The Noble Savage

• A “noble savage” is a literary stock character who embodies the concept of the wild human, an outsider, an ‘other’ who has not been ‘corrupted’ by civilisation, and therefore symbolizes humanity’s innate goodness.
• The phrase is often said to have come from Rousseau because it links with his ideas about education, innate goodness and the corrupting effects of civilisation. However, he never used the term himself