Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell's Feral Tale

304 Ellen Brinks Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale Ellen Brinks When I became a man, I put away childish things. King James Bible He would rather lie down with the animals than stand up with the men. Franz Kafka Timothy Treadwell has quickly become the stuff of (American) legend, inspiring several books and short films, as well as a feature-length docu- mentary by Werner Herzog, entitled Grizzly Man (2005). Treadwell’s is the story of an individual who lived with Alaskan wild bears for thirteen summers, until his and a companion’s death by a bear in 2003. The narrative arc recalls other stories of young men who shun civilization and seek a more authentic existence in the wild. Early incarnations include real-life figures such as Daniel Boone to more recent ones such as Alex McCandless (in Jon Krakauer’s and now Sean Penn’s Into the Wild).1 Beyond a fascination with the psychic dilemmas and desires that shape the unique contours of these lives, lies a collective, cultural uncertainty and controversy regarding the place of wilderness in (North American) life and different styles of masculinity, all constituted in relation to Na- ture as Other. What is missing from discussions of Timothy Treadwell’s story thus far—especially its discursive constructions in Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), Treadwell’s own autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1996), and Nick Jans’s bestselling The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (2005)—is the centrality of childhood and so-called childlike The Lion and the Unicorn 32 (2008) 304–323 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale 305 or childish behaviors and longings to its ideological meanings, including the texts’ understandings of Treadwell’s demise. Most obviously, the adult Timothy positions himself as a boy-child. Herzog’s Grizzly Man, for example, contains “films within a film” by another director, namely, a large amount of video footage that Timothy Treadwell himself shot, narrated, and intended for use in his advocacy work on behalf of Alaskan bears.2 In this footage, Treadwell projects a child-like persona, conveyed in part by his abundant energy (when he is being chased by “Timmy the fox,” the mood is breathless, buoyant, and joyous); by his “Prince Valiant” haircut (which, as one friend recalls, utterly disguises his receding hairline); by his diet of peanut butter sandwiches, candy bars, and Coke; and by the presence of his childhood teddy bear as tent-mate. His narration casts him as a boy surviving alone on a grand adventure, a young hero who has animals as his closest friends: “Now let the expedition continue. Now it’s off with Timmy the Fox. We’ve got to find Banjo—he’s missing!” Further, the audiences for his films were primarily schoolchildren. During the winter, Treadwell—dubbed “a Pied Piper in a children’s crusade” by Jans (23)—used images and segments from these films in presentations he designed to educate children about the risks grizzlies face from diminished wild habitat and poaching, gleaned from the life he shared with them. While the audience, then, for much of his filmmaking is clearly children, Grizzly Man’s mainly adult viewers can simply write Treadwell himself off as “infantile,” criticizing moments such as the one where his narration slips into a child’s intonation and pitch. After filming a grizzly rearing up and scratching his back against a tree, Treadwell goes up to the spot, measures the bear’s size with his own body by way of comparison, and with a deep intake of breath, drawn out vowels, and a breathless intonation, asserts, “Oh he’s a big bear. He’s a very big bear. A very big bear. He’s a big bear.” Because Timothy fashions himself in his films and in his non-fiction autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1997), as someone who is essentially acting out a familiar fantasy ascribed to children—living in communion with wild animals, the bears and the foxes whom he knows “by name”—Treadwell’s story is clearly a feral tale, a genre of children’s literature in which a childhood lived in the wild figures prominently.3 Feral tales have mythic and folkloric roots worldwide, depicting children raised by animals or as the offspring of animals (Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf-mother, for example; Semiramis brought up by birds; Zeus nursed by the she-goat Amalthea; or in Sioux creation myth, the first- born who talks and walks with the animals), but they exist in abundance in literary form as well. The best-known feral tales within the Western tradition are the Enkidu episode of The Epic of Gilgamesh; the scores of narratives 306 Ellen Brinks about Kaspar Hauser and the Wild Boy of Aveyron, both “savage” boys, subjects living untouched by civilization, who, though not raised by animals, were seen during the Enlightenment as the developmental equivalents of wild animals;4 as well as modern children’s classics such as Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books. Scholars such as Kenneth Kidd have recently expanded the genre and its different modes of articulation from the Enlightenment to the present. He identifies a whole plethora of “wild boys” peopling writings as diverse as scouting manuals with their animal totems, Freud’s animal-identified Rat-man and Wolf-man case studies of children, juvenile adventure fiction such as the “Bomba the Jungle Boy” series, as well as the narratives of urban bad boys made popular by Charles Loring Brace. For Kidd, feral tales balloon during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a major symbolic discourse about human and cultural development, childhood, the wildness of boys, and the path to manhood.5 And while feral stories, precisely because of their focus on what is marginal, alien, or subversive to the adult social order, offer an occasion for ambivalence regarding the ends of civilization’s developmental narratives, in the course of the twentieth century in the United States, they have mostly been complicit with a variety of social institutions in producing the middle class white masculine subject out of the feral boy (Kidd, 5–7, 11, 17). My interest in the constructions of Timothy Treadwell as feral child in his own films and autobiography, as well as in its articulations by Herzog and Jans, centers on the resistances to conformity with the genre’s lessons, even to the dismay of Treadwell’s “authors,” Jans and Herzog.6 This essay will explore the nature of these resistances and how each, in its way, depends upon the figure of the child. First and foremost, “Treadwell” refuses the passage from nature to culture, from pack life to individual, adult heterosexuality. The transition from the human-animal bond to a human-human one runs aground as Treadwell forms his deepest attach- ments with the bears, in a reversal of the feral tale’s socially normative temporality. Further, he is depicted as refusing to adopt the mature masculinity of the hunter/scientist that demands men keep wild animals at a distance (in order to enable the killing of, or rational control over, animals). Instead of conforming, he seeks out physical contact and proximity, and touches, names, and speaks to the bears. Finally, the essay considers at length Treadwell’s persistent efforts, through a mimetic transformation of his own body, to be recognized as a bear among bears. This endeavor tells a much more radical tale about the rejection of species difference in favor of some more radically hybrid experience, one which Eurowestern culture only tolerates as a form of play during childhood. My aim is not Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale 307 to endorse romanticized strains in the narrative that Treadwell himself fashions. Indeed, though Treadwell’s self-construction at times articulates the pervasive ideological assumption that children are instinctively close to nature,7 the aspects of his story with which I am concerned reveal that just as children must be pushed to learn appropriate adult behaviors, Treadwell pushed himself to learn to become animal. To do so, he was compelled to adopt a number of modes of relating that are culturally denigrated as belonging appropriately only to childhood. In underscoring how Jans’s, Herzog’s, and Treadwell’s narratives deviate from the standard feral tale, which recuperates the wild boy for civil society, then, I want to suggest that Treadwell’s feral tale tells us another, different, yet no less important, story: about the refusal to abdicate desires for deep cross-species relating, or to abandon a mode of object relating that yields unpredictable, embodied forms of knowledge—despite the consequence of being stigmatized, or dismissed, as childish for doing so. Modern incarnations of the feral narrative, as Kidd has observed, have increasingly underscored the Bildungstale’s developmental trajectory, emphasizing the progress or growth from feral child to civilized young man, plotted as the movement from an unsettled to a stable existence. James Dickey’s poem, “The Sheep Child,” whose speaker is the fantasized offspring of a man and a ewe, points to the way feral tales’ otherness push their human readers ultimately toward normalcy: I am he who drives Them [boys] like wolves from the hound bitch and calf And from the chaste ewe in the wind. They go into woods into bean fields they go Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me, They groan they wait they suffer Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

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