Where the Wild Things Were: Victor of Aveyron and the Pre-Emptive Critique of Developmental Disability in the Early Modern Novel

Summary

The history of psychology, with its notions of 'development', has returned regularly to Victor of Aveyron. He has become a test case for the emerging mind-sciences' ability to tame, civilise, educate, and cure. Historians have established first his idiotism, then his mental retardation, and most recently his autism, in various retrospective explanations à la mode as to why he failed to become a fully rational and therefore perfect adult being. Literary and cultural historians, meanwhile, have noted his subsequent influence on the wild monsters of Romantic fiction. What has not been noted is that he has some deficient fictional predecessors too. The present article looks closely at these and sets him in their context. Alongside Victor, as a paradigm case for the early history of psychiatry, three seminal early modern novels are considered, two German and one English: Simplicius Simplicissimus, Wilhelm Meister's Years of Apprenticeship and Tristram Shandy.

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