question of their having read about the wolf children; and the story was far from being a widespread folk tale in the jungle areas we visited.”3

  If Singh’s book is the most famous example of a claim for the authenticity of wolf children, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle books, written in 1894 and 1895, are the most famous works of imaginative fiction on this theme. Singh, of course, knew the Jungle books, as did most literate Indians. Kipling himself was by no means the first person in India to imagine stories of wolves raising children. Such accounts were common in India, and the author of a book (published in 1884) that Kipling knew, Robert A. Sterndal, wrote in his scholarly and charming Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon:

  Hundreds of children are carried off annually, especially in Central Indian and the North-west provinces. Stories have been related of wolves sparing suckling young infants so carried off, which, if properly authenticated, will bring the history of Romulus and Remus within the bounds of probability. I have not by me just now the details of the case of the “Boy-Wolf” of Lucknow, which was, I believe, a case vouched for by credible witnesses. It was that of a boy found in a wolf’s lair, who had no power of speech, crawled about on his hands and knees, ate raw flesh, and who showed great wildness in captivity. I think he died soon after being caught. The story of the nursing is not improbable, for well-known instances have been recorded of the ferae, when deprived of their young, adopting young animals, even of those on whom they usually prey.4

  Kipling’s father wrote: “India is probably the cradle of wolf-child stories, which are here universally believed and supported by a cloud of testimony, including in the famous Lucknow case of a wolf boy the evidence of European witnesses [sic].”5 No doubt Kipling heard these stories from his father.

  Perhaps if we understand why the theme recommended itself to Kipling we will come closer to understanding humanity’s constant preoccupation with wolves and feral children. For obvious reasons this theme had deep emotional resonances for Kipling. Randall Jarrell has written: “To Kipling the world was a dark forest full of families: so that when your father and mother leave you in the forest to die, the wolves that come to eat you are always Father Wolf and Mother Wolf, your real father and. real mother, and you are—as not even the little wolves ever quite are—their real son.”6 Kipling spent the first six years of his life in India, primarily Bombay, and regarded these years as edenic. He was exquisitely sensitive to the atmosphere around him: “I have always felt,” wrote Kipling in old age, “the menacing darkness of tropical eventide, as I have loved the voices of night-winds through palm and banana leaves, and the song of the tree-frogs.”7

  For mysterious reasons Kipling’s parents took him and his sister to Southsea in England, and left them both for six years in a dreary boarding-house, with complete strangers who were committed to destroying the creativity of these unusually vivacious and open youngsters. Kipling, in his never-completed autobiography Something of Myself, was to describe it as sheer hell.

  The curious thing is that the life actually led by Amala and Kamala, as described by the Reverend Singh, was infinitely sad and depressing. It is not possible to read about it without thinking that they would both have been better off left with the wolves. What had Reverend Singh accomplished? He had deprived those two children of their only source of happiness. They both died, one shortly after being captured, the other some years later. The Reverend Singh thought he was saving their souls. But perhaps he had, in his arrogance, ignored the wolf souls they may have had.

  What is the desire that fuels these stories? It is not just the desire to be accepted by an alien species but the wish to be connected, on some deeper level, with another species—to be understood, and to understand. There is some fascination with the warmth, the darkness, and security of the den, with a mother and a father and siblings, living in harmony, protected, playing, out of the elements. We can measure this by the thrill almost everybody experiences upon seeing the few photographs that exist of the inside of a real wolf den (such as those accompanying the book White Wolf).8 The desire to be part of that den, or to imagine that it would be at least possible to be part of such a world, is immense.

  NOTES

  Introduction

  1 Defined by John Money (The Kaspar Hauser Syndrome of “Psychosocial Dwarfism”: Deficient Statural, Intellectual, and Social Growth Induced by Child Abuse[Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1992], p. 19) as “the mystery of how isolation, abuse, and neglect in childhood might induce a syndrome of overall physical and mental growth retardation, following which catchup growth would be at best only partial and incomplete.” See also E. Nau and D. Cabanis, “Kaspar-Hauser-Syndrom,” Münchener Medizinische Wochenschrift 108, no. 17 (1966), pp. 929-31. The term was first used by Alexander Mitscherlich in his 1950 article “Ödipus und Kaspar Hauser,” Der Monat 3 (1950), pp. 11-18.

  2 It appeared on her 1987 album Solitude Standing.

  3 See Hans Peitler and Hans Ley, Kaspar Hauser: Über tausend bibliographische Nachweise (Ansbach: C. Brügel & Sohn, 1927). A great deal has been written since 1927, of course. During Kaspar Hauser’s lifetime some seventy books and articles were published about him. It is certain that he did not know of all of them, and may perhaps have seen only the book by Feuerbach and the attack by Merker (see p. 51).

  4 Quoted in Richard Bernheim, Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment, and Demonolagy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 11.

  5 I have taken the text from Hermann Pies, Kaspar Hauser, Eine Dokumentation, Ansbach: C. Brügel & Sohn, 1965, pp. 24-34. The text itself was first printed in two newspapers, the Friedens und Kriegskurier and the Nürnberger Intelligenzblatt, on July 14. The dates here are important. Binder was among the first to see Kaspar Hauser, either on the very day of his arrest or the next day. He wrote his proclamation on July 7. On July 11 Feuerbach visited Kaspar Hauser (which means that he heard about him through means other than the proclamation). On July 14 the proclamation was published, but after Feuerbach s official complaint the document was withdrawn from circulation. Kaspar Hauser was then, obviously at Feuerbach’s request, handed over to his first teacher, Georg Friedrich Daumer (four days later, on July 18).

  6 The appendices
consist of three documents. The first is a copy of the two letters that Kaspar Hauser had with him. After producing them Binder says:

  There is a great similarity in the handwriting of both letters. Also, both are clearly written in one and the same ink, and it therefore follows that the second letter [meant to be taken as written by Kaspar’s mother] was not written 16 years ago, but only recently, and is therefore fabricated. For if the second letter is 16 years older than the accompanying letter, the ink would have taken on a completely different color than the one found in the first letter. This seems however not to have been taken into account by the otherwise shrewd, malicious evil imposter.

  The second is a description of the appearance of Kaspar Hauser. It corresponds fairly closely to that given by Feuerbach (see pp. 79ff.). But, curiously, Feuerbach writes in his note that he took his description from his own observations, since the police files he obtained did not contain it. This means that the document Feuerbach had in front of him, whether published in the newspaper or from some other source, did not contain this appendix, nor did the papers he received later. In the version published by Pies (Dokumentation, p. 33), unfortunately reproduced without any indication of where he took it from, there is a final sentence that gives information not available elsewhere: “Kaspar says, ‘Er kümmt scho, wenn i a Reiter were, wie mei Voter aner gween i,’ instead of ‘Er kommt schon, wenn ich ein Reiter werde, wie mein Vater einer gewesen ist’ [He will surely come, if I become a rider as my father was] etc. etc. But now through lessons his dialect is improving from day to day.” The third appendix is a description of the objects and books that Kaspar Hauser had with him when he arrived. These are the same as those given by Feuerbach.