A Silent Childhood [Part I & II] - Gwern.net

The New Yorker, Apr 13, 1992

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ANNALS OF SCIENCE

century B.C., it occurred to

Psamtik I, thefirst of the Saitic

kings of Egypt, to wonder whichmightbe the originallanguageoftheworld. Psamtik was, byall accounts,

a forward-lookingruler. He was thefirst to open his country to large-scaleimmigration,receiving therebya sub-stantial infusion of Hellenic culture,and also, not incidentally, the Hel-lenic mercenaries with which he se-cured his reign against the claims ofelevenrivals and against the Scythian,Ethiopian, and Assyrian armies onhis frontiers. Considering that heundertook his scholarship betweenperennial military campaigns, it isnot surprising that his interest in theJanguagequestion hadterritorial over-tones: the country possessed of thelingua mundi would ownan indisput-able hegemonic legitimacy. Yet hepursued his question with an unbi-ased rigor and a devotion to the sci-entific method which could be seen asadmirably unsentimental, if not down-right brutal.As recounted by Herodotus two

hundred years later, Psamtik’s experi-ment was a simple one: two infants

were taken from their mothers atbirth and placed in the isolation of ashepherd’s hut. The shepherd was in-structed not to speak to them. Theywere reared on a diet of goats’ milkand silence until one day two yearslater when, the shepherd returning to

his hut, the pair accosted him withtheir first utterance. The word theyhad developed was “bekos,” which,after semantic inquiry on the part ofthe King, was determined to mean

“bread”in the languageof the Phry-gians, an Indo-European people ofAsia Minor. With the shepherd’s ac-count in front of him, Psamtik wasobjective enough to abandon his na-tionalistic hopes and stand by the re-sults of his research. He announcedthat Phrygian was the protolanguage,and thus established himself as theprotolinguist, the earliest practitionerof an enduring scientific pursuit.

Sadly—orperhapsfortunately, sinceexcept for the word bekos and a fewtexts and inscriptionslittle remains to

GeersBC in the late seventh

A SILENT CHILDHOOD-I

usof the Phrygian language—Psamtik’sresearch hasnotstoodthetest of time.Hehasbeen accusedofa certain meth-odological informality. There wasno way of ascertaining, for instance,whetherornotthe children hada nat-ural grasp of many languages andwere merelyexpressing an innatepref-erence for Phrygian baked goods.Historians are satisfied that Phrygiawasthe birthplace of the flute and theDionysian orgy but probably not ofhumanspeech, and Psamtik is remem-bered by science mainlyfor his errors.

Nevertheless, in nearly every col-lege primer on linguistics and in in-numerable late-night conversationsamongpracticing linguists, he is re-membered. Onesuch text, Vivien Tart-ter’s 1986 “Language Processes,” hasa two-sentence “Conclusion”that reads,“We still have a long wayto go tounderstand language andits process-ing, and manyexciting years of re-search ahead. But we have come along way since Psammetichos!” TheKing’s inclusion in the book,like hisgeneral durability, is evidence to thecontrary. Psamtik is very much withus. While his experiment was flawedin fulfilling its declared intention, itwas in other ways brilliant—aninci-sive bit of scientific prescience. It em-

archives.newyorker.com/?i=1992-04-13#folio=080b

bodied both the theoretical questionsand the practical quandaries thatstillbedevil the discipline. Beyond thearid statistics and the arcane analysisthat characterize modernlinguisticsloomsa philosophical question: Whatmakesusspecial as a species? Whatpart of our essential humanity isexpressed in ourability to communi-cate with language?Itis in that lightthat his scientific sin—his experi-mentation on children—takes on theimport that continuesto subtly troublethe science. For his sin was of theessence: in investigating onepiece ofthe humancharter, Psamtik, by his

lack of compassion, did violence toanother.

‘Thescience initiated by the Egyp-tian king has been revised and rein-vented manytimes over the millen-nia, most recently ina Horn & Hardarton Woodland Avenue in Philadel-phia, where Noam Chomsky began

working out a set of ideas so revolu-tionary that their publication, in 1957,is known amonglinguists as the Event.Toits credit as a human endeavor,the

science of linguistics has maintainedthroughits generations a certain wist-ful indecision aboutits ambitions. Onlya stalwart linguist—or an especiallymyopic one—canavoid the temptation

to look up from the voluminous tabu-lations of syntax and phonemics foran occasionalglance into the heart ofhuman nature, much the wayastron-

omers look through the silica lens atthe origins of time. Linguistics andastronomy constitute an unlikely sis-terhood, for they are both constrainedto be more observational than experi-mental—astronomy because its sub-jects are too distant to be experimentedon, and linguistics because its subjectsare too human. Nolongerare childrenimpressed from the crib to serve asguinea pigs. But the revelations abouthow we acquire language still comefrom children: wild children, who havegrown up with beasts as their onlycompanions; abused or neglected chil-dren whose family histories replicatethe isolation in the shepherd’s hut,sometimes with far more attendanthorror. The cases are exceedinglyrareand mostly fleeting. They become the

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property of whicheverresearcheris for-tunate enoughto be present at which-ever dark hour. In that regard, no sub-ject has ever fallen into the lap ofsci-ence out of a more incomprehensibleworld than thelittle girl who limpedthrough the doors of a Los AngelesCounty welfare office in the fall of1970, accompanied by her nearly blindandalmost equally traumatized mother.

aes Ciry, California, is inmany waysa typical town of the

San Gabriel Valley, and Golden WestAvenue, which runs due north throughit, is a typical Valley residential street.It is as straightas a surveyor’s rod, andyou might suppose that its intendeddestination is the San Gabriel Moun-tains, whose shadowed canyons andsnow-panelled peaks rise above thegrid of suburban Valleystreets like thepromise of a wider world. But GoldenWest Avenue never reaches the SanGabriels, near as they are. It ends in

the more prosperous reaches of Arca-dia, and the San Gabrielsremain a taunting vision, as

distant in their way as theaffluent hills of Hollywood,fifteen miles to the west.

Heading up Golden WestAvenue from Las TunasDrive, Temple City’s maindrag, you pass the parklikeacreage of the civic centerand, a block farther on, the

steepled Church of Christ.Then the public places arebehind you, and you enteran orderly regime of smallhouses—bungalows, for themost part—which becomemore modest andinsular blockby block. Each house has adriveway and a yard, and anumberofthe yards are sepa~rated from one another bychain-link fences. TowardtheArcadia townline,five royalpalms nearly a hundred feethigh float above the avenuelike an incongruous appari-tion. They are the neigh-borhood’s only aristocraticflourish. For here there areno rolling estates, no guardedgates, no Armed Responsemedallions such as dot thecurbs of Bel Air and Mul-holland Drive. The equationof prominence and privacy



that prevails in the wealthy precinctsof Los Angeles is here turned onits

head: security lies in a respectful ano-nymity—an injunction, in a land ofcompact privacies, to mind one’s ownbusiness. People don’t come to TempleCity to be discovered, they cometo beleft alone. Golden West Avenue isaboveall a quiet street of quiet fami-lies. Before the disruption of that quietin November of 1970, the residents ofone small house behind the row ofpalms were knownto their neighborsas the quietest family of all.The disruption was spectacular—

enough so to earn a week’s worth ofstories in the Los Angeles Times, sand-wiched betweenaccounts ofthetrial ofCharles Manson,the policies of Gov-ernor Ronald Reagan, and the bomb-ing of Hanoi. “GIRL, 13, PRISONERSINCE INFANCY, DEPUTIES CHARGE;PARENTS JAILED,” the headline onNovember 17th read. The followingday,a story headed “MYSTERYSHROUDS.HOMEOF ALLEGED CHILD PRISONER”

APRIL SHOWERS

APRIL 13, 1992

featured a photograph of two menstanding in a driveway: the girl’s el-derly, bespectacled father, clothed inrumpled khakis and a rumpled hat,one handin his pocket and the otherloosely holding a cigarette; and herbrother, a tall teen-ager dressed inblack, his arms folded and his facewadded in belligerent distress.

But it was another photograph thatinflamed the public imagination andbrought the curious cruising alongGolden West Avenuein a slow, neck-craning procession that lasted the bet-ter part of a week. The photographisof a girl’s face, smooth, olive-shaped,pretty. A strand of dark hair has es-caped from behind her ear to hangacross her forehead. Her headis turnedwith an attentive tilt toward the cam-era, but her eyes do not meet the lens.She looks above us, as though someobject of interest were hovering overthe photographer’s shoulder. Her ex-pression gives nothing away. It is com-posedbutnot self-conscious, withdrawn

but with no trace of sullen-ness. Her mouth,its full lower

lip closed against the serratedcurveof the upperin a perfectCupid’s bow, turns up at theends in what might be thebeginning of a smile, exceptthat she is otherwise so seri-ous, so pensive and watchful.‘The energy in herface is allin her eyes. Without beseech-ing, they attract. If her facehas an adult’s earnestness,her eyes have the straightfor-ward curiosity of a toddler,unburdened by any evidentcapacity for prejudice or ap-praisal. Her innocence is in-congruous with the report ofthe epic abuse she suffered.That her condition was

cause for concern had beenimmediately apparent to thesocial worker who receivedher and her mother in thewelfare office one morning inearly November. Like muchelse in the child’s history, her

arrival there wasa fluke. Themother had come seeking helpnot for the child but for her-self; three weeks earlier, she

had finally managed to fleean abusive marriage, and was

living nearby with her par-ents, who wereall but desti-

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tute. Cataracts and a detached retinahad rendered herninety per cent blindin herleft eye andtotally blind in theright. She was searching for the ser-vices for the blind. But, leading herdaughter by one hand and her agedmother by the other, she had stumbledmistakenly into the general social-services office. Theeligibility workerwhom she approached wastransfixedby the child, a small, withered girlwith a halting gait and a curious pos-ture—unnaturally stooped, hands heldup as though resting on an invisiblerail. The worker alerted her supervi-sor to what she thought was an unre-ported case of autism in a child sheestimated to be six or seven years old.The supervisor did not confirm the

autism diagnosis but agreed that some-thing was amiss. The ensuing inqui-ries found the girl to be a teen-ager,though she weighed only fifty-ninepounds and wasonly fifty-four inchestall. She was in much worse physicalshape thanatfirst suspected: she wasincontinent, could not chew solid foodand could hardly swallow, could notfocus her eyes beyond twelvefeet, and,according to some accounts, could not

cry. She salivated constantly, spat in-discriminately. She had a ring of hardcallus around her buttocks, and shehad twonearly complete sets of teeth.Her hair was thin. She could not hop,skip, climb, or do anything requiringthe full extension of her limbs. Sheshowed no perception of heat or cold.Of most interest to the scientists

whowereto becomeher constant com-panions was that she could not talk.Whatthe social worker had mistakenfor an autistic’s abstention from verbalcommunication was in fact a completeinability. Her vocabulary comprisedonlya few words—probably fewer thantwenty. She understood “red,” “blue,”“green,” and “brown”; “Mother” andsome other names; the verbs “walk”and “go”; and assorted nouns, amongthem “door,” “jewelry box,” and “bun-ny.” Herproductive vocabulary—thosewords she could utter—was even morelimited. She seemed able to say only“Stopit” and “Nomore,” and a coupleof shorter negatives. Thesocial workerpaid a visit to the child’s home and

convinced the mother that her daugh-ter neededattention. She was admittedto Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles,for treatment of extreme malnutrition.

Anexplanation for the child’sstate


“I ask that the record show that the witness does not presumeto speak for the animal kingdom butis testifying here strictly

in his capacity as a beaver.”

waseventually pieced together, thanksto the efforts of the Temple City policein the days following her discoveryand to the persistent elaborations ofscientists over the next several years.A doctoral dissertation on the child,

written by Susan Curtiss, a graduate

student at the University of Californiaat Los Angeles and the linguist whowas to spend the mosttime with her,begins, “To understand this case his-tory, one must understand [the] fam-ily background.” And, indeed, everyscientist involved with the unfortunatechild would be drawn again and againthroughthat background, much as therubberneckers had been drawn downGolden West Avenue—hopingto findin the neighborhood, the house, andthe story of the household some answer.

Like most personal histories, the

child’s preceded her by years. Herparents migrated to the Los Angelesarea from differentparts of the countrybut from similarly impoverished cir-cumstances. Clark, her father, was anative of the Pacific Northwest, and

Irene, her mother, was from Okla-homa. Irene’s family had moved westto escape the dust bowl. Like otherreal-life Joads, they ran out of conti-nentbefore reaching the promised land,andthe children approached maturity


with little prospect except the assur-anceofa restricted future. When Irenewasin her early twenties, she founda traditional solution for her predica-ment (and, traditionally, her parentsopposedit): like her mother, she mar-ried a man twenty years her senior.

Clark had a goodjob as a machinistin the aircraft industry, and was goodat it. He bet moderately on the horsesat nearby Santa Anita racetrack. In aphotograph taken during their earlyyears together, Irene and Clark ap-pear to be a happy couple, even bitglamorous. They are leaning againsta shining black sedan; Clark’s crispfedora is tipped onto the back of hishead as he and his wife turn to eachother with broad smiles. Butthe felici-ties were all on the surface; Irene hadrun headlong out of a confining up-bringing into a confining marriage.She wouldlater say that herlife cameto an end on her wedding day.

Prominent among Clark’s restric-tions washis express desire not to haveanychildren. For onething, they werenoisy. Late in Irene’s first pregnancy,five years into their marriage, Clarkbeat her severely. In the hospital fortreatment of her injuries, Irene wentinto labor and gavebirth to a healthydaughter. The infant’s crying infuri-

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4ated Clark, and she wasplaced in thegarage, where, at the age of two anda half months, she died. Irene laterprotested that the girl had been putthere only to spare her the noise whilethe linoleum was being removed fromthe kitchen floor, and that once in thegarage she had beenstruck with “quickpneumonia.” The likelihood is thatbehind the euphemism was a case ofdeath by exposure. A subsequentinfantwas moreliterally a victim of the cou-ple’s incompatibility: it died of Rhblood poisoning soonafter birth. Irene’sthird pregnancy produced a healthyson. Hesurvived infancy, but his de-velopment wasstifled by an approxi-mation of the neglect that had killedhis oldest sibling. He was slow to walk,and at three years of age was not yettoilet-trained, but he was saved by theintercession of his paternal grand-mother, who took him in and kept himfor several months, long enough to gethim back on track. In April of 1957,Clark andIrenehadtheir fourth child,a girl. She, too, had Rh blood poison-ing, but she was given a transfusionsoonafter birth. She went on to sufferthe same developmental fate as herolder brother, but this time there was

no paternal grandmotherto rescue herat the critical moment.

Clark had an extraordinary attach-ment to his mother, surprising in thelight of his upbringing: he had spentmost of his early years in orphanagesand foster homes, and few with her.She was a flamboyant woman—atonetime, she had managed a brothel—andwas given to travelling armed. It issaid that she thought her sonintolerably straitlaced. Butstraitlaced or not, he was slav-

ishly devoted to her, to thepoint where Irene never be-came more than a secondaryallegiance in his life. In De-cemberof 1958, Clark’s motherwasstruck by a car and killed as shecrossed the street with her grandson tobuy an ice-cream cone. Clark arrivedsoon after the accidentto find his moth-er’s bodystill in the road and nosignof the vehicle that had hit her. A teen-ager was arrested the next day andchargedwith hit-and-run and drunkendriving. He received a probationarysentence. The court’s leniency fuelledClark’s fury. He decided that a worldwithout his mother, a world that didnot care enough to punish her murder



adequately, was a world he could bestdo without. He quit his job and movedhis family into his mother’s two-bedroomhouse, on Golden West Avenue, wherehe wouldlive out the last decade of hislife as a recluse, with his family asvirtual prisoners.

Irene’s world closed in on her se-verely at this time. Her encroachingblindness made her almost completelydependent on her tormentor. Theirson wasallowed out of the house toattend schoolor to play with a neigh-bor but for little else, and within the

house he waseffectivelya hostage. Heslept on the living-room floor; hisparents alsoslept in the living room—his mother on a couch and Clark in aneasy chair in front of a defunct tele-vision set, sometimeswith a gun in hislap. The main bedroom,according tosomeaccounts, was keptas a shrine toClark’s mother. But it was the daugh-ter—twenty months old whenthe fam-ily moved—who bore the brunt ofClark’s renunciation.“In essence, Clarkappointed himself a guardian to hisfamily,” Jay Shurley, a professor ofpsychiatry and behavioral science atthe University of Oklahoma, who be-cameinvolvedwith the case, explainedto merecently. “His delusion was thathis daughter was retarded and wasgoing to be very vulnerable to exploi-tation. He dreaded the idea of peopletaking advantage of her.”

After one of the child’s rare earlymedical examinations, a pediatrician

noted on her records that she was“slow,” and pronounced her a “re-tarded little girl with kernicterus’—a

condition that sometimes re-sults from a botched transfu-sion for Rh incompatibility.“Clark amplified that to de-lusional intensity—that thisgirl was profoundly retarded,”Shurley told me. “He wasconvinced that she would need

his protection from the evil of theworld, and that no one was better

prepared than heto recognizeits evil.He didn’t reckon, of course, on hisown evil. These people never do.”

Clark’s idea of protective custody isdescribed in Susan Curtiss’s doctoraldissertation, which was published as abook—“Genie: A Psycholinguistic Studyof a Modern-Day ‘Wild Child’ ”—in1977, by Academic Press. In both thedissertation and the book, the girl isreferred to not by her real name but

APRIL13, 1992

by herscientific alias, Genie—the nameused in the symposium papers,the psy-

chology magazines, andthe textbooks,and contrived in order to protect thechild’s identity. Curtiss’s account agreeswith that of other investigators. Shewrote:

Inthehouse Genie wasconfinedto a smallbedroom, harnessedto an infant's pottyseat.Genie’s father sewed the harness, himself;unclad except for the harness, Genie wasleftto sit on that chair. Unableto move anythingexcept her fingers and hands,feet and toes,Genie wasleft to sit, tied-up, hourafter hour,often into the night, day after day, monthafter month,yearafter year. At night, whenGenie was not forgotten, she was removedfrom her harness onlyto be placed into an-other restraining garment—asleeping bagwhichherfather hadfashionedto hold Genie’sarmsstationary (allegedlyto prevent her fromtakingit off). In effect, it was a straitjacket.‘Therein constrained, Genie was put into aninfant’s crib with wire mesh sides and a wiremesh cover overhead. Caged by night, har-nessed by day, Genie wasleft to somehowendure the hours and years of herlife.There waslittle for her to listen to; there

was no TVorradio in the house. Genie’sbedroom wasin the back of the house next to[the master] bedroom and a bathroom...‘Thefather had an intolerance for noise, sowhatlittle conversation there was betweenfamily membersin the rest of the house waskeptat a low volume. Exceptfor momentsofanger, when herfather swore, Genie did nothearany languageoutside her door, and thusreceived practically no auditory stimulationof anykind,aside from bathroom noises. Therewere two windowsin her room, and one ofthem was keptopen severalinches. She may,therefore, have occasionally heard an air-plane overhead or someothertraffic or envi-ronmental noises; but set in the back of thehouse, Genie would not have heard muchnoise from thestreet.

Hungryandforgotten, Genie would some-times attempt to attract attention by makingnoise, Angered, her father would often beatherfor doing so. In fact, there was a large pieceof wood left in the corner of Genie’s roomwhichherfatherusedsolely to beat her when-ever she made any sound. Genie learned tokeepsilent and to suppress all vocalization. ...

Just as there waslittle to listen to, therewas not much for Genieto touch or look at.The onlypieces of furniture in her roomwerethe crib and the potty seat. There wasno carpet on the floor, no pictures on thewalls. There were two windows, but theywerecovered up exceptfora few inches at thetop out of which Genie couldsee the sky fromoneandthesideof a neighboring house fromthe other. There was one dim,bareceilinglightbulb,a wall of closets, and anotherwallwith the bedroom door. The roomwasa dirtysalmoncolor. Occasionally, twoplastic rain~coats, one clear andoneyellow,hungoutsidethe closet in the room, and once in a whileGenie wasallowedto “play” with them, Inaddition, Genie was sometimesgiven “partlyedited” copies of the TV log, with picturesthat her father considered too suggestive re-moved (like womenadvertising swimmingpools, etc.). She was also given an occasionalemptycottage-cheese container, emptythread

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spools, andthelike. These were Genie’stoys; and together with the floor, herharness, and her body, they were herprimary sources of visual and tactilestimulation.

Genie’s diet was equally limited. Shewas given baby foods, cereals, an occa~sional soft-boiled egg. Under pressurefrom the father to keep contact with Ge-nie to a minimum, she was fed hur-riedly, usually by having food stuffedinto her mouth. Should Genie choke andspit out some of her food, she wouldhave her face rubbedinit... .

Genie’sfather was convinced that Ge-nie would die. He waspositive that shewould notlive past theage of twelve. Hewas so convinced of this that he prom-ised his wife that if the child did livebeyond twelve, the mother could seekhelp for Genie. But age twelve came andwent; Genie survived, but the father re-neged on his promise. The mother, tooblindto even dial the phone and forbid-den underthreat of death to contact herownparents (wholivedin the area),felthelpless to do anything.

Finally, when Genie was 13% yearsold, Genie’s mother,after a violent ar-gumentwith her husband in which shethreatened to leave unless he called herparents, succeeded in getting her hus-bandto telephone her mother. Later thatday Genie’s mother took Genie and lefther homeandher husband.

Curtiss went on to relate thegirl’s discovery: how she wastakeninto custody by the police; how theparents were arrested and chargedwith child abuse; how the child wasadmitted to the hospital. The familyhistory is wrapped up, like LittleDorrit’s, with a breath of exultation:“She had been discovered, at last.”

Butthe real epitaph to the era waswritten by Clark himself. On themorning of November 20, 1970—themorning that he and his wife were toappear in court on charges of willfulabuseor injury to the person or healthof a minor—he spread out a blanketanda sheetof cellophane ontheliving-room floor and shot himself throughthe right temple with a .38-calibre re-volver. He was seventy years old. Heleft two notes, scrawled with a ballpointpen. One was forthe police and read,in part, “My son... is out in frontwith friends. He hasn’t the slightestidea of whatis going to happen.” Thesecond was to his son, and includedthese instructions:

Don’t take that shirt back. Its for myfu-neral. You know where my blue shirt is,Underwear in hall closet... 1 love you.Goodbye and be good.

—Dai

Clark did not leave a note for hiswife or his daughter, but he did in-



45

“This is definitely the last time for Chapter Seventeen!”

clude in his farewells a sentence thatseemedaddressedto the public at large:to the press that had exposed his fam-ily’s disarray; to the people in the auto-mobiles, whose finger-pointing paradehad distressed him tremendously; tothe scientists and doctors who hadtaken his daughter and renamed her.He wrote, “The world will neverunderstand.”

Alreadyin court that morning,Irene

had heard her counsel enter a plea ofnot guilty, on the ground that she hadbeen forcedinto her role by an abusivehusband. Then the judge received amessage and summoned the lawyersinto chambers. Irene’s counsel returnedto tell her that her husband was dead.She was visibly shaken, the lawyerlater recalled, but did not break down.“She just sat there, silent,” he said.Her plea was accepted.

‘Thesuicide—reported,like the par-ents’ arrest, on network news—did

nothing to lessen interest in the case.Thepress had set up camp on the lawnof Childrens Hospital, where Geniewas now residing. Childrens was, andis, one of the most prominent, expen-sive, and up-to-date pediatric facilities

on the West Coast, and one accus-tomedto security concerns, since amongits clientele are a numberofthe chil-dren of Hollywoodcelebrities. Freedfrom herlittle room and placed in themost competentof professional hands,Genie was, in the view of the doc-tors and psychologists and others whowere now becominginvolved with herprogress, liberated. If such a thing waspossible, she was to be given a chanceat a new life, with new surroundings,a new future—even a new mission—to go along with her new name.

YY the summerof 1988, when SusanCurtiss and I first met, Curtiss

had become an associate professor oflinguistics at U.C.L.A. She was shar-ing a small office in Campbell Hallwith two of her graduate students.Her desk was crammed into a farcorner of the room, and over it wereseveral pictures, tacked to an orangeroom divider. There were photographsof her two daughters, aged five andone,andthere was a drawing of Curtissherself, done by Genie almost fifteenyearsearlier. The drawing was stickfigure, made with a series of quick

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crayon strokes. It wasn’t easy to decidewhether the rendering was immature

for an artist in her middle teens or, ina primitivist way, accomplished,foritsportrayal of its subject was accurate:Curtiss is painfully thin, and as ner-

vous as summer lightning. Sheis alsoextraordinarily focussed, in the iron-clad mannerof one who haslong donebattle with the hectoring distractions ofthe academic world.

In 1971, when Genie entered her

life, Curtiss was twenty-two years oldand first-year graduate studentin theLinguistics Department. “Iwasone ofthe few linguistson campusstudying languageacquisition in children,” she

told me. “It seemed to methat once we cameto under-stand language acquisition,we would have answers tomost of the central questions of lin-guistics. Besides, I love children. Itseemed as if it would be fun to havethem be mysource of data.”

Her interests had put her in theright place at the right time. She re-members the spring afternoon whenshe was summonedinto the office ofher faculty adviser, Victoria Fromkin.Fromkin, who is now a_ professor

emeritus, began discussing develop-ments in a case of an abused andlinguistically deprived child. Curtisshad already heard ofthe case, but nowshe wasbeinginvited in on the groundfloor. “As a new student, I foundmyself presented with an opportunitythat changed my life in every way,”she told me. “Personally as well asacademically. Because the case is animportant one, it shaped myfutureresearch, right down to today. I wasjust starting on the core curriculumthen. I hadn’t been exposed to manyof the issues that Genie presented tome. I wasn’t even awareofthe critical-period hypothesis.”

In 1971, the science of linguisticswas perplexing to some of its oldhands as well. Thecritical-period hy-pothesis—the idea that there are cer-tain distinct periods in a person’s de-velopment during which skills like afirst language can be learned—wasjust one of a host of new contentions.As the questions changed rapidly,there was also a shift in who wasasking them. Curtiss’s field—the ac-quisition of language by children—hadpreviously been the carefully guardedpurview of psychology departments.

APRIL13, 1992

Linguistics is arguably the most hot-ly contested property in the academ-ic realm. It is soaked with the bloodof poets, theologians, philosophers,philologists, psychologists, biologists,and neurologists, along with whatever

blood can be got out of grammarians.Each discipline has at one time oranother set its flag in the territory,knowing that its internal orthodoxieswould be partly determined by who-ever owned the language question.Susan Curtiss was in the vanguard ofthe newest of a hundredraidingparties.

Until the High Renais-sance, European philosoph-ers had related the languagequestion, along with mostother questions, to the Bible.‘Then Descartes made a he-retical attempt to prove thecomplete independenceof the

soul from the body, and therebyhelpedto establishthe science of biology. Therewas impressive historical testimonyinfavor of including language in thisnew,naturalist science. In the thirdcentury B.C., Epicurus,the first Greekphilosopher to address the origins oflanguage, felt that it was the creationnot of God or of man’sintellect but ofa farless interested party: nature. Lan-guage,he said, was a biological func-tion, like vision or digestion. But hisview was anathema to the tenor oflater times, when language was con-sidered an integral part—perhaps thekeystone—ofman’s soul, or (lesslikely)man’s reason. Orboth:in the late sev-enteenth century, Leibniz proclaimedlanguage ability to be a gift of God,withits form of expression determinedby natural instinct—except for Chi-nese, which, he suggested, was the in-vention of a wise man. Thuslinguis-tics was left standing with one foot onthe theological dock and the other inthe naturalist boat.

‘The discomfort was relieved some-whatby therise of the social sciences,at the end of the eighteenth century.If language was somewhere betweentheology and biology, then perchanceit could be considered a problem foranthropologists, with linguists playinga backup role. The voyages of explo-ration and colonization had shaped the

public imagination the way the Cru-sades had in earlier times, but witha moreutilitarian grail. Comparativelinguists quit worrying about the ques-tions of the Vulgate text and got busycataloguing new languages. Butbythe

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THE NEW YORKER

late nineteenth century the bulk of thequestions concerning the relationshipof language and man had disappearedinto psychology—a discipline that thequestions helped create. And that’swhere they stayed until the Event—the publication of Noam Chomsky’s“Syntactic Structures,” in 1957, the

year of Genie’s birth.The galvanic effect of Chomsky’s

innovation wasdescribed to me by Cath-erine Snow,a professor of human de-velopmentand psychology at HarvardUniversity. “There was a barrennessin the study of language acquisitionthrough the nineteen-forties and mostof the fifties,” she said. “Until 1957,linguists believed that all there wasto think about was vocabulary. ThenChomsky made syntax central, andfor the first time the questions be-came compelling, interesting. It waslike driving across a prairie and all ofa sudden seeing the Rocky Mountainsjump out at you.”

Chomsky and his adherents foundthat the complex variety of syntacticstructures within a language could bedistilled into a small set of core prin-ciples. Though the grammarsof differ-ent languagesdiffer widely, the prin-ciples applied equally to all. Thissuggested an astoundingunity: accord-ing to Chomsky, sentences of diverselanguages—of Japanese, with its in-verted phrases; of Finnish, which ex-

presses cases the way Latin does; ofLithuanian, among modernlanguagesthe one closest to Sanskrit; of Spanish,in which the subject of a sentence iscommonly omitted—arenot fundamen-tally different from English sentences.Somelinguists have speculated, basingtheir hypothesis chiefly on similaritiesof vocabulary and pronunciation, thatall languages derived from a commonancestor. Chomsky doesn’t think so.Onthe syntactical level that Chomskyis concerned with, languages don’tjust have similarities—they are iden-tical. The source of such uniformity,Chomskyargues, mustbe soughtcloserto homethan an ancientprotolanguage.It mustbe contained within us—withinthe species. The rules of languageareeither the product of an unparalleledachievement of human cognition oringrained on a level more basic thanthought. The question is no longer“Howis language designed?” but “Howdoes languagereflect the way we aredesigned?”The pervasiveness of Chomsky’s


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influence on modern linguistics hasbrought him detractors as well as dis-ciples. Every working linguistcarries,involuntarily and sometimes unfairly,a vest-pocketvita summarizinghis life’swork as “pro-Chomskian” or “anti-Chomskian.” Thereare those who ob-ject to Chomsky because of his promi-nencein thefield, and those who objectto his prominence outofit, in endeav-

ors suchaspolitics and philosophy. Butmostof the contention centers on theory.The school of linguistics associatedwith his ideas—a school described,variously, as “nativist,” “generative,”“innatist,” and “rationalist”—quicklymet with heated opposition from theschool of “environmentalists” or “em-piricists,” who hold that a child learnslanguagefrom its interaction with theworld and from the speechofits par-ents. Both schools have since frag-mented, and their ideas and observa-tions have mingled overthe years, andthese days the contest looks decidedlyesoteric from the outside. “I love thepro- and anti-Chomsky debate,” thefilmmaker Gene Searchinger told menot long ago. “It reminds me of thejoke where the guy says, ‘I don’t likeSo-and-So. He’s a Communist,’ Andthe other guy says, ‘He’s not a Com-munist, he’s an anti-Communist.’ Andthe first guy says, ‘I don’t care whatkind of a Communistheis,I still don’tlike him. Truth is, most of thesepeople are operating on Chomskianprecepts, even whenthey disagree withhim on the details.” Searchinger hasspent the last five or six years mak-inga seriesoffilms about linguistics—a project so extensive that it seemsto somepeople as thoughthe languagequestion were now beingtaken over by filmmakers.

Since the mid-nineteen-fifties, Chomsky has taughtat the Massachusetts Insti-tute of Technology. I caughtup with him there one day,in a steeply pitched lecture hall—akind of theatre, whose orchestra pitwas lined with movable blackboards.Hewas sitting in the front row, speak-ing into one of Gene Searchinger’smovie cameras. “Recently, this rathercommon auditorium was filled withmany young linguists debating thecentral issues of the science,”he said.

“Thirty years ago, the numberofpeoplewho could even have conceived ofthese questions was virtually nil.”

Searchinger yelled “Cut!” and the

APRIL13, 1992

camera went dead. Chomsky, a shymatchstick of a man, crumpled back

into his chair and beganchatting withSearchinger while the crew adjusted thelights. Searchinger had the appearanceof a stockbroker on two telephones.

Grip (to Searchinger,yelling): “Isthat good?”

Searchinger: “Yes. No. Moveit up.”Chomsky (to Searchinger): “What’s

more sacrilegious than religion?”(Gripraises lights.)

Cameraman(to Searchinger): “Thechair back is lit. Is that what youwant?”

Searchinger: “That's O.K.”Chomsky(to Searchinger): “.. . but

perfection? There’s no such thing, un-less you're religious.”

Cameraman(to Searchinger): “He’sgot a halo. Is that O.K.?”

Searchinger: “That’s O.K., too.”Finally, Searchingersaid “Sticks,”a

slate marked “Take 5” was held infront of Chomsky’s face and snappedshut, and Chomskyreturned to thesubject of his life’s work and Search-inger’s film.

“Languageis a tool,” he said. “Thetool has no limits—in the sense that wecommonlycreate and understand sen-tences that we have never heard be-fore. How do we do it? Languageislike a hammer:it can be used in manyways, and whatit does depends on theperson using it. Nevertheless, it is asystem with a structure. Anything withstructure has to have limits. It must;

otherwise,it wouldn’t work. If a ham-

mer were an amorphousblob, it wouldnot be useful.

“Theproblem arises when you lookcarefully at that structure—when you

start to take language seri-ously.... If you have suc-ceededin findingsome struc-ture, you’ve just begun.You're readyto ask new ques-tions of the world. Therewasa basic assumption ofthe

studyof language and humanbehaviorin the nineteen-fifties—that we shouldconcentrate on what people do andproduce. There is a major new per-spective: a shift in focus to the innermechanisms of mind that account forbehaviors. Whatare the inner mecha-nisms?“Now, I’m enoughof a materialist

to think that language is in the brain.If you cut off someone’s foot, he canstill speak. In fact, it is useful to think

of language as an organ ofthe mind.

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THE NEW YORKER

The brain is like every other systemin the biological world: it has special-ized structures with specialized func-

tions, and languageis oneofthese. Butdid we invent language because wewere sentient? No more than wein-vented our circulatory system. Whatseemsto be true about languageis thatits basic design is in the genes. Thegenes determinethe structure and de-sign of language. As far as we know,it is plausible to say that there is novariation in the computational sys-tem—intheprinciples that determinethe organization of the series of noisesthat makes sense to us. All this hap-pens in a veryrigid manner,as rigidas the computation in your personalcomputer.”“No, no,” Searchinger objected.

“Would youstart that again? It soundstoo wordy.”

Chomsky looked momentarily baffled.“Te’s comparable to walking,” Search-

inger prompted him.“Well, take, for example, the fa-

cility of walking,” Chomsky wenton.“If a child is raised by a bird, does heendup flying? No. Orif a dogis raisedby a person,doesit end up walking onits hind legs? No. That we are de-signedto walk is uncontroversial. Thatwe are taught to walk is highly im-plausible.”

Listening to the explanation unfold,I was reminded of why different dis-ciplines have wished so fervently tokeep hold of the language question:itis a hard one to divide up and share.

Chomsky started out talking aboutlanguage,andpretty soon he wastalk-ing about the nature of man. He hadalready gored a sacred precept: moth-erhood. According to Chomsky’s in-natists, children weren’t learning lan-guage from their mothers, or fromanyoneelsein their environment. Theywere bringing language with them.The contention affronted common

sense, and though it is now widelyaccepted it still draws fire. “The in-natists think that languageis acquiredvery fast, very easily, and that it’svery much the child’s responsibility,”Catherine Snow, who considers her-self a non-Chomskian, explained tome. “They also see language as onelarge problem. We onthe othersidethink that learning languageis a longslog, which requires from the child aJot of work. Andthe child is workingas hardas he can,fifteen, sixteen hours

a day. Wethinkit requires a relation-



ship with an adult, and a whole set of

cognitive abilities. We also think thatthe child is refining onelittle bit of thelanguage system at a time. People whoare inclined to fall back on innatistexplanationsare falling back on a met-aphor.It’s an exciting metaphor. Theimage that transfixed them wasthatofthe child as linguist: in his every ut-terance, he is the perfect speaker of anexotic, weird language. But even themost rabid innatist cannot point to agene or cell for language. And eventhe most rabid environmen-talist must concede that lan-guage doesn’t get learned byevery species, and thatif toomuchofthe brain is missingyou won't learn language.Thesolution lies somewherein the middle. The problemis takingit out of the realmof mystery. The Princetonpsycholinguist George Millersaid, “The trouble with lan-guage acquisition is that the nativistshave proved thatit’s a mystery and theenvironmentalists have proved thatit’simpossible.’ ”

In the M.L-T. lecture hall, NoamChomsky and Gene Searchinger werefinding it impossible to proceed withthe filming: a scheduled class was ar-riving, and a professor had come inand nodded timidly in Chomsky’s di-rection before turning and writing“Developing Amphibian Oécytes” onthe blackboard.

“Supposethat a child hears no lan-guage at all,” Chomsky was saying.“There are two possibilities: he canhave no language,or he can invent anew one.If you wereto putprelinguisticchildren on anisland, the chances are

good thattheir languagefacility wouldsoon produce a language. Maybe notin thefirst generation. And that whenthey did so, it would resemble the

languages we know. You can’t do theexperiment, because you can’t subjecta child to that experience.”

Thelights flashed off, and the filmcrew began hurriedly packing upcables and microphones. “Of course,”Chomsky commented to Searchingeras the two pushed against an incomingtide of undergraduates and headed forthe M.I.T. quad, “there are naturalexperiments.”

HE luckthat befell Susan Curtisswhen she was invited into the

Genie case by Victoria Fromkin was

51

greater than sheatfirst knew,for thecompetition for access to Genie wasfierce. Even by early Mayof 1971, sixmonthsafterthe girl’s discovery, therewas no assurance that any linguistswould be included amongherscientificobservers. And the scientists weren’tthe only ones trying to gain entry.“Immediately, there was such interestin Genie, such publicity,” HowardHansen, whowasthen the headof thePsychiatry Division of Childrens Hos-pital, told me. “We had calls from all

over the world—press, doc-

tors, do-gooders, kooks. Wetried for anonymity. But wehad to keep her in the hos-pital. She was a wardof thecourt at that point. If we haddischarged her, she wouldhave gone to Juvenile Hall,andthat would not have beenright. So David got active ona research design, and weput togethera little money.”

“David” was David Rigler, a pro-fessor of pediatrics and psychology atthe University of Southern Califor-nia andthe chief psychologist in thehospital’s Psychiatry Division. He hadbeen with Childrens a year, havingworked previously as an evaluator ofgrant applications for the NationalInstitute of Mental Health, in Bethesda,

Maryland. His experience proveduseful in helping the hospital secureinitial funding for research on Geniefrom two foundations and, in Februaryof 1971, a contract with the N.I.M.H.

itself for twenty-one thousandfive hun-dred dollars. The N.I.M.H.contractwouldrun until the following Septem-ber, during which time a number ofconsultants were to be invited in forpreliminary research and a conferencewas to be mounted to debate long-range plans. Hansen and Rigler actedas gatekeepers for the process, withhelp from another hospital psycholo-gist, James Kent. Kent’s presence,es-pecially, seemedto bode well for Genie.Hewasanauthority on child abuse—a phenomenonall too familiar now butnot often acknowledged twenty yearsago—and in 1972 he would be ap-pointed to a White House commissionstudying the problem.

Kent was the doctor originally incharge of following Genie’s case. “Iwas supposedto give Genie therapy,”he recalls. “But mostly that entailedwatching her improvement, document-

ing her progress. I became more her

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54

Boswell than her therapist.” The dayafter her admission to Childrens Hos-pital, he paid her a visit. She had ar-rived in diapers, and was having themchanged when he walked in. Whenshe had been successfully outfitted ina new set of pajamas, she got out ofbed and shuffled toward him, appar-ently attracted by what he had broughtwith him: a magazine, drawing paper,crayons, and a Denver kit—a set of

toys used to gauge the developmentallevel of young children. He was amazedat the skill with which she flippedthrough the magazine. It seemed thatall her dexterity was in her fingertips,

for tests had shown her to have, ingeneral, the motorskills of a two-year-

old. As Kent removeditems from theDenver kit—a bell, a block, a smalldoll—she took each one and held itmomentarily to her cheek but thenlaid it aside. She made good eye con-tact with him, seemed very curiousabout her environment, and wasatten-

tive to sounds, moving about the roomto determine the source of each. ThisKent found promising. But his over-all assessment was bleak. “As far asI’m concerned, Genie was the mostprofoundly damaged child I’ve everseen,” he told me. “There has beennothing in other cases to approachit.It was orders of magnitude worse.Genie’s life was a wasteland.”The question for Kent—and, even-

tually, for Susan Curtiss—was what

this damage meant for Genie’s emo-tional and intellectual state. Because

she couldn’t talk, testing her intellectwas almost impossible. But she wasexpressive of emotion: Kent noticedher fear when he pulled a puppetfrom the Denver kit. Genie started,yankedthe puppet from his hand, andthrew it on the floor. Kent feigned ahorrified concern andsaid, “We haveto get him back.” Tohis astonishment,the child repeated the word “back” andgave a shrill, nervous laugh. Encour-

aged, Kent began slapstick panto-mime, picking up the puppet andlet-ting Genie throw it again, which shedid with bursts of laughter. She wasplaying, and was quick to enjoy hisreciprocating play.

She showedlittle beyond this, andKentreported in a 1972 symposiumpaper that “apart from the peculiarlaugh,frustration was the only otherclear affective behavior we could dis-cern.” The frustration was just aspeculiar. She would scowl, tear paper,



THE SKELETON OF A TROUT IN SHALLOW WATER

wedged between two stonesnear the bankof a rushing streamstartled the old man with the shockof white hair who uncovereditwhile stoopingto pick watercress.Fora long time he examined the skeleton—skull, ribs, and spine polished clean—before dislodging it with his caneand watchingit spin awayinto the fast currentand disappear through the shadowsof the overhangingtrees.Then,with the sun beating down

on his head and bleachingthefields that stretched awayto the mountains, he released

the dripping clumpof watercresshe had been clutchingall that timeand watcheditfloat away,too,

dark andtangledin the clear water.—Nicuoras CurisTOPHER

or scratch objects with her fingernails.When she was very angry, she wouldscratch her face, blow her nose vio-Jently into her clothes, and urinate.But she would not make a sound, and

she would not turn her anger outward,toward another person. Her usualcomportment, Kentnoted, was a “som-

bre detachment.” If not deliberatelyengaged, she drifted around in hernew physical world, walking with bentelbowsin her strange “bunny walk,”spitting into her clothing or into acurtain hem, far more aware of the

room thanof the people in it. In fact,she seemedhardly ableto differentiatebetweenvarious visitors. Some observ-ers referred to her as “ghostlike.”Amongthefirst of the consultants to

fly in was Jay Shurley. “Thatfirst trip,I paid my own way,”he recalled. “Ispent a week with her, examining herclinically. I determined for myself thatshe was the genuinearticle—that shehad suffered the most extreme long-duration social isolation of any childthat had been described in any litera~ture I could find.”

Shurley had sent the bulk of hisluggage overland—six hundred poundsof state-of-the-art equipment for in-vestigating brain activity. For threenights running, on three of his earlyvisits, he wired Genie to an array ofmeters, measuring her brain waveswhile she slept, lookingfor any anoma-lies that would imply abnormal braindevelopment. “Genie was about the

richest source of information you canimagine,” he said. “I responded tothis, because I’m an investigator on a

fundamental level. There were allkindsof questions that I felt she mightshed some light on. Naturalistic casesof intense isolation don’t come alongoften—not with a period ofisolation asextensive as that.”

Shurley had a charterinterest in theisolation question; he had grown upunusual, in a hardscrabble Texas farmfamily. “I was a black sheep,” he toldme. “Myfamily are all ranchers. I’mthe first one that wanted to go tocollege and become an academic.” Aftergraduating from the University of‘Texas Medical Branch, at Galveston,

Shurley went to Pennsylvania Hospi-tal, in Philadelphia, for his psychiatrictraining. After a brief stint of privatepractice in Austin, he was drafted intothe Army, where he taught psychia-trists who were accompanyingthe troopsto Korea. After this tour of duty, hebecame the chief of the Adult Psychi-atric Branch of the N.I.M.H.; therehe spent his off-hours helping to de-velop the warm-water sensory-depri-vation chambers that eventually madetheir way from science to parapsychol-ogy. Throughthe late nineteen-fiftiesand early nineteen-sixties, first at theN.LM.H.and then at the VeteransAdministration hospital in OklahomaCity, he used the tanks to experimenton himself, floating in their null en-vironment until he experienced the

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64

vivid hallucinatory state of the disem-bodied mind. Some of these dream

states reminded him of reports he hadheard in the military—the accounts oftest pilots whoflew the new reconnais-sancejets so high that they could seeneither clouds nor horizon andso fastthat they escaped the sound of theirown engines. The Air Force deniedthat its pilots were hallucinating inflight, but the pilots themselves had aname for the point at which theyseemedto depart from reality and enterthe dream state—“the breakoff.” Sim-ilar dislocations were reported by sol-diers stationed at lonely DEW-lineoutposts, and by released AmericanP.O.W.s returning from North Ko-rea, where they had been kept in sol-itary confinement. Shurley realized thatwhat he was experiencingin the tankswasreally a combination of two phe-nomena, which he wished to teaseapart. “You cannot achieve sensoryisolation without social isolation,” heexplained. “For an intact, developedhuman being, the richest source ofsensory contactis input from fellowhumanbeing.”

Tostudy the effects of social isola-tion independentof the sensory, Shur-ley went to places where there werefew humanbeings. He studied seamenon small ships, and in thesixties spentthree summers in Antarctica, record-

ing the metabolism, sleeppatterns, andpsychosocial behaviorofscientists andwork crews sent there for thirteen-month stints by the National ScienceFoundation. He became sucha fixtureon that continent that the NationalGeodetic Survey named a mountain inthe Pensacola Range Shurley Ridge.Students at the University of Okla-homa named his graduate course the‘Twenty-Foot Stare in the Ten-FootRoom. The equipment he hooked upto Genie wasstickered with bills oflading from the South Pole.Of his first visit with the child,

Shurley remembers that she treatedeverything, including people, as ob-jects. “If you gave her a toy, she wouldreach out andtouchit, holdit, caress

it with her fingertips, as though shedidn’t trust her eyes,”he told me. “Shewould rubit against her cheek to feelit. So when I met her and she beganto notice me standing beside her bed,I held my hand out and she reachedout and took my hand andcarefullyfelt my thumb and fingers individu-ally, and then put my handagainst her



cheek.” His clinical experience pro-vided a context for this odd behavior.

“She was exactly like a blind child,”he said. “She didn’t integrate tactileandvisual information. Even the bunnywalk—hands in front. Its what wecall a blindism. It’s what people dowhen theydo notentirelybelieve theireyes.”

Shurleyarrived on the scenein timeto note some of Genie’s initial progress.“When I saw her first, there waspendantflesh hanging aroundher but-tocks where the hole of the chair hadbeen. It was bruised black. There’sno record of this except in my mem-ory. Three weekslater, it had beenreabsorbed, and the bruises had gonefrom blue to yellow.” When he re-turned some two monthslater, he noted

other, less encouraging transforma-tions. “From being a totally neglect-ed waif at the time I did my consul-tation, by the time I came back Geniehad become a prize,” he told me.“There was a contest about who wasgoing to investigate her, and how—

about where to go with the treatmentand research. You can’t go every-where. There were several leads, andafter my initial sleep study I was try-ing to figure out where J wanted togo. Language acquisition was part ofwhat I was interested in, but not a

predominant part. Victoria Fromkinhad declared an interest in the cogni-tive area, but if Genie turned outto bea mentallyretarded child—geneticallyor because of her diet—she wouldn’tbe a good case for study ofcognitivedevelopment. Thepotential for cogni-tive development would notbe there;there would not be a flowering. Thisgirl had lived on gruel and on milkfrom nursingbottles. I thoughtit wouldbe easy to investigate whether herbrain had suffered deprivation nutri-tionally, informationally, socially. Iwanted to know whatthe effect was onher growing brain and, secondly, onher growing personality. I was moreinterested in the socioemotionalaspectsthan in the cognitive. An issue that Ithoughtcould really be explored waswhether she could be reattached to a

TY ;iyene

APRIL 13, 1992

maternal figure. I thought it impor-tantto put her in contact with someone

she could bond with. This case wassomething that was not duplicable. Itwasimportantthatit be exploited fullyand properly—and I don’t mean ex-ploitation in a pejorative sense.”To Shurley, the prospects for a prop-

er handling of the case seemed dim.“Tt was a politics-ridden situation, amatter of internecine warfare, almost

from the word go,”he said. “ChildrensHospital was an extraordinary loca-tion for pursuing a process that shouldbe quiet and calm. It’s supported bythecelebrity community. There wasa glitzfactor. Anything that happened therewas tainted by who wasgoingto getthe publicity, who was going to ben-efit—morethan in anyother pediatricshospital I know of. Andso,very soon,that engenderedthis breakdown—thisconflict between doctor and hospital,

between teacher, school, psychiatry,psychology. It became almost an armedcamp, very quickly.”

Genie, for one, seemed oblivious ofthe battles behind the scenes. For thefirst time in her life she was beingtreated relatively the same as otherchildren, and was,relatively, thriving.

Her mental and physical developmenthad begun almost immediately on heradmissionto the hospital. By her thirdday, she was helping to dress herselfand was voluntarily using the toilet,thoughherincontinence problems wereto persist. After two weeks, she seemedready for another expansion of herworld, and wasreleased into the hos-pital’s Rehabilitation Center, a single-story building with a yard and a playschool, set apart from the hospital proper.There she was free to wander orwatch, or to join in playing games andusing arts-and-crafts materials along-side much younger patients, Whilethey learned creative discipline, shelearned freedom. She discovered thatwhen she dropped things, even thingsthat broke, she was not admonished,

and might, in fact, be encouraged torepeat the action. Herresponseto thislicense was what James Kentcalled“the most spontaneous and sustained”of her affective reactions.

“She entered quickly into a ritualplay,” he reported in his 1972 sympo-sium paper, “during which she wouldeventually destroy the object. Thenervous, tense laughterfirst associatedwith these episodes gradually changedto a relaxed and infectious laugh that

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THE NEW YORKER

would sometimes double her up andbring tears to her eyes. She wouldoften accompanyher ownactions withcries of ‘Stop it—burst out laughingand repeat the action.” Despite thedisapproval of some on thestaff, whofeared that Genie would go too far inthis atmosphere of permissiveness (asshe indeed seemed to do one day whenshe gleefully jumped all over her neweyeglasses and threw them onto theroof), Kent condonedher small orgiesof destruction, seeing them as “at-

tempts at active mastery of formerlytraumatic situations.”

Actions that would have earned anormal child a spanking seemed inGenie to be healthy signs of emer-gence. One dayin early spring, shemade hitting gestures at a new girlin the Rehabilitation Center, much tothe surprise and pleasure of her ob-servers. Previously, her rage had beendirected inward. Susan Curtiss wrotein her dissertation, “Genie would eruptand have a raging tantrum, fiail-ing about, scratching,spitting, blowingher nose, and frantically rubbing herface and hair with her own mucus,all the time trying to gouge or other-wise inflict pain on herself—all insilence. Unable to vocalize, Genie woulduse objects and parts of her body tomake noise and help express herfrenzy:a chair scratching against the floor,her fingers scratching against a bal-Joon,furniture falling, objects thrown

or slammedagainst other objects, herfeet shufiling. These were Genie’snoises during her sobless, silent tan-trum. Atlonglast, physically exhausted,her rage would subside, and Geniewouldsilently return to her undemon-strative self.”

Now,finally, Genie had turned someanger outward, aiming it at a sourceof frustration. She was upset with thenew girl because she was wearing adress from the hospital laundry whichGenie had formerly worn; the episodewasthefirst indication that Genie wasdeveloping a sense ofself.

She already had a sense of pos-session; she hoarded found objects—books, paper cups, and anything madeof plastic. Gradually, she showedsignsof extending that possessiveness topeople. From thestart, her routine hadincludeddaily walks aroundthe groundswith James Kent, and, on most days,a drive with him to a local store orpark. As was her habit, she seemedcurious about him and glad to see him



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when he arrived but did not show inany way that she distinguished himfrom anyone else or mourned hisabsences. A month passed before afleeting facial expression indicated thatshe registered his departures; finally,after another month, she reached over

one day and took his handto detainhim. From then on, she would pullhim back downto sit beside her whenit was time for him to go. She carednot at all for other children; her at-tachments were to adults—especiallyto men who,like Kent and Shurley butunlike her father, wore beards.

She made friends with women aswell—particularly with a woman namedJean Butler (“Miss Butler”to the chil-dren, a title Genie abbreviated to“Mibbi’”), who administeredthe special-education program at the Rehabilita-tion Center, underthe aegis of the Los

Angeles Public School District. Geniealso befriended the center’s handy-manand coupleof the cooks, andit

wasto the latter that she turned earlyone morning when an earthquake hitLos Angeles. Runninginto the kitchen,she began verbalizingso profusely thatoneof the cooks commentedlater thatif there had been one more tremorGenie would have achieved normalspeech on the spot. And she was achiev-ing speech, if not quite on the spot.Hercuriosity about her new surround-ings sent her on a constant quest forthe names of things. She would leadone or anotherofhercaretakers around,

using their fingers to touch or pointto objects, while they said the corre-

sponding words. “Hungry to learn thewords forall the newitemsfilling hersenses,” Susan Curtiss wrote, “shewould at timespoint to the whole out-doors and becomefrustrated and angrywhen someonefailed to immediatelyidentify the particular object she wasfocused on.”

Yet, although Genie’s vocabularyincreased, her speech stayed limited toa few short utterances; it soon became

clear that she was understanding morethan she could produce. Duringa classat the Rehabilitation Center one dayin May, Jean Butler asked a boy whowas holding a couple of balloons howmanyballoons he had. “Three,” thechild said, and Genie, lookingstartled,handed him theextra balloon he need-ed to make his answercorrect. Intel-ligence tests were now being admin-istered to her, and she was showingremarkable progress, gaining in some

APRIL13, 1992

areas a year in developmentevery fewmonths. She showed what experts inchild development refer to as scatter:on someskills—in the performance ofsuch routine tasks as bathing herself,for instance—she scored the same asan average nine-year-old; on others,

such as her almost complete inabilityto chew food, she scored as a toddler.Withinthescatter, language remainednear the bottom.

She was, at any rate, exceedingexpectations, and in Mayherprogresssuddenly accelerated. Her vocabularyquest became moreassertive, and her

spontaneous(iflargely incoherent) ver-balizing more frequent. She gainedconfidence in her movements, and beganactively engaging in horseplay. Shewanted to be carried piggyback, or tobe swung around in the air like awhirligig. She wasthrilled when some-one holding her pretended to let herdrop. “A great change from the childwe saw at admission who shrank frommost physical contact,” Kent noted inhis symposium paper.

M* of 1971 was also decisiontime, when, underthe terms of

the N.I.M.H. contract, the consultantswho had beenobserving Genie werescheduled to convene to consider herfuture. Several less formal meetingshad beenheld, but this was the officialone, on which the decisions abouttherapy and research and the applica-tion for a long-term grant would bebased. David Rigler and Howard Han-sen sent out the invitations; partici-pants were booked into the HollywoodPlaza Hotel, on Vine Street. Thefirst

evening—Sunday, May 2nd—theywere invited to Hansen’s house “fordrinks and chatter.” The next morn-ing, the chatter over, the discussion

began in earnest, in the boardroom ofChildrens Hospital.The stakes were clearly high. From

time to time, closet children (as im-prisonment cases like Genie’s havebeen called) and wild children (chil-dren abandoned asinfants in the wil-derness) have surfaced, and they havetraditionally given rise to very visiblescience. Visible, difficult, and usually,in the long run, dubious.

The first feral child to come tothe attention of what might be calledmodern science was Victor, the WildBoy of Aveyron, a pitiable creaturediscovered in January of 1800 lurkingnaked in front of a tanner’s cottage in

7/16/2019

THE NEW YORKER

the Languedoc region of southernFrance. He was almost completelywild, having reached an age of ap-proximately twelve in a state of inde-pendent savagery, living in the woodsand eating acorns and pilfered pota-toes. He had no language; his lasthuman contact seemed to have beenwith whoever had cut his throat andleft him to die when he waslittle morethan a toddler. “Rescued,” he wasbrought to Paris, to the Institut Na-tional des Sourds-Muets, there to beobserved, taught, tormented, and loved

by a young physician named Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard. So varied andfruitful was Itard’s careerthatit givesan impression of professional profli-gacy; he has beencalled the father ofchild psychology andthefather of thestudy of ear, nose, and throat disor-

ders. Victor was his most celebratedand most frustrating subject.The emotional connection between

the ambitious teacher and his strangestudent is apparent from Itard’s notes.Itardtells of the remorse he felt whenhis pressuring induced quiet tears orsobbing tantrums, of how he wouldsit immobile for minutes while Victorsat before him fondly caressing andkissing the teacher’s knees. Even so,Itard could not refrain from using theboy’s affection as a tool—challenginghis trust by terrorizing him with aLeyden jar (a sort of battery that candeliver a shock), and unfairly punish-ing him over his lessons to test hissense of justice. Victor knew enoughaboutjustice to be outraged, and Itard

found the outrage edifying. UnderItard’s aggressive instruction (he oncedangled the boy from a fifth-storywindow to frighten him out of hisrecalcitrance), Victor made some hard-

won headway. He learnedto spell theFrench word for milk, andonvisits toa neighbor’s home would take alongthe appropriate letters from the institute’smetal teaching alphabet so that hecould spell out “LAIT” while downinga glass of it. But he never learnedto talk.He was nonetheless influential. In

1912,the Italian educator Maria Mon-tessori called Itard’s work “practicallythe first attempts at experimentalpsychology,” and she based some ofher innovations on his experience withVictor. The metal cutoutsofletters andshapes still common in Montessoriclassrooms are descendants of the onesthat Victor used. In other ways, too,



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the world is different for Victor’s hav-ing come underscientific scrutiny bymen who understood methodology andthe merits of objective observation. Evenso—as Thierry Gineste, the reigningexpert on the Wild Boy, contends inhis book “Victor de PAveyron: Der-nier Enfant Sauvage, Premier EnfantFou”—the useful knowledge arisingfrom the case was limited by how lit-tle was learned about the boy’s pastandabouthis potential. He remained,

finally, an enigma.Amongthewild children discovered

over the last seven centuries, more

than fifty have been documented. Thelist includes the Hesse wolf-child;the Irish sheep-child; Kaspar Hauser;the first Lithuanian bear-child; Peter

of Hanover; the second Lithuanianbear-child; the third; the Karpfen bear-girl; Tomko of Zips; the Salzburgsow-girl; Clemens, the Overdyke pig-child; Dina Sanichar of Sekandra;the Indian panther-child; the Justedalsnow-hen; the Mauretanian gazelle~child; the Teheran ape-child; Lucas,the South African baboon-child; andEdith of Ohio. Investigations of thesecases were generally marred by anexcess of enthusiasm and a lack ofmethodology on the part of those whocould have turned the children’s mis-fortunes into revelation; by Genie’sadvent, a sorry pattern of missed op-portunities had beenestablished.“Whenan experimentlike this comes along,there is intense excitement, and in-

tense pressure,” Jay Shurley remarkedto me. “People tend to operate inthese situations much more withtheirthalamus than with theircortex.”

Onthefirst day of theconference, Shurley gavethe results of his sleep stud-ies. Genie’s brain waves,he said, had showna largenumberof whatare calledsleep spindles—artifacts that may in-dicate retardation. Others’ observationswere more subjective, less technical.Jean Butler reported that Genie waseuphoric on holidays and weekends,when shegotto leave the Rehabilita-tion Center on chaperonedtrips; that

she often said “No” but didn’t meanit; that she called people “peepa”; that“dert” meant“doctor.” She had had noproblem withurinesoiling since Christ-mas, She had been afraid of some boyswho one day camepast the classroomwindowscarryingrifles. She was ter-

APRIL13, 1992

rified of big dogs, and of all menwearing khakis. She thought thatsing-ing was exclusively for her benefit.Videotapes were shown of Genie inthe Rehabilitation Center, and Rigler

described a party that had been heldthere to celebrate her fourteenth birthday. It had overwhelmedher,he said,and her anxiety had mounted witheachpresent opened, until at last shehad to leave the room andsit in acorner holding Rigler’s hand whileshe calmed down.The second day was reserved for

“deliberationsof the consultantpanel,”meaningthatit did not include thosepeople seen only as caretakers, likeButler and the Rehabilitation Centercooks, who had been invited to par-ticipate on Monday. (“So Genie re-sponds well to your intrasupportiveinitiatives?” a scientist had asked oneof the cooks. “I just gives her love,”the cook had replied.) Tuesday wasfor scientists only; besides Shurley,

Rigler, Hansen, Kent, and Fromkin,there were somefifteen psychologistsand neurologists from all over thecountry. When they convened, theirdiscussion was shaped as much by anevent of the evening before as by thefirst day’s testimony.

It is one of the resonantcuriositiesof Genie’s story that her discoveryco-incided with the Los Angeles premiéreof Francois Truffaut’s “The WildChild,” a movie thattells the story ofItard and Victor, l’enfant sauvage deL’Aveyron. Between the newspaper ac-counts of Genie’s rescue on page | andthe cinema ads in the entertainment

section, art andlife seemedto be doing a do-si-do. Atfour-thirty Mondayafter-noon,the day’s testimonyon Geniefinished,the sym-posium members adjournedto a movie theatre a fewblocks from the hospital

for a private screening of “The WildChild.”

“No one hadseenit before,” Shurleyrecalled. “I hadn’t seen it. The impacton the whole group was stunning. Atfirst, there was silence. It was verymoving—no one could say anything.Once people overcame the shock, thequestions began to flow.” The ques-tions flowed through dinner and intothe next morning’s session, but any-one who may have hoped that thefilm would promote accord amongthe attendees was quickly disabused.

7/16/2019

THE NEW YORKER

“There were so many things com-mented on,” Shurley said. “All ofus saw in the movie what we wereprepared to see to confirm our own

biases.”The biases concerned two areas:

what Genie could bestrevealto scienceand what,in the course of that reveal-

ing, science could ethically ask ofGenie. Shurley’s handwritten notes ofthe Tuesday meeting include the sen-tence “Rigler talked on second day onconstraints on research, legal and

moral.” After the movie, even more

than before, moral concerns seemed to

be on everyone’s mind.“My pitch was—and some others

agreed—thatthe interests of the girl,

in termsof therapy, would haveto be

uppermost, andthat anything we mightlearn from her should be a secondaryconsideration, and should be donewithin the context of her therapy,”Shurley told me. “Otherssaidthatthiswastoo greata scientific opportunity—that research had to be primary.”Three months after the conference,

Rigler elegantly expressed the interde-pendence of the two themesin letterto Jean Butler. “Justification for these[N.LM.H.] funds was thescientificimportanceassociated with the study ofthis child, study that was based essen-

tially upon successful rehabilitation,”he wrote. “Theories of child develop-menthold that there are essential ex-periences for achievement of normalpsychological and physical growth. Ifthis child can be assisted to develop in

cognitive, linguistic and social, andother areas, this provides useful infor-mation regarding the critical role ofearly experience which is of potentialbenefit to other deprived children. Theresearch interest inherently rests uponsuccessful achievement of rehabilita-tive efforts. The research goals thuscoincide with [Genie’s] own welfareand happiness. Conversely, if our re-search methods were to interfere with[her] development, they would defeatthe very purpose of the research.”

In Shurley’s recollection of theconference, science was already inter-

fering. “Dr. Rigler and others arguedfor the primacy of research—couched,of course, in ethically sensitive terms,”

he told me. The meeting ended inwhat one conferee called “some con-siderable confusion.” Rigler was leftwith the chore of digesting all thedebate and deciding the nature of thefinal N.I.M.H.-grant proposal—what



69

kind of work the grant should fundand who should do it. The advice hehadreceived was, perhaps, more thanhe hadbargainedfor. “He looked likea man who’s thirsty for a sip of waterand is handed a fire hose,” Shurleyrecalled. In a post-conference letter,Rigler and Hansen thanked the con-ferees for an “enriching exchange,”and solicited their reactions to theproceedings.

Thosereactions soon rolled in, andsome had a warningtone. David Elkind,a professor of psychology at the Uni-versity of Rochester, wrote, “Althoughlanguageis not my area, I would liketo reinforce the words of caution Iexpressed at the meeting. Too muchemphasis on language could be detri-mental if the child came to feel thatlove, attention, and acceptance were

primarily dependentupon herspeech.”David A. Freedman, a professor ofpsychiatry at Baylor College of Medi-cine, in Houston, argued that the ac-

quisition of speech might be dependenton whathe, like Elkind andthe cook,called love. Herejoiced in the evidenceof Genie’s progress which was pre-sented in the videotapes, noting the

“very dramatic... change in her ap-pearance from apathy, to a wan andpitiable appearance, to an at timesanimated and involvedlittle girl, whichseemedto correlate with the passage oftime.” Buthis clinical experience withother unfortunate children had taughthim to be cautious of the varnish that

videotape and optimism can apply tosuch cases. He was unconvinced bysurfaces. He was looking for a thawat the center, and a visit he had hadwith Genie had disquieted him:

WhenL arrived she was having her break-fast. Although shesat at the table with twoother children who were engagedin fairlytypical childish conversation and play, shehad nothingto do with them.It is difficult toput into words the feeling I had about whatshe did. I don’tthink it would be accurate tosay she actively ignored or rejected them.Ratherit seemedto methatit was as thoughfor her they were no different from the wallsand furniture in the room. . .. The questionbecomes how to go about inducing in thischild the ability to be aware of both herselfand others andfeel an interest in and needfor others. My prejudices saythatif this goalcan be achieved she stands a chanceof lead-ing a relatively normal life; if [it] can’t, shewill remain an automaton. My prejudicesalso say that to achieve this goalit will benecessary for Genie to establish a particularlyclose relation with some one person whosecare for her will include the provision of agood dealof body pleasure. I’m referring tosomething analogousto what any good motherautomatically and unconsciouslyprovides herinfant as she bathes, feeds, and diapers it.Obviouslythis won't be easy to do fora fourteen-year-old.Yet, I believe a necessary precursorto anyeffective educative process would beher development of an intense, dependentattachment to some one person whom shewould be interested both in identifying her-self with and pleasing. . .

Withoutthe creation of such an attach-ment, andall it implies with regardto Genie’sneedto attemptto maintainit, I doubt whethershewill have the equipmentto integrate what-everskills she develops. I believe somethingalongthis line was implicit in the sense of thegroup when we wereall in accord thatitwould not be indicated to attempt to train

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Genie in talking... She should be, in myview, bathed, clothed, toileted, massaged,kissed, cuddled, and fondled all by one per-son. Otherpeople should be available but inadistinctly secondary role. Out of such an in-tense relation should grow both an awarenessof herself and of whoeverit is whois caringfor her. Such an awareness,to reiterate, seemsto me to be the necessary first step in hereducation.

Later that summer, Rigler madehisgrant decision, and its focus was onlanguage acquisition—not teachingGenie language so much as watchinghow she learnedit. The main benefi-ciary was the scientist whom Shurleyremembers as having hadthe least tosay at the Maysession. “It was asurprise when I learned that VictoriaFromkin initiated a major study,” hetold me. “But Rigler thought a lan-guage study was a good idea—thoughhe later came to doubtit.”

Shurley fully understood why thecase might be perplexing. “At first,confronted with this child, we didn’t

know what questions to ask her,” hetold me. “Genie was an absolutelybeautiful example of a process: whenconfronted with nature—human na-ture—in the raw, you stumble aroundand come upwith one or twoquestionsto ask. If they are the right questions—whichisto say,if they are the relevantquestions—then you get aroundto thecontent, and you begin to read whatwaswritten there all along. The ques-tions come out of your culture. TheWild Boyof Aveyron—Victor—camealong when all the questions of theEnlightenment were being asked. Andthey were asked of him. But he didn’tanswer them.”

‘TRUCK though Shurley and theotherconferees were by Truffaut’s

movie, they could not have imagined,

as they sat in the otherwise emptymovie theatre, how deep wouldrun theparallels between the two so distantcases—the boy abandonedto the for-ests of revolutionary France and thegirl trapped in a twentieth-centuryAmerican suburban bedroom—or howinsistently the similarities would sur-face. Indeed, simply by viewing themovie the committee was aligning thecase in hand with the one on thescreen: in 1800,thescientists decidingthe fate of the Wild Boy had alsosought counsel from popular entertain-

ment. Theyattended a play, then the

rage in Paris, about a fictitious enfantsauvage. The melodrama was called

APRIL 13, 1992

“The Forest’s Child,” and Victor wasnamedafter its protagonist.

Like Genie, Victor seemed on dis-covery to be impervious to heat andcold: he pulled potatoes outof the firewith his bare hands, and he cavorted

naked in the snow. Like Genie, heseemed not to make distinctions be-tween whatcould best be perceived byfeel and whatbysight, suffering fromwhat one attending scientist termed“a dissonance of vision and touch.”Like Genie, he was substantiallyoblivi-ous of the existence of anyone buthimself. (“I am dismayed to see thenatural man so egotistical,” reportedJ.-J. Virey, one of Victor’sfirst observ-ers.) As would be the case more thana century and a halflater, the egotismseemed,at least on the surface, gradu-

ally to melt. Like Genie in the Reha-bilitation Center, Victor adopted as afavorite activity the setting of the table.One day, he set a place for the justdeceased husband of his loving care-taker, Mme. Guérin, and her tearsastonished him;it washis first encoun-ter with humangrief. Heput the placesetting in the cupboard and neverbrought it out again.

As with Genie, Victor’s discoveryoccasioned a sideshow,though on some-thing of a granderscale. His arrival inParis from the departmental capital ofRodez—thetrip, by coach, had takena week, during which the boy was kepton a leash—created a public furor.Rumorsflowed through the crowd sur-roundingtheinstitute grounds that hewasperhapsthe long-lost Louis XVII,who,like some premonitory Anastasia,

had survived the execution of his royalparents and wassaidto have fled intothe forest; however, the foundling’sage seemed wrong. Oddsmakersset upshop, taking bets on whether the boywould evertalk, everbecivilized. News-paperscarried the betting charts. Itardsequestered Victor from the more in-discriminate attentions; later, however,

he acted as Victor’s chaperon amongthe perils of Parisian high society.‘Whenthe twoaccepted a summonstodine with Mme. Récamier, the ravish-

ing young socialite whose attentionsconferred social beatification in thecapital, Victor left the table and raninto the yard, tore off his clothes, and

climbed a tree; he wasnot invited back.

Onanotheroccasion, he met the Mar-quis de Sade—an encounter that theofficial history of the Institut describesas “vraiment un rendez-vous manqué.”

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THE NEW YORKER 71

The public’s interest in Victor was (Advertisement)notjust morbid. Modern children whoare abused or neglected draw our at-tention because we see them, usually,

as disturbing exceptions, albeit symp-tomatic ones, to society’s prevailingorder. In France in 1800, order wasnot presumed; the Committee of PublicSafety and the Reign of Terror hadtaken care of that. Evenin the prevail-ing orderofearlier, calmereras, chil-drendid notenjoy their currentcossetedstatus. The Enlightenment’s emphasison the worth of the individual hadbeen extended to individual children,but in a grudging sort of way, and the

expedience of leaving them—atleast,

the unwanted ones—to die in the woodswas not unheard of and not altogethershocking. The boyfound nakedin thetanner’s doorway was interestingto hiscountry’scitizens not becausehis brutalhistory astonished them but becausethe Enlightenmentand the Terror hadhoned an appreciation of certain ques-tions that the boy might be able to “Room #21007-A.”address—questionsaboutthe nature of

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the Revolution seemed to have worked | e 1to Victor’s advantage. Foremost among| 1 a 5 Iits courtesies was its timely end, which [I |)ATTACH| C) I’m movingto the new address 1permitted a renewalofinterest in things I TaserEne indicated below. 1scientific. During the preceding de- I ronnie !cade, Paris had not been a happyplace |! current address) Name (please print) 1for scientists, amongothers. Intellec- I peeee 1

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ciety of Ob: f Mi f nerThe Society o!i fue I O I'd like to renew my subscription for one 1the anthropological organization that I yearat $32. Iinitiated the research on Victor, asda © Pd like to subscribe for one year Ionly a month old when hewas discov- I (52 issues) at $32. I

ered. Ten years earlier, the Revolu- 5 Cee, : ly check for$. is enclosed. 1tionary governmenthad sanctioned the | Charge my [ American Express. C1 MasterCard Visa |institute where he wastolive, adding 5 I IBeane c a“National” to its nameandsupporting| J Account Number Expiration Date 1it from state coffers. The deaf had 5 1been considered subhuman,before the j Signature 1school’s successfulefforts to teach them § Canada | year $65.27 (includes GST); otherforeign year |sign language, and had been locked [ a] $66.00. Paymentin U.S, funds with order. 1away in the purgatoryof the Bicétre | Vy (Remove my name from THE NEW YORKER 1

prac. Silt \ subscriberlists available for rental. 4152asylum,with criminals, epileptics, and | g~S !the insane. For the government, the I ‘ MAIL COMPLETED ORDERTO: 1new ability of deaf people to commu- I 1nicate was a symbolic resurrection, a |b 1metaphorical promise to the voiceless f 1s SUBSCRIPTION DEPARTMENT, P.O. BOX 56447, BOULDER,CO 80322of all kinds. The government had also Le ae ae aeoo oe oe ot oe oeoe

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72

appointed a doctor, Philippe Pinel, torun Bicétre, instead of the usual po-

liceman. Pinel would become knownas the father of psychiatry. Like AbbéSicard, the director of the Institut

National, he played a role in Victor’seducation: the two proclaimed himunsalvageable,a true and irremediableidiot. After that harsh dismissal, theboy languished for monthsin a limboof neglect, until Itard, disagreeing withSicard, his mentor, took on the task ofproving Victor’s potential.

Like bronze, French science is a

useful amalgam oftwoslightly softerelements. Descartes set out the basicscientific method, rooting it in a rig-orous adherence to what canlogicallybe inferred; he trusted the corporeal

senses the way a Bedouintrusts theshimmerof silver in distant sands. Acenturylater, the philosopher EtienneBonnot de Condillac adopted a moregenerous opinion of outward experi-ence. Taking his cue from the empiri-cism of John Locke, Condillac con-tended that our minds are blankslatesat birth and are tutored entirely byour surroundings. The world livedin Descartes; Condillac lived in the

world.Much scientific endeavor of the

eighteenth century was aimed at de-termining the physical distinctions be-tween manandbeast. It had long beenheld by some that the physiologicalfeature most innately human was thefanny, or perhaps the calf—or,atleast,the upright posture that had created

both of them. But then the voyages ofexploration reached Borneo, whereEuropeans encountered upright andeminently fannied orangutans, and thedistinction collapsed. Articulation ofvocal sounds was another promisingcriterion, except that magpies couldalso doit pretty well, and New Worldparrots marvellously. Andtheability toexpress emotions was the property ofany pet. So hotly contested was theborder between men andanimals thatthe Indians discovered in the West byColumbus werenot accepted as humanuntil they were conclusively decreed tobe so by a papal bull, in 1537. InCondillac’s time, the orangutan’s pos-sible humanity was so seriously con-templated thatit was proposed that onebe mated with a prostitute to see whatprogeny would ensue.

Clearly, some defining event wasneeded. Thescientists of the age, likephysical anthropologists of a later day,



sought a missing link—in this case, aliving one, someone or something

perched squarely on the species’ fron-tier. By their orthodoxy, that wouldhave to be either a talking ape or ahuman being reared without humancontact, like an animal in the wild.So distinct from humanity were feralchildren considered that Linnaeus,in his “Systema Naturae,” accordedthem status as a separate species,Homo ferus.

Victor, even before he reachedParis,was debunking some of the prominenttheories. To the dismayof the upright-stance advocates, he was seen, dur-ing one of his several escape attempts,to cross a field on all fours, runningclose to the ground, like an animal.J.-J. Virey found no sign of another“Snnate” human trait: “Is our youngAveyronnais capableofpity?” he asked.“Personally, I venture to believe thatif this young mancould . . bring someinterest to bear on the things aroundhim, then he would be inclined to

commiserate as much as childrenordinarily are.” Like Genie, Victorhoarded what he cherished, and he

refused to share. Like Genie, he warmed

only slowly to adults and notat allto other children. Having given thelieto physical rectitude and empathicfeel-ing as defining characteristics, the boy,like Genie, was called to preside overa grander mystery—the mystery nearthe center of the web.

Montaignesaid,in an essay of 1580,“TI believe that a child brought up in

complete solitude, far from all inter-course (which would be a difficult ex-periment to carry out), would have

some kind of speech to express hisideas,” and he implied that the in-herent enigma wasstill that of Psam-tik: Which language wouldthe childspeak? The Enlightenment torturednew subtleties out of that question.Wasournative language that of thesoul, of society, or of the intel-

lect? Did thought lead to language,and language to society? Some in-verted the progression:society was ourmost innate characteristic, they said;it

enabled language; language enabledthought. Did the child in the woodsnot think, then? Was it possible tothink with something other than lan-guage? Was it impossible to thinkalone? Or was thinking alone thenecessary precursor to all else? Thequestions outlived the age. By the endof the nineteenth century, the Ger-man philologist Heymann Steinthalhad concluded that language wasnot meant solely for communication.“Languageis self-awareness,”he said.“Thatis, understandingoneself . . . asone is understood by another. Oneunderstands oneself: that is the begin-ning of language.”

ForVictor, all this distilled into amake-or-break equation: no matterwhether he crawled or crept, if hecould talk he would be judged human.The equation was different, but hard-ly less compelling, for Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard. If he could resurrectthe boy from savagery, he would pro-vide what he termed “concrete proof”of Condillac’s theories. He would dem-onstrate that man brings nothing withhim, that education is all.

However,for the young teacher andhis young charge the beginnings oflanguage weredifficultto locate. In thedrafty apartments of the Institut Na-tional, the twosuffered together throughone or another draconian teachingscheme for two years before Itardfinally developed a system that showedsome promise. Hetrained the boy torecognize certain written wordsandtoconnect those words with individualobjects—the word chaussure, for in-stance, with a particular shoe. Thisaccomplishment led to a game—acombination of flash cards and hide-and-seek, in which Itard wrote a wordandVictor ran aroundtheir chambersseekingits correlate. Then Itard tookthe game a step further, deprivingVictor of the specific shoe and makinghim seek others, thus forcing him toform a generalized notionof the word’smeaning. For a while, the boy wasoff on a rocket ride of comprehension.He learned not only to find an objectif he was presented with its writtennamebutalso to write the name whenhe was shownthe object. And notjustobjects: he learned adjectives and verbsas well, with which he could bothcomprehend and concoct written sen-tences. Interestingly, even a little bit

of language seemed to open up newways of thinking for him. The boy

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who had been completely adrift couldconcentrate. Chores he had performedmechanically were suddenly imbuedwith spontaneity and imagination. Heeven seemedbetter able to imagine theneeds of others.

Thetriumphant note at the end of‘Truffaut’s movie marks the point ofItard’s First Report, presented in 1801,whenVictor had madea certain amountof frail early progress and seemed onthe verge of much more. Five yearslater, Itard offered the Society of Ob-servers of Manhis Second Report, andit is markedly different. There hadbeen progress,true, but Itard had come

to appreciate the limits, rather than thepotential, of his young student’s mind.‘Theboywasclearly capable of hearingand producing the necessary sounds,but he had shownthat he would neverlearn to speak. His writing skills couldproceed only so far. And his progresshad beenobstructed by the debilitating“crisis” of puberty, which drove theboy into torments and distractionsthathe was even less able to control orunderstand than other boys his age.Itard bled him to relieve his hormonalstorms and recommendedstopping theexperiment.

In 1811, when Victor was in hisearly twenties, he was evicted from theInstitut. He went to live with hiscaretaker, Mme. Guérin, in a smallhousein the Impasse de Feuillantines,a few blocks away. Hereceived a smallstate pension, but he was otherwiseforgotten by the government and thepublic, and even byItard, his formerchampion. Itard was on the way tobeing famous: in 1814, he received theMedal of the Legion of Honor; in

1821, he was elected to the Academyof Medicine. He continued to work atthe Institut, but he never walked over

to visit his onetime pupil. Victor diedin 1828. His obscurity in his later yearswasnotjust the result of the failure ofItard’s experiment; the times hadchanged. The questions of the En-lightenment had lost their urgency.When a new wild child was discov-ered in the provinces someyearslater,the provincial authorities notified thegovernmentin Paris, and the Parisiansreplied, “You keep him.”

ie the questions of the Enlighten-mentwentunderground,they didn’t

go far. Just when we think we havemovedon to more modernperils in theAge of Deconstruction, they recur.

APRIL13, 1992

When Noam Chomsky professes theinnate nature of language,citing theinadequacy of the input the child re-ceives from its encompassing world,and when Catherine Snow respondsthat she is sure the child must gleanmost ofits language from its surround-ings, they are donning Cartesian andLockean robes. Genie intruded intothat argument, andfell into a wonder-landofancientrivalries. Her Hansensand Kents werechildren of Pinel, herJean Butlers descendants of Itard.Condillac attended, his ghost guidingthose who hopedthat education woulddetermine the remainder of Genie’slife. Condillac is the patron, and Des-cartes the hobgoblin,of social workerseverywhere.

Unlike most of the known wildchildren, both Victor of Aveyron and

Genie of Temple City arrived to ex-pectant audiences. Victor’s début wastimed roughly to the questions of Con-dillac and precisely to the creation ofthe Society of Observers of Man. In1971, Genie had the services of a dif-ferent advance team. As David Elkind,one of her early observers, puts it,“Chomsky was new then,and linguis-tics was hot—there was a new theorycoming out every day.” Her arrivalwas even moreprecisely timed to theadvent of one of those theories.The study of language acquisition

in children turns on a single simpleidea—onethat I heard mostsuccinctlyexpressed in the keynote speech at the1989 Stanford Child Language Re-search Forum. The address wasdeliv-ered by Lila Gleitman, a professor ofpsychology andlinguistics at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania. In herlatefifties, with close-cropped dark-grayhair and wearing an orange-patternedfrock and sneakers, she managed togive the impression, as she leaned onthe lectern, of a truant leaning againsta gymnasium wall smokinga cigaretteinstead of going to class, and beingtoo cool to care. “Can you hear me?”she barked into the microphone, andthen snorted to herself, “Huh! Onlytoo well.” The snort,it turned out, wasa trademark—the nasal harrumph ofa prizefighter, equal parts cynicism anddeviant relish. On the movie screenbehind her appeared a slide ofthe frontpage of a supermarkettabloid, with aheadline reading “MOM GIVES BIRTHTO 2-YEAR-OLDBABY,”beneath whichwasthe subhead “CHILDWALKS, TALKS

IN 3 Days.”

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THE NEW YORKER 75

‘The audience laughed. The speakerfinished arranging her papers andlooked up. “As by now you probablyknow, I’m Lila Gleitman,”she said.“And basically what I want to talkaboutis this.” She walked over andhitthe screen a sharp one with pointer.“What took three days?”What Took Three Days has been

Gleitman’s obsession for the last sev-eral decades, during which she hasbecome, rather despite herself, an ar-dent Chomskian. “People say, “ThatLila, she’s justthis crazyrationalist,”Gleitman told me over lunch the dayafter her speech. “‘She thinks every-thing’s innate.’ But I started out as ahard-core empiricist, honest! I designedmy studies to prove the empiricistposition, and I couldn’t ignore it whenthey showed me to be wrong.”One of the experiments she de-

signed was directly inspired by em-piricism’s patron saint. “Locke said,“Lookat blind people—there should besome things theycan’t learn,” shetold me. “So we did the experiment.Wethought, We'll see how experi-ence guides language learning. Butwhat happened was that the blindchildren learned things they shouldn’thave been able to. They knew theanswersto things beyondtheir abilityto experience. That was very upset-ting. Well, we were happy at thisvictory of the human spirit but un-happy at having wasted our time withblind children. I figured the experi-ment had failed—simple as that! I

went to my husband, Henry”—Henry G iGleitman was then the chairman Boat shoes are like boats.PabieenSPayeholorya Deparment= The beauty lies in thedetails’“and hesaid, ‘So how did the kid learnthe answer? I said, ‘Oh, that’s notimportant,’ and I went to Cambridge

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some inner quality. Westarted...testing the effects of good and badmothers,but they didn’t have anyeffect.So we ripped the ears off of kids—wetested deaf kids. Then wetore theireyes out. Still, you know what? Thelittle bastards learned language. Thehumanchild has a massive resistanceto conditions, because he is going to

learn language no matter what. Youtake away language, he invents one.Weevendid a nice study of preemies.‘They have the same experience in theworld as full-term children do, butthey’reat a different physiologicalstage.It turns out that the age since concep-tion is better as an indicator of lan-guage performance than the age sincebirth. Now, surely, observation of the

world is one source of evidence. Youcan’t take all forms of perception awayfrom children. If you did, they would

be falling off ledges and mistakingtigers for kitty cats, and pretty soonthere wouldn’t be any morechildren.Butchildren aren’t learning languagefrom experience. They learn wordsfrom experience. They bring the sen-tence with them.”

In the innatism to which Gleitmanwas a convert, the Three Days ques-

tion was not “How dochildren learn language?”but “How does languageflower out of the child?”What happensin the mindto permit that burgeoningcomprehension? Gleitmanhad already founda pieceof the puzzle: she showedthat the Three Day clockis set at conception. Butwhen does the clock rundown?Is there a set dead-line to language learning?This was the question towhich Genie’s arrival wasso explicitly timed. It burstinto prominence in 1967,three years before her dis-covery, with the publica-tion of a book by the Har-vard neuropsychologist EricLennebergcalled “Biologi-cal Foundations of Lan-guage.” The book was insome ways more revolu-tionary than Chomsky’sof a decade earlier—morerevolutionary for beingmore concrete. Lennebergplayed Lenin to Chomsky’sMarx,Itard to Chomsky’s



Condillac. As Catherine Snow puts it,“Chomsky’s brain,the linguist’s brain,has nonerves in it; Lenneberg gaveita biologist’s brain, with a cortex andlobes and axons and dendrites.”

Chapter 4 of “Biological Founda-tions of Language”presented what hassince been called the critical-periodhypothesis. It suggested that the brainis able to learn a primary languageduring certain early period, and notlater on, and it proposed physiologicalexplanations of why this mightbe so.Lenneberg’s innovation lay in thoseexplanations; the idea itself had been

around for a while. The Swiss psy-

chologist Jean Piaget had spenthislifeobserving and investigating the stagesat which children develop certain ca-pacities. According to Lenneberg, thechild’s ability to learn its mother tongueeffectively ends at the onset of sexu-ality. If Chapter 4 were to be borneout, it would have the effect of vindi-

cating Chomsky, for how could lan-guagebe tied to our biological clock ifit weren't tied to our biology?

His concreteness notwithstanding,Lenneberg was,like Chomsky,a theo-retician. What was needed was aclinician’s validation,but the clinician

CE.

“This sounds serious—like something weshould go to Maine and work out.”

APRIL 13, 1992

would need something to work with:a child who had exceeded Lenneberg’sdeadline—whohad passed twelve andhit puberty—but wasstill embarkingon learning languageforthefirst time.After 1967, there was a yearningin thelinguistic field for a proper youngarbiter—someone who could do forLenneberg and Chomsky what Victorof Aveyron had been meantto do forCondillac.

HE accounts in Susan Curtiss’sdissertation of Genie’s progress

in the hospital during the spring of1971 areall secondhand,gleaned fromvideotapes andinterviews. Until afterthe consultants’ conference, in May,the U.C.L.A.graduate student and thesubject who would shape her careerhad not even met. On June 4th, that

situation changed: Curtiss accompa-nied Victoria Fromkin ona visitto thehospital.

She foundthesetting itself daunt-ing. “I was nevera person whothoughtof being a nurse or doctor,” she toldme. “I’ve never been comfortable inthe children’s ward of a hospital. ’mnot good in hospitals. It’s not mystrong suit. I was also scared—or,at

any rate, nervous.” Andwith reason. To an unac-

[~~ climated sensibility, Ge-nie wasa true grotesque.She was barefoot on themorning Curtiss met her,her tininess exaggeratedby a dress that was tooJong, her movements jerky,her teeth jagged and dis-colored, her hair thin.

Curtiss describes her as“pitiful and strange,” andsomething else: pretty.The scientist was en-thralled by the softness ofthe child’s manner, herbeautiful skin, the blush

| in her cheeks, “almost asif an artist had paintedeach one of them care-fully and delicately,”andher upturned nose, “finelydrawnlike that of a chinadoll.” She soon learnedthat Genie’s indiscriminatespitting, scratching, nose-blowing,food-filching be-havior could be somewhatless appealing. “It washard,” Curtiss said of theearly contacts. “She was

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THE NEW YORKER

very— She was—hmm—challenging.”Thetiming of Curtiss’s arrival made

her mission doublydifficult. Genie had

notyet been trainedinto social accept-ability, but in other ways she hadprogressed unfortunately far from herinnocence of the autumn before. “Interms of watching Genie learn lan-guage,” Curtiss said, “I felt I wasarriving a little late.”

Hertardiness wasrelative. If Curtisshad been at the hospital’s admissionsdesk on the day Genie arrived, shewould have encountered a languagedperson, in the sense that all childrenhave some degree of language beforethey begin making use of it. Geniecould not have acquired her meagrestore of wordsif she had notpreviouslymastered one of the most profoundearly tasks of any language learner:she had learned to separate meaning-ful sounds from the general cacophonysurrounding her. In the words of LilaGleitmanin her addressto the Stanfordconference, Genie had “bootstrapped.”“The child has no passwords,”

Gleitman said on that occasion. “Hedoesn’t know he’s in the U.S. Hedoesn’t know he’s learning English.


His mom showshim this room’”—shewaveda hand outover the audience—“and describes it. What does she say?‘Bahbahbahbahbahbahbahbahbah.’‘That’s what she says. She could havesaid that the lady in back there iswearing blue, but what she really said,as far as the child knows, is ‘Bahbah-bahbahbahbahbahbah.’ The questionis: How does he figure out what hismotheris saying about the room? O.K.?That’s the story. That’s bootstrapping.”

WhatGleitman calls bootstrappingis called other things by other linguists,depending on their academic orienta-tion. But the mystery is the same: Howdoes the child divide a stream of soundinto syllables and sentencesthat he canbegin to make sense of? It is easy tounderstandthe child’s bafflement. Onehas onlyto listen to an animated con-versation in an unfamiliar language:our ownlanguageis built of discreteblocks, everyone else’s of quicksilver.It seems as hard to grab a word outof a foreign tongueasto clutcha fistfulof water from a pond. Yet the child,for whomall tonguesare foreign, doesjust that.

Scientists are not yet sure whether

79

the young listener first grabs pho-nemes—that is, individual speechsounds—or syllables, which can bemade up of one or more phonemes.In normal conversation, nine hundred

phonemes race by each minute, andthere is attached to most of them nomeaning to indicate their significance.Words have meaning, but their vari-ations in length and form are count-less, their boundaries indistinct. Innormalspeech, we break words up andslur adjacent words together; some-times we pause within words. Andifwords are devious, sentences are evenmore so.

Here, as elsewhere, babies seem to

know morethan linguists can explain.Babies are born with somefeeling foror understandingof language on boththe phoneme andthe sentence level.Amongthe hundreds of phonemesusedin the world’s known languages, onlyforty are found in English. Newbornsin English-speaking families displaya preference for those forty, possiblyfrom having heard them in the womb.Theyrespondto their mother’s nativetongue. As the child ages, that dis-crimination becomes more pronounced;

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80

the child becomes more and more ofa specialist. An adult speaker of En-glish cannotaccurately hear the pho-nemespeculiar to Chinese or French,muchless replicate them in speech,without intensive training. Interest-ingly, it appears that the newborndoesn’t so much develop his predilec-tion for his mother tongue aslet hisperception of “foreign” phonemes at-rophy. A Chinese babyis born with adeveloping bentfor his native “r-lesslanguage, but he can hear and pro-nounce “r”s, An American baby cando the same forall the French vowelsounds.An equally astonishing ability ap-

plies to sentences. In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, who stud-ied at the knee of Lila Gleitman andnow teaches at Temple University,wasfrustrated by one of the standardconstraints of linguistics research: mosttesting is done verbally, and thereforeonly children who already have lan-guage are tested. What, she asked, didthe prelinguistic child know? She andtwo colleagues devised methods tomeasure the responses of very youngsubjects. They played tape recordingsof sentences to nine-month-olds andobserved eye movements for telltaleindications of recognition. When thesentence ended at the properplace, thechild acknowledgedit. When the sen-tence ended improperly, the child didnot recognize it as language. The in-correct sentence was received in thesame way as arbitrary noise. Hirsh-Pasek has applied this method toyounger and younger children. Sheprofessessurpriseat the furtherresults.Infants of four and a half months cantell correct from incorrect sentences,

and what’s more, they can do so for

sentences both in Polish and English.Thetests suggest that the ability thatthe nine-month-old has in its mothertongue the infant may have in anylanguage. It has not yet let languishthe grammarsit will not use.Though Genie had embarked on

language learning before Curtiss mether, she hadn’t acquired enough tomake heravailable to the standardizedtests that determine children’s linguis-tic competence. In the summerof 1971,Curtiss and Fromkin faced the taskof inventing a completely new set oflinguistic examinations, appropriate toher. They eventually devised twenty-six of them. The administration ofthose tests, along with a battery of



psychological and neurological tests,would within five years make Genie,in David Rigler’s words, “perhaps oneof the most tested children in history.”

Fortunately, the linguistic-researchtradition allows for other, less rigidmethods. Curtiss began a diary on theday she met Genie, recording every-thing that Genie said and analyzing itfor signsof progress. Even here, Geniewasstubbornly enigmatic. Mostof thetime, she said nothing; her vocaliza-

tions were usually whimpersor squeaks.“She had been beaten for vocalizing,”Curtiss explained to me. “So when shespoke she wasvery tense, very breathy

and soft. She couldn’t be understood.There was a lot of sound distortion, asthough she had cerebral palsy, butthere was no evidence of muscle ornerve damage. Also, she had a highfundamentalpitch. It was so high thatwe couldn’t analyze it on the instru-ments we use to acoustically analyzehuman speech. And she was mono-tonic—high monotone. Nopitch varia-tion whatsoever.”

Realizing how fruitless any attemptat formal research would be for themoment, Curtiss settled in for a sum-

merof watching—getting to know thechild, and trying to gain her confi-dence. She sat with the patients in theRehabilitation Center and, usually ac-companied by Rigler or James Kent,took Genie on excursions.

“I would go by andtake Genie forwalks, or take her out to fast-food

restaurants,” Kent recalled. “At first,

a nurse would go along with us. Thenurse and I were supposedto be likesurrogate parents, giving Genie thefeeling of a family structure. We wouldhear some languagefrom heron thesetrips, so Susan Curtiss started comingalong to hear what Genie said. Geniewas soon attached to Susie more thanto the nurse who was supposed to beher surrogate mom.”

Theitineraries gradually expanded:

OHS. QZ 2.284 aay MS 82 220% 92WeeyRUE ABe

SSR %wees

APRIL13, 1992

they went to the zoo; they went for

waiks in Griffith Park. Especially, theywent shopping—anactivity Genie likedso much that on the way to the shop-ping center she would point to everypassing building andrepeat oneof hernew words,“Store?” Thelocal Safewayand a Woolworth’s were Genie’s em-poriums ofchoice, and there she dis-played to Curtiss her disconcertingbrilliance at both offensive and charm-ing behavior. She would attach herselfto strangers whom shefoundinterest-ing, grabbing their arms, putting herface directly in front of theirs andstaring into their eyes. Or she wouldattach herself with equalfervorto theirpossessions, from which Curtiss would

have to pry her loose.Onepiece of merchandise she found

irresistible was beach pails. On anouting in mid-June, Kent used Genie’sfascination with them to demonstratea linguistic curiosity to Curtiss—aproblem of definitions. He pointed toone plastic pail and asked Genie whatit was. “Pail,” she said. He pointed toanother, and shesaid “Bucket.” Therewasno discernible difference betweenthe two, but Genie was resolute in herdistinction. The pails were located ina section of Woolworth’s that Geniefoundespecially enticing—anaisle ofbright-coloredplastic containers. Alongwith pails and buckets she covetedplastic necklaces,plastic purses,plastictrash cans—anything made ofplastic.WhenI asked David Rigler about

the preference, the explanation upset

him. “I think it was because of thebright colors and the texture,” he said.“Welearned that during herisolationGenie had had some smallplastic toys.She had hada plastic raincoat hangingon the wallacross from her potty seat.”He paused, and then rushed on. “Youvisualize this house, and youpicturethis kid seated in this room, day afterday, with very limited stimulation. She’sgrasping for some kindof stimulation,and the things she can see play a verylarge role. There’s a plastic raincoaton the opposite wall.” Rigler bowedhis head suddenly, as though dismiss-ing something unbearable. “She likedplastic,” he concluded.

For Genie,the excursions werevisits

to a magic kingdom. Her innocentquesting elicited extraordinary re-sponses. A butcherat the Safeway sawhow fascinated she was by the shrink-wrapped meat packages. He openedthe service window andheld outto her

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THE NEW YORKER

an unwrapped cut of steak, and shefondled, smelled, and studied it. Inlike fashion, over the months,he offeredfor her inspection bones, chickens,fish, and turkeys, all wordlessly, asthough he and she shareda tacit un-derstanding. Occasionally, when Cur-tiss reached the checkout counter thecashier would producea toy or a trin-ket, with the explanation that “theman ahead of you sensed she wantedthis and boughtit for her.” Thegiftswere chosen with such uncannyaccu-racy and weretendered insuchsilence that Curtiss be-came convinced that shewas witnessing a preter-natural communication—anexplicit, unvoiced under-standing—that her carefulnotebook analysis was un-equipped to explain.

“Genie was the mostpowerful nonverbal communicator I’veever come across,” Curtiss told me.

“The most extreme example of thisthat comes to mind: Because of herobsession, she would notice and covetanythingplastic that anyone had. Oneday, we were walking—I think wewere in Hollywood. I wouldact likean idiot, sing operatically, to get her torelease someofthat tension she alwayshad. Wereached the corner of thisvery busy intersection, and the lightturned red, and westopped. Suddenly,I heard the sound—it’s a sound youcan’t mistake—ofa purse beingspilled.A womanin car that had stopped atthe intersection was emptyingherpurse,and shegot outof the car and ran overandgaveit to Genie and then ran backto the car. A plastic purse. Geniehadn’t said a word.”

Genie’s more conventional commu-nication was improving.Shestill spokein one-word snippets, but with an

enhanced vocabulary. She was catch-ing on to the give-and-take of conver-sation. She seemed, in fact, to have

gained roughly the level that Victorhad achieved at the Institut Nationaldes Sourds-Muets: she was formingsocial attachments and had picked upenough crude language (though herswas spoken, while Victor’s was writ-ten) to express her needs. Great at-tention had been paid all along, ofcourse, to even the smallest signs ofGenie’s psychological state. WhenDavid Elkind met her, he noticed that

she retrieved an item from herdresserdrawer. “She had the idea of object


permanence,” he told me. “That’s amajor cognitive step for a child. Doessomething exist whenit is not presentto our senses? Children don’t get thatuntil after their first year.” He alsowitnessed her attempts to bark like adog she had heard earlier in the day.“That's a deferred imitation, and thedelay is mediated by mentalimagery,”Elkind said. “So she was into herpreoperational period.”

“Preoperational period” is the ter-minology of Piaget, the Swiss psy-

chologist who believed thatchildren havecritical peri-ods not just in languageacquisition but in generalmental development. Themind doesn’t expand onlyby learning,he said. It un-folds naturally from within,going through predictablestages as the child matures.

Preoperational thoughtis the second ofthose stages. Piaget saw the growth oflanguage as tied to the growth ofthought, as thoughit were a branch onthe cognitive plant. Chomsky is in-clined to see language learning andcognitive developmentas independentplants in a commongarden. It wasanother dispute that Genie might shedlight on eventually, but in the mean-time Curtiss’s evaluation of Genie’smental level concurred with the Piagetscale. The fervent search for names ofthings placed her at the beginning ofpreoperational thinking.

By all measurements, then, Genie

was equipping herself to break out ofher emotional isolation, her egocen-

trism. There might well be an inter-mediate step. Accordingto L. S. Vygot-sky, a contemporary of Piaget’s whoapplied the Master's theories to lan-guage, the name-learningstageis fol-lowed by a period in whichthe childuses its new vocabulary to speak toitself, to encode its inner ideas. Vy-gotsky’s theory embellished Hey-mann Steinthal’s old formulation:perhaps, behind her inscrutability,Genie was building self-awareness—understanding herself as she was un-derstood by others, for “that is the be-

ginningoflanguage.” Throughthe sum-merand onintothefall, Susan Curtissjotted down Genie’s every utterance,all her sporadic, inchoate talk, andwaited for the day when she might be-gin to reveal herself.—Russ Rymer

(This is the first part ofatwo-part article.)


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43

ANNALS OF SCIENCE

N Novemberof 1970, a thirteen-I year-old girl cameto live at Chil-

drens Hospital of Los Angeles.Since the age of two, Genie (her sci-entific pseudonym) had been keptunder restraints in a bedroom of amodest house in the Los Angelessuburb of Temple City. Her jailerswere her parents, called here by theirfirst names, Clark and Irene. Clarkcommitted suicide soon after Genie’sdiscovery; Irene, who was nearlyblind and had engineered her daugh-ter’s escape, was absolved in courtof responsibility for the girl’s im-prisonment.

Havinglived for eleven of her thir-teen years in virtual solitary confine-ment, Genie was unable to talk whenshe arrived at the hospital. She quicklybecameanobject of intense interest toa hostof doctors andscientists, amongthem Howard Hansen,the head of thehospital’s Psychiatry Division;the divi-sion’s chief psychologist, David Rigler,whoproposedto direct a multifacetedstudy of Genie, to be funded by theNational Institute of Mental Health;James Kent, the doctor in charge ofher case; Jay Shurley, a psychiatristat the University of Oklahoma whospecialized in cases of extreme isola-tion; and Susan Curtiss, a graduatestudentat the University of Californiaat Los Angeles, whose field was lan-guage acquisition in children, andwhose doctoral dissertation on Geniebecamethe child’s definitive scientificbiography.

(Gye dissertation makes nomention of the mostsignificant

event of Genie’s first summer of free-dom. But it was documented by JeanButler, Genie’s teacher at ChildrensHospital’s Rehabilitation Center, withwhom Genie had developed a strongrapport. Butler’s account was writtenin the form of a diary:

June 23, 1971—I signed the necessarypapers at the Hospitalin order to be a volun-teer and take Genieonfield trips and to myhome.

“Home” was a two-story house ablock from the Wilshire Country Club,on Cahuenga Boulevard—a housethatseemed somewhat beyondthe meansof

archives.newyorker.com/?i=1992-04-20#folio=042

A SILENT CHILDHOOD-II

a schoolteacher with an income ofthirteen thousand dollars a year. ButJean Butler was doingall right. Shehad recently turned down an offeramounting to almost a quarter of amillion dollars for twenty-five acresshe owned near the Leisure Worldretirementvillage in Orange County.She came from a wealthy Midwesternfamily; she was unmarried, and she

supplemented her incomeoccasionallyby writing children’s books. Her househad a guest bedroom downstairs, where

Genie could sleep.Not long after she had signed the

papers, Butler called the hospital withdire news: she was ill, and herillness

had been diagnosedas rubella. Geniehad been exposed, and though shenever came down with the disease shewas at that point presumed to be con-tagious. Rubella is a havoc wreakerinschools, but in the light of Genie’s pastthere was no humane wayto isolate

Cea

her. Theobvioussolution wasto quarantine her with her teacher, and onJuly 7th she moved in.

“Tt was apparent that Genie washappyto be in my home,” Butler wrotein herjournal. But Butler herself wasless than happy to entertain house callsfrom various members of what shetermed the Genie Team. Butler’s dis-paragementof Genie’s other caretak-ers had been evident ever since theMayconferenceat the hospital, wherescientists from around the countryhad gathered to debate Genie’s future.She found Susan Curtiss inept, DavidRigler self-important, James Kent over-permissive, and all of them ambitiousand insensitive.

July 8—Student Susan Curtiss was in myhome recording speech and attempting toamuse Genie. However,she followedthe childand hovered over her most of the day. Shehad a notebook handy and discussed Genie’sspeech andlack ofit andhereating habits ina critical manner in front of her.... That

“How about a nice, big coffee-table book about women?”

129

44evening Dr. Rigler phoned andI told himthat the“help”he wasgiving mein the housewas not helping me.

James Kentmayhave annoyed Butlerthe most. Among Genie’s abiding en-thusiasms was a fondness for mastur-bation. She was uninhibited by anyconcept of modesty, and wasfrequentlyan embarrassment in public. Butlerbelieved that Kent, unwilling to con-strain a child whose life had beendisfigured by constraint, encouragedher in her habit—an allegation thatKent has denied.The care and feeding that Genie

received in the hospital had spurredher development, and not just in be-havior. Among other physical trans-formations, she began developingbreasts. Signs of her sexual maturitywere splendid news to Curtiss andher faculty adviser, Victoria Fromkin.To properly test the critical-periodhypothesis—the theoryof the neuropsy-chologist Eric Lenneberg that a firstlanguage can be learned only duringchildhood—they neededto observe thelanguage-learning attempts of some-onepast puberty. It was a heartrendingserendipity. David Rigler once showedme calendars he had made to followGenie’s progress in conquering herbed-wetting. Theyillustrated eloquentlythe child’s awful dilemma. There amidthe dry days and the wet days weremarked the days she had her menses.She wasgetting her period and beingtoilet-trained, all at the same time.

“I expressed my fear to Dr. Kentthat Genie was being experimentedwith too much and not being allowedto relax,” Butler recounted in herjournal. “Hesaid this was necessary.”Butler did not feel that she was alonein her concerns:

July 13—Sue Omanskyof the Departmentof Public Social Servicesvisited my home.. . .[She] was extremelycritical of putting thischild ondisplay as a guinea pig andobjectedto the U.C.L.A. student hoveringand jottingdown everything said by the child. MissOmansky expressed her beliefthat these menwere using Genie to gain fame.

As the summerprogressed, the ten-

sions between Butler and thescientistssometimes erupted into full-volumearguments. Her house becamethefieldfor a jurisdictional battle of Titans. SueOmansky, in her position with theD.P.S.S., was Genie’s de-facto guard-ian. Her departmenthadlittle interestin making Genie accessible to research-ers from Childrens Hospital; still, the



PROSPECT PARK, HOLY WEEK

‘The mean swan hasreturnedto the pond;

the white ducks are back; the wild ducks are outin the grass, bobbing between darktufts of ramp;the drake’s green head gleamslike the jewelfrom a cocktail ring. A pale jet streamstreaks the sky, a stretch mark on a mother’sbelly,andthe late-afternoon sunis a bronze fruitthat glazes the pond withits bronze juice.‘Theblack boys on mountain bikes, who pedalfastas they can downthehill, have drunk thatjuice,andthe flushed white men whojogin their college shirtshave drunkthatjuice, and thecyclist with dreadlocksandshiny blacktights pedalshis silent racing bikelike that juice was sweet, And you can smellsweatin yourhair and wetearth on the windthatstirs dried oak leaves and the sheer chartreuseof the willow. Throughthe baretrees,the old Quaker tombstonesflash in the sunlike a moundofpolished fingernails.Thesquirrelssit up on their haunches,andthe magnolia’s black branchesshock the air with their waxy, white blooms.The meadowhasblossomed intoall the colors of sweatshirts,

andthefootball is back, soaring highaboveall of us,the pit of that fruit.

twoinstitutions were boundtogether inGenie’s name. They had been confer-ring for months about howto get thechild out of the Rehabilitation Cen-ter and into a private home. Nowthe rubella had forced the issue. But-ler applied to the D.P.S.S. to becomeGenie’s foster parent, and Omanskyfelt that the teacher’s home wassuit-able for a permanent placement. Buther D.P.S.S. supervisors, after theirdiscussions with Childrens Hospital,hadreservations. For one thing,it wasagainst hospitalpolicy to place patientsin the homesof people who worked atthe hospital. For another, it was feltthat Genie would be better off in ahome with a foster father as well asa foster mother.

Butler had a handy solution to thatproblem: she decided to ask her loverto move in. He was Floyd Ruch, apsychologist who had taught for thirtyyears at the University of Southern

—Juta KasporF

California and had written a seminaltextbook, “Psychology and Life.” Hewas well-to-do and well thought of,but he was not unencumbered. Ruchwasseparated from his wife and wasliving alone, two blocks from Butler’shouse. In effect, though, he was al-ready on the scene—enoughso to bedrawn into some of the quarrellingbetween Butler and the Genie Team.Butler’s journal recounts a disagree-ment between her and David Riglerthat turned into a midnight shoutingmatch on the front walk, with Ruch

rising to break it up. (Rigler doesn’trecall the incident. “Oh, somethinglike that might have happened,” hetold me. “We did argue about admin-istrative stuff. But not shouting. Andnot at midnight.”)

July 14—I asked Dr. Kent to have MissCirtiss removed from my home, as she wasnohelp but completely untrained and inexpe-rienced with children and had no awarenessofsafety factors. Dr. Kentsaid it was necessary to have herhere and the needfor pho-netic recording of speech attempts was moreimportant than herlack of ability in helpingwith Genie. I pointedout that Genie did nottalk around Miss Curtiss.

A few daysafter that entry, at theheight of the conflict, came the episode

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7/16/2019

of the puppy. Riglerre-lates it this way: “Atone point,I visited JeanButler’s home and had


a golden-retriever pup-py with me, and Geniemust have seen thepuppythrough the win-dow,because accordingto Butler she got veryupset. Now,this puppywasonly ten or twelveweeks old. It was justa furball, and it wasn’tup against the window,it wasstill in the yard,but Genie must havebeen scaredofit.”

Butler’s version ismore vivid:July 20—Dr. Rigler

phoned andsaid his wifehadpicked up a puppy andhe wouldlike to bring itoverto show Genie.I askedhim to wait a few days. Hesaid he wasanxious.I thensaid to please keep the dogin his car andlet Genie peerthrough the window... .

Atabout 8:00 p.m., Ge-nie and I were foldingsheets and the task wasgiving her great satisfaction. .. . Justthen Dr. Rig-ler came.... He took herhandandled herto thefrontdoor, opened it, saying,“Come with me, Genie, Ihave something to showyou.” By this time Mrs.Rigler had taken the dogout of the car andplaced itonthelawn. Fromthe porchGenie saw the dog and ranback in the house, slam-mingthe doorviolently. Shegot in my bed.... For awhile she watched the dogthroughthe front window.‘The Riglers left and Geniestayed in my bed for twohours, frequently gettingup to go to the bathroom.She said, “No dog,” and“Scared.”She slept less thantwo hours that night. At 2:30she came in to me and took myhandandledme to her bed. I sat by her for two hourswhile she repeated “Scared.”

Genie’s aversion to dogs was fa-mous even before the incident withRigler’s puppy; Rigler himself hadwitnessed it during his earliest walksaround town with Genie. After onecanine confrontation, Rigler had com-mented to Butler that he had neverseen such fear in any child. “Thething Genie would do when she sawa cat or dog, she would climb you like


a pole,” he told me. “Or she woulddesert you altogether. You'd look aroundand she’d be headingfor the white linein the centerof the road, because it wasequidistant from the yards on bothsides. And she was bright enough toknow that a dog behind a fence wasbehinda fence,but a cat behind a fencewasnotbehind a fenceatall.” FloydRuch, in particular, spent some timetrying to get Genie over her alarm. Hewatched episodesof “Lassie” with her,and bought her a battery-operated toy

The artist tries to explain to a TV reporter why he declines

to take part in a talk show.

dog that barked and waggedits tail.Only years later did he and Butler andthe Riglers learn just how deep Genie’sfear ran, and why.Through July and into August, the

haggling continued. Butler struggledto control the intrusions of scientistsinto her home and,at the sametime,

struggled to be numbered officiallyamong them. She requested a thirty-eight-per-cent raise in pay, and shealso asked to be acknowledged along-side the researchers in their scientific

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“Shane, come back!”

papers. Genie seemed to be the onlyone growing more relaxed. Photo-graphs of her taken at Butler’s houseshow her animated, cheerful, com-posed, content. She sits on a hassockwith one tanned, hospital-braceletedwrist cradled in her other hand, andlooks up with such confidence, socompletely self-aware, that it is hard

to believe she is not a normalchild. Ina picture taken on the back porch, herponytails have gone sodden from play-ing under the hose, and she tossestoward the camera a grin of unbridleddelight. She also went to the beach,whereshe learnedto sample, at least

to ankle depth, the terrifying entice-ments of the Pacific Ocean.

Butler reviewed Genie’s progressthat summerin her diary: she claimed


that Genie was wetting the bed lessoften, with thirty dry nights out ofthirty-seven, and that her masturba-tion had declinedas she gainedinterestin other activities. Along with every-thing else, Butler wrote, Genie wastalking: “The quality of her speechimproved andthe quantity increased atleast tenfold....1 was able to getGenieto say ‘Yes’ appropriately. Thisshe had neverdonebefore. Also, I wasable to get Genie to verbalize when shewas angry, by saying the word ‘angry’and making a hitting motion in theair or hitting certain inanimate ob-jects (such as a largeplastic inflatableclown). This was her first verbaliza-tion of her hostilities and anger.” Ina letter to Jay Shurley, who had stud-ied Genie when she wasfirst rescued

and was nowback atthe Universityof Oklahoma wondering about thesummer's events, Butler wrote:

You asked me about Genie’s speechhere, The last two weeks Floyd calledher “Mylittle yakker.” He often said,“You're going to grow up and bea yakkerlike Jeanie.” She talked one evening for45 minutes after a trip to the pet shoptoget fourfish. During the day we talkedandeven arguedabout ¥ ofthe time. Shewasusing two- and three-wordsentences.She used the negative appropriately, andwhen I told her that she would have tocomeinside if she did not stop puttingwater on theservice porch shesaid “Nocomein.” . . . She often described an ob-ject with two adjectives... “one blackkitty” . . . “four orange fish”, . . “bad or-ange fish—noeat—bad fish,”the longestexpressed thought. I’ll tell you the sagaofthe fish and their demise when you arehere.

Butler’s self-congratulatory as-sessment of Genie’s mental statewas borne out by an evaluatingcommittee from the N.I.M.H. Thecommittee noted a “striking im-provement”in Genie since her trans-fer to Butler’s home. “Rather dra-matic behavioral changes haveensued,” its evaluation stated. “Avisit to the homeby twosite visitorssubstantially confirmedthe positivebehavioral patterns and adjustmentwithin thatsetting.” The visitorsreported back to Bethesda thatButler’s home “would be an excel-lent placement”for Genie. In thecontentious milieu of Los Angeles,however,the verdict was less sure.

August 6—Dr. Riglerinsisted on driv-ing me home[from a meeting], whichhe did. On the way home,he said that Iwas not codperating as a “trainee” andthat he had never haddifficulty with stu-

dents before. I got very angry andtold himthat I certainly objected to beingtreated like astudent, a trainee, and an idiot. I told himthatit was not necessaryto tell me why I wasusing certain methodsof discipline with Ge-nie. explained that he had had thelast eightmonths to handle her and had done a verypoorjob. I explained that the problems shepresented were the product of his departmentand I think I could at least be respected as anexperienced person.

August 9—Before the regular mail deliv-ery I found in my mailbox a metered butunpostmarked envelope containing a ten-pageletter from Dr. Rigler.

‘Theletter, copies of which had beensent to Kent, Hansen, and Omansky,was a painedrecapitulation of recenthistory—an effort to set straight whathad been scrambled in all the acri-mony. “Dear Jean, I am writing toexpress my concerns aboutthe current

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situation,” it began, and proceeded todefend the charter of the research fromButler’s chargesofexploitation: “Thischild is not for sale, but in our viewandin the view of funding agencies,knowledgeobtained from studyofthisuniquechild is important knowledgetobe employed for humanitarian pur-poses.” Rigler extolled the staff of theRehabilitation Center, which he de-scribed as “one ofthe best institutionsofits kind to be found anywhere,”buthe also endorsed Butler’s claims as apotential foster mother: “In this re-gard, I would offer my opinion thatGenie is receiving excellent and lov-ing care within your home at thepresent time.” Nevertheless, he be-moaned whathe saw as Butler’s lackof codperation, and he discouraged herhopesofincreased compensation:“It isnot likely that any parent or fosterparentofa difficult-to-care-for child isadequately compensated for the end-less and extraordinary demandsplacedupon them.”On the morning of August 13th,

Sue Omanskyand her supervisor fromthe D.P.S.S. arrived at Butler’s house.They brought with them their depart-men’s finaldecision on her applicationto be Genie’s foster parent. It had beenrejected. Butler wrote in her journal:

For about twenty minutes Genie knewsomething was wrong. She was very upsetwhenI told her that she must go with Mr.Wodowski and Miss Omansky back to Rehab.She said, “No,no, no!”I told herI loved hervery muchbut she mustdo whatI sayand gowith them.

Just before Mr. Wodowski took out herclothes he thanked meforall that I’ve donefor Genie. ...

Theyleft at about 10:30.

No sooner had Genie been takenback to the Rehabilitation Center thanshe was turned overto her new fosterparents. Apparently,the policy concern-ing patients’ living with hospital em-ployees was a flexible one: the fosterparents were David and Marilyn Rigler.The sudden end of Genie’s short

summer on Cahuenga Boulevard markeda turningpointof sorts for Jean Butler.Herdefeat confirmed herin the struggleagainst Rigler and the other membersof the Genie Team. She began arelentless campaignto avenge the wrongthatshe felt she and Genie hadsuffered,firing off letters critical of the team’sresearch to various scientists, and

muckraking throughthe grant propos-als and symposium papers of teammembersfor the least sign of misfea-



sance. Herfirst move wasto complainto the D.P.S.S. about the apparentreversal of its position, claiming thatthe caseworkers had forsaken theirbetter judgment and capitulated topressure from thescientists to place thegirl in an environmentless hostile toresearch, The charge had no effect onGenie’s placement, and David Riglerdismisses it as vitriol.

Notsurprisingly, thereis little co-incidence between Butler’s version ofthe summer’s events and Rigler’s. “Shewas angry at being turned down,” hetold me one afternoon, as he andMarilyn Rigler and satin his kitchen.“She began accusing us of bizarrebehavior, but we found her behaviorbizarre. She was as destructive as sheknew how. She became the WickedWitch of the West from then on, asfar as we were concerned.”When I asked him about Genie’s

new placement, he said, “We neverhadanyintention or plan to be Genie’sfoster parents. Howard Hansen haddiscussed the idea with me. My wifeand I consulted our respective navels,and each other’s navels, andretired toour individual cornersto thinkthis out.And we decided to take Genie if noone else could. We told the SocialServices Departmentthatif they abso-lutely couldn’t get anyone, we wouldtake herin for a limited period of time,that being—oh, how long, Marilyn?”Heturned to his wife.

“Oh,a year.”“No, no. It was much shorter. I

think it was three months. And thenGenie arrived. I remember the date—it was Friday, August 13th. And shestayed with us for four years.”

I N Horatio Algeresque fashion, Genienow arrived at the grandest of her

new accommodations. David and Mari-lyn Rigler lived in Laughlin Park, anexclusive enclave in the Los Felizdistrict of Los Angeles. The neighbor-hoodis a self-conscious exceptiontoitssurroundings—self-conscious enoughso that a gate has been erected at each

(A

APRIL 20, 1992

ofits entrances. Within,thestreets are

hushed, their manorial houses hiddenbehind massive boxwood hedges andstuccoed walls. The Riglers’ house, atleast until Genie arrived, was an or-

derly sort of place. David and Marilynhad three adolescent children, a cat,and Tori, the golden-retriever puppy,whom Genie had already met. Geniewas given a downstairs bedroom anda bathroom of her own. There was alarge back yard where she could play,and even some neighbors she couldvisit: the Hansensalsolived in LaughlinPark, several blocks away.The presence of a new family

member occasioned immediate adjust-ments.“For one thing, weprize books,”Rigler told me. “Genie’s room was aroom in our house that had been a sortof library. Two walls werefilled withbooks and magazines. Genie was fas-cinated by them, especially the Na-tional Geographics, and she had herfavorite issues. She could also be de-structive. I can’t bring myself to markpassages in books. But if she liked apage she might just tear it out.”And she might just do other things

as well. Onher arrival at the house,Genieran herfingers nervously aroundthe perimeter of each room, then def-ecated in Rigler’s daughter’s wastebas-ket. She urinated every ten minutes,wherever she happened to be. Thathabit eased almost immediately, butothers didn’t. She hid feces in her room(she had also done this at the hospi-tal—once, to Rigler’s great amuse-ment, spraying them with deodoranttomask the smell), appropriated posses-sionsof the family’s other children, satat the table with her cheeks bulging,waiting for her saliva to break downthe food that she hadstill not learnedto chew. That worked passably wellwith the cereal and apple sauce shewas accustomed to eating, but as

Marilyn Rigler added tougherfoodstoher diet the method entailed copiousspitting.The Riglers spent the first several

days trying to get Genie to accept herold nemesis, Tori. “We found thatGenie and the puppy couldn’t be in thehouse at the sametime,” David Riglertold me. “So weinstituted a programwhere they could get to know eachother. We had them on opposite sidesofthe sliding glass porch door. Thenwhen Genie had got usedto that, weopened the glass and left the screenclosed, and then we openedthescreen.

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THE NEW YORKER

She eventually reached out when thedog was turned the other way, andtouchedits tail, and from that time on

she wasfine.”The success of fur-ball therapy re-

inforced a general optimism. Geniewasat last settled in a home; she was

at last free of vituperative bureau-cratic wrangling. The grant from theN.I.M.H. had come through. Overthe next two years, it was to provide

a hundred thousand dollars throughChildrens Hospital for a wide rangeofresearch efforts, including the lan-guage studies of Susan Curtiss andVictoria Fromkin. David Rigler, as

the principal investigator, was releasedfrom his duties at Childrens Hospitalfor almost half his time, with no re-duction in pay, to attend to his workwith Genie. Underthe grant’s terms,his wife—who, advantageously, wasworking toward her graduate degreein human development—would be paidfrom five hundredto a thousand dol-lars a month for her ministrations.Los Angeles County would also fur-nish the Riglers with foster-homesupport, amounting to two hundredand thirty dollars a month. (Eventu-ally, it would rise to five hundred andfifty-two dollars a month.) From nowon,the research could proceed unim-peded, the only constraint on its paceprovided by Genie herself.

Susan Curtiss kept up atthe Riglers’her almost daily visits, recording inher notebooks as much of Genie’sspeech as she could catch. When, atthe beginning of September, she beganadministering the first of a series oflinguistic tests that she and Fromkinhad devised, she found out quicklyhow exhaustingly stubborn and rest-less Genie could be. Even on thechild’s codperative days, when sheobeyed orders and participated in ac-tivities, she never initiated anything,and her participation was minimal.She was, Curtiss decided, lazy. Howwasone to know whether sucha childwasreally still at the one- and two-wordsentencelevel or was just disin-clined to use sentences of greater com-plexity? Muchlater, when Genie beganusing sentences of several words, shewould compress them into one or twosyllables, so that “Monday Curtisscome” would end up sounding some-thing like “Munkuh.” This behaviorearned her the nickname, amongthelinguists, of the Great Abbreviator.She would pronounce the uncondensed


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version only on firm request. Genie’scapabilities, Curtiss decided, were“masked by her behavior.”

Another masking behavior was soingrained as to be metabolic. Geniewas slow. Unless confronted with adog or someother alarming apparition,she movedas though walking throughwater. This behavior had been observ-able from the beginning—ever sinceshe shuffled into the Social Servicesoffice on the day of her discovery—butit became moreevident as her compre-hensionof verbal commandsincreased. When she wasasked to do something, shewould often not move at alluntil many minutes hadpassed, and then would sud-denly obey, as though therequest had just registered.She had the same“latency of response”with language tasks. There was nosure way to know whetherthe childcould not answer a question or hadsimply not answeredit yet.

Curtiss had taken to reading storiesto Genie, of which Genie remainedpolitely oblivious. Then, on Octo-ber 13th, the oblivion broke. Curtisssaw the girl’s facial expressions reflect-ing the contentofthe tales. Genie hadalways heard; now she waslistening.

She waslistening in general—tuningin to talk not aimed at her. In a word,

she was learning to eavesdrop. AsCurtiss and the Riglers becamefriends,Genie often seemed to be doing theobserving while the scientists did the

talking. Sometimes she would try toobstruct the conversations between theadults, but at other times she listened

in and occasionally even interruptedwith apropos comments.

Her new home wasa fertile envi-ronment for such progress. In theirparlor the Riglers had a Steinwayconcert grand. It was notoften playedby members of the household, butCurtiss, usually just before dinnertime,would giverecitals for her audience ofone. If Genie merely tolerated beingread to, she was a rapt concertgoer.“Musicsentherinto a reverie,” Curtisstold me. “She would be compelled tostand there, and may even have hal-lucinated. I don’t know where shewent. She may have been musing onthe past.” But Genie was transfixedonly if the music was classical, andonlyif it was performedlive. Rigler’sexplanation for this goes back to theyears in the little room: during part of

Genie’s incarceration, a neighbor’schildtook piano lessons, and his practicesessions,filtering in through the barelyopened window, were Genie’s matinées.Whatever their source, Genie’s tasteswere adamant. If Curtiss’s repertoirestrayed too far into the popular, Geniewould pull her hands from the key-board and replace the sheet music witha piece she recognized as being morehighbrow.On November 10th, Curtiss was

playing some nursery songs she haddiscovered that Genie wouldtolerate, and singing along.Toher surprise, Genie clapped,danced, andstampedherfeetto the music when Curtissasked her to, and she sang,changing pitch in a sem-blance of tonal control she

had never previously demonstrated. Aweek later, music provided the context

for another innovation—notin inflec-tion this time but in volume. Duringa drive to the hospital, Curtiss sangGenie an improvised song abouttheirdestination. Genie joined in,repeating“hospital”over and over, and once,indefianceof her fear of vocalizing,beltingthe word out. Some monthslater, shedefied that fear again,this timelettingout a scream when David Riglertriedto remove some wax from her ear.Theevent wentstraight into the note-books. As far as the researchers know,

the scream washer first and her last.But coming from a child whose explo-sions were almost always undergroundit was remarkable.

Advances in speaking came pack-aged with behavioral leaps. The per-son unofficially in charge of teachingGenie how to act was Marilyn Rigler.To show Genie how to chew, shechewed with Genie’s hand held to herjaw. In four months, Genie had learnedto move her own jaw in approximatefashion, and the Rigler dinner tablerecovered a semblance of normality,disrupted only by Genie’s gesturing.Instead of asking for what she wanted,Genie would grab Marilyn’s face orarm and then point or otherwise ges-ture to indicate her need. Hergestureswere a kind of language, peculiar andpeculiarlyeffective. To express plea-sure, she would moisten two fingersin her mouth and rub them quicklyagainst Marilyn’s nose. But communi-cation at dinnertime required conver-sation of a more conventional sort,

and soon Genie was pressured into

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learningto state, not manuallyindicate, her desires.

After Genie had had a whileto adjustto life at the Riglers’,she wasenrolled in a nurseryschool, and,later, in a publicschool for the mentally re-tarded. At home,she wasgivenspeech therapy and taught somesign language—in part becauseit seemed to suit her predilec-tion for manual expression.In general, though, she re-

mained extremely taciturn.Curtiss and the Riglers sawno evidence of the chattinessor the long-string sentencesthat Butler had reported. Herlack of expressiveness wasnowhere more dramaticallydemonstrated than in her tan-trums, which she still con-ducted in a straitjacket of si-lent self-destruction. MarilynRigler painted Genie’s finger-nails, predicting, accurately,that vanity would discourageher from tearing at the wallsandfloor. Knowing how muchGenielovedto becalled pretty,she told her that she was notpretty when she scratched herself orripped at her face. Marilyn foundherselfin the strange position, for a parentfigure, of teaching a child how to havea good king-hell-buster of a fit—howto slam doors and stampher feet. Shewould drag Genie out of the kitchenso that she could do her stamping

outdoors.Here,too, gesture gave wayto word.

In Genie’s iconography, a shakinghand indicated frustration, while ashaking finger signalled the immi-nenceof a full-blown tantrum. Seeingthese storm warnings, Marilyn wouldsay to her, “You are upset, you arehaving a rough time.” Soon she hadonly to say “You are upset” for Genieto assent, “Rough time.” Eventually,“Rough time” became a verbal shak-ing finger, a spontaneous phrase bywhich Genie could broadcast distress.Curtiss witnessed a further break-through in emotional expression onemorning when she arrived to findGenie crying. She had had a coughand a cold and had complained thather ear wasaching, and hadjust learnedfrom Marilyn the scary newsthat shewould have to go see a doctor. “Inoticed the striking changein this girlwho such a short time previously did



not sob or shedtears,” Curtiss wrote

in her dissertation. In mid-June of1972, Curtiss recorded an eventthatapproximately marked the first anni-versary of her acquaintance with Ge-nie. As with other accounts in Curtiss’sdissertation, it is hard to tell who,

subject or scientist, was being morechanged by the experiment. “Today Itook Genieintothecity,” Curtiss wrote.“We browsed through shops for aboutan hour. We sang and marched andcarried on in our own nutty, specialwayas we walked. Genie seemedelatedanddelighted by everything I did. Shecommented, ‘Genie happy.’ So was I.Ourrelationship had developed intosomething special.”

In September,the eightieth annualconvention of the American Psycho-logical Association was held in Hono-lulu, and several of Genie’s watchersflew there to participate in a sympo-sium chaired by David Rigler. In theMynah Room ofthe Hilton HawaiianVillage, Howard Hansen delivered apaper about Genie’searlylife in TempleCity, James Kent spoke of the eightmonths she had spent in the hospital,and Marilyn Rigler recountedthe tri-als ofthe year just past, in an addressshetitled “Adventure: At Home with

“He was well on his climb to the top when they declawed him.”

Genie.” Then Victoria Fromkin re-lated whatshe and Curtiss and StephenKrashen, another of Fromkin’s gradu-ate students, had observed of Genie’slanguage.“By Novemberof 1971, a year after

she was admittedto the hospital, Genie’sgrammarresembled, in manyrespects,that of a normal eighteen- to twenty-month-old child,” Fromkin said, andshe delineated some ways in whichthat situation had changed. In theweeks before the convention, Geniehad finally shown that she knew thedifference between singular andpluralnouns; when Curtiss said “balloons”toher, or “turtles” or “tails,” Genie nowrespondedto the final “s” and pointedto a picture of two balloonsor turtlesinstead of a picture of one. Similarly,she knew the difference between posi-tive and negative sentences. She un-derstood the meaning of some prepo-sitions, so that when Marilyn askedher where elephants are found shereplied, “In zoo.” She understood yes-

or-no questions, and she used posses-sives ofa sort: she could say “Curtisschin” or “Marilyn bike.” (Onlyafteranother half year did she figure outhowto insert a verb, and say, “MissFromkin have blue car.”) Her com-

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prehension and production had pro-gressed from one-word to two-wordsentences, with an occasional three-

worder thrown in. “Now, two-wordutterances are very complex, whenyou think of whatthis entails,” From-kin told her Honolulu audience. “Shewasn’t just stringing together anytwo words randomly; the two wordswhich she put together in her sen-tences wereverystrictly controlled andrule-governed. They were not randomstrings.”

“Rule-governed”wascode,a hinttothe hip that Genie was in the processofpulling off a coup that would rockthe linguistic world. Fromkin had ahard time toning down her excitementat the prospect. The rough draft of herspeech betrays her expectations. “It isclear that Genieis acquiring the rulesof English grammar,” she wrote, andthen amendedthatto read “someof therules.” On a later page, “Genie isacquiring syntactic rules” was pen-cilled over to read, more firmly, “hasacquired.” And on another page camethe declaration “Genieat this stage hasa grammar.”All three references weredeleted by the time Fromkin reachedHawaii.

Thepossible significance of Genie’sachievement was made clear in an-other section deleted from the finalspeech: “This summary of Genie’ssyntactic and phonological develoment indicates that language acquisi-tion can occur after the age of fiveand even after the onset of puberty.

Genie’s linguistic development thusseems to contradict the conclusions ofsomethat language acquisition occursduringthe period whencerebral domi-nance, or lateralization, is develop-ing.” Fromkin wenton to mention the“some” by name. Genie was going todebunk Eric Lenneberg: she was go-ing to learn syntax, even if the pre-vailing theory of the time said shecould not.

There was a certain justice in that.Both Lenneberg and Noam Chomskyhad been invited to participate in theresearch on Genie, and both had de-clined—on the groundthat hercase,which they saw as complicated by theemotional trauma of herincarceration,was too muddy for good science.Fromkin and Curtiss strongly disagreedwith this argument. “Atfirst, Genie’snatural state was non-talking, and that

state might have been reflection ofher emotionalstate,” Curtiss told me,

APRIL 20,1992

getting (as she tends to do on thesubject) a bit emotional herself. “Butas she grew socially, and acquired theability to be happy and live life, itbecameclear that her problems withlanguage were notrelated to any dis-tress or emotion. I don’t see how anemotional profile could allow someaspects of language to grow but notothers. There are a variety of viewsof language acquisition. The one Ican best tell you about is my own,though my view is shared by mostgenerative linguists. That view is thatemotion haslittle to do with it. Cer-tainly Genie was an emotionally dis-turbed child, but that wasn’t relevant

to my concerns.”It is easy to see why Lenneberg,in

particular, might have overlooked themerit of Curtiss’s argument. For him,Genie presented a dismaltest case: atbest, she could provide a flawed en-dorsement of his theory; at worst, a

ringing refutation. If Genie could notlearn language, her failure would beattributed ambiguously—either to thetruthof the critical-period hypothesisor to her emotional problems. If Geniedid learn language in spite of all thathad happenedto her, how muchstron-ger the rebuttal!And, for that brief time, learning

language was what she appeared tobe doing. In retrospect, the Septem-ber, 1972, conference in Hawaii seemsthe point at which the tide of optimismwas taken at the flood. If Francois‘Truffaut had made “The Wild Child”

about Genie instead of about Victorof Aveyron, this is where the storywould -have stopped and the creditsbegun to roll.

iE mustbe said, in looking back, thatthe prospects for Genie’s eventual

triumph were already beclouded thatsummer. One piece of the orthodoxyof language acquisition is the notionthat, no matter how slow or how fastchildren learn language, they all gothrough the same stages, in the sameorder. After children get two-wordphrases, they are poised for an explo-sion. It is as though they had beenpushing a sled up a hill, andall of asudden they were over the edge andracing down the slope; their skillsaccelerate as abruptly as that. Geniehad been using two-wordstrings evenbefore her stay at Jean Butler's, butmonth after month passed and theexplosion never came. She continued

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THE NEW YORKER

to plod along at a slow, sled-pushingpace.

Onething that normal children learnquickly is how to form a negativesentence. They begin by saying “Nohavetoy,” and proceed directly to thenext stage, where they bury the nega-tion within the sentence: “I not havetoy.” Thenthey figure out how to usea supporting verb and say, “I do nothavea toy,” and the prodigies contractthe verb to “don’t.” Genie stayed stuckat the “No have toy”stagefor almost three years, andfour years after she was talk-ing in strings she was stillspeaking in the abbreviatednon-grammarof a telegram.

Nor could she ask a realquestion. Normal children are some-times thought by their parents to bemuch too adept at what linguists callthe WHinterrogatives. But any childwho says “Why?” at every turn isdoing what Genie could not. SinceFebruary of 1972, she had been ableto understand all questions involving“where,” “when,” “who,” “how,”“why,”or “what.” But when she waspushed to produce such a questionherself, she mouthed monsters: “Whereis may I have a penny?”or “I whereis graham cracker on top shelf?” Oneof the obstacles to forming true ques-tionslayclose to the core of Chomskiantheory. To make a WH question,one must engage in what linguistsrefer to as “movement”—thatis, de-riving the word order of the sur-

face sentence (“When is the traincoming?”) from the word order ofthe declarative sentence underneath(“Thetrain is coming [soon ]”). Move-mentwasa facility that Genie did nothave.

She also had a problem with pro-nouns. Most were missing from herlexicon entirely. “I” was her favorite,and “you”and “me”wereinterchange-able. Here the grammar reflectedGenie’s egocentrism—the lack of aborder between her person and her

world. She never figured out who shewas and who was somebody else.“Mamalove you,” Genie would say,pointing to herself.

“Genie was highly motivated tointeract socially and to use language inthat interaction,” Curtiss told me. “Shecould be almost frantic aboutit. Shewould stare at people’s mouthsas theytalked. She was very inventive, verysensitive to whether she was commu-



nicatingor not. For instance, she wouldoften try to describe what she had donein phys-edclass at school. It’s hard todo. It’s an area where tense markersare needed, and where you have toindicate who’s doing what to whom.And an area where she couldn’t makeherself understood. She would drawpictures, mime, use homonyms—tryanything to get you to understand. Ifyou thoughtyou did but it wasn’t whatshe had in mind,she would try again.

She was very intense aboutthis.”That Genie’s language

seemed motivated by hersocial strivings contained apathetic irony, because she

was especially incompetentat the array of interactions known asautomatic speech—the interactionsessential to social discourse. She couldnot learn to say “Hello” in responseto “Hello,” could not grasp the mean-ing of “Thank you.” She would comewhen she wascalled, but, with rareexceptions, could not summon anyone

herself. She complained of a boy whowas pestering her in school, but noone was ever able to teach her howto ask him to cutit out. She inhabiteda prison not unlike a stroke victim’s,

with more to say than she wasable tosay, and awareof herinability. Non-verbally, however, she had no such

handicap. “Without a word,” Curtisswrote in her dissertation, “she canmake her desires, needs, or feelingsknown,evento strangers.”

Faced with Genie’s failure, manyscientists have fallen back on the ex-planation—putforwardby her father—that she was retarded. Curtiss dis-agrees. She noted to me that on someof the tests she and Fromkin admin-istered Genie scored higher than any-one hadever scored. “On spatialtests,Genie achieved a perfect adult score,”she said. “She could imagine a figurewith pieces missing, and she couldlook at something from oneperspectiveand know how it would look from adifferent perspective. She could drawsilhouettes. She could categorize. Somepeople have said that categorizing isthe key to learning language—thatgrammaris just organizing things intosmaller and smaller categories. Geniecould organize, but she couldn’t learngrammar. Whatever she brought tobear on categorizing wasn’t what shehad to bring to bear on grammar. Iwould give her complex hierarchical

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models to copy, and she could do iteffortlessly andflawlessly. Genie couldapprehendthe most complex structure.One time, we asked her to copy astructure madeof a set of sticks. Thesticks were different colors, but we

didn’t think about that—we were in-terested in the structure’s shape. WhenGenie re-created the structure frommemory,she got not only the shape butall the colors correct—every last stick—even though that was notpart of thetask. She could doall these things thatare supposedto be related to grammati-cal structures, but she couldn’t getgrammar.”

Genie’s specialty—her ability withthe spatial and the concrete—was re-flected in her talk. Most children con-centrate their conversation onactivitiesandrelationships: what happened when,what So-and-Sodid to So-and-So. Genieconcentrated instead on objects, me-ticulously describing anddefining themby color and shape, number andsize.A normal child would rarely utteramongits early several-word phrasesthe ones that dominated Genie’s speech:“big, rectangularpillow,” “very, very,very dark-green box,” “tooth hard,”“big, huge fish in the ocean.”

In the late nineteen-seventies, after

Curtiss finished her dissertation, shesubjected Genie to a broad range ofpsychological tests that measured cog-nitive skills other than language,and she compared the results withthose from tests administered to Geniebyother scientists from the beginning.

“I found some interesting things,”Curtiss recalled. “I found that forevery year that Genie hadbeen outofisolation she hadadvanced a year in mentalage. Given a chanceto inter- Nact with her environment,

she was growing. This is thestrongest evidence that shewas not mentally retarded. You neversee a case of a mentally retardedchild in which the mental age in-creases a year with every year. Also,with retarded kids the lexicon is veryimpoverished. They'll get a case cor-rect but the semantics wrong. They’renot sure of gender or number. Geniewas always correct on cognitive mat-ters. She knew how many and ofwhat kind. Besides, being with Geniewasn’t like being with a retarded per-son.It waslike being with a disturbedperson. She was the most disturbedperson I'd ever met. But the lights



were on. There was somebody home.”At home with Genie in Laughlin

Park, the Riglers, too, felt that theywere dealingwith anintelligence. “Thiswas not a dumb kid—no way,” DavidRigler told me. “She had energy andpersonality and incredible curiosity. Shemost emphatically responded to ap-proval and was dismayed by repri-mand. She craved affection and shegaveit. She had a wonderful sense ofhumor.” Around the house, Geniehandled complex tasks: she ironed,and sewed both by hand and with asewing machine. And she drew. Herdrawings seemedactually to be part ofher lexicon—a compensatory, self-taught speech. When Genie wasfail-ing to transmit some idea, she would

grab pencil andpaper, and sketch whatshe could not describe. She sketchedmore than objects: she could depict herthoughts and desires. Curtiss remarkedonherability to convey with a few deftstrokes on paper the gestalt of a situ-ation—the juxtaposition of people orthings central to one ofher tales. Herperception of gestalts was uncanny.Her mind had no trouble seeing theorganization behind a chaotic scene orperceiving a whole from scatteredparts. It was on the gestalt tests thatGenie scored higher than anyone inthe literature. But her portrayal of hercomplex comprehension was betterachieved through visual than verbalmeans.

Throughout her emergence, Geniegrasped her everyday experiences byrelating them to images in magazinesand books. Whenfear of the Riglers’

pets was her greatest con-cern, sheclipped photographsof similar cats and dogs andcollected them, as though

they had the magical protec-tive qualities of voodoodolls.When she saw a helmeted

diver at Sea World, she did not calmdownuntil she had got Curtiss back tothe house and shownher a picture ofthe selfsame monster in National Geo-graphic, Curtiss’s early conjecture wasthat Genie had been programmed bya childhood that was almost devoid ofevent or society and was dominatedinstead by visual experience—anexpe-rience as static as a postcard. For her,the vision frozen in National Geo-graphic may have been fully asaliveas the one that moved at Sea World.Later, when investigations of Genie’sbrain unveiled the utter dominance of

her “spatial” right hemisphere overher “linguistic”left, a more mechani-cal cause suggested itself,

Genie’s progress was withal too slowto reallybecalled steady, but progressshe made, through someidiosyncraticlandmarks. She learned to fantasizeverbally, and she learned to manipu-late, and in March of 1974 she com-bined the twoskills and learnedtotellan outright lie. She came home fromschool one day with a story about howher teacher’s demands had made hercry. It wasa fictional event, calculatedto gain sympathy from Marilyn. Heruse of language to relate past eventsposed the question of whether shewould be able to put into wordseventsthat had happened before words werepart of her world. Wouldshe have anymemories from that time? And howwouldthey be encoded? The answer—part of it—cameall too horribly. “Fa-ther hit big stick. Father is angry,”Genie said one day. And on otheroccasions, “Father hit Geniebig stick”and “Father take piece woodhit. Cry.”‘Thescientists were learning aboutthatpart of the child’s life they had notknown,andlearningit, moreover, from

the child. “We worked with her fearof her father,” Rigler told me. “Wekept assuring Genie that her fatherwas dead and was not going to appearand punish her. We had a problemcommunicating to her the concept ofdeath. She was always afraid that hewould return. As she learned to talkmore, a stock phrase became ‘Fatherhit.’ Hundredsof times. Thousandsoftimes.”

Typically, one of her worst revela~tions was wordless. One day she wouldnot come when she was called, andRigler found her in her room sittingbefore a magazine, paralyzed with fright.The magazine was open to a photo-graph of a wolf. Genie wastoo terri-fied to explain her weird behavior, sowhenthe Riglers had the opportunitythey questioned her mother. They recailIrene’s explanation—that on the rareoccasions when Clark hadinteractedwith his daughter he had imitated adog, barking and growling at her.Sometimes,Irene said, he would standin the hallway outside her closed bed-room door and bark.The psychologists and psychiatrists

familiar with Genie’s case remainhaunted by this image, and I haveasked several of them, “Why a dog?”The nearest thing to an explanation

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was offered by Jay Shurley, who beganbyadmittinghis bafflement. “All I canthink is that it had to do with Clark’sappointing himself his daughter’s guard-ian,” he said. “Remember, he wasgoing to protect Genie from the world,andat the sametime he was punishingher with his protection. And people areoften guarded by their dogs.” Heshrugged. “So he became a dog.”

SNE the November day in 1970when Genie and her mother

walked into the Los Angeles Countywelfare office, Irene had been a ghostin her daughter’s life. She had never,perhaps, been much more—a blind,sad momentary presence from the worldbeyondthedoor.After the two escapedfrom their home, things had becomebetter, and worse. It was not by anymeans merely an escape for Irene.Ifthat had been all she was after, shecould have escaped alone. But sheconfronted her husband and abductedher hostage daughter. If she had nothad herdaughter to take—hadnot hadthe obligation ofsetting rightthatblighton her life, worse even than the in-justice of her own mistreatment—whoknows, Irene mightjust have stayedat home.

Irene’s belated heroism paid harshdividendsin the short term.“Heck,thefirst rattle out of the box there wereheadlines in the L.A. papers, and shewas yankedinto court,” Jay Shurleysaid. “Her husband committed suicide.Thatwas thefirst week. And then she

lost control of the child.”Dismissed by the court, Irene re-

turned to the house on Golden WestAvenue. She spent the nextfive yearstravelling aroundgreater Los Angeles,hauntingthe fringesof her daughter’scelebrity. She visited Genie’s variousnew homes and was introducedto hernew extended family. Amongthefirstpeople she met was James Kent, whenshe interrupted his initial session withGenie at Childrens Hospital. He de-scribed their introduction in his speechat the Hawaii A.P.A. symposium. “Inthe course of [Genie’s play with apuppet], her mother and brother en-tered the room. Sheignoredher brother’sgreeting, moved quicklyto her mother,and, pushing her face within a fewinches of her mother’s, peered at herwithout expression for a moment, then

returned to the puppet play... . As wefirst observed it, Genie seemed lessinterested in her mother than in many

APRIL 20, 1992

of the other hospital staff. She wouldcomply with her mother’s requests tosit on her lap, but she remainedstiffand aloof, and wasnoted at least onceto have an angry outburstof scratchingandspitting as soon as she could es-cape. Genie’s mother seemed notto beaware of this notable lack of warmth;

on the contrary, she remarked onceafter such anepisode that Genie seemedto ‘like me today.’ ”

Irene took to visiting the hospitaltwice a week, and asthe visits went on

they improved. “Genie’s mother be-came more spontaneous andappropri-ate with Genie,” Kent reported, “andGenie, as her relationship deepenedwith others, became more responsiveand relaxed with her mother. Indeed,she beganto look forwardto the mother’svisits with obvious delight.”The change wasnoaccident. Kent

credits theefforts of Vrinda Knapp,thehospital’s chief psychiatric social worker,who began visiting Irene at home.Knapp’s counselling of Irene was partof an attemptby the scientists to keepmother and child together. “We con-sidered it important for Genie to haveregular and frequent contact with hermother,” Kenttold me. “This was heronly real link to her past, and wefeltthat it should be maintained.”The first battle the scientists had

hadto fightin that regard was keepingIreneoutof jail. When she and Clarkwere indicted on child-abuse charges,Howard Hansenprevailed on a friendof his, a lawyer named John Miner,to attend the preliminary hearing onbehalf of Childrens Hospital and ar-gue in defense of Irene. Miner hadrecently retired as the head of thedivision of the Los Angeles Dis-trict Attorney’s office which handleschild-abuse cases. Since 1964, he hadalso headed a Los Angeles Countycommittee on the battered-child syn-drome, which drafted the legislationthat made child abuse a felony inCalifornia. Miner’s involvement withGeniepersisted after the disposition ofIrene’s case, and in April of 1972 hefiled an application with the JuvenileCourt to become Genie’s legal guard-ian. An internal memoin the D.P.S.S.noted his concern. “His interest ismotivated by his desire to safeguard[{Genie’s] part of her father’s estate,”it said. Minerexplainedto the regionalD.P.S.S. bureau director that it wouldnot be customary to become the guard-ian of a child’s estate without also

7/16/2019

THE NEW YORKER

becoming the guardian of the child.The estate left by Clark was hardly

sizable. In addition to the house onGolden West Avenue, it includedabout twenty thousanddollars, of whicha third wentto Irene and a third toeach of his children. The court con-sidered two affidavits: one from Ireneconsenting to the guardianship andone from Genie’s “attending physi-cian,” Howard Hansen. “In said doc-tor’s opinion,” another Social Servicesmemosaid, “John Miner . . . wouldbe a suitable guardian of [Genie’s]estate and person.” On May18th,theguardianship wasassigned, and Minerbecame the person legally chargedwith protecting Genie’s interests—insuring, for example, that she was not

exploited by the researchers at ChildrensHospital.The convenience ofit all did not at

first seem dangerous. Letting a patientlive with a doctor, a subject with a

scientist, was, of course, somewhat

unorthodox, but Genie’s case was an

unusualone. True, the men in control

of Genie all knew eachother, but atleast they all knew each other to bereasonable and honorable men. And,best ofall, the goals of research andtherapy were seemingly in concert;why, then, should the boundary be-tween them be sharply defined?The first blurring of that boundary

may have occurred with John Miner'spresence at Irene’s hearing; the hos-pital was,in effect, participating in acriminal case involving the family of

one of its patients. By the time theGenie Team made the decision torehabilitate Irene, the line was hardlydiscernible. Vrinda Knapp was in-structed to glean from her counsellingsessions with Irene a history of thefamily, and to relay that informationto the scientists for their use. Manyofthe details in Hansen’s paper at theA.P.A. convention, and much of whatlater appeared in Curtiss’s dissertation,had been revealed by Irene to hertherapist.

David and Marilyn Rigler some-times drove Genie to Temple City onweekends, and those trips, too, were

opportunities for observation. The Rig-lers frequently filmed Genie in theirown home, eating, talking, playing;they also took a camera along to GoldenWest Avenueandfilmed her with hermother.

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sink, beside her mother. Irene isworking at thesink, her hair permed,her face a plain face, worn less withage than with worry. Genie fluttersabout her with a limby coquettishness,

checking the counters and the refrig-erator, occasionally comingtorest,likea butterfly alighting precariously, ather mother’s side. In a fluty, urgingvoice she asks for cereal, but her mothersays no, cereal isn’t for lunch—theyhave chicken for lunch. As the camerafollows, she leads Genie to the stoveandlifts the lid on a largepot, so thatGenie can see the chicken, and for amoment they are caught with theirfaces too close to the camera,frozen in

grainy black and white. They aresmiling. The mother’s smile seems alittle tight, but the child’s is cheerful.When Genie walks off to a corner ofthe kitchen, the camera pansafter her,

and you can see her awkward hobble.She asks for orange juice, and forcereal again, and her high voiceis allbutlost in the roar throughthe kitchenwindow ofthetraffic on Golden WestAvenue.

Irene’s house had been rearrangedand redecoratedsince the days of Genie’sincarceration. “It looked very nice,”Rigler told me,butothervisitors found

it depressing. Thepottychair,atleast,had been taken out back and burned.Although Irene had lived there formore than a decade before her escape,

her new view of her own home wasthefirst she had everreally had. In thesummer of 1971, she had undergonean operation to remove her cataracts,and her failed eyesight was largelyrestored. Hansen and Knapp had ar-ranged for her surgery; like her psy-chotherapy, it was provided free ofcharge. But anyone who expectedgrati-tude wasin for a disappointment.“JimKent, in particular, went to bat for

doing things for Irene,” Shurley toldme. “I suppose Dr. Hansen did aswell. Both wereinterested in convert-ing her into a friend, but they didn’tsucceed.”

It would have been a friendshipacross a great gap,as difficult to bridgeas the chasm between Temple Cityand Laughlin Park. “Irene was quitelooked downon,as the upperclass cando toward the lower class,” Shurleysaid. “It was a whole day’s journey onpublic transportation for Irene to getback and forth from Childrens Hospi-tal. She felt bad that she didn’t havethe right clothing—didn’t have a dress



to visit her daughter in the hospital.Irene commented to me aboutthisfancy hospital that her daughter wasin—how she could not have affordedit if she had had to foot the bill.Neither side had an appreciation ofwhatlife was like for the other. Irenewas suspiciousof the Riglers’ intellec-tualism. And I neverfelt that Rigler,

for his part, saw Irene as human, saw

Clark as human. Rigler, Hansen,Kent—they came from environmentswherethey had alwayslived well. Forthem,Irene waslike something the catdraggedin, andthat was a problem forthem.”

In the unacknowledged class war,the person with diplomatic immunitywas Jean Butler Ruch. She and FloydRuch had married, andthe couple hadseveral homes and a yacht. “Never-theless, I think Jean was more sensi-tive to that socio-economicstuff thanRigler was,” Shurley said. “She knewhow to keep her distance, respectfully,and she didn’t use her wealth andposition to dominate the situation. ShegaveIrene advice, didn’t usurp, didn’tinvade.”As Irene’s health improved and she

became accustomed to her life as awidow, her affection for Jean Ruchgrew, and so, apparently, did her dis-taste for the scientists who were study-ing her daughter. One day, after hereye operation, she was leaving theRehabilitation Center with Genie andDavid Rigler. They were walkingslowly, to accommodate Genie’s characteristic shuffle, and,as Riglerrecalls,“We got outside, and Irene looked ather daughter and looked at me andasked me, ‘What have you done to herthat she walks this way? ” Rigler wastaken aback. “I don’t think Genie’smother ever understood what her rolein Genie’s condition was,” he told me,and henoted thatthis denial may havebeen a testament to the success ofIrene’s therapy. “I think the mother,after her counselling and rehabilita-tion, had a task of her own—to resolvethis in her mind in a way that wouldallow her to live with it,” he said.“Irene saw our presence as a repri-mand, an indictment—as a reminder.And we weretoo busy congratulating

APRIL 20,1992

ourselves on our benevolenceto noticehow much we were antagonizingher.”

S 1972 became 1973, and 1973turned into 1974, David Rigler

must have beenwell pleased with SusanCurtiss’s progress toward her doctor-ate. Except for the linguistic workpursued by her and Victoria From-kin, precious little was coming outof the ambitious experiment of whichhe was the principal investigator.During her years as a residentin theRiglers’ house, Genie had gone frombeing “the most promising case studyof the twentieth century” to being, inRigler’s words, “perhaps one of themost tested children in history.” Shehad not, however, turned into much of

an oracle.“At onepoint,” Rigler told me, “I

did a diagram ofall the people fromaroundthe nation who were involvedwith researching and helping Genie,and it was a huge circle,” and hespread his armsas wide as they wouldgo. Theresearchers had produced reamsofdata. But the data piled up uncollatedand unprocessed, the sheer volume an

impediment to the drawing of anysignificant conclusions. A handful ofpapers had ensued, most of them re-capitulations of Genie’s horrific child-hood, and none of them of much moreabiding import than the paper Davidand Marilyn Rigler submitted to the‘Twentieth International Congress ofPsychology, in Tokyo, in August of1972. The paper wastitled “Attenua-tion of Severe Phobia in a HistoricCase of Extreme Psychosocial Dep-rivation.” It detailed how, by theuse of such devices as a sliding glassdoor, Genie had been introduced toTori.The N.I.M.H. found the lack of

progresstroubling. In series ofsitevisits, its grant overseers expressedtheir concernsto Rigler. Worried thatthe data were being collected in hap-hazard fashion, they suggested newtests to fill in gaps, and asked that

others be readministered. In the fall of1973, Rigler was given an extensionand additional money for “developingan adequate research plan” and ana-lyzing the research he had alreadydone. A yearlater, with the extensionrunning out, the N.I.M.H.deliberatedon his application for a further twohundred and twenty-six thousanddollars to support the research for threemore years.

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Genie’s progress was also beingwatched, from a greater remove and

with a much more jaundiced eye, byJean Butler Ruch, who gleaned re-ports of Genie’s health and behaviorfrom anyavailable source. Convincedthat Genie was not doing as well asadvertised, she lobbied aggressivelyagainst Rigler, Hansen, and Curtisswith anyone in the scientific commu-nity who would listen.Whydid Rigler contend that Genie

wasacting appropriately in social situ-ations, whensheclearlywas not, Ruchasked in her letter campaign. Whywas Marilyn claimingcreditfor train-ing Genieto set the table (by reward-ing her with ten pennies each time),when Genie had already been a zeal-ous table setter during her summerwith Ruch, and before? Why, Ruchasked, did the Riglers say that Geniehad arrived at their house unable todress or clean herself, when the nurseshad trained her to do all that at theRehabilitation Center? Why were Rig-ler and Curtiss crowing that Geniewas making three-word utterances bythe end of her third year in LaughlinPark, whenin the summerof 1971 shehadbeenable to say “Foybig black cargo ride” when she wanted Floyd Ruchto take her outto, for instance, the pet

store, and “Bad orange fish—no eat—bad fish” in explaining why she hadtossed her newpet goldfish outinto theyard?Jean Ruchinsisted that the Riglershad reset the chronology of Genie’sprogress to concealthe fact that Geniehad declinedin their care. “This soundsterribly self-serving,” she wrote to one

scientist, “but no one who saw herafter her stay with us reports her everas vibrant and active or acting andlookingso ‘near normal’as she wasinour home.”

Ruch charged that Rigler had in-flated his original grant applicationwith “imaginary consultants”—listingas collaborators eminentscientists whohad donelittle more than poke their

heads in while passing through. WhenI spoke to Rigler about this particularcharge, he frankly admitted that hecould not recall meeting one of thepsychologists he hadlisted in the grantapplication as having spent two dayswith Genie; however,thelistingof allthese consultants could justas easily beascribed to optimistic self-deception asto fraud. Ruch also accused Rigler ofcallous behavior toward Irene; he had,she said, insisted that Irene visit her



daughter in fast-food restaurants andother such places rather than at the

Rigler home, and he had refused toabet those meetings with any financialassistance, even though Irene wasrunning through her inheritance andwas sewingand selling dolls to makeends meet. “Consideringthat Rigler etal. went all over the USA, Hawaii,and Japan on Genie Funds,to not givea portion oftheir State foster-care foodallotment to the mother was [viewedas] unforgivable by all who knew herfinancial problems,” Ruch wrote. Inher files she catalogued this particu-Jar item under the heading “Mother’sNeed vs. Rigler’s Greed.” The fileswere voluminous, running, by Ruch’scount, to six thousand documentpages.“She used the Freedom of InformationAct to go to N.I.M.H.and getall therecords of my research,” Rigler toldme. “Andthen she got furious whenthey notified me that she had beengiven the documents.”Through the error of an inexperi-

enced clerk, Ruch was sent a seven-page paperthat should not have beenreleased to her—the grants committee’sappraisal of Rigler’s application for anew three-year grant. “The rule isthat under the Freedom of Informa-tion Act you may buy only documentsabout projects which have been ap-proved,” Ruch gloated to onescientist.She characterized the committee’s ap-praisal as “scathing.”The N.I.M.H. grants committee

met to decide on its recommendationsin September of 1974. A two-daysitevisit to Los Angeles had convinced thecommittee that “verylittle progress hasbeen made” and that “the researchgoals projected probably will not berealized.” Its report continued:

The Committeefeels that the proposed re-search plan is deficientin its own right andinappropriate for the special needs and cir-cumstancesof this unique case study... . Thefailure during the past year to implementtherecommendations madeby the Committee forwhich funds were madeavailable .. . is dis-quieting. The Committee feels that this ap-plication is clearlylacking inscientific merit,and, therefore, unanimously recommends dis~approval, requesting that its comments be con~veyedto Dr. Rigler.

Onthe bright side, the committee

expressed its opinion that the researchhad posed “nosubstantial risks to theindividual who is the object of thisproposal,” and observedthat “the thera~peutic benefits to the subject have beenand continueto be considerable.” The

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well-being of the “subject” was none-theless a worry:

The Committeeis concerned about Genie’sfuture welfare and how the consequences ofdisapproval will directly affect Genie. TheRiglers have indicated that without supportfortheir research project, they would prob-ably haveto terminate their foster relation-ship with Genie andleave herfuture care tothe State of California. The Committee ap-preciates that Genie is properly a ward ofCalifornia, not of N.I.M.H., and feels thatthe appropriation of research funds for Genie’smaintenance outside of a research contextwouldnotbein herbest interestor that of theFederal Government.

“There were some good reasonsand somebadreasonsforrejecting thegrant,” David Rigler told me. “But,essentially, they didn’t understand. Thestudy wasn’t like most scientific stud-ies. There were no controls. It’s astudy of a single case, and those arerare. They’re anecdotal. They can’t bedone in the way of normal science.The people on the N.I.M.H. staff areinvolved with grants. I used to workwith them, and I know what that

means. There was pressure on me tobe much more scientific in my ap-proach. Measurements,that’s what theywanted, Notthat I didn’t want to makemeasurements,but I didn’t wantto doso in ways that would be intrusive tothe well-being of the kid. I was neverable to satisfy people on the committeethat I was doing this in the best wayfor science and for the child.”On June 4, 1975, Rigler addressed

a letter to an administrator at ChildrensHospital summarizing Genie’s progressoverthe past four anda half years. Shewas capable of some autonomy, hesaid, but she still needed substantialsupervision, She could care for herhygiene andeven prepare simple meals.Herself-destructive tantrums werelessfrequent. Rigler described Genie’sperformance on “a very large numberof standardized and custom-designedtests, many of them [administered]repetitively over time,” and addedthat,“the tests notwithstanding, Genie re-mains in somesense an enigma.” Shewas still an emotionally disturbed child,hesaid, but there was hope. “At age 18,Genie has not stopped her process ofachievement in any sphere,” Riglerwrote, noting that she had “clearlyestablished powerful emotional ties toboth the foster mother and to herbiological mother.” He concluded bysaying, “As you know, we are contem-plating relinquishing Genie’s foster care;however, we have a continuing wish

APRIL 20,1992

to be of service to her in a new place-ment.”

Before the month wasout, Genie’sbags were packed. She went home toIrene—to the house on Golden WestAvenue in Temple City, where shehadspent the bulk of a painful child-hood and almost every weekend of theprevious six months.

“After we gave her up, we wereworried how the mother would takecare of her,” Rigler told me. “We havesome money. Wecan afford babysittersandhelp. [rene was impoverished. Sothat first summer we made arrange-ments for Genie to go to summerschool and, when that wasover,to day

camp. But the mother asked her ‘Doyou want to go to day camp?” andGenie said no. So she didn’t go. Shestayed home,andbefore long the motherwascalling for help. Notto us, but tothe protective services.”

So Genie was moved again, in thefall of 1975, entering the first of fivenew foster homes. Now she was be-yondthedirect care of both her motherandthe scientists; John Miner’s legalguardianship, too, had ended, on theday she turned eighteen.

Thatshe was in crisis was evidentfrom her behavior. She seemed to beintentionallyregressing. She closed up,depriving the world of whatever shethought it wanted. A barometer of herhappiness had always been her bath-room habits. Herlifelong bowel prob-Jems had wanedat Jean Butler’s houseand returned when she movedto theRiglers’, only to improve again as shesettled in. Now they resumed, force-fully, and the consequence showedjusthow full circle her life had come.During her childhood, a chronic con-stipation had been Genie’s physicalprotest. At one point, Clark hadtriedto remedy his daughter’s obstinacy byforcing her to downanentire bottle ofcastor oil. The overdose had landedherin a physician’soffice. That battle,as it turns out, was premonitory.

Accordingto Rigler, “the lady run-ning one of the foster homes wasrather bizarre.” He recalled visitingthe home “from time to time,” andcounselling Genie in her regular out-patient visits to Childrens Hospital.“The woman was very rigid, andGenie had a powerfully strong will,”he said. “Ultimately, the collisionoccurred over the issue of hertoiletbehavior. What happenedin this homewas that she becameconstipated, and

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THE NEW YORKER

this got to the point where it was verypainful. The womantried to extractfecal material with an ice-creamstick.There was no injury. But she wastraumatized.”

Genie’s reaction to the trauma, as

the scientists interpreted it, was to upthe ante. If the world would goto thatextremeto invade her sovereignty overher body, she would deprive it ofsomething else—somethingit had de-sired from her and rewarded herfor.For five months, she didn’t speak.“Genie wanted to have somecontrolover her life, and she never did,”Curtiss told me. “She never had anycontrol whatsoever over what hap-penedto her. Theonly wayfor her tocontrol her life was to withhold fecesor withhold speech, and so she did. Itwasn’t an attempt to quit communicat-ing that made her quit speaking. Shehad had this terrible—a coupleof ter-rible experiences. She had a fear ofvomiting, and she had vomited a coupleof times and been punishedforit. Andthen—oh, this story is so terrible Ican’ttell you all of it—she wasin oneof her foster homes, and it was anabusive home, and theytold her that

if she vomited once more she wouldnot ever get to see her mother again.She didn’t know what she had donewrong, but she was afraid that if sheopened her mouth she would vomit.But even during herelective mutismshe wanted to communicate with cer-tain people, and one of them was me,and, thank God, she’d been taught

some sign language. She signed furi-ouslyto me, about how muchshelovedher mother and missed her—abouteverything. You could see her wantingto eat, but she would refuse to open hermouth.It was very labored eating. Shewould—” Curtiss twisted her facesidewise and looked up, like a fisheying a morsel of food on the surfaceof the water. “And then she wouldopen quickly and gulp it. After noteating, and living with that abusivefoster family, she ended up in thehospital.”

Curtiss’s notes from Genie’s tenurein foster homesdisplay thegirl’s long-ing.“I want live back Marilyn house,”Genie said in November of 1975. InAugust of 1977, it was “Think aboutMamalove Genie.” These notes wereintended as records not of Genie’semotions but of her languageability,for Curtiss’s pursuit of Genie wasstillin the nameoflinguistics. In 1977, she



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66

WE 4


-

Shana hav?

“Get out of my face!”

and Fromkin received a grant from theNational Science Foundation, so theywere able to continue their work irre-spective of Rigler’s fortunes with the

N.I.M.H. They were now the onlyscientists funded to work with Genie.“Noneofthe other research had pannedout,” Curtiss says.

OR Curtiss, it was panning out ontwo fronts. She continued hertest-

ing of Genie, andat the sametime shewas compiling her doctoral thesis—summing up the Rigler years, sortingoutall the things that Genie had learnedto do from all that she had not. “Shehad very quickly developed a vocabu-lary, and puther vocabularyin stringsto express complex ideas,” Curtiss toldme. “She was a very communicativeperson. But, despite trying, she nevermastered the rules of grammar, nevercould use the little pieces—the wordendings, for instance. She had a clearsemantic ability but could not learnsyntax. There was a tremendous un-evenness, or scatter, in what she was

able to do.”


That scatter had been one of theinitial curiosities of Genie’s case; now

the years of research had seasoned itinto significance. “Oneofthe interest-ingfindings is that Genie’s linguisticsystem did notdevelopall of a piece,”Curtiss told me. “So grammarcould beseenasdistinct from the non-grammaticalaspects of language, and also fromother mental faculties. The hallmarkof cognitive development in normalchildrenis its multiplicity. Everythingis going on at once. It’s difficult to tellby observing the average child thatacquiring language is a cognitive taskseparate from others, and full of dis-crete pieces. But we saw with Geniethat these things could sprout in-dependently, by means of differentmechanisms.”When Curtiss says “mechanisms,”

she is not being abstract or metaphori-cal, She means not only psychologicalbut physical mechanisms—structuresin the brain. As Curtiss chased herquarry deeper into her dissertation, shechased it more and more in EricLenneberg’s direction; her last chapter

APRIL 20,1992

was on neurolinguistics, and delvedinto the biological basis of Genie’slanguageskills. Genie’s inabilities boreout Lenneberg’s theory, at least con-ditionally. She demonstrated thatafterpuberty one could notlearn languagesimply by being exposed to it. Herscatter was especially confirming. Itdivided the “learned” skills, such asvocabulary, from those said to be in-nate, such as syntax. Furthermore,the syntactic abilities, which bothChomsky and Lenneberg had predictedwould be biologically determined, hadindeed been constrained by Genie’sbiology—thwarted by her develop-ment.

It was a mischievous revelation.Thoughit appearedto affirm Chomsky,it could also be read as refuting him.If someparts of language were innateand others were provided by the en-vironment, why would Genie’s child-hood hell have deprived herof only theinnate parts? How could a child wholacked language because she had beenshut away from her mother be proofof the contention that our mothersdon’t teach us language? Why shouldshe be unable to gain precisely thesyntax that Chomsky said she was bornwith? The problem wasnotpeculiar toGenie’s case. It was constitutional, anaspect of Chomskian thought thatseemed, on the surface, paradoxical: ifsyntax is “innate,” why must it be“acquired”at all?The answer might lie in Genie’s

brain; perhaps she was not graspinggrammar because she was using thewrong equipment. As earlyas the fallof 1971, Curtiss, Fromkin, and StephenKrashen had begun doing neurolin-guistic tests in the hope offinding outexactly whatpart of Genie’s brain theyhad beentalking to all those months,

whatpart of Genie’s brain had beentalking back. The equipment searchwould have alarmed those early lin-guists who thoughtthat seeking a bio-logical center for somethingasineffableas language wasasfutile a misadven-ture as looking for a center of the soul.Nevertheless, modern neurology hasfound concrete mechanismsfor otherincorporeal things—or,at least, foundwhere those mechanismsreside. Theability to watch a baseball’s flight andknow whereit will land inhabits thebrain’s right parietal lobe, above andbehind the ear. Getting a joke, under-standing a metaphor, and realizingthat something is inappropriate to say

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THE NEW YORKER

in a conversationarealso talents of theright hemisphere. The right brain lis-tens to music. Both hemispheres knowthe meanings of words. Mathematics,logic, and language—at least, the gram-matical part of it—have a preferencefor the left hemisphere.From the misfortunes of brain-

damaged people,it is clear that lan-guagetasks are dispersed within theirleft-hemispheric home. Someone whosebrain is injured above the left ear ina region called Wernicke’s area maystill be able to speak correctly, evenglibly, but often there will be no dis-cernible idea behind the voluble wordstrings. If the injury is forwardof that,in Broca’s area,the victim will strugglepainfully toward expressing his thought,unable to form sentences. From theearliest observations of Genie, it ap-peared that her brain function wasbiased: the tasks she performed wellwereall right-braintasks; the tasks she

failed wereall left-brain. Genie’s re-sponse to tasks requiring an equalcollaboration between hemispheres wasfrustrated and hesitant, with none of

the quick confidenceshe displayed whenthinking “right.”

‘The dominance of one hemisphereor one lobe in any given task is nevertotal. Both sides of the brain work onevery task, but their collaborations

are lopsided. How the tasks are di-vided depends on the individual. Inthe fine points of brain layout, we areeach different from our neighbors.Genie’s deviation, however, was ex-

treme, and Curtiss wanted to know

why.Her opportunity was provided by

another aspect of brain physiology.Each side of the brain controls theopposite side of the body. Unfortu-nately for neurolinguists, you cannotwhisper to the left brain through theright ear without the right brain’soverhearing you, because each ear iswired to both sides of the brain. Theconnectionto the opposite side is stron-ger, however, andin onecircumstanceit has a near monopoly: when a soundis presentedto the left ear at the sametime that a different and competingsound is presented to the right ear,each ear reports almost exclusively tothe opposite side of the brain. Thisoddity makes possible whatis calledthe dichotic listening test. By playingdifferent things simultaneously into eachof Genie’s ears, Curtiss was able tospeak directly to each hemisphere of



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her brain, and measure each hemi-sphere’s response.“What matters is the material the

ear hears,” Curtiss told me. “Lan-guage is handled better by the rightear, and environmental or musicalsounds by the left ear. We playedenvironmental sounds to Genie andchecked her response. Each ear aloneperformedperfectly; both ears with thesame sounds were O.K.; but when thetwo ears competed the left ear per-formed better. That’s normal—but thedegree of the asymmetry wasnot. Thenwe fed her words the same way.” Theresults bore out long-standing suspi-cions. Genie’s brain was processinglanguage just as it did environmentalsounds—onthe right. The right brainwas handling work usually done acrosstheaisle. The real surprise lay in thedegree of the imbalance. Normally,the dominance of one side over theother showsup in thedichotic listeningtest only as a subtle preference—noth-ing too pronounced. With Genie, itwas pronounced.

Seeking to provide herself with asecond opinion, Curtiss took Genie tothe Brain Research Institute, on theU.C.L.A. campus. “Weattached elec-trodes to her skull to read her brainwaves as we showed her pictures orread her sentences,” Curtiss told me.“First, we showed her faces. Herresponse pattern was parallel to theenvironmental-sounds test—that is,

the right hemisphere showed a great-er response than the left. Normal.Then we played sentences.” The re-sults, as before, were radi-cal. Genie’s performance wasas lopsided as that of chil-dren whoseleft hemisphereshave been surgically removed.She didn’t seem to be usingherleft brain for language atall. Whenit cametoits cen-tral function, her left brainappeared to be functionally dead.“Why should this be so?” Curtiss

asked, in a paper on language andcognition published in Working Papersin Cognitive Linguistics in 1981. Shecontinued, “Genie’s case suggests thepossibility that normal cerebral orga-nization may depend on languagedevelopmentoccurringat the appropri-ate time.” To the question “Whymustwe acquire what’s innate?” Genie wassuggesting an answer. Eric Lenneberghad claimed that the brain organizedlanguage learning. Now it seemed likely

APRIL 20, 1992

that some stimulus was needed toorganize the brain. Curtiss had run herfinger down the string of Genie’sexperience until she encountered thefabled, elusive knot—the tie between

language and humanity. If Genie wasany indication,we are physically formedby the influence of language. An es-sential part of our personal physicaldevelopment is conferred on us byothers, and comes in at the ear. The

organization of our brain is as geneti-cally ordained and as automatic asbreathing, but, like breathing, it is

initiated by the slap of a midwife, andthe midwife is grammar.A slapis all that’s needed. “It seems

to take a phenomenally small amountof inputto trigger this special process,”Helen Neville told me. Neville is aneuroscientist with the Salk Institute,in La Jolla. In Curtiss’s 1981 paper,she cites experiments by Neville tocorroborate her observations of Genie.In 1977 and 1978, Neville carried outexperiments on deaf children who usedAmerican Sign Language. Suchchil-dren have provided the armamentariumof modernlinguistics with one of itsmost potent weapons. Their usefulnesslies in their history. Even today, deaf-ness in children is often misdiagnosedas retardation, and the children lan-guish in misdirected programs. Thebest-intentioned families may feel thattheir deaf children would be better offlearning to read the speaking world’slips rather than the hand signs of aninsular culture. Thus, the deaf mayhave contact with A.S.L., their first

bona-fide language, at twoor at five or atfifteen yearsof age. Theirplight has pro-vided linguistics with a thou-sand Genies, and,far better,with Genies who have notbeen psychologically abused

08 but only linguistically de-prived. Neville found that

the deaf who learned A.S.L. duringchildhood had left brains lateralizedfor language as well as for othertasks,but those who were deprived of signlanguagein their early years did not.Their brains were unformed. The mid-wife had not spanked the baby. “Re-lating Neville’s data to Genie’s casesuggests that language developmentmay be the crucial factor in hemi-spheric specialization,” Curtiss wrote.“When [language] develops,it deter-mines what else the language hemi-sphere will be specialized for. In its

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THE NEW YORKER.

absence,it prevents the language hemi-sphere from specializingfor any highercortical functions.” The insight prom-ised to redefine somebasic intertwinedideas: What does it mean to say thatsomething is a language? Languageisa logic system so organically tuned tothe mechanism of the human brainthat it actually triggers the brain’sgrowth. What are human beings?Beings whose brain development isresponsive to and dependent on thereceipt at the proper time of even asmall sample of language.

In the light of all this, then, whatwas Genie?

(Gans: best attempt to grapplewith this question remains her

doctoral thesis. It is the most signifi-cantpublished result of all the researchon Genie—significant enough to becited in virtually every current Ameri-can textbook on basic linguistics, soci-ology, or psychology. In addition (some-thing rarefora scientific thesis), it waspicked up for publication as a book.“Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of aModern-Day ‘Wild Child’ ” was pub-lished by Academic Press, in mid-1977. Besides sporting hard covers,itdiffered from the dissertation in hav-ing a dedication page, which read “ToGenie,” and a frontispiece, which wasa pencil drawing of a smiling personwith curly hair and big ears holdinga small figurein its left arm. Curtiss’scaption for this drawingread, in part:

Early in 1977, filled with loneliness andlonging, Genie drew this picture. At first shedrewonly the picture of her mother and thenlabeledit “I miss Mama.”She then suddenlybeganto draw more. The momentshefinishedshe took my hand, placedit next to what shehad just drawn, motioning me to write, andsaid “Baby Genie.” Thenshe pointed underher drawing andsaid, “Mama hand.”I dic-tated allthe letters, Satisfied, she sat back andstared at the picture. There she was, a baby inher mother’s arms. She had created her ownreality.

Irene’s response to Curtiss’s disser-tation was apparently instantaneous.She disliked it even before she hadopened it. “WhenI sawthetitle of thebook, I felt hurt,” she wrote. “My

daughter. . . classified as a ‘wild child.’ ”Her rebuttal was handwritten on linedloose-leaf paper and was addressed“To Sam”—R. Samuel Paz,a lawyerin Alhambra. It became Exhibit B inthe long season that was about toensue. Exhibit A wasthe dissertationitself.


Irene was especially incensed atCurtiss’s opening chapter, which re-counted Irene’s life with Clark and thedreadful tribulations of their children.Irene’s letter (in it, shecalls her daugh-ter by her real name, which I havereplaced) quibbled with much of thatdescription. She wrote:

I wasnot frequently beaten. 2 times in theJast year.

Hedid try1 time to kill me...Genie was neverforgotten and I did the

best I couldin taking care of her...It depended on the weather to whatshe

worewhile sitting on thepotty chair. She wasable to move her arms, legs, bend forwardandto the sides.

[Curtiss] writes as though Genie stayedall the time onthepottychair.

Genie was never forgotten.Genie was able to move her arms when

she had her sleeping bag on. It was not astraitjacket. It was an oversize infant’s cribwith wire screen aroundsides. There was awire screen top but I neverusedit... .

Genie did hear speech.Ourhomeis very small... .She could hearthetraffic noise from street.Sheheard the neighbors next door coming

andgoing...Sheheard airplanes, birds, neighbors,traffic

noises.Genie was not forgotten.Herfather did not beat her.Thepaddle wasnotleft in Genie’s room.Herfather did talk to her.Once in a while he did bark at her to

distract her making noise without openingdoor.He neverbarkedat herface to face,Hetalkedto her.Hedid notscratch her. . . . He did not beat

Genie.Hedid notstand outside of her room and

bark and growl at her... .“here wasa chest of drawers, a chair, a

foldingbed, 2 large trunks, windowshades,andcurtains. Oversize babybed. Pottychair.

Irene’s official complaint was notabout inaccuracies. It was, rather, the

opposite—thatdepictions as detailed asthose related by Curtiss, and by otherscientists in various papers andspeeches,could only have been pilfered fromIrene’s own privileged conversationswith her therapist, Vrinda Knapp,andwith Knapp’s supervisor, HowardHansen. In October, 1979, Irenefiledsuit in Superior Court against Hansen,Knapp, David Rigler, James Kent,Susan Curtiss, and Childrens Hospital,accusing them of multiple infrac-tions of patient-therapist and patient-physician confidentiality. The de-fendants had, the suit claimed, “ex-posed, revealed, and published to thepublic... personal, confidential, andintimate details of the years of im-prisonment,suffering,isolation, abuse,and torture” suffered by Irene and

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Genie. That wasn’t all, or even theworst. The fourth of five causes ofaction in the suit accused thescientistsof subjecting Genie to “extreme, un-reasonable, and outrageous intensivetesting, experimentation, and observa-tion” under “conditions of duress andservitude”—in short, of performing un-ethical human experimentation. Theremainingcauseofaction faulted JohnMiner, Genie’s guardian from 1972to 1975, for not protecting her fromharm.Irene asked for both compensa-tory and punitive damages.“The suit wasright out

of the blue,” Rigler says.“One Sundaymorning, wegot a call from a friendwhosaid, ‘Did you knowyour name is in the pa-per? So we got the L.A.Times, and that’s how we learned wewere being sued. And it had Genie’sreal name, and we’d beensocarefulallthose years to keep that away from thepublic.”The debacle had been brewing. In

1975, when Miner lost guardianship,Irene took receiptof the guardianshippapers chronicling Genie’s career, anda full awareness dawnedonherofjustwhat her daughter had been livingthrough. And in 1978 she had hadtodefend Genie’s estate against a claimfiled by Miner and David Rigler; Riglerwasrequesting compensation for therapygiven to Genie in the first six monthsof 1975, after the N.I.M.H.grant hadrun out and before Genie had left the

Rigler home. Irene’s lawyers objectedthat Rigler had no documentation ofthe therapy sessions and only an inex-act memoryof them, and that he hadnot presented Miner with an itemizedbill. The judge agreedthat Rigler hadbenefitted from “substantial sums”paidout by the N.I.M.H., and from thefoster-home subsidy from the county,but he praised the Riglers’ role inGenie’s rehabilitation. Noting that theforty-five-hundred-dollar claim would“virtually exhaust the estate,” heawarded the petitioners thirty-onehundred dollars, including six hun-dred dollars to cover legal fees.

Nevertheless, the biggest provoca-tion for Irene remained Curtiss’sbook, according to Samuel Paz, whoalong with another attorney, Louise

Monaco, represented Irene in hersuit against the scientists. Paz waswell prepared for the issues in thecase, scientific as well as legal. As an

APRIL 20,1992

undergraduate at U.C.L.A., he hadmajored in psychology and had trodsome of the sameintellectual hallwaysas Victoria Fromkin and Susan Cur-tiss. “At one point, I went through

Curtiss’s book andtallied up the ex-perimenting that was done,” he toldme. “Theintensity and frequency ofsessions was high. There were otherresearch papers, too, and if you lookthrough them you will get a goodidea of what Genie had to endure. Shewasona testing regimen,at one point,

of sixty or seventy hours| a week. The response

when we asked the re-searchers about this wasthatit was fun—that Geniethought of mostof this asa game.” Thecase pro-vided plenty of other fuel

for outrage. In one early deposition,Howard Hansenstated that the recordsof Irene’s psychotherapy, which con-tained information so sensitive thatthey were not allowed out of the psy-chiatric ward, werelost entirely, gone

withouta trace.However amply inspired, the suit

was remarkably adventurous, comingfrom a woman who was describedeven by her lawyers as a timid indi-vidual. David Rigler remembers themoment when the mystery was madeclear to him, the hidden hand re-vealed. “When I gave mydeposition,Trene’s lawyer had a copyof Curtiss’sdissertation marked up, with passagesunderlined that were supposedlyslan-derousofIrene,”hetold me. “I askedif I could see the book, and he handedit to me, and the front coverfell open,

and the name written inside was JeanButler Ruch.”

In the eight years that Jean Ruchhad been Rigler’s antagonist withinthe scientific community, he had hadno suspicion of her growing associa-tion with Irene. By Ruch’s account,

that association had suffered a hiatusof four years, after Irene called herone afternoon to cancel a meeting,

saying that Rigler had forbidden herto see Ruch under penalty of losingvisitation rights with her daughter.Whenthe guardianship was no longercontrolled by John Miner, the motherand the schoolteacher were emboldenedto find in their common antipathies thegrounds for an alliance.

“Ruch stayed in the shadows, butshe was constantly chiding Irene—putting a bug in her ear that the

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THE NEW YORKER.

scientists were overreaching,” Paz toldme. “Her involvement seemed to bethe catalyst. My ownassessmentis thatIrene wasvery passive, that she wouldnever have done this on her own.Whenshe called me, I felt that Iwasn’treallytalking with her but withMrs. Ruch. She wouldn’t sound likeherself, she wouldbe very assertive. ‘Iwant to do this? or ‘I know what’sgoing on! I didn’t get the feeling thatI was dealing only with Irene.”

In length as well as rancor, thecourt case proved epic: the process ofdiscovery, deposition, hearing, and judg-mentstretched outoverfive years. Thelonger it dragged on, the strongergrew the suspicion on the part ofIrene’s lawyers that they were contest-ing marshy ground. The sameendlessrecitation of test procedures andtestresults which had given rise to thecharges of human experimentation madea mockeryof the notion that Curtisshad intended herdissertation as a pot-boiler—had exploited Genie’s sad pastfor the sake of profit. Early in theproceedings, Curtiss hadoffered a com-promise. Paz and Monaco recom-mended to Irene that she accept it.“We got to the point of settling thecase in what I thought were the justinterests of Genie,” Paz said. “Curtisshad proposed putting into Genie’s trustfund moneythat came from profits onher dissertation or anyother scientificwork based on Genie. But Irene wasprodded by Jean Ruchto declinethatoffer. Ruch thought that it was unsat-

isfactory—that Irene should receive alot of money. But the privacyissuesrelatedto Irenejust weren’tthatstrong.She had become public figure.”

Faced with Irene’s intransigence,

Paz and Monaco withdrew from thecase. It was to be decided in cham-bers, and Irene wentbefore the judgerepresentingherself. It was now 1984,and the principal characters weresubtly (or not so subtly) changed fromthose who had been there atthe start.Floyd Ruch had died, leaving Jean awidow. Susan Curtiss, now Dr. Curtiss,

had married and hadgiven birth to herfirst child. Paz had becomethe presi-dent of the Los Angeles A.C.L.U.Owingto “economicexigencies,” Chil-drens Hospital had undergone some-thing of a reorganization: James Kenthad moved to Children’s InstituteInternational, a child-abuse treatment

center, and David Rigler, whose po-sition had been eliminated, had opened


The New Yorker, Apr 20,

a small private practice in NorthernCalifornia.

‘The complaint was essentially dis-missed—or,rather, upheld, in a TomSawyerish bit of jurisprudence. Thethings that Curtiss had wanted to dowith Genie she was nowinstructed todo by the Court. She agreed to directa program for Genie of linguistic,neurolinguistic, and neuropsychologicalevaluation and language instruction.Childrens Hospital was enjoined togive Genie yearly physical and psychi-atric evaluations. To fulfill such obli-gations, Curtiss and the other defen-

dants had full access to and use ofGenie’s records, and were granted theuse of Genie’s family history in scien-tific publications and speeches as longas they observed certain modest propri-eties and donatedany incometo Genie’strust fund. As first step in that di-rection, Curtiss relinquished $8,383.79,her royalties to date. No otherfinancialpenalties were imposed.

Irene’s anger overrode the settle-ment’s condition that she not deprivethe scientists of access to her daughter.She hid Genie away. Genie currentlylives in a homefor retarded adults, and

visits her mother on one weekend eachmonth. With the exception of JayShurley, none of the scientists haveseen her. They do not know where sheis, nor, except for rumors, have they

heard how sheis doing. In 1987, Irenesold the house on Golden West Av-enue. She left—for the scientists, atleast—no forwarding address.

IN& long ago, I paid a visit toDavid and Marilyn Rigler in

their new home, a pretty, two-storyframe house on the Northern Califor-nia coast. The house was smaller thantheir previous one, but it didn’t needto accommodate the life they had ledin Laughlin Park: the children weregrown, the Steinway was sold, andTori’s ashes were spread beyond awindbreak of eucalyptus in a fieldacross the road. Genie remained onlyin a voluminouscollection of reports,films, drawings, and photographssquirrelled away in the back of theRiglers’ garage.When I asked David Rigler about

the claim he had brought against Genie’sestate in 1978, he looked uncomfort-able and forlorn.

“J didn’t do that for the money,” hesaid. “I never had funds in mind whenI took Genie in.” His memory of the

1992

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claim was both fragmented and ada-mant. It had been Miner’s idea, and

nothis, he said. He had never seen anymoney from it. He didn’t know ifMiner had received the money. Andanyway they had intended to put anymoney they received into a trust fundfor Genie.We were sitting in his office, a

downstairs room so strewn with pa-pers, books, old tape recorders, andfilm projectors that it seemed more thereliquary of a career than a placewhere one mightstill be carried on.‘There wasa cloth-covered couch anda gray metal desk, and on the wall,

amid the diplomas and citations, aprint that seemed an odd choice tograce the office of a therapist. It wasthe optical illusion by M. C. Escher ofan endless circular stairway goingnowhere.

Rigler wasin his late sixties, burly,gray-haired, and marked byan air ofgentle domesticity and an expression ofearnest and distracted kindliness. He



make your ownGomposr=

described his feeling about the tellingof Genie’s story as “discomfort” and,later, as “dread.” But to the degree thathe was notreticent he was often con-fessional. Though he wastoo jealousof his documents cacheto let me peruseit, he made repeated trips to the mys-terious garage to drag out paper aftervideo after drawing.

“Understand,” he said. “No oneever came to meandsaid, ‘Dave, youshould be doing X, Y, and Z’—exceptfor Jay Shurley, who came in with aphilosophical point of view. From hiswork with isolation cases, he said,“You’ve got to let up on the pressuregradually, as though you had someonewith the bends and you werebringingthem to the surface. Let her come outa little at a time.’ That had an impacton me. It was a useful notion. I don’tthink Shurley ever understood howmuch tried to use his ideas.”

Rigler stared at his hands awhile.“But it’s one thing to come up withtheories, and another to figure out

APRIL 20, 1992

what to do at breakfast,” he said.“Someonehad to meet the demandsofresearch, and someone had to meet

Genie’s therapeutic needs, and I hadboth roles. And I was always awarethatit wastricky mixingthe two. I hada lot of ambivalence aboutit, at times.

But in terms of the way we treatedGenie—the things we did—I think wedid about as gooda job as anyonecouldhave done. As far as the complexitiesof the case went, I wish they hadn’t

beenthere. In my hopes, I was blindto the complexities. They inhibited mefrom working right. There was nowayof getting informed consent here,which has become a byword in humanresearch, Genie never gave any indi-cation that the filmingor otheractivi-ties were an imposition. If she had, wewould have cut them out. Occasion-ally, we would get signs that she wasstressed by the testing. Butit’s just likechildren’s anxiety when they go toschool for the first time: when theycome home,they’re very proudof them-selves. Genie had a sense of triumphat doing manythingsforthefirst time.People don’t grow whenthey're wrappedin cotton wool. They grow when theyconfront the world. The negative in-terpretations of the case are oversim-plified, from my point of view. Myown position—if I can psychoanalyzemyself—wasnotone of expectation butof hope. The sky was not high enoughfor my hopes, but my expectationswere down to earth. One easy outwould have been for me to say earlyon that I would be muchless involved.If I'd known whatthe outcome wouldbe, I wouldn’t have touched it—theoutcome in general, and for me.”

Other members of the Genie Teamfeel as bruised as Rigler does. Theyhave imposed what amounts to a gagorder on themselves and speak of thecase reluctantly. As a result, a promi-

nentpiece ofscience has been forcedinto the shadows. Nevertheless, the

research on Genie has provedits util-ity. “Genie was oneofthefirst timesscientists hadused a case of an atypicalchild to understand the typical,” Curtisstold me one evening recently, as we sat

talking at her kitchen table. “Duringthe Genie research, a lot of otherprojects of that sort started.” Curtiss’shouse was a modest clapboard bunga-low a few blocks from the Santa MonicaFreeway, in the vast Los Angelesflatland. The soupconof yard outsidewould not have accommodated a vol-

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THE NEW YORKER

leyball game. Her husband, John, hadlured their two young daughters awayto leave us aloneto talk, and the drone

of a television sitcom and an occasionalfit of giggles escaped from the livingroom.

Curtiss is currently studying chil-dren who have haddiseased or dam-aged halves of their brains removed.What Genie sufferedfunctionally, theyhave suffered physically. “I want toknow to what extent hemispherec-tomied children can acquire gram-mar,” Curtiss said. “The question is,how well can the right hemisphere doin supporting grammarfunctions? Isthe left hemisphere essential?”

I recalled that this was a womanwhohadsaid of her younger self thathospitals were not her strong point—a woman of whom Jean Butler hadsaid that she did not respond well tochildren. But watching her with herdaughters and with her hemispherec-tomied subjects, I saw that childrendraw an easy, playful kindness fromher. Curtiss is, in any case, a personof unsuspected softnesses. She had toldme firmly when wefirst met that shewould talk only about science—thather personal history with Genie wasout of bounds. But at the end of thatinterview, and of each thereafter, she

violated her ownrestriction and, with-

out prompting, spoke movingly of herfeelings for the child she had investi-

gated. “I developed a needfor her,”Curtiss would say. “I missed her whenshe wasn’t in my life.”Over a meal and dessert, and now

over uncleared dishes, Curtiss and Ihad concludedourfinal hour of syntaxand semantics, critical periods andhemispherectomies. As I folded up anotebook and put away a pencil, sheveered againoutof the confident realmof research and into that forbiddenpersonal room. There wasdesolationin her voice. “I would pay a lot ofmoneyto see her,” she said. “I woulddo a lot. I haven’t heard from her inyears. And I’ve heard only tworeports.The last one was that she was speak-ing very little, that she was with-drawn, depressed. Genie was verylovable. She wasbeautiful. When Johnand I first met, I would tell him about

her, and he would say, ‘Stop! Stop!You're building this person up so muchthat if I meet her Dll be disillusioned.

Noone canbe that wonderful.’ Thenhe met her, and when weleft he said,“My God! Why didn’t you tell me?”



Curtiss’s older daughter pirouettedinto the kitchen to showus her sun-glasses. The earpieces were gone, andthe lenses, perched on her nose, wereheart-shaped. She leaned into hermother, and Curtiss put an arm aroundher shoulder, but her mind was else-where,andthelittle girl skittered back

to the living room.“Whatis it that language can do for

a person?” Curtiss asked. “It allows usto cognize, to think, andthat’s impor-

tant to me, because I’m that type ofperson. It also allows us to shareourselves with others—our ideas andthoughts. And that provides a hugepart of what I consider to be humanin my existence. Genie learned how toencode concepts through words. Sheused languageasa tool: she could labelthings, ideas, emotions. It afforded hera completely new way to interact withher world. If I had to choosethe piecesof language that would serve me bestin being human, they would be theparts Genie had. It was from her welearnedof her past. She told us of herfeelings. She shared her heart andmind. From thatperspective, who caresabout grammar? Acquiring those partsof language didn’t cure her. She’sunbearably disturbed. But it allowedher to share herself with others. Foryears after I was not permitted to seeher again, I would wonder about whatI would say to her if I saw her. Notjust how would I react—I know Iwould give her a hug—but what Iwould say. She is the most powerful,most inspiring person I’ve ever met.Pdgive up myjob, I'd changecareers,to see her again. I worked with her,and I knewherasa friend. And, ofthe two, the important thing was get-ting to know her. I wouldgive up therest to know her again.”

FTERthe death of her husband,in 1982, Jean Butler Ruch con-

tinuedto live in a beach house they hadbought in Santa Monica. On visitsthere with her mother, Genie wouldstand inside the sliding glass doors,her hands held up before her in herpersisting bunny posture, and watch

the waves that had onceso frightenedand delighted her. Ruch’s letter writ-ing continued; the campaign cul-minated in her plans to write a bookwith Jay Shurley, setting the recordstraight. (“I was bent on revelation,”Shurley says. “She was bent on re-venge.”) The project was cut short in

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74

1986 by a stroke—theresult of vascu-litis, which Ruch had suffered sincechildhood. It left her aphasic, unableto speak coherently; believers in fatemight have found her final torment atragic irony. In 1989, a further strokekilled her.

Onelate-spring day, I went to seeShurley. His study is an aluminum-sided sun porch tacked on to the backof his home in OklahomaCity. Throughthe open doorway leading to the backyard I could hearthe tinkling of windchimes, and the constant chirping offinches in the silver maples.

Shurley had unearthed for my ben-efit two cartonsfilled with manila fold-ers and set them on his desk. Theywere his Geniefiles. As he talked withme during the next several days, hewould dip into the boxes for letters,symposium papers, the scribbled logsof phone conversations he had had withRigler, Ruch, Kent, and Hansen al-most twenty years before. There was afile marked “Sleep Spindles” in one ofthe boxes, but by and large whathe hadpreserved in his cardboard repositorywas not the science of Genie but theexperience. The questionthat tormented


him lay somewhere beyond the data.“Here,” Shurley said, reaching into

acarton. Thefiles werelabelled “GenieEmerges” and “Jean’s Input” and“Genie Book”(in the outline of whichGenie’s life was divided into Genesisand Exodus). He pulled out one la-belled “Photos.”

Thefirst picture he handed me wasof a nondescript house, seen from acrossa street througha picketof royal palms.Pages of a newspaper blow across ayard through the cold gray shade ofa lemontree. A second photograph wasof the same house, but it was taken

from the drive, where Irene stands ina plaid skirt and holds a cloth pursetight against her smooth yellow cardi-gan, as thoughexpecting a sudden chill.It is the day, soon after her acquittal,when the house was first opened forinspection by curious strangers.

“Trene hadall the instincts of moth-erhood, to my mind,” Shurley said.“And she was verythwarted, and shewas very weak. Only after a longperiod of befriending by Jean Ruchwas Ireneableto stand up and reassertherself. I remember some years ago,when she wasliving in almost abject

APRIL 20, 1992

poverty, one of the big networks—maybe overseas—came along andoffered her ten thousanddollarsfor thestory, and putall these documentsin

front of her, and she told them firmly‘No.’ I wasthere at the time—atleast,

I was in Los Angeles and talking withher—andI was amazedat the strengthof her fear, or the strength of her

conviction.”Shurley set the pictures of the house

aside and drew a rectangle on a pieceof notebook paper. He divided it upinto smaller rectangles. “Here is theroom they said was a shrineto Clark’smother,” he said. “It was the masterbedroom,andit was almost completelyfilled with the bed. It wasn’t verylarge. Here’s the living room, andthere was a chair here, and thetele-

vision, which didn’t work. Clark sleptin the chair most of the time. He sleptthere, and here is the pallet where hisson slept, on the floor.” He drew asquare in the corner for Genie’s room.“She had a windowhere, and anotheraround the corner, over here. Thedresser was here, between them, and

here is where she slept.” He drew asmall rectangle andlabelled it “CRIB.”

archives.newyorker.com/?i=1992-04-20#folio=042 26/29

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THE NEW YORKER

“Andhere is the potty chair,” he said.“Sometimesit was over here.” Shurleylooked up and then back, and drew a

yard around Genie’s house, with adriveway and a lemontree.The next several photographs were

taken on that samewinter day, but theywere taken inside, in Genie’s room.

The room was dim. Here were thecloset doors—three plywoodpanels withchromepull handles. The dresser waspine and had four drawers. And herewerethe two windows, the upper halfof each covered by a shade. Yellowishhalf-curtains draped the lower halves,their fabric thin andpatterned with redflowers. One window’s curtain hadbeen pulled back and wasfastened tothe wall with packagingtape. “Genie’sroom was not sensory deprivation somuch as sensory monotony,” Shurleysaid. “Monotony. You know,varietyis notthespiceoflife;it’s the very stuffof life. To the developmentof a de-fensible, adaptable ego, monotony isdeadly. In that little room, a personwould project internal images, not absorb

outside ones, and would become con-fused about what was real and whatwas imagined—would lose the ability


to differentiate between dream andwaking.Socially isolated children usu-ally have psychotic parents who treatthem as animals. There is no encour-agement of any humancloseness. It istypical for them to be locked in acloset—it isn’t rare. There was a boyhere in OklahomaCity recently whowas four years old, and his parentswere keeping him penned with thedogs in back of the house. He walkedon all fours. Genie remains by a goodbit the kingpin of these cases. She hasthe record. Thoughit’s not a recordthat anyone would envy.”The next photograph had been taken

half a year later. It was summer, andGenie wassitting on a floor, laughingand alert. A note on the back of thephotographread,“This photo was takenabout three days after she cameto staywith me (she has hospital p.j.s on).”The note is in Jean Ruch’s hand.“The ability of that little girl to elicitemotionon thepart of the observer wasfantastic,” Shurley said. “You had towitnessit. Just hearing about it wouldbe orders of magnitude from the actualexperience. Jean and Floyd Ruch,theywere almost obsessed with this child.

75

Jeanreally did latch on to Genie in theearly days, and it was reciprocated.Jean, of course, had never had a childof her own. Rigler had three andfeltthat experience was on his side. Butafter I got to know Jean I didn’t seeanything to suggest that she wouldn’tbe a good foster parent. She was theteacher, and had developed a verypositive relationship with Genie withina couple of weeks. I never found theRiglers to be that warm or empatheticwith her. At their house, it was as

though Genie were being studied in acold frame rather than in a hothouse.I understand someof Rigler’s feelingsabout Jean Ruch. She had a veryinteresting paradoxical streak: she couldbe extraordinarily kind andsensitive tochildren—and she was, as teacher tosomevery disabled andsick children—and then she was capable of doingmalicious and, I’ll say, sadistic things,notto the children butto those who shefelt were in disagreement with herabout howthe children should betreated.Butto several of us, it seemed a pitythat Genie could not be with someonelike Ruch, who would bondto her as aperson and notas scientific case. Be-

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sides, I tend to go with the child. Ifthe child says, ‘I like this person,’there’s something real there that achild can latch on to. To adults theremay be things that don’t seem right,that cause concern. But the child’sinstinct is usually right on the issuethat’s most important.”There were a few other photo-

graphsfrom the summerof 1971: Genieat an art gallery, stepping into a patchof bright sun in a smart maroon dresswith a white collar and big whitepockets; Genie in a swimsuit at thebeach, concentrating with apparentdelight as a receding wave washesaroundherfeet, and holding her handup in the O.K.sign, the tip of theforefinger joinedto the tip of the thumb.The last two photographs were of

someoneelse, or so I thought: a large,bumbling womanwith a facial expres-sion of cowlike incomprehension. Inone picture, the womansits in a car

pretending to drive, her eyes at halfmast, her front teeth protruding in adrawn grin, a starburst reflection of

palm tops floating in the windshieldglass. In the second, the woman isindoors. She is about to cut a birthdaycake with white frosting. Her eyesfocuspoorly on the cake. Herdark hairhas been hacked off raggedly at the topof her forehead, giving her the aspectof an asylum inmate. Something abouther dress is sad and reminiscent:it isshapeless and has red flowers. Herright hand grips the cake knife, andher left hand is held in front of her,

forefinger touching thumb.Shurley watched grimly as my recog-

nition dawned. “Her twenty-seventhbirthdayparty,” he said. “Iwasthere, and then I saw heragain when she was twenty-nine, andshestill looked mis-erable. She looked to melikeachronicallyinstitutionalizedperson. It was heartbreaking.”A note by Shurley on the backof the photograph read, “Ge-nie is very stooped and rarely makes eyecontact. This photo wasat her happiest,other than when momentarily greetingher mother and mean hourearlier.”As I turned the photograph back

over, my association with the dress

came clear to me. “Irene sewed it,”Shurley told me. “She’d been a masterseamstress before her eyesight went.”The dress, its thin weight and floralpattern, reminded me of the curtainsin the little room.

APRIL 20, 1992

“What do you make of her expres-sion?” I asked Shurley.“What do I make of it?” he said.

“She looks demented.” He paused, and.then spoke intensely, as though he wereat the center of something. “The wayI think of Genie, she wasthis isolatedperson,incarceratedforall those years,

and then she emergedandlived in amore reasonable world for a while,andrespondedto this world, and thenthe door was shut and she withdrewagain and her soul wassick.” Withoutlooking away from myface, he pointedto the photograph of the womanin thecar. “This is soul sickness,” he said.“There is no medical explanation forher decline into what appears to beorganic, biological dementia.”

For a while, Shurley seemed disin-

clined to speak, and welistened to thefinches in the yard. Then hesaid, “At

the time that Genie came to light, Iwentback to try to find, anywhere Icould, any kind of directions. Anythingthat said, ‘In case of tornado do this,in case of earthquake do this, and incase of an experiment in nature dothis.’ I found it nowhere. There’snothing of the sort. But from myexperience the research with Geniecould not have been handled worse.The process wentoff track from theday it was conceived. It went, after alittle while, a hundred and eightydegrees from the direction it ought tohave taken. There is a fundamentalissue here that nobody has grasped.The key issue—I believe now, verystrongly, in terms of my own experi-ences with isolation in many differentcontexts—is not the acute effects of the

isolation. It is the problem ofreéntry into the matrix fromwhich the child has beenisolated. Isolation places one’sownreadiness to react in akindofcoldstorage. Imag-ine using a muscle that hasbeen in a cast, or a sling.Once you take the encum-

brance off, the muscle has to retrain

itself, It’s suffering from atrophy, fromdisuse. Rehabilitation involves figuringout how you allow the strength backwithout rupturing anything.

“We're born helpless. We are borninto the world with no boundary be-tween self and not-self. We spend thefirst twenty years of ourlife establish-ing that boundary. Children who areso abused, deprived, are losing thatbattle by the age of three or four. I felt

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THE NEW YORKER

that Genie was one of those—alittlegirl with no sense of herself as aseparate, inviolable entity. I wantedGenie to come into the world as a coreego, capableoftrust and mistrust. Properreéntry is a key ingredientin treatmentandin research.A proper reéntry is notone preémpted by scientific exploita-tion gone wild.“A child needs more than approval.

She needs a senseof security, safety—the absolute convictionthat she is worth-while. Well, Genie grew up ina housewhere the father didn’t likehimself and the motherdidn’tlike herself and no onelikedGenie. And later she was acelebrity. All these peoplelooking at this extremelyprimitive child—this larvalchild. In this six-year-oldbody, a thirteen-year-old girl. Talkabout a weird kid: Genie was a weirdkid. And that’s how she was treated byeveryone—as a weird kid: ‘What doyou do with a poor, weird kid likethat? Genie was viewed as a childviews feces—first as a treasure, then as

shit, in Anglo-Saxon terms. And, re-ally, what did Genie,taken apart, haveto offer the world? Except for herunique early-life development, notmuch. Not much.

“Genie’s problem wasseen too muchas a pedagogical one, not an emotionalone. Wetried to teach her language.Well, I don’t know. There’s a prob-Jem. In Linnaeus’classification, Homosapiens is known as cultura, not aslingua. Our advancements take placein relationship. In order for an infantto learn anything—andthis takes youback to Victor, the Wild Boy ofAveyron—there hasto be a relation-ship in which the child gets enoughnurturance to proceed. Affective at-tachmentplays the primary role. It isnot an intellectual process. Intellectrides on the backof affective bonding.Andaffection’s not easy to come by.Human beings have a uniquetalentnot only for cruelty butfor indifference.Compassion wasnotreferred to by theEnlightenment philosophers as theessential or defining characteristic ofhumankind.It’s somethingin our naturethat must be taught.”

Shurley waved a handdismissively.“Thisis old stuff,” he said. “I resolvedthatif I lived long enough I would doa case study that would show howthings should be approachedin caseslike this. These experiments comealong.



Victor in 1800. Kaspar Hauser in theeighteen-twenties, I believe. Genie in1970. Noneof the wild children havebeen handled well. All of them werehandled the way Genie was. She couldhave been handled well. She wouldhave been a disappointment in someways, but the outcome would havebeen happier. Genie arrived at thehospital, and withinthe first couple ofmonths she became hungry. She cameout of an environment that was un-friendly but consistent. Now she was

in a new environment, with

noise and other kids. A hos-pital is an overstimulatingplace. The problem was howto get her out of it and intoa home. But she went fromone hometo another. Morenoise. She went from famine

to feast. Her response was not to takethat feast. She was overwhelmed. Thisis part of the emergencething. She wasenormouslystarved, but the starvationwas so chronic, so long-lasting, thatshe didn’t trust her world to give herwhat she wanted. She wasafraid thatpart of what she would be given wouldbe toxic to her. As it turns out, she was

right. These were not bad people.They just didn’t allow this child todevelop along normallines. The courseof research defeated the treatment,

which defeated the research. Thesci-ence would have fared better if thehumanaspect had been put first. Weprobably would have learned a lotmore, and what we learned would

have been transferrable to other cases.The only generalization you can getfrom this is as a bad example—anexample of how notto do it.“What I saw happen with Genie

wasa pretty crass form ofexploitation.I hadto realize that I was a part ofit, and swear to refrain. It turned out

that Genie, who hadbeen soterriblyabused, was exploited all over again.She was exploited extrafamilially justas she was exploited intrafamilially—just by a different cast of characters, ofwhich I’m sorry to say I was one. Asfar as Genie is concerned,it’s a fatedcase. You have a second chance in asituation like that—a chanceto rescuethe child. But you don’t get a thirdchance, and that’s the situation now.Wecan’t do the experiment over. Wecan’t go back. Andthat’s the bitter-ness.” —Russ RyMER

(This is the second part of atwo-part article.)

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A Silent Childhood [Part I & II] - Gwern.net

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