Deconstruction of the Human: The Post-Darwinian Feral Child in Juvenile Fiction
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2013
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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eng
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Dark Archive until 2018-01-01, afterwards Haverford users only.
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Abstract
The subject of this thesis paper is the construction of a feral child character in late 19th - early twentieth century juvenile literature. In the late 19th century, a convergence of imperialist mentality and progressive scientific advancement simultaneously radiating throughout the public discourse led to new scrutiny upon the formalized understanding of human identity. The arguments of social scientists Hobbes and Rousseau had, in prior centuries, framed a debate for the state of humanity outside of a social contract. Each of their posited arguments, however, assumed a level of a purified human form that Darwin's work in On the Origin of Species challenged. Through Darwin's work, the assumed separation between the human and the animal became less clearly delineated. During the same time period, the widespread development of British imperial conquest led to racially‐based speculation on the human form. Rudyard Kipling's children story The Jungle Book and Edgar Rice Burroughs' pulp publication Tarzan of the Apes both present characters developing outside of a human‐made social contract or a European environment. Through the development of these characters, Kipling and Burroughs necessarily make decisions that form a position on the nature of human identity. Through the dissembling act of maturing an unacculturated infant character in an animal setting, the two authors deconstruct the elements of a human figure, suggest a degree of transmittable identity from the animal to the human, and comment upon the macrocosm of human culture. Tracing the contemporary arguments of the human form demonstrates how the figure of the feral child became a trope fraught for such a wide spread literary examination of identity.