Talk:Victor of Aveyron

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Does anyone know what parts of the movie diverge in important ways from Victor's real life? Here are a few conflicts:

1. In the movie,v Victor never managed to escape captivity until he'd been in training with Itard for several months.
2. In the movie, Victor has a much greater mastry over the spelling L-A-I-T than the pronunciation of lait. (He can pronounce it very strangely, but tends to do so only after he gets milk; he never uses it to request milk.)
3. This article implies that people were, in general, nice to Victor. The movie implies that, though Itard and a few others cared for him, most people thought of him as a kind of circus freak, and refused to let him be.
4. In the movie, Victor emerged from the woods and had to walk on all fours, and had to be taught to "walk upright". Did this really happen?
5. Do the journal entries that Itard reads in the movie correspond to a real journal he kept? If so, how faithful are the journal entries we see the Itard character write during the film?

--Ryguasu 02:20 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

Yes, to the best of my knowledge, Victor was inclined to walk low to the ground, rather than upright. I've never seen the movie, and am not an avid study of Victor, so I couldn't say whether the movie's portrayal is accurate. It was considered 'disappointing' at the time, as walking on 2 legs, upright, was seen as something uniquely human. Between Victor's behaviour, and the discovery of Orangutans, that hypothesis was completely blown out of the water.

Please see this Saskatchewan Central i-School page for a full description of the early (pre-Itard) interactions with the boy. Although the commentary states that the boy walked upright, it makes no quotation to support this. In one quotation it says that he "stands four feet one inch tall", but again there is no reason to suppose that he preferred to walk erect from this. Still, I would say that if he did have a stooped gait, "walk low to the ground" or have quadrupedal motion, this would be remarked upon. Absence of comment would seem to be in favour of a normal gait. --Gruffling (talk) 16:48, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

As for Lait, Victor was never much of a speaker. Itard demonstrated that Victor was learning to listen and understand, to recognise and to read, but Victor never said more than a few words, and those were infrequent. It's somewhat common for individuals without a primary language to have difficulty expressing anything more than the information about the present, or the very recent past. Language tends to be more reactive than proactive when learned late, initially, though as Genie taught us, the information and desires are always there. Genie is particularly notorious for, despite speaking significantly more than Victor, communicating her wants non-verbally.

Itard kept regular journal entries, and used them to write one, then another report. I could say 2 reports, but it's important to note that each was distinct, and spaced apart. The movie is, to my understanding, based wholly, and fairly accurately, on the information contained within the first report. The ending is still criticised somewhat, but at the time, things seemed pretty optimistic about Victor. Shortly afterwards, though, Victor's progress rapidly dwindled, and Itard's second report is much more negative, and he recommends ending the study. One of the key bits of information to remember is that at this point, Victor had just hit puberty. 14 perhaps? I can't remember, but in any case, this is something he has in common with Genie. Inappropriate public masturbation. Itard would bleed Victor to 'help' deal with the sexual furor. That's the most striking example, but just keep in mind, as with Genie, there are many more associated changes with adolescence that can make a youth challenging.

The above is based on recalled information from the documentary about feral children covering Victor and Genie, and Genie: A Scientific Tragedy by Russ Rymer, and some bits and pieces from Psychology textbooks. Again, I've never even read Itard's reports, so I'd take the above with a grain of salt. Hope this helps, for all that it's about statements over 4 years old. Im-Mersion

See Roger Shattuck's The Forbidden Experiment: the Story of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (1980; paperback 1981), pp. 228-34, for a sustained discussion of the differences between the film and the historical record. Mark K. Jensen (talk) 22:16, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Name

Please note who named him Victor 06:52, 1 July 2006 (UTC)

Content Lifting From The Secret of the Wild Child

A lot of this page's content sounds very similar to how it is presented in The Secret of the Wild Child, a NOVA documentary on Genie. A transcript of the documentary is available here: [1]

To skip to the section about Victor, one may copy/paste "STACY KEACH: For the first time in her life" in their browser's find function. -Martinman 03:51, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Plagiarism is bad, but libel is worse. There are only two sentences that are at all similar in these works:

"Shortly after Victor was found, a local abbot and biology professor, Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre, examined him."

"Shortly after the boy was captured, a biology professor took a very careful look at him, name of Bonaterre."

"He removed the boy's clothing and led him outside into the snow, where, far from being upset, Victor began to frolic about in the nude, clearly accustomed to exposure and cold."

"One day, he took him and took off all his clothes, and the boy was thrilled to have his clothes taken off, and he started leading him into the outdoors, and it was surrounded by snow at that time. And Victor, far from protesting, was filled with joy."

This story may be apocryphal. Harlan Lane, whose Nova interview you suggest has been plagiarized, included what he claimed to be the first English translation of Bonnaterre's "Historical Notice of the Sauvage de l'Aveyron" in his 1979 book "The Wild Boy of Aveyron", but there is no mention of this particular experiment, and the only similar anecdote is Itard's, taken from "An Historical Account of the Discovery and Education of a Savage Man".

"One morning, after a heavy fall of snow, as soon as he awaked, he uttered a cry of joy, leaped from his bed, ran to the window, afterwards to the door, going backwards and forwards, from one to the other, with the greatest impatience, and, at length, escaped half-dressed into the garden. There he exhibited the utmost emotions of pleasure; he ran, rolled himself in the snow, and taking it up by handfuls, devoured it with an incredible avidity."

I suspect both authors are relying on some third undisclosed source for this story. However, it's beyond me how you decided that this constitutes plagiarism.

You'd best not cast stones, young scholar, unless and until you've done your homework. Yappy2bhere (talk) 06:45, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

References

Posthumous commentary: Victor and the critical period for language acquisition

To say that Victor is evidence of anything in the question of whether a critical period exists for language acquisition is simply wrong. He may likely have had an underlying organic deficit, it's not known how old he was when he was abandoned or when he was found, and he had obviously been abused before he was abandoned. Certainly he's influenced the thinking of philosophers and linguists in his day, but not in the way that was stated. Yappy2bhere (talk) 07:20, 29 November 2009 (UTC)

Later life?

The article currently takes us up until 1805. If Victor passed away in 1828, what transpired in final 23 years? Morganfitzp (talk) 01:44, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

As I understand it, he lived the rest of his life, mute, forgotten by the rest of the world, in the doctor's home, looked after by the housekeeper.

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"Influence of colonialism" section

This section is totally speculative and irrelevant.98.167.42.163 (talk) 15:55, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Agreed that this section needs work. There is one citation there, but I have added citation needed tags to some of the other statements which come after the citation. I think that if this section was sourced properly, it would have more validity within the article. It should also be noted that the corresponding article in French makes no mention of this idea. Redtree21 (talk) 12:06, 13 November 2020 (UTC)