TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NOVELISTIC DIMENSION OF JEAN- JACQUES ROUSSEAU’S EMILE

by Stephanie Miranda Murphy

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto

© Copyright by Stephanie Miranda Murphy 2020 Toward an Understanding of the Novelistic Dimension of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile

Stephanie Miranda Murphy Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science

ABSTRACT

The multi-genre combination of philosophic and literary expression in Rousseau’s Emile provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between the novelistic structure of this work and the substance of its philosophical teachings. This dissertation explores this matter through a textual analysis of the role of the novelistic dimension of the Emile. Despite the vast literature on Rousseau’s manner of writing, critical aspects of the novelistic form of the Emile remain either misunderstood or overlooked. This study challenges the prevailing image in the existing scholarship by arguing that Rousseau’s Emile is a prime example of how form and content can fortify each other. The novelistic structure of the Emile is inseparable from Rousseau’s conception and communication of his philosophy. That is, the novelistic form of the Emile is not simply harmonious with the substance of its philosophical content, but its form and content also merge to reinforce Rousseau’s capacity to express his teachings. This dissertation thus proposes to demonstrate how and why the novelistic dimension of the Emile belongs to it not mechanistically, but integrally. To illustrate this central idea, this dissertation is divided into three sub-themes, each of which is motivated by a corresponding major research question: (1) Rousseau as a writer of a novel: What is the function of the novelistic structure of the Emile? (2) Rousseau as an appropriator of a novel: To what end does Rousseau use (and abuse) novels in the Emile as part of Emile’s and Sophie’s pedagogical programs? (3) Rousseau as a fictional character in a novel: What is the function of Rousseau’s fictionalized self-representation in the Emile as Jean-Jacques the tutor? The findings of each chapter prompt a re-thinking of Rousseau’s novelistic technique in the Emile as it relates to the substance of his broader philosophical teachings.

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rousseau stated that philosophers do not require an education; only individuals with ordinary minds need to be educated. Seeing as how I undeniably fall into the latter category, I would like to take a moment here to acknowledge those who have made significant contributions to my much-needed education. These individuals have helped me tremendously by supporting and inspiring me throughout the long process of researching and writing this dissertation.

For opening my eyes to the brave new world of political philosophy and introducing me to the splendid writings of history’s giants, I want to thank my professors in the department of political science at the University of North Texas: namely, Drs. Steven Forde and Richard

Ruderman.

Through these teachers I found my way to the University of Toronto where I have had the extraordinarily good fortune of working with Dr. Clifford Orwin, a student of political philosophy of the highest order. Thank you, Professor Orwin, for teaching me so much about

Rousseau and about the qualities of good writing and serious scholarship. I am a stronger reader and scholar in particular and a more resilient person in general due, in large part, to your never- ending willingness to push me toward excellence. There’s a part of the human spirit that would prefer to play it safe and retain the status quo. But there’s also that indomitable part of the soul that longs for adventure and exploration – to seek what lies around the next turn or discover what awaits us over the next rise. Writing this dissertation has not always been fun. It has never been easy. But studying with you has helped me satisfy my adventurous, curious side and learn to soldier on with a never-say-die attitude. And, in the end, I’m better for having done so. Perhaps, as Socrates suggests in Xenophon’s Apology, that is the true reward for the hard work of thinking: the great pleasure of looking back and recognizing the distance you have covered and

iii the new heights you have reached. I will be forever grateful that I got the chance to be an explorer with you on this most formidable of Oregon Trails: “The Cowards Never Started | The

Weak Died on the Way | Only the Strong Arrived | They Were the Pioneers.”

I would also like to express my special appreciation to the other members of my thesis committee: Drs. Ronald Beiner and Rebecca Kingston. Your advice on my research has been invaluable. I could not have formulated the overall argument of my thesis without your thoughtful insight and thorough feedback. I cannot thank you enough for joining my committee at such a late, hurried stage in the proposal-writing process. Completing this work would have been all the more difficult were it not for your support. Professor Beiner, thank you for holding my feet to the fire to make me produce work in a timely manner. Professor Kingston, thank you for your penetrating feedback on my writing. You have a way of helping me see Rousseau from new angles that I never could have seen on my own. For this I am grateful beyond measure.

Sincere thanks, as well, to Dr. John T. Scott for accepting the invitation to serve as my external examiner and Dr. Emily Nacol for serving as my internal departmental reader.

Also deserving of recognition are the many friends I have made along the way, with whom I’ve shared many ideas, stories, and laughs over beers: Sara Schiveley, Seth Bracken, Dr.

Benjamin Gross, Evan Lowe, and Johann Kwan. And I am particularly indebted to my great friends, Drs. Lindsay and Lincoln Rathnam. I am deeply grateful for our once-in-a-lifetime, for a lifetime friendship: the brutally honest feedback on my writing, the Sunday “bro downs,” the many enriching high-brow conversations and the many equally enlightening low-brow ones, the marathon grading sessions, the Waskesiu PAMPin’, the dancing, the laughing, the crying, and the chance to fulfill my childhood dream of being a Spice Girl for a day. Thank you, as well, for

iv trusting me enough to be the godmother of your son Peter. And, most importantly, I will be forever grateful to you both for introducing me to my husband.

This brings me to my final acknowledgment. My deepest gratitude belongs to my loving husband, Conor McGrath, who has been inhumanely patient, loving, and supportive throughout every stage of this dissertation’s composition. Conor, I look forward with great anticipation to no longer needing to kick you out of the house every time I try to concentrate on writing this wretched thesis. I can’t wait to spend more time with you and to start our family together. But before we begin our much-awaited “life after Rousseau,” I dedicate this thesis to you.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Table of Contents and Primary Source Abbreviations vi Chapter One: Introduction 1 1.1: Rousseau’s Novels: How the Emile Differs from His Other Novelistic Works 7 1.2: The Generic Novel Form and Rousseau’s Particular Engagement With it in the Emile 13 1.3: Overview and Organization of the Analysis 32 1.4: A Note on Sources and Translations 35 Chapter Two: The Emile as Anti-Utopia 36 2.1: Rousseau’s Novel Philosophy of Nature 43 2.2: The Emile: Rousseau’s Anti-Utopia 61 2.3: Not the Man of Man, But the Man of Nature: The Role of Emile’s Fictionality 75 Chapter Three: The Shared Literary Education of Sophie and Emile: Rousseau’s Appropriation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque 92 3.1: “La Télémacomanie” and Rousseau’s Debt to Fénelon 99 3.2: Sex, Love, and Cosmopolitanism: Emile’s Télémaque and the Political Education of Men 112 3.3: Sex, Love, and Family: Sophie’s Télémaque and the Sexual Education of Women 127 Chapter Four: A governor! O what a sublime soul: On the Nature and Purpose of Rousseau’s Fictional Self-Presentation as Jean-Jacques the Tutor 154 4.1: Disentangling the Narrative Knottiness of the Emile 164 4.2: Ensuring the Perfect Circumstances: Jean-Jacques, Nature’s Regulator 173 4.3: Jean-Jacques’ Role in Emile’s Socialization 190 4.4: The First Desire Which Nature Has Impressed Upon Man: The Question of Happiness 204 Chapter Five: Conclusion 233 Bibliography 239

vi PRIMARY SOURCE ABBREVIATIONS

Beaumont Lettre à Christophe de Beaumont (Masters and Kelly, CW IX) Bordes Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes (OC III) CC Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Vols. 1-53 (Leigh) CG Correspondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau, Tomes I-XXIV (Dufour) Conf Les Confessions de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Masters and Kelly, CW V) d’Alembert Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre (Bloom) Dialogues Rousseau Juge de Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Masters and Kelly, CW I) Emile Emile, or On Education (Bloom) Émile et Sophie Émile et Sophie; ou Les Solitaires Favre Le Manuscrit Favre edition of Emile, or On Education (Kelly) FD Discourse on the Arts and Sciences [First Discourse] (Gourevitch) Grimm Letter from J.J. Rousseau of Geneva to Mr. Grimm on the Refutation of His Discourse by Mr. Gautier Julie Julie, or the New Heloise (Stewart and Vaché, CW VI) Levite The Levite of Ephraim (Kelly) Malesherbes Lettres à Malesherbes (Masters and Kelly) Mably Memorandum Presented to Monsieur de Mably on the Education of Monsieur His Son (Kelly) Method Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book (OC II) Moral Letters Lettres Morales (Kelly, CW XII) Mountain Lettres Écrites de la Montagne (Kelly, CW IX) Observations Observations on the Reply Made to His Discourse (Kelly, CW II) OC Œvres Complètes, NRF-Editions de la Pléiade (Gagnebin and Raymond) Philopolis Letter by J.J. Rousseau to M. Philopolis (Cambridge-Gourevitch) Poland Considerations on the Government of Poland Political Economy A Discourse on Political Economy (OC I, CW III) Reveries The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, VIII (Kelly) Sainte-Marie Plan for the Education of Monsieur de Sainte-Marie (Kelly) SC Of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (Kelly, CW IV) SD Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Men [Second Discourse] (Gourevitch)

vii

“...you know that Commentators suppress the essential things and expand on those which have no need of it, that they have passion for interpreting everything that is clear, that their explanations are always more obscure than the text, and there is nothing they fail to perceive in their Author, except for grace and finesse.”

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letter to M. Grimm (Collected Writings II [121])

“[Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist,] suffered from a hideous bladder stone – the best metaphor I know for a doctoral dissertation. Daily it accumulated inside him, drop by drop of minerals that hardened into a little globe. At last it grew impossible to live with, so he underwent surgery sans anesthesia: multiple men held him down while a physician incised his perineum and tweezed it out, a mass the size of a tennis ball. It had no purpose; it was a useless curiosity. Pepys kept it in his house as a grisly souvenir; I keep my dissertation in a bedroom drawer. He commemorated the removal with an annual party; I raise a glass each January to my freedom and lightness.” - Andrew Kay (“Academe’s Extinction Event,” The Chronicle of Higher Education)

viii CHAPTER ONE Introduction

The mid-eighteenth century marked a major turning point in the history of political philosophy. This century tells the story of man’s attempt to escape from the cold fetters of commerce and trade to the freedom of nature. The desire for such a break was animated by a man who, in the midst of the age of commercial modernity and the rising metropolis, dreamed of a very different idea as to how human beings ought to live. At a time when the world was becoming increasingly mechanized, Jean-Jacques Rousseau sought a sublime human experience by forging an intense reconnection with the natural world.1 In doing so, he revolutionized our perception of life itself.2 If Rousseau’s writings appear to hold up a mirror that reflects our image back to us, and if he sounds as though he is speaking our language, it is because he gave us both that image and that language. Rousseau gave powerful expression to a number of phenomena that reshaped the eighteenth-century sensibility and which continue to influence us today: the attachment of great importance to authenticity, the disillusionment with urban commercial society and the desire to retreat from city life to a more pastoral environment, the understanding of compassion as an important moral principle, and the simultaneous impulse for community or connectedness and solitude, to name merely a few. His writings continue to appeal to us because

1 While mechanization is often associated more with the nineteenth century than with the eighteenth century, historians generally agree that the structural changes associated with the Industrial Revolution began somewhere between 1760 and 1780. Arnold Toynbee – who wrote the first and, arguably, most influential account of the Industrial Revolution – argued that “the Wealth of Nations and the steam-engine...destroyed the old world and built a new one” (Toynbee 1887). Both of these emerged in the eighteenth century: 1776 and 1712, respectively. For more on the mechanization of Europe and the New World, see also Hobsbawm 1962. 2 Certainly, one could reasonably make the case that the eighteenth century did not actually allow for man’s escape from commerce. If anything, commerce more concertedly enveloped humanity in its grips. However, the crucial point here is that the eighteenth century marked a sea change in the general attitude toward commerce. While I grant that the critics of the Enlightenment were unsuccessful in stopping the advancement of commercial life, they nevertheless managed to introduce “a new feeling” with its reverberating battle cry of “Back to Nature!” (Introduction in Cassirer 1954 [49]). This new anti-commerce climate swept through Europe, capturing the hearts and minds of generations of people. Rousseau was neither the only nor even the first to urge men to return to nature (ibid). Yet, as arguably the most famous, most influential thinker associated with this movement, he is typically seen as its de facto leader.

1 they express a vision or feeling that aligns with some of our innermost preferences, needs, desires, and motivations. That is, some of man’s deepest sentiments have been voiced by

Rousseau, without whom they may have remained silent forever.

In this thesis, as we seek to make sense of Rousseau’s radical reinterpretation of life and the world around us, we will also gain a new understanding of the procedure by which he communicates his ideas. A dissertation, if it is to be more than merely a collection of remarks, must have a fundamental idea that permeates it. The central focus of this dissertation is the purpose of the narrative structure of Rousseau’s writings. An investigation into this matter can, I believe, shed new light on his thought. I defend this claim by examining the novelistic dimension of his 1762 masterpiece, the Émile, ou de l’éducation (Emile, or On Education).3 Why the

Emile? Here, I take my cue from Rousseau himself: he proclaimed it to be the book with which one can and should begin a careful study of his philosophic system (Malesherbes CW V [575]).

As Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (2019) have observed, Rousseau “identified Emile and the

Second Discourse as the key works for the exposition of the principles of his system, and the

First Discourse and The Social Contract as important corollaries or appendices” (4). Rousseau explicitly considered the Emile to be one of his “three principal writings” that, along with the

First Discourse and the Second Discourse, most effectively demonstrates the “great principle” of his philosophy that man is naturally good (Malesherbes CW V [575]).4 While the remainder of his corpus contributes to our understanding of his systematic thought, these three principal writings are, according to Rousseau himself, the ones in which the principles of his system are most clearly articulated.

3 For brevity’s sake, hereafter referred to as the Emile. 4 Rousseau states that his body of work is a cohesive “system” that expresses the same principles (Beaumont 22, 26, 39, Dialogues III (Pl. I [932-933]), Conf VIII [309] (Pl. I [367-369]), Philopolis 224). For a history of various scholars’ attitudes toward Rousseau’s unity of thought, see the introduction in Cassirer 1954.

2 Among these three key texts, Rousseau confidently singled out the Emile as his “greatest and best book” that he considered to be most “useful to the human race” (Dialogues CW I [23],

Beaumont CW IX [46-47], cf. Conf. CW V [V: 475]). And he specifically named the subsection within the work entitled “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar” as “the best and most useful

Writing in the century during which [he] published it” (Beaumont 29).5 For us today, the Emile is attractive not only because it is a foundational work that introduces ideas that still inform contemporary intellectual awareness, but also because, in it, Rousseau roots his philosophy in a theoretical analysis of nature, human relationships, the role of the sexes, love, and happiness – phenomena that have eluded the greatest minds for centuries and are as important to us today as ever. Our exploration of these issues in this dissertation will occasionally take us beyond the

Emile to engage in broader reflections on the themes to which Rousseau’s philosophy introduces us. I here hope to strengthen our understanding of both the diagnostic and prescriptive elements of his political philosophy.

But ultimately, we are spurred to examine the Emile by the fact that it is a puzzling, complex work that cries out for a critical interpretation of its literary dimension. Creative skill and imagination are of central importance to the Emile. In it, Rousseau suggests that, to recover humanity’s naturalness in modern civil society, what was once provided spontaneously to man by nature can and must now be achieved through art. Appropriately enough, the Emile itself is also artfully arranged: it is a genre-bending work that depicts the conjugation of philosophy and literature that, at times, feels strangely ultramodern. It is simultaneously a philosophical treatise

5 While I believe most scholars would agree that the Emile is worthy of careful study, the work has certainly had its share of harsh critics. See, e.g., the letter from Archbishop Beaumont censuring the Emile and Rousseau’s response to it (Collected Writings (Masters and Kelly, eds.), Vol. IX). Even so, regardless of whether readers share Rousseau’s views, they generally agree that his books are worthy of serious examination. Of course, one must note that Beaumont had an agenda, to say the least.

3 and a lively novel interspersed with ostensibly autobiographical episodes from Rousseau’s real- life experiences as a pupil and a tutor. The core of the novelistic dimension of the Emile lies in the tale of its eponymous, imaginary pupil’s upbringing, which takes place over the course of more than twenty years, from the boy’s birth to his wedding day. Emile is raised by a fictionalized version of Rousseau who occasionally discusses the merits and demerits of novels, among various other topics.

Readers have always been struck by the unusual manner in which Rousseau conveys his ideas. Yet, the hybrid narrative arrangement of the Emile hitherto has not been sufficiently examined or valued as a useful hermeneutic tool. Some important work has been done with regard to studying Rousseau as a general literary figure. One thinks, for instance of Jean-Louis

Lecercle’s Rousseau et l'art du roman (1969), Peter Jimack’s chapter “La genèse et la rédaction de l’Emile de J.-J. Rousseau” (1960), Christopher Kelly’s “Taking Readers as They Are:

Rousseau’s Turn From Discourses to Novels” (1999), and Allan Bloom’s various interpretive essays on Rousseau which pay special attention to his romanticism. Yet, critical gaps remain, owing to two general tendencies in the scholarship. On the one hand, a number of readers regard the specific literary character of the Emile as merely incidental (e.g., Jimack 1960, DeJean 1984,

Cherpack 1988, Lecercle 1969, Burgelin 1969, P. Coleman 1977).6 Despite the slight differences among scholars in this group, they are all united in the belief that the literary form of the Emile is not an important, thoughtful part of the work. To these readers, the novelistic dimension is symptomatic of Rousseau’s carelessness as a writer, and it detracts from his ability to articulate a coherent teaching.7

6 Christopher Kelly is a notable exception. He gives what I believe is due regard to Rousseau’s thoughtfulness as a writer. We will examine Kelly 1999 more closely in the paragraphs below. 7 For a more detailed exegesis on these scholars’ interpretations of the literary structure of the Emile, see Chapter Two of this dissertation.

4 On the other hand, because Rousseau’s language is provocative and emotional, others have argued that his prose often distracts the reader with style over substance (cf. Introduction in

Cassirer 1954 [13-14]). Beginning with Rousseau’s contemporaries, several of his readers have remarked on the stylistic ornamentation of his works, which includes the various paradoxes that riddle his writings. Mary Shelley, the “four-famed” author of Frankenstein and imaginative student of political philosophy, claimed that “no author is more eloquent in paradox” than

Rousseau (Hunt 1860 [212], Shelley 1839 [174]).8 David Hume, even before his boisterous quarrel with Rousseau that called into question the Genevan’s sanity, spoke of his eloquence as

“always intermingled [with] some degree of extravagance,” by which he meant the world- inverting paradoxes that he referred to as “philosophical chemistry” (cited in Zaretsky and Scott

2009 [100, Letter to Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon, Comtesse de Boufflers, 22

January 1763]). Hume questioned whether the “eloquence” of Rousseau’s arguments “alone” would prove sufficient to “support them” (Greig 1932 [103, Letter to Jean-Baptiste Antoine

Suard, 5 November 1766]). Because of this “extravagance,” he accused Rousseau of lacking a love of truth that characterizes genuine philosophy. And in recent years, John Rawls stated that

“style can be a danger, attracting attention to itself, as it does in Rousseau. We may be dazzled and distracted and so fail to note the intricacies of reasoning that call for our full concentration”

(Rawls 2007 [192]). This general line of interpretation suggests that, far from paying too little attention to the form of his works (the charge made by the first group of scholars), Rousseau was actually overly attentive with regard to his writing style and that he was so at the expense of

8 Shelley was a thoughtful reader of Rousseau, and it has been argued that his writings influenced her own fictional works. For a compelling argument that Frankenstein was inspired by a passage in the Emile, which we know Shelley read in 1815 (a year before she began writing her Gothic novel), see Richardson 1991.

5 clarity of thought. For these scholars, Rousseau’s aesthetic form is a showy kind of embellishment with little or no relevance to the philosophical content of his works.

What both lines of interpretation share in common is the view that Rousseau’s literary form ultimately precluded him from conveying his philosophy clearly and systematically.

However, one of the chief problems with this view is that Rousseau himself emphasizes the importance of thoughtfully merging form and content in such a way as to make them mutually reinforcing. While he addresses the topics of writing and rhetoric throughout his body of work, perhaps the clearest exposition of his view on this matter occurs in an early essay titled “Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book” (OC II [1242-1247]). There, Rousseau speaks about the difference between books that are “well or badly crafted” and asserts that the success of a written work depends not only on one’s ability to have “perfect knowledge of one’s material,” but also on one’s proper organization of such information, where one is required to carefully attend to questions of “form” and “style” (ibid 1242). He expresses the idea that a composition should be treated as a unified whole with various interdependent parts that must be made to harmonize with one another. Based on Rousseau’s own statements about the qualities of good writing, it would seem that a well written, thoughtful piece, such as his self-proclaimed greatest work the Emile, establishes the proper coalescence of several elements, including form and content, into a single well-ordered whole. It is entirely reasonable, then, to conclude that

Rousseau produced his own written works as he himself advocates: by organizing them “in the way best suited” to producing a well-crafted composition, carefully placing each element in such a manner as to “support one another” (ibid).

The chief aim of this dissertation is to expose the inadequacies of the modes of interpretation advanced by the scholars cited above – that is, to refute the idea that the literary

6 form of the Emile detracts from Rousseau’s ability to adequately convey a coherent philosophy.

Rousseau’s Emile is, I believe, a prime example of how form and content can actually fortify each other. In other words, the novelistic form of the Emile is inseparable from Rousseau’s conception and communication of his philosophy; form and function are united, as form has an indispensable practical function (cf. Nabokov 1982 [9]). My suggestion is that the novelistic form of the Emile is not simply harmonious with the substance of its philosophical content, but indeed also that its form and content merge to reinforce Rousseau’s capacity to express his teachings. In other words, I am arguing that the novelistic structure of the Emile is an essential part of its teaching: Rousseau had to write it as a novel to convey his philosophy most effectively. I thus propose to demonstrate in this dissertation how and why the novelistic dimension of the Emile belongs to it not mechanistically, but integrally. The Emile is comprised of a patchwork of stories, and its ideas or principles become apparent only when these stories are understood in terms of their intricate parts and their overall artistic unity. As Allan Bloom has noted, proper interpretation of this novel-treatise “requires a union of l’esprit de geometrie and l’esprit de finesse” – a blending which the Emile not only exemplifies, but also elucidates

(Bloom in Emile 6). Complete access to Rousseau’s thought can be attained only when one appreciates that both aspects of the Emile – its philosophical content and its literary configuration

– are integral aspects of the whole work.

Rousseau’s Novels: How the Emile Differs from His Other Novelistic Works

In undertaking such a study of the essential nature of Rousseau’s literary technique in the

Emile, a natural starting point is to begin by understanding the specific character of the work’s fictional form. Rousseau is a writer of uncommon range and skill. Perhaps more than any other figure in the history of political philosophy, Rousseau is notable for his prolific and inventive use

7 of various narrative forms throughout his writings. In this regard, he differs greatly from the major scholarly or academically trained philosophers who emerged since the late eighteenth century. Not only did Rousseau engage a diverse readership — which has included socialites, monarchs, prominent literary figures, intellectuals, revolutionaries, philosophers, and ordinary men and women alike — but he also composed a wide range of different kinds of works. In addition to being a writer of traditional academic discourses and novels, he also composed plays, a dialogue, operas and other musical scores, legal and political commentaries for the governments of Corsica and Poland, personal letters that he clearly intended to publish, and he even invented a new genre when he published The Confessions, which is generally acknowledged to be the first modern autobiography.9

In many ways, each of his different modes of writing can strike us as simultaneously foreign and familiar. With regard to the Emile specifically, no doubt the contemporary reader is acquainted with the two narrative forms in which it engages: the philosophical treatise and the

9 On the question of the novelty of The Confessions, I can do no better than to cite Christopher Kelly’s Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The Confessions as Political Philosophy (1987). To sum up his argument: Rousseau’s title is obviously a reference to Augustine’s work of the same title. Rousseau begins his Confessions in such a way that prepares the reader for a book that belongs to a tradition we can trace back to Augustine. But their shared title does not indicate a common purpose or a common procedure. Indeed, as Kelly states, “in choosing the same title as Augustine, Rousseau calls attention to his departures from his predecessor rather than to his agreements” (11). Oddly enough, by harkening back to Augustine, Rousseau actually indicates that he is doing something dramatically different and new (see also Frye 2000 [8-9]). Properly understood, Rousseau is consciously anti-Augustinian. For one, while Augustine speaks to God in order to seek His forgiveness, Rousseau is apparently indifferent to divine forgiveness and speaks instead to human beings. For another, whereas Augustine’s self-revelations are likened to his revelation of God (i.e., his confessions point to something greater than himself), Rousseau’s self-revelations point inward to himself, to his innermost private/hidden self (i.e., his confession point to nothing beyond his self). The true novelty of Rousseau’s Confessions is that it is a chronicle of the inner life; it marks a complete reorientation/redefinition of the autobiographical genre, the purpose of which, prior to Rousseau, had never been to provide a written account of one’s inner life. The common perception in Rousseau’s day was that a personal work, such as his Confessions, lacked seriousness. Rousseau’s “Confessions is an attempt to establish that self-absorption and self-expression are in fact serious activities. [...] [B]ehind Rousseau’s autobiographical enterprise stands the view that personal and individual experience can be at least as serious as the public deeds recorded by historians and biographers or the thoughts of philosophers” (12). My too-brief summary of Kelly’s interpretation cannot do justice to his thoughtful discussion. I recommend it in its entirety, but see especially Chapter One, as well as his listed citations to the secondary literature. For an earlier, albeit less thorough interpretation of the novelty of the genre of The Confessions, see Lecercle 1969.

8 novel. Yet, the Emile is neither wholly a treatise nor wholly a novel. It is something of both. The

Emile defies or “bends” customary notions of narrative structure by participating in two quite different narrative modes at once and, in this specific regard, it partakes in what American novelist John Gardner has playfully called “genre-jumping” or “hybreeding” (Harvey and

Gardner 1978 [79]). As I will demonstrate throughout this dissertation, Rousseau, by freeing himself from familiar literary and philosophical patterns, is better able to show us what we would otherwise be unable to see and to communicate what he otherwise would have been unable to convey. While the multi-genre approach has its advantages, it also means that the hermeneutic tools with which we analyze the works of other thinkers – and even Rousseau’s other writings – may not be appropriate for the Emile. Ultimately, Rousseau chose to present an image of actual human nature in actual modern civil society by portraying the fictional story of a fictional boy who is educated by a fictional tutor and who eventually settles down with his fictional wife. This presentation is meant not only to reveal the characters’ identities by personifying them or giving them a more concrete form, but also, more importantly, to portray the fullness of the problem of human nature as Rousseau conceived it and to elucidate man’s uncertain place in civil society.

The Emile coincides with a period (1756-1762) of general rhetorical transformation in

Rousseau’s works during which he turned away from writing primarily academic discourses and toward becoming a novelist. The questions regarding why Rousseau wrote novels and how we ought to read them are inseparable. Each chapter of this dissertation addresses these two major questions from various angles. For now, let us begin by inquiring about whether and how the

Emile might differ from Rousseau’s other novelistic works. Several studies have explored the method and purpose of the development of Rousseau’s novelistic technique, yet scholars have failed to reach a codified consensus on this matter. Margaret Buchner (1937) examines “the

9 frequency of sensory notations” in his autobiographies and novels, and she argues that his literary writing style was influenced by his association with the Encyclopédistes. She contends that through “his contacts with this group, he became familiar with the keystone of its philosophy and the mainspring of its literary dialectics: the theory of sensationalism as the basis of all human experience” (ibid 11).10 In her reading, Rousseau then applied this principle to his literary writings, especially to his Emile where he emphasizes the senses as he “envisage[s] the growth of the ideal personality” (ibid). Jean-Louis Lecercle (1969) provides a literary analysis of a number of Rousseau’s major and minor narrative works, including a chapter dedicated specifically to the

Emile. He argues that Rousseau introduced a lyrical quality to his treatise on education for the sake of stylistic variation. But despite Lecercle’s claim that Rousseau uses narrative devices unsystematically, he does correctly discern the systematic character of the substance of his corpus.11 While Lecercle’s book represents an important contribution to the study of Rousseau’s literary expression, Santo Aricò (1994) addresses a residual lacuna in his research: “it stops short of developing the full implications of an oratorical mindset by neglecting to indicate...major features of the novelist’s rhetorical technique” (xiv). While Aricò’s study focuses primarily on

Julie, he suggests that his statements about Rousseau’s general literary approach extend to all of his narrative works. Aricò suggests that Rousseau deeply believed that one’s ability to persuade depends on creative rhetorical strategy. He argues that Rousseau’s fictional characters draw on a

10 Buchner’s argument is not always entirely clear, but she defines the “theory of sensationalism” as follows: “Man is what he is through his reaction to impulses which strike upon his sensory organs. Just as one’s earliest development is influenced by this factor, so is his subsequent outlook upon life and upon his associates indissolubly linked with these primary experiences” (1937 [11]). 11 For a more exhaustive treatment of Lecercle’s claim about Rousseau’s ostensibly empty stylistic choice to add a novelistic dimension to the Emile and my counterargument that its narrative structure is more coherent and more deliberate than interpreters have hitherto realized, see Chapter Two.

10 broad range of rhetorical techniques in an effort to persuade each other to adopt particular viewpoints or modes of conduct.

Christopher Kelly (1999) has also focused on the persuasive power of Rousseau’s literary rhetorical technique, but, unlike Aricò, he considers this strategy externally from the perspective of its ability to shape his reader’s thought and behavior rather than in terms of the internal formation of his characters. Kelly argues that Rousseau began writing in the more popular novelistic form after observing that people are led more by their passions than by reason. As a practical matter, he adopted a more literary manner of communicating so that he could more effectively influence society at large by speaking to human beings as the emotional creatures they are, rather than by treating them as philosophers driven primarily by rationality. Kelly specifically points to passages in Julie (as well as to statements made elsewhere about it) to make the case that Rousseau “had to change [his] style” to “get the attention” of his ordinary reader and thus “make [himself] better understood by everyone” (6, 88-89; cf. Julie CW VI [331], d’Alembert 6, 100).12 Although Kelly’s discussion focuses primarily on Julie, one might be tempted to apply his argument to the Emile as well, just as Aricò applied his arguments about

Julie to all of Rousseau’s narrative writings. After all, both Julie and Emile were written at around the same time and have a novelistic dimension: Rousseau repeatedly insisted that Julie is a novel (Kelly 1999 [96]), and he explicitly refers to his Emile as “un assez beau roman,” or a quite beautiful novel (Emile 416).13 What is more, Rousseau says that “everything that was bold

12 Cf. what Rousseau says elsewhere about men’s varying ability to process information: “With heads so variously organized, man cannot be equally affected by the same arguments” (Mountain, 3rd Letter [165]); “men do not at all have the same head” (Mountain, 2nd Letter [164]); “we may as well want to force someone else to see through our eyes” (Mountain, 3rd Letter [165]). 13 Bloom translates the French word “roman” as “romance.” He notes that the term is most often translated as “novel” (Emile 493 [fn41]). Novels and romances share certain similar elements, but they are not interchangeable – particularly in the regard that romances deal with events that are remote from real life, and novels represent action

11 in the Emile was previously in Julie” (Conf CW V [IX: 342). Clearly, there is a connection between the two works.

Nevertheless, I am here suggesting that they are two very different books intended for different kinds of readers. Whereas Rousseau openly states that he wrote Julie for a popular audience, he says essentially the opposite about the Emile. As far as I know, Rousseau never complained that people misunderstood Julie – for certainly, as Kelly (1999) argues, he wrote it with the aim of speaking with clarity and simplicity – but he lamented over and over again that readers grossly misinterpreted the Emile – a text that is anything but clear or simple (e.g.,

Beaumont CW IX, Mountain CW IX [Letter V], Letter to Philibert Cramer).14 In the Emile itself,

Rousseau states that, unlike Julie where he said everything more or less plainly, here he speaks more obliquely and refrains from “proclaiming the truth to those who are not in a condition to understand it” (Emile 259; cf. 137, 248, 249, Favre 40, 72, Beaumont CW IX [51, 211]). The reader of the Emile, he tells us, must be “made for understanding” – meaning that Rousseau presents his thought in this particular work not as a set of clear-cut educational rules to follow but as philosophical ideas worthy of careful examination by les hommes sages (Emile 433).

Rousseau declared the Emile “a rather philosophical work on this principle...that man is naturally good,” “the plan of which I offer to the examination of the wise (à l'examen des sages), and not of a method for fathers and mothers, about which I never dreamed” (Beaumont CW IX [211]; cf.

with some degree of verisimilitude (e.g., Huet 1715, Scott 1834, James 1934, Watt 1957, Shroder 1963, Frye 2000). Personally, I believe “novel” is the more accurate translation since, as I will suggest throughout this dissertation, the Emile is a decidedly prosaic book that is grounded in the realm of the possible and the real. The term “roman” is the origin of the word Romanticism. According to Irving Babbitt (1919), “The early French and German uses of the word romantic seem to derive from England. [...] Before using the word romantique the French used the word Romanesque is the sense of wild, unusual, adventurous. [...] An example of romantique is found in French as early as 1675; but the word owed its vogue practically to the Anglomania that set in about the middle of the eighteenth century. The very first influential French example of the word is appropriately found in Rousseau in the Fifth Promenade (1777)” (7). 14 Of course, the fact that the Emile was burned on account of its impiety certainly gave Rousseau good reason to protest that people misunderstood it.

12 Letter to Philibert Cramer, 13 October 1764 [CG Tome IX, 339], Mountain CW IX [Letter V],

Malesherbes CW V [575], “Bordes” CW II [185], SD Exordium [133], “Composition of a Book”

OC II [1243]). The Emile is primarily directed toward a wise readership rather than a popular one. It is a book for philosophers. By this, I mean to say that the practical effect of the Emile is its power to appeal to a rare group of careful, thoughtful readers’ rationality in order to change their overall attitudes or general way of regarding things.

Seen in this light, the Emile is consistent with Maurice Z. Shroder’s (1963) description of a well-written, advanced novel: “the more sophisticated, the more subtle, or the more devastating

[the novel is]...the less ‘popular’ the novel is likely to be” (300). In other words, the more highly complex a novel is, the more it resembles a philosophical work that appeals to “an intelligent elite” as opposed to the more common readership “in the middle ground” that Julie engages

(ibid, Kelly 1999 [93]). While I grant that Rousseau did begin composing novels in the mid-

1750s to reach a broader audience, this cannot suffice to explain why he made the curious decision to use elements of a popular form of writing to speak to a decidedly uncommon, philosophic audience. I am not here suggesting that the Emile is not an emotive work intended to

“get the attention” of and appeal to ordinary readers in some capacity. Certainly, it is. What I am arguing is that the Emile is meant to do more than merely arouse the reader’s intense feelings – much, much more.

The Novel Form and Rousseau’s Particular Engagement With it in the Emile

Rousseau himself saw the Emile as (at least partly) a novel.15 This much is clear. Yet, given that it differs in certain critical ways from Rousseau’s other literary projects, what kind of

15 He also once refers to the Emile as his “treatise” on education (Malesherbes CW V [575]). To my knowledge, Rousseau’s references to it as a “roman” in the Emile and as a “treatise” in one of his letters to Malesherbes are the only occasions in which he speaks of the book’s form. The first draft of the Emile was written as a straightforward

13 novel is the Emile? To answer this query, we ought to start by asking a series of corollary questions about meaning and expectations. As E.D. Hirsch (2000) has suggested, what is meant in any text is, to some degree, “constituted by [the interpreter’s] meaning expectations” (14). In other words, one’s expectations about a written work “do not arise out of nowhere” but from

“past experiences” with other similar texts (ibid 15). Every existing narrative mode is associated with certain assumptions the reader makes based on his or her experiences with the established conventions that typically exemplify a work’s particular genre. As we read the Emile with this general idea about meaning, we must ask ourselves: What is a novel, generally speaking? Then, more specifically, what does the novelistic form do in Rousseau’s Emile? Does the Emile meet our expectations regarding what a novel is and what it ought to do? Where the Emile challenges our normal expectations for what constitutes a novel, what can we learn from Rousseau’s deviations from the standard form? And, finally, how have scholars identified the literary dimension of the Emile, and how can their interpretations help inform our own understanding of

Rousseau’s novel-treatise? We will address ourselves to these questions for what remains of our time in this introduction.

The first thing to note is that the novel is one of the broadest, most variable narrative forms and, for this reason, has been dubbed an “amorphous” and “formidable mass” (Forster

1927 [16]). According to the American-British novelist Henry James (1934), “the novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms” (326). Some theorists have gone so far as to argue that the novel is too loosely defined, as nearly all existing definitions tend to describe works that nobody would categorize as a novel. As a consequence, Mieke Bal (2009) has advised against using the phrase “theory of the novel,” as

treatise, but as Rousseau’s work progressed, the text took a distinct novelistic turn. For more on the transformation of the Emile from treatise to novel, see Chapter Two of this dissertation.

14 she contends its practitioners have “obscured the precise position of the novel with respect to other genres and types of text” (175; cf. Shroder 1963). As Northrop Frye (2000) has observed, among literary historians since “about 1900,” the word “novel” has “expanded into a catchall term which can be applied to practically any prose book that is not ‘on’ something” – that is, on any prose writing that is not intended to be a straightforwardly factual, chronological record of real events or real people, such as biography or history (5). Perhaps more than any other narrative mode, the novel has undergone a number of significant changes since its inception and, for better or for worse, we are able to classify a wide range of books under the umbrella category

“novel.” Our task here will be to discover the precise kind of novel that the Emile is. To do this, let us begin by examining the generic, constant traits and usage of the novelistic form to identify the genre’s abstract mode. Once we have established an abstract model form of the novel, we will proceed from the universal to the local to examine the particular, concrete variant features present in the eighteenth-century French novel, then in the Emile specifically.16

According to William Burgwinkle (2011), fictional narratives specifically designated as novels emerged in the baroque period (early 1600s to 1740s) in various subgenres (359-360).

While the novel is generally considered a distinctly modern form, by the time it rose to prominence in the eighteenth century, it already had a long history, dating back to the verse narratives (or romans) of the Middle Ages. Thus, far from being “the unique literary expression of modern society, the novel is essentially a continuation of a very old and honored narrative tradition” that arose during an extended metamorphosis of narrative forms that occurred roughly

16 I should note that we will only consider the state of the novel up to Rousseau’s day. The novelistic mode has continued to evolve post-Rousseau so that, for instance, the “American novel” conjures up an image of something quite different from what was recognizable as a novel in the mid-eighteenth century (e.g., Shroder 1963 [305-308]). Thus, at the risk of needlessly stating the obvious, in our assessment of the novelistic dimension of the Emile, we will limit ourselves to what Rousseau and his contemporaries would have recognized as a novel.

15 between 1550 and 1800 (Watt 1957 [238], Mazzoni 2017).17 Ever since this period of transformation, literary theorists and historians have struggled to establish a single, universal definition of the genre. Even so, scholars tend to agree on a set of at least four general characteristics shared by all novels from the early seventeenth century to today:

(1) Fictionality. Perhaps the most obvious, universally accepted quality of the novel is that it

is a work of fiction (Huet 1715, Chevalley 1921, Forster 1927, Scott 1834, James 1934,

Frye 1962, 2000, Watt 1957). As a fictional writing, the novel tells an imaginary story.

Indeed, as E.M. Forster (1927) has asserted, “Yes – oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story.

That is the fundamental aspect without which it could not exist. That is the highest factor

common to all novels” (45; cf. Frye 1962 [81]). A story is essentially a basic sequence of

events; it prompts the reader to ask, “and then?” (ibid 130). Additionally, a novel also

contains a plot, which is different from the story; the plot is the sense of causality in a

fictional work that is arguably more important than the story and leads the reader to ask,

“why?” (ibid). In short, “‘The king died and then the queen died,’ is a story. ‘The king

died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot” because the former merely outlines the

simple chronological chain of events, whereas the latter clarifies the reason why those

events unfolded as they did (ibid). Additional components associated with a novel’s

fictionality include its setting and a narrative method or point of view (i.e., the presence

of at least one narrator). Of course, fictionality is not unique to the novel. Broadly

speaking, several forms of literature are characterized by this feature. While the novel

cannot be said to encompass all of fiction-writing, it is undoubtedly a “form of fiction”

17 According to many historians of the novel, German literary critic Friedrich Schlegel is responsible for shaping our understanding of the novel as a uniquely modern form (Schmidt 2011 [xii]). While Schlegel emphasized the novelty of the narrative form, he overlooked the longstanding literary tradition that led to its rise.

16 (Frye 2000 [6]). What formally distinguishes the novel from other forms of fiction is that

the novel undertakes a fictional representation in combination with the remainder of the

characteristics listed below.

(2) Prose structure. A novel is a work in which the “predominating rhythm” tends to be

prose, as opposed to verse – a feature that is nowadays “so ubiquitous in novels that we

tend to forget that it wasn’t inevitable” (Frye 2000 [5], Moretti 2010 [1]; cf. Chevalley

1921, Forster 1927, Burgess 1970). It has been suggested that the novel’s prose format

has helped make it “a uniquely adaptable and successful form” because it has allowed

such works to participate in two “completely different” spheres: the popular and the

cultivated (Moretti 2010 [2]). Stated differently, the novel’s lack of a metrical structure

lends itself to being restructured for various purposes – from the creation of popular

works with widespread appeal among a broad audience (as Christopher Kelly has argued

that Julie has) to the drafting of more cerebral texts intended for a more selective, more

pensive readership (to which I suggest the Emile appeals).

(3) Length. A novel must be a prose work of “substantial length” (Shroder 1963 [291],

James 1934, Chevalley 1921, Forster 1927). E.M Forster goes so far as to circumscribe a

precise word limit: a novel “should not be less than 50,000 words” (1927 [17]). Shorter

fictional writings in prose are either novellas/nouvelles or short stories.18

(4) Realism. Historians of the novel “have seen ‘realism’” as one if its most important formal

characteristics (Watt 1957 [9]; cf. Huet 1715, Scott 1834, Shroder 1962, Forster 1927,

18 According to William Burgwinkle (2011), “The word nouvelle first appeared in the Middle Ages...and competed with roman for a time, but usage finally reserved nouvelle for shorter works of fiction” that are now more commonly referred to as the novella (359).

17 McKeon 2017).19 As Sir Walter Scott (1834) observed, “real life is the very thing which

novels affect to imitate” (130fn1). A novelistic work “tends to approximate a slice of life

itself, to represent ‘real’ men and women in ‘real’ situations” (Shroder 1963 [303]). In

other words, the novel is a depiction of society and must be recognizable as such. It is for

this reason that Guido Mazzoni (2017) has stated that the novel eventually became the

modern book of life, as it is one of the best representations of our experience of the

world. It has even been suggested that this more concrete depiction of life “achieved for

the novel what D. W. Griffith’s technique of the ‘close-up’ did for the film: [it] added a

new dimension to the representation of reality” (Watt 1957 [24]). Verisimilitude imparts

authenticity, which arises from the reader’s ability to connect and interact with the

physical, temporal, and spatial setting of a novel’s literary protagonist. That is, a key

aspect of any novel’s “realism” lies in the unmediated accessibility of the recreation of

the world it depicts to its readers.20

As part of the novel’s realism, it introduced a new kind of leading character: “unlike

romances, the protagonists of novels are not heroes, or they are ‘anti-heroes’” (Shroder

1963 [293]; cf. Watt 1957 [59], Burgess 1970, Mazzoni 2017). In short, the central

figures of novels are generally ordinary people who lead ordinary lives. Earlier literary

works largely conveyed idealized characters who often had superhuman qualities or who

19 Arguably the most important text on the history of the novel that we review here is Ian Watt’s The Rise of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (1957). It is considered by many contemporary literary scholars to be the seminal work on the origins of the novel, as well as an important study of literary realism. Watt links the rise of the modern iteration of the novel to the philosophical, economic, and social changes that occurred in the early eighteenth century. While I find Watt’s argument mostly compelling, not all scholars do. For a well-researched rebuttal, see Delers 2015. 20 However, to be clear, as E.M. Forster (1927) has also observed, “a novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and...a character in a novel is real when it lives in accordance with such laws” (95- 96).

18 were of divine origin: for instance, Greek and Latin epic poetry (e.g., Homer’s Iliad and

Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid), the hagiographies and Norse sagas of Medieval Europe (e.g.,

Beowulf), the Arabian fantasies of the fourteenth-century Islamic world (e.g., The Book of

One Thousand and One Nights), the Early Renaissance tales of the Arthurian knights

(e.g., Le Morte d’Arthur, Canterbury Tales) and romantic lyrical poetry (e.g. Petrarch’s

sonnets). The rise of the novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however,

brought with it the elevated status of “real” or realistic men and women. As Anthony

Burgess (1970) has remarked, the kinds of human beings portrayed in novels are those

who interact in “streets and taverns, not battlefields and palaces. There is more low

fornication than princely combat; the gods do not move the action; the dialogue is homely

rather than aristocratic.” Novels “demythify” life by seeking to portray the fullest range

of human experiences, and, in so doing, it has been said that they force the reader to

confront reality and even to question the basis of myths altogether (Shroder 1963 [295],

Watt 1957 [10-12], Frye 2000 [9], Mazzoni 2017).21

Throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the novel was a relatively minor literary genre that coexisted with a number of other, more sought-after forms of fiction, including the romances and myths that had been popular since the Middle Ages. But by the eighteenth century, the taste of readers – and especially of French readers – had changed dramatically. During the 1700s, the novel suddenly become “the dominant [genre] in France, eclipsing all others in popularity” (Burgwinkle 2011 [359]). According to historical records, nearly “1,050 new French works of fiction were published during the seventeenth century. By

21 This aspect of the novel is so widely accepted that Maurice Shroder confidently prefaced his statements about “demythification” by saying that “all critics would, I think, agree” with his assertions (1963 [295]).

19 comparison, 2,900 new works of fiction written in French were published during the eighteenth century,” nearly triple the number published in the previous century (ibid 359).

The novel not only gained unprecedented, widespread popularity in eighteenth-century

France, but it also underwent a number of changes that distinguished the novels of this period from those written in the previous century. Scholars have suggested a number of reasons for the emergence of new forms of narrative fiction in eighteenth-century France, but literary critic

Henri Coulet, in his classic study Le roman français jusqu'à la Révolution (1967), offers the most common explanation: “what determined the evolution of the novel is the development of a bourgeois state of mind, the necessity of elaborating a mode of literary expression that reflects the outside world and modern thought when traditional modes were tied to a social reality which was no longer current” (323-24). In short, the novel of the eighteenth century “is the means of expression of the bourgeoisie” (ibid). As Thomas DiPiero (1992) has asserted, “studies of the early French or British novel have traditionally considered formal realism to be the genre’s defining characteristic...but in general all agree that the rising middle class had something to do with the change” (8). Even though the general mode of the novel arose from a long-established literary tradition, most theorists accept that the eighteenth-century novel in particular, “is the literary companion to economic modernity” (Delers 2015 [10]; cf. Lukács 1920/trans. 1974,

Goldman 1977, McKeon 1987). That is to say, “in the paradigm of the rise of the novel, the coming of age of a bourgeois middle class and the advent of new realistic techniques cannot be separated from the idea that the novel is the literary vehicle best equipped to convey through its characters and storylines the perfect rationality of homo economicus” (Delers 2015 [15]).22 The

22 While the causal link between the rise of the bourgeois class and the evolution of the eighteenth-century French novel is widely accepted among literary historians, there are a few individuals who deviate from the standard view. Most notably, Olivier Delers (2015) outlines various scholars’ objections to the view that the novel evolved as a

20 pragmatic attitude that characterized the new social class structure, alongside the overall faith in the power of reason, individualism, and self-reliance inspired by the Enlightenment, are all well represented in the fiction prose writing of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth-century French novel in particular encompasses a body of work distinguished by at least four key features, according to literary historians.

(1) Increased realism. French novelists during this era pursued an even greater

degree of realism than their sixteenth and seventeenth century forerunners. As Ian

Watt (1957) has stated, “there is no doubt that the pursuit of verisimilitude led”

eighteenth-century French novelists “to initiate that power of ‘putting man wholly

into his physical setting’ which constitutes for Allen Tate the distinctive capacity

of the novel form” (Watt 1957 [26], Tate 1948 [143]).

(2) Greater Individualism. Watt also argues that this change is a consequence of a

larger transition in the philosophical outlook of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, most notably the political philosophy of Hobbes and Locke: the

evolution of the novel reflects “the transition from the objective, social and public

orientation of the classical world to the subjective, individualist and private

orientation of the life and literature of the last two hundred years” (1957 [175]).

While the new scientific political philosophy of the Enlightenment was not the

sole reason for the development of the eighteenth-century novel, its influence

upon the literary transformation of the century was substantial. This new

philosophy gave rise to a decidedly anthropocentric viewpoint, and “one in which

result of socio-economic shifts and ultimately suggests that the French bourgeois “is a myth not because there are no people called bourgeois, but because there is no coherent social group that thinks of itself as a class with a common identity and shared aspirations” (6).

21 the individual was responsible for his own scale of moral and social values” (ibid

176). Accordingly, the literature of eighteenth-century France adapted to this new

orientation and increasingly demonstrated a greater concern for the individual and

the private (cf. McKeon 2009, 2017 [54]).

(3) Unique Storylines. A third characteristic of the eighteenth-century French novel

is the advent of original plots, as opposed to storylines based on traditional myths

or historical events. These new plots also began to be “acted out by particular

people in particular circumstances, rather than, as had been common in the past,

by general human types against a background primarily determined by the

appropriate literary convention” (ibid 14). As a consequence, eighteenth-century

novelists, “made an extremely significant break with tradition, and named their

characters in such a way as to suggest that they were to be regarded as particular

individuals in the contemporary social environment,” as opposed to fanciful

heroes or extraordinary historical figures (Watt 1957 [18]). This, of course, is not

to deny that characters in previous forms of literature were given proper names.

However, as Watt has suggested, earlier classical and Renaissance writers tended

to prefer “either historical names or type names,” while later novelists in the

eighteenth century veered away from this practice by assigning their protagonists

more contemporary names that were not linked to historical figures (1957 [17]).

Rousseau’s Emile exemplifies this eighteenth-century trend, as we will see below.

(4) The “Novel of Ideas.” The rising status of the eighteenth-century French novel is

linked to the development of experimental and philosophical novels, or the novel

of ideas (Israel 2002 [591-599], Pearson 1993, Goodman 1989, O’Reilly 1967,

22 Pomeau and Ehrard 1998). Of course, the confluence of philosophy and fiction is

not unique to the eighteenth-century novel. A number of other philosophers

throughout the ages, many of whom Rousseau clearly read, had already

communicated their ideas in various literary modes by producing philosophical

works that have been read as works of literature.23 But what is unique to the

eighteenth century, according to literary historians, is the expression of

23 For instance, Plato was not merely the “first to mold and to stabilize philosophy into a system of extensive and accurate thought” – certainly a monumental accomplishment on its own – but he was also “and in a preeminent degree, an artist and a poet” (Keane 1930 [54]). Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson stated in a more appropriately poetic manner, the “command of two elements [sc., philosophy and art] must explain the power and the charm of Plato. Art expresses the one, or the same by the different. Thought seeks to know unity in unity; power to show it by variety; that is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the two vases, one of aether and one of pigment, at his side, and invariably uses both” (Emerson 1950 [480]). In Plato, the poet and the philosopher embody one soul (cf. Keane 1930 [55]). He is the poet-philosopher par excellence. Yet, Plato was not even the first Western thinker to convey his system of philosophical ideas in a distinctly literary mode. All the pre-Socratic thinkers had done so, and the dialogue form itself was borrowed from Epicharmus of Syracuse, who originated the genres of comedy and tragedy (e.g., Plato’s Theaetetus 152e and Gorgias [505e], Aristotle’s Poetics [1449b5], Pickard-Cambridge 1962 [Chapter IV]; In the Poetics, Aristotle also cites Phormis as a co-originator of the comedic genre (1449b5)). Nevertheless, when one thinks of philosophical fiction, likely the first works that come to mind are Plato’s dialogues, for they established the precedent from which all others later followed. It is for good reason that Alfred North Whitehead (1979) claimed that the Western philosophical tradition is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato (39). Indeed, even though Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, has been referred to as a “nonliterary writer” (Nussbaum 1990 [18]), strong evidence shows that he composed a number of dialogues as a young man. These texts were well known to have existed in antiquity. However, they have since been lost to the ages. For a discussion of the regrettable fate of Aristotle’s missing dialogues, see Masters 1977. More recent examples of philosophical fiction include: The philosophical dialogues of the Medieval Christian thinkers, such as Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard, which provided systematic treatments of religious doctrines via fictional narrative. When the defining cultural spirit of Europe began to move away from the Christian thought of the Middle Ages toward the humanistic beliefs of the Renaissance, Niccolò Machiavelli conveyed several aspects of his distinctly modern political philosophy in a number of his own fictional works: his satirical play La Mandragola, which Voltaire praised as “better than all of Aristophanes’ comedies” (cited in Maria 2006 [132]), his prose comedy Clizia, his novella Belfagor arcidiavolo, and his poems Decennale primo, Decennale secondo, and Asino d'oro. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the thinkers during the Age of Enlightenment produced such literary philosophical works as Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, the novels and tales of Voltaire and Denis Diderot, and Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. A few generations later, during the counter-Enlightenment era, the close link between literature and philosophy became characteristic of the writings of this European intellectual movement throughout England, France, and Germany (Diekmann 1971) – of which Rousseau’s Emile is possibly the finest example. More recently still, Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra chronicles the fictional travels and speeches of a character named Zarathustra, and it is perhaps the most significant post-Rousseauian work of literary philosophy. Because Rousseau’s mental “storehouse of ideas” was so immense, it would be impossible to review a comprehensive list of the literary thinkers with whom he engaged. For an insightful, thoughtfully assembled compendium of essays on a wide range of authors who have influenced Rousseau, see Kelly and Grace 1999. While this text is certainly not comprehensive, it is the most exhaustive study of this matter that I know of.

23 contemporary abstract concepts – the psychological and spiritual aspects of

human life – in a distinctly novelistic mode, where plot exists but appears almost

secondary to philosophy.

Turning to the Emile, we see both the generic/abstract and eighteenth-century-specific features of the novel represented in the text. On the abstract level, Emile’s story is a prose work of fiction of substantial length that displays a significant degree of realism, so it qualifies as a novel in the generic sense. On a more granular level, it is fairly easy to detect some of the qualities specific to the eighteenth-century French novel in Rousseau’s novel-treatise. For one, as a work of prose fiction that overtly features a number of Rousseau’s philosophical ideas, the

Emile appears to conform to the eighteenth-century predilection for experimental philosophical novels, or novels of ideas. The fictional story of Emile’s upbringing provides the framework upon which Rousseau builds his arguments regarding some of his signature topics of concern, such as the proper arrangement of society and the function of human relationships, the role of experience or reason in the development of knowledge, the moral value of authenticity, the purpose of art, etc. As we mentioned in the opening passages to this introduction, according to

Rousseau himself, the ideas presented in Emile are “inseparable” from those introduced in his first two discourses, as these three works “together form the same whole” (Malesherbes CW V

[575]). This statement suggests that the Emile is not fully comprehensible on its own. Knowledge of the philosophical concepts Rousseau introduced in his first and second publications is prerequisite to one’s ability to thoroughly comprehend the teachings of the Emile. In short, the

24 Emile reads like a narrative essay that fuses Rousseau’s distinctive philosophy with the aesthetic form of the novel in order to provide the reader with new insight into his thought.24

A significant part of Rousseau’s novel system of ideas includes his response – generally critical, but occasionally also approving – to the philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers, such as

Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu. The modern anthropocentric orientation in which the individual is seen as responsible for defining the moral and social values, along with the correlated shift with respect to how eighteenth-century novelists portrayed and named their characters, are also, to some degree, evident in Rousseau’s novel-treatise. Emile’s name emphasizes an aspect of his individuality, especially his distinction from his peers. The name

24 While philosophy and literature wrestle with the most important questions in an attempt to establish order out of life’s bewildering confusion, it is not self-evident whether these disciplines are adversaries – where the creative mind is in opposition to the rational mind – or allies confronting the same problems by different methods (cf. Pascal 1963 [#533]). In recent decades, some contemporary scholars have argued that philosophy and literature are antithetical activities, meaning that no literary writing could adequately and coherently communicate a philosophical system. One of the most notable scholars to have subscribed to this idea is the late British novelist, Iris Murdoch. During a BBC interview broadcast in 1978 (which was later transcribed and published in book form), she argued that philosophy and literature are contrary activities – the former appeals to the analytical mind to decode conceptual problems in prose that is “austere, unselfish, candid,” while the latter relies on the reader’s imagination to reveal something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about our world (Magee 2001 [242]). She insisted that any occurrence of philosophical ideas in her novels was simply an “inconsequential” manifestation of what she “happened to know”: “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships. And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy” (ibid). By contrast, David Foster Wallace has argued that fiction supplies a method by which one can express the sentimental spirit of philosophy. The goal is not simply to make “abstract philosophy ‘accessible’ to an extramural reader” by simplifying concepts for a lay audience, but instead to determine how to reproduce the reader’s individual and emotional responses to a work of philosophy (Wallace 1990 [219]). For Wallace, David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress exemplifies this notion. Wallace believed that Markson’s haunting, lonely work successfully replicates the haunting, lonely tenor of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy. In so doing, it exhibits “an imaginative portrait of what it would be like to actually live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posits” (ibid 223). Markson’s emotive novel helps us to experience Wittgenstein’s philosophy in a way that the original abstract text cannot. I do tend to agree with Wallace’s assertion that the literary form can facilitate one’s access to otherwise abstract ideas by appealing to our sentimental side. Consequently, I am unconvinced by Murdoch’s claim that philosophy and literature are contradictory pursuits – not to mention my disagreement with her contention that Rousseau’s more literary writings now “seem dated and rather dead,” for reasons I will highlight throughout this dissertation (Magee 2001 [243]). It seems highly unlikely that, in a good piece of writing, the concurrence of poetry and philosophy is arbitrary and contradictory, as she contends. To be sure, Murdoch’s view does not preclude literature from having a didactic purpose that may be interpreted as philosophic. She also believed that, even though novelists ought not to consider themselves teachers, they are nevertheless “compulsory moralist[s]” and must be mindful of themselves as such. Thus, while she would not consider a novelist to be a truth-seeker, she would perhaps deem him or her to be a truth-teller.

25 “Emile” was unconventional in eighteenth-century France; as an appellation that is neither explicitly historical nor a generic type of the sort that were typical of fictional texts prior to the eighteenth century, the origin of Emile’s name is ambiguous. While most scholars have tended to overlook this detail, Lewis Piaget Shanks (1927) has offered a possible theory regarding its source. He proposes that Rousseau’s intimate familiarity with the writings of Plutarch and la

Bruyère “may have combined” in his “mind to give him the name Emile” (243). Rousseau states in his Confessions that he read both writers’ works in “the winter of 1719, at the height of his first enthusiasm for reading” (Conf CW V [I: 8]) and that Plutarch in particular left a deep impression on his mind. The young Genevan read their works “every day” while his father was at work, and, through them, he soon “developed a taste that was rare and perhaps unique for that age” (ibid). Rousseau’s reading preferences were certainly uncommon for his age, to say the least, for in the winter of 1719 he was a mere seven years-old. Nearly a decade later, he reread la

Bruyère at the prompting of Mme de Warens. Plutarch’s “Life of Aemilius Paulus” tells the story of its title figure whose life is characterized by his devotion to education and his independence of fortune. La Bruyére used the name Aemile as a tribute to Aemilius Paulus in his portrait of

Louis, Prince of Condé in his Characters.

While Shanks’ suggestion regarding the potential source of Emile’s name is certainly thought-provoking, and the theory coheres with the general presentation of the strategy of the pupil’s education throughout the Emile as one that establishes his independence from fortune, the precise significance of the young boy’s name nevertheless remains obscure. In the end, we cannot say for sure that Emile’s name stems from either Plutarch’s or la Bruyére’s similarly- named figures. Indeed, I would suggest that Shanks’ speculation about the origin of Emile’s is without basis because the boy’s fate is in no way explicitly tethered to the fate of Plutarch’s

26 Aemilius or la Bruyére’s Aemile. As I will emphasize throughout the remainder of this dissertation, Emile has no clear link to the past and he is unlike any other known human being, past or present. Unlike Julie, upon whom Rousseau confers the epithet “la nouvelle Héloïse” – an explicit reference to the story of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abelard, a tragic medieval tale of lust, love, and Christian renunciation that established an early model of the classical epistolary genre – Emile, by contrast, is sui generis. His name does not explicitly point to anybody else.

The young boy appears to represent a singular whole. Rousseau intends to present his pupil as an individual – but specifically as wholly new kind of individual who pursues the kind of life that has never been done or known before. Through Emile, Rousseau defines a new individual personal identity. We will soon see that the boy does not represent a nod to the past, as Shanks contends, but instead offers a forward glimpse into a hitherto concealed possible future for man.

Ultimately, the fact that Emile’s name cannot be clearly and definitively linked to a historical name or name type seems to suggest not only Rousseau’s break from earlier literary tradition, as

Ian Watt has proposed, but also Emile’s distinctive kind of individuality, which I will suggest is critical to his education.

While we are on the topic of characterization in the Emile, I wish to take a brief moment to consider the work’s character development, something that is generally considered an important part of any fictional piece. A common pitfall of philosophical fiction is its tendency to lack strong character development, which is to be expected since ideas are likely to take precedence over characters in a novel of ideas (Huxley 1928 [351], Logan et al. 2011 [111]).

Indeed, this difficulty is reflected in Rousseau’s novel-treatise, as Emile does not have much of what could be termed a deep inner life. As a result, he resembles what E. M. Forster (1927) has called a “flat character.” Forster argues that there are two general fictional character types: “We

27 may divide characters into flat and round.” A flat character is one that can be summed up in a single phrase. The focus is on one, two, or three facets of a man or woman as the most useful for understanding them. Nearly all of the characters depicted by Charles Dickens and H.G. Wells are

“as flat as a photograph.” By contrast, a round character is one that constantly brings in new sides of their character and is not tethered to simple qualities. According to Forster, “The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is flat pretending to be round. [A round character] has the incalculability of life about it – life within the pages of a book.” The example of a round character provided by Forster is Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park. Forster identifies a few advantages of depicting flat characters: “They are easily recognized whenever they come in” and

“are easily remembered by the reader afterwards. They remain in [the reader’s] mind as unalterable for the reason that they were not changed by circumstances.” The flat character type is bad in biography, but “in a novel it has its place: a novel that is all complex often requires flat people as well as round, and the outcome of their collisions parallels life more accurately.” For

Forster, “The part of the novel that is alive galvanizes the part that is not, and causes [flat] characters to jump about and speak in a convincing way.” For instance, with Dickens’ characters,

“nearly everyone can be summed up in a sentence, and yet there is this wonderful feeling of human depth. Probably the immense vitality of Dickens causes his characters to vibrate a little, so that they borrow his life and appear to lead one of their own...Part of the genius of Dickens is that he does use types and caricatures, people whom we recognize the instant they re-enter, and yet achieves effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow.” I would suggest that Emile is a flat character who never surprises us and can be summed up in a

28 single phrase: he is the natural man of civil society in every respect. The complexity of the ideas expressed in the Emile helps bring this simple character to life.25

To return to our discussion of the novelistic features of the Emile, while Rousseau’s novel-treatise certainly conforms to many of the common literary practices of the eighteenth century, this work cannot be defined by its conventionality. As I have already suggested in this introduction, the Emile is not your garden-variety novel, eighteenth-century or otherwise.

Indeed, Anthony Burgess (1970) has appropriately referred to the Emile as an “agent of change in language and thought.” As this dissertation will emphasize, the Emile defies many ordinary literary and philosophical standards and even tends to demonstrate an overall preference for novelty over customary practice.

While little attention has been paid to the specific kind of novel the Emile is, Northrop

Frye makes a rare attempt to demarcate its classification as a novel. In his seminal book,

Anatomy of Criticism (2000), Frye examines the broad category of fiction from the point of view of form and provides a literary framework by which to understand narrative structure. He argues that there are four strands binding all fictional works together: novel, confession, anatomy, and romance. He explicitly categorizes the Emile as an admixture of the traditional novel and the

“Menippean satire” or “Varronian satire,” which he anglicizes as “anatomy” after Robert

Burton’s encyclopedic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), considered by Frye to be “the greatest

Menippean satire in English” (ibid 9, 311). In other words, according to Frye, Rousseau’s Emile is a novel-anatomy. This would place it in the same literary family as Gulliver’s Travels or the

Alice in Wonderland books. Since these works seem quite different from the Emile, we ought to

25 Whether Emile is convincing is another issue entirely and is certainly up for debate. Unfortunately, that matter is beyond the purview of our topic of discussion.

29 ask ourselves what anatomy is as defined by Frye, how it differs from a straightforward novel, and whether Rousseau’s novel-treatise is indeed accurately categorized as a novel-anatomy.

Following Burton’s work, the defining characteristic of anatomy is dissection or analysis, particularly the various ways in which an author can dissect or analyze the object(s) of his or her satire. According to Frye, Menippean satire belongs to a literary tradition dating back to

Menippus, continuing through the Renaissance where “anatomy, of course, eventually begins to merge with the novel, producing various hybrids including the roman à clef ” and extending into the nineteenth century with more recent novelists such as Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll (ibid

312). Such works tend to concentrate on theme rather than plot, and they treat complex philosophical or intellectual issues. Anatomy “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes” (ibid 9). Human beings are “handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior” (ibid). According to Frye, characterization in anatomy is

“stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces for the ideas they represent” (ibid 9-10; cf. Bakhtin 1963 [118]). Novels that contain a strong element of anatomy

– such as those in the Menippean tradition – tend to be difficult to read and give the appearance that they are written by a careless hand, which typically leads to many readers’ confusion. These works depict “a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern...the appearance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader” (ibid 10). In the end, anatomy is a “purely moral type” that presents one of two types of ethical tales: either a frivolous

“adventure story” that is “pure fantasy” (e.g., the fairy tale) or “a serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other words a Utopia” (e.g., the Emile) (ibid). Ultimately, the

“form” through which the “attitude” of an anatomy is expressed establishes whether the satire is a fantasy or a utopia.

30 While Frye’s argument is bold, I wish to suggest that the Emile cannot be classified as a satirical novel. Where satire is characterized by its irony or sarcasm – indeed, “in satire, irony is militant,” as Frye tells us – by contrast, Rousseau’s novel treatise appears to be neither ironic nor sarcastic. In the Emile, human beings are not the objects of Rousseau’s contemptuous ridicule or humiliation, as they are in satire (ibid). Indeed, the “militant” irony and/or sarcasm that typify satire serve as the conduit by which a satirical author attacks the vices, foolishness, corruption and flaws of man and his values, tastes, and beliefs, but under the comical, over the top guise of his approval of them. While satire aims to expose problems and/or contradictions, it does not necessarily seek to solve them (Forbes 2010). Whereas Rousseau’s first and second discourses certainly lay bare the misfortunes of life in every known form of civil society, the Emile, by contrast, acts to “illuminate and give proper balance to Rousseau’s political philosophy,” for it presents one of Rousseau’s earliest attempts at offering an ostensible remedy for the grave ills he diagnosed in his first two publications (Introduction in Cassirer 1954 [12-13]).26 The explicit aim of the Emile is to provide a potential solution for the problems and contradictions posed by life in modern civil society. With the Emile Rousseau seeks not to satirically ridicule, humiliate, or denigrate man, but rather to begin the process of restoring humanity to health.

For the remainder of this dissertation, my objective will be to challenge several aspects of

Frye’s categorization of the Emile as a novel-anatomy (i.e., as a satire) and, in so doing, to clarify the kind of novel that I believe it actually is. In other words, this dissertation aims to interpret

Rousseau’s novel-treatise in such a way that clarifies the sum and substance of its narrative structure. In many ways, the Emile defies general categorization of the kind attempted by Frye

26 The Social Contract represents Rousseau’s other early attempt at providing a possible solution to the problems identified in the first discourses. Rousseau wrote The Social Contract and the Emile concurrently. The former was published about a month before the latter, April and May 1762, respectively.

31 and, in this regard, it arguably belongs to a class of its own. What is more, the boundaries that delineate genre conventions are variable and are continually being renegotiated by writers and readers. Over time, terminology evolves, new narrative structures are created, and existing genres develop or decay. Yet, even so, the value of undertaking the proposed enterprise of this dissertation obliges us to embark on this venture, for discerning the precise nature of the Emile can help us make sense of what we are reading; the task can allow us to more easily recognize the purpose of the text, its intended audience, the kind of response it requires, and so on.

Overview and Organization of the Analysis

In the chapters that follow, and in contrast to much of the existing scholarship, I will emphasize three major aspects of the novelistic dimension of the Emile: (1) its anti-utopian character, (2) its utilization of others’ novels to strengthen the bond between men and women, and (3) its emphasis on art as crucial to the proper formation of civilized man, for ordinary human development can no longer be surrendered to our spontaneous, irrational impulses and inclinations. To carry out my intended task, each subsequent chapter will investigate a different sub-theme:

1. The type and function of the novelistic structure of the Emile – or, Rousseau as a writer of a novel. 2. The use (and abuse) of novels in the Emile as part of Emile’s and Sophie’s shared literary education – or, Rousseau as an appropriator of a novel. 3. The fictional representation of Rousseau as the tutor in the Emile – or, Rousseau as a fictional character in a novel.

Accordingly, this dissertation is divided into three chapters, in a scheme of organization that I hope does some justice to Rousseau’s philosophy.

The first chapter, “The Emile as Anti-Utopia,” treats rather generally the literary framework of the hybrid novel-treatise Emile. It answers the question: what kind of novel is the

Emile? This matter is worth examining because the Emile was not originally written as a novel,

32 but rather as a more straightforward academic treatise. Why did Rousseau completely change the narrative form of the book midway through its first draft? I argue that the work’s novelistic element serves at least two primary functions that could not be achieved with a traditional treatise. First, it helps the reader to exercise his or her imagination so that he or she is able to visualize a natural civilized human, such as Emile. Because this fictional pupil will differ so dramatically from all actual eighteenth-century youths, and because no real-life historical figure has ever exemplified the natural life in civil society, Rousseau must call upon the reader to form a mental image of Emile in order to observe him. Second, the novelistic character of the book helps to make Emile more realistic. His naturalistic presentation personifies or objectifies

Rousseau’s otherwise abstract concept of nature. Ultimately, the fictional dimension of the Emile serves an anti-utopian purpose: it demonstrates that the natural man of civil society is not merely an abstraction or a chimera, but rather that he is achievable.

The next chapter, “The Shared Literary Education of Sophie and Emile: Rousseau’s

Appropriation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque,” offers an exploration of Rousseau’s usage of another writer’s novels within his own quasi-novel. It is puzzling that Rousseau uses novels as part of Emile’s and Sophie’s educations, not in the least because he explicitly censures them in the Emile. Nevertheless, François Fénelon’s Christian novel, Télémaque, plays a critical part in the pedagogical program deployed by Jean-Jacques the tutor. What is more, Fénelon’s novel stands out amongst the books used in the Emile because it is the only point of convergence between Sophie’s and Emile’s otherwise disparate pedagogical programs. I suggest that Emile’s and Sophie’s different experiences with Télémaque are what help bridge the gulf between the sexes and lead them to their unified end. I argue that Rousseau accomplishes this goal by radically repurposing Fénelon’s Télémaque for distinctly Rousseauian (that is to say, un-

33 Fénelonian) ends. Télémaque is used in two different manners that diverge from its initial intended purpose, in one way for Emile’s education, and in another way for Sophie’s instruction.

For Emile, Fénelon’s novel is used as a world travel guide that fosters his cosmopolitanism and teaches him to lose confidence in social and political institutions by providing him with an unpolitical understanding of freedom. For Sophie, Télémaque is used as a sexual education handbook. In the end, Rousseau appropriates Télémaque to teach Emile and Sophie two anti-

Fénelonian lessons: one that is anti-government (for Emile) and another that is pro-sexuality (for

Sophie). Through a discussion of these lessons, I demonstrate that Télémaque helps highlight the important unity between Emile and Sophie over and above the inherent division between men and women.

In the final chapter, “A governor! O what a sublime soul: Rousseau’s Fictional Self-

Portrayal as Jean-Jacques the Tutor,” we shift our focus away from Rousseau as a writer and appropriator of novels to Rousseau as a character within a novel. There, we will investigate the character of Jean-Jacques the tutor, who is a fictional self-representation of the real Rousseau.

While scholars have produced a great number of studies on Rousseau’s more explicitly autobiographical self-portraits, there is a notable dearth of research on his fictional self- representation as Emile’s instructor. Chapter Four seeks to fill this lacuna. While Jean-Jacques’ function throughout Emile’s education is multifold, I highlight two key aspects of his job as an educator: his relationship to nature and his role in Emile’s interpersonal relationships. I argue that, as Emile’s educator, he is first and foremost a creator who augments nature beyond its capacity to do so itself by regulating it. In doing this, Jean-Jacques is able to provide Emile with a plan that man needs but which is not supplied by nature. In the end, the explicit goal of Emile’s education is to make him happy. With Jean-Jacques, Rousseau paints an image of the

34 philosopher as modern civilized man’s indispensable guide to achieving happiness, without whom we would be directionless and purposeless.

A Note on Sources and Translations

Before concluding these prefatory remarks, I should mention some of the technical details. Throughout the dissertation, I cite both Rousseau’s works and secondary sources with in- text parenthesis for the purpose of minimizing the use of footnotes, which I often find distracting. References to Rousseau’s writings will use the abbreviations listed above in the

“Primary Source Citations.” As for the versions of each primary text I have chosen to cite, no translation of Rousseau’s works can do justice to the original. For this reason, I have developed my interpretation of Rousseau primarily by reading his works in the original French. But for the sake of readability and ease of finding cited passages, throughout this dissertation I primarily quote Rousseau in English. I have carefully chosen the translations I believe are the most faithful to the original, including, among others, those by Allan Bloom, Christopher Kelly, Victor

Gourevitch, and Roger Masters. I have indicated above which collections utilize these translations. If no translator is indicated, then the translation is my own. All translations of

Rousseau’s general correspondence and of any other text that do not yet have what is generally accepted to be a reliable English translation are also mine.

35 CHAPTER TWO The Emile as Anti-Utopia

“For a long while [my readers] have seen me in the land of chimeras. I always see them in the land of prejudices. [...] I know that they persist in imagining only what they see; and therefore they will take the young man whom I evoke to be an imaginary and fantastic being because he differs from those with whom they compare him. They do not stop to think that he must certainly differ from these young men, since he is raised quite differently, affected by quite contrary sentiments, and instructed quite otherwise from them; indeed, it would be much more surprising if he were to resemble them than to be such as I suppose him. This is not the man of man; it is the man of nature. Assuredly he should be very alien to their eyes” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Emile [253, emphasis added])

One fine day in late 1758, while living at Mont-Louis in Montmorency, Rousseau sat down to begin his Emile, the work that would eventually become his self-proclaimed “greatest,”

“worthiest and best book” (Dialogues CW I [23], Conf CW V [XI: 475, 480]; cf. Beaumont CW

IX [46-47, 29]).27 In it Rousseau conjures up an alternative world that parallels our own world and comes to life through an unusual dramatis personae: Emile the pupil, Jean-Jacques the tutor,

Sophie the love interest, and an assortment of minor figures who play small but important supporting roles in carrying out Jean-Jacques’ work. But the Emile did not begin its life with this cast of characters. In fact, its first draft – accessible to us as the posthumously published Favre

Manuscript, so named because of its editor Léopold Favre – looks remarkably different from the final version, and it contains few of the marks of greatness that characterize the Emile. The text underwent a dramatic metamorphosis over the course of its three-year composition: the Favre

27 This estimated timeline is based on Rousseau's statements in The Confessions in which he says that the Emile “cost” him “three years of labor” and that he began working on the book immediately following his completion of Julie (Conf CW V [VIII 324], X [432]).

36 Manuscript contains gaps that were later completed in the final version, passages that were eventually erased or abandoned, discrepancies between it and the published work as a result of later modifications, and marginal notes that show Rousseau’s early corrections and reflections.28

The Emile is notably much longer than the initial draft and it expands on many topics covered in the Manuscript, in addition to introducing new ones. The final text also depicts a total transformation of Rousseau’s presentation of a number of issues, including a dramatic shift from a materialist psychology (pronounced by Rousseau himself) to a metaphysical one (revised so that it is affirmed by the Savoyard Vicar instead, who emerges as quite different from

Rousseau).29 What is more, during the revision process, the Emile was restructured; most obviously, the contents of what now comprise Books I and II were originally more concise and were contained within a single book.30

But perhaps the most striking difference between the first draft of the Emile and its final version is that, during the editing process, Rousseau completely changed the book’s narrative structure. What began as a straightforward and rather dry academic treatise on education ended up as an unusual assemblage of disparate genres: the Emile is partly an academic discourse on politics, human nature, and child development, and partly a novel that traces a boy’s journey from his birth to his wedding day with guidance along each step of the way from his devoted tutor. By contrast, the Favre Manuscript contains no journey, no wedding day, no Sophie, no

Jean-Jacques, and Emile is nearly absent from the original draft. The young boy eventually makes his first appearance near the end of the Manuscript. Rousseau completed nearly three-

28 These four divergences between the Favre Manuscript and the Emile – the lacunae, abandoned passages, variations, and marginal notes – are the four principal ones identified by Favre himself in his description of the Manuscript (Favre 1912 [241-242]). 29 For a more complete elaboration of this topic, see John S. Spink’s analysis in OC IV [lxxi-lxxii, lxxix-lxxx]. 30 For a more extensive discussion of this issue, see Christopher Kelly’s Introduction to CW XIII [xxix].

37 quarters of the work before he decided to announce the presence of “our Emile” (Favre 110).

And, even then, in the space where Emile’s name appears in the Manuscript, Rousseau originally merely wrote in “pupil” as a placeholder (Favre 735 fn131). Shortly after introducing this student, Rousseau suddenly stopped working on this early draft, essentially mid-thought, and started over on what we now know as the Emile. To my knowledge, no other writing by

Rousseau underwent as dramatic a revision from first to final draft as did the Emile. In this regard, then, the Emile not only holds the distinction of being Rousseau’s self-acknowledged greatest work, but it is also unique for being the only writing that he modified so thoroughly from its initial conception.31

This raises the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question for Rousseau’s reader: why did he choose to rewrite the Emile as a book so drastically different from its initial version? What prompted Rousseau to cease his treatise mid-thought and do it all over again but as a quasi-novel instead? He could have taken any of “une infinité de routes,” so why did he change course and lead us down the particular strange “route” of the Emile (OC II [1243])? These questions form a subset of another, larger inquiry that has challenged readers since the work’s initial publication in 1762: how should we read the Emile? While Rousseau leaves us some clues on this matter by discussing numerous aspects of his creative writing process throughout his works (e.g., Conf CW

V [III: 95-96], OC II [1242-1247]), he never mentions the reason(s) behind his decision to completely redraft the Emile with a novelistic dimension. Thus, any effort to seek clarity on this matter is inevitably replete with challenges. Nevertheless, the importance of the task spurs us to make the attempt, for as John Spink states in the introduction to the Pléiade version of the Emile,

31 Like any writer worth his or her salt, Rousseau repeatedly revised all of his manuscripts to perfection. In The Confessions, he describes the process by which he transforms his confused vision into an orderly publication, as well as the disordered, messy state of his rough drafts (Confessions CW V [III: 95-96]). Even though Rousseau revised all his manuscripts, my point here is that none underwent as thorough a transformation as did the Emile.

38 “In the Favre Manuscript, the initial argument is much easier to follow than in the printed text: the outline of Rousseau's thought is much clearer and easier to grasp. The definitive writing is denser, richer, more detailed, more flexible, but, if we do not take into account the fundamental structure that reveals the first record, more schematic, rather stiff, we risk not grasping perfectly the intentions of the author” (OC IV [186]). Strangely, while many elements of Rousseau’s writings have tended to generate a wide array of incompatible (mis)understandings as to his intentions, a consensus of scholars appear to have settled on an ostensible explanation for the dramatic changes that occurred between the Favre Manuscript and the Emile.32

Peter Jimack (1960) has argued that the transformation from straightforward discourse to quasi-novel came about “more by accident than by design” and can be traced to Rousseau’s psychological afflictions. To him, Rousseau’s imagination ran overly wild as his pupil started to take shape and the narrative voice slowly started to become intertwined with that of the child’s imaginary tutor. As the line between the author and the tutor becomes ever more muddied,

Rousseau occasionally attempts to straighten out the narrative, such as when he interjects, “Here is how I went about it – I, that is to say, the man who speaks in this example” (Emile 141). This detail, together with alleged displays of Rousseau’s psychological infirmities, in Jimack’s view limits the coherence of the Emile. Joan DeJean (1984) follows Jimack’s reading and adds to it that the changes from first to final draft “culminate, not in the originally predicted Utopian situation, but at best in a supplemental pis aller, or at worst in a total negation of the original premise” (128). In her view, Rousseau’s allegedly unplanned revisions led him to produce a work that is, at best, far inferior to his original plan and, at worst, at odds with his initial vision.

Clifton Cherpack (1988) contends that the book is irrational. He asserts that even though the

32 Rousseau lamented that his writings tended to generate misunderstanding among his readers (e.g., Conf CW V [VIII: 326, IX: 342] Mountain CW IX [150], Beaumont CW IX, Dialogues CW IX [170]).

39 Emile has two distinct narrators, Rousseau had originally intended to have only one. Its dual narrator and double narrative form are the products of Rousseau’s inattentive “editorial adjustments” in his transition from the Favre Manuscript to the final text due to “lack of time”

(17-18, 22, 26). Jean-Louis Lecercle (1969) argues that Rousseau alternates between discursive and novelistic styles in the Emile simply to add variety to the text. Pierre Burgelin (1969 [Notes in OC IV]) suggests that the confusion resulting from the changes Rousseau made between the first and final drafts is attributable to the overwhelming force of his gift for creating fantastical stories. Patrick Coleman (1977) affirms that the novelistic dimension of the Emile indicates that it is an incomplete text. The Emile is simply a “prelude” to what Rousseau intended to be a complete novel, Émile et Sophie.33 He asserts that the literary element of the Emile was written into later drafts as a way for Rousseau to point the reader to the sequel.

My intention here is to introduce a fresh interpretation of the Emile that suggests its narrative structure is more coherent and more deliberate than interpreters have hitherto realized.

Despite the slight variations among the readings above, they all share one essential feature: each argues that the unusual narrative form of the Emile is merely a perfunctory, arbitrary stylistic choice that detracts from Rousseau’s ability to articulate a fully comprehensible teaching. In other words, they all observe the book’s apparent ambiguity or confusion and seek to resolve the complexity by ascribing a disposition to Rousseau that requires explaining away key elements of his discussion in an attempt to make the Emile more immediately intelligible. As a work that is partly academic, partly literary with no obvious link between these two styles, it does indeed give the impression that it oscillates between these two poles almost capriciously (cf. Frye 2000

[10]). I concede that, on the surface, the Emile certainly appears to be carelessly disordered. Yet,

33 Oddly enough, however, it is the sequel that is the fragmentary text, not Emile, which is complete.

40 the Rousseauian corpus as a whole and the Emile in particular are complicated, nuanced writings that Rousseau insists require great care and attention to detail to be properly understood (e.g.,

Emile 93, 112fn, Dialogues CW I [170]). I wish to suggest that Rousseau took every aspect of his writing very seriously – including and especially the narrative form of his works.34 He tells us in The Confessions that he would regularly write poetry because, even though he did not have great talent for it, it was a “rather good exercise” for learning to compose better, more elegant prose (CW V [IV: 132]). What is more, in 1745, four years before his great vision on the road to

Vincennes, Rousseau drafted a short essay titled “Idea of the Method in the Composition of a

Book” (OC II [1242-1247]) in which he carefully outlines the procedure for writing a book well.

In this piece, he describes a “skillful” book as one in which a

subtle analogy runs through most of the propositions one can make about one and the same subject, a hidden connection which escapes the vulgar Mind but which true genius always grasps. Once one has a hold of one end of this chain, one finds one’s way with marvelous ease and is utterly astonished that an infinite number of roads that seemed to have nothing in common, or that seemed to criss cross one another in a thousand different ways, yet successfully lead you by the surest and shortest way to the goal (ibid, emphasis added [1243]).35

In the case of the Emile, the “hidden connection” between its narrative structure and Rousseau’s teaching with regard to Emile’s education is one I believe scholars should scrutinize more carefully, as many contemporary interpretations of the Emile have suffered from insufficient attention to detail.

One of the most common misinterpretations of Emile’s fictional story has been scholars’ tendency to read it as a utopia (Walpole 1840, Gray 1900, Shklar 1966, 1969, 2001, Cherpack

34 For a compelling treatment of various aspects of Rousseau’s attitude toward authorship, especially as it relates to his decision against following the common eighteenth-century practice of publishing anonymously, see Kelly 2003. 35 Sincere thanks to Harvard for granting me access to the original manuscript of this essay, which is housed in their special collections and archives at Houghton Library. Also, cf. “Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes” OC III [106].

41 1988, Frye 2000, Lane 2009, Newell 2014, Mendham 2014). Yet, Rousseau himself repeatedly tells us, both in the Emile and elsewhere, that the work is not utopian. Rousseau’s candor about the non-chimerical nature of Emile’s story is a critical part of his teaching in the novel-treatise.

Properly understood, the Emile is not merely a fanciful tale about a fictional boy’s upbringing but a serious investigation into Rousseau’s understanding of nature, especially its place in a modern civilized context. The book leads us to the conclusion, I believe, that the fictional story of the Emile is anti-utopian – that Rousseau is as serious about his radical proposals for educational reform as he is about every other aspect of his analysis of human beings. I argue that

Emile’s fictional life renders the only truly natural life that is available for the civilized person who is a non-philosophic, non-citizen bourgeois; by contrast, civilized life as we observe it in reality is artificial and unnatural. Because modern man is limited by his prejudices, he is inclined to mistake Emile’s genuine nature for the unreal and to confuse civilization’s inauthenticity for the real. In light of this, the novelistic dimension of the Emile serves at least two primary functions. First, it helps the reader to exercise his or her imagination so that he or she is able to visualize a natural civilized human, such as Emile. Because this fictional pupil will differ so dramatically from all actual eighteenth-century youths, and because no real-life historical figure has ever exemplified the natural life in civil society, Rousseau must call upon the reader to form a mental image of Emile in order to observe him. Second, the novelistic character of the book adds a measure of realism to the deliberation of nature, which can more effectively engender the reader’s deeper commitment to the natural life. Emile’s naturalistic presentation personifies or objectifies Rousseau’s teachings about nature. By this I mean to say that Emile adds a human dimension to Rousseau’s otherwise abstract concept of nature. The purpose of the Emile is to demonstrate that the natural man of civil society is not merely an abstraction or a chimera, but

42 rather that he is achievable. Thus, he is depicted as a boy with common human features, such as those that any ordinary reader is also likely to possess. On the one hand Emile’s example highlights the vast dissimilarity between him and the reader: his naturalness serves as the benchmark against which we can measure our own inadequacy. But on the other hand, Emile’s naturalistic presentation underscores an important equivalence between him and the reader: his thorough ordinariness establishes a critical point of correlation between him and the (typical) individual, which thereby prompts one to recognize one’s own potential in him. As Rousseau himself says, “[Emile’s] education ought to serve as an example only for that of [his] kind”

(Emile 52). In the end, the reader and Emile share the same fundamental composition. The primary thing setting us apart from him is simply whether and how our faculties, capacities, and overall structure have been formed. What separates us from Emile is education. Or, to paraphrase

English Reformer John Bradford, the reader is meant to see Emile and think, “There but for the disgrace of my inadequate education, go I.”

In what follows, I will develop my argument in two main parts. Since the success of the

Emile hinges on the plausibility of Rousseau’s understanding of nature, I will first provide an account of his treatment of nature and describe its place within the project of Emile’s education.

Next, I will examine the development and purpose of the novelistic structure of the Emile. Here, we will explore the work’s anti-utopian character. We will then review relevant theories of fiction in order to determine what type of book the Emile is and to delineate the nature of the fiction in which Rousseau engages.

Rousseau’s Novel Philosophy of Nature

Rousseau first discovered the fundamental principle of his thought regarding nature one fortuitous day in the autumn of 1749. While traveling to visit his friend Denis Diderot, who was

43 incarcerated at the Vincennes fortress following his incendiary criticism of the 1748 Treaty of

Aachen, Rousseau whiled away the intervening time by idly glancing through The Mercury of

France. Flipping through its pages, he stumbled upon an announcement by the Academy of

Dijon for an essay competition. The theme of the contest dealt with the question regarding whether the development of the arts and sciences had improved or corrupted public morals.

Upon seeing the question posed by the Academy, in that single, seminal moment – otherwise known as the “Illumination of Vincennes” – Rousseau had an epiphany that marked the philosophical turn of his life. The sudden revelation, he claims, showed him “another universe” and transformed him into a “new man” (Conf VIII [294]). Akin to a modern-day Ponce de León in search of the mythical Fountain of Youth, Rousseau believed he had discovered something that countless individuals had sought throughout the ages, but which none had ever found: true human nature.

In his illumination, Rousseau hit upon a groundbreaking new answer to the fundamental philosophical question regarding the relationship between the individual and his larger community, or between the private and the public: man is naturally good and only in civil society does he become wicked. To analyze Rousseau is, I believe, to journey with him as he shepherds us through the particulars of his epoch-changing vision on the road to Vincennes. That is, the principal reason we study him is to accompany him on his profound, philanthropic quest to discover how human beings can be (re-)made good for themselves and for others, or to redress the ill-considered opinions men hold that cause them to proceed recklessly toward a life of unhappiness, inequality, and corruption (e.g., Emile 41; cf. Lanson 1903 [769]).

Little did Rousseau know that fateful day in 1749, but throughout the rest of his life, he would wield one of the most powerful pens in Europe. He used that influence to share his vision

44 of the new-found universe he had discovered so that others willing to make the serious effort to understand his philosophy could benefit from his insight and potentially begin their own deliberate and reasoned effort to recapture some semblance of man’s natural goodness.

Rousseau, therefore, essentially adopted the air of man’s self-appointed guide, without whom he believed civil society would remain lost.

Turning to the Emile, the unifying declaration about its eponymous pupil, “This is not the man of man; it is the man of nature,” presents this work as a reflection on nature and the possibility of its revival in modern civil society (Emile 253). Indeed, all of the major motifs treated in the Emile – love, art, science, imagination, knowledge, religion, etc. – are but illustrations or examinations of Rousseau’s theory of the relationship between human beings and nature, about the illusions we entertain about the natural world, about the alienation we currently experience as a result of our separation from nature, and about the development of our faculties relative to the proper preservation, and even enhancement, of our nature.

In the Emile, Rousseau’s conception of nature is on the line. It is where he puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak, to follow through on the statements he began to make in the First Discourse and articulated more fully in the Second Discourse by demonstrating the validity of his understanding of nature. Stated differently, whereas the Second Discourse is “the work in which he explores most radically nature as a question,” the Emile may be said to be the book in which he explores most radically nature as an answer (Grace 2019 [19]). As American novelist John Gardner has suggested about fiction writing, it is where “you take an abstract idea, your own or somebody else's, and then you imagine real characters in a real city in a real world and you put the characters through kind of a laboratory experiment testing the idea” (Harvey and

Gardner 1978 [73]). In this same vein, the Emile is where Rousseau “make[s] a test of his own

45 practice” to determine “whether he follows the progress of childhood and the movement natural to the human heart” (Emile 51). If the notion of nature that Rousseau first articulated in the

Second Discourse is unsound, then the entire educational project of the Emile is also, by necessity, untenable. This is so because the Emile purports to illustrate the education of the natural man of civil society. Emile will live according to nature and will thereby demonstrate that one can be healthy and whole within a civilized setting. The idea for such a project rests on a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of nature and man’s relation to it. Accordingly, Rousseau, in the Second Discourse, boldly challenges every understanding of nature that had been proposed throughout the two-thousand-year history of Western philosophy. Most notably, he argues that the Hobbesian notion of life as “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” does not describe the “Natural

Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery” (Hobbes 1994 [Ch. XIII]).

According to Rousseau, the entire early modern realist tradition had fundamentally misunderstood nature because they had mistaken the effects of history for that of nature. The source of man’s problems is not nature but history (see esp. SD Preface [124-125, 128],

Exordium [133], I [134,139, 151], II [173, 187-188]). Indeed, according to Rousseau, all earlier philosophers – ancient and modern alike – had all agreed that nature is somehow the source of human problems, and the most important function of society is its capacity to address those problems (SD Preface).36 Rousseau, by contrast, suggests this view fundamentally misapprehends the human situation. As the epigraph to the Emile states, “nature, having brought us forth sound, helps us if we wish to be improved” (Emile 31). Nature is not the source of our problems, but rather the wellspring of potential solutions to our problems (in a qualified sense, as we will soon see). Rousseau defends the goodness of nature, yet, at the same time, he also

36 Note that it is Rousseau who makes this declaration. This assertion may be up for debate would be a worthy topic for scholarly exploration.

46 radicalizes the modern philosophical tradition because his perception of nature introduces a novel set of complications that require the development of new solutions, one of which is offered in the Emile.

We cannot hope to understand the Emile – or any of Rousseau’s other works, for that matter – if we do not grasp his treatment of nature, for it is the central problem of his entire philosophy. To understand the story of the Emile requires us to understand Rousseau’s conception of nature. One of the fundamental premises of this dissertation is that the novelistic character of the Emile comprises an integral aspect of its philosophic content. Thus, an examination of Rousseau’s conception of nature is necessary for explaining the novelistic dimension of the Emile because, as I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, the substance of

Rousseau’s teaching regarding nature is directly connected to the literary mode of the Emile. In short, content and form in the Emile are inextricably linked. In order to understand this connection, we must begin by finding the meaning and coherence of the content of Rousseau’s philosophy – that is, by seeking to understand what he aims to teach us – before we are adequately equipped to provide a satisfactory and informed interpretation regarding how he presents that teaching and why.

Unfortunately, Rousseau’s conception of nature is arguably the most challenging aspect of his thought, so the task before us is no small one. The goal of Emile’s education, we are told,

“is the very same as that of nature” (ibid 38). In other words, Rousseau depicts the good education as an undertaking that occurs in harmony with nature. The two appear mutually supportive. It is as though Emile’s education and nature are riding a tandem bicycle in perfect unison toward a shared end. But what is that shared end? And what, exactly, is nature? And what is its place in Emile’s education? Rousseau readily admits the ambiguity of the way he uses the

47 term “nature,” which he says, “perhaps...has too vague a sense” (ibid 39). As Ronald Grimsley

(1978) has observed, Rousseau “constantly speaks of ‘nature’ as though it were a simple, almost self-evident notion, but as soon as his reader tries to understand its precise function in the many and varied contexts in which it is used, he may be unable to arrive at a clear and consistent comprehension of its meaning” (225). In short, Rousseau’s understanding of nature requires explanation. Given the centrality of nature in the Emile, as well as its ambiguous treatment throughout the Rousseauian corpus, it is worth taking the time here to delineate the problem of nature for Rousseau and to provide an account of its place in Emile’s upbringing. My purpose here is not to introduce a new interpretation of Rousseau’s conception of nature but to clarify my position on this matter with special reference to the secondary literature. Doing this will serve the function of providing the essential framework of my argument that will allow me to better fulfill the chief aim of this chapter: to elucidate a new evaluation of the function of the novelistic dimension of the Emile.

In order to understand what nature is and its place in the project of the Emile, it is perhaps most helpful to begin by establishing what Rousseau’s conception of nature is not: it describes neither a prospective nor a retrospective degree of human development. What do I mean by this?

First, Rousseau’s thought differs most obviously from that of the ancient thinkers in that he proposes a distinctly non-teleological notion of nature. Classical thought is based on the teleological notion of perfection. The ancient philosophers – namely Plato and Aristotle – assert the natural existence of an end toward which the life of man inherently points. By this standard, then, human life has a natural purpose and its achievement culminates in the highest good for man. This goal determines the correct path a person must take in order to transform his existence from one of mere life to the good life. Perfection is exceedingly difficult to achieve – to the point

48 of being nearly impossible – and is the product of a lifetime of habituation and great exertion.

While nature always strives to reach its perfection, it generally tends to fall short of success. It comes closest only in the rarest of cases, such as the life exemplified by Socrates.

For Rousseau, by contrast, there is no such natural teleological perfection of the species.

Whereas the ancient tradition had defined human beings in terms of an end goal of perfection – which establishes the permanent standard of goodness – Rousseau defines “the specific characteristic of the human species” as the faculty of perfectibility – which describes a capacity for adaptation, without any internal impulsion toward any specific kind of change (SD Footnote

X [208], I [141]).37 Thus, unlike the concept of perfection, perfectibility does not imply any particular prospective degree of development. According to Rousseau, the difference between primitive man and civil man is merely the result of “the singular and fortuitous concatenation of circumstances” (SD I [139]). The human species has developed over time as a result of a series of rational responses men made within the limited horizon of human foresight to the introduction of new environmental stimuli that emerged throughout the haphazard march of history.38 We – the maldeveloped creatures that we are – are the byproduct of the whims of history. Primitive man adapted to his particular environment to survive to the end of the day, but his behavior was not guided by any consideration or design for tomorrow or for the day after that. Indeed, he could not have foreseen the long-term results of his actions due to his inadequate foresight, his lack of experience, and, perhaps as Leo Strauss suggests, the absence of philosophy or fully actualized reason or complete humanity (Strauss 1953 [273]). Rousseau explicitly tells us that

37 Unfortunately, here we can provide only a brief summary of Rousseau’s notion of perfectibility. For a more detailed introduction to the concept, see Leo Strauss’ lectures on Rousseau, delivered in Autumn 1962. These lectures are available as a series of recordings and as a typed transcript online through multiple sources, including the website for The Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. 38 It is critical to recognize that he emphatically does not assign rationality to history, and it is therefore inappropriate to speak of a “historical process” when discussing Rousseau’s philosophy.

49 this early man had “no idea of the future, however near it may be” (Second I [143]). He could not plan ahead because “foresight was nothing to [him]” and “far from being concerned with a distant future, [he] did not even give thought to the next day” (Second II [163], cf. ibid [164,

169, 173]). With primitive man, “only present inconveniences were noticed” (SD II [175]). Thus, man today is the consequence of a long succession of adjustments that his species has had to make to conform to its ever-changing environment and survive. While human beings possess the capacity to develop their higher faculties by nature, there was no natural inevitability of their actualization. That is, man’s potential to develop his faculties is natural, but the drive to actualize them is not. Rousseau’s state of nature simply describes the condition during which our faculties were least developed, and over time they have become increasingly actualized.

Therefore, we “ought to judge [savage man] with less pride” because our differences are a matter of chance not a consequence of nature (SD I [150]). Indeed, it is even quite possible that our primitive forebears might have led happier lives – or at least less miserable ones – than we do today (SD Exordium [133], I [137-138, 141, 150] II [165-167, 172-188]). Because human beings are incapable of desiring more than they know, and because everything man knows is necessarily limited by the scope of his current desires, Rousseau asserts that no period of human development can possibly point beyond itself toward any subsequent phase of expansion (e.g.,

SD I [142-143], Emile 80-81). In other words, for Rousseau, the primitive man of the state of nature cannot be considered an incomplete creature with an internal drive to make himself whole and perfect. Ultimately, because life in the state of nature was generally characterized by equilibrium, primitive man was not anxious or distressed about who he was; consequently, he would have been perfectly satisfied to remain eternally primitive if he had been given the opportunity to remain so, if his self-preservation had not depended on his adaptation. It is thus

50 that Rousseau provides a non-teleological understanding of the human faculties, in which their development is a result of historical circumstance, not of a natural inclination. The critical mistake of the ancient thinkers, according to Rousseau, is that they had presumed that human beings possess an inherent drive or desire for ever greater development.

Yet, while Rousseau presents a decidedly non-teleological notion of nature and human development, it is equally important to recognize that he does not simply equate the natural with the original. Rousseau’s descriptions of the state of nature can confuse readers and lead them to incorrectly infer that the primitive constitutes Rousseau’s new concept of nature. That is, one can easily make the mistake of taking Rousseau’s notion of nature to be a descriptor for a state of pre-development as opposed to one of teleological development – or as a type of “reverse teleology.” But, as with every element of Rousseau’s thought, it is not that simple. In the Second

Discourse, nature denotes origins and is depicted as incompatible with all forms of social development. Yet, in the Emile, nature describes a specific kind of social advancement. In one sense, nature for Rousseau certainly signifies origins, as indeed it does in the Second Discourse.

But given its varying usage across Rousseau’s works, nature must also mean something more than origins. Rousseau’s writings are rife with complicated paradoxes, but perhaps one of the most puzzling of these is the apparently contradictory idea that Emile receives an “education founded by nature” to mold him into the “natural man living in the state of society” or “a savage who must inhabit cities” (Emile 313, Favre 114, 133; cf. Emile 205, 253, 393, 406, 411, Favre

154).39 My wording here is carefully chosen. I specify that Emile’s status as the natural civilized

39 It cannot be denied that Rousseau’s writings are full of paradoxes and contradictions; he admits as much himself (e.g., Emile 93, 108n., 113; he also, contradictorily, denies that he contradicts himself, e.g., Emile 230, 408). See also Strauss 1947 [463] and Salkever 1977.

51 man is apparently contradictory because, in what follows, I hope to demonstrate that it is actually non-contradictory.

On the face of it, what I am suggesting might itself seem contradictory, as Rousseau clearly and consistently presents the social order as being “at every point contrary to nature”

(Beaumont 52). In the Second Discourse, Rousseau depicts nature and convention as diametrically opposed, and he says elsewhere that all the “vices of man and all the ills of society” are explained by the conventional social order’s “tyranny” over nature (ibid). What is more, education is itself a convention that leads us away from our natural condition of ignorance

(Emile 61-62, 134, 171, 178, 219, SD I [157]). An education is the conventional form of human development that prepares a man for a particular way of life. It is a social convention intended to produce a conventional man fit for his specific society and its specific conventions. To educate and to be educated is thus to alienate oneself from nature, strictly speaking. Yet, whereas the

Second Discourse and other works represent nature and society as simply incompatible, in the

Emile Rousseau moderates his stance and explores the feasibility of producing a man who lives a

“natural” life in civil society. That is, he considers the possibility of a social life conformable to nature. Nature and society, then, are not inherently contradictory. In fact, Emile’s gregariousness is a fundamental component of his naturalness. The implication of Rousseau’s investigation in the Emile is that nature does not necessarily inhibit the well-balanced development of our more advanced faculties, so it is at least theoretically possible to form the natural civilized man such as

Emile will be.

Yet, Emile’s naturalness must certainly be of a different variety than that of primitive man. The original state of nature was undeveloped, and primitive natural man was a simple creature who was swayed by simple self-preservation (e.g., SD I [134, 140], II [161], Strauss

52 1953 [271], 1989 [90]). Emile, by contrast, will be a wholly developed human. As a result, despite the young boy’s ordinary intelligence by modern civilized standards, he will be far more complex than his ancient forebears, and his behavior must be guided by much more than simple self-preservation. We are explicitly told that the “object [of Emile’s education] is not, for all that, to make him a savage and to relegate him to the depths of the woods” (Emile 255). And the

“same man who ought to remain stupid in the forests ought to become reasonable and sensible in the cities” (ibid 255). After all, there is a “great difference between the natural man living in the state of nature and the natural man living in the state of society” so one “must not confound what is natural in the savage state with what is natural in the civil state” (ibid 205, 406, cf. Favre 133,

SD I [138], II [187]). The accidental necessity that had compelled primitive man to leave the state of nature and establish society has altered his physical and psychological constitutions in such a manner as to permanently deprive him of the capacity to return to that pre-developed state.

Thus, nature can only move in one direction: forward. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau paints quite a bleak picture of the future for human beings. He affirms that the state of nature’s attractiveness to us should function as “Praise of [our] earliest forebears, the criticism of [our] contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the misfortune to live after [us]” (SD

Exordium [133]). Yet, any sentimental longing we may have for the past is futile. Rousseau makes it explicitly clear that a simple return to the primitive state of nature is out of the question, as it is both impossible and undesirable (e.g., Emile 454, Favre 5, 122-123). As Leo Strauss

(1953) has observed, if the state of nature is one of pre-development “it is absurd to go back to

53 the state of nature in order to find in it the norm for [developed] man” (274).40 According to

Rousseau himself, “Human nature does not go backwards, and one can never return to the times of innocence and equality when one has left them” (Dialogues II [213]). Because “the Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age” and “each age, each condition of life, has its suitable perfection,” it is necessary to recognize that in our present age “civil life is necessary” – a statement Rousseau quietly sneaks in at the end of the Emile – and “we can no longer do without the institutions that cause our misfortunes. The man of [the state of] nature has disappeared, never to return” (SD II [186], Emile 158, 454, Favre 5). So, if Emile is to be a

“savage,” he must be one who necessarily differs significantly from his primitive forebears of the remote past, for the boy will be properly civilized, socialized, and educated. Correctly understood, Rousseauian nostalgia is not a kind of “homesickness” for the past, which is irrecoverable, but rather an intense desire to escape from the “home” in which we currently reside to someplace else.41 In the version of nature that Rousseau champions in the Emile, it is clearly not one that is primitive or uncultivated. Rather, Emile will embody a refined, domesticated manifestation of nature – one that is closer to a carefully tended garden than to the untamed wilderness.

Above, we asserted that primitive man was guided by his concern for self-preservation.

Rousseau indicates that the desire to preserve oneself proceeds from the blissful experience of the sentiment of one’s existence, an inherent love of living which is good (esp. SD I [143]). The term describes a positive love of life that is experienced by all sentient creatures at all times (see

40 Strauss incorrectly asserts that Rousseau’s “state of nature is subhuman” (1953 [274]). To mistake the state of nature for one of sub-humanity is to fundamentally misapprehend Rousseau’s conception of the human. It is critical to grasp that natural man is no more subhuman than civilized man is superhuman. 41 At certain points, Rousseau utilizes the home as a metaphor for life. As one example, he says, “sometimes we must take an interest in the house in which we live even though it does not belong to us” (d’Alembert 42).

54 esp. Reveries CW VIII [Book V], SD I [143], Emile 42).42 Primitive man strived to stay alive because his experience of the simple act of living was so thoroughly enjoyable. He was attached to life by an intense love of life. The sentiment of existence was the exclusive and purest sensation felt by the man who inhabited the state of nature. It was the natural, self-supporting, self-reliant core of man’s happiness in the original condition. Unfortunately, the fullest experience of this sentiment of existence is no longer accessible to most human beings. Modern man has a completely different experience of life. Civilized human beings are miserable; they have an aversion to their specific way of life, which is unpleasant. For Rousseau, the act of living itself is depicted as a perennially positive experience, but life in modern civil society is a distinctly negative phenomenon. This remarkable and contradictory sensation that Rousseau implicitly depicts in civilized man surely magnifies the disunity in his soul, not to mention the sentimentality he inevitably feels for early man’s primitive way of life in the state of nature.

Where primitive man’s original inclination was his desire to exist, civilized man is torn between two warring inclinations: an antipathy toward the typical pattern of human behavior in life that arises in civil society and an intrinsic attachment to life itself that exists by nature. In short, one loves life itself but hates one’s way of life.

Emile’s nature will be evaluated, in large part, on the basis of its capacity to fulfill the fundamental objective of man’s original disposition: the intense love of life, the experience of living a life that is most “felt” (Emile 42; cf. 61, 270). Rousseau thus redefines the notion of “the good life” in terms of mere life as opposed to a lofty, nearly impossible eudaimonic notion of a

42 This is not the place to conduct a thorough examination of this concept. For a particularly incisive study of Rousseau’s account of the sentiment of existence, I recommend reading Eve Grace 2001b. Rousseau did not coin the term “sentiment of existence,” the first appearance of which occurs in Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience.” Georges Poulet (1980) provides a helpful review of the earliest uses of the term as they compare to Rousseau’s usage.

55 life devoted to virtue, such as the one the classical thinkers had conceived. But it is crucial to recognize that Rousseau’s new understanding of the life well lived is not defined by simple, mechanical or vegetable existence. It is perhaps most accurately described as “mere life plus.”

As Rousseau says, “To live is not to breath; it is to act; it is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves which give us the sentiment of our existence”

(ibid). It is the feeling of one’s completeness that comes from an individual’s awareness that he or she is fully exercising all of his- or herself. It is the most intense, most satisfying fulfillment that comes with the feeling that one is drinking deeply from the cup of life. This feeling signals the most complete appropriation and internalization of a being’s own unique existence, the experience of the most complete pleasure of one’s whole being. Properly understood, the distinction that Rousseau makes between the primitive natural man and the civilized natural man is not merely with regard to their respective starting points; it is also a matter of difference in their end points. Emile’s naturalness will ultimately be superior to that of the primitive savage because he will enjoy his existence more. The natural man of civil society illustrates the creation of a peak of nature, in which man’s sentiment of his present existence is most fully felt as a consequence of the most complete development of his higher faculties. Emile’s education exemplifies how the high or the human develops out of or is informed by the low or the primitive without the former being reduced to the latter.

In the end, the “natural man” is “Rousseau’s ultimate standard” (Strauss 1953 [263]). I here follow the definition of the natural provided by Leo Strauss in his classic book, Natural

Right and History (1953): “the closest approximation to the state of nature which is possible on the level of humanity” (282). I also adhere to Eve Grace’s (1996) insightful observations regarding the contingent character of nature for Rousseau: “If perfectibility is the essential

56 human characteristic, then no stage of development is any more natural than any other; human nature is actual or present ‘nature’ [...] The human animal in the state of nature is a seed which can grow into a multiplicity of different plants in response to historically diverse conditions”

(14). Hence, the history of man can be understood as the progressive replacement of his primary

“nature” by subsequent “nature(s).” Even though Rousseau often speaks in vaguely teleological terms, “human nature has no end because no stage of ‘modifications’ points necessarily to a full and final stage of development beyond itself; each stage results from external, rather than internal, causes” (ibid). Eventually, these various “natures” can be evaluated by looking to their origin to determine “the degree to which they fulfill the primary goal of our original inclinations: the ‘desire to exist’” or the blissful sentiment of our existence (ibid 15). While we have already established that a return to the primitive state of nature is both impossible and undesirable for modern civilized man who has developed his higher faculties, we must aim to come as close in quality to our original condition as is possible in our current stage of development. As Rousseau explicitly states, before we are corrupted by our heightened faculties and enlightenment, there exists what he calls in us nature (Emile 39). The fundamental vindication of the state of nature is to be found in its near absence of pathologies – in primitive man’s wholeness and unity of soul.

The natural is defined in terms of the utmost independence or self-sufficiency of the individual that is possible. Rousseau tells us that the primitive man of the state of nature was a “numerical unity, the absolute whole which is relative to itself or to its kind” who lived “entirely for himself” and (Emile 39). He was a single whole. In other words, natural man’s naturalness is measured in terms of his “oneness.” Civil or unnatural man, by contrast, “is only a fractional unity dependent on the denominator; his value is determined by his relation to the whole, which is the social body” (ibid 40). He is merely a part of the whole. Where nature reveals unity or

57 “oneness,” civil society discloses inconstancy and division (esp. SD I [136]). Modern man is complex and disharmonious, and his life is marked by a multitude of structural disorders and defects. As a result, civilized man is fragmented and incomplete. Thus, Rousseau’s reconception of nature denotes a new understanding of it: the “natural” is characterized by wholeness, unity, uniformity, and simplicity (Emile 39-41, SD I [136, 138, 146, 158], II [166-167, 188]). As the epigraph for the Second Discourse indicates, “Not in corrupt things but in those which are well ordered in accordance with nature, should one consider that which is natural” (SD CW III [1,

13]). By “wholeness” I mean “the absence of internal conflict or division” or an “equilibrium between desires and duty” (Schaeffer 1998 [608]).43 Ultimately, Emile’s education will be

“natural” in that it will seek to preserve a life free of pathologies, such as that which characterized life in the original state of nature. Like the primitive natural man, Emile will be “a man raised uniquely for himself” (Emile 41). By this new understanding of nature, Emile will be natural in the sense that his development will allow him to retain his natural unity and uniformity of soul; he will remain as independent and self-sufficient as is feasible within the modern civilized context.44 This, then, is the key: for Rousseau, wholeness, unity, and self-sufficiency are what define a positive conception of nature. The preservation of the fundamental entirety of man is the primary objective of the Emile. Emile’s education will arrange circumstances so that his faculties are allowed to develop in such a way as to retain his natural unity of soul at each and

43 Schaeffer (1998) actually challenges the ubiquitous view that Rousseau is committed to wholeness as an ideal. In particular she questions whether the family is actually one of Rousseau’s models of wholeness. While I still do believe that wholeness is Rousseau’s ideal, Schaeffer’s argument is thoughtful and though-provoking. It is worth reading in its entirety. 44 Except, perhaps, for his initial dependence on the tutor (Schaeffer 2002) and, later, on Sophie’s opinions.

58 every point along the timeline of his growth. His life will be characterized by constancy and unity, which, as we noted above, once typified life in the state of nature.45

This, then, is precisely how Jean-Jacques can raise Emile to be the “man of nature”

“without departing from nature’s law,” even though his pupil otherwise looks nothing like the primitive man of the state of nature (ibid 253, 317; cf. 393, 411). The fundamental point of convergence between Emile – the natural man of civil society – and primitive man – the natural man of pre-civilization – is that both are non-contradictory, whole beings whose lives are uniform and whose souls impart unity. Each is entirely “oneself and always one” (ibid 40). Each is a harmonious “numerical unity” whose value is independent of his relation to the whole species; neither cares anything for the opinions – the praise and the blame – of other men and the behavior of both is directed only by their impulses and their reason. By this new standard, humans can be just as whole and harmonious in eighteenth-century France or even in twenty- first-century North America as they once were in the pre-civilized jungles – at least in principle.

A particular individual can also exhibit complete wholeness or naturalness at any stage of his or her life, whether in infancy, in early adulthood, or in one’s advanced years. Naturalness does not denote a peak stage of advanced development or a primitive level of pre-development; the decisive Rousseauian measure of naturalness is now the proper establishment and maintenance of one’s wholeness and unity of soul in each phase of life.

Education, Rousseau asserts, “is certainly only habit” and is “limited to the habits conformable to nature” (Emile 39). Such habits are those that do not stifle, corrupt, or contradict

45 Yet, this unity and uniformity will manifest itself quite differently in civil society. In the Emile, the uniform and constant life of the bourgeois non-citizen turns out to be the domestic life. As Rousseau himself asserts, “If the uniformity of a steady [family] life at first appears boring, upon taking a better look one finds, on the contrary, that the sweetest habit of soul consists in a moderation of enjoyment which leaves little opening for desire and disgust” (Emile 229-230).

59 our natural wholeness. Stated differently, Rousseau’s definition signifies that, among the gamut of conventional behaviors and acquired faculties that man did not practice or possess in the original state of nature, all that support the maintenance of man as a “numerical unity” qualify as

“natural” in the project of the Emile. Such practices are what he later refers to as “good habits” and “true habits” (ibid 144, 432). Thus, ultimately what constitutes Emile’s “nature” is best understood as a blend. It is an admixture of certain original characteristics that we have possessed since the beginning and newer conventional traits that we have acquired along the way

– both of which must be developed in harmony with each other to support the preservation of our soul’s unity. It is critical to recognize that Emile will not be any more or less natural than the first men. For Rousseau, a man may be classified as “natural” no matter how much his higher faculties have developed if – and the “if” is decisive here – if those faculties have evolved in accordance with his natural wholeness. In other words, under Rousseau’s new definition of nature, “natural” describes a condition of symmetry and harmony between one’s higher faculties and man’s original unity of soul. In Rousseau’s own words, nature has “no fixed point that cannot be moved ahead or back” (Emile 317). By this, I take him to mean that at any given time there exists a kind of spectrum of nature, along which there is a small range of acceptable options considered “natural” and these are surrounded on either side by “unnatural” deviations. The habits one forms must not be allowed to add new unnatural needs to the natural ones (ibid 63,

213). The goal of a good education is “to prevent social man from being totally artificial” (ibid

317). This represents a negative endeavor: the tutor will not strive to have his pupil achieve a lofty standard of perfect naturalness but will instead aim to inhibit the formation of complete artificiality. Emile’s education will build him up to achieve the desired unity of soul, but what the boy truly needs, he already possesses intrinsically. Jean-Jacques’ task will be to protect his

60 pupil’s organic wholeness to prevent it from deteriorating. For the time being, given what we now know about nature, let us delve into our examination of the purpose of the fictional dimension of the Emile, the book in which Rousseau cultivates his understanding of nature and puts it to the test by bringing it to life via a fictional pupil. In the Emile Rousseau aims to demonstrate that only his unique understanding of nature can provide a satisfactory account of what human beings truly are.

The Emile: Rousseau’s Anti-Utopia

Among readers of the Emile, from the eighteenth century to today, one of the most prevalent interpretations is that the work is utopian or chimerical. Eighteenth-century English poet Thomas Gray stated, “it abounds with [Rousseau’s] usual glorious absurdity, [and] his general scheme of education is an impractical chimera” (Gray 1900 [Letter to Thomas Wharton,

5 August 1763]). In the same year, Rousseau’s critic Thomas Heinrich Samuel Formey complained, “Here the chimera of the project on which this work turns becomes manifest…[Rousseau] does an act of creation rather than of invention, and one can no longer continue reading his work except based on a principle of curiosity and amusement, as one reads

Utopia and other imaginary republics” (1763 [35]). In the following century, Horace Walpole,

Fourth Earl of Orford, identified the Emile with “such epithets as ‘chimeras’ and ‘reveries of fancy’” (Walpole 1840 [Letter to H. S. Conway, 28 September 1762]). Closer to our time,

Clifton Cherpack (1988) has stated, “Rousseau seems to be suggesting that Emile is not a treatise, not a history, and definitely not a novel, but rather a kind of utopia. In fact, it is a kind of utopia that has a generic identity and a history of its own” (28). Melissa Lane (2009) has affirmed, “Rousseau’s various models fit the standard utopian tradition whereby only a reformed society (even if it is only a society of two, as in Emile) can produce a good and free person”

61 (341). Ted Newell (2014) contends, “Emile, Rousseau’s educational novel, is a progressive utopian presentation” (chapter abstract). Denise Schaeffer (2014) has labeled Emile “a chimera.”

Northrup Frye (2000) suggests that the Emile belongs to a moral literary tradition that depicts a

“serious vision of society as a single intellectual pattern, in other words a Utopia” (10). Matthew

Mendham (2014) declares, “Rousseau offers his rustic, domestic utopia most clearly in works such as Emile and Julie” (51). Joan DeJean (1984) asserts that the “union between teacher and student is Utopian not only in intensity but in duration as well,” for “under the terms of the contract that binds them together, the limits of their lives will be conterminous with those of the pedagogical enterprise” (138-139).

Among contemporary scholars, the most influential theoretical basis for understanding the Emile as utopian has been provided by renowned Rousseau scholar Judith Shklar (1966,

1969, 2001). Indeed, a number of readers who believe the work to be a utopia explicitly acknowledge their debt to Shklar (e.g., Lane 2009, Mendham 2014). In her seminal article,

“Rousseau's Two Models: Sparta and the Age of Gold” (1966), Shklar argues that “Rousseau was the last of the classical utopists,” among which she also counts Sir Thomas More, author of

De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (1516), more commonly known simply as Utopia (26). Shklar contends that utopias generally depict “genuine portraits of the human heart, but they [are] not photographs of actual [i.e., realistic or possible] people” (31). With regard to Rousseau’s works specifically, she seeks to correct existing academic interpretations by arguing that the Rousseauian corpus presents two distinct utopian models, not one as earlier scholars had suggested. She asserts that “one model was a Spartan city, the other a tranquil household, and the two were meant to stand in polar opposition to each other” (28).46 While the

46 Shklar’s article examines the relationship between Rousseau’s alleged two-model approach alongside that of François Fénelon. For a treatment of this aspect of her discussion, see Chapter Three of this dissertation.

62 former is depicted in Rousseau’s civic writings, such as The Social Contract, the latter model is portrayed in his domestic works, namely Julie and Emile. If we confine ourselves to the parts of

Shklar’s interpretation that are directly relevant to our present discussion, according to her,

Rousseau’s presentation of the ideal family in the Emile “is a utopia, not a plausible plan of action” (ibid 41). In other words, “the model of simplicity is no more available to actual men than the civic one. Both should be contemplated and sought, but neither can be attained” (ibid

42). Ultimately, Shklar portrays Rousseau as a kind of despondent utopian who was acutely pessimistic about the possibility of moral reform in civil society and who could merely “draw a map of the worlds that might be, but that never were or would be” (Shklar 1969 [32]).

I here wish to argue that the interpretation which suggests the Emile is utopian is fundamentally unsound. It is untenable for at least three reasons. First, utopias depict non- existent, imagined communities or societies. In fact, the term “utopia,” coined in the sixteenth century by More in his book of the same name, is based on the Ancient Greek prefix “οὐ-”

(meaning “not” or “no”), “τόπος” (meaning “place”), and the suffix “-ία” (which is typical of toponyms). Thus, the word literally means “no place” or “nowhere,” and it designates an imaginary location or state of things. According to Ernst Cassirer’s widely-cited “An Essay on

Man” (1977), “A Utopia is not a portrait of the real world, or of the actual political or social order. It exists at no moment of time and at no point in space; it is a ‘nowhere’” (85). One of the chief problems with describing the Emile as a utopia is that, unlike More’s Utopia which depicts an imaginary island society, Rousseau’s work does not create a new or fanciful society; properly understood, it creates a new human type who lives within a very real existing society: eighteenth- century France. The Emile depicts what can only be described as an alternate reality that co-

63 exists with Rousseau’s eighteenth-century reality.47 The world that Emile and his tutor inhabit is a variant of Rousseau’s own actual world, with a significant degree of overlap between the two.

For instance, Emile roams the large and small cities and regions of eighteenth-century Europe –

Paris, London, Galicia, Madrid, Geneva, Montmorency, and more – where he learns their languages, and he eventually chooses to settle down with Sophie in a small village somewhere in the French countryside (Emile 467, 471, 473, 474). Thus, it is incorrect to refer to the Emile as a utopia, in the first place, because its story transpires in a real setting, not an invented one. As we will see below, the non-fictional backdrop of the Emile is crucial to understanding the purpose of its fictional dimension.

It bears reminding that no written work can ever depict an “actually real” setting, as all written depictions of real settings are in some way fictionalized. Even though the novel is a depiction of society, and must be recognizable as such, it is neither intended to be a documentary resource for cultural history nor a perfectly historically accurate chronicle of events. As E. M.

Forster (1927) has stated, “the function of the novelist is to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history” (72). Or, as Martha Nussbaum (1990) has observed, “Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something” (5; cf. James 1934 [8-

9], Frye 2000 [5]). In other words, every piece of writing is an interpretation of an aspect of the world and, as such, it is necessarily a stylized portrayal of the world. Where the historian records,

47 While it may seem a minor point, my decision to refer to Emile’s world as an alternate universe/reality, as opposed to a parallel universe/reality, is deliberate. The term “parallel universe” either does not imply a relationship to reality, or it implies a lack of a relationship. A parallel universe can be subject to laws that differ from our own reality. By contrast, alternate reality connotes the depiction of a variant of our own world that is subject to the same laws and limitations. By choosing to refer to the Emile as an alternate reality, I am implying that there is a relationship between his world and ours. This relationship is vital for understanding the project of the book. For a comparison of the application of these terms in physics and in narrative, which clarifies my point further, see Ryan 2006.

64 the novelist creates or imitates (Forster 1927 [74]). That said, not all fictional settings are utopias. But all utopias, by the very definition of the word, necessarily depict wholly imagined settings. They are, quite literally, u topos – no place, or a non-existent society. Based on the definition of the word utopia, the presentation of an existent or non-imagined setting suffices to disqualify a work from being a utopia. The Emile, by depicting a real, non-imagined setting

(even if it is fictionalized in that it includes two characters who have never existed), presents a direct contradiction of the literal, precise meaning of the word “utopia,” thereby making it ineligible for utopian status. The crucial distinction is that I can actually step foot in the general setting of the Emile, even if Emile and Jean-Jacques never actually existed there. By contrast, it would be impossible for anyone to visit the setting of Utopia because it has never existed. It is in this sense that I mean to say that the setting of the Emile is real.

Second, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a utopia is “an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect” (emphasis added).48 Utopias traditionally depict perfection – a perfect place that has been designed so that there are no problems, or one that is intended to be viewed as considerably better than contemporary society (Sargent 2005). Indeed, the term utopia is also associated with a second meaning based on the Ancient Greek prefix “εὐ-

” (meaning “good”). Thus, the word can also be translated as “the good place,” typically as a superlative to indicate that it is the good place, meaning that is the best place. Again, More’s

Utopia nicely illustrates this point. The Utopians are “perfectly acquainted” with various kinds of knowledge, they “carry [the arts] to perfection,” they exhibit “perfect health,” they choose their spouses by a method that is “perfectly consistent with wisdom,” and, through their labors, they are known to bring everything they do to “perfection” (More 2014 [119, 138, 130, 142, 84]). The

48 "Utopia" OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2019. Web.

65 mythical land of Utopia is characterized by its general perfection.49 Yet, the same certainly cannot be said for the eighteenth-century French setting of the Emile. Rousseau’s entire body of work serves as a constant and vigorous reminder of his society’s grave imperfection. Even the highly praised state of nature is not totally idyllic (e.g., SD I [136-137, 139]). What is more, not even Emile’s and Jean-Jacques’ alternate reality is completely free of problems or imperfections.

For instance, the tutor – who is, by all accounts, a demi-god-like figure who exercises total control over Emile’s life and appears to possess the wisdom of a learned, old philosopher but with the body of an energetic, young man – admits to committing a “blunder” when he is “struck

49 Here, one could contest the notion that More’s Utopia depicts perfection because it includes slaves and other features a contemporary reader is likely to find objectionable. While these matters are certainly contemptible by today’s standards, I believe we would be mistaken to categorize More’s work by applying our contemporary standards of perfection to it. Stated differently, we are perfectly justified in passing judgment on More’s conception of perfection in Utopia, but we must also recognize that it is meant to depict More’s idea of perfection, not ours. What would disqualify Utopia from depicting More’s image of perfection is if he himself thought that slavery constitutes a problem. On this matter, his position is not entirely straightforward. All evidence in the book suggests that he considered some forms of slavery acceptable and non-problematic, while other forms of servitude were deemed inappropriate. This view is reflected in the legal code of Utopia. All slaves in Utopia are either convicted criminals, prisoners of war, or non-Utopians who voluntarily subject themselves to slavery in order to escape the death penalty in their native country. The Utopian legal system allows slaves to earn their freedom by a combination of good behavior and a clear demonstration of character reform. The text makes clear that slavery is not hereditary; the children of slaves are granted free citizen status at birth. More’s attitude toward slavery is very likely a product of his Early Modern European environment, as “forced labour seems to be a typical English” practice (Avineri 1962). But in the end, we cannot forget that Utopia is, above all else, a critique of Early Modern England. When thinking about the criminal code of Utopia, we must ask ourselves: what is the alternative? Life during the reign of Henry VIII was often precarious and his subjects were at the mercy of his whims – which became increasingly erratic after his famous jousting accident. We should not forget that More was beheaded for actions that we today would not deem criminal offenses by any stretch of the imagination: More refused to support Henry’s annulment to Catherine of Aragon and declined to sign the Oath of Succession which acknowledged Anne Boleyn as the true queen and Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church. If the inclusion of slavery “does mar the ‘idealness’ of Utopia, it may be argued with some justification that as More criticizes the contemporary English usage of executing felons even for petty thefts, turning them into slaves is certainly more humane, and does not, after all, differ much from the modern concept of a life sentence” (ibid). Avineri 1962 helpfully lays out the scholarly debate that has transpired over the years about whether and how the inclusion of slavery and war in Utopia ought to be judged. While I emphatically disagree with the scholars who offer a blanket apology for these features, at the same time, I also take issue with those who would suggest that More ought to be judged by the standards of contemporary Western codes of punishment. I think we need to start by understanding More as he understood himself and proceed from there. In the end, as Emile and Utopia are both novels, they, each in their own way, do engage in something similar: as Sir Walter Scott (1843) has said, “real life is the very thing which novels affect to imitate” (130fn1). In other words, since Rousseau and More both seek to critique the actual societies to which they belong, they both participate in the “most independent, most elastic” literary form we call the novel (James 1934 [326]). Since we are now far adrift from the topic of this dissertation, I shall have to leave the discussion there for the time being.

66 by a new reflection” that he “ought to have dictated” certain duties to Emile at an earlier point

(ibid 428; cf. Favre 113). Yet, there is no indication whatsoever in the text that this incident is staged for Emile’s benefit. In fact, Emile never seems to become aware of his tutor’s mistake.

This episode stands in stark contrast to an earlier one in which Jean-Jacques commits an error that is explicitly staged (Emile 174-175). In the account of this orchestrated “mistake,” the tutor is reprimanded “explicitly and out loud” by the so-called “magician-Socrates” for letting Emile disclose the secrets of his tricks. The lecture is directed at Jean-Jacques, but the text makes it clear that it has been pre-arranged so that it will be delivered in such a way as to embarrass

Emile to teach him a valuable lesson. The difference between Jean-Jacques’ two errors is striking. In the earlier case, the tutor’s “mistake” clearly coheres with his claim that “everything must be foreseen very far ahead of time” (ibid 175). The later blunder appears to be mentioned strictly for the reader’s benefit, and it seems to quietly signal that Jean-Jacques is not perfect after all.50 Indeed, as Rousseau the “editor” says in the Second Preface to Julie, “No one is perfect: that is the fantasy” (Julie 8).

Thus, to wish to see the Emile as depicting a state of perfection is to misunderstand the book. Jean-Jacques does the best he can with the imperfect material he has: he seeks to educate a boy of ordinary intellectual capacity within the limits of a decidedly flawed society. Indeed, the point of the Emile seems to be to show that human beings do not need a pristine environment in order to become whole and good. As Rousseau states, “It is enough for me that wherever men are born, what I propose can be done with them” (ibid 35). The Emile demonstrates that it is possible to make a man good for himself and for others, even with all his higher faculties fully developed and even living amidst modern-day corruption (e.g., ibid 41). That which allowed

50 This would, therefore, seem to contradict the claim in Scott 2020 that Jean-Jacques the tutor is “infallible” (146).

67 man to be whole and good in the state of nature did not die when he entered civil society. It has merely lain dormant for many, many years. The proper task of the good educator, then, is to

“awaken” “nature’s sentiments” at the right time and in the right way at each stage of an individual’s young life (ibid 46). But even if one mistakenly misses the opportunity to teach certain duties at the “right” time, as Jean-Jacques confesses he does with Emile, then all is not necessarily lost.51 The Emile shows us that perfection is neither the means nor the end of raising the natural man of civil society.

The third and final reason why it is inappropriate to read the Emile as chimerical is that, if we take Rousseau at his word, everything he tells us – time and time again, in the Emile and elsewhere – precludes the interpretation that the work is utopian. He explicitly says that Emile’s education only does what is possible and appropriate for man “in order not to pursue chimeras” or “to run after chimeras” (ibid 80, 350). We are told directly that Emile is not a chimera (ibid

467) and that the “golden age” that he and Sophie will usher in will appear utopian only “for anyone whose heart and taste have been spoiled” (ibid 474). If one’s soul is unsullied, then they will see the couple as realistic. What is more, Rousseau sharply criticizes his readers who interpret the Emile as a utopia. In these instances, it is worth quoting him in full:

For a long while they have seen me in the land of chimeras. I always see them in the land of prejudices. In separating myself so far from vulgar opinions I do not cease keeping them present in my mind. I examine them, I meditate on them, neither to follow them nor to flee them but to weigh them in the scale of reasoning. Every time that this reasoning forces me to separate myself from those opinions, I have learned from experience to take it for granted that my readers will not imitate me. I know that they persist in imagining only what they see; and therefore they will take the young man whom I evoke to be an imaginary and fantastic being because he differs from those with whom they compare him. They do not stop to think that he must certainly differ from these young

51 It seems delaying certain kinds of knowledge or development is permissible. What is proscribed is the premature introduction of knowledge or development of certain faculties.

68 men, since he is raised quite differently, affected by quite contrary sentiments, and instructed quite otherwise from them; indeed, it would be much more surprising if he were to resemble them than to be such as I suppose him. This is not the man of man; it is the man of nature. Assuredly he should be very alien to their eyes (ibid 253).

And he protests,

You will say, “This dreamer always pursues his chimera. In giving us a pupil of his making, he not only forms him, he creates him, he pulls him out of his brain; and although he believes he is always following nature, he diverges from it at every instant.” I, comparing my pupil to yours, hardly find anything that they can have in common. Since they are reared so differently, it would almost be a miracle if Emile resembled yours in anything (ibid 315).

While the majority of his readers will surely consider the feasibility of his proposals “doubtful,” he retorts, “I do not doubt at all” because the project is “practicable in itself” and “suitable for man and well adapted to the human heart” (ibid 34). As a matter of fact, Rousseau insists that the practicality of Emile’s education “is all I promise” (ibid 35). Elsewhere beyond the Emile,

Rousseau asserts, “I dedicated my Book [i.e., Emile] to seeking how to go about preventing

[man] from becoming [wicked]. [...] I certainly affirmed and still do that there are no other means to succeed to this end than those I have proposed” (Beaumont 29). In the end, according to Rousseau, the education depicted in the Emile is clearly not meant to be read as a utopia. He plainly indicates that the Emile is a thoroughly practical work, the teachings of which are limited to the realm of the intrinsically possible. We must note, however, that Rousseau does declare a different sort of education to be “much more chimerical than mine”: every other existing educational project besides his own (Emile 34). More specifically, he condemns educational plans that seek to “propose some good which can be allied with the existing evil,” which is to say those that offer merely partial reform of a defective or damaged system (ibid). These proposals offer only “halfway” solutions and are even worse than the “established practice” because,

69 through them, “the good is spoiled, and the evil is not cured” (ibid). Rousseau anticipates his reader’s objections to his educational recommendations and tells this skeptic what must be done:

“‘if nothing of what you advise is feasible, what is to be done instead?’ I will be asked...I have already told you: what you are doing. One needs no advice for that” (ibid 59). Rousseau’s point is that one must either follow his radical proposals completely, or else not at all. No intermediate solution is possible. Looking beyond the Emile, if we lend credence to a report by Mme. d’Epinay, then Rousseau once asserted in a conversation with the saloniste that effectuating a model education is unthinkable without root and branch social and educational reform (OC X

[26-51], CG I [367-379]). He considered the defects of existing educational schemes to be irremediable (Beaumont 52-53). Qualified reform not only fails to improve upon current practice, it may even worsen it. In short, any attempt to seek a compromise between Rousseau’s proposed plan and the established educational practices constitutes the truly chimerical or utopian educational vision.52

Rousseau’s stated mission in the Emile is to “say what must be done” in order to raise the

“natural man living in the state of society” (Emile 416, 205). If his radical proposals appear to be merely “a quite beautiful roman of human nature” (“un assez beau roman que celui de la nature humaine”), then Rousseau is perfectly clear that he is not to blame for this (ibid 416).53 His readers are culpable. Rousseau points the finger directly at his reader – “You” – to declare that the modern civilized individuals who “deprave” our species are the ones “who make a roman out of [his] book” (ibid). That is to say, his readers, limited by their prejudices, mistake the work for

52 Cf. what Shklar (1966) says about Rousseau’s stance on radical reform: “Let the states of Europe run to their ruin, Rousseau was convinced that reform was useless and impossible” (31). Further, she claims Rousseau expressed “a general dislike of all change as such...alteration and deterioration must be synonymous” (48). I am puzzled by Shklar’s assertions, as they are incompatible with Rousseau’s own presentation. To Rousseau, it was not reform that he considered useless and impossible; rather, a lack of reform and partial reform were futile and chimerical. 53 Supra note 13.

70 a fantasy for the simple fact that Emile is so dramatically different from the youths of Rousseau’s day. Therefore, to them the boy seems unrealistic. Rousseau is explicit: the intention of his Emile is emphatically not to depict a utopia or to “pursue chimeras.” He repeatedly opposes the notion that Emile is a chimera (e.g., ibid 80, 253, 315, 354, 401, 405, 467, Beaumont). His life is not based on an illusion, but on actual human nature as Rousseau understands it. The Emile, which reads like a roman, “ought to be the history of [our] species” (“Ce devrait être l’histoire de mon espèce”) (Emile 416; cf. SD Exordium [133]). By this, Rousseau means that the story told in the

Emile should be the true chronicle of human existence. It should read as though it were a profile or biography of an actual eighteenth-century youth. But, regrettably, Emile’s story exists only in the imagination. Therefore, it can appear to be merely a roman.

In the Emile Rousseau aims not only to demonstrate that his conception of nature alone can truly illustrate what human beings actually are, but also to warn his readers against misunderstanding and debasing humanity. Rousseau repeatedly decries the falsity of life in civil society; modern men, “always dupes of appearance, take it for reality” (Emile 227). Society is teeming with vile deception: “false taste” (ibid 104, 341, 388), “false privations” (ibid 265), false sensations (ibid 271), false morality/virtue (ibid 104-105, 222, 443), “false appearances” (ibid

140, 143-144), false politeness (ibid 338, 376), “false prudence” (ibid 187, 294, 418), “false fear” (ibid 218), “false prosperity” (ibid 284), “false dignity” (ibid 246), false young men (ibid

335), false women (ibid 382, 385-387), “false ideas” (ibid 33, 89, 96, 106, 328), “false wisdom”/“errors of prejudice”/“deceptive opinions” (ibid 34, 37, 39, 42, 44, 51-52, 68, 79, 82-

83, 85, 93, 111, 120, 127, 152, 165, 167, 178, 184-190, 194-197, 200-201, 205-208, 214-215,

228, 237-238, 241-246, 252-255, 260, 262, 265, 269, 313, 317, 327-339, 344, 349, 354, 361,

71 374, 382, 388-391, 405-406, 410, 422, 431, 446, 456, 467-468, 471-472, 476).54 And Rousseau consistently distinguishes between this falseness of civil society and the sincerity of nature (e.g., ibid 167, 187, 205, 241, 349). Emile, as the natural modern man, will be “above opinion” and

“the prejudices born of the morals of [his] age” (ibid 331, 405). He will not merely appear to be happy and good, but he will actually be so (ibid 227). Throughout the entire book, Emile is depicted as the antithesis of civilized unnaturalness and falsehood. He, alone, is “natural and true” (ibid 335).

But because civilized man has become so corrupt and so artificial, Emile, who embodies what is most natural and most authentic, appears fictional or chimerical in comparison to the men of eighteenth-century France. In other words, because of civilized man’s prejudices, what is

“true,” authentic, and natural (i.e., Emile) appears false; what is “false,” inauthentic, and unnatural (i.e., every actual civilized individual) appears real. Emile is “real” to the extent that he is wholly natural and free of the corrupting effects of society’s falsehoods. That is, he represents the true essence of what man really is and should be.55 We readers are conversely “false” in that we represent the other side of the coin: we are unnatural, and we behave in a manner inconsistent with our true nature. In other words, “real” and “false” in the sense in which I am currently using these terms do not describe the actuality of one’s existence. Clearly Emile is a fictional character, not an actual person the way you and I are. Rather, the terms “real” and “false” delineate the moral condition of the human soul in terms of its naturalness and unnaturalness, its genuineness and falseness (e.g., ibid 405). Modern civilized men have difficulty recognizing this concept

54 Even nature is, to a certain degree, deceptive (Emile 204). For Rousseau, man’s capacity to accurately see what is in front of him is always limited. We are constantly prone to deception by our sight. As I understand Rousseau, it is not that civil society introduces deception as such, but rather that it both adds new ones to those that exist by nature, and it exacerbates the tricks nature plays on our eyes. 55 Cf. Dame Iris Murdoch’s assertion that fiction unites imagination and reality (Magee 2001 [229-250]). She sees the former as an indispensable route to the latter, rather than something that simply opposes the latter.

72 because they are deceived by what they see around them. As Rousseau asks, “What do we see, what do we know, what exists? We are only running after shadows that escape us. Some slight spectres, some vain phantoms flit before our eyes and we believe we are seeing the eternal chain of beings” (Moral Letters CW XII [189]). All of our senses – but especially our sense of sight – are deficient, and, as a consequence, we are susceptible to error when they supply sensory information to our reason (e.g., Emile 412-414, 427-428, Moral Letters CW XII [182-187]).

The difficulties posed by our insufficient senses and the error of our reason have resulted in our confusion about the world around us. Life in civil society as we observe it in reality is inauthentic and unnatural. Yet, under the guidance of the “false wisdom” of prior philosophers who possessed a naive optimism in the power of rationalism, we have mistaken it for the life most in accordance with our true human nature. Dazzled by this false wisdom, man is not concerned with reality, for he is content to define his nature based on an illusion. Paradoxically,

Emile’s fictional life represents the only authentic and natural life for the non-philosopher, non- citizen who lives in civil society. Rousseau’s Emile jettisons the “false” individuals who appear so genuine in our quotidian existence, but who are actually paragons of artificiality. Ultimately, then, the novelistic element of the Emile appears to be rather fluid, the interpretation of which depends on the limitations of the reader’s prejudices. The reader’s own individual experiences and education will determine how they see the story of the Emile. One reading is false or wrong, and the other is true or correct. The vast majority of readers – those who are limited by their preconceptions and moral corruption – will mistake the work for a utopia because Emile is so thoroughly unlike youths known in Rousseau’s day. But to a much smaller minority of readers – to those rare few who can think beyond the limits of civil society’s prejudices – the Emile will

73 read as Rousseau says it is meant to: as a realistic, albeit aspirational, portrait of a new natural- social human type.

It is worth pausing briefly to consider our examination of the “real” Emile and the “false” men of civil society alongside Rousseau’s presentation of “false” and “real” Sophies in Book V

(ibid 402-406).56 The text subtly indicates that the “false” Sophie is real and that the “real”

Sophie is not (esp. ibid 402). At first blush, this proposal in isolation may seem quite puzzling and strange, for the text gives no immediate indication as to how a false person can be real and vice versa. However, this suggestion about the two different Sophies cannot be properly understood, I believe, without seeing the two girls’ place in the overall argument of the Emile. I understand the so-called “false” Sophie to be the female analog of the inauthentic, unnatural civilized men among which Rousseau lived. Thus, she is “false” in the sense that she embodies the feminine version of civil society’s artificiality and corruption; she is morally false. This false

Sophie is “real” to the extent that she is like every other corrupt individual who actually exists in civil society. That is, she is real because women like her exist in real-life. By contrast, the “real”

Sophie is real in the same way Emile is real: she is truly natural, even if her naturalness ultimately differs in significant ways from that of her beloved. She is, likewise, also not real in the same manner that Emile is not real: no civilized person has received the natural education, so no natural civilized individual – man or woman – currently exists outside of the alternate reality of the Emile. Before moving on, it is also worth noting that there is no “false” Emile depicted in the Emile. There is only the “true” Emile and a “common” one (ibid 182, 188). Presumably the book does not require a “false” Emile because we, the readers, are all false Emiles to the extent that we are all inauthentic and unnatural.

56 For a more extensive discussion of Rousseau’s two Sophies and his treatment of women’s education more broadly, see Chapter III of this dissertation.

74 Not the Man of Man, But the Man of Nature: The Role of Emile’s Fictionality

Because everything in the Emile exists within the realm of ordinary possibility, we can safely assert that it is not a utopia. Even so, there can be no doubt that this novel-treatise contains a conspicuously fictional dimension. So, what kind of work is the Emile, and what is the function of its novelistic aspect? Jorge Luis Borges once suggested that one’s understanding of the present affects one’s perception of the past (Borges 1962 [199-202]). By this he meant that we can examine texts and events from the past in new ways under the influence of novel ideas and information. While this dissertation is guided by the fundamental premise that the surest, most reliable way to comprehend any thinker is to seek to understand him as he understood himself, I also grant that it can be helpful to interpret older texts by drawing information from contemporary concepts with which an author could not have been acquainted. In light of more recent studies of literary theory, then, it is possible to look anew at time-honored texts, such as the Emile. Since the mid-1960s there has been much scholarly interest in and speculation about the nature of narrative, and a number of notable cross-cultural studies (e.g., Levi-Strauss 1972) have concluded that narrative is a basic, ubiquitous form of human communication that crosses various ethnic, language, and cultural boundaries. On this matter, French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes (1977) has stated:

The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances – as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a

75 people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is very often shared by men with different, even opposing, cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself (79).

Because of the ubiquity of narrative, as well as the interdisciplinary nature of narrative studies,

“there is no definitive theory, no paradigmatic definition of what a narrative actually is” (Hazel

2008 [1]). Research on narrative and narrative structure is rife with semantic difficulties, as scholars across various disciplines either attach different meanings to the same collection of terms, or else use different words in reference to the same idea (ibid). My objective here is to refrain from using specialist jargon as much as possible in an attempt to avoid obfuscating the purpose of the narrative structure of the Emile.

Rousseau’s novel-treatise contains two interwoven narrative planes – one that presents childrearing guidance to actual parents, governors, and governesses and another that tells the fictional story of Emile’s upbringing with his gouverneur – each of which is self-contained but exists to frame the other. In the parlance of contemporary literary theory, the Emile is perhaps most accurately described as a multi-genre or combinational narrative. Tom Romano (2000) defines this kind of writing as “composed of many genres and subgenres, each piece self- contained, making a point of its own, yet connected by theme or topic and sometimes by language, images, and content” (x-xi). In short, it is the integration of different narrative structures within a single piece of writing.57 The author must grapple with the proper formation

57 Perhaps the most common manifestation of this narrative technique is the story within a story, which has been used in the tales of the Arabian Nights, The Canterbury Tales, Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the often- forgotten introduction to The Taming of the Shrew. More recent examples include Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Italo Calvino’s If on a winter's night a traveler. For more on this topic, see Corn 1987. Another popular display of the multi-genre approach is in the use of more than one narrator. Examples of this method include Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, Robert Cormier's I am the Cheese, and, of course, Rousseau’s Emile.

76 of each genre and ensure that every part links together to create a coherent piece (ibid xi). Italian novelist and literary theorist Italo Calvino has suggested that the greatest purpose of narrative combinations is to construct something new and odd. Calvino states that works with multiple genres “become charged with an unexpected meaning or unforeseen effect which the conscious mind would not have arrived at deliberately: an unconscious meaning, in fact, or at least a premonition of an unconscious meaning” (Calvino 1986 [20]). Literature of this sort is “a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material...it is a game that at a certain point is invested with unexpected meaning” (ibid 22). Ultimately, combinations “can work to challenge our understanding of the world or [serve] as a dissuasion from understanding it” (ibid 26). For Calvino, “literature, like myth and like science, is an ongoing and dialectical process of interpretation of reality” (Teresa De Lauretis 1975, 231).

I would like to suggest that the Emile is a multi-genre work, the purpose of which coheres with Calvino’s assessment of the highest function of an author’s use of combined narratives: to challenge our understanding of the world we see in order to prompt us to form a new and unexpected interpretation of our reality, which we would not have otherwise seen without the author’s creative assistance. The project contained within the novelistic dimension of the Emile creates the natural – that is, the harmonious and whole – man of civil society. Rousseau has already demonstrated in the Second Discourse that the natural individual was ubiquitous in the remote past. Yet, today, he is no longer anywhere to be seen. In the Emile, Rousseau tells the story of his fictional pupil’s upbringing to demonstrate whether and how the formation of a natural man in civil society is possible. Whereas the Second Discourse introduces Rousseau’s theory of nature, the Emile is where that theory is put into practice. Within the alternate reality depicted in the Emile, Rousseau pilots a pedagogical program that differs radically from those

77 that existed in his day (and, indeed, from those have ever existed, before and after).

Appropriately enough, his purpose is to produce a human being who is utterly different from his contemporaries. Emile, who in many ways begins the work nearly indistinguishable from other ordinary boys in eighteenth-century France, by the end of his education has undergone such a dramatic transformation that “it would almost be a miracle” if the other boys resembled Emile

“in anything” (Emile 315). “In seeing nature thus reborn” with Emile, Rousseau asserts that the reader “feels revived oneself” (ibid 158). By reviving nature within a civilized context, Emile’s education can be understood as creating a new human type – one that has hitherto not existed in our species’ long history. His education is not simply the reformation of man, but rather the formation of a new kind of man. Emile will be a new man for a new era. He will be the natural man of civil society. The presentation of this novel teaching required a unique presentation – one that is part-treatise, part-novel. As I hope to demonstrate below, the novelistic dimension of the

Emile is intended for the activity of the reader’s imagination. Emile is a fictional but naturalistic character who provides a healthy, relatable model for the reader as he or she learns about the real value of a natural social life. To clarify what I mean by this, let us take a closer look at this young man and his story.

The narrative structure of the Emile is not static – it actually shifts throughout the work.

At the opening, it resembles something closer to a traditional treatise with merely light fictional elements woven in. In the beginning of this chapter, we referred to Emile’s delayed introduction in the Favre Manuscript. Although Rousseau names his pupil much earlier in the final version of the Emile, he nevertheless announces the boy’s presence somewhat later than one might expect, especially considering that the entire work is named after him. The first mention of Emile comes nearly halfway through Book I (Emile 51). Prior to his introduction, the Emile reads like a more

78 polished version of the original Favre Manuscript treatise. Both the final text and the first draft open with a collection of observations on the original purity and goodness of nature’s creations, with particular reference to plants, and the degeneration of nature “in the hands of man” as he

“removes himself from the natural condition” (ibid 37, Favre 3). Both works proceed to deal formally and systematically with various issues related to nature and life within civil society, alongside practical advice given to parents on how best to raise a child.

Yet, once Rousseau introduces his imaginary pupil in the middle of Book I, the Emile begins to deviate from its original path. It starts to take a slow but steady novelistic turn, and it becomes increasingly novelistic and decreasingly treatise-like as the work progresses (cf. Scott

2020 [138]). By the end of the Emile, it reads wholly like a work of fiction, and the treatise element has essentially faded away. As Rousseau closes out the final Book of the Emile,

Rousseau no longer informs us of his general, technical observations about life and child-rearing, but he instead solely recounts the love story of Emile and Sophie, which constitutes the culmination of their life-long educations. I here wish to suggest that the changing narrative structure of the Emile is crucial to interpreting the significance of its fictional dimension. I maintain that the narrative structure of the Emile becomes progressively more novelistic because, as the reader gets deeper into the work, he or she must use more of his or her imagination to visualize the life of a natural civilized individual such as Emile – a boy who begins as a rather ordinary person but who ends up so radically different from every actual youth that exists in reality. Where the reader’s creative power becomes more important, so, too, does the novelistic dimension of the work become more necessary.

Appropriately enough, then, as the narrative structure of the Emile shifts and becomes progressively more novelistic, so, too, does the role of imagination change throughout the book.

79 Early on, Rousseau simply tells us about his personal experience of imagining Emile: “I contemplate the child, and he pleases me. I imagine him as a man, and he pleases me more” (ibid

158). At this point in the text, the pupil remains a relatively abstract figure who is only beginning to assume individual qualities. Yet, as we get deeper into the project of the Emile, Rousseau explicitly begins to call upon the reader to actively envisage his Emile as the picture he paints of him slowly comes together. For instance, in a passage in Book IV of the Emile in which

Rousseau criticizes authors, books, and how we read them, he states, “We are bent over books from our childhood and accustomed to read without thinking; what we read is all the less striking to us since we already contain within ourselves the passions and prejudices which fill history and the lives of men, and therefore all men do appears natural to us because we are outside of nature and judge others by ourselves” (ibid 241). He then entreats us to take a step back and to instead

“picture a young man raised according to my maxims. Think of my Emile. Eighteen years of assiduous care have had as their only object the preservation of a sound judgment and a healthy heart. Think of him at the raising of the curtain, casting his eyes for the first time on the stage of the world” (ibid 241-242). Where Rousseau began the Emile by dryly telling us about the fact that he imagines his pupil, here in Book IV the narrative shifts and he actively commands us, the reader, to begin to envisage him as well. For the first time, we are asked to think of him, to see him, and to shape him in our minds. Alongside Rousseau, then, the reader eventually becomes an active participant in the imaginative formation of Emile (cf. Booth 1983, Scott 2020 [11]).

Emile, who begins the book as Rousseau’s exclusive vision, as the book progresses becomes increasingly a product of Rousseau’s and his reader’s shared vision. We are required to exercise our imaginations to see Emile because he neither exists in actual civil society, nor is he depicted

80 in any of our books. Because nobody like him exists in actual life – past or present – we must create him.

As the Emile continues, the reader is required to exercise his or her creative capacity more fully. By the time we reach the dialogue-heavy novelistic Book V (in which Rousseau’s treatise-like monologues have essentially disappeared) the reader is no longer simply asked to imagine a boy such as Emile. Rather, our vision of him becomes increasingly complex – so much so that the text shifts in such a way that we begin to see the world though Emile’s eyes. We begin to imagine what Emile himself imagines. Book V marks the first occasion in which

Rousseau starts to speak about what goes on inside Emile’s mind, which, as it turns out, consists primarily of thoughts of Sophie. Indeed, the reader’s own vision of Sophie, who Rousseau describes for the first time in Book V, coincides with the point in the story where Emile first

“imagines the wife who can make him happy” (ibid 393). Rousseau paints for his reader the same portrait of the ideal woman that he paints for Emile (ibid). We are called upon to envision her at the same time as Emile. By the end of the book, the reader is deeply entrenched in the fiction of the Emile. We must not only imagine the natural man of civil society – who exists nowhere in reality – but if we are to truly understand him and his tastes, then we must also be able to see Sophie, “that rare woman,” through his eyes as well (ibid 399). To the corrupt men of eighteenth-century France, when it comes to picking someone to be one’s lover, women “are all almost equally good” and men have “scarcely any other choice to be made than of what falls most readily to hand” (Women of Paris 137).58 But, as we have already noted several times,

Emile will be nothing like his contemporaries. Appropriately, then, his taste in women will be quite different as well. Sophie will be the singular object of his affection, and she “is not

58 Cf. man’s sexual preferences (or lack thereof) in the state of nature (SD I [145]).

81 constituted to give exercise to the small talents of a clown” (i.e., any man who is not the natural man of civil society) (Emile 399). Rousseau suggests that Sophie will not be immediately appealing to the typical eighteenth-century young man who does not seek out the “woman who has an elevated soul” and a “good nature” (ibid 391, 393). Yet, the presentation hinges on her being depicted as attractive. Since none of Rousseau’s readers will have had Emile’s education, in order for us to appreciate Sophie and find her attractive, we must be able to see her from the young pupil’s perspective.

Of course, Rousseau could have easily stated everything in a purely academic disquisition – as indeed he started to in the original draft of the Emile. Rational normative theory has the capacity to provide a vision of an alternative or aspirational reality, as it does, for example, in the Social Contract. Yet, as we have already observed, Rousseau desisted from writing his straightforward treatise on education and instead chose to rewrite the Emile with an added novelistic dimension. What, then, is the “value added” of the book’s fictional element?

What additional enhancing ingredient does it contribute that was otherwise lacking in the work’s first draft? Does not the fictional and the individualized aspect of the literary presentation differ from the rational normative account in that it deals with particulars rather than generalities? And do not the particulars have the capacity to appeal to our empathy and understanding in ways not possible in rational normative theory?

Martha Nussbaum (1990) has a great deal to say on these matters. She has explored the relationship between literature and philosophy – the relationship between style and content, as well as the role of emotions in deliberation – and contends that we ought to broaden our conception of moral philosophy to include texts usually considered literature, as they often express a superior notion of ethics than traditional works of moral philosophy. To her, the

82 literary narrative form is a valuable vehicle for conveying ideas, particularly because it has the capacity to stir human emotions in a way that rational normative theory generally cannot. As

Nussbaum emphasizes, a work that is primarily literary deals with the particulars (ibid 39). To illustrate this point, Nussbaum cites the relationship between Maggie and her father in Henry

James’ The Golden Bowl (1999 [1904]), which she says reflects “a depth and quality of love that would not, we feel, tolerate the substitution of a clone, even one who had all the same describable features” and “to imagine the recurrence of the very same circumstances and persons is to image [sic] that life does not have the structure it actually has” (39). In other words, with the emotional power of Maggie’s relationship with her father, the chief reason it is so memorably beautiful is because it is unique. While I readily grant that literature deals with the particulars, works of philosophy, such as the Emile, deal with the universal. And as I have suggested in this dissertation’s introduction, the main significance of the Emile lies not necessarily in its emotive power, but in its rational survey of the human condition to show its readers that only Rousseau’s conception of nature and history can describe humanity and to warn against the contemporary inclination to simplify and enervate the human phenomena. In short, Rousseau’s Emile deals not with particulars, but with universal principles. Even though Emile is an individual character, he is an unusually generic figure who, I believe, is intended to be a kind of “every-man.” With

Rousseau’s Emile, unlike James’ Maggie, a qualitatively similar replacement is, to borrow

Nussbaum’s locution, acceptable.

The addition of Emile and the rest of Rousseau’s small cast of fictional characters has the beneficial, if not counterintuitive effect of making the book’s presentation more real, or at least more realistic. By this, I mean that the characters in the Emile make Rousseau’s philosophy of nature come alive. Treatises and other forms of normative rational theory present information in

83 an abstract, lifeless manner. Rousseau, by exhibiting his teachings in a novelistic format via a young boy named Emile along with his beloved wife Sophie and his devoted tutor Jean-Jacques, is able to give his philosophy of nature a more definite shape. And, indeed, if Rousseau’s aim is to demonstrate that the life of the natural civilized man is the truly “real” one, as I have already suggested it is, then it would certainly make sense that he opted for a more naturalistic presentation than a purely theoretical one, for it would serve to make such a life all the more realistic.

Emile adds a human dimension to Rousseau’s otherwise merely conceptual framework of nature. Because of this, the Emile demonstrates that the natural man of civil society is not merely a theoretical abstraction or a reverie but, rather, a boy with a name, a spouse, preferences, emotions, hunger, pain, and every other ordinary human attribute that the rest of us typically possess. In short, I am suggesting that Rousseau added Emile and his storyline to make the natural civilized man appear just as human as you and I are. Because of this, the reader is able to more readily identify himself or herself with Emile. While the young pupil ends the work very different from his readers, at the start he is very nearly like us. Every man can theoretically be

Emile and indeed is Emile to the extent that he shares the same basic human features as the young boy. The crucial difference between us and Emile is that while Rousseau’s pupil receives a natural education to retain his wholeness, and thus his happiness, we are fragmented beings who live unnaturally and, therefore, unhappily. Emile’s life is “realistic” in the sense that it is feasible in principle, as Rousseau himself says that it is. Yet, it is certainly neither for all people nor for all times. Emile’s life requires his education. His education requires suitable circumstances, including his unusual tutor, who we will discuss in Chapter Four. Rousseau explicitly states that he never “[affirmed] that this [sc. the natural man of civil society] was

84 absolutely possible in the present order” (Beaumont 29). While Emile’s education is practicable in theory, Rousseau is clear that it is supremely unlikely under the circumstances of his day. The creation of an individual such as Emile would require nothing short of radical reform. And while

Rousseau wished to dramatically reshape the political conditions of eighteenth-century Europe, he was also acutely aware of the unpredictable nature of life in a decent or tolerable political order. He foresaw the imminent revolutions, but he neither championed them nor saw much hope for the future through them (“Observations” OC III [55-56], SD II [186], Emile 194]).

Consequently, the education depicted in the Emile can be summed up as possible but highly improbable.

Despite the improbability of recreating Emile’s education, Rousseau certainly regarded his Emile as “useful to the human race” (Beaumont 29). In order for it to have any utility, it must have some kind of application for actual human beings, even if its relevance is merely limited.

While Jean-Jacques may be singularly qualified to educate the natural man of civil society,

Rousseau also intends for his book to be of service to real parents and educators. After all, social reform ultimately rests in their hands (e.g., Emile 45). As a result, the story of Emile’s upbringing is punctuated with child-rearing guidance to actual mothers and fathers. The Emile is set against the backdrop of a real-life “unsettled and restless” age that, as I mentioned above,

Rousseau prophesied was leading up to an impending “state of crisis and the age of revolutions”

(ibid 42, 194; cf. 194fn.). He was convinced that he lived in a privileged time shortly preceding the dawn of a new era marked by the collapse of the European monarchies. As Allan Bloom observes, “Rousseau's enemy was not the ancien régime, its throne, its altar, or its nobility. He was certain that all these were finished, that revolution would shortly sweep them away to make room for a new world based on the egalitarian principles of the new philosophy. The real

85 struggle would then concern the kind of man who was going to inhabit that world, for the striking element of the situation was and is that a true theoretical insight seems to have given rise to a low human consequence” (ibid Introduction [4-5]). This emerging debased human type was the bourgeois, the embodiment of Hobbes’ and Locke’s political philosophy. He is the man who is primarily motivated by a fear of violent death and a desire for comfortable self-preservation.

His concerns drive him to become a role-player in his social relations, and, in this capacity, he exploits others while also depending on them for his own wishes. The bourgeois is an especially disingenuous, fractured man who lives entirely outside himself. Given the rise of this low human type, the question of education for Rousseau was not simply a matter of theoretical importance.

It was one of great practical significance as well because it involves “the first of all useful things, the art of forming man,” an art that has unfortunately become neglected (ibid 33).59 And after the forthcoming revolutions, “Who can answer for what will become of [human beings] then?” (ibid

194).

To support the favorable formation of the new bourgeois, the Emile does also offer information about a more viable but qualified, less radical way to raise an individual who is not wholly artificial (ibid 139, 419, Favre 74). In other words, Rousseau’s proposals here mix “some good” educational advice “with the existing evil” practices (Emile 34). Above, we noted that he considered such “halfway” measures to be chimerical. Thus, even though Rousseau’s advice in the treatise-like portion of the text is ostensibly meant to be more attainable within the immediate eighteenth-century context, we must seriously question how effective it would actually be for establishing the kind of large-scale social reform Rousseau believed was so necessary. In other

59 cf. Shroder 1963 on the purpose of a novel: Novels with “the completion of that educational process [...] In other words, the Bildungsroman is not merely a special category: the theme of the novel is essentially that of formation, of education” (294).

86 words, despite initial appearances, perhaps it is actually the parental advice provided in the treatise-like dimension of the Emile that represents the truly utopian aspect of the work.

In any event, here Rousseau lays the groundwork for this presentation by attacking two key failings of education as it was actually practiced in his lifetime. First, Rousseau calls our attention to the temporary and unpredictable character of all aspects of human life. He chides us for complacently trusting in “the present order of society without thinking that this order is subject to inevitable revolutions” and warns that “it is impossible for you to foresee or prevent the one which may affect your children” (Emile 194; cf. Favre 123-124). Everything connected with man seems to be “founded on piles of Quicksand,” as all “is finite and everything is fleeting in human life” (SD, I [128], Emile 447; cf. Emile 446, Letter to Voltaire, 18 August 1756).

Ultimately, everything “that men have made, men can destroy” (Emile 194, cf. 222, 400,

“Observations” OC III [50-51]). The implication is that, all too often, we raise human beings as though each man were fixed in his fortune. We therefore fail to prepare individuals for a life inherently characterized by flux. Whereas primitive man was quick to adapt to environmental shifts, if men today are slow to adapt to their changing circumstances, this is a failing of convention. It is due to faulty educational practices that fail to adequately prepare people to cope with certain realities of life.

Second, and relatedly, Rousseau suggests that the most effective way to deal with the ever-changing tides of fortune is to train oneself to belong to a universal, natural “station of man” as opposed to one of the many specific, artificial positions in society (Emile 194). While everything man-made can be eventually erased or forgotten, the only “ineffaceable characters are those printed by nature; and nature does not make princes, rich men, or great lords” (ibid).

Rousseau further asserts, “Men are not naturally kings, or lords, or courtiers, or rich men. All are

87 born naked and poor; all are subject to the miseries of life. [...] Begin, therefore, by studying in human nature what is most inseparable from it, what best characterizes humanity” (ibid 222, cf.

194, 48, 78, 131, 133, 229, 393, 400). The decisive human characteristics are not those that differentiate us, whether they are natural or conventional: our intelligence, our looks, our wealth, etc. Rather, what fundamentally matters for Rousseau are the great equalizers of life: our vulnerability, our neediness, and our mortality. It seems, then, that any pretensions to achieve distinction – that is, to stoke our amour-propre – represent a deluded and ineffectual disregard for or denial of the most crucial human features. Ultimately, when we form a man “exclusively for one station,” we merely make “him useless for any other,” for “civil life is not simple enough, natural enough, exempt enough from extreme changes and accidents for man properly to get accustomed to this uniformity to the point of making it necessary to him” (Emile 194, 129). It is critical to possess the ability to adapt to any station in life, from the most preeminent position to the least distinguished one.

Consequently, Rousseau entreats us, “In everything let us not give [man] a form so determined that it costs him too much to change it in case of need,” and he goes on to request that we prevent our young people from developing one particularly bad habit: “Let us not make it so that he will die of hunger in other countries if he is not everywhere attended by a French cook.

[...] I would say it is only the French who do not know how to eat, since so special an art is required to make dishes edible for them” (ibid 152). Initially, it might seem odd that Rousseau would choose to single out picky eating as something especially important to disallow. Yet, this statement perhaps makes better sense in the context of Rousseau’s entire oeuvre. This observation about a hypothetical fussy aristocratic eater recalls an earlier passage from the

Second Discourse in which we are told, “the Beast cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it

88 even if it would be to its advantage to do so, while a man often deviates from it to his detriment.

Thus, a Pigeon would starve to death next to a Bowl filled with the choicest meats...although [it] could very well have found nourishment in the food it disdains if it had occurred to it to try some” (SD I [14]). Just as the pigeon is a finicky eater with a limited diet, so, too, is the high- society (French)man. If neither is served the food it is accustomed to eating, then both would sooner perish than learn how to deviate from their routine practices. The pigeon is unable to deviate because it is not endowed with perfectibility and therefore simply cannot, and the aristocrat, because his fastidiousness appears to negate his ability to adapt. In the end, it turns out that man’s flexibility, his perfectibility, is a great boon. When we raise a person for a specific high-ranking station in life, that inherent capacity to adapt apparently deteriorates – so much so, it seems, that one’s ostensibly sophisticated and pretentious habits actually come to resemble the crudest, lowest instincts of the Beasts. While members of the beau monde believe their fussy manners are elevating, in reality, their behavior only seems to lower them to the level of the animals. And in the process, man seems to sacrifice his most vital, most human faculty.

Thus, it is important for civil man to retain some semblance of his natural flexibility.

Accordingly, Rousseau makes a recommendation that surely would have been appalling to his refined eighteenth-century readers: that a young man should learn “a true trade, a mechanical art” (Emile 195-196). In twenty-first century parlance, this advice would be tantamount to dissuading a parent from sending their child to an elite liberal arts college and urging them, instead, to send their child to a technical or community college. Quelle horreur!60 By learning a

60 I am merely being facetious, of course. To be perfectly clear, I have no animus toward community and technical colleges. In fact, in my experience working with higher education system heads, governors’ offices, and state policymakers, it has become clear to me that many community colleges are hubs of innovation that can prepare individuals for sophisticated, high-paying occupations. For instance, in New England where I live, there is a strong public-private partnership between the community colleges in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and the

89 trade as opposed to seeking out a more traditional high-ranking station, Rousseau argues that a man is able to protect himself against “the blows of fate” inasmuch as he is given “a rank which he cannot lose” (ibid 194, 195). With the imminent collapse of the monarchy that Rousseau predicted, it seems governments are periodically subject to revolutions that upend the social order: “The noble become commoners, the rich become poor, the monarch becomes subject”

(ibid 194).61 These volatile times tend to reduce the most powerful men to “less than nothing”

(ibid 196). By contrast, the man who practices a trade can thrive under a wider variety of social conditions, and he remains the same no matter the political climate, when “exposed to all the accidents of human life” (Emile 42). For Rousseau, the specific trade that helps one rise to the

“station of man” is that of the artisan, for “the artisan’s work is most independent of fortune and men” (ibid 195). An alternative trade, such as farming, for instance, is far too dependent on fortune as each season’s crop flourishes or dies based on the weather, which is both unpredictable and uncontrollable (ibid). Moreover, the farmer is dependent on men, as he is merely a tenant who must operate at the landowner’s discretion. At any point, “the enemy, the prince, a powerful neighbor, or a lawsuit can take this field away from him” (ibid). Thus, the farmer must tend not only his crops, but also his landlord’s ego. Even the farmer, whose work constitutes “the most decent, the most useful, and consequently the most noble” trade one can practice, becomes a “slave” to another and, therefore, lives outside himself (ibid). The artisan, by contrast, is “as free” as the ordinary man who does not receive Emile’s education can hope to be in civil society, for “wherever [other men] want to vex the artisan, his baggage is soon packed.

aerospace and defense industry – along the “U.S.-Canada Aerospace and Defense Trade Corridor.” In most cases, these two-year institutions are no longer the “junior colleges” or “transfer schools” of the 1970s but innovative training grounds for careers in advanced technology sectors. 61 Where the social order is subject to radical changes, the state of nature appears to have been characterized by uniformity (see, e.g., SD I [136, 146, 158]).

90 He takes his hands and goes away” (ibid). The artisan, much like the natural man, constantly has all his strength at his disposal and always carries all of himself along with him (cf. SD I [135]).62

Fittingly, then, Emile will also learn an artisan’s trade as part of his natural education (Emile

197-201). While learning this trade is not itself sufficient to form the natural man, he who learns it is at least able to approximate the natural man’s wholeness, unity, and simplicity on the level of humanity.

62 Perhaps the only individual against which this person would be no match is the original man of the state of nature (see FD I [135]).

91 CHAPTER THREE The Shared Literary Education of Sophie and Emile: Rousseau’s Appropriation of Fénelon’s Les Aventures de Télémaque

In the previous chapter, we took an in-depth look at the significance of the anti-utopian novelistic structure of the Emile – of the reader’s literary education with the Emile. In this chapter, we will delve into the text to explore a key aspect of the novelistic dimension within the

Emile – of Sophie’s and Emile’s literary education in the Emile. What can we learn from examining the reading material that comprises the educations of Emile and Sophie? The question is an important one considering that the Emile is remarkable, among other things, for its severe criticism of books, especially novels. Emile’s educational plan is nearly devoid of books, as

Jean-Jacques believes reading to be a plague on childhood. The tutor certainly does not mince words when he openly proclaims, “Je hais les livres” (Emile 184). Even so, Jean-Jacques also hesitantly concedes that “we absolutely must have books” (ibid). The initial harsh pronouncement against books is revised to admit the use of certain kinds of books. Given the necessity of some books, then, in what way can they be made useful or beneficial as part of one’s education? More particularly, what is the ideal function of literary fiction and its appropriate relation to life, especially to the specific kind of life that Emile and Sophie will lead? These are the primary questions that will guide our discussion in this chapter.

Ultimately, Emile’s and Sophie’s respective curricula include a restricted selection of reading material: on the one hand, Sophie reads François Barrême’s writings on accounting (ibid

410) and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator63 (given to her by Emile at Jean-

Jacques’ urging, ibid 450); on the other hand, Emile is assigned a censored version of Daniel

63 The Spectator is a book version of Addison and Steele’s British periodical on home economics, which was published in six volumes in 1716. A French translation first appeared in 1714.

92 Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe that is “disencumbered of all its rigmarole [fratras]” (which, by Jean-

Jacques’ account, is “the most felicitous treatise on natural education,” ibid 184-188), a set of fables with moral teachings (ibid 247-249), and Homer’s Odyssey (strongly implied but never explicitly stated, ibid 414).64 While Emile reads a revised treatise version of Robinson Crusoe so he can learn to imitate its titular character as a critical part of his early natural education, Sophie studies more prosaic works on accounting and home economics in order to make herself ready for domestic life.

And then there is a single book that stands out from among the others, as it is the only one that is included in both Sophie’s and Emile’s pedagogical programs: François de Salignac de

La Mothe-Fénelon’s (1651-1715) didactic novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (The Adventures of

Telemachus [written in 1693-1694 and published, almost certainly without his consent, in

1699]).65 Fénelon was the Archbishop of Cambrai and royal tutor to the Duke of Burgundy

(1682-1712) – Louis XIV’s grandson and heir-apparent – and he was otherwise known in his

64 Given our earlier observation that Rousseau attacks novels, it might seem odd that Jean-Jacques would have the young Emile read one. Indeed, Denise Schaeffer (2002) goes so far as to assert that “Emile’s exposure to Robinson Crusoe is not presented in a grudging or qualified light” (123). However, I would argue that Emile’s contact with Defoe’s novel is actually qualified. We are explicitly told that the book has been heavily edited before it is given to Emile to read. It is crucial to note that, even though the unabridged version of Robinson Crusoe is certainly a novel, Jean-Jacques tells us that his redactions transform the copy Emile receives into a new genre: a treatise. I believe, then, that novels cannot be truly said to form any part of Emile’s early education. And if Rousseau’s/Jean-Jacques’ revisions to Defoe’s book are significant enough to completely modify its genre, then we must question whether the book Emile reads is actually Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (cf. Flanders 1997 [321, 325]). Given the significant alterations that Rousseau/Jean-Jacques admits to making, one could argue that the work Emile reads is a totally different text of Rousseau’s/Jean-Jacques’ own creation. When this is considered alongside the unclear source of Emile’s familiarity with the Odyssey – it is quite possible he knows of it only through Jean-Jacques’ retelling of it – it is remarkable that Emile’s early literary education is heavily censored. By contrast, the text suggests that Sophie is allowed to read her fictional works undoctored. Emile consumes fiction filtered through Jean-Jacques; Sophie, on the other hand, has direct access to her fictional works. 65 Hereafter, simply Télémaque. The provenance of Sophie’s copy is never stated (ibid 404, 410), and she later gives the book to Emile at Jean-Jacques’ request (ibid 450, 467). According to Patrick Riley (1994), Télémaque was published through “the infidelity of a copyist” (2001 [277]). However, Jacques Le Brun (1983, 1997) believes that Fénelon very well could have been involved in the book’s publication, which occurred shortly after his falling-out with Louis XIV (Fénelon 1983 I [xxi], 1997 II [ix]).

93 lifetime as “the tutor of princes.”66 Fénelon originally wrote Télémaque for his royal pupil and, in a 1710 letter, he expressed his chief purpose in doing so:

As for Télémaque, it is a fabulous narration in the form of a heroic poem like those of Homer and of Virgil, into which I have put their main instructions which are suitable for a young prince whose birth has destined him to rule. [ ...] In these adventures I have put all the truths necessary to government, and all the faults that one can find in sovereign power” (“Letter to Letellier,” Fénelon 1835 [653- 54]).67 His Télémaque is essentially a “mirror of princes” disguised as a continuation of Book IV of

Homer’s Odyssey. In Fénelon’s account, the focus of the epic shifts from Ulysses (Odysseus)68 to his son, Télémaque, and the nature of the mission is modified: the main objective of the journey is no longer the quest to find his long lost father but, rather, the son’s education for future kingship. The book portrays the “life of Télémaque, being every moment regulated by the wisdom” of the goddess Minerva, disguised as a male tutor named Mentor, “with a view to the consummation of [Télémaque’s] glory” (Télémaque [Fénelon 1847 406]). Mentor instructs his pupil on a number of critical lessons regarding political power and morality, and Télémaque is repeatedly taught to reject three particular sins: the scourge of absolute sovereignty, the allure of luxury, and sexual temptation. The young man is shown, through a series of ancient models of virtue, the value of leading a people via a disinterested dedication to the public good, as well as the benefits of simple nature and sexual purity. These themes – all fundamentally guided by

Fénelon’s deep Christian piety – are central not only to Télémaque, but indeed also to his other principal political and moral compositions, namely Traité de l’Éducation des Filles (Treatise on

66 Sadly, Le Petit Dauphin, as the duke was nicknamed, died in 1712 before having the opportunity to ascend the throne. We will never know the effect Fénelon’s education could have had on the young man’s practical governance. 67 According to Patrick Riley (2001 [277]), Fénelon also wrote Dialogues of the Dead for the young Duke of Burgundy. 68 Fénelon uses the less common Latin variant of Odysseus’ name, Ulysses – the same one Rousseau uses throughout the Emile (e.g., 36, 137, 212, 326, 439). For this reason, so, too, will we use this variant.

94 the Education of Girls [written 1678, published 1687]) and his Lettre à l’Académie Française

(Letter to the French Academy [written 1714, published 1716]). In the former, Fénelon offers an innovative educational plan for young women that decries the pernicious luxury and licentiousness of the institutionalized court and instead champions a life of simplicity, frugality, chastity, and domesticity. In the latter, he reflects on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rhetorical practices to argue that literature, politics, and religion should be integrated in a manner that privileges substance over form so that rhetoric can serve as an effective instrument of moral

(i.e., Christian) reform, not merely entertainment.

That Télémaque was originally written as an instruction manual for future monarchs by an author steadfastly committed to matters of theology and religion is more than enough to make

Fénelon’s novel an odd choice of reading material for Emile and Sophie. Neither of Rousseau’s fictional pupils is raised in the traditional Christian faith, nor are they groomed for public or political life – not to mention that Sophie is a female, and Télémaque is intended for a decidedly male readership. Thus, given that Télémaque’s education incorporates the particular concerns and knowledge that are required for public service, one might suggest that there is little about his adventures that is relevant to Emile or Sophie. Yet, the peculiarity of their reading of Télémaque is further magnified by the fact that it is also the exclusive aspect in which Emile’s and Sophie’s otherwise markedly disparate curricula intersect. This single point of convergence in their educations is especially remarkable given Rousseau’s repeated emphasis on the critical importance of differentiating the educations of men and women as much as possible. Rousseau argues that, in order to bring about social harmony, it is necessary to devise distinct curricula for men and women divided along strict gender lines because amicable human relations require a mutual and equal interdependence that can arise only with the observance of an inflexible sexual

95 dichotomy. Or, as Rousseau asserts, “The needle and the sword cannot be wielded by the same hands” (Emile 199). For Rousseau, men’s and women’s differences allow them to establish a reciprocal relationship in which their interaction is harmonious and each one provides what the other believes he/she cannot do on his/her own. To make the case for this rigid sexual division of labor, he must demonstrate that by nature “man and woman were formed for one another”

(d’Alembert 128). Rousseau defends the view that the healthy union of men and women requires an adherence to gendered social roles based on complementary and natural biological differences that will serve as the basis of one’s attraction to the other, rather than a gender-ambiguous uniformity that he believes is likely to cause men and women to compete with and repel each other.69 Ultimately, Sophie and Emile are to form a singular unit composed of discrete parts working together toward the same goal because, as Rousseau himself says, “the goal of [men’s and women’s] labors is common, but the labors themselves are different” (Emile 377, 363). For this reason, essentially every aspect of Emile’s and Sophie’s educations must differ dramatically

– including the few readings they are assigned, which we noted above. Fénelon’s Télémaque is the lone exception to this rule.

69 It is worth noting that in the description of the state of nature Rousseau provides in the Second Discourse, he speaks of humans in non-gendered terms – of mankind as a whole, not of men and women distinctly. There, he also says, “The first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation that brought husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children together in a common dwelling; the habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to man, conjugal love, and Paternal love…mutual attachment and freedom were its only bonds…this is when the first difference was established in the ways of living of the two Sexes, which until then had but one” (SD I [164]). This suggests that “man” and “woman” did not exist as inherently relevant categories in the state of nature. The separation of humans into meaningful conventional categories of sex/gender happens only in Rousseau’s account of civil society. This means that, while the anatomical differences between the sexes may indeed be natural, social conventions exaggerate these differences. Rousseau appears to regard a specific blend of these natural differences and conventional exaggerations as salutary for ordinary men and women in civil society.

96 No part of the Emile has provoked more controversy than Rousseau’s differentiation of the social roles of the sexes and their respective educations.70 Readers from the eighteenth century to the present day have examined and debated, condemned and defended the differences between the content of Emile’s and Sophie’s educational schemes on a number of fronts.71

Several contemporary scholars have specifically weighed in on the distinct readings that comprise their curricula, as well as their different experiences in reading Télémaque. Barbara de

Negroni (1987) argues that the disjuncture between Emile’s and Sophie’s reading assignments reflect two distinct gender-based models of society. Sophie’s readings are part of a feminine social model, and Emile’s constitute a masculine natural model (380). Laurence Mall (2002) contends that Emile’s initial lack of knowledge of Télémaque, which Sophie reads first, is

70 As we have already noted above, the narrative structure of the Emile is part political treatise, part romantic novel. Elsewhere in his writings, Rousseau explicitly links these narrative forms to human genders and their associated traits: treatises are labeled masculine, and novels are categorized as feminine (Conf. V [150-154], Dialogues I [123]). Viewed in this light, if we adopt Rousseau’s schema for the “gendering” of narrative forms, the physical text of the novel-treatise the Emile exists in an ambiguous middle ground between two sides of an otherwise seemingly contradictory gender binary. This odd commingling of the two distinctive – or, to use Rousseau’s specific locution, contradictory – narrative forms in the Emile thus frames the entire work in terms of the interaction between masculine and feminine traits. This merging of gendered narrative forms invites us to interpret and clarify the most important elements of Rousseau’s thought in the Emile with direct reference to the questions regarding human gender and sexuality. 71 On the topic of Rousseau’s general treatment of the sexes, perhaps the most famous eighteenth-century criticism is Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Other notable condemnations include Mme. d’Épinay’s Les Conversations d’Émilie (1774, definitive Paris version 1782) and Mme. de Genlis’ Adèle et Théodore (1782). In the nineteenth century, Mary Hays’ six-volume Female Biography (1803) has been interpreted by scholars as a prominent early feminist critique of Rousseau's treatment of women in the Emile (e.g., Greentree 2017). Among early defenses of Rousseau’s theories on women’s education and motherhood, see Olwen Hufton’s The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 (1995 [453-454]), which explores female support for Rousseau’s expositions, and Mme. de Montbart’s Sophie, ou l’education des filles (1777), which emphatically recommends Sophie’s education as an ideal for women to follow. More recently, contemporary scholars have characterized Rousseau as an excessively timorous man and “enemy” who is afraid of women’s power and superior intelligence (Lange 2002, Wexler 1976), as a male chauvinist who believes in an inferior female nature that requires a stringently restricted role (Christenson 1972, Okin 1979), as a patriarchal supporter of women’s dutiful submission in order to bring about men’s freedom (Eisenstein 1981), as an open-minded sexual deviant who, despite initial appearances, actually supports a “certain gender-bending confusion” (Kennedy 2012 [3]), as a visionary who established the principles that later drove the progressive women’s liberation movement (Berger 1979), and as a champion of sexual equality who delegates different roles to men and women out of a genuine regard for establishing their equal status (Schwartz 1984, Bloom 1985).

97 indicative of the young man’s masculinity.72 Emile is familiar with more manly epics (the

Odyssey), whereas Sophie reads domestic manuals and novels, which Rousseau considers to be a feminine genre (Conf. V [150-154], Dialogues I [123]). Hans van Crombrugge (1995) claims that Sophie’s specific readings are important because they allow her to sublimate her sexual desires in a way that Emile’s books do not (457). Diane Brown (2009) asserts that, before Emile has had a chance to read Télémaque, the novel’s primary function is to distinguish readers from non-readers. Because Jean-Jacques immediately likens Sophie to Eucharis, the woman from whom Télémaque was forced to flee, Brown suggests that this indicates Rousseau’s belief that women represent a disruption that jeopardizes the stability of the treasured teacher-student bond

(56). Because Sophie has read Fénelon’s book, she will pick up on this message, but Emile’s initial ignorance of the novel means that he will not. In spite of the differences among these interpretations, they all tend to emphasize a slight variation of the same theme: the deep, inflexible dividing line between men and women in Rousseau’s presentation. In other words, these scholars all argue that Sophie’s and Emile’s distinct reading assignments – and even their different readings of the same book – accentuate the drastic division between men and women.

My reading offers a new perspective on the Fénelon-Rousseau connection by suggesting that Emile’s and Sophie’s different experiences with Télémaque are what help bridge the gulf between the sexes and lead them to their unified end. I argue that Rousseau does this by taking

Fénelon’s Télémaque – which was originally written as a set of instructions “for a young prince whose birth has destined him to rule” – and radically repurposing its teachings for distinctly and radically Rousseauian (that is to say, un-Fénelonian) ends. In the Emile, Télémaque is used in two different manners that diverge from its initial intended purpose, in one way for Emile’s

72 N.B., here it is appropriate to speak of Emile as a young man, as opposed to a boy, as he has grown into early adulthood by the time he meets Sophie and eventually reads Télémaque.

98 education, and in another way for Sophie’s instruction. For Emile, Fénelon’s novel is used as a world travel guide that fosters his cosmopolitanism and teaches him to lose confidence in social and political institutions by providing him with an unpolitical understanding of freedom.

Because Emile is not intended to remain rootless, Jean-Jacques ultimately follows up on his pupil’s reading of Télémaque by exhorting his pupil to devote himself to Sophie, who will serve as his much-needed link to society. And for Sophie, Télémaque is used as a sexual education handbook. Fénelon’s novel is instrumental not only in developing her romantic tastes for the opposite sex and establishing the criteria by which she chooses a suitable husband, but also in teaching her to embrace and understand her sexuality, which she will use to reign over Emile. In sum, in the Emile Rousseau appropriates Télémaque to teach Emile and Sophie two anti-

Fénelonian lessons: one that is anti-government (for Emile)73 and another that is pro-sexuality

(for Sophie). Both of these lessons are instrumental in providing the fundamental basis of the young pupils’ eventual devotion to each other. Stated differently, I hope to demonstrate below that, contrary to what the present scholarship suggests, Télémaque is more important for the way it unites Emile and Sophie than for its ostensible exhibition of the inherent separation of men and women.

“La Télémacomanie” and Rousseau’s Debt to Fénelon

Before we investigate the function of Télémaque as comprising the single shared aspect of Emile’s and Sophie’s educations, let us first step back and examine Fénelon’s influence on eighteenth-century French culture, literature, and political thought in general and on Rousseau’s philosophy in particular. Three hundred years ago, Fénelon’s Télémaque was a cultural phenomenon and a runaway bestseller. It was perhaps the most popular literary work in

73 As we will see in our discussion below, Fénelon opposed certain kinds of societies, but he was not anti-society or anti-government in toto.

99 eighteenth-century Europe, and it was, without question, the most widely-read book in eighteenth-century France – after the Bible, of course (Brownell 1863 [477], Riley 2001 [278],

Hanley 2020 [1-2], Chérel 1917). In 1700, French writer Pierre-Valentin Faydit, who was well- known among his contemporaries, published a book-length refutation of Télémaque. In it, he notes:

If we must judge by the fire and ardor with which this book is sought, it is the most excellent of all books. Never have so many copies of any work been printed. Never have we made so many editions of the same book. Never was a writing read by so many people (Faydit 1700 [2]).74

Vexed by the overwhelming commercial success of a book he deemed morally questionable and greatly overrated, Faydit flippantly dubbed the craze for Télémaque “la Télémacomanie.” While some aspects of Faydit’s criticism tend toward the hyperbolic, his review is helpful to the extent that it captures the incredible popularity of Fénelon’s novel. The marketplace was flooded with the book: between 1699 and 1810, one hundred fifteen French editions and seventy-five different translations were published, including a version in Latin. Each new printing of Télémaque continued to sell out year after year. In 1734, thirty-five years after its initial publication, an

Amsterdam edition of the “Avertissement des libraires” observed, “Even if the editions of

Télémaque were to multiply, it always happens that they are soon exhausted” (Fénelon 1734 [I, translation mine]). It was impossible to keep up with public demand for Fénelon’s book. Even well into the nineteenth century, it remained among the top five best-selling books in Europe.75

The legacy of Télémaque’s incredible success lives on today in our commonly used word

“mentor,” which was introduced into the French and English lexicons as a result of the

74 Among other book-length criticisms of Télémaque is also the popular multi-volume work by Nicolas Geuedeville titled Critique générale des Aventures de Télémaque (1923). Faydit enjoyed his own criticism from Jean-Pierre Rigord in his Critique d’un livre intitulé la Télémacomanie. 75 The Bibliographie de la France presents evidence of its popularity well into nineteenth-century in France.

100 popularity of the work’s most cherished character, Télémaque’s tutor Mentor. The word

“mentor” first appeared in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française in 1762, the year of the

Emile’s publication. By the early eighteenth century, the term informally entered into both

French and English lexicons as a common noun, and it remains there today. But Fénelon’s epic did more than simply increase the number of entries in French and English dictionaries. More importantly, it also created a new literary type that launched a fresh understanding of educational authority during the Enlightenment. For this reason, literary historian Jean-Claude Bonnet (1998) has described Fénelon’s Télémaque as “the true key to the museum of the eighteenth-century imagination.” After its publication, the figure of Mentor quickly rose to prominence as an iconic figure of wisdom in Enlightenment-era popular European culture.76 Consequently, Télémaque inspired a chain of fictional post-Fénelonian teacher-pupil pairs that appeared again and again throughout eighteenth-century visual art, music, and literature, including Samuel Johnson’s

Rasselas, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and Idomeneo, and even Voltaire’s satirical novella Candide, in which the bumbling anti-Mentor Pangloss, a professor of the patently absurd “métaphysico- théologo-comolo-nigologie,” indoctrinates his pupil with a saccharine optimism.77

Yet, of all the works of Enlightenment-era pedagogy that emerged during “la

Télémacomanie,” perhaps the most outstanding is Rousseau’s Emile. Indeed, it is, to a certain

76 Fénelon was influential across the Atlantic as well. Fliegelman 1982 notes that during the American Revolution, the Minerva/Mentor figure enjoyed a prominent place in popular iconography, as it represented the “true parent” of the colonies (and Britannia was the false one) (46, 49). Andrew Jackson even wallpapered the grand stair-central hallway of his Tennessee home with images from the scene in which Télémaque lands on Calypso’s island (Winterer 2007 [39]). The wallpaper remains in place today. For more about Fénelon’s general influence upon the English-speaking world, see Hont 2006 and Schmitt-Maaß et al. 2014. 77 For a more detailed analysis of Télémaque’s place in the literary tradition, see Clark 1984. There, she tracks the numerous fictional works that have been written that chronicle a character’s educational rite of passage from boyhood to manhood. These works typically fall under two categories: The Bildungsroman – the “novel of education” and the Erziehungsroman – the “novel of instruction” (200). Clark outlines the long history of both literary categories and argues that Télémaque is the exemplary Erziehungsroman; this category “calls upon someone to direct the education, to guide and to protect the protagonist,” which is precisely Mentor’s role in the book (200).

101 degree, a rewriting of Fénelon’s novel, and Henri Gouhier (1980) has even asserted that

Rousseau wished to provide his century with its own Télémaque (283).78 More generally, we know that Fénelon ranked quite prominently among Rousseau’s most significant literary influences. Or, as Ryan Hanley (2019) has suggested, “Rousseau was clearly smitten with

Fénelon” (87). Rousseau most likely read Télémaque for the first time at age twenty-five, during his time at Les Charmettes with Mme. de Warens (Gouhier 1980 [281]). It was then that his deep admiration for Fénelon began. Rousseau himself claims that the experience of reading

Télémaque left him “devout almost in the manner of Fénelon,” and he lauded the Archbishop as

“an exemplar of modern virtue” who he placed “in the company of Socrates and Cato” (Reveries

CW VIII [19], Hanley 2019; cf. Chérel 1917 [393], Haillant 2001 [577], C. Coleman 2005 [315],

Pire 1955 [290], Gouhier 1980 [279]). In a well-known, widely cited statement by Bernardin de

Saint-Pierre, Rousseau purportedly claimed that he “preferred Fénelon to all others” (Bernardin

1907 [108]). When Bernardin proposed that “if Fénelon were living, you would be Catholic,”

Rousseau, allegedly “moved to tears,” responded, “If he were alive, I would seek to be his lackey, to merit being his valet! Ah, it is happy to believe!” (ibid; cf. Chérel 1917 [396], Pire

1955 [291], Gouhier 1980 [279], Haillant 2001 [578], C. Coleman 2005 [316], Brown 2009 [67],

Mendham 2014 [50], Hanley 2019 [87-88]). It would be difficult, therefore, to overstate

Rousseau’s high regard for Fénelon. The Archbishop had a great influence not only on

Rousseau’s intellectual development, but also on the substance of several aspects of his moral

78 This is in addition to Emile being a loose rewriting of or a response to other major works, including Plato’s Republic and Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education.

102 and political philosophy. Perhaps the only other author to whom Rousseau is more indebted than

Fénelon is Plutarch.79

Given the immense popularity of Télémaque in the eighteenth century, it is safe to say that every contemporary reader of Rousseau would not only have been familiar with the novel but would also very likely have already read it. One of the most significant differences between

Rousseau’s eighteenth-century readers and today’s readers may very well be our general lack of familiarity with Fénelon and his tale. Rousseau and his contemporary readers knew Fénelon well; we no longer do. Télémaque, which once sparked a multi-generational cultural obsession, is now essentially obscure to everyone living in the twenty-first century, save for a niche group of modern-day academics and avid readers of classic Christian texts. Thomas Merton (1964) has speculated that modern readers no longer appreciate Fénelon because his writing “may be too refined for today’s tastes” (11). Matthew Mendham (2014) has suggested this may be because

“the intellectual and cultural world of Fénelon becomes more distant with each passing decade,” while with other writers who remain relatively well-known today, such as Rousseau, we can still

“see much of ourselves in some aspect of” their work (76). Ryan Hanley (2020) suspects that the twentieth-century commitment to secularization, laïcité, and the liberal optimism of ever- increasing economic growth may explain our hesitation to “embrace the political philosophy of a

Catholic archbishop” who champions “an economic system dedicated to the small and simple”

(3). Whatever the case may be for Fénelon’s modern-day obscurity, it would be helpful at this point to contextualize our discussion by summarizing the crucial plot points and fundamental concepts of Télémaque and mapping its key principles to those of the Emile. Doing so will

79 Of Plutarch, Rousseau stated he is “the author who grips and benefits me the most” (Reveries CW VIII [28]). See Kingston 2019 for an insightful examination of the most significant themes through which Rousseau drew upon Plutarch. Besides Plutarch and Fénelon, other thinkers who left a smaller, albeit clearly visible mark on Rousseau include Plato, Lucretius, Seneca, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz, and Montesquieu, among others.

103 position us to better understand how Rousseau repurposes Fénelon’s novel when he assigns it to both Emile and Sophie.

Although Télémaque is the book’s title character the real hero of the work is his tutor

Mentor, who is actually the goddess Minerva in disguise. Much like Emile’s tutor Jean-Jacques,

Mentor/Minerva is presented as an all-knowing, infallible authority figure who Télémaque must learn to implicitly trust and imitate.80 Indeed, this obligation to obey Mentor’s perfect guidance in an unflagging journey to find Ulysses is the single greatest distinction between Fénelon’s

Télémaque and Homer’s Τηλέμαχος. Télémaque opens with its title character and Mentor shipwrecked, washing ashore on the island of the goddess Calypso who still regrets the departure of Ulysses from her fetters. Calypso receives the pair favorably. Shortly thereafter she falls in love with Télémaque. She then offers the young man immortality and inquires about his adventures. He recounts the exciting trials he and Mentor have encountered and the exotic foreign lands they have seen thus far on their voyage. Calypso listens intently with inexpressible delight. Once the young man finishes his account of their adventures leading up to the shipwreck, Calypso exerts all her power to detain Télémaque on her island by inciting him to return her passion. Mentor intervenes to protect his pupil against Calypso’s artifice, and during this intercession, Télémaque becomes enamored of one of the goddess’ nymphs, Eucharis, who

80 While Mentor is mentioned several times in the Emile, Minerva is never named. As small as this observation may initially seem, it must be noted, as Télémaque makes repeated references to the tutor’s identity as both Mentor and Minerva. In fact, in the opening lines of Fénelon’s novel, Télémaque’s tutor is introduced by immediately revealing her/his dual identity to the reader: “it is the prerogative of superior deities to conceal whatever they please from those of a lower class and it was the pleasure of Minerva, who accompanied Télémaque in the likeness of Mentor, to be concealed from Calypso” (Fénelon 1847 [4]). Moreover, the book ends with Mentor’s/Minerva’s grand revelation of her/his true identity to his/her charge. Rousseau’s choice to limit Jean-Jacques to a singular identity linked to the human Mentor rather than the goddess Minerva must have been deliberate, and it is surely significant. On one hand, Jean-Jacques’ mortal identity casts Emile’s tutor as less than divine, as all-too-human. But on the other hand, as an all-wise puppet master who exhibits complete control over Emile’s life and his own (Mentor/Minerva still had to surrender to the will of other gods in Télémaque, whereas Jean-Jacques is beholden to nobody but himself), Jean- Jacques in this sense positions himself as something more than divine.

104 is defined in the text by her sexuality and the reckless consequences of the lustful passion she ignites. The nymph awakens sexual passion in the young man and the two quickly fall in love.

This provokes Calypso to jealousy and rage, and she swears that Télémaque must leave her island immediately.81 Eucharis, fearing that the young man might soon escape her clutches, uses her wiles to try to detain him.

Télémaque’s affair with Eucharis establishes the context for Mentor’s speeches on virtue and sexual purity. During this episode, the tutor depicts sexual passion as a “forbidden” and

“unworthy” pleasure that terrorizes man and clouds his judgment. Under the spell of the “tyranny of love,” Télémaque is warned, one becomes degenerate and slothful. In the end, Mentor protects his student by commanding him to flee Eucharis’ poisonous temptation, “for love is only conquered by flight” (Télémaque [Fénelon 1847 124]). In a dramatic exit more reminiscent of a

James Bond novel than a didactic Christian book, Mentor heaves his pupil from the top of a cliff into the crashing sea below and leaps after him. We will return to the significance of this episode and Fénelon’s characterization of love below – especially as they relate to Rousseau’s treatment of human sexuality in the Emile. For now, let us continue with our brief synopsis of Télémaque.

After escaping Calypso’s island, Mentor and Télémaque swim to a vessel which has appeared not far off shore and embark upon a new set of fantastic adventures, during which time

Fénelon showcases a number of social orders that exemplify different aspects of his wider political teaching.82 While reading these passages, it is crucial to bear in mind Fénelon’s chief

81 Calypso’s fit of jealousy is reminiscent of Rousseau’s statement to the effect that, although love begins as a sweet and gentle sentiment, if presented with an obstacle it tends to devolve into a violent, bitter jealousy – a monstrous beast that is awakened with love: “A tender and sweet sentiment steals into the soul, and the least obstacle becomes an impetuous frenzy; jealousy awakens together with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of all passions receives sacrifices of human blood” (SD I [165]). 82 Mendham (2014) provides a helpful discussion of the various societies depicted in Télémaque, along with a categorization of these social orders: (1) Societies which are brutally savage or decadent – The shepherds of the

105 aim. Télémaque was written in and for a monarchical age. Fénelon’s main preoccupation in the work is to identify and eventually rectify what he perceived to be the fundamental defects of

Louis XIV’s totalitarian aspirations. Consequently, Télémaque generally celebrates simple social orders, which establish the standard by which Fénelon sharply attacks corrupt civilizations and their leaders. Notable among these critiques is the portrait of the tyrant Idomeneus, with whom

Télémaque enjoys a prolonged stay. It is during this episode that Mentor offers his most sustained lessons on the dangers of luxury and despotism. These passages, in turn, led the following century to view Fénelon as the greatest modern critic of opulence, idleness, and absolutism. As Patrick Hanley (2019) has noted, Fénelon, like Rousseau, emphasizes “the way in which the morals of a society are shaped by its economic organization” (90). Idomeneus originally reigned over Crete but was eventually exiled by its inhabitants due to his excessive cruelty. When Télémaque meets him for the first time, he is the ruthless absolute monarch of

Salente, a new city he founded following his expulsion from Crete. Salente is the epitome of luxury, and Télémaque observes that it continues to rise “into greater magnificence every hour”

(Télémaque [Fénelon 1847, 160]). Initially, the young man is wonderstruck by Salente’s splendor. Yet, in time, Mentor censures the city for its decline in population, the quantity and quality of its cultivated lands, and its prosperity, all of which has resulted from Idomeneus’

“arrogant and injurious” enthusiasm for grand buildings, “pomp and magnificence,” and a false sense of honor that gave rise to unnecessary wars (ibid 209, 239). Mentor bluntly reprimands

Idomeneus, “By attempting to appear powerful, you have subverted your power” (ibid 178).

mountains in the desert of Oasis, outside of the civilized part of Egypt (Book II), Cyprus (Book IV), Unreformed Salente (Book X, understood to be a portrait of France under Louis XIV); (2) Societies which are healthy, or at least sound in their fundamentals – The Mandaurians (Book IX), Boetica (Bétique, Book VII), Crete (Book V), Reformed Salente (Books X, XI, and XVII, understood to be a reform program for contemporary France), Tyre (Book III, understood to depict contemporary Holland).

106 Fénelon’s depiction of Salente is commonly seen as a condemnation of seventeenth-century

France – or, at least, this is how Louis XIV read this portion of Télémaque. Louis censured the work after he interpreted the work to be a roman à clef in which he saw himself caricatured as the vicious tyrant Idomeneus. Shortly thereafter, Fénelon was banished from court, and he was never reinstated.83

Mentor and his pupil retreat from Salente, during which time Télémaque visits the mythical Fields of Elysium, where his great grandfather assures him that Ulysses is still alive and that they will meet again in Ithaca. When Télémaque leaves Elysium, he returns to Salente, which he finds has been reformed into a city of moderate wealth over which a now compassionate Idomeneus reigns. As Télémaque observes when entering the new Salente, “The magnificence and splendor in which I left it have disappeared. I see neither silver, nor gold, nor jewels: the habits of the people are plain” and agriculture proliferates (ibid 385). The once magnificent and glittering city is now a quiet, rustic agrarian community. Mentor implores his pupil to remember that “there are two evils in government which admit of no remedy: an inequitable and despotic power in the prince and a luxurious depravity of manners in the people”

(Télémaque [Fénelon 1847 386]). The latter corrupts a prince, and the former, his subjects.

Regarding the rise of luxury, Mentor contends that a “deviation from the simplicity of nature” causes new “factitious necessities” to multiply, and soon “people can no longer subsist without things” that “before had never been in being” (ibid 387). What is more, the proliferation of desires caused by luxury has a corrupting effect on morals, as wealth becomes the new conventional mark of success and poverty, that of disgrace. As a result, people, driven by greed and an intense wish to avoid dishonor, are driven to borrow, cheat, and “practice a thousand

83 For more about Louis XIV’s reception of Télémaque, see, e.g., Kapp (1982), esp. “Le Scandale politique,” 153- 173.

107 other scandalous expedients” to either actually procure wealth or give the false appearance that they have money (ibid 388).

Following the lesson on luxury in Salente, Télémaque confesses to Mentor that he has fallen in love with Idomeneus’ daughter, Antiope, who meets with Mentor’s approval as a suitable wife and companion for the future king. In Antiope, Télémaque finds a pure “royal virgin” and “the sister of [his] soul” who represents the opposite of the fatal passions that

Eucharis had ignited (ibid 398, 395, 404]).84 The young man most admires his new beloved’s gentle and domestic qualities, such as “the glowing modesty of her countenance,” her “constant attention to tapestry and embroidery,” her “contempt for excessive finery,” her “ignorance of her beauty,” and the fact that she seldom speaks (ibid 395). It is vaguely implied that Télémaque will eventually marry her, because his tutor claims that she is intended for him by the gods (ibid 398).

However, their union is omitted from the book, as Mentor encourages his pupil to take leave of her to return to Ithaca. In a sad but tame farewell (relative to their wild flight from Eucharis), the pedagogical pair leave the newly reformed Salente once again and resume their travels free of any distractions from women. At long last, Mentor reveals his true identity as Minerva to his/her charge. As Minerva, she gives him her final instructions and disappears. The book closes with

Télémaque arriving in Ithaca, where he is finally reunited with his father.

The story of Rousseau’s own wandering pupil-teacher pair implicitly echoes various aspects of Télémaque in a manner that eighteenth-century readers were sure to recognize. To

84 In the preface to Daisy Miller, Henry James stated that reserved women such as Antiope “who respected themselves took particular care never to have adventures; not the least little adventure that would be worth (worth any self-respecting novelist's) speaking of. There were certainly, it was to be hoped, ladies who practised that reserve which, however beneficial to themselves, was yet fatally detrimental to literature, in the sense of promptly making any artistic harmony pitched in the same low key trivial and empty” (1934 [286]). In other words, women such as Antiope are far less interesting in a novel than their more uninhibited counterparts, such as Eucharis. Appropriately enough, then, while Eucharis figures quite prominently in the storyline of Télémaque, Antiope has a noticeably smaller speaking role.

108 start with the most obvious parallel, the Emile-Jean-Jacques-Sophie triad of the Emile neatly mirrors the Télémaque-Mentor-Antiope triad of Télémaque (Pire 1955 [306-307], Chérel 1917

[398]). What is more, a number of specific allusions in the Emile directly recall Fénelon’s epic:

Sophie reads the book and forms her romantic tastes from her reading of it (Emile 404, 414), the girl compares Emile to Télémaque and she is compared to Eucharis (ibid 414, 450), Jean-Jacques likens himself to Mentor (ibid 414, 424, 467), the tutor presses Sophie to give Emile her copy of

Télémaque (ibid 450), Emile reads the book during his travels with Jean-Jacques, during which the two imagine their journey to follow the same route taken by Télémaque and Mentor on their grand adventure (ibid 467), Emile chooses a homeland based on the lessons he learns from his reading of Télémaque, and Jean-Jacques acts as an authoritarian, authoritative Mentor-like figure who quietly controls every aspect of Emile’s education.

Moreover, among the central themes of Rousseau’s Emile, scholars have called attention to many of the same issues and literary strategies that echo Fénelon’s novel. Judith Shklar (1969) provides what is perhaps the most well-known theoretical basis for comprehending the

Rousseau-Fénelon connection. She argues that Rousseau’s greatest debt to Fénelon is his presentation of two different utopias – a rustic, pre-political Golden Age and a political era of

Spartan civic virtue. While previous scholars had attempted to reconcile these two disparate

“models,” Shklar contends that Rousseau follows Fénelon, who she claims also uses two models

“as Rousseau was to do, as two equally valid, though different utopias” (ibid 4). In other words,

Rousseau’s two visions of society are not meant to be combined. In Télémaque, “Bétique, the utopia of spontaneous rural simplicity, illuminates all the vices of a denatured civilization.

Salente, the creation of a single legislator, is a model of organized civic virtue, which serves to

109 show up the social degradation of France under Louis XIV” (ibid 5).85 According to Shklar’s observations, Rousseau creates comparable models in his own works to diagnose “mankind’s psychic ills” and identify “the emotional diseases of modern civilization” (ibid). With Rousseau, man can choose between two “soul-satisfying” choices: either rustic peace or Spartan civic order, each of which is “totally artificial” but “meets the psychic needs of men for inner unity and social simplicity” (ibid).86 Within this template, Shklar argues that Rousseau’s Spartan, civic model is endorsed in The Social Contract and Considerations on the Government of Poland; his pastoral, domestic model is defended in works such as Julie and the Emile.

As part of his defense of the pastoral in the Emile, Rousseau, much like Fénelon in

Télémaque, condemns modern indulgence and luxury.87 The parallels between Fénelon’s and

Rousseau’s treatments of luxury are quite striking. For Rousseau luxury is often the engine of vice and an instrument of deception as it abandons men to the tyrannical “whims of opinion”

(Emile 127; cf. 341). Opulence establishes a multitude of new false needs and introduces the division of human beings into unnatural categories of “rich” and “poor” which eventually devolve into those of “master” and “slave” (SD II [175, 182]). Similar to Mentor’s warnings about luxury, Rousseau concludes that its rise leads to depravity; wealth and rank become superficial markers of prestige and proxies for virtue or merit. As a result, a “universal” “frenzy to achieve distinction” “consumes us all” because everyone wishes to be thought of as worthy

(ibid 184). Thus, “luxury establishes its empire and leads people to love what is difficult and

85 Keohane (1980), much like Shklar, argues that Fénelon presents “two exemplary regimes that have come to be seen as his two utopias: Bétique and Salente” (338–343). 86 Riley (2001) has observed that Fénelon’s and Rousseau’s utopias are distinctly ancient models of virtue. Both thinkers tend to venerate the ancient over the modern. 87 Here, we can only provide a brief summary of the Fénelon-Rousseau connection regarding their treatment of luxury. For more extensive discussions of the matter from different angles, see Mendham 2014, Chérel 1917, and Riley 2001 [86-92].

110 costly” over what is natural, beneficial, or useful (Emile 341). But what truly matters is not necessarily the actual possession of wealth, but, just as Mentor had also observed, merely the appearance that one is rich, for everything is reduced to outward show and “play-acting” (SD II

[187]). Consequently, the appearance of virtue becomes a substitute for virtue itself. In this scenario, one lives for and through the opinions of others. As Rousseau asserts, “The pleasure one wants to enjoy in others’ eyes is lost for everyone; it is enjoyed neither by them nor by oneself” (Emile 351). One becomes divided, dependent, and inauthentic. For these reasons,

Emile and Sophie “will not have the disadvantage of [being accustomed] to luxury” (ibid 70; cf.

395). Their educations will, instead, prevent them from deviating from the simplicity and unity of nature. We are never told the specific location where the couple eventually settles down, but the text implies that they will reside in the French countryside “around Sophie’s dwelling” and will enjoy the many charms of their simple life, which “their former wealth” would have

“prevented them from tasting” (ibid 474, 480). Similar to Télémaque, then, the Emile prizes rural simplicity over urban grandeur.

But in spite of some of these clear links between Télémaque and the Emile, there are a number of notable differences between the educational journeys presented in both works.

Understanding these differences is critical to deciphering the meaning of Rousseau’s explicit references to Télémaque in his Emile. Perhaps the greatest contrast between the two works is found in their dissimilar ends. Whereas Fénelon’s primary concern was monarchical reform,

Rousseau is instead more interested in matters of republican self-governance and questions of political legitimacy. Rousseau readily admits that his Emile is certainly no Télémaque, and as such, “is not a king,” just as Jean-Jacques is no Minerva and thus “not a god” (Emile 467).

Whereas Télémaque’s adventures show a famous future king on a coordinated but often

111 unsupervised quest to find his father and to learn the qualities of good governance from a goddess tutor in disguise, Emile’s venture takes an unknown bourgeois homme vulgaire on an antimonarchic journey, every aspect of which is highly regulated by his demigod-like gouverneur, to shape him into the healthy natural man in society. To be sure, Emile’s status as an homme vulgaire is conditional. He is an ordinary man in the sense that he is not famous, is not being groomed for leadership, and is of average intelligence. Emile also appears not to possess extraordinary skills of any kind. However, to the extent that he does eventually become the natural civilized man, in this respect he represents a new kind of person and, therefore, is very much an homme rare (e.g., Emile 41) – but one who is dramatically different from the rare sort of man that Télémaque is destined to become. As Christopher Kelly (1987) has stated, Emile offers the reader a new kind of exemplary life that is not only different from the traditional ones that Rousseau viewed as the most important (e.g., Socrates, Cato, and Jesus), but one that is also different from the new sort of exemplary life represented by Rousseau’s own strange life. We are told that Emile’s “example will serve [average individuals] better than all our books,” including, presumably, not only “The Book of Books,” which he does not read, but also the very book that actually does offer Emile his primary literary example in adulthood: Télémaque.

Sex, Love, and Cosmopolitanism: Emile’s Télémaque and the Political Education of Men

In the Emile, Rousseau takes Télémaque – a book that was originally written for the education of a specific reader who is meant to fill a specific position in a specific country – and repurposes it to direct the instruction of man more generally. With Emile, Jean-Jacques uses

Télémaque as a kind of global travel guide: the young man is made to read Fénelon’s work

“while proceeding on his journey,” and, along the way, he and his tutor seek out modern-day equivalents of the social orders Télémaque encounters, including “Salente and the good king

112 Idomeneus” (ibid 467).88 Instead of merely reading about diverse cultures – as an ordinary reader might – Emile actually emulates Télémaque’s adventures. Like Fénelon’s pupil, he physically interacts with a wide range of people. But despite this parallel between the two young men, their dealings with various types of civilizations lead to wildly different ends. Whereas Télémaque’s journey teaches him a distinctly political notion of freedom that accords with Fénelon’s austere

Christian philosophy, Emile’s own comparable adventures present him with a teaching about an unpolitical concept of freedom that coheres with the fundamentals of a uniquely Rousseauian political philosophy. In these passages, Emile’s greatest lesson is that all existing governments are illegitimate, and he eventually shuns the chains of citizenship, for freedom is “the first of all goods” but “is found in no form of government” (Emile 84, 473). Thus, Emile initially claims to wish to “withdraw” himself “from dependence on man” and return only to a “dependence on nature” (ibid 472). Whereas Télémaque’s travels eventually open his eyes to the virtues of wise leadership and lead him back home to Ithaca, Emile’s own odyssey creates a rootless man with no true home or parental ties and who forsakes political life. In other words, he becomes the cosmopolitan man par excellence – a vagabond of no fixed abode.

Nevertheless, the aim of Emile’s upbringing is not to make him an unsocial man who lives along the periphery of society. The Emile does not depict the reveries of a solitary walker, but the education of a soon-to-be husband and “good father of a family” (ibid 473).89 Emile is a

88 Interestingly, Emile will only seek out the “good” post-reform Idomeneus, but not the original tyrannical version. There is no indication in the Emile that the young boy even reads the passages about unreformed Salente. Indeed, it is quite possible – if not probable – that Emile’s copy of Télémaque is as heavily redacted as his copy of Robinson Crusoe. If he does not read the passages about unreformed Salente, this would make the lessons he obtains from Télémaque all the more remarkable; Emile gains a negative perception of government from his reading of the book – but only, we may presume, from reading about the ostensibly good political orders. 89 Cf. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which surveys the “praiseworthy characteristics” – otherwise known as moral and intellectual virtue – that are required “in order to become good” (1103a10, b27). While this work begins with the explicit purpose of engendering one’s personal improvement, Aristotle does not simply treat the acquisition of virtue as something done at the individual level. Indeed, many of his virtues – such as magnanimity and

113 wealthy individual (ibid 52) whose birth under different circumstances may have destined him to rule (ibid 472, 475), but is, under present conditions, fated to live a private life as a husband and father.90 Jean-Jacques is quick to remind his pupil that he must conform to certain demands of political society. The tutor proclaims, “O Emile, where is the good man who owes nothing to his country? Whatever country it is, he owes it what is most precious to man – the morality of his actions and the love of virtue” (ibid). In the end, according to Jean-Jacques, man is indebted to his country for the virtue he possesses, which does not exist by nature. The laws of one’s country do benefit one who lives under them. Even if such laws are imperfect – as every political order is necessarily defective (SD II [175]) – Emile is taught that they “give him the courage to be just even among wicked men” and teach “him to reign over himself” (Emile 473). In short, one’s country is instrumental in encouraging a certain kind of human virtue. Ultimately, Emile will contribute to the public good by living as a private citizen among his fellow countrymen who he must befriend (ibid 474). He and Sophie will do their duty by acting as a model of virtue that will surpass all others. Jean-Jacques exhorts his pupil, in an impassioned (and seemingly quixotic) call to action, to return to his beloved Sophie so the “lovable couple” can inspire others to follow their virtuous example and live happily (ibid). While Télémaque deflates Emile’s fervor for

friendliness – develop one’s relation to the city. What is more, the Nicomachean Ethics ends with a description of friendship and a transition that points to the Politics, his study of human associations in the political community. Because men now rarely live in isolation, any study of character formation cannot abstract from the city. We are born into civil society where we interact among other human beings who influence, for better or for worse, the possibility that we may live the best way of life. Even before an individual begins his formal education, his city/community shapes his essential nature as well as the conventions he observes. The existence of the city makes character development an inherently political endeavor. Therefore, we must not only be able to establish the proper character in ourselves, but also to properly judge the characters of those around us. We must be both inward and outward looking beings. See, especially, Nicomachean Ethics 1097b11, Politics 1253a3; cf. Hume’s “Of the Origin of Government” I.v.1. 90 The text makes it clear that Sophie is far less affluent than Emile. In short, she “marries up.” As Ian Watt (1957) has observed, it is a fairly constant feature in the tradition of the novel that the “marriage of the protagonists usually leads to a rise in the social and economic status of the bride, not the bridegroom. Hypergamy, though not a convention of modern society, is a fairly constant convention of the novel; and its ultimate cause is surely the preponderance of women in the novel-reading public, a preponderance which this crucial detail of its matrimonial mystique directly reflects” (153).

114 citizenship, Jean-Jacques reattaches his pupil to the community by encouraging his bond to an individual woman. Emile will serve his country well and contribute to the public good by pursuing his individual interests.

Rousseau’s pedagogical goal for Emile emerges from his unique and unprecedented assessment of man’s social relations. Rousseau laments that modern civil society has become populated by lone individuals who merely happen to live collectively. Humans are forced to reside amongst each other, but they live as competitors camouflaged as allies. Or to use a popular contemporary slang word, civilized men have become “frenemies” – people who are friendly toward one another despite a fundamental dislike or rivalry. This is the case because man entered society without becoming truly fit for it: he has become a socialized creature, but he has not succeeded at becoming genuinely social. According to this presentation, man currently exists in a halfway house, split between the necessities of two worlds. One part of him remains stuck in the state of nature and the other part is already firmly planted in the opposite condition of modern civil society. Man is no longer a truly solitary being, yet he has not yet become fully socialized.

Due to the dramatic, irreversible changes that occurred to man’s living conditions when humanity was propelled from the state of nature to civil society, our natural sentiments, which were once healthy in primitive times, are no longer beneficial in our present social setting. Stated differently, Rousseau recognizes a constant tension between man’s natural inclinations, or his individual desire, and the demands of life in civil society, or one’s duty.

As Allan Bloom (1979, 1985, 1993a) has argued cogently in his analyses of the Emile, the work represents Rousseau’s genuine attempt to repair this delicate balance between duty and desire in civil society (e.g., Emile 444-445, 471-474; cf. Kant 1963 [60-61]). Bloom demonstrates that the “special problem to which Rousseau addresses himself is the atomization

115 and egotism produced by modern bourgeois society” (1993a [100]).91 Rousseau agrees with the modern rationalist thinkers in concluding that man is a fundamentally self-interested creature, and to him our egotism is ineradicable. It is a feature that has characterized man from his beginnings and will continue to define him until the end of days. But Rousseau postulates that in the original state of nature, humans exhibited a harmless self-sufficient form of self-interest.

Once we entered civil society, our egotism became complicated by our need to use other people as means to our selfish ends. Now, social man is an artificial creature suffused with a bundle of false desires and passions that contradict his social duties, and on top of that, he is overwhelmed by the materialism of modern philosophy. According to Bloom, then, for Rousseau “the opposition between natural man and social man, between desire and duty, is the core of the human problem, which is not soluble. The modern crisis results, precisely, from the false opinion that the two can be reconciled, an opinion that produces the bourgeois – neither natural man nor citizen” (ibid 49). Because of the insolubility of this difficulty, one can only hope to discover a way to ameliorate these tensions in the best way possible. In dealing with this dilemma,

Rousseau sides with modern philosophy in remaining devoted to the cause of equality and human freedom. These requirements establish the problem he commits to resolving. Given modern man’s predicament, one may state Rousseau’s goal as follows: he must discover a forceful and non-mercenary incentive for human associations within civil society that can also cultivate freedom and equality among modern human beings.

91 Bloom’s analysis focuses on Rousseau’s solution for modern men, which means (as it does for Rousseau) the materialistic man whose opinions are determined by his concerns for property values and conventional respectability, i.e., the bourgeois. Rousseau’s specific teaching about the relationship between the sexes is not part of his civic solution to the human problem – which includes Rousseau’s account of the social contract, the General Will, and citizenship – for which love plays no role.

116 Thus, despite the initial presentation of civilization as the source of man’s problems due to our natural unsuitability for it, ultimately Rousseau’s intention is to urge man to fully integrate himself into the modern world of civil society. Only by doing this can human beings learn to live happily and finally feel more at home in today’s civilized world (although we likely will never truly be at home in the civilized world, as Rousseau says that we were not made for it). If there is to be a happy individual in civil society, he will not emerge spontaneously; he will need to be made with the proper human intervention. With Rousseau this intervention takes shape as a lifelong pedagogical enterprise. Humans – more so than any other creature – need to be taught how to improve themselves. Given the complex nature of man’s higher faculties, his education is necessarily the most urgent and the most problematic one. Rousseau joins the modern thinkers in rejecting the notion of a natural summum bonum that could serve to order man’s soul, yet he also attempts to recover the ancient notion of virtue as a guiding social principle. Rousseau’s thought differs most significantly from the ancients – and ultimately signifies a radical advancement of modern thought – in his assessment that nature has not established a clear road to virtue.

Rousseau sets out to overcome nature’s shortcoming and paves that path himself by (re)defining virtue and guiding man toward it. For Rousseau, a positive bonding force among humans had to be discovered to replace the current inimical one. His aim is to find it and lead us to it.

Remarkably, this quest led Rousseau to identify sentiment as the true stable foundation for duty in civil society. For the bourgeois man, the supreme happiness of life is not to be found in contemplation or glory, but rather in sublimated romantic love.92 With this form of love that eventually leads to marriage and the formation of a nuclear family, a man’s or woman’s desire

92 Rousseau foresees at least three primary solutions to man’s problem: near isolation/retreat from society (the artist/philosopher’s solution), a society in which the individual is subsumed to reinstitute regard for others (the civic solution), and sublimation through pure love of another (the bourgeois solution). This chapter focuses on the third potential answer to man’s problems on the list.

117 drives their choice of a partner, and they subsequently pledge their fidelity to their chosen beloved because they recognize this to be their most serious duty. In this scheme, desire and duty do not merely harmonize, but indeed they fuse together. In the marital partnership as reconfigured by Rousseau, Emile and Sophie will each long to be deserving of the other and will enthusiastically desire to behave in such a manner as to win his or her mate’s genuine and freely given affection.93 To genuinely care for each other, they must love each other; to love the other, each must be able to connect his or her mate to his or her own self-love. Ultimately, the partnership of the sexes “produces a moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man is the arm…Each follows the prompting of the other; each obeys, and both are masters” (Emile

377). Man and woman, then, form a complementary unit comprised of two discrete actual individuals who, together, form one figurative moral body. Or to borrow a phrase introduced by

Sir Philip Sidney’s Argulus, each is to the other “My deare, my deare, my better halfe.”94 For

Rousseau, marriage and the nuclear family emerge as the forms of human association that stand the best chance of replacing the antagonistic economic relations that dominate modern society.

Marriage and the family become the new healthy root of human connectedness in society, and the marital contract will form the basis of the community’s larger social contract; marriage in the

93 Specifically, regarding women’s reciprocated love, Rousseau decries male violence against a woman to force her submission. In order for a man to appropriately possess a woman “the consent of the will is needed” (Two Sexes 55fn). Following the rape of the wife in The Levite of Ephraim, the assailants are rebuked: “O wretches, who destroy your species through the pleasures destined to reproduce it” (Levite 185). 94 The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (Book III, Chapter 12). Cf. Emile 479: Jean-Jacques says to Sophie, “Become his other half to such an extent that he can no longer do without you.” Bloom (1993a) notes the similarity between Rousseau’s presentation of love and Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium – the most obvious difference being that while Aristophanes’s mythological story is intended to be comedic, Rousseau’s account is serious (108). Yet, I would suggest that Rousseau’s presentation of love may actually be more comparable to the biblical one. With Aristophanes’ presentation, the male-female pairing is only one of three possible options, whereas the Bible and Rousseau both treat the male-female pair as the only option (cf. Burger 2000 [7]).

118 Emile serves a crucial political function by linking individuals not only to each other, but also to their community, thereby establishing a fundamental characteristic of the political community.95

Here, one could contend that romantic love is a particular experience in that it occurs only between two people; as a result, it would seem that love cannot, in principle, act as a bonding force for a whole society. Rousseau would certainly agree that the particular/individual cannot be the root of society. That belief lies at the core of his revision of existing social contract theories. Whereas previous thinkers had sought to base the social contract on a calculus of individual goods (i.e., personal rewards and punishments), Rousseau by contrast seeks to base it on duty to another, which he sees as a much more reliable means to forge a human connectedness that does not exist by nature. By basing the social contract on duty rather than goods, Rousseau establishes the grounds for obligation to others – a key element that is missing from earlier social contract theories. That is to say, if human beings are naturally selfish and unsocial, as social contract thinkers assume (hence the need for the convention of a contract to develop an artificial framework for society), then it is absurd to base the contract on an egotistical concern for private rewards and punishments. Indeed, such egotism forms a fragile basis for a political order because it is missing any form of obligation or commitment – arguably the glue that binds together individuals into a single mass. In other words, previous iterations of the social contract theory were all flawed in that they all lacked a binding agent that would serve to link individuals into a solid, coherent whole.

95 While the bulk of Emile’s education occurs in relative isolation, eventually he must settle down in a small community. As Rousseau says, the point of the boy’s education is to teach him how to live among his fellows; Emile will absolutely be social (Emile 184, 208, 220, 327, 335, Favre 114). But he will reject large cities, such as Paris, and will instead opt to live in a small rural community.

119 Rousseau asserts that love will keep us together. Love is that critical binding agent that can establish a sense of obligation or duty and, thus, connect us to each other. Thus, Rousseau would wholeheartedly disagree with the claim that love and the family cannot be a bonding force for society – as would, for that matter, Aristotle (Politics [Book I]) and Edmund Burke (e.g., his

“little platoons” in Reflections on the Revolution in France [¶ 75]). It is important to realize that

Rousseau does not view love as something that is strictly particular, for he explicitly states that each individual is a part indivisible from the whole (ibid 460). Just as the family man is not self- sufficient or whole on his own, neither is the family unit self-sufficient or whole on its own.

Thus, love cannot be simply particular because the unit it forms is not independent and self- sustaining. Inasmuch as a husband commits himself to his wife and children, they form a mini community that is an essential subset of the larger community.

Emile joins in a kind of contractual agreement with Sophie (Emile 53, 324, 450) which forms the basis for all the other social contracts he will ever “sign” for the rest of his life, for it is the “contract that connects him with the community” (ibid 455). Stated otherwise, this first contract with Sophie contains all the others. Emile’s learned obligation/duty to Sophie gives rise to his subsequent obligations to his family/children. These successively lead to the obligations he learns to fulfill to the larger community to which he and his family belong (e.g., ibid 233-234,

455). One’s deep commitment to the family establishes the basis for one’s willingness to commit to the community, for the community has a direct effect on the well-being/happiness of the family and its individual members (ibid 473). Emile’s promise to obey the larger social contract

(i.e., the contract’s legitimacy) is predicated on the understanding that doing so will contribute to his and his family’s well-being/happiness as he himself conceives it. Marriage subordinates citizenship to love, but because the family will serve as the basis of one’s link to the larger

120 community, the affirmation of one’s commitment to one’s own family simultaneously signals one’s pledge of allegiance to the general public. Rousseau, much like previous social contract thinkers, uses man’s self-interestedness to connect him to the larger community. But Rousseau does so by linking that selfishness to a moral/sentimental commitment to others. For Rousseau, the private is what binds man to the public, as one’s duty to one’s community becomes merely an extension of or redirection of one’s self-love, or one’s individual desire.

Rousseau thus uses marriage as a way to fashion man into a gentler, more truly social creature who lives as a genuine member of a community. He indirectly serves the common good because it is united with the direct, salutary pursuit of his primary concern: his personal interests.

This introduces a new equally selfish but softer conception of Locke’s materialistic pursuit of selfish desire or greed. In effect, Rousseau seeks to transform human relatedness away from a transactional, exploitative dependence among people who feel antipathetic to all and toward a mutual dependence between men and women who feel deep affection for one another.

Accordingly, Rousseau identifies the development of human sexuality in an individual as a great opportunity to lay the groundwork for this cooperative type of dependence. Jean-Jacques’ specific task as gouverneur is to delay the formation of Emile’s immediate raw biological sexual urges, which initially lack a naturally defined or established target, and then redirect those impulses toward a morally acceptable object: his future wife, Sophie. It is important to note, then, that Rousseau’s proposed solution to man’s problems emphatically does not urge the development of our faculties toward an impossibly difficult, lofty goal as the ancient thinkers had tried to do. Rather, the bar is lowered, and we are told to acquiesce in our innate animal sexual urges and to merely redirect them toward a less exalted but more reliable end. The Emile aims to resolve the problems of social life, not by transcending them to reach new heights as

121 previous philosophers had urged, but by harkening back to man’s carnal instincts. Rousseau’s ultimate task is to civilize human sexual behavior by infusing it with the proper “sentiment of the heart” in order to transform it from a “purely animal act” to a tamer human one (SD I [161]).

Sex, originally merely a course carnal deed that natural man carried out with as little emotional attachment as he did the act of eating,96 is, with Rousseau, humanized as it becomes the end of the finest education and a sublime expression of love for one’s romantic partner. In the Emile,

Rousseau refines the basic physical needs of man described in the Second Discourse: food, shelter, and sex (ibid 142, cf. ibid 134). Because man has not successfully learned how to civilize these behaviors himself, it is necessary for Rousseau to show us the most salutary manner in which to tame our beastly impulses. It is in this way that he seeks to complete man’s transition away from the state of nature to a wholly civilized, fully human way of life in the Emile.

Ultimately, Rousseau’s scheme is able to represent a more moderate, more certain, more humane avenue to interpersonal connectedness, in large part because it also transforms the nature of the human sentiments Sophie and Emile experience. Rousseau shifts the consummate form of human longing that one feels for another from Eros to romantic love. Eros – an all-consuming passion that knows no bounds – is erratic, potentially dangerous, and often points beyond the mundane to the preternatural or the divine. On the other hand, romantic love is a pleasant but decidedly less exultant sentiment that simply expresses an emotional attraction to another person and is often

96 Rousseau says that man in the state of nature gave little thought to his food – he ate merely to live, as the beasts do. In the Emile, the various children depicted throughout the work are all emotionally attached to food in some capacity and care a great deal about it. Indeed, children are such gluttonous creatures that Rousseau recommends using food as an effective teaching tool with pre-adolescent pupils. This feature of modern children demonstrates that, even at a young, “pure” age, human beings have undergone such dramatic changes since leaving the state of nature that, even in a civilized person’s “purest” state, he or she is radically different from our primitive forebears. Emile is intended to be a “natural” man, but we are dealing with a very different kind of human. Therefore, his naturalness will also manifest itself differently.

122 associated with sexual attraction. Whereas Eros bespeaks the superhuman, romantic love is human, all too human.

For the sake of comparison, let us contrast these aspects of the Emile against certain comparable elements of Fénelon’s Télémaque. To begin with, whereas Rousseau gives Emile only one object of affection, Fénelon takes creative license with Homer’s original epic by introducing two love interests for Télémaque: Eucharis and Antiope. Yet, even though Fénelon doubled the number of potential mates for Télémaque, compared to Emile, women are, at best, only half as important in the education of the latter as they are in that of the former. Whereas the purpose of Emile’s education is to lead him to a wife, the women Télémaque encounters along the way are presented as merely discrete learning opportunities subsumed under a more comprehensive educational program with a greater objective. Stated differently, women do teach

Télémaque vital life lessons, but what they demonstrate to him is only important to the extent that those lessons reinforce the larger teachings provided to him by Mentor. The ultimate goal of his education is not to find and marry a woman but to discover the wisdom of benevolent, moderate governance. Each of Télémaque’s women seem to symbolize a standard female archetype: Eucharis represents the seductive Jezebel, and Antiope exemplifies the virginal wife.

Certainly, Fénelon is not unique in depicting these feminine motifs. So, what is special about his presentation of these archetypes in their service to his larger purpose? And how does Fénelon’s treatment of women differ from Rousseau’s distinct approach and philosophical purpose?

While the significance of Fénelon’s portrayal of Eucharis and Antiope has been largely overlooked by scholars, Diane Brown (2009) has argued that Télémaque characterizes women as distractions that jeopardize important male endeavors. In an obvious sense, a temptress such as

Eucharis threatens the “Christian ideals of virtue and chastity” that Fénelon, a devout Roman

123 Catholic, clearly valued (ibid 56). But more significantly, she argues, women of all types pose a greater threat to “the exclusivity of the homosocial teacher-student pair and thus unsettle the stability of the instructional enterprise” (ibid). In other words, Brown believes that Mentor and

Télémaque form a sort of “pedagogical couple” of which the tutor is fiercely protective. Her argument suggests that Mentor perceives women to threaten the exclusivity of this “coupling” with Télémaque. As a result, Mentor appears to force his student to flee from women as a defensive act of love-fueled jealousy akin to Calypso’s envious rage toward Télémaque for his love affair with Eucharis – although, to be clear, Brown does not explicitly describe the relationship in these specific terms. The implication of her argument, then, is that Fénelon positions women as outsiders who must be shunned in order to protect the closed space of the male-centered society.

I largely follow Brown’s suggestion that women in Télémaque represent distractions that threaten the male-centered educational endeavor. However, I propose that the true threat of this distraction posed by women is not to the structure of the pedagogical enterprise – to Brown’s so- called homosocial “pedagogical couple” – but rather to the ultimate Christian, monarchic substance of Télémaque’s education. Love is a delightful but selfish and exclusive bond. A couple’s love for each other is a distinctly personal expression of passion that is inward-directed toward the pair and its exclusive interests. Anyone who has ever fallen in love will likely recall the feeling of living in a microcosm of bliss in which the outside world seems to have faded out of focus and where “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”97 By contrast, the chief purpose of Télémaque’s education is outward-directed and inclusive: he must learn the qualities of good governance and Christian

97 John Donne, “The Sun Rising” (1633).

124 charity, as the “sole end of government is to render mankind virtuous and happy” (Télémaque

[Fénelon 1847 416]). Time after time, Mentor presses upon his pupil the gravity of the responsibilities associated with leadership, and he repeatedly informs the future king that his most important lesson is to learn to subsume his personal interests to the common good.

Mentor’s lesson is Aristotelian to the extent that good or legitimate kingship is defined by one’s capacity to sacrifice one’s own good for that of one’s subjects, and bad or illegitimate leadership is characterized by the opposite condition.98 Mentor warns Télémaque that his primary goal as a king will be to bring peace and to give life to his subjects’ happiness, not to his own. In a clear equivalence to the example set by Christ, Télémaque is taught to act as the Prince of Peace and the Good Shepherd to his people. It is only by subordinating his private interests to the common good of Ithaca that Télémaque will avoid living in a “savage and unsocial magnificence” and prevent himself from “[floating] in the stream of time, like a ship in the ocean without a pilot, the stars unmarked, and the shores unknown” (ibid 416-417). In other words, the sacrifice of one’s own good for the public good is the only way to combat the uncertain tides of chance and avoid a figurative shipwreck.

Fénelon continues his emphatically Christian education in Télémaque by demonstrating a disdain for the ephemeral goods of this world in favor of receiving eternal glory in the next world. As Fénelon says, both for men and women alike, the “soul of Christianity is contempt for this life and love for the other” (L’éducation des Filles [Fénelon 1937 491]). Accordingly, in

Télémaque, the rewards for virtuous and wise governance extend into the afterlife, and it is there that good kings reap their just rewards. Fénelon presents death as a kind of rebirth in which the deceased is punished or rewarded according to the manner in which he or she conducted

98 Aristotle, Politics (1278b30-1279a21).

125 themselves through the course of their life on earth. As Télémaque learns during his journey to the Fields of Elysium, boundless happiness awaits those individuals who have ruled over a people virtuously, as “good kings enjoy infinitely greater felicity than other lovers of virtue”

(Télémaque [Fénelon 1847 329]). Télémaque ultimately embraces Mentor’s great teaching and learns to eschew glory and wealth in this life for eternal happiness in the next world.

Accordingly, the young man ultimately chooses to rule over a simple, moderately prosperous

Ithaca in which he is responsible for making his subjects content and comfortable. But until

Télémaque fully masters this valuable lesson, his exposure to any distraction that potentially threatens to derail his education by shifting his focus away from a concern for the common good and toward the selfish pursuit of his personal desires, must be severely limited.

It is for this purpose, then, that I believe Mentor actively diverts his pupil away from women. They must serve only a severely restricted role in Télémaque’s education because his love for any woman – no matter how pure she may be – would lead him to pursue his personal desires before he has fully embraced the notion of promoting the good of others over his own interests. In this sense, Mentor’s pedagogical strategy with regard to women represents Fénelon’s own implicit recognition of a tension between Télémaque’s desire and his duty. Whereas

Rousseau conceives of women as a serious solution to bring about the convergence of one’s desire and duty, Fénelon’s presentation, by contrast, suggests that a woman represents the temptation of individual carnal desire, and, as such, is a fatal distraction that threatens to widen the gulf between the pursuit of one’s personal desires and adherence to one’s duty to a greater good. For Mentor, women make a temporary cameo in the story of Télémaque’s education only in order to teach him specific, important life lessons. Each woman in Télémaque provides the context for Mentor’s many lectures on sexual purity and virtue (Eucharis) and good governance

126 (Antiope). Once Télémaque has learned these lessons, he is then forced to take his leave of these women and move on to the next task. Certainly, we can expect that he will eventually reunite with Antiope, as a king requires a queen. Yet, my point here is that we never actually see that reunion, and Télémaque’s education does not prepare him in any way for his relationship with

Antiope. Fénelon’s and Rousseau’s opposing views on the role of women bespeak the radically different aims of the educations they present: Télémaque receives a royal education that grooms him for public service, and Emile receives a natural education that prepares him for a private, domestic life. Ultimately, Emile’s education will reveal the great chasm between the ideal and the actual in political life. Emile’s reading of Télémaque plays a pivotal role in allowing him to compare various ways of life and ultimately “choose” a homeland, which is really his decision to return to Sophie.

Sex, Love, and Family: Sophie’s Télémaque and the Sexual Education of Women

Given the undeniable connection between Télémaque and the Emile, not to mention

Rousseau’s great admiration for Fénelon, one would expect to see references to Télémaque throughout the Emile. Yet, curiously, despite the many indirect allusions to Fénelon’s novel throughout Rousseau’s treatise-novel, the first direct reference to Télémaque does not occur until very late in the Emile: approximately one-third of the way into Book V, or nearly eighty-five percent of the way into the entire work (Emile 404). This substantial delay in naming Fénelon’s novel is remarkable not only because of its broad influence on Rousseau in general and the Emile in particular, but also because Rousseau is otherwise not shy about naming several other influential authors throughout the course of the book. A quick glance through the Index at the end of Bloom’s edition of the Emile reveals dozens of Rousseau’s cited philosophers, novelists, theologians, poets, scientists, doctors, historians, and more. Because all references to Fénelon in

127 the Emile are contained within Book V, they all occur within the context of the discussion of

“Sophie, or the Woman” – the portion of the book in which Rousseau provides sustained discourses on women, romantic love, and marriage. And indeed, a substantial part of the plot of

Book V is driven by its characters’ reading (and grave misreading) of Télémaque. Thus, while we may be able to detect the influence of Fénelon’s work throughout the whole of the Emile, the restricted placement of Rousseau’s explicit references to Télémaque highlights its special significance for our understanding of the specific teachings of Book V regarding the education of women and the relationship between the sexes. This particular matter will preoccupy us for the remainder of this chapter.

As Emile enters the “last act in the drama of youth,” the time has finally come for him to meet and eventually marry his Sophie. Her chief role in Emile’s life will be two-fold. First, as we mentioned above, she will serve as the major link between Emile and society. In this capacity, she is instrumental in completing the process of civilizing Emile and in limiting his artificial passions. Second, Sophie will prevent Emile from becoming a corrupt civilized man because she will incentivize virtuous behavior in her beloved. She will be able to fulfill both of these roles, in large part, because Emile’s imagination has been so severely restricted and well-directed that he fixates on Sophie as the one and only object of his desire – first as an abstract portrait of a woman painted by his tutor, then as the actual girl named Sophie that Emile is carefully led to believe is Jean-Jacques’ image of the ideal woman come to life. Jean-Jacques rigs it so that any woman who fails to live up to that image also fails to satisfy his pupil’s desire. Jean-Jacques essentially authors a fictional love object for Emile to incite his desire and help him fall in love with the actual Sophie when he eventually meets her. Ultimately, even though Emile’s sexual

128 desire is stronger than that of primitive man in the state of nature, Jean-Jacques restrains his pupil’s imagination so that his desire is nevertheless satisfiable, even if only by Sophie.

Since Sophie must be the singular object of Emile’s desire, it is important to determine what kind of woman she must be in order to meet the necessary standard. Similar to Emile,

Sophie will also receive an education because “nature wants [women] to think, to judge, to love, to know, to cultivate their minds,” and not simply be raised in ignorance strictly to perform housekeeping tasks (Emile 357, 364). In short, Emile will not need a servant for a wife; he will need a suitable companion and a partner. Rousseau’s development of an education for women in the Emile coincides with a widespread cultural interest in specialized female instruction that emerged in France during the late seventeenth century and exploded in the eighteenth century.

Female education, which in 1600 was a luxury available only to an elite few women of the highest social standing, by 1700 became essentially a social necessity for women of all classes

(Rapley 1987). By the time the Emile was first published in 1762, both urban and rural France were well supplied with a variety of schools for girls to suit every father’s purse, including free schools founded by nuns as a public service to the community in exchange for land and donations from the city (ibid 301). Primitive barbarism was being left behind, and “civilité was coming to the masses” (ibid 305). A series of calculations performed by François Furet and

Wladimir Sachs (1974) provides empirical evidence for this rise of female literacy in the eighteenth century. In their study, they examine the results of the so-called “Maggiolo survey,” a large-scale study conducted in 1877 by the French Ministry of Education at the request of retired schoolmaster Louis Maggiolo (Furet and Saches 1974 [145], Markoff 1986 [328]). The survey measures the frequency with which French men and women signed their names on their marriage licenses (as opposed to merely making their marks) over a period of roughly two hundred years

129 (1686-1690, 1786-1790, 1816-1820, 1866, 1872-1876).99 The authors note that until the mid- eighteenth century in both Britain and France, reading and writing were not taught simultaneously, but sequentially (see also Furet and Ozouf 1982 [76-77]). Yet, their calculations determine that “there is a close correlation between the ability to sign one’s name and the ability to read and write” (Furet and Sachs 1974 [146, emphasis in original]). More importantly for our present purposes, Furet and Sachs also conclude that, beginning in the eighteenth century and accelerating through the French Revolution, “female literacy grew faster than male,” as indicated by the fact that women’s scores on the Maggiolo survey nearly doubled during the period. The eighteenth century was “the age of the take-off of female literacy par excellence” (Furet and

Ozouf 1982 [37]). To be sure, most of the female peasants who learned to read never again put this skill to use once they left school and moved back “into a world which was still largely illiterate, and where such reading skills as they had learned might be of little use” (Rapley 1987

[314]). Nevertheless, the available evidence strongly indicates that French women across all socioeconomic classes were becoming more literate and generally more educated throughout the eighteenth century.

Not only were women in the eighteenth century becoming more literate, but they also

“had much more leisure than previously” due to the rise of machinery which accomplished many household tasks that were previously done by hand (e.g., clothes-making) (Watt 1957 [15]). As a result, women used a good deal of their newfound free time “in literary and other cultural pursuits” (ibid). This shift in the day-to-day activities of women “is reflected in the increasing

99 Maggiolo’s data are published by the Ministere de l'Instruction Publique (1880 [156-73]). For a discussion of signatures as a measure of literacy, see Schofield (1968). Fleury and Valmary (1957) is widely considered to be the authoritative examination of Maggiolo’s research. Additionally, Maggiolo’s data on men’s and women’s signatures are carefully studied by Houdaille (1977), Vovelle (1980), and Furet and Ozouf (1977/1982). Furet and Ozouf 1977/1982 is perhaps the most comprehensive evaluation of l’alphabétisation in France.

130 tendency of booksellers and writers to address special appeals to the feminine audience” (ibid).

Indeed, the eighteenth century is associated with the creation of periodicals specifically addressed to women: John Dunton founded the first of these, the Ladies' Mercury (1693), and many others followed suit throughout the following century, including The Female Tatler

(1709), Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744), and Addison and Steele’s The Ladies'

Library (1714). Each of these periodicals aimed to provide women with more edifying reading material as an alternative to the more frivolous texts to which allegedly they more often gravitated. Indeed, the silly “the novel-reading girl” became an established comic type early in the eighteenth century, suggesting that “fiction was the main reading of younger girls” (ibid).

With more women reading and enjoying more time to read, a widespread concern with feminine instruction grew throughout the eighteenth century, resulting in a cultural debate about the proper material that should comprise the female curriculum.100

The explicit references to Fénelon in Book V of the Emile are critical in establishing

Rousseau’s position within the contemporary discourse surrounding this burgeoning preoccupation with the education of girls in eighteenth-century France. Indeed, the first clear mention of Fénelon by name in the Emile is not a reference to the novel Télémaque, but rather to his other notable work, Traité de l’Éducation des Filles, a pedagogical treatise originally written for Henriette-Louise Colbert (1657-1733), the Duchess of Beauvilliers and Dame du Palais to the queen, as a practical guide in the education of her eight daughters (Emile 369, Brownell 1863

[478-479], Morrison 1893 [181]). L’éducation des Filles reached a wider audience and brought

Fénelon great fame when it was published in 1687 – when he was “already deeply involved in the elaboration of agrarian and aristocratic opposition to the government of Louis XIV” with

100 For a more detailed exposition of this debate, as well as of the major books that either contributed to it or arouse out of it, see Watt 1957, especially Chapter V.

131 which the Duchess of Beauvilliers and her husband were also associated (Lougee 1974 [88, 96]).

Fénelon’s L’éducation des Filles represents one of the earliest attempts to systematically discuss the peculiarities of a specifically female education, and it brought him a significant amount of attention both in France and abroad. Throughout the rest of his life, Fénelon earned a reputation for being a leading expert in women’s education. Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon – the morganatic wife of Louis XIV – regularly solicited Fénelon’s counsel on her establishment of the distinguished Maison Royale de Saint Louis at Saint-Cyr, an academy for demoiselles from noble but impoverished families (Rapley 1987). Indeed, the education of girls occupied a central place in Fénelon’s proposals for social reform. From the understanding that the family is the fundamental building block of civic life, Fénelon concluded that women, by managing their families, were able to make a society either virtuous or vicious. His stress on the importance of women's roles and of female education led later writers to label Fénelon an early feminist who possesses "the most just idea of the social role and consequently the true role of the woman”

(Lougee 1974 [94]).

A number of elements of Book V of the Emile recall L’éducation des Filles – particularly

Fénelon’s emphasis on preparing girls for motherhood and home management as opposed to either the cloister or the luxurious court life at Versailles, his insistence that women should not participate in political life, and his claim that “the excesses of men often spring from the bad education they have received from mothers…[and] other bad women” (cf. Emile 37-38).

Rousseau, in his only reference to L’éducation des Filles, presents Fénelon as an authority on education and positions himself as standing in complete agreement with the Archbishop: here,

Rousseau states the importance of striking the correct balance in a girl’s education. He tells us that a young woman must not be allowed to become too bored by her work, and she must be

132 prevented from becoming overly enthusiastic about her entertainment, for, “as Fénelon says, [in vulgar educations] all the boredom is put on one side and all the pleasure on the other” (ibid

369).101 The cited passage occurs within a discussion in the L’éducation des Filles about the most effective way to teach children to read and write given the pliancy of their brains. Fénelon recommends intermittently “season[ing] study with amusement” by permitting games and other diversions in order to make learning more agreeable and provide children with much-needed respite from more traditional modes of study (L’éducation des Filles [Fénelon 1937 Ch. 5]).102 At first blush, these statements from L’éducation des Filles appear to align perfectly with

Rousseau’s general statements throughout the Emile about the importance of incorporating play into a child’s education.103 Such an agreement with Fénelon would place Rousseau firmly within the ardently guarded, progressive customs for women’s education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – a tradition of which Fénelon was at the fore. We have already seen how

Rousseau departs from Fénelon with regard to the education of men. Can we say that Rousseau truly is a follower of Fénelon with respect to women’s education?

Despite Rousseau’s initial statement of allegiance to the Fénelonian conception of a proper education for women, upon closer examination, I believe the reference to L’éducation des

Filles and the later depiction of Sophie’s reading of Télémaque actually signal Rousseau’s divergence from the Fénelonian female pedagogy, as well as his introduction of a wholly new conception of women’s education. According to historian Elizabeth Rapley (1987), men’s and women’s educations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated in completely different

101 The indirectly cited passage occurs in chapter five of L’éducation des Filles. 102 All translations of L’éducation des Filles are mine. 103 On this point, the legacy of this recommendation appears to live on in the extensive research on play-based learning that exists in the field of early childhood education. Major contemporary experts in this area include Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, Clair Mellenthin, Angie Stratton, and Lauren Harness, among numerous others.

133 spheres, since both the Church and the Crown railed against the evils of coeducation (303). Boys and girls were almost completely segregated so they could learn to speak “en chrétiennes,” and girls were generally prevented from walking, talking, and playing games with boys (ibid,

“Règlement journalier pour les écoles chrétiennes” in Barré 1994). Canon regular Pierre Fourier and later commentators viewed the innocence of childhood as a gift from God that they argued should be preserved in women through their careful upbringing (e.g., Fourier’s letter to the nuns of Saint-Nicolas in Sa Correspondance, Vol. I [11]). If raised correctly, educators believed a child could grow up in total ignorance of sin and evil. Included among the greatest of sins was human sexuality. As a result, reticence about the body or anything remotely associated with sex was so pervasive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that many educators refused to discuss the Incarnation or even utter the word “marriage,” and sexuality was only discussed indirectly (Rapley 1987 [312]). In fact, this distrust of the human body became so characteristic of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that it came to define human identity during this era

(e.g., L’éducation des Filles [Fénelon 1937 62]).

In alignment with these contemporary practices and beliefs, in L’éducation des Filles, immediately following the passage cited by Rousseau in the Emile, Fénelon emphatically asserts that in the amusements an educator chooses for a child’s education, “Boys must not mingle with girls” as doing so would risk exciting the passions and producing “an improper attitude of the body” (ibid Ch. 5). Appropriately, then, Fénelon’s writings on masculine and feminine pedagogies also do not “mingle” and are contained in two separate books: L’éducation des Filles outlines the education for girls, and Télémaque lays out an education proper for boys. While certain men, such as monarchs and Church leaders, played a key role in creating the feminine curriculum in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, men were otherwise essentially absent

134 from participating in girls’ education itself. Likewise, women played only a limited role in male pedagogy and, even so, were treated as something a man must flee once they have served their intended purpose – just as Mentor encourages his pupil to take flight from the women they encounter. Fénelon’s separate male and female educational plans never converge at any point, and they lead to disparate ends: men are educated to govern among men, and women are trained to manage a household and associate with other women. It is as though Fénelon’s pedagogical systems are intended to produce wholly separate beings trained for wholly separate lives in which one’s duties and needs are neatly self-contained within one’s own gendered sphere. Surely

Fenelon’s educated female subjects eventually had to function in a world of men, not to mention that the sexes would be expected to join together in adulthood by marriage, for as God said, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18; cf. Emile 357). Yet, oddly, nothing about their respective specialized educations in Fénelon’s works suggests that either of them has been prepared to be a suitable companion for the other. In other words, men and women educated under the Fénelonian systems will eventually become one bodily flesh in their matrimonial union, but they would likely fail to reproduce the soul of the whole human created originally in the likeness of God. Thus, while the Bible presents men and women as having been originally formed as companions for each other by God, the wholly divergent male and female pedagogies laid out by Fénelon surprisingly appear to subvert the divine pronouncement regarding the human need for a mate, despite the Archbishop’s express intent to carry out model Christian teachings. An individual’s need for a companion is seen as “a sign of the fundamental gap between divine and human” (Burger 2000) – yet the isolated, detached nature of Fénelon’s male and female educational plans and their respective ways of life suggests that men and women do not have an inherent need for each other or an innate imperative to seek out their mate, a

135 teaching that quietly diminishes the gap between the divine and the human. Ultimately, then,

Fénelon’s male and female pupils are educated in separate domains. At no point does he explicitly tie the pedagogical endeavor to the development of personal human relationships. The strong implication is that individual men and women leave their education and then “are all of a sudden cast into the world” hoping – but not necessarily knowing – that they are prepared to function in an environment with members of the opposite sex (Emile 249).

This poses a fundamental problem for Fénelon’s pedagogies that I believe Rousseau recognized, and which he confronts in the Emile. As Denise Schaeffer (1998) has observed,

“Rousseau intended the sexes to be educated to be interdependent and complementary. Only then could the family function as a seamlessly integrated whole” (609; cf. Elshtain 1993, Schwartz

1984). This means that a lack of interaction between men and women during their respective periods of education is inexpedient. Education cannot be exclusively informed by purely academic goals and objectives; it must also incorporate insights from the world of human relationships. After all, Rousseau is clear about what we need: because nature has taken such

“little care” to “bring Men together” and to facilitate “their Sociability,” one’s education must be used to socialize that individual and shape him or her into “a loving and feeling being” (SD I

[149], Emile 203, Favre 132). In our examination of Rousseau’s concept of nature in the previous chapter, we saw how Emile will be a man raised for himself. His value is independent of his relation to the whole species. Yet, while his value as a human being will not be a relative measure, he must nevertheless reside and interact with other individuals. The man raised uniquely for himself will not live uniquely with himself alone. Thus, here in this chapter, we investigate a crucial corollary matter: “what will a man raised uniquely for himself become for

136 others?” (Emile 41).104 Rousseau aims to modify human relationships by establishing a partnership between the sexes that “produces a moral person of which the woman is the eye and the man is the arm… [and where] each obeys, and both are masters” (Emile 377). Rousseau’s goal, therefore, requires that he bring the worlds of men and women into commission with each other. To this end, the Emile corrects and replaces the fundamental difficulty posed by Fénelon’s separate pedagogical systems by offering a novel educational approach that encourages deep and intentional joint participation between men and women. Prioritizing for human social needs in education will help ensure that individuals are better prepared to live peacefully – and even lovingly – among their fellows. Let us take a closer look at Rousseau’s procedure.

He begins by replacing Fénelon’s unintentional subversion of the biblical teaching regarding men and women with an intentionally un-Christian — or, perhaps, more accurately anti-Christian — education. Indeed, as Mary Nichols (1985) has asserted, “Rousseau’s new education, culminating in Emile’s love of Sophie, is a rejection not simply of modern commercialism and ancient heroism, but of religious piety as well” (545). An indication of this occurs at the beginning of Book V of the Emile, which immediately opens with a biblical allusion: “It is not good for man to be alone” (Emile 357). Even a casual reader is likely to easily recognize these words as God’s famous pronouncement in Genesis chapter two. Indeed, the phrase in the Emile is essentially lifted from the Bible verbatim, which should eliminate any uncertainty about the source of the allusion. Yet, notably, Rousseau fails to attribute this phrase to God. He states these words in his own “voice” (to borrow a term used in postmodern literary analysis) and quietly assumes ownership of this assertion. In essence, Rousseau plagiarizes the

104 Denise Schaeffer (1998) astutely observes that “Self and other are neither dichotomized nor fused in Rousseau’s presentation of the guiding questions” of the Emile (608). The complexity of Emile’s wholeness will distinguish him it from the wholeness of both natural man and citizen.

137 Bible and appropriates the word of God (cf. Scott 2020 [230]). Rousseau clearly intends for the final part of his educational system to recall the biblical teaching that man and woman were created to serve as companions for each other. Yet, the biblical connection ends there. Just as

Rousseau replaces God in his claim regarding the unsatisfactory quality of human solitude, so, too, is the Emile, in effect, intended to supplant the Bible by introducing a teaching on the new, non-Christian means and ends of male and female companionship. The union of the sexes will not complete a divinely ordained reproduction of the whole human that was originally a composite of male and female traits created in image of God.105 Rather, Rousseau’s schema will seek to bring about a different sort of unity for a radically different kind of composite being.

Rousseau seeks to rediscover mankind’s primitive psychological unity to repair the fracture that occurred with the development of our higher faculties and our entrance into civil society.106

Accordingly, then, even though Rousseau maintains the traditional view that male and female pedagogies must be different, the two educations nevertheless do “mingle” in a number of ways in the Emile. And while his educational plan for women comprises a distinct section of the Emile, it is crucial that it is nevertheless included as a part of the work – that Rousseau did not write an exposition on female education as a wholly separate book, as Fénelon did. Because it is not good for man and woman to be alone, a crucial aspect of their educations involves preparing them for their union. For Rousseau, the chief aim of the education of civilized men and

105 For a thoughtful discussion of the composite male-female nature of man’s origins as depicted in the Bible, see Burger (2000). 106 It is worth noting that in the description of the state of nature Rousseau provides in the Second Discourse, he speaks of humans in non-gendered terms – of mankind as a whole, not of men and women individually. This suggests that, while the two sexes have always existed, “man” and “woman” were insignificant categories in the state of nature. The separation of humans into meaningful conventional categories of gender happens only in Rousseau’s account of civil society, implying that, while the differences between the sexes may indeed be natural, convention likely exaggerates these differences. Rousseau appears to regard a specific blend of these conventional exaggerations as salutary for ordinary men and women, such as Emile and Sophie.

138 women is to prepare them for one another. Such a goal constitutes Rousseau’s extraordinary educational innovation, and it is where he most specifically objects to Locke, Plato, and, as I am suggesting in this chapter, Fénelon.

It is true that, for Rousseau, men and women must receive different educations guided by different curricula, but their inclusion within the single text of the Emile not only distinguishes the book from other pedagogical theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it also implies that male and female pedagogies represent two distinct branches of one overarching educational system with one shared objective. Indeed, this view is supported by Rousseau himself who says that in the education of men and women “everything tends to the common end”

(Emile 377). As a first step toward approaching this unified goal, Rousseau will break a few of

Fénelon’s prescribed rules of education. The clearest example of this occurs when Sophie and

Emile participate in a race together during a day of games (ibid 436-437). The race recreates one that Emile ran much earlier in the text with other children (ibid 141, 153), except that in this new version of the game the prize for winning changes. Whereas the “indolent and lazy child” once required a piece of cake placed strategically at the finish line to be sufficiently motivated to run, now an “agile Emile” bolts to the finish line to claim Sophie as his prize.107 His behavior has

107 The first race is mentioned on two separate occasions in the Emile: once on page 141 and a second time on page 153. In the first instance, Jean-Jacques simply refers to the child participating in the race as “an indolent and lazy child.” Hitherto, Jean-Jacques has not given us any indication that Emile fits this description, so the identity of the lazy child running the race is initially unclear. Pages later, the identity of the child in question is revealed when Jean-Jacques confirms that it was indeed Emile (153). He reaffirms that Emile is the “lazy and indolent child” again when he introduces the story of the race with Sophie (437). Cherpack (1988) attributes this oddity in the narration to an inexplicable blurring of identities in the Emile “due to editorial carelessness on Rousseau’s part” (22). Burgelin (1969), too, suggests that this is also because of Rousseau’s inattentiveness because at this point in the text Emile is not yet Emile (1427, 1433). Scott (2020) assumes that the earlier story of the indolent and lazy child is “assuredly not Emile” (161). By contrast, Nichols (1985) and Vargas (1995) believe that this child is Emile. On this matter, I side with Nichols and Vargas. Initially, it does seem strange that Jean-Jacques would call his Emile lazy and indolent, when he has not otherwise described the boy in such negative terms. However, in a separate footnote Rousseau/Jean-Jacques recalls the first passage about the race in a discussion about man’s “laziness” and ways to manage “the indolent” (160n., cf. SD 143-144 [§22]) There he states that “laziness [is] natural to man.” Thus, what at first appears to be an odd way to describe Emile, upon closer examination seems quite reasonable. If all humans are naturally lazy, then this would include Emile as well.

139 changed along with his tastes, and by the time he reaches adolescence, Jean-Jacques has discovered an effective way to “overcome the mortal hatred...of work” that all men possess (SD I

[143-144]). What is more, the race also presents an important opportunity for Emile and Sophie to recognize some of the consequences of the physical differences between men and women.

Whereas Emile is swift and athletic, we are told that Sophie is “not made to run” and does so

“maladroitly,” “gracelessly,” and “like [a grasshopper] who wants to run without jumping”

(Emile 437). Perhaps her ineptitude at running is more a result of her improper footwear than her supposed innate feminine clumsiness, as “the high heels on which [she is] perched” would certainly make running quite challenging for anyone wearing such shoes. In any case, up to this point, Sophie has become “sure of her empire” over Emile, whose heart has been completely captivated by his beloved (ibid 417). Slowly, certain aspects of the balance of power between the two lovers begin to shift in Emile’s favor as he comes to recognize Sophie’s relative physical weaknesses, which Rousseau presents as characteristic of all women. In these instances, the circumstances are such that Emile can learn about these differences between men and women without feeling compelled to exploit Sophie. The account of the race between Sophie and Emile presents one of the first occasions in which Emile suddenly becomes the predator over his “prey”

– in which he assumes a position of dominance over Sophie, who until now has been described as ruling over and conquering Emile. The playful setting of this change in the power dynamic between the two provides a circumstance in which this transfer of power can occur innocently and without Emile being tempted to totally dominate over Sophie. Indeed, he patronizingly allows himself to be conquered by Sophie in the race despite her clear inability to outpace him.

Rousseau depicts Emile recognizing his adroitness over Sophie’s lack of athleticism, and, since he has already won his true “prize” (i.e., Sophie), he can feel free to playfully lift her up and

140 declare her the winner by placing her across the finish line ahead of himself, as a parent might also do with a child. The light-hearted scene – albeit one that may be said to unfairly stereotype against women on the basis of sex – is likely intended to be suggestive of the kind of marriage they are eventually meant to have. In some cases, Sophie will rule, and in other instances Emile will lead; yet, in either scenario, the strength of one should compensate for the weakness of the other, and they should amble toward life’s figurative finish line together. Ultimately, then, despite the different curricula that Rousseau has assigned to each sex, because of men’s and women’s shared objective in the Rousseauian presentation, their educations must necessarily converge at certain points under one larger pedagogical system.

The primary point of this convergence in the Emile begins, strangely enough, with

Sophie’s and Emile’s reading of Fénelon’s Télémaque. During the eighteenth century, reading was considered the most significant of the “profane” subjects taught to girls (Rapley 1987 [313]).

The capacity to read was valued almost exclusively as an instrument of salvation – it was the surest way to grant women direct access to the word of God. As a result, all educators, and especially Christian pedagogues such as Fénelon, considered it their great duty to teach girls how to read. For this reason, despite modern prejudices that underestimate the literacy rate among women during past epochs, it is not entirely surprising that reading forms a key part of Sophie’s education. But even so, Télémaque is a strange choice of a book for Sophie to read, given that it is Fénelon’s work on royal Christian male pedagogy intended to benefit a royal Christian male readership. For anyone who has read the Emile, it should go without saying that Sophie is not being groomed for royalty, is being raised in a modified version of the Christian faith (e.g.,

141 Emile 374, 381, 396-397), and is certainly not a male.108 It is possible that this unusual reading assignment forms part of Rousseau’s larger strategy to “mingle” masculine and feminine pedagogies, or perhaps that it represents his judgment that Fénelon’s male education is actually quite feminine. In any event, the most surprising and significant function of Télémaque in

Sophie’s education appears to be something that does not factor into Télémaque’s instruction at all: her romantic tastes are shaped by the book and it establishes the parameters of her choice of an appropriate spouse. As I hope to demonstrate in the remainder of our time in this chapter,

Rousseau cleverly and subtly transforms the pedagogical function of Fénelon’s novel from its originally intended purpose of serving as a set of instructions for a future prince ("Letter to

Letellier," Fénelon 1835 [653-54]) to operating as a kind of sexual education guidebook for an ordinary young woman.

108 Compared to Emile’s education, Sophie’s upbringing is decidedly less rigorous, and she will experience only a small, distilled portion of the equality that Emile enjoys. Consequently, certain aspects of Sophie’s education seem regressive and sexist by twenty-first-century standards and woefully ordinary by eighteenth-century standards: there are certain topics deemed “not within [her] competence” (Emile 386-387), she is taught “to limit herself to domestic government…[and] keep herself closed up at home” (ibid 408, 424; cf. Fragment 2 [680], d’Alembert, Women of Geneva 144, Lucretia 160), and she is taught that her chief purpose in life is to please her husband (Emile 358). A number of scholars have observed that the restrictive elements in Sophie’s education appear to lead Rousseau astray from his otherwise egalitarian civic philosophy (e.g., Okin 1979, Eisenstein 1981, Landes 1988, Thomas 1991, Lange 2002, Wexler 1976, Pateman 1988, Elshtain 1993). Ronald Beiner (2011) has noted that these feminist interpretations of Rousseau have “had to content themselves with reconstructing his presumed exclusion of women from citizenship...because it is never spelled out as an element of his ‘official’ doctrine of citizenship” (216, emphasis in original; for a thoughtful consideration of Rousseau’s implicit inegalitarianism as compared to Kant’s explicit inequality, see Beiner 2011). Beiner’s observation is certainly well taken. Nevertheless, one of the greatest difficulties with the argument that Rousseau’s separate educations do not preclude gender egalitarianism is that equality is generally synonymous with sameness. Allan Bloom (1993a) has argued that, for Rousseau, equality and sameness are not necessarily interchangeable. Thus, he detaches the issue of differentiation from that of subordination and contends that Sophie’s and Emile’s educations can be separate and different but equal. The greatest problem with this argument, however, is that this is precisely the meaning of the French term égal that Rousseau uses throughout the Second Discourse: primitive man’s equality was his sameness (e.g., SD I [137-138]). In other words, the word égal inherently means sameness, just as it does in the Latin aequalis and the other Romance languages (igual in Portuguese and Spanish and uguale in Italian). To complicate matters further, all actual modern instances of separation are also examples of inequality. In reality, differentiation has become synonymous with subordination. The phrase “separate but equal” is emphatically negative and understandably so, as its practice in the twentieth century conferred the separation but certainly not any sort of equalization of the races, and indeed the argument that segregation and racial equality are compatible is wholly insupportable. In the end, Rousseau certainly does seem to subordinate women in a manner that classifies as inegalitarian and sexist. This matter requires further investigation but is, unfortunately, beyond the purview of this chapter.

142 According to Bloom (1993a), Sophie needs a literary love object in order to learn how to fall in love, so Rousseau has Télémaque serve as her fictional romantic ideal. The character helps to ignite her desires and to allow her to envision the type of man that is worthy of her love.

Bloom makes the case that Emile does not require a similar literary aid because he has his “tutor- poet,” Jean-Jacques, who paints a sufficient portrait of the ideal woman (ibid 125). Bloom’s argument is mostly compelling. Yet, if Sophie does indeed need Télémaque to be her literary love object, it is strange that something so essential to her education “fell into her hands by chance” (Emile 410). Of course, no part of the Emile is accidental, since Rousseau as author has complete control over every detail of the imaginary microcosm he creates in the book. Yet, it is nevertheless striking that Rousseau makes a point of mentioning the accidental nature of

Sophie’s access to the book because this statement stands in direct contrast with his claims elsewhere in the Emile that a successful education requires that nothing be left to chance (ibid

131). In fact, the entire educational endeavor is intended to “arm a man against unexpected accidents” by carefully controlling the “choice of circumstances” in which the young pupils are placed (ibid 139, 219, cf. 92, 95, 196, 419, Favre 39, 58, 74). Yet, at the same time, from the moment Jean-Jacques first meets Sophie, he seems oddly aware that she has already read

Télémaque (ibid 414), and he later admits that he has “arranged everything” with the girl’s father

(ibid 450). Both of these peculiarities seem to suggest that the provenance of Sophie’s copy of

Fénelon’s novel may not be so mysterious after all. It seems very likely that, like everything else in the Emile, the demi-god-like Jean-Jacques has meticulously arranged every minute detail of the girl’s reading material. Regardless of whether Sophie’s reading of Télémaque occurs “by chance” or is the result of Jean-Jacques’ careful coordination with the girl’s parents, the novel does play a key role not only in igniting the young couple’s love for each other, but also in

143 sustaining it. Télémaque functions as a pedagogical tool of manipulation that is important for what it allows Sophie to see about herself, as well for what it conceals from her.

Rousseau actually introduces the reader to two different Sophies: the “real” Sophie that

Emile eventually marries and a “false” haughty Sophie (ibid 402-406).109 Rousseau names

Fénelon’s Télémaque for the first time in the Emile in the context of recounting the sad fate of the “false” Sophie (ibid 404).110 The language Rousseau uses in this reference plainly recalls his earlier more oblique citation from L’éducation des Filles in which Rousseau cautions against allowing a girl to become overly “enthusiastic about their entertainment,” as the tale of the

“false” Sophie is about an unfortunate girl whose fatal “enthusiasm” for her entertainment via

Télémaque precipitates her destruction (ibid 369, 405). It is significant that Rousseau had initially alluded to the passage from Fénelon’s L’éducation des Filles without directly naming the source of the citation, which contrasts with the explicit references to the title of Télémaque throughout the rest of Book V (ibid 410, 450, 467). This decision not to explicitly name

L’éducation des Filles appears to serve the purpose of further reinforcing Rousseau’s process of co-mingling male and female pedagogies. By choosing not to name L’éducation des Filles,

Rousseau allows himself to slip imperceptibly from Fénelon’s text on female education to his other work on male education and speak about Fénelon’s distinct pedagogies as though they

109 Gouhier (1980 [283]), Goubier-Robert (2002 [263]), and Deneen (2000) conflate the two Sophies. However, Rousseau clearly intends for the two girls to be interpreted as different characters. As Scott (2020) has observed, “Part of the test Rousseau gives the reader apparently involves being aware that there is a test in the first place” (232). The existence of two Sophies would seem to recall Fénelon’s creation of two love objects for Télémaque, yet Emile will only ever meet one of them, the “real” Sophie. Rousseau also depicts two Emiles: a “true” Emile and a “common” Emile (Emile 182, 188). It may prove worthwhile to compare the “true” and “common” Emiles versus the “true” and “false” Sophies. Unfortunately, this task is beyond the scope of this chapter. 110 There is a subtle suggestion in the work that the “false” Sophie is real and that the “real” Sophie is not. For the sake of simplicity, references to the “false” version are to the one who does not end up marrying Emile (or any man, for that matter), and any mention of the “real” one denotes the Sophie one who does marry Emile.

144 were part of one comprehensive system. In the Emile, then, Fénelon’s different educational plans are quietly made to appear as though they intertwine, just as Rousseau’s actually do.

Rousseau’s story of the “false” Sophie introduces a girl who “resembled” the real one “in all the ways which could make her merit the name” except for her unfortunate inability to find a suitable husband due to an overactive imagination and unrealistic expectations regarding love

(ibid 402).111 This ill-fated Sophie was introduced to society by her family in order to present her to a number of potential suitors, yet each and every one of them fell short of her expectations.

The young girl judged all the men she met to be “only monkeys” with “superficial minds” and

“unruly morals” and quickly became distraught by her inability to find someone she deemed to be a suitable husband (ibid 404).112 This Sophie’s description of her male contemporaries is strikingly reminiscent of Rousseau’s harsh criticism of the small-minded, corrupt men in modern civil society, especially Parisians.113 Emile is raised to become the antithesis of these degenerate men, but we must wonder if the “false” Sophie would even find him appealing. After all, she is exceedingly rare in terms of her virtue, her noble pride, and her passion. By this same measure,

111 Literary historian, Ian Watt (1957), has argued that there is “a considerable variety of evidence to support the view that the transition to an individualist social and economic order brought with it a crisis in marriage which bore particularly hard upon the feminine part of the population. Their future depended much more completely than before on their being able to marry and on the kind of marriage they made, while at the same time it was more and more difficult for them to find a husband” (147). Eighteenth-century Europe saw the rise of a new model of conduct for the relations between men and women: the decline of courtly love and the rise of what Émile Durkheim has called “conjugal marriages.” Consequently, it became harder for both men and women to find mates, which resulted in record high numbers of spinsters (a word that first occurred in 1719, as it was unnecessary prior to the eighteenth century (ibid 144)) and bachelors (the increase of which “was widely regarded as socially deplorable and morally dangerous” (ibid 145)). If Watt is correct, then this would suggest that the significant social and economic shifts that occurred in the eighteenth century may have driven a great deal of Rousseau’s concern with women and marriage. Because the rules of the relations between the sexes were in flux and there was not yet public agreement regarding those relations, matters which we take for granted today required attention. 112 A few pages later, Rousseau reveals that the “mannered monkeys” and “giddy rascals” encountered by the “false” Sophie are the ones who are raised by ignorant mothers – thereby making it all the more important that a woman is sufficiently educated (Emile 408). 113 I am not the first to notice some sort of connection between the “false” Sophie and Rousseau. For instance, Burgelin (1969) argues that there is a parallel between the girl’s situation and Rousseau’s unfortunate love life as depicted in his autobiographical works. In this particular regard, this version of Sophie appears to be Rousseau’s fictional analogue.

145 however, Emile is quite ordinary and is unlikely to satisfy a girl with such stringent requirements. In any event, Sophie’s mother, struck by her daughter’s overwhelming grief, presses her daughter to reveal the cause of her emotional distress. Hesitantly, the young girl hands her mother a copy of Télémaque and exclaims that she seeks “someone who resembles” its title character who she believes should exist but “is none of those [she has] seen” (ibid 405).

Fénelon’s novel provides the foundation upon which Sophie’s most private of passions emerges

– her sexual desire. Yet, tragically, this desire is doomed to remain unsatisfied forever because her overactive imagination has allowed her to dream up a chimera for a love object, not a husband. This Sophie’s excessive imagination has created a being who is well beyond any woman’s reach, thereby breeding a perpetual frustration of her deepest desire. Rousseau stops narrating the dreadful story of the “false” Sophie just short of depicting her death, which presumably happens as a result of the crushing “persecution” she suffered at the hands of her

“irritated father” who treated his daughter like a “madwoman” for failing to find a husband

(ibid). At first blush, this tale of the “false” Sophie appears to be a cautionary tale that warns

Rousseau’s readers of the fatal repercussions that follow from allowing girls to read the wrong books prematurely. But, remarkably, the “real” Sophie also reads Télémaque and she has “a happier destiny” despite also being “capable of becoming impassioned by Télémaque” (ibid

410). Rousseau explicitly attributes the “real” Sophie’s more felicitous fate to her less lively imagination. Nevertheless, it is important to note that her mind’s creative power will merely be diminished, not eliminated altogether. The “real” Sophie’s particular reading of Télémaque under

Jean-Jacques’ partial direction is crucial to her ability to see what the overly enthusiastic “false”

Sophie could not see – both in herself and in her potential suitors. By reading Fénelon’s novel

146 with a less active imagination, the “real” Sophie not only appraises potential suitors in a different manner than her more imaginative counterpart, but she also sees herself differently as well.

The most notable difference between the “real” Sophie and the “false” one is that the former finds a suitable husband and lives happily, while the latter does not and perishes.

Rousseau clearly links a girl’s happiness to her ability to become a man’s wife. Given this dimension of Rousseau’s teaching, the placement of the “false” Sophie’s story in the text is odd because her tale immediately follows a passage that, at first blush, appears quite progressive by eighteenth-century standards: Rousseau insists that a girl should be granted the freedom to choose her own husband and that she should even be free to choose not to marry at all (ibid 401-

402). In isolation, this statement certainly appears unusually ahead of its time. Yet, in the context of the larger discussion to which it belongs, Rousseau’s view actually seems complacently of its time. Sadly for those readers who may wish to make the case for Rousseau’s progressive stance toward women, the philosopher follows his statements regarding a woman’s supposed freedom not to marry with the tale of the “false” Sophie – the only example we are provided in the Emile of a woman who makes this very choice to forgo marriage, and she dies as a result of this disastrous decision. In the end, Rousseau’s assertion that a woman should be free to remain unwed appears insincere. Elsewhere, he insists that a woman’s “proper purpose is to produce children” and establish a family (ibid 362). He tells us that the “happiness of a decent girl lies in causing the happiness of a decent man…[since] the destiny of life depends on marriage’” (ibid

399). For a woman to fail to marry is to depart from nature’s command that a woman yield to man “and to endure even his injustice” (ibid 396, cf. 407). So then why would Rousseau suggest that a woman should be allowed not to marry if she so chooses? It appears that, ultimately, this choice is a false one. If a woman wishes to secure a happy fate, then she is compelled to find a

147 suitable husband, as the “real” Sophie does. As Rousseau says, “There is no subjection more perfect than that which keeps the appearance of freedom. Thus it makes the will itself captive”

(Favre 58). A woman’s apparent freedom to choose to remain unwed is actually her freedom to choose her demise.

In order to avoid a tragic end, because Emile has such a “common soul,” his Sophie must have one as well. Accordingly, if she is going to find someone she is willing to marry, an ordinary man must be able to satisfy her desires (Emile 406, cf. 187). Similar to the “false”

Sophie, the “real” one also never finds “someone who resembles” Télémaque – after all, we are explicitly told that “Emile is not a king… [and does] not fret about not being able to imitate

Télémaque” (ibid 405, 467). Yet, because the actual Sophie has a much less active imagination, finding someone who is described as superficially resembling Télémaque suffices to satisfy her desires.114 The serious extent to which the happier Sophie’s imagination is weakened is first exposed in the account of her and Emile’s initial meeting. One day, Emile and Jean-Jacques receive a tip from a peasant about a household of charitable people who live nearby, and they decide to walk to this house (ibid 412-413). Along the way, it begins to rain heavily. The pair arrive at their intended destination thoroughly soaked from the rain, and they are immediately and warmly received by the home’s owners. After drying off, Emile and Jean-Jacques are invited to join the master of the house and his wife for dinner, whereupon they notice that there are five settings at the table rather than the expected four. A girl (who we soon learn is Sophie) enters and is seated, yet Emile fails to notice her. At this point, the master of the house turns to Emile

114 Nichols (1985) notes that the origin of Emile’s “image of Sophie is not himself but in his tutor” (552). It is perhaps worth noting that, similarly, Sophie’s image of her ideal beloved is not herself but Fénelon. In this sense, Rousseau and Fénelon are quasi-co-tutors of the two children. One wonders, however, if Rousseau intends this to be more disparaging than flattering. Is Rousseau suggesting that the romantic lesson in Fénelon’s Télémaque — originally devised for a royal, male audience — is really best suited for a common, feminine one?

148 and says, “Sir, you appear to me to be a likeable and wise young man, and that makes me think that you and your governor have arrived here tired and wet like Télémaque and Mentor on

Calypso’s island” – to which Sophie instantly blushes (ibid 413-414).115 Emile has not yet read

Télémaque, but Sophie clearly has. Indeed, as John T. Scott (2020) has observed, “Everyone in the story except Emile appears to have read” Télémaque, “and the reader of Emile who has not read the book would share Emile’s ignorance” (239).116 At any rate, the father’s reference to the

Fénelon’s teacher-pupil duo is clearly intended to garner a reaction from Sophie. It is wholly for her benefit, and it plants the first seed in her mind that she has found her Télémaque. It is difficult to say whether the “false” Sophie would have blushed in this scenario as well, as

Rousseau never depicts her in any situation in which a young man in her presence is likened to

Télémaque.117 And perhaps the unhappy Sophie would have fared better had she only met one potential suitor, as the “real” Sophie does, as opposed to an endless stream of foolish young men.

In any case, what is especially remarkable about the “real” Sophie’s reaction upon her father’s mention of Télémaque and Mentor is simply how loose the connection between Emile and

Fénelon’s title character needs to be to hook her in. Emile is not likened to Télémaque because of any grand heroic accomplishment or because he is the famous son of a well-known king or even because he is named Télémaque himself. Rather, the connection is made based on the simple fact that Emile and Jean-Jacques are tired and wet from the rain – quite a generic detail (certainly

Télémaque and Mentor do not enjoy a monopoly on becoming wet upon coming into contact

115 Here, Jean-Jacques refers to himself as Mentor, but only to the reader. This marks the first time Jean-Jacques likens himself to Fénelon’s goddess-tutor. 116 Brown (2009) has stated that Télémaque “functions as a marker that identifies readers and nonreaders, those who recognize intertextual references and those who do not” (60). For more on the role Fénelon’s novel plays as this distinguishing marker, I point my reader to her thoughtful analysis. 117 A clear difference between the two Sophies’ parents is that the parents of the “real” one have read Télémaque (or, are at least aware of the story and its principal characters) whereas the “false” Sophie’s parents seem completely unaware of the book until their daughter presents her copy to them. The suggestion is that a girl’s parents must be at least as well-read as their daughter.

149 with water), as well as a distinctly unheroic, mediocre point of comparison. Indeed, that

Télémaque and Mentor were wet when they arrived at Calypso’s island is never mentioned in

Fénelon’s novel and is a non-factor in the story. Ultimately, Sophie’s imagination is stifled enough that she develops only a vague image of a man “who resembles” Télémaque – an image so vague that simply meeting a boy drenched from the rain suffices to allow the sight of Emile to bring this fuzzy picture into complete focus.

In this first encounter with Emile, the happy Sophie distinguishes herself from her unfortunate counterpart not only in that she (thinks she) finds her Télémaque, but also in that she comes to see herself differently as well. The distinct self-perceptions of the two Sophies are also important to establishing each girl’s understood position relative to the men they encounter.

Immediately after the “real” Sophie’s father claims that Emile and Jean-Jacques are “like

Télémaque and Mentor,” the tutor adds that, at this family’s home, they have found “the charms of Eucharis” (ibid 414). It is at this point that Jean-Jacques catches the girl blushing, presumably because she not only recognizes the tutor and his pupil to be Fénelon’s characters come to life, but also because she sees herself in this situation as akin to Télémaque’s seductive lover,

Eucharis. By contrast, we are told that the “false” Sophie considered herself to be the “rival of

Eucharis,” not like Eucharis herself (ibid 404) – and in this regard, this ill-fated version of

Sophie is closer to being the counterpart of Eucharis’ rival in Télémaque, Calypso, the forlorn goddess who was doomed to be forsaken by Ulysses in the Odyssey and by his son in Télémaque

(Scott 2020 [234]). Calypso may have found her loveable and virtuous men, but it was not her destiny to keep them. This first likeness in the Emile between its characters and those of

Télémaque highlights the extent to which Jean-Jacques’ mission as a teacher differs from that of

Mentor. Where Mentor railed against sexuality and romantic love, Jean-Jacques supports it

150 (within certain limits). The nouveau Mentor will encourage love between men and women, not stifle it.

With regard to Rousseau’s likening the “real” Sophie to Eucharis, scholars have offered several justifications for this comparison. Susan Okin (1979) suggests that it reflects Rousseau’s sloppy reading of Fénelon and provides a further indication of the absurd, irrational nature of the educational plan of the Emile (185). Robert Granderoute (1985) contends that Rousseau merged the characteristics of Eucharis and Télémaque’s other love interest, Antiope, into the character of the “real” Sophie. He argues that Emile’s arrival at Sophie’s home recalls Télémaque’s landing at Calypso’s island, and Emile’s later departure is reminiscent of the young man’s withdrawal from Antiope (1189, n6). Laurence Mall (2002) also proposes that Rousseau fuses Eucharis and

Antiope together, and by doing so, he weakens Fénelon’s Christian austerity (259). And, finally,

Jan Crosthwaite (1992) believes that by connecting Sophie to Eucharis, Rousseau is able to define the female “essence” by her sexuality (198).

In my reading, I also suggest that Rousseau appears to meld certain aspects of Eucharis and Antiope into the “real” Sophie’s character. While Antiope is never explicitly named in the

Emile, Sophie is described as possessing qualities similar to those that defined Antiope and which made her so loveable in Télémaque’s eyes. These are the particular characteristics that explicitly draw Emile to his Sophie. Sophie thus appears to correspond most closely to the virtuous, chaste, gentle Antiope; yet, oddly, it is not to her that Jean-Jacques likens the young girl

– but to the lusty Eucharis. By implicitly connecting Sophie to Antiope and explicitly linking her to Eucharis, I believe that Rousseau intends to suggest that the ideal woman must do the seemingly impossible: she must somehow embody the antithetical qualities of both women.

Sophie must be more than a Eucharis and more than an Antiope. She must be both at once. She

151 will need to be meek but unafraid, tender-hearted but impassioned, virginal but seductive. In the end, Rousseau appears to have determined that it is not possible for these contradictory qualities to reside successfully in one woman. In the incomplete sequel to the Emile, Émile et Sophie,

Sophie struggles to fulfill the role of the perfect wife, and Emile eventually leaves her after he discovers her infidelity (a passionate moment reminiscent of Télémaque’s flight from

Eucharis).118 Even so, the sexual subtext in the Emile fulfills a necessary function in Sophie’s pubescent education. It is critical that she learn to see herself as a sexual being, especially in relation to Emile, even if the young boy cannot initially understand Jean-Jacques’ semi-erotically charged allusion to Eucharis. With the Emile, the traditional eighteenth-century reticence about the body is cast aside, and sexuality and the body are no longer things by which to be embarrassed (Emile 392). For Rousseau, a woman must understand and embrace her sexuality as it will be a key means by which she will reign over her husband and “feel the empire of [her] sex and all its advantages” (ibid 392-393).

A fundamental aspect of Sophie’s well-understood sexuality is that she will use it to inflame Emile’s imagination and ignite the fire of desire in him, just as Eucharis did with

Télémaque. Accordingly, Sophie is raised to develop the proper tastes, the first of which are the ones associated with the “art of getting looked at” (ibid 373). Rousseau tells us that because men’s willingness to attach themselves to a woman depends a great deal on her physical attractiveness, Sophie must learn to enhance her external beauty by refining her “very definite primary taste” for adornment (ibid 367). Her entire wardrobe must be composed of carefully selected pieces, which enhance her naturally attractive features but also downplay her imperfections. This serious attentiveness to heightening her natural beauty has one main purpose:

118 For a good book-length treatment of Émile et Sophie, I recommend Launay (1998).

152 to be “taken off piece by piece by [men’s imaginations]” (ibid 394). A woman’s attire, then, must be used to sharpen a man’s lust for her by exciting his erotic desire, thereby (by Rousseau’s logic) increasing the likelihood that he will want to attach himself to her. A woman’s most important adornment is the one she wears – or doesn’t wear, as the case may be – in her lover’s mind. His imagination alone can crown her with jewels more splendid than any piece any queen has ever worn in reality. Nevertheless, Rousseau counterintuitively argues that a woman’s appearance should not call explicit attention to her sexuality (ibid 372). And what is more, despite Rousseau’s embrace of women’s sexuality, he also recognizes the dangers associated with an overtly open attitude toward sexuality. Even though a woman needs to recognize her own sensuality and “use” it, her sexual desire and behavior must be moderated. Until Sophie can be trusted to do this on her own, her moderation (and Emile’s sexual passion) will require third- party mediation. Jean-Jacques will provide this needed intervention. At this point in our discussion, what still remains to be seen is the precise nature and purpose of Rousseau’s fictional self-presentation as the gouverneur Jean-Jacques.

153 CHAPTER FOUR A governor! O what a sublime soul: Rousseau’s Fictional Self-Portrayal as Jean-Jacques the Tutor

“Enfant de l’Art, Enfant de la Nature Sans prolonger les jours j’empêche de mourir: Plus je suis vrai, plus je fais l’imposture, et je deviens trop jeune à force de vieillir.”

- A riddle by Rousseau, written at the age of thirty (Œuvres Complètes II, 1133)

This chapter is a study not of the historical Rousseau but of Rousseau’s fictional self- portrayal as Jean-Jacques the tutor in the Emile, of his place in Emile’s education and of his relation to the central themes of Rousseau’s broader political philosophy. I have chosen to take a closer look at the character of Jean-Jacques because I believe that a careful study of this unusual figure can help bring into sharper focus Rousseau’s teaching in the Emile, a book that presents what is arguably the deepest, most comprehensive account of the philosophy he elaborated in response to the dreadful situation he first identified in his First and Second Discourses. The enterprise we undertake here leads us not only to start by seeking to understand the Emile in particular, but eventually also to move beyond this single text to confront the wider themes that preoccupied Rousseau throughout his life. To study Rousseau is to accompany him as he guides us through the details of his great vision on the road to Vincennes, of his profound quest to recover some semblance of man’s natural goodness by discovering how man can be (re-)made good for himself and for others. Thus, when investigating the puzzling figure of Jean-Jacques – or, indeed, any aspect of Rousseau’s philosophy – it is critical to consider the wider problem of his thought.

The answer to the riddle in the epigraph above is, of course, “a portrait.” The riddle and its solution reflect what I believe was a lifelong preoccupation and regular source of anxiety for

154 Rousseau: the conscious fashioning and preservation of his self-image not only for his contemporary readers but also, more importantly, for a much larger number of future readers

(e.g., FD Preface OC III [3]). It is well known that the founder of Western philosophy, Socrates, has enjoyed the good fortune of being memorialized by his most famous student, Plato, whose dialogues make his beloved teacher come alive with each reading. Plato’s presentation is a dramatic one in which the old, profoundly ugly philosopher is highly idealized and remade

“καλοῦ καὶ νέου γεγονότος,” or, according to Liddell and Scott (1996), young/anew and beautiful/fine/noble (Second Letter [Plato 1929]). As Clifford Orwin (1998) has suggested,

“Socrates has led two lives, the longer of them as the reigning symbol of dedication to a life of reason and virtue” (174). It is on this enigmatic model of Socrates created by Plato that the whole

Western philosophical enterprise has rested. Somehow the Platonic image of Socrates has lived on through the ages. No matter how different each subsequent era has been, Plato’s Socrates has given something important to each one (cf. Starobinski 1971 [319]).

But with Rousseau, Socrates’ reign as the symbol of the philosophic ideal comes into question, and philosophy itself endures a moment of crisis. Rousseau had determined that the entire philosophic enterprise leading up to his day had been built on unsteady ground because it had all proceeded from what he perceived to be Socrates’ fundamentally and irreparably flawed conception of human nature, especially as it relates to man’s need for society. In short, men prior to Rousseau had written about human beings incorrectly. So, it may indeed be, as Alfred North

Whitehead (1979) claimed, that the Western philosophical tradition is simply a series of footnotes to Plato (39). After all, the Socratic model depicted in the dialogues served as the springboard for all subsequent European thinkers. Yet, if the logic presented in the Platonic corpus is unsound – if its entire way of thinking about the most important questions is wrong –

155 then Rousseau seeks to demonstrate that all subsequent thought derived from it must also be deeply defective.

Rousseau never tired of stating the novelty of his position, and in the Emile, he promises to show his reader something that “up to now...has never been seen” (476). Throughout his writings, he declares himself the first philosopher to see human beings as they actually are, to identify the gulf between nature and society resulting from the fundamental dualism between nature and history. Because of this, he considered his thought to represent a radical break from the entire tradition that had preceded him, and he saw himself as establishing the first true philosophy of human nature. Certainly, one could dispute Rousseau’s claim that his depiction of human beings is the objectively correct one. As Leo Tolstoy once stated to Maxim Gorky,

Rousseau, far from demonstrating the love of truth, “lied and believed his lies” (cited in Coetzee

1992 [264]). Yet, it is not our purpose here to (dis)prove the validity of Tolstoy’s assertion. What matters most for our present purposes is Rousseau’s perception of his mission, for it had, I believe, a profound and direct impact on how he chose to communicate his thought. We explore

Rousseau’s method of writing in order to explain Rousseau himself, to interpret his literary aesthetic.

Rousseau’s ostensibly new enterprise, and its novel mode of philosophical investigation, required a new model for the life dedicated to reason and virtue. Naturally, Rousseau stepped up to fill the role of philosophy’s new model.119 But perhaps because, unlike Socrates, his greatest pupil was not only non-philosophical but also completely fictional, Rousseau found it necessary to take control of shaping his own image. Consequently, he created an early version of his own

119 Rousseau himself points to a kinship with Socrates (e.g., Observations CW II [52]), and a number of his contemporaries remarked on this relationship as well (Trousson 1967 [67-103]). See also Grace 2019, who suggests that Rousseau “perhaps” represents “a new kind of Socrates” in that he “turns from a dialectical examination of opinion to introspection” (21).

156 self-portrait via the enigmatic, romanticized figure of Jean-Jacques the gouverneur in the

Emile.120 One could say that, by creating such a self-image, Rousseau, much like Socrates, has also led two lives. Yet, unlike Socrates, the longer of Rousseau’s has been as the prevailing symbol of dedication to the praise of nature and blame of reason.

The Jean-Jacques of the Emile reflects Rousseau’s attempt to imagine himself endowed with the necessary qualities of a good tutor so that he can shape the young Emile into the

“natural man living in the state of society” and, in “reading this work, one will see with what liberality” he depicts himself (Emile 205, 50-51; cf. 406, Favre 133).121 This strange figure of

Jean-Jacques raises an important question that is woven throughout the Rousseauian corpus: who does Rousseau think he is (e.g., Confessions I OC [I, 5], Reveries I OC [I, 995])?122 Throughout his body of work, we are introduced to various different versions of Rousseau, each one of which captures a particular aspect of the actual author’s complex persona. What is most perplexing, however, is that the fictional tutor Jean-Jacques differs from the real Rousseau in almost every possible way. First, notwithstanding Hume’s apocryphal claim that Rousseau “read very little during the course of his life, and [had by 1764] totally renounced all reading: He has seen very little, and has no manner of curiosity to see or remark; he has reflected, properly speaking, and studied very little; and has not indeed much knowledge: he has only felt, during the whole course of his life” (“Letter to Hugh Blair,” Hume 1764 [331]), we know in fact that Rousseau was a

120 Arguably, the Citoyen de Genève of the First Discourse qualifies as his first actual self-portrait. Rousseau’s works depict a man of many faces. An investigation of his various “identities” would likely be a fruitful and interesting endeavor. 121 Cf. Conf V [158]: “In the Kingdom of the blind the one-eyed are Kings; I passed for a good teacher because there were only bad ones.” 122 Sorenson (2009) poses this question in the context of examining Rousseau’s Dedicatory Letter to the sovereign people of The Republic of Geneva in his Second Discourse. He argues that the letter is his introduction to the world as a political philosopher. While this may be a necessary part of Rousseau’s answer to the question, it is certainly not sufficient. After he had established himself as a serious thinker, the question of who Rousseau thought he was persisted in his writings.

157 voracious reader from early childhood and a prolific author of many published and unpublished writings. The tutor, by contrast, does not ever appear to read a book or seek to improve his knowledge in any way, and it is clear that he must not be an author (Emile 248). Jean-Jacques is nevertheless presented as a mysteriously omnipotent, omniscient figure who has unique access to

Rousseau’s distinctive understanding of nature and, as a result, is indispensable for the proper education of Emile (e.g., ibid 61, 246). Second, the actual Rousseau never expressed any wish to devote his life to the education of an homme vulgaire or esprit commun, such as Emile, and, by his own account, he was also a poor teacher (e.g., ibid 50, Sainte-Marie). Indeed, he was not even interested in raising his own children. By the time the Emile was published, it was well known that Rousseau was abusive toward his wife and that he had already consigned his five children to a foundling home – one of the greatest paradoxes and scandals of his life. In short, it was no secret that Rousseau was a terrible husband and father, a “compleat cad” (Catlin 1937

[437]). Yet, this very same man depicts a fictionalized version of himself not only dedicating more than twenty years of his life to raising a single ordinary child, but also championing the joys of the duties of family life. And although it is never explicitly stated anywhere in the Emile, it is obvious that Jean-Jacques does have any children of his own. Neither is he married or in any way involved in a committed romantic relationship. Strangely enough, over time, Rousseau has come to be known among certain academic circles as one of the greatest theorists of children’s education. Third, when the Emile was first printed, the real-life Rousseau was already fifty years- old, yet Jean-Jacques is presented as a young man whose youth is critical to the tutor’s relationship with his pupil (e.g., Emile 51). Each time we read through the Emile, we inevitably see its eponymous pupil age before our eyes, growing from an inexperienced infant and child into a mature husband and future father. But whenever we return to the pages of the Emile, no

158 matter the time or the place, Jean-Jacques magically appears to remain constant throughout the text, unchanged by varying circumstances or by the cruel effects of time’s passage.

Lastly, the tutor is completely free of the vices, illnesses, and other serious debilities from which the real Rousseau suffered. Jean-Jacques is depicted as more mind than matter: he exhibits the imaginative genius of Rousseau’s philosophical mind liberated from the limitations of his defective body. In this specific regard, Rousseau is similar to the Platonic Socrates who acts throughout the dialogues as though the mind/soul were independent of the body. Rousseau’s self- representation in the Emile, in its disregard for the body, stands in stark contrast to his later autobiographical depictions, in which Rousseau’s body is conspicuously in the foreground.123

The Confessions is especially (in)famous for its sensational revelation of numerous overly intimate and grotesque details of his life. The Rousseau portrayed in The Confessions is personal in a flashy manner that is impressive to all kinds of readers, including and especially the ordinary reader. There, he regales his readers with provocative stories about urinating in a cooking pot, his nascent taste for sadomasochism, his discovery of masturbation, and the complications associated with his lifelong bladder disease, just to name a few. These passages – which set “the contemptible and the low” against the “the good, generous, [and] sublime” – all immediately catch one’s attention (Conf I [5]). Rousseau occasionally apologizes to his reader for his frankness, but he insists that such candor and “courage” are necessary to reveal the “useful but harsh truths” (ibid XI [462]). By contrast, Rousseau’s self-presentation in the Emile is noticeably more subtle. In the character of the tutor we see Rousseau free of all defects and, in this sense, putting his best foot forward in presenting himself to posterity. Through Jean-Jacques, the aged,

123 Is Socrates, then, Jean-Jacques’ philosophical counterpart more so than Rousseau’s own autobiographical self (selves)? Unfortunately, this question is beyond the purview of this chapter.

159 physically and morally disfigured Rousseau permits himself to be remade, if not young and beautiful,124 then at least anew and de-uglified.125

One of the effects of the lack of grotesque or racy material in the Emile is that, at first blush, the tutor is not an immediately striking figure. I believe the greater subtlety of Jean-

Jacques’ character as opposed to the vulgarity of the autobiographical representations of

Rousseau is reflected in the secondary literature. While there are countless books and articles

124 At this point, one could raise the objection that my reference to Jean-Jacques as Rousseau “remade young and beautiful” is too strong since the text stresses the tutor’s maturity and always depicts him as a grown man around the age of thirty-five, and not, say, nineteen. But if this is the case, then the same charge must also be raised against the original Platonic declaration that the dialogues remake Socrates “καλοῦ καὶ νέου γεγονότος.” Does Plato ever depict Socrates as a nineteen-year-old? Certainly not. Throughout the Platonic corpus, Socrates is presented as a mature adult from beginning to end – as a post-Aristophanes’ The Clouds seeker-of-wisdom. In some dialogues the Athenian gadfly is in his thirties. In the Republic he is likely in his fifties. The Socrates of the Apology and the Phaedo is seventy years-old. Nothing in the dialogues stresses his youth or youthfulness, but rather his maturity as someone who is wise enough to have knowledge of his lack of knowledge. Yet, if we follow Plato’s own words about how he perceived his own work, then all of the dialogues depict Socrates remade young and beautiful, even those that show him at the age of seventy. This does not have to mean, then, that Socrates or Jean-Jacques are literally physically young. According to Liddell-Scott, the word translated as “young” (νέου) has a few varied connotations. In one sense, it can mean young/youthful. But in another sense, it expresses a slightly different relationship to time in that it describes something made anew/afresh. Given the obvious difficulty of interpreting Plato’s statement as saying that he made Socrates literally youthful since he is always depicted as a mature or old man, I have always instead understood it to mean that he remade Socrates anew; he rewrote a fictional version of Socrates that recasts him in a new light to make him more appealing and especially to give his tragic death a more favorable consequence. That is to say, Plato restyles Socrates afresh in such a way as to diminish his repulsive aspects and to heighten his attractive ones in order to mitigate people’s hostility toward philosophy – so that Socrates’ actual death did not simply mark the end of his philosophizing, but rather the great birth of Western Philosophy itself. It is in this sense that I mean to say that Rousseau’s remakes himself “young and beautiful” through Jean- Jacques. Whereas the tutor’s youth is discussed in Book I of the Emile, I do not believe it is imperative that he remain young through the entire work. Jean-Jacques does not need to be depicted at the age of nineteen or even nine to be “young” in the sense described above, just as Socrates can be “young” even though he is portrayed all the way up to his seventies. I simply mean that Rousseau is making himself (and thus philosophy) anew/afresh by rewriting a fictional version of his life that presents a new image of philosophy and of the philosopher. On a final note, unlike Plato’s Socrates, Rousseau’s Jean-Jacques is depicted in a time warp. The Socrates of the dialogues ages, but Jean-Jacques does not appear to age until perhaps the final sentence of the Emile. And, even then, his growing old is not entirely explicit. 125 Even though Rousseau in the Emile “strikes a Socratic stance,” to borrow another phrase from Orwin 1998, I am not here arguing that he is a Platonist. On the contrary, as I have already suggested, Rousseau positions himself in contrast to Plato’s Socrates – albeit with a sense of great “veneration” toward him, who he calls “the Wisest of men” (Last Reply OC III [94], FD I [OC III 13]). Meier (2002) suggests that the differences between Rousseau and Socrates are a consequence of the dramatically different times in which they lived rather than a genuine disagreement. For a brief but compelling discussion of Rousseau’s views on traditional philosophy and philosophizing, see the Postscript in Kelly 2003. For recent defenses of Rousseau’s alleged Platonism, which I find less compelling, see Williams 2008 and Cooper 2002.

160 about the Rousseau depicted in The Confessions, Reveries, and Dialogues – many of which seek to discover a so-called “hidden Rousseau” by dissecting the sordid details of his life, his physical ailments, his supposed mental disorders, etc. – to my knowledge and great surprise, there exists no deliberate scholarly discussion of the tutor Jean-Jacques that is either systematically organized or philosophically oriented to discern the importance of this character. Only one scholarly interpretation comes close: an article by Hunter McEwen titled “A Portrait of the

Teacher as Friend and Artist: The Example of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (2011). In this piece the author promises to provide a reflection of “a sort of philosophical portrait of” Rousseau via Jean-

Jacques that he argues was conceived “with the same purpose that Plato created a version of

Socrates.” He argues that the figure of Jean-Jacques not only provides a model of how one can or should live (similar to the representation of Rousseau in The Confessions), but also of how one should teach. Yet, regrettably, the article never quite does what it sets out to do. Instead,

McEwen devotes his time primarily to explaining what it means to teach by example and to analyzing the figure of the Savoyard Vicar, a character who emerges as quite different from

Rousseau and/or Jean-Jacques. Only in the final paragraph of his analysis does McEwan “point to the portrait of Jean-Jacques in Rousseau’s Emile,” at which time he provides a brief list of philosophical teachers – Socrates, Augustine, Zarathustra, and “perhaps” “religious figures like

Jesus, Confucius, Mohammed, and Buddha” – and merely suggests that Emile’s tutor fits in among these figures (519). Yet, McEwan never explains how he sees Jean-Jacques conforming to this group and, more critically, how he might not fit into it. In effect, then, it is safe to say that the interpretive literature neglects to provide an adequate analysis of Jean-Jacques the tutor.

161 It seems fitting that we opened this chapter with a riddle, for Jean-Jacques (and, indeed,

Rousseau too) is like a riddle that must be deciphered.126 In what follows my purpose here is to correct what I perceive to be a glaring oversight in the scholarship by giving Jean-Jacques the attention I believe he rightfully deserves. To this end, whereas Chapter Two of this dissertation evaluated Rousseau as writer of a quasi-novel, in this chapter we will turn our attention to the fictional tutor Jean-Jacques in order to examine Rousseau as a character in that quasi-novel. In other words, I here seek to discover the meaning of Rousseau’s method of depicting himself as

Emile’s fictional tutor. It is perhaps worth mentioning that this chapter emphatically does not seek to go behind the curtain, so to speak, to discover some hitherto unseen personal depiction of

Rousseau. The particular details of Rousseau’s private life are important to us only to the extent that they can help clarify a specific element of Jean-Jacques’ character or of Rousseau’s philosophy.

As an important first step in our endeavor here, we can state the fundamental assumption of the Emile is as follows: because, on the one hand, civil society (i.e., social inequality) has corrupted man’s original primitive goodness and, on the other hand, human beings are continuously shaped and re-shaped by their environment, what is most needed now is the constructive, systematic adaptation of man if he is going to thrive in the modern civilized

126 Juliet Flower McCannell (1974) and Ann Hartle (1983 [37, 133]) have offered interpretations of the importance of Rousseau’s riddle for his life and thought. They have argued that the self-depiction of Rousseau that most closely resembles a portrait is the one in The Confessions. McCannell’s interpretation of his first autobiography relies particularly heavily on a painting analogy. Yet, Christopher Kelly (1987) points out that her discussion ultimately overlooks the importance of temporal movement in The Confessions. He ultimately rejects McCannell’s portrait analogy and concludes that the “‘portrait’ in The Confessions is more like a piece of music that must be followed across time than like a painting” (ibid, Chapter I [fn26]). I here agree with Kelly’s assessment of The Confessions; yet, at the same time, I also believe that Hartle and McCannell had accurately intuited the importance of Rousseau’s riddle and astutely detected a certain linkage between his writings and portrait painting. I believe they applied the portrait analogy to the wrong book. Rousseau’s “portrait” is not to be found in The Confessions, but rather in the Emile because, as noted above, this work does not display the same temporal movement that we see in The Confessions, at least with regard to the depiction of Jean-Jacques.

162 world.127 As we discussed in Chapter Two, the Emile aims to demonstrate that the natural, harmonious development of the human soul is feasible in civil society. In this chapter, we add to this a qualification: the text strongly suggests that this goal is possible only in a carefully controlled environment presided over by an exceptional philosopher-educator who can provide a necessary level of protection and maintain optimal growing conditions throughout the entire development of his pupil’s early life. Indeed, again and again, the Emile contrasts the educational art with the spontaneous activity of nature. The implication is that, in the vitally important art of forming man, the ordinary individual’s development cannot be ceded to the spontaneity of his unreflective urges and desires, even if they are perfectly natural and, in principle, neutral. Rather, his care must be put in the hands of an extraordinary individual educator who is led, before anything, by rationality and who is emotionally detached from all social exigencies or opinions while he is, at the same time, also totally and unflaggingly devoted to his pupil’s well-being.

Enter Jean-Jacques the tutor. While Jean-Jacques’ function throughout Emile’s education is multifold, I here wish to highlight two key aspects of his job as an educator: his relationship to nature and his role in Emile’s interpersonal relationships. I argue that, as Emile’s educator, he is first and foremost a creator who augments nature beyond its capacity to do so itself. Building upon the argument of previous chapters, here we will explore the tutor’s main function as nature’s enhancer or supplement. As such, he provides its regulation. In doing this, Jean-Jacques is able to provide Emile with a plan that man needs but which is not supplied by nature. In the end, the explicit goal of Emile’s education is to make him happy. With Jean-Jacques, Rousseau paints an image of the philosopher as modern civilized man’s indispensable guide to achieving happiness, without whom we would be cast adrift in the world.

127 In the Emile, the changes that are made are not to the collective society but to the individual man. Whereas one could say that The Social Contract offers a kind of general social reform, the Emile alters a specific human being.

163 Our discussion will proceed as follows: First, we will disentangle confusing double narrative of the Emile to define its fluctuating pedagogical identities, separating the real

Rousseau from the fictional Jean-Jacques. Once that matter is settled, we will proceed to the substantive argument of this chapter. There, we will explore Jean-Jacques’ regulatory role in relation to nature, especially to Emile’s natural passions. Finally, we will conclude by turning to the question of happiness – that of both Emile and Jean-Jacques – for the end of the pedagogical process is not only to bring about the pupil’s happiness, but of that of the tutor as well. In being the first to present an analysis of Jean-Jacques, this chapter does not aim to make comprehensive conclusions. Rather, I here lay a foundation for thoughtful discussion of this curiously overlooked embellished self-portrait of Rousseau as Jean-Jean the gouverneur.

Disentangling the Narrative Knottiness of the Emile

In one sense, the dramatic nature of Rousseau’s presentation makes the Emile quite attractive and enjoyable to read, and, indeed, he states elsewhere that he wants readers to take

“pleasure in reading” his works (Levite 179).128 Yet, in another critical sense, the dramatic quality of the Emile can also make the work very confusing for readers. As we have already discussed in Chapter Two, a recurring theme in the Emile – and surely throughout Rousseau’s entire body of work – is our (mis)perception of what is real and what is false, what is reality and what is merely imagination. Rousseau first calls our attention to this confusion in the Second

Discourse when he states that “it is no light undertaking” to understand human nature, as our eyes are deceived by the men we see today, and the “successive changes” that have occurred to our constitution have made our original nature nearly “impossible for us to know” (SD Preface

128 Cf. d’Alembert 6. Shortly after its publication, the Emile was condemned by the Parliament of Paris, and an order for Rousseau’s arrest was issued on June 9, 1762. That very day, Rousseau was warned about the warrant for his arrest and immediately fled Paris for Geneva. During his escape from Paris, Rousseau developed the idea for the Levite of Ephraim, which he wrote on his journey (see esp. Conf. XI).

164 [145-125]). While this duality between reality and fantasy is prevalent throughout the Emile, it is perhaps most conspicuously manifest in the work’s multiperspectivity. Whereas Chapter Two of this dissertation focuses on the general narrative structure of the Emile, here we turn our attention to the narrator who directs that narrative. The Emile is an extraordinarily complex work structured as first-person narrative that compels its readers to keep track of various narrators.129

There is Rousseau, the actual author of the Emile, and two first-person narrators crafted by the persona of the authorial Rousseau, who, as is the case with all narrators, may be unreliable in any number of ways: “Rousseau,” an allegedly non-fictional representation of the real Rousseau who relates anecdotes that are supposedly about real incidents from the author’s life, and “Jean-

Jacques,” the fictional tutor of the work’s title character.130 The narrative weaves back and forth, often subtly and almost imperceptibly, between these two individuals, and the reader must constantly pay attention to determine which one is being depicted at any given point. To complicate matters further, the Emile also features embedded narrations (e.g., “Profession of the

Savoyard Vicar”),131 implied dialogues with imaginary adversaries conveyed by prosopopoeia, and mimetic fiction.132 What is more, the narrative often shifts back and forth in time between a present day alternate reality in which Jean-Jacques is Emile’s tutor and an ambiguously real past

129 According to William Edmiston, the “development of first-person narration was the major innovation of the French novel of the eighteenth century” (Burgwinkle, et al. 2011 [362]). 130 Jacques Derrida, in his foundational text Of Grammatology, argues that Rousseau, in “straining toward the reconstruction of presence,” constructs a “supplement” that professes to be the thing itself, but which can only be auxiliary to the thing (1976 [141]). In other words, Derrida highlights the necessary detachment between the actual Rousseau and the allegedly equivalent textual depiction of Rousseau. But, of course, any perfect equivalence of person and textual representation is impossible. 131 A common device of the eighteenth-century novel is the tiroir (or, literally, “drawer”), which is a shorter narrative inserted within the longer primary narrative. The shorter narrative is commonly told by a character whom the narrator meets. For more, see Burgwinkle, et al. 2011 (365). 132 Prosopopoeia is a rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates as another person or object. The term was introduced into English in the sixteenth century and is derived from the Greek πρόσωπον [prósopon] meaning "face” or “person,” and ποιεῖν [poiéin] meaning "to make.” See “prosopopoeia” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2018. Web.

165 that depicts Rousseau as both a tutor of various children other than Emile and a pupil himself.

Because the work is told from Rousseau’s and Jean-Jacques’ perspectives, we get to observe

Rousseau from a unique vantage point as both the creator and the created, the source and the object of his art.133 He is the master painter of his own self-consciously exaggerated portrait.

Ultimately, the tutor is neither totally imaginary nor simply real in any conventional sense.

Rousseau enigmatically presents part of the teaching of the Emile in the voice of a character that is at once intended to be a version of himself and is also, as we mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, emphatically nothing like himself. Jean-Jacques the tutor both is and is not a version of Rousseau. Disentangling the creator from the created is critical to one’s ability to understand the Emile. Yet, this is no easy task. That Rousseau the author, Rousseau the narrator, and Jean-

Jacques the tutor are so enigmatically intertwined only adds to the perplexities of the work’s narrative.

Several scholars have attempted to unravel what Clifton Cherpack (1988) has called the

“narrative knottiness” of the Emile. Norma Thompson (2001) argues that the work is actually narrated by a single “compound voice,” which she refers to as the “Rousseau/tutor” construct

(112-113). In her view, “the single terms [sic] Rousseau, tutor, or narrator” should be used interchangeably to describe what she perceives to be an individual pedagogical identity depicted in the Emile (ibid). Her interpretation ultimately arises from her judgment that Rousseau and

Jean-Jacques “together [add] up to the most convincing depiction of the Great Legislator” of the

Social Contract. According to Thompson, the Legislator, the actual Rousseau, and the fictional

Jean-Jacques all have “no affinity with our nature, yet [they know] it through and through” (ibid

112). In other words, by her account, all three figures are fundamentally united by their shared

133 Indeed, this is certainly the case with any of Rousseau’s works in which he figures as both the author and one of its characters, such as his autobiographical works, especially the Dialogues, and the second preface to Julie.

166 distinctly Rousseauian understanding of nature. Because Rousseau and Jean-Jacques both proceed to act on the basis of the same teaching of nature, it is for this reason that she considers the Emile to be narrated by a single “voice” rather than two distinct speakers. Together, they are, in her view, the voice of nature.

By contrast, Joan DeJean (1984) has suggested that the Emile contains a “fractured”

“narrative bricolage” of three separate narrators – a narrator-tutor-pupil triad – which eventually merge to form a single “problematic” narrative voice (125, 137-138). She contends that at the beginning of the book, each member of the narrative triad is a distinct figure with a discrete identity. Yet, as the text progresses, there is a “slippage” in the narrative that “blends the three figures into a single mass” (ibid 137-138). According to DeJean, Rousseau consistently depicts the teacher-pupil relationship as one of domination; in Emile and Julie various pupils are infantilized, then dominated by the wills of their educator (ibid 136). Throughout the Emile,

DeJean alleges that Jean-Jacques progressively identifies more strongly with Emile, “until by the end he [sc. Jean-Jacques] moves to take over the pupil’s space, to become the pupil” (138). That is, Emile’s desires and intentions are absorbed into those of his tutor. By her estimation, the pedagogical vignette of the Emile putatively reveals Rousseau’s “obsession with the control of the student that has as its goal the erasure of every écart” (ibid 136). Ultimately, the purpose of what DeJean sees as a shrinking narrative voice – from three narrators down to one – is its demonstration that, for Rousseau, the “pedagogical relationship is founded on a drive toward narcissistic engulfment…[in which] three souls are meant to share the same ‘body.’ The hybrid creature inhabiting Emile's narrative voice reveals through this vision its desire to take over all the principal roles in this pedagogical drama” (ibid 138). In short, her interpretation of the narrative of the Emile is a faithful recitation of the master-slave trope where Rousseau casts

167 himself as the master, Emile as the slave, and teaching is simply “the instrument of Emile’s repression” (ibid 139). The ostensible blending of the book’s narrators, then, mirrors the teacher’s domination of the pupil, as Emile’s will is allegedly subsumed under that of his tutor.

Situated somewhere in between Thompson’s single narrator and DeJean narrative triad, is

Cherpack’s delineation of two distinct narrative personae in the Emile: “N1,” the primary narrator that represents Rousseau, the non-fictional author of the book who “voices theory”, and “N2,” a secondary character who speaks in the fictional passages as Jean-Jacques, the imaginary tutor of

Emile (1988 [23]). He suggests that the work cannot be considered a monologue because its many voices would either reflect “a virtuoso performance of [sic] a ‘Man of a Thousand

Voices’” or “the product of an emotionally disturbed visionary who passes abruptly from rational thought to vivid hallucinations” (ibid 17, 22). He also believes that Rousseau had originally intended to have only one narrator in the Emile, as he does in the Favre Manuscript, and that the dual narrative of the published version is the result of carelessness in the “editorial adjustments” that occurred during the transition from the first draft to the final text due to “lack of time” (ibid

18, 26).

So, how many narrators does the Emile truly contain, and to what extent can or should this matter inform our interpretation of it? This inquiry is no small matter and is certainly a question of the greatest importance for interpreting any work. While I agree with Thompson’s observation that Rousseau and Jean-Jacques share the same understanding of nature, I do not believe this alone is sufficient to signify that they constitute a single character. If anything, the

Emile highlights the numerous differences between the two figures more than their few similarities (e.g., Emile 51; see also the introduction to this chapter). Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, I also disagree with DeJean’s contention that the narrators of the Emile blend into a single

168 voice. For one, her claim that Emile is one of the book’s narrators is deeply problematic. He cannot possibly be considered a narrator, for he never speaks. The boy’s words are always recounted to the reader via Jean-Jacques, who does narrate part of the book.

More critically, however, DeJean does not provide a single piece of textual evidence to support her fundamental claim that the Emile reflects Rousseau’s “narcissistic” desire to dominate over the wills of others. This makes the task of evaluating the validity of her argument quite difficult, as her logic is not entirely clear. Or perhaps it is the case that her lack of evidence actually makes DeJean’s claim very simple to evaluate, for if the Emile offers no textual confirmation of her assertion, then the strongest implication is that her contention simply cannot be substantiated. And, in fact, if we look at the available textual evidence, it seems to support the precise opposite of her claim. DeJean appears to overlook that Jean-Jacques’ main characteristic is his selflessness, and he states that he must sacrifice himself fully for the sake of Emile’s proper upbringing (e.g., Emile 53). He must give himself over to his pupil so that the two become

“inseparable” to the point where “the lot of each in life is always a common object for them”

(ibid). In other words, contrary to DeJean’s contention that Jean-Jacques oppresses Emile’s will, the text explicitly indicates that it is the tutor who must be repressed so that his fixed desires or intentions are less important than Emile’s personal good, not the other way around. This also applies in the instances when Jean-Jacques clearly opposes Emile’s will; opposition does not necessarily mean repression. The tutor often actively resists his pupil’s will to “[present] natural necessity in palpable form to the child so that the child lives according to nature prior to understanding it” (Bloom 1979 [13, emphasis added]). We are told that “the child is at birth already a disciple, not of the governor, but of nature. The governor only studies under this first master and prevents its care from being opposed” (Emile 61). The goal of Emile’s unique

169 education is not for Jean-Jacques to repress his pupil, as DeJean contends, but rather to “prepare from afar the reign of his freedom” so that he is “in the condition always to be master of himself and in all things to do his will, as soon as he has one” (ibid 63). Until Emile has a will of his own and he is capable of shifting for himself, he will require his tutor’s guidance to keep him on the course of nature.

Cherpack, I believe, makes a more successful argument regarding the narrative structure of the Emile. Ultimately, I believe it is crucial to realize that Jean-Jacques the tutor is as much a fiction as is Emile the pupil. Near the beginning of the Emile, just prior to the introduction of

Emile’s educator, Rousseau declares his intention: “Not in a condition to fulfill the most useful task, I will dare at least to attempt the easier one; following the example of so many others, I shall put my hand not to the work but to the pen; and instead of doing what is necessary, I shall endeavor to say it. [...] I have hence chosen to...hypothesize that I have the age, health, kinds of knowledge, and all the talent suitable for working at his education, for conducting him from the moment of his birth” (50). Undoubtedly, then, the Emile contains two separate narrators:

Rousseau the allegedly non-fictional portrait of the real author who inhabits actual eighteenth- century France and Jean-Jacques the “hypothesize[d]” tutor who resides in a separate alternate reality and who narrates certain episodes of Emile’s education as “I,” where “I” can only mean the tutor. Poised above these two narrators is the actual author Rousseau who crafted these two figures. So, ultimately, we must follow three main narrative figures:

1. Rousseau: “the authorial presence that animates the text taken as a whole” (i.e.,

the actual author of the Emile) (Nussbaum 1990 [9]).134

134 Scott 2020 suggests that the “I” that speaks as Rousseau may actually depict two different Rousseaus in “two moments in time, perhaps pre- and post-illumination of Vincennes” (146).

170 2. “Rousseau”: the “author-character” (i.e., the ostensibly non-fictional narrator

created by the author who is akin to Cherpack’s theory-driven N1) (ibid).

3. Jean-Jacques: Emile’s fictional educator who is also a fictional creation of the

real Rousseau who corresponds to Cherpack’s action-driven N2.

From this point forward, it will be critical for us to maintain that distinction among these three figures and to bear in mind that the focus of our discussion here is not Rousseau the philosopher or “Rousseau” the author-character-narrator, but Jean-Jacques the tutor.135

Whereas we know “Rousseau” by his speech – “instead of doing what is necessary” (i.e., instead of raising a child himself), he “shall endeavor to say it” – by contrast, we know Jean-

Jacques primarily through his behavior as we watch him methodically raise his pupil. The fundamental difference between the narrators “Rousseau” and “Jean-Jacques” is the distinction between words and deeds. To know the tutor is to know him by his actions. That Jean-Jacques is known only by his deeds is particularly striking considering that Rousseau’s writings tend to otherwise emphasize what one is rather than what one does. Whereas the crucial thing for Emile is to determine who he will become, or his character, the tutor’s character is downplayed, and the emphasis is principally on what he does. We know remarkably little about who he is – which certainly makes Emile’s parents’ trust in this man all the more mysterious. We only know the

135 Where I disagree with Cherpack is in his contention that the presence of two narrators in the Emile is a result of Rousseau’s carelessness and inattention to detail. Certainly, the temptation to interpret the Emile as a carelessly irrational work is reinforced to some degree by the strange nature of the text itself. After all, it depicts a pupil who is raised, seemingly paradoxically, to be a natural man in civil society. This boy is a fictional character who is the only truly natural social being (Emile 253). What is more, the text introduces two versions of this pupil: a “common” one and a “true” one, where both are still unmistakably fictional characters (ibid 187-188). His love interest is another imaginary figure who is contrasted against a “false” version of her, who the text oddly suggests is actually the “real” rendition of the girl (ibid 402-405). And the entire book is narrated by a fictional representation of its author who is at once intended to recall the real Rousseau while also presenting a dramatic departure from his actual life. Jean- Jacques, a Rousseauian fiction embedded in a Rousseauian fiction, is simultaneously a false and a real Rousseau. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the Emile is the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life. However, one of the chief assumptions of this dissertation is that Rousseau is a careful thinker and writer of the highest order; I believe the final text reflects his deliberate choices and is not the result of mere accident or sloppy editing. For more on this matter, I point my reader to Chapter Two of this dissertation, where this topic forms the basis of my argument.

171 tutor by his work with Emile. Thus, in our character analysis of Jean-Jacques, we will focus primarily on evaluating his function in the education he provides his pupil, alongside issues related to his behavior, his motivations, and his relationship with Emile throughout the story. In short, we will study the tutor primarily by examining his pedagogical work.

Before proceeding to the central topic of this chapter on the nature of Jean-Jacques’ role in the Emile, it is worth taking a moment to acknowledge the scholarly debate with regard to the precise job title of Emile’s educator. Benjamin Gross (2017) has surveyed the relevant literature on this matter and has made the case that scholars should use more nuanced terminology in reference to Jean-Jacques. According to him, “The secondary literature often identifies the individual educating Emile as his tutor,” while a handful of other scholars “use the terms tutor, governor, and preceptor interchangeably to describe Emile’s educator” (97-98). He argues that these terms should not be conflated, as “these different titles are purposeful and tied to

Rousseau’s overall thought” (ibid). He suggests that Jean-Jacques’ job title actually shifts throughout the Emile as he “takes on the specific roles of the governor, master, and preceptor at different parts” of the educational process “to correspond to the learner” as he evolves throughout each period of his development (ibid 96, 101). In short, Jean-Jacques’ precise role changes as Emile’s needs change. Gross’ point is insightful and well argued, and it highlights a critical detail that had been previously overlooked in the scholarship. Even so, here we will not make such nuanced distinctions with reference to Jean-Jacques’ various job titles. My analysis of the Emile examines this character from a different perspective; because here we are speaking not only of Jean-Jacques as the single physical tutor who provides Emile’s entire education from start to finish, but also of his overarching creative capacity across all the phases of his pupil’s

172 life, for the sake of simplicity and clarity I believe it suffices to use the terms “tutor” and

“governor” interchangeably in reference to Emile’s educator.

Ensuring the Perfect Circumstances: Jean-Jacques, Nature’s Regulator

Rousseau’s unique understanding of nature was central to our investigation in Chapter

Two of this dissertation. Likewise, nature will comprise a fundamental aspect of our analysis here. Yet, in the present chapter, we will expand on the discussion from Chapter Two to provide a more nuanced exploration of Rousseau’s conception of nature – to advance the discourse to the next level, so to speak. The primary difference between the treatments of nature in Chapters Two and Four can be summed up as follows. In Chapter Two, I emphasized how Rousseau’s understanding of nature is informed by the low or the primitive, for the man of the state of nature is the ultimate natural standard. Here in Chapter Four, we will explore how Emile’s education exemplifies the manner in which the high or the human develops out of or is informed by the low or the primitive without the former being reduced to the latter. That is, whereas Chapter Two identified the standard of what constitutes the natural, Chapter Four examines the application of that standard to human life in a distinctly modern (i.e., eighteenth-century) civilized context. In short, Chapter Two asked “What is nature?” and Chapter Four asks “How is that conception of nature achieved in modern civil society?” Chapter Two introduced Rousseau’s “great principle” that man is naturally good, and society makes him wicked. Here in Chapter Four, we discover that society, the regrettable cause of our damnation, is the sole source of our “return” to nature and, hence, of our salvation (cf. Gay in Cassirer 1954 [27]). Let us now demonstrate this claim by exploring this matter in greater depth.

Even though the lead role in the Emile is reserved for its eponymous pupil, Jean-Jacques plays a vital part throughout every act in the drama of youth. The success of Emile’s education

173 depends entirely on the exemplary skill and unselfish commitment of his tutor who must not only accurately understand what nature is, but he must also know how to provide it with the proper support. Emile, we are told, is “is a tender plant, but one which will bear sweet fruit if properly cultivated” (Emile 18). If Jean-Jacques subverts nature at any point during the course of his pupil’s education, then “nature remains imperfect” and he “shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting” (ibid 232, 90; cf. 38, 154-155). That the tutor is presented as essential to the proper education of Emile is plain enough. But what is perhaps less clear is who Jean-Jacques is and the precise nature of his role in Emile’s upbringing.

This matter merits careful consideration since, as Lawrence Cooper (1999) has observed,

Rousseau charts the terrain of human possibilities “in human terms...rather than in terms of disembodied philosophical principles” (51). That is, Rousseau’s philosophy is typically concrete and human, not intangible and abstract. Human beings, in all their various forms, serve as the focal point of Rousseau’s thought. Thus, Cooper has suggested that the Rousseauian corpus centers around five basic human types: the corrupt social man, the virtuous citizen, the inhabitant of the original state of nature, the autobiographical Rousseau, and Emile (ibid). For him, these categories offer a menu of “fundamental alternatives that are or have been available to humanity” with regard to the question of how one ought to live (ibid). According to Cooper, they constitute

“the full range of basic responses” to the fundamental questions of man’s relation to nature, each of which is differentiated on the basis of how nature is “achieved and manifest” – from denaturalization to the healthy development of one’s self-centered passions. While Cooper’s list represents a good start, I would like to argue that it is incomplete.136 Setting aside the fact that

136 I also take issue with Cooper’s claim that the “primary meaning” of nature for Rousseau is “origins” (53). For my argument regarding why Rousseau does not simply equate the natural with the original, as well as what I believe to be the primary meaning of nature, I again point my reader to Chapter Two of this dissertation.

174 this ostensibly comprehensive inventory of human types only captures male types and entirely overlooks women, “that precious half” of our species that Rousseau took great care to understand

(SD Ep Dedicatory [121]), Cooper also forgets an additional type: the Jean-Jacques of the Emile.

What human type is Jean-Jacques, and what is his particular relation to nature? I do not believe the tutor fits in anywhere on Cooper’s list.

It is to be hoped that nobody will confuse the tutor with at least four of Cooper’s human types; he is obviously not the corrupt social man, the virtuous citizen of The Social Contract, the inhabitant of the original state of nature, or Emile. Yet, what is perhaps less clear is how the

Jean-Jacques of the Emile is distinct from “the Jean-Jacques of the Reveries and selected other autobiographical depictions” (Cooper 1999 [51]). We can begin to differentiate these two self- depictions by first recognizing that, in the Rousseauian corpus, there appear to be two different

“Rousseaus.” By this I simply mean that we can divide his philosophical works into two separate categories: in the “First Walk” of the Reveries Rousseau himself makes a distinction between the

“monumens de mon innocence,” which comprise his autobiographical Dialogues and The

Confessions, and the “vrais écrits,” which encompass his other, non-autobiographical works (OC

I [1001]). I do not wish to suggest that there is a fundamental difference in the substance of

Rousseau’s thought between these two types of writings. After all, he clearly states that his whole philosophy comprises a single, cohesive “system,” as we have already mentioned a number of times throughout this dissertation. Rousseau was adamant that his thought was already fully developed when he wrote the First Discourse, and it is important to realize that he never retracted any part of its core teaching in his later writings. What I mean to suggest here by stating that there are two “Rousseaus” is that the phase of Rousseau’s life that occurred after the Emile is marked by a clear shift in his estimation of the importance of the details of his personal life for

175 his philosophy. With his persecution and the suppression of his works, especially after the publication of the Emile, Rousseau concluded later in life that the preservation of his teachings required that he vindicate his reputation. As a result, after the Emile was published, the details of his life suddenly emerged as critical to his message, and thus he decided to pen his autobiographical works. This had simply not been the case for any other philosopher up to this point, including for Rousseau himself in his earlier works. Therefore, it is my view that the Jean-

Jacques depicted in the Emile must somehow conform to and advance the substance of

Rousseau’s unified systematic thought, but the tutor’s character does not – and indeed cannot – do so by serving the same function as his later autobiographical self-representations, all of which offer an account of how an exceptional individual can live in a corrupt age.137 And to the extent that the tutor not only appears to be immune to the corruption of eighteenth-century French society but is also completely free of the serious moral and physical defects from which the real

Rousseau suffered, one could argue that the Jean-Jacques of the Emile does not resemble any known human type since he is free of “the accidents common to the species” (Emile 42, 131,

235, 245). The tutor must necessarily serve a different purpose for Rousseau’s philosophy than his autobiographical depictions, and what this may be is precisely what we are setting out to discover in this chapter.138

With this in mind, I would like to suggest that Jean-Jacques the tutor depicts a man whose relation to nature is markedly different from that of the five human types listed by

137 For a penetrating analysis of Rousseau’s project in The Confessions, see Kelly 1987. For studies of Rousseau’s personality, see Starobinski 1988 [1957], Lilti 2008, and Arnold 2014. 138 While I am here suggesting that the Rousseauian corpus depicts two “Rousseaus” – the pre- or non- autobiographical Rousseau and the autobiographical one – Grace (née Noirot, 1996) has argued that The Reveries alone “presents us with two ‘Rousseaus’: the natural scientist who seeks to discover the first mechanical movements of the human ‘soul’ and the pious Rousseau of the Third Walk, who knows that God exists and that the world is ruled by a moral order” (34). If correct, then this would suggest that there is actually a multiplicity of “Rousseaus.”

176 Cooper. The hallmark of all the Rousseauian human types identified by Cooper is that each one represents a different manifestation or achievement of nature. One key way in which Emile’s tutor differs from these various men is that, even though his aim is to raise the natural man of civil society, there is no indication that he himself must be a man of nature. Naturalness is conspicuously missing from the list of the good tutor’s qualities, the first concentrated description of which occurs in the middle of Book I of the Emile (49-51). We are told that Jean-

Jacques must have been “well raised himself,” for, if he were not, then it would not be possible for him to raise his pupil well (ibid 50). Yet, while the Emile defines what it means to be “well raised” for “nature’s call to human life” (i.e., Emile’s education), we are never told what it means to be well raised for the tutor’s calling.139 While Jean-Jacques must have a proper understanding of nature – as indeed he does, for he shares Rousseau’s distinctive understanding of nature – the suggestion is that one need not necessarily be natural oneself to educate the natural man of civil society.

If Jean-Jacques is not defined by his naturalness, then what is his relation to nature? And how is this relationship critical to the establishment of Emile’s naturalness? In the Second

Discourse, Rousseau argues that human beings do not naturally understand how to direct their perfectibility or freedom. Instead, history – which he depicts as lacking providence, rationality, or determinism in any strict sense – has haphazardly exercised a great deal of control over human affairs. Because man does not fully comprehend how to use his capacity a free agent, he, more often than not, has exercised his freedom by deviating from nature to meet his immediate needs,

139 It is clear that the philosopher, unlike the homme vulgaire, does not require an education (Emile 52, FD CW II [21]). Indeed, Rousseau himself was never formally educated in his youth, but instead worked briefly as a notary’s clerk and as an apprentice (1725-1728) to an engraver. The philosopher is the one for whom the highest development of reason is possible. The homme vulgaire, by contrast, is the individual who is not capable of developing the highest form of reason.

177 but at the great cost of his overall long-term well-being. Since man has demonstrated that he lacks the capacity to direct his own perfectibility for his benefit over a long period of time, he will need the proper guidance if he is to succeed. Man is in need of a plan or a project, yet nature does not furnish him with one. The tutor steps in to provide Emile with such a plan. In other words, one of Jean-Jacques’ primary roles in the Emile is to provide providential or otherwise rational direction for Emile, the much-needed guidance that has been missing in human life throughout the course of history. The education that Jean-Jacques provides his pupil gives Emile that which he needs by nature, but which nature does not automatically supply. Thus, in his capacity as Emile’s tutor, Jean-Jacques is properly understood as nature’s supplement. As the tutor himself states, the specific kind of enhancement he provides nature is best understood as her regulation (e.g., ibid 92, 205, 251, 259, 314, 327, 333-334; cf. 365-367, 377).

Let us put flesh on the bones of what I have just stated. Let us begin by taking a closer look at one of the recurring images used throughout the Emile as a metaphor for education: that of a fruit-bearing plant (e.g., ibid 52-53, 90, 116, 216, 419, 475). The plant imagery I provided above in this chapter and the comparison I made in Chapter Two between nature and a well- manicured garden were both purposefully chosen, as they mirror much of Rousseau’s own language regarding nature and education. In the opening pages of the Emile, Rousseau provides a narrative about a plant as an image of nature and its cultivation as metaphor for education.

Initially, the analogy is somewhat odd because what is being likened to a plant shifts: at first the image is of nature broadly, which Rousseau describes as being like a shrub that has grown by

“chance” in the middle of a high-traffic footpath on which it gets trampled by passers-by (ibid

37). In the very next sentence, the shrub no longer symbolizes nature generally but has instead transformed into one that depicts human nature specifically. The plant now represents a newborn

178 baby which is again on a highway, but this time it is exposed to “the impact of human opinions”

(ibid 38).140 Rousseau therefore emphasizes the need to “form an enclosure around [one’s] child’s soul” to protect it (ibid).141 This representation is significant as it constitutes Rousseau’s first definition of education in the Emile: just as “plants are shaped by cultivation,” so, too, are

“men by education” (ibid). Education, properly understood, is the much-needed supplement to nature that helps establish the conditions that allow one to grow and bloom. Thus, as the educator, Jean-Jacques takes an active role in completing or enhancing nature by serving as the provider of this “cultivation.”

In addition to presenting the work’s first definition of nature, Rousseau’s plant imagery also offers the first depiction of man and his relation to nature in the Emile – an opening image that sets the stage for the entire discussion that follows. What a striking analogy with which to open a book in which the principal aim is to support nature and raise a natural man in civil society, for to liken nature to a plant that requires cultivation is tantamount to indicating that nature is somehow deficient or incomplete. Cultivation (and hence education) is the modification of our environment in order to shape and direct nature’s development. Human nature is like a seed: it can blossom into a beautiful and bountiful tree, it can merely sprout into a weak sapling, or it can fail to grow altogether. What matters most for the seed’s development is the environment in which it is planted and the care that it is given. Additionally, Rousseau implies that what nature would produce spontaneously is inferior to what she can yield with human aid.

On this matter, one cannot help but recall Locke’s labor theory of value in the Second Treatise

140 Cf. Emile 343 fn82. In death all men become more literally like a plant on a high-traffic footpath – even heroes. 141 In the First Discourse, Rousseau likens nature not to a child but to a mother who “snatches a dangerous weapon” from her child’s hands (FD I [OC III 15]). In that presentation nature is our protector, not something that must be protected. This image in the First Discourse constitutes Rousseau’s first statement on nature, but certainly not his last. As his argument develops over the course of his career, I believe he demonstrates the serious extent to which man must protect and help nature.

179 on Government (Section VI). There, he says that nature/God supplies us with worthless raw materials, the value of which exists only in potential. It is entirely up to human beings to give that valueless material its tangible value by mixing it with their labor. In other words, human effort is what imparts value on otherwise worthless material. Nature, then, needs human assistance in order to reach her full potential. I am not here suggesting that Rousseau is a

Lockean, even though there is one instance in which he does seem to suggest he is (CW IX

[236]). Yet, both men’s insistence that nature is mere potential – that it cannot bear fruit, so to speak, without human support – is certainly striking. Thus, in this specific regard, despite

Rousseau’s anti-modern rebellion against the thought of Hobbes and Locke and his partial return to classical political thought, we see that his philosophy is actually quite modern. Ultimately,

Rousseau’s philosophy radicalized modern thought; he pushed modernity further than any previous modern thinker had dared to.

Whereas Rousseau opens the Emile by castigating man for causing the degeneration of

“everything” that is “good” by nature, already in the next paragraph when he introduces the image of the shrub, we see that this first claim, though bold, proves inadequate. Even though man may disfigure nature’s creations, what is even worse is unmodified (human) nature: “man abandoned to himself in the midst of other men from birth would be the most disfigured of all”

(ibid 37). In short, the suggestion is that nature abandoned to itself – especially in the context of civil society – is essentially doomed to fail. Rousseau frames this entire discussion in terms of man’s neediness, which makes sense because, after all, “with life there begins needs” (ibid 56; cf. 161, Favre 17, FD I OC III [6], Last Reply OC III [95]). But perhaps the most striking detail to emerge from this presentation is that nature, too, is needy. And what she needs is human assistance. Just as cultivation serves an important purpose by improving upon nature’s creation

180 with regard to plant growth, the goal of education, it would seem, is to do the same for human development. Plant cultivation and education are not themselves supplied by nature; they are human contrivances. Yet, according to Rousseau’s presentation, nature requires these forms of human labor in order to truly flourish. Indeed, both cultivation and education allow human beings to take care of or support nature to help its creations reach their greatest potential (e.g.,

Emile 192, 200, Favre 121). Jean-Jacques will respect nature, yet he must also augment its work beyond its limited capacity to do so itself. In this manner, education and plant cultivation bring the power of human contrivances to reinforce and improve upon nature. Rousseau here seems to suggest that nature merely supplies the simplest, most basic material requirements for all biological creatures: life itself and a broad potential for a living thing to grow into something better – and, with human beings specifically, an additional even broader potential for an individual’s nature to flounder and come to naught. Man (in this case, Jean-Jacques) must help nature to actualize that potential in the right manner.142

To make use of a different image of Rousseau’s that he employs elsewhere (SD Preface

[124]), a sculptural analogy might be the best means of articulating his position regarding this aspect of nature. It is as though nature hands us a mixed bag of soil, minerals, and other various raw materials that serve as the basis for making clay without providing any instructions to us about how to combine everything since, after all, “nature is silent” even as man’s “will continues to speak” (SD I [140]). Consequently, we are unaware of “what our nature permits us to be” (SD

I [140], Emile 62; cf. Emile 92, 194, 208, Favre 9, 39, 58). That is, nature does not provide a blueprint one can use to plan a course of action toward a goal or result one seeks to achieve. It is

142 Compare, for instance, the imagined speech by the first men in the Emile in which they discuss the fact that the “earth produced no good fruits [...] Thus hunger never left us. [...] Finally when the earth, stripped and naked, had nothing more to offer us, we were forced to violate nature to preserve ourselves” (Emile 154).

181 up to man to actually make sense of the raw materials by discovering whether and how its separate parts might be combined, and then, once it is all mixed together, assemble a meaningful, useful structure out of them. There is no natural imperative for the raw materials to join together into any particular structure, and we have no choice but to work with the material that has been made available to us.

Just as clay cannot assemble itself into a meaningful structure, such as a statue, it would seem that an ordinary human being is not capable of establishing his own proper formation. In the end, clay – like the raw natural material we have been provided – is merely shapeless clay.

What really matters is how it is shaped. The specific form the clay and nature eventually take is entirely up to a separate sculptor. The end product is the work of a highly skilled third-party human creator. Given the present state of things, nature, which Rousseau depicted in the Second

Discourse as having once been self-supporting in the distant past, is here shown to no longer be able to maintain itself without the specialized assistance of another individual. Civilized man appears to be merely a half-formed being. As Rousseau states, “He has already compared too many ideas to feel nothing and not enough to have a conception of what he feels” (Emile 222).

That is, civilized man is far too developed to live a primitive existence, but he is not yet sufficiently advanced to fully comprehend his new situation. Nature has ultimately left man

“totally unprovided” for and “everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education” (ibid 38; cf. 154-155, 232). Everything that man needs to become fully formed, must be provided to him by his education, by his educator. Even if humans are somehow responsible for their current misery, as the opening lines of the Emile suggest, this is less important than what truly matters now: that the proper action to ameliorate his condition is in human hands, but they must be the hands of another human being who will care for his pupil’s

182 upbringing. In the end, the final product of Emile’s education is not the work of nature but of man, of Jean-Jacques. The so-called natural man of civil society will be a man-made contrivance.

To return to Rousseau’s image of the shrub, if this plant or the human child are to not only survive but also to truly blossom, they will need to be “cultivated” by careful and knowledgeable hands. Only in this way can that wild, trampled shrub grow into a lovely fruit- bearing tree. Likewise, the proper education provided by an exceptionally gifted educator will improve upon the foundation provided by nature to give rise to the natural man who thrives in civil society. In the Favre Manuscript draft of the Emile, Rousseau went so far as to say that during the “first growth” of all organic bodies, “they engender nothing at all, they bear no fruit at all, they are good for nothing, they seem to occupy a useless place on the earth” (Favre 3). He then asks what it “would have cost nature” to produce these organic beings “completely formed and to give them from their birth the strength and maturity that they attain so slowly” (ibid).143

Because Emile was not automatically “completely formed” prepared to prosper on his own, the

“cost” of obtaining his proper formation is his education – that is, the special attention he must be given by a tutor who will tend to him so that he and his nature can be deliberately shaped into the proper form. In the end, that which begins life as a pure creation of nature, in order to maintain its naturalness, must become an admixture of nature and (a specific kind of) human modification or social convention. With Emile, Jean-Jacques “add[s] art to nature” and in doing so, art and nature both “gain without losing anything” (Emile 177). The Favre Manuscript also aggregates man, animals, and plants into a single group that requires special upbringing.

However, based on later revisions that were made to the final version of the text, it becomes clear that no other creature requires the same level of attention and care as human beings. While

143 These exact passages do not appear in the final text, but the opening paragraphs of the Emile certainly read like a more dramatic re-writing of them.

183 some social conditions lead man to misery, others can give man the opportunity to enjoy himself and live his life most fully. The social condition of the latter variety must be discovered and made possible, while the former kind is to be avoided if we wish to supplement and strengthen nature. The strong implication of the Emile is that this enhancement of nature is absolutely fundamental to the success of Emile’s education. Ultimately, the purpose of the good education provided by Jean-Jacques is to “subsidize” nature to close the gap between what little it provides and what social man fully needs. In the end, it turns out that the image of a fence around a plant proves to be an inadequate representation of the proper education. Eventually Rousseau explicitly states, “A man is not planted like a tree in a country to remain there forever” (ibid 52).

Human beings are subject to various changes and complex environmental pressures throughout their lives, and they must be raised accordingly.

Man, long ago in the process of civilizing himself and organizing societies, committed a great number of mistakes that destroyed the original happiness of the state of nature. While

Rousseau’s notion of history is not providential, rational, or otherwise deterministic in the strict sense, he is nevertheless clear that all of the errors that man has made have been necessary. Man was forced to leave the state of nature due to accidental necessity. For Rousseau, each stage of human history must have occurred as it did due to a combination of present exigency and man’s unavoidable lack of foresight, experience, and knowledge or reason:

[A]ll this misery and all these blunders were necessary; they were the necessary outcome of early man’s lack of experience and lack of philosophy. Still, in and through society, however imperfect, reason develops. Eventually, the original lack of experience and philosophy is overcome [...] At that moment, which is Rousseau’s moment, man will no longer be molded by fortuitous circumstances but rather by his reason. Man, the product of blind fate, eventually becomes the seeing master of his fate” (Strauss 1953 [273]).

184 Once inequality materialized, and thus human interdependence emerged with all of its implications, including the social contract in its defective historical version, society proved to have a dynamic of its own.144 It is thus that society and its many ills have reigned supreme.

Indeed, this primacy of society or social inequality is one of Rousseau’s greatest theoretical innovations.

Given the situation man now faces, the Emile makes it clear that it is not enough for Jean-

Jacques to merely assist nature in order to raise his pupil well, but he must also govern the diverse environmental circumstances that act upon her. Thus, in the Emile, Jean-Jacques’ role in his pupil’s development evolves from one that is primarily passive – where the educator serves as a metaphorical fence and simply allows nature to grow freely within certain confines – to a more active role in which he gains greater control of circumstances and, hence, of nature’s specific development throughout the different phases of Emile’s life. In the Emile, we witness the fate of a boy falling into the hands of his tutor, Jean-Jacques, who becomes the sole source of the “foreign causes” that allow the young pupil’s nature to become perfected. Perhaps the tutor’s most important function in Emile’s education is that he becomes the “seeing master” of the young boy’s fate. Rousseau doubts “that anyone reading this book with some attention could believe that all the circumstances...in which Emile finds himself have been gathered around him by chance” (Emile 433). Every aspect of the boy’s upbringing is a product of “force or ruse” by a tutor who is “the master of all that surrounds him” in order to raise Emile in a wholly controlled environment (ibid 316, 95). Emile is not shaped by natural fortuitous circumstances as every other man in history has been, but rather by human reason, by the all-knowing Jean-Jacques.

144 For a concise, but insightful description of this dynamic, see Strauss 1953 (283-285).

185 The boy’s guidance regarding what he ought to be or aspire to be is supplied entirely by philosophy or fully actualized reason. Reason – i.e., Jean-Jacques the tutor – replaces nature. If history is the process by which man actualizes his full human faculties without actively aiming to do so, then education as it is depicted in the Emile is the process by which a fully rational educator deliberately shapes the humanized (bourgeois) man into what he ought to be – i.e., he eliminates the gulf between the is and the ought – by using his reason, the greatest product of the blind forces of history. Jean-Jacques intentionally perfects his pupil in such a way as to create the life that is the closest semblance of the state of nature that is feasible on the human level.145

Through philosophy’s creativity or its mastery over the blind forces of nature, the fully rational man can finally succeed in establishing a natural, whole, harmonious life for an average social man – one that is built on solid grounds. In the first lines of the work, Rousseau declares,

“Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (ibid 37). This is an idea we have heard many times before from Rousseau throughout his works: nature is good, and man ruins everything; nature is good, and wickedness comes from human interference. The question, however, is to what extent this thesis holds true.

Since nature is good, is the lesson that man is obliged to do nothing, to leave nature alone? To this, Rousseau answers emphatically, “no.” Now that nature has been corrupted by man, a great deal depends on what human beings can do to remedy the degradation they generated. By the end of the Emile, a very specific kind of man – the tutor – becomes the sole architect of human affairs, and what leaves his hands – Emile – is good. What Emile eventually becomes is not bestowed by nature (or by a divine creator) but is the product of human exertion, of what man

145 Here I am borrowing part of Leo Strauss’ (1953) well-known definition of Rousseau’s conception of the good life: “the good life consists in the closest approximation to the state of nature which is possible on the level of humanity” (282). For more on this topic, see Chapter Two of this dissertation.

186 has become forced to do to produce a life well lived. Ultimately, the “final perfection” of Emile’s upbringing is to “fix it so that he will be the same at all times” and can protect himself against

“the revolutions which time necessarily brings” (ibid 431, SD I [146]). Uninhibited nature is characterized by a lack of uniformity and steadiness, and chance or accident renders life precarious and unstable. Jean-Jacques artificially instills balance, steadiness, and uniformity in

Emile’s life in order to make him “happy in spite of fortune” (Emile 446). Emile’s education does have an ultimate object or aim, but any notion of a natural telos is supplanted by a man- made end which is reached by man-made means.

For Rousseau, humans are mere potential in every aspect of their being, from the development of their latent higher faculties to the emergence of their moral virtue or wickedness.

Man is what we wish to make him. Modern civilized man must do deliberately what hitherto has happened merely spontaneously. Humans are now required to give history direction, for our environment is no longer natural. Expressed somewhat differently, the alternative to Emile’s artifice-filled, meticulously calculated education in our wholly artificial modern world would not itself be truly natural. The Emile appears to suggest that artifice is an ineradicable part of life in civil society. Every option available to social man is artificial, strictly speaking. Jean-Jacques’ task is to discover and utilize the right kinds of artifice that will be most conducive to creating the natural man, or the individual who is as whole and self-sufficient as possible.

Human nature appears to be totally inadequate to provide us with direction or guidance.

Thus, the good education, such as the one Jean-Jacques provides, supplements and enhances nature; it provides man with a plan that is needed but otherwise not supplied by nature. The so- called natural education certainly modifies nature, but it safeguards nature and augments it; and the bad or unnatural education is that which destroys or diminishes nature (Emile 34, 177). One

187 of the consequences of this notion is that Rousseau radically alters his reader’s perception of man’s relation to nature. It is no longer something to be conquered, as had been the aim of the modern scientific project. By Rousseau’s account, what little guidance nature supplies is essentially limited to its bestowal of the faculty of perfectibility. This uniquely human characteristic is essentially man’s ability to deviate from his “present nature” or, stated otherwise, “the capacity to cultivate a new ‘nature’ through the development of language, new desires, and new needs” (SD I [140-142], Grace 1996 [13]).146 It initially began as one of our most beneficial faculties because it allowed original man to compensate for some of his natural shortcomings, especially his lack of instinct (SD I [141-142]). Yet, eventually this faculty became a mixed bag for man – good in some senses but detrimental in that it “afterwards [raised] him far above nature” to the point where his perfectibility has turned him into “nature’s tyrant”

(ibid). The conveniences humans obtained by their improving upon nature initially allowed our forebears to ensure their self-preservation by giving them the means to protect themselves from the numerous challenges posed by their environment. But this relief soon devolved into a new set of artificial needs which have proven to be enslaving. Over time, the social order emerged and evolved, and civilized man now “tyrannizes over nature constantly and constantly makes nature demand its rights” (Beaumont 52). According to Rousseau, the “vices of men and the ills of society” can be explained by this subjugation of nature (ibid). Indeed, the balance of power between man and nature has shifted so dramatically that it is now the case that “the evils to which nature subjects us are much less cruel than those which we add to them” (Letter to

146 Pierre Manent (1996) has argued, “it is in man’s nature to be contradictory [...] it is natural for man to change his nature because man, at bottom, is not nature but liberty [i.e., perfectibility] [...] liberty is that power by which man gives orders to his own nature, or changes his nature, or is a law unto himself [...] man’s nature is not to have a nature but to be free” (77). The chief problem with this interpretation is that it does not cohere with Rousseau’s subsequent elaboration of his understanding of perfectibility: the term does not imply man’s giving “orders to his own nature.”

188 Voltaire, 18 August 1756 [235]). While our capacity to improve upon nature originally began as a beneficial, and even necessary, tool for our survival, in its present manifestation it is the cause of our misery. As a result, in civilized men’s “quest for tranquility, they are rushing to their death” (Philopolis OC III [231]). That which once helped save man’s life is now the instrument of his destruction. As it turns out, according to Rousseau, naturalness is “not such a great misfortune” as is commonly believed (SD I [139]).

So, we must certainly free nature from our subjection, but this alone is not enough.

Rousseau also teaches us that nature needs our help if she is to thrive – and she must indeed thrive. Stated differently, there is a great difference between contradicting nature and enhancing or supplementing her work (e.g., Women of Geneva 145). Man must cease doing the former and learn to carry out the latter properly. Thus, Rousseau redefines man’s relationship to nature as one that in which he intentionally augments it. Man is meant to be nature’s indispensable aid. Or, as Rousseau himself puts it, we must set out to work “in collaboration with nature” to discover

“the route which must be opened to [Emile] in order to assist nature” (Emile 314, 192; cf. 200,

Favre 121). The implication is that the route one takes when nature is assisted is not nature’s route. It is one paved entirely by man. It is important to note that Rousseau does not totally acquit nature of the modern charge that it is defective: nature does not supply an image of perfection, but rather of that which must be perfected. The purpose of education is to support and strengthen nature to guard it and preserve it. The relationship between man and nature must be mutually reinforcing. We absolutely need nature in order to live well, yet, at the same time,

189 nature is not capable of sustaining itself without human support.147 Jean-Jacques the tutor serves the critical function of being nature’s “enhancer” on Emile’s behalf.

Jean-Jacques’ Role in Emile’s Socialization

A critical part of this entire endeavor is marked by Emile’s unusual, meticulously coordinated integration into society via Jean-Jacques who stages every human interaction his pupil has in the first twenty-five years of his life. Rousseau defied the Western philosophical tradition by declaring that man is not an inherently gregarious being, that he has never had any natural inclination to unite with his fellow man in order to form society (SD I [144, 149-150,

157, 158], II [162], Emile 59, 221, 453).148 As Rousseau states in the Emile,

Men are made not to be crowded into anthills but to be dispersed over the earth which they should cultivate. The more they come together, the more they are corrupted. The infirmities of the body, as well as the vices of the soul, are the unfailing effect of this overcrowding. Man is, of all the animals, the one who can least live in herds. Men crammed together like sheep would all perish in a very short time. Man’s breath is deadly to his kind. This is no less true in the literal sense than the figurative (59).

The final mocking remark about the poor oral hygiene of the French is quite serious, as Rousseau is likely referencing the dangers of communicable diseases which afflicted human life in the eighteenth century, especially in cramped, filthy cities such as Paris. Yet, Rousseau’s main point here is to express his well-known declaration that human beings are not naturally fit for communal living. Man has never had any natural, internal impulse to seek the company of other

147 In this regard, then, one could argue that there appears to be a certain subtle parallel between Rousseau’s treatment nature and that of the human female. Just as Rousseau teaches that women are to be respected and supported, so, too, must we learn to treat nature with due regard and great care, even though both women and nature are commonly mistreated (e.g., Emile 364, Two Sexes 55fn., Levite 185). We cannot help but compare this image to Machiavelli’s famous analogy in Chapter XXV of the Prince where he likens fortune (and, hence, nature) to a woman who must be savagely beaten. Perhaps no other image so thoroughly captures the extent of the vast difference between the two men’s understandings of our relationship to nature. 148 One could certainly argue, though, that man’s potential to experience the disharmony present in civilized life existed in man by nature since he was, from the beginning, a bundle of dormant higher faculties with the potential to develop.

190 individuals and form the long-lasting relationships that serve as the basis of civil society. Even though we now find ourselves living collectively, our experience with life in society is decidedly negative precisely because we are not naturally social creatures.

Here, one could raise a potential objection to these claims against man’s fitness for society on the basis of another statement made by Rousseau himself in the Emile: “But if, as cannot be doubted, man is by his nature sociable, or at least made to become so, he can be so only by means of other innate sentiments relative to his species” (ibid 290, emphasis added).

This one sentence initially appears to contradict the basic thesis of the Second Discourse. Yet, upon closer examination, I believe it actually reinforces Rousseau’s claims that man is unsocial.

It is essential to recognize that in the passage presently under investigation he refers to man as sociable and not social, for there is a subtle but critical difference between these two terms.

Rousseau admits that humans have an innate capacity to socialize – an ability to acquire language skills that permit individuals to verbally interact with one another – without being truly social creatures. We are naturally able to communicate with others, yet this does not mean that we are inherently suited to seek and maintain the company of others. We are endowed with what

Kant would later call an “unsocial sociability” (2009 Fourth Proposition). While Rousseau in the

Second Discourse connects language to society – language is coterminous with enduring human relationships (SD I [145]), and since language is not natural, lasting human bonds are not natural

– this unsocial sociability is precisely how he can at once classify the human aptitude for language as natural (albeit originally dormant) and also declare language itself and the socialization that emerged alongside it (and possibly even instigated it) as unnatural. Humans are intellectually capable of creating a structured method of communication consisting in the use of words to transmit information to others, but they are not naturally equipped to form a lasting

191 emotional bond with any recipient of that transferred information. The earliest development of the higher faculties marked the beginning of man’s dividedness and imbalance, as it corresponded with a lack of proportion between our growing cognitive capacities and our limited social-emotional fitness. Consequently, the chief goal of Emile’s education is to achieve his naturalness in the sense of recapturing and maintaining his psychic unity and balance.

Man’s unsocial sociability is so deep-rooted that it does not presuppose the existence of society or the development of complex language. For proof of this point, one need not take an imaginary trip back to the original state of nature, for Rousseau finds it exhibited among humans today. One need only look to a modern infant. A baby can cry to signal his or her hunger, discomfort, sleepiness, etc. (ibid 65-66). However, his or her tears merely communicate an immediate need and are not intended to form a bond with the listener beyond the satisfaction of that need. The cries have more to do with the baby’s concern with self-preservation or amour de soi même than they do with any outward-directed interest in companionship with another person or pride or amour propre (cf. SD I [145]). Indeed, as Rousseau explicitly says, “Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that for his preservation” (SD II [161-163]; cf.

Emile 92, 193, 212-213, Favre 3-4). It is of no importance to whom the cries are directed, who hears them or who responds to them; what is relevant is simply that the need that causes the tears is satisfied. It does not matter whether the listener of those cries has his or her own needs; the baby’s only concern is his or her own needs.

According to Lawrence Cooper (1999), this same passage on babies’ tears in the Emile is evidence of man’s “taste for domination” that he alleges exists “before [he] has even had the opportunity to depart from nature” (45-46). Yet, if this were the case, then it would signal a grave inconsistency in Rousseau’s thought, one that I firmly believe he is actually careful to

192 avoid. As Rousseau’s discussion about a newborn’s cries clearly shows, babies are not born corrupt – “their first tears are prayers” (Emile 66) – but only become so due to bad parenting. He says that cries that turn into the basis for longer-lasting human relationships of master and servant are simply the result of careless caretakers, not a sign of any natural proclivity for dominance (ibid). In other words, Rousseau deliberately demonstrates that babies, like nascent natural man, are free from all viciousness that presupposes pride or amour propre. Thus, similar to natural man, babies prior to the corrupting effect of poor parenting are governed by amour de soi même or the simple preoccupation with self-preservation. Rousseau’s point is that man’s selfishness is inborn and powerful, and it manifests itself essentially at birth.149 But, contra

Cooper’s claim, its first manifestation is an inward-directed selfishness in which a baby’s primary concern is the desire for self-preservation, and he or she does not initially take interest in hurting others as he or she would if he or she were proud or driven by amour propre. Pride develops later than the basic wants of the body and emerges only under adverse conditions in the

149 One here must resist the temptation to equate man’s innate selfish concern for his preservation with amour propre. Rousseau is equivocal and unclear on a number of matters, but on the issue of man’s selfishness/self-interest he is unambiguous: in the Second Discourse he explicitly states that selfishness/the self-interested concern (which he equates to the basic desire for self-preservation [e.g., Second Discourse I [134, 139-140], II [161]]) is innate and universal; for the primitive man of the state of nature whose amour propre remained dormant, “self-preservation was almost his only care” (SD I [139, Note XV], Emile 92, Favre 122-123). Thus, we are all endowed with a natural selfish impulsion toward self-preservation from day one. Rousseau tells us that this impulse, along with compassion, is one of the principles of the human soul which is anterior to reason, and which therefore predates the development of our amour propre. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue (as others before me have) that compassion – which apparently takes man outside himself to care about another – is actually the manifestation of our natural impulse toward self-preservation, suggesting that our self-interestedness ranks so far above the other natural principle of the human soul that our natural faculties all act in service to it. In short, by nature man cares only for his own preservation, and all of his faculties are directed to that end. On this point generally, Rousseau is in agreement with Hobbes and Locke. That is to say, he agrees with the modern natural right thinkers that man’s only natural vocation is self-preservation or selfish concern. Rousseau differs only in that he does not believe that the duty to obey the laws of civil society can/ought to be derived from self-interest. The selfish/self-interested impulse is fundamentally and deeply linked to every sentient being’s natural love of its own existence. Amour propre is distinctly human. But the self-centered love of existence – in all its concern for the self over any concern for others – is elemental and universal. To be sure, the “hateful and irascible” versions of our “passions are born of amour-propre,” including the wicked, exploitative forms of selfishness (Emile 214). Yet, the natural, original form of self-interestedness that is “gentle and affectionate” is inborn and universal and is “born of amour de soi” (ibid). It is clear from the text that the baby’s self-concern is of this latter variety born of amour de soi.

193 process of satisfying these wants. Stated differently, the human mind develops in relation to the distinct manner in which one’s elementary wants and/or their satisfaction are shaped by certain circumstances (cf. Strauss 1953 [273]). This point is critical to validating Rousseau’s thesis about the goodness of human nature, for if a newborn baby demonstrated a “taste for domination” that is symptomatic of pride or amour propre, then it would suggest that the

Hobbesian account of man is right after all, that man is naturally a vicious savage.150 For

Rousseau’s claims about our natural goodness to be tenable, he must demonstrate that human beings issue forth good and that it is only through the corrupting effect of (conventional forms of) socialization that they become wicked. Furthermore, a baby’s tearful outreach to another human being – which could be taken as evidence of one’s natural desire to seek the long-lasting company of others – is here taken as evidence of the opposite, of man’s deeply unsocial nature.

For Rousseau, this type of communication is merely symptomatic of man’s inherent lack of fitness or desire to pursue an emotional association with other human beings beyond the wish to satisfy an immediate need.

Among grown adults, Rousseau states that, in society, man learns to fulfill his wishes by establishing lasting bonds in order to live at the expense of others (Emile 195). And this exploitative human interaction is exacerbated further by the current structure of civil society; one of the hallmarks of bourgeois life is that it derives men’s sociability from their selfishness (ibid

Introduction [4-6]). Rousseau believes that a society rooted in calculated self-interest provides neither a strong enough nor a profound enough bond for human relationships. A deeper, more powerful bonding force had to be discovered. With Rousseau, the primacy of self-interest as the root of society is replaced by sentiment or passions. Romantic love that leads to the

150 Cooper incorrectly attributes Augustine’s position on babies to Rousseau, who is, in fact, consciously anti- Augustinian. For a more thorough critique of Cooper’s argument, see Kelly 1987.

194 establishment of a family is one of the bonding forces offered by Rousseau that proves to be a stronger, more reliable root of civil society than self-interest alone and, therefore, than the social contract. Consequently, for Emile and his beloved Sophie, their sentimental affection for each other will form the basis of their miniature society, of their alternative social contract between each other (cf. ibid 13, 25-26, 53, 324, 326).151

Ultimately, despite the many ills of society and our inherent lack of fitness for it, nowadays “no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (Donne 1923 [98]).152 It is now the case for modern man that “civil life is necessary” and so to “live in the world, one must know how to deal with men” (Emile 454, 249; cf. 208, 220,

184, 327, 335, 357). Thus, as a fundamental part of Emile’s education, Jean-Jacques will need to guide his pupil in such a way as to train him live with his fellow man and to form the proper

151 For a more complete statement regarding Rousseau’s conception of love as forming the basis of society, see Chapter Three of this dissertation. 152 Rousseau’s famous argument is that primitive man was originally “an island entire of itself,” and that his leaving the state of nature destroyed his original independence and commenced the necessary development of the mind and the introduction of new desires, which led to our increasing reliance on other human beings. Human progress brought our “island living” to an end, so to speak. Strangely enough, though, the rapid advancement of technology and the spread of automation that has occurred in my lifetime – all products of the modern scientific project that Rousseau opposed – have made it possible for modern man to resemble “an island” as much as one can today. Now, more than at any other point in man’s post-state of nature history, we can function in our day-to-day lives with very little need to interact with other people. One’s home can be made one’s island paradise. Modern man has various machines to do the kinds of work that were previously done by human hands (e.g., coffee maker, washing machine, dish washer, etc.), a number of innovative services that eliminate the need for certain kinds of daily human interaction (e.g., online shopping and at-home delivery for every possible need, such as clothing, groceries, and even prescription drugs), and technology-driven shifts in standard work practices (e.g., telecommuting and remote work). And with the decline in religious participation in recent decades, one could suggest that we have done away with what is possibly the last form of regular social interaction. An individual could thus go an extended period of time with all of his needs fulfilled, yet not interact with a single soul, if he so wished. Indeed, I have known of some individuals who have done so. Granted, we still rely on humans to invent the household appliances we use, deliver our ordered goods, etc. But in every one of these instances, we revert to a close approximation of the pre-social manner of interacting with others that Rousseau describes, where other people are simply seen as a piece of equipment by which one may satisfy his or her needs, then proceed with the rest of the day emotionally unaffected by that encounter. In short, advanced technology has made it possible to recapture some semblance of the independence man is said to have enjoyed in the state of nature. To be sure, Rousseau states that we are now social creatures and we need to interact with others. Whether our modern technology-based independence is desirable and contributes to the felicity of our species is another matter entirely and is certainly up for debate, which unfortunately cannot be held here.

195 bonds that will serve as the basis of the society he will inhabit (ibid 328). To carry out this task, the tutor functions as the intermediary that ensures his pupil is fully integrated into society in a healthy manner. He does so in at least two key ways that we will discuss here: by removing all obstacles to Emile’s full integration to society and by acting as a filter through which the boy’s passions can be purified during the socialization process. Let us take each of these in turn.

As the first necessary part of this undertaking, Jean-Jacques adheres to an unusual in loco parentis educational approach. Because “education begins with life” and “to be well led, the child should follow only a single guide,” Emile’s parents must promise their son to Jean-Jacques

“before [Emile] is born” (ibid 61, 42, 51). The newborn Emile must be handed directly over to his tutor. Indeed, Jean-Jacques’ “sole condition” in choosing to take on the responsibility of educating Emile is that the boy will “obey only” him, and the tutor will, in turn absorb, all of the parents’ “duties” and “inherit their rights” (Emile 52-53; cf. DeJean 1984 [138]).153 The tutor alone will direct Emile’s entire education. To this extent, then, Jean-Jacques becomes an enigmatically androgynous figure: Jean-Jacques will need to be equal parts mother and father, man and woman. In a certain sense, this sexual duality in Jean-Jacques foreshadows Book V of the Emile in which we see Emile and Sophie unite as man and woman to form a conjugal pair

153 As a consequence, Jean-Jacques will be the sole beneficiary of the guardian’s rewards. Jean-Jacques states that, one day, his pupil will blossom and yield “fruit he is going to harvest” someday (ibid 53). Notably, this statement likening Emile to a harvested fruit directly recalls the opening sentences of the Emile, which we discussed above. In these passages he says that mothers should treat their infants’ upbringing as a long-term investment, for which “its fruits will one day be [her] delights” (ibid 38). In other words, Jean-Jacques’ initial statement regarding his potential motive is the same one he states should be that of a mother raising her own child. In the second formulation of the plant analogy that occurs when Rousseau repeats it in reference to himself (ibid 53), the image undergoes a handful of significant changes. Most notably, in the second instance Jean-Jacques completely supersedes the mother. His initial statement about a mother’s potential reward for raising a child well, in its second articulation applies only to himself. The analogy of the “fruit” makes one final appearance in the final pages of the Emile (478). There, Emile and Sophie have just awoken from spending their first night together as man and wife. Emile is upset because Sophie made him sleep in a separate bed. Jean-Jacques takes the young woman aside to gently chastise her for making an “inappropriate use” of a “man” such as Emile. The tutor reassures her, “You have had the first fruits of his youth. He has not squandered it on anyone.” The sexual innuendo regarding the “fruits” that Sophie enjoys is obvious enough. These are not the same “fruits” that Jean-Jacques/Rousseau will “harvest,” but what he does reap is not yet clear. I hope to shed some light on this as we proceed in this chapter.

196 that eventually comprises a father and a mother. Yet, whereas Emile’s and Sophie’s union is a result of their individual incompleteness – for which Rousseau contrives their mutual interdependence by way of romantic love as the proper framework for healthy social relations – that Jean-Jacques embodies both male and female characteristics implies that he is whole and self-sufficient in a manner that no ordinary person such as Emile or Sophie could ever be.154

With this suggestion, Rousseau thus demonstrates the incredible gulf that exists between what

Jean-Jacques is and what the fictional Emile, or even the actual reader, are. Neither the young pupil nor Rousseau’s reader (nor even Rousseau himself) could ever hope to achieve the androgynous kind of autonomous completeness that the text implies Jean-Jacques embodies.

Already from the beginning of the Emile, Rousseau indicates the extent to which Jean-Jacques eclipses ordinary men – almost to the point of being superhuman. Yes, the tutor will act as a substitute for Emile’s parents; but he must also be so much more, as he must provide around-the- clock supervision and manipulate nearly every aspect of Emile’s controlled environment. As

Rousseau says, to raise a man properly the teacher “must be either a father or more than a man oneself” (ibid 50).155 By eliminating Emile’s actual father (and mother) from the boy’s education, Rousseau indicates that Jean-Jacques must necessarily be of the latter variety: he is more than a man himself.

Certainly one of the strangest aspects of the Emile is the parents’ striking willingness to relinquish all control of their son, handing him over to Jean-Jacques before the boy’s first cries have subsided only to see him again once he is a grown man with a child of his own (ibid

154 Jean-Jacques androgyny also recalls the dual sexuality of the first human of the Bible, who was initially male and female before God separated the sexes. A key difference, however, is that whereas wisdom in the Bible leads to the division of the sexes, Jean-Jacques’ wisdom appears to be the source of his ability to maintain his autonomy. 155 Cf. Aristotle’s Politics (1.2 [1253a28-30]).

197 480).156 The text provides no explanation for two key aspects of Emile’s parents’ behavior: their apparent emotional detachment from their son and their implicit trust in the untested abilities of

“the father's friend” (ibid 51, 59). Both of these are essential to Emile’s entire education, and without either of which, the tutor would very likely find himself with a great deal more free time on his hands. Jean-Jacques admits himself that the art he practices, “that of governing without precepts and doing everything by doing nothing,” is not one that makes his “talents conspicuous from the outset” and, as a result, does not “make an impression on fathers” (ibid 119). So, it is not immediately apparent why Emile’s parents would be willing to entrust their unborn son to the tutor.

The conduct of the boy’s parents seems to represent an odd hybrid between the practices of modern civil society and the behavior of the original state of nature. The fact that the parents enjoy an enduring conjugal bond with one another is certainly consistent with modern social convention. Yet, in the ease with which Emile’s parents voluntarily cease to keep their child, their behavior departs from ordinary modern practice and resembles the attitudes of mothers and fathers described by Rousseau as once having occurred in the original state of nature.157 In the

Second Discourse, Rousseau denies the naturalness and necessity of the family on the basis of at least two assertions: first, men and women in the state of nature had no sexual or romantic attachments to each other; second, neither parent, mother and father alike, originally had any emotional connection to their children (SD I [162]). As Roger Masters (1968) observes, “the

156 However, it does appear that Jean-Jacques allows the parents to write to their son, even though Emile is unable to read their letters (Emile 117). 157 One here is reminded of the fact that Rousseau consigned all five of his children to foundling homes. However, I am reluctant to liken the behavior of Emile’s parents to Rousseau’s abandonment of his children. While it is strange that Emile’s parents readily relinquish their son to the tutor, unlike Rousseau, they do not entirely discard their child. They trust that Jean-Jacques will provide Emile with an upbringing far superior to what they could give to their own son. In a certain strange sense, then, by giving up Emile, they appear to demonstrate a serious concern for his genuine well-being. Rousseau, by contrast, abandoned his children to die in foundling homes, with no apparent concern over their survival, much less their education and well-being.

198 family cannot be said to exist in the precise sense until, having a fixed habitation, its members acquire ‘a union as intimate and permanent as among us’” (131).158 Rousseau never says the family exists by nature, as indeed we have already established that no lasting human relationships exist by nature; our species was originally wholly independent and asocial. The unnaturalness of the family is, according to Rousseau, evidenced by at least two explicit assertions he makes about the state of nature: first, men and women in the state of nature had no sexual or romantic attachments to each other, as man was “limited to the Physical aspect of love alone” (SD I [155]); second, neither parent – mother and father alike – originally had any emotional connection to their children (ibid 145). With regard to the first point, Rousseau asserts that humans were once so radically independent that not even the act of sex evoked any emotional attachment between people the way it does for modern civilized individuals. Men and women in the original state of nature were sexually indiscriminate and completely satisfied with very brief encounters that lasted only long enough to alleviate physical sensations of carnal arousal (ibid 155). In other words, humans had no real connection beyond the occasional fleeting animal act of copulation. Once the sexual act was done, so too was any association between a man and the woman who served as his temporary mate. To the inhabitants of the state of nature, other humans were not individuals with whom one can identify emotionally or psychologically and form a lasting connection; rather, other people were simply seen as a piece of equipment by which one may satisfy his carnal urges, then proceed with the rest of the day emotionally unaffected by that encounter.

With regard to the second piece of evidence from the Second Discourse, Rousseau maintains that neither fathers nor mothers had a natural enduring attachment to their own

158 Cf. Okin (1979) who incorrectly contends that the nuclear family is a natural institution for Rousseau.

199 children, and vice versa. Because fathers allegedly have no true emotional attachments to their children, one of Rousseau’s key teachings in the Emile is that a woman must learn how to create and maintain such an attachment. While I doubt that men are as unattached to their own children as Rousseau argues, for the sake of time, here we will focus on what I believe to be his far more controversial claim that women in the original state of nature had no inherent emotional connection to their children. He asserts that mothers in the primitive state of nature cared for their offspring only so long as their young were too physically weak to care for themselves (ibid

145). Once their children had grown strong enough to fend for themselves, the mother and the child would part ways without any hesitation and without any intention of crossing paths again.

Primitive mothers did not insist on maintaining any sort of relationship with their progeny, and their young were likewise perfectly fine leading wholly independent lives without any communication with their mothers. No aspect of the traditional family, Rousseau argues, exists by nature.

One could argue that Rousseau comes closest to asserting the naturalness of the family at the beginning of A Discourse on Political Economy. Nevertheless, I believe he stops short of making such an admission. There, Rousseau says, “Le père étant physiquement plus fort que ses enfants, aussi longtemps que son secours leur est nécessaire, le pouvoir paternel passe avec raison pour être établi par la nature” (Political Economy OC I [585]). To say, as Rousseau does, that paternal power or authority can be established by an argument that is “reasonably” made on the basis of nature (i.e., the father is naturally physically stronger, and his young children are weaker and need protection, and this can justifiably establish a father’s authority over his children so long as they require it) is different from saying that paternal authority itself exists by nature. And this statement is different, further still, from saying that the family exists by nature.

200 In other words, as I understand Rousseau’s claim in Political Economy, paternal authority is merely a contrivance that can be made compatible with nature, and is thus allowable by nature, but it is not natural in any primary sense. Rousseau clearly warns that a father’s authority over his children “can have its excess, its defects, its abuses,” meaning that it can be carried out in a manner inconsistent with or harmful to the natural order (Emile 84). Paternal authority – and, by extension, the family – is not an institution established by nature, but rather is one with which great care must be taken to shape it so as to make it consistent with nature’s laws. Indeed, this view is consistent with the fundamental character of Emile’s education: the shaping of social conventions in such a way as to make them not only compatible with nature, but also to make them enhance it. There is no doubt that the nuclear family holds a special place in Rousseau’s works, particularly in the Emile; yet, for Rousseau, this unit is not natural in any strict sense.

Emile will be raised outside of a traditional family. He will be raised as an orphan (ibid

52).159 Jean-Jacques will be the true emissary of Emile’s education, not his parents. But why? If the purpose of Emile’s education is to train him for family life – to teach him how to be a good husband and father to the family that he will one day establish (ibid 473) – and if the family- centered life is modern man’s best hope for revitalization (ibid 46-49), then why is it appropriate and necessary that Jean-Jacques raise his pupil outside of a family? As Rousseau himself states,

“In order to love the peaceful and domestic life, we must know it. We must have sensed its sweetness from childhood. It is only in the paternal home that one gets the taste for one’s own home” (ibid 388). It would seem, then, that exposure to family life from a young age is critical to raising the kind of domestic man that Emile will be. Yet, this domesticity is precisely what Jean-

159 This is reminiscent of Book VII of Plato’s Republic in which the philosophers who assume control over the city expel every person older than ten, thereby effectively making them orphans (541a, Strauss 1962 [106]).

201 Jacques withholds from his pupil during the first two decades of his education. Instead, the tutor will be the sole mediator between Emile and civil society.

There are a number of reasons why Jean-Jacques must supersede his pupil’s parents and raise him outside of a traditional family. For one, the well-intentioned but misguided affection of mothers and fathers tends to spoil their children (e.g., ibid 59, 94, 111, 196); parents know neither “the method of nature” nor “the art of observing children” (ibid 89, 199). Consequently, the suggestion is, as we mentioned in our discussion above about babies’ cries, that children are not generally born inherently bad, but rather are made so by inept parents.160 Further, and more critically, the family represents an obstacle to one’s complete integration into civil society because the education they provide is based on “specious maxims” and preconceived opinions, which make children “slaves to the prejudices they feed them” (ibid 187). Yet, for Rousseau, the education of the natural man in civil society requires that the pupil must not be exposed to such prejudices. The clear message of the Emile is that if one is introduced to them, all is lost. The education Jean-Jacques provides will bypass the problem of social prejudices, in part, by removing the family, thereby supposedly establishing his immunity against opinion. Throughout the various stages of Emile’s education, the tutor circumvents the “false prudence” of the family

160 This reminds us of a time early in Rousseau’s life when he was a tutor to actual children. From April 1740 through May 1741 Rousseau, aged twenty-eight, was employed in Lyon as a tutor for Jean Bonnot de Mably’s two sons, Monsieur de Sainte-Marie, aged six, and Monsieur de Condillac, aged five. Our knowledge of Rousseau’s short stint as the tutor for M. de Maby’s children comes from three sources: a brief account he provides in The Confessions (VI [223-228]), as well as two works he crafted a few months into his job that are directly addressed to M. and Mme de Mably, the “Memorandum Presented to Monsieur de Mably on the Education of Monsieur His Son” and a shorter “Plan for the Education of Monsieur de Sainte-Marie.” An English translation of both can be found in Kelly’s Collected Works, Volume XII. Kelly suggests that, based on internal evidence, the Memorandum was likely written toward the end of 1740. These writings offer a fascinating glimpse of a pre-philosophic Rousseau working as an actual young preceptor. For our present purposes, shortly after beginning his work as tutor to MM. de Sainte- Marie and de Condillac, Rousseau realized that he was terribly ill-suited to the job – not for lack of “zeal,” as he puts it, but rather because he believed that M. de Mably unwittingly undermined many of his efforts, and consequently Rousseau felt this made him far too powerless over his pupils (Mably 91, Conf VI [223]).

202 and attaches the boy to society by shaping Emile’s mind entirely with respect to the satisfaction of his carefully controlled, tamed natural bodily pleasures.

Yet, each of these reasons for removing Emile from his family merely points to a final decisive one, which Jean-Jacques reveals at the end of the Emile. The tutor states:

My job is to find out the choice that nature has made. I say my job and not that of Emile's father, for in confiding his son to me he yields his place to me, and he substitutes my right for his. I am Emile's true father; I made him a man. I would have refused to raise him if I had not been the master of marrying him to the woman of his choice – that is, of my choice (407, emphasis added).

The single factor which, if unresolved during negotiations, would have caused Jean-Jacques to withdraw from the deal he ultimately makes with Emile’s parents is his ability to have total control in the boy’s selection of a wife. Not only must the tutor direct his pupil to choose the right woman to wed, but he must also be at the helm of the boy’s expressions of his natural passions toward the object of his affection. That is, until Emile is fully formed and able to manage his life without the tutor’s help, his sexual passion will require third-party mediation.

Jean-Jacques initially acts as a literal mediator between Sophie and Emile, for he tells Sophie that “without being heard by” her beloved Emile, she “can converse with his [tutor]” (ibid 424).

The two young sweethearts communicate and show affection toward each other only indirectly through Jean-Jacques. Emile and Sophie grasp his hand in lieu of reaching out for that of their beloved, and they even verbally communicate with each other via the tutor. Emile at one point begs Jean-Jacques, “Friend, speak for me” (ibid). The Emile-Sophie-tutor triad forms a kind of love triangle in an episode that reads like a bizarre rewriting of Cyrano de Bergerac.161 This passage serves to demonstrate the controlled and tamed nature of Sophie and Emile’s romance.

161 Personally, I find this particular passage creepy and borderline pedophiliac.

203 They are able to be completely frank and physically sensual with each other, but with a significant caveat: their affections must be moderated by Jean-Jacques through whom their passions are filtered. As a result, the two lovers are able to freely express their love for each other without the danger of being swept away by their emotions. In the previous chapter, we noted that in Fénelon’s Télémaque, Mentor had kept his pupil from being overcome by his sexual passions by simply separating the young man from women, thereby hindering his affections altogether. Here we see that, by contrast, Jean-Jacques will attempt to prevent his own pupil from being overwhelmed by runaway sexual passions by keeping Emile and Sophie together and allowing them to express themselves openly, but their passions will filter through the tutor as a way to purify their sentiments. Jean-Jacques intervenes throughout the initial, most heated phase of their courtship and tempers their behavior until their passions have cooled a bit and they are ready to enjoy each other’s company without his supervision. In this way, Emile and Sophie are allowed to grow to be lovers while avoiding falling prey to the dangerously intoxicating, immoderate sexual passions. The Emile strikes an overall hopeful note as the primary goal of

Emile’s education – the end of his romantic bond with Sophie – is happiness. To fully understand the education that Jean-Jacques provides, we must therefore determine the precise nature of the happiness the young pupil will experience. It is to this topic that we now turn.

The First Desire Which Nature Has Impressed Upon Man: The Question of Happiness

The question of happiness in the Emile will occupy our attention for the remainder of our time here. Toward the end of Emile’s journey on the road of nature, Jean-Jacques turns to his pupil and tells him, “You must be happy, dear Emile. That is the goal of every being which senses. That is the first desire which nature has impressed on us, and the only one which never leaves us. But where is happiness? Who knows it? All seek it, and none finds it” (Emile 442; cf.

204 77-82, 177, Favre 107). Happiness, the first desire of man and “[the] object of human life,” is the final goal of Emile’s education (Lettres Morales OC IV [1087]).162 Indeed, “the road of nature” that Emile walks is described as the path to “the road of happiness” (Emile 443). In other words, the purpose of the whole endeavor – the very thing that is on the line in this whole enterprise – is

Emile’s happiness.163 A study of the issue of happiness in the Emile is critical to our present discussion because the success or failure of this venture lies entirely in the hands of Jean-

Jacques. The tutor is the sole author of Emile’s happiness. Ultimately, Jean-Jacques is the critical conduit for his pupil’s happiness, the channel through which Rousseau’s philosophy flows throughout the entire process. By assuming total control over Emile’s life, the tutor also necessarily assumes complete responsibility for the outcome of his efforts to make him happy.

The issue of happiness represents a common theme that is woven throughout Rousseau’s writings – even from the First Discourse, the work that launched his career as a philosopher, which he opens by stating that his primary concern is to discover the “truths that affect the happiness of mankind” stemming from his own “intense desire to see men happier” (FD Preface

OC III [3], Last Reply OC III [96]). Much later on in his final work, the Reveries, Rousseau asserts that he had devoted his life to “projects of earthly happiness” for the sake of the “public”

(Reveries V OC I [1947]). In many ways, the rest of his writings that occupy the space bookended by these two works offer a variety of ways in which human beings can enjoy life. In the Emile, Rousseau equates a kind of wisdom with happiness (80). Earlier in the Second

Discourse, he states, similarly that man needs “wisdom” to “use” happiness “well” (I [119]). He declares, “all you [sc. the Magistrates and other readers] need in order to become perfectly happy

162 In this sense, then, Emile’s entire education is framed in terms of the discovery of the means by which to satisfy a desire. 163 To underline the pervasiveness of the issue of happiness in the Emile, happiness is mentioned one hundred fifty- one times throughout the work.

205 is to know how to be content with being so” (ibid I [118], emphasis added; cf. Emile 177). Thus, even prior to writing the Emile Rousseau had indicated to his reader that happiness requires a certain type of knowledge or education. As education is not natural, the suggestion is that human happiness necessitates a certain application of social convention – even in the Second Discourse, the very book where Rousseau provides his most rigorous denouncement of convention.

The Emile specifically explores the possibilities and limitations of the bourgeois solution to the problem of happiness, and Jean-Jacques seeks to make his pupil happy throughout all the phases of his life. The beginning of Book II of the Emile (esp. 77-82, 85), contains the work’s first concentrated treatment of happiness. Here Rousseau asserts that knowledge regarding what constitutes perfect happiness and perfect unhappiness is inaccessible to man, as pleasure is always mixed with some kind of pain (ibid 80; cf. 131, Favre 26).164 Equally out of reach, then, is also the potential to experience such absolute happiness. He concludes that happiness is a

“negative condition” that involves stopping, removing, or avoiding a negative outcome or aversive stimulus: the happiest man is the one “who suffers the least pain” and, conversely, the unhappiest is he who “feels the least pleasure” (ibid 80).165 It appears the most we can hope for is to be “not unhappy,” to not suffer, or to be the least removed from happiness (ibid 80, 177).

164 Yet, in the very next paragraph, Rousseau provides a definition of absolute happiness, the very thing he initially states is unknowable: a person endowed with desires that perfectly equal his capacity to fulfill them would be “an absolutely happy being” (Emile 80). He goes on to state that this equilibrium has only existed in the state of nature. Curiously, though, he merely says that the man in this original state was “not unhappy” because he did not suffer (ibid 80, 177). But was this primitive man happy, absolutely happy, as he had initially suggested? Rousseau is also equivocal in the Second Discourse on the issue of primitive man’s happiness. There he implies that life in this original state was not entirely idyllic after all. The ultimate implication appears to be that, for Rousseau, perfect happiness is indeed not of this earth – not even for our primitive forebears. 165It is interesting to consider this formulation of happiness in relation to Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979, 1992) aversion theory, which posits that losses are twice as painful, psychologically, as gains are joyful. Rousseau’s conception of happiness, in light of this theory, would imply that one’s happiness would require that the pleasures in life greatly exceed the pains, by at least double, because there is not a 1:1 balance between the two.

206 Such is Rousseau's description of the man of the original state of nature whose happiness

– or, more accurately, his lack of unhappiness – was a function of the symmetry that existed between his desires and his ability to satisfy them. As a result, he was self-sufficient (ibid 85).

This passage marks Rousseau’s first official definition of the condition of unhappiness in the

Emile: “the disproportion between our desires and our faculties” (ibid 80). One might be tempted to conclude, then, that such an unpleasant condition could be avoided by simply decreasing one’s desires and/or expanding one’s faculties. Yet, Rousseau quickly disabuses the reader of this assumption. In the first place, happiness cannot simply consist in “extending our faculties, for if, proportionate to them, our desires were more extended, we would as a result only become unhappier” (ibid). In other words, if man were able to increase his power to satisfy his desires by developing new faculties or by enhancing the ones he currently possesses, this would also cause his wants to proliferate at an equal rate. This would mean that man would possess the capacity to satisfy his previous set of desires but not his new ones – leaving him worse off than before because, even though the disproportion between his new set of wants and his newfound power would remain the same as they had been since they both grew proportionately, the satisfaction of his new desires would require the development of even more power which would be difficult to attain. At a certain point, man’s capacity has a limit beyond which it cannot grow any further.

Desire, however, is infinite (ibid 81). Thus, man’s ability to satisfy his desires is always outpaced by his ability to desire; one is able to wish for far more than one is able to obtain. In Rousseau’s presentation there appears to be a reciprocal relationship between the development of even greater faculties and the expansion of desire. When one increases, this in turn causes the other to grow, which then leads to the expansion of the other. The picture Rousseau paints is one in which, as man’s faculties develop further and further, his desires eventually snowball out of

207 control, well beyond any accessible human means to satisfy them. Because we cannot endlessly expand our faculties, it is necessary to curb desire, or else risk generating “all the pains which make us truly unhappy” (ibid 81).

Yet, at the same time, Rousseau is also clear that happiness does not consist in merely

“diminishing our desires, for if they were beneath our power, a part of our faculties would remain idle, and we would not enjoy our whole being” (ibid). For Rousseau, the fundamental experience of life – what he calls the sentiment of existence – is unequivocally positive (SD I

[143], II [161], Emile 42, Reveries V).166 This understanding of the pleasurable experience of living is a central notion in his thought. The concept describes the enjoyment felt by all sentient creatures – man and beast alike – in the positive experience of one’s own existence in circumstances that are favorable to one’s ability to be alive. It is the feeling that one’s corporeal existence is good. Thus, the deep desire we all have to stay alive is motivated primarily by our love of life. Rousseau’s conception of the positive experience of life is the opposite of Hobbes’ distinctly negative view that life is naturally wretched. For Hobbes, man spends his lifetime running on a kind of hedonic treadmill – always moving, always wanting, never going anywhere, never satisfied. As he puts it, “man is famished even by future hunger” (Hobbes 1972 [40]). As animals, our bodily needs are never permanently met. As humans, our desires (which often extend beyond the basic bodily needs) are infinite. Even as we fulfill our present needs and wishes now, we do so always with an eye to the next object of our desire. The only thing that attaches anyone to this miserable life is the overpowering fear of (violent) death. It is the understanding that, as bad as life is, the alternative to it is far worse. Life for Hobbes, then, is not

166 Cf. Buffon 1749 [46]. Buffon, who Rousseau often cited throughout his works, was a great source for the Rousseauian understanding of nature and the notion of the sweet sentiment of existence. For an excellent discussion of the sentiment of existence, see Grace 2001b.

208 a great good, but rather merely the lesser of two evils, where a premature, violent death is the greatest of all evils. With Hobbes, man is driven much less by an attachment to life than to a deep aversion to death. While nobody can evade death outright, what the Hobbesian man seeks to avoid is his untimely end.

Rousseau, by contrast, re-evaluates our understanding of the fundamental experience of life and asserts that man is motivated primarily by a general love of life. Existence itself, or mere life, is the greatest source of bliss. Not only does this view directly contradict that proposed by

Hobbes, but it also differs greatly from the perception of the classical thinkers, for Rousseau rates mere life more highly than any ancient conception of the good life. Rousseau’s perspective is an emphatically non-teleological one, for any conceivable notion of the good life would actually detract from the sentiment of our existence; the natural necessity to reach a telos would cause a sense of discontent at one’s lack of achievement, at one’s eternal imperfection. For this reason, every imaginable version of the good life that points to an aspirational telos alienates man from experiencing the simple pleasure of mere life here and now.

Moreover, as Rousseau also states, the diminishment of our desires below a certain point would likewise detract from the simple pleasure of living. In the Emile, the problem is not necessarily that we are desiring beings or that we possess higher faculties, but rather that our desires currently exceed our faculties, and that these faculties have developed in a fragmentary, contradictory manner that has shattered our original psychic unity. Rousseau therefore seeks to discover a way in which the human faculties can develop harmoniously (if this is even feasible) so that they work to our greatest benefit rather than to our detriment, as they currently do – thereby helping man achieve his greatest potential and providing him the possibility of intensifying the sentiment of his existence. If successful, this endeavor would result in an

209 attachment to one’s own life that is more potent, more profound than anything that primitive man

– that simple brute who lived in his paradise of stupidity – ever felt and was ever capable of feeling. The rearrangement of the maturation of civilized man’s higher faculties would induce not only the feeling of one’s completeness but also the sensation that an individual is fully exercising all of oneself, including all of the desires that are within one’s capacity to satisfy given the faculties one already possesses. Jean-Jacques’ aim in the Emile to induce in his pupil the most piercing, most exquisite fulfillment that comes with the feeling that one is drinking every last drop from the cup of life. This feeling would signal the most complete appropriation and internalization of a being’s own unique existence. Thus, to diminish desire “beneath our power” and leave a portion of our faculties “idle” would be to estrange man from the experience of the most complete pleasure of his whole being. Accordingly, then, Jean-Jacques will neither seek to increase Emile’s faculties nor will he strictly curtail his pupil’s desires. The boy’s education will instead teach him to eliminate only the excess of his desires so that he will continue to experience the sensation of longing, but he will only want what is within his current power to obtain (cf. Favre 27). Emile will indulge in dreams about the things he greatly desires, but he will neither dream big nor dream small. His mantra will be: “dream medium.” Emile will never experience the incredible emotional highs that life has to offer, but he will also never need to endure the excruciating lows (Emile 446). As a consequence, his temperament will remain steady throughout every phase of his life.

A significant part of Jean-Jacques’ job in guiding his pupil to enjoy his existence will be to prevent Emile’s dream – however modest it may be – from evolving into a nightmare. The initial treatment of happiness in the Emile also includes joint a discussion of foresight and imagination. Indeed, foresight is an offshoot of the imagination: it is the act of conjuring up in

210 one’s imagination a time that has not yet elapsed. It is a vision of the future, one that necessarily exists solely in the mind. As a result, it leads an individual to extend his being into an imaginary time and place. We know from the Second Discourse that savage man had “no idea of the future, however near it may be” (SD I [143]). He was severely short-sighted. He did not have the faculties that are necessary to be able to think of the long-term consequences of his behavior, and he had no concept of the future at all. In fact, Rousseau says, “foresight was nothing to” primitive humans and “far from being concerned with a distant future, they did not even give thought to the next day” (SD II [163]; cf. II [169, 175]). As a result of this incapacity to think beyond the present moment, primitive man always existed where he was and never where he was not. By this, Rousseau means that he concerned himself only with his immediate situation and did not needlessly torment himself with the thought of any perils, imagined or real, that he may or may not encounter in a future that may or may not ever arrive. In the presence of actual danger, primitive man would deal with such perils accordingly; in the absence of any hazard, he remained content. He was neither plagued by excessive desires he did not have the capacity to satisfy, nor was he terrorized by the specter of a future he did not have the ability to truly see.

Modern civilized man – with his more highly developed faculties – now has foresight and the capacity to think beyond his present moment. But the ability to ideate a future time has not brought man comfort by allowing him to care or provision for the future but has instead made him restless and uneasy. Foresight steals from man’s sentiment of his present existence because it allows him to prolong his “views up to the point of death,” making “it the worst of evils for us” (Emile 82). This represents another remarkable twist on the Hobbesian account of the experience of life. Whereas Hobbes presents man’s fear of death as a natural reaction toward nature’s greatest evil, Rousseau by contrast seems to treat the fear of death as not only unnatural,

211 but also something that is wholly imaginary. For him, it is not death itself that man’s sees as the worst evil, but rather the imaginary fear of dying. If we could stifle the imagination, then perhaps we can diminish the terror of death. Whereas savage man’s life was defined by the enjoyment of his “present existence” with no conception of his future (e.g., SD I [143]), modern civilized man’s life is now defined by the real pain of his imagining his future death; it is the replacement of the real, blissful sentiment of existence by the imagined, agonizing sentiment of non- existence. And it comes at the great expense of man’s contentment in life here and now.

Consequently, Rousseau asserts that modern man does not “feel” death only once at the actual final moment of his life, but “every day” of his life in his “troubled imagination” (Emile 82). If contentment in life consists in being the least removed from happiness, as Rousseau claims, then, in this light, the savage man’s condition of being merely “not unhappy” now seems far more preferable to civilized man’s apparent detachment from happiness and his inability to enjoy the simple act of living (cf. Last Reply OC III [78]).

Remarkably, in the initial presentation of happiness in the Emile, Rousseau provides a definition of the negative condition of unhappiness but not of its positive counterpart. One must pay close attention to his wording, as he never states that the opposite of what constitutes man’s discontent establishes happiness. Whereas unhappiness is marked by the disproportion between our desires and faculties, which is exacerbated by the expansion of our imagination, happiness is not simply established by placing one’s power and will in perfect equilibrium and by merely stifling one’s imagination. Such parity only puts a man on “the road of true happiness” (Emile

80). Thus, while balancing desire and power is a necessary component of the felicific equation, it alone is not sufficient to constitute the fullest possible expression of human happiness.

212 To round out the complete picture of happiness, we will need to turn from the beginning of the Emile to a passage that occurs near the end of the book: the time Emile and Jean-Jacques spend wandering after they leave Paris when they realize that a woman such as Sophie will never be found there (ibid 410-412). It is here that we learn the crucial second half of the young man’s capacity to truly enjoy life. Emile, in addition to limiting his excess desires so that he can take pleasure in attaining what little he does want, will also be taught by Jean-Jacques to enjoy the longer intervening periods that occur between the brief moments of gratification that punctuate life. In other words, Jean-Jacques arranges it so that Emile will not only avoid unhappiness in each and every specific moment, but he will also learn to be content through every broad phase of his life. The satisfaction of a desire can bring only a fleeting moment of satisfaction. Such instances tend to be few and far between in a person’s life; if one were to add up all the moments over the course of one’s life in which one experiences joy from the attainment of a desire, one would very likely discover that these occasions comprise only a tiny fraction of one’s life. The act of desiring is a waiting game. The bulk of a person’s experience of living is occupied by the prolonged intervals of waiting and wanting. Thus, even if we can establish a situation in which

Emile’s excess desires are limited to such an extent that he can satisfy all his wants, he would nevertheless still spend the greatest share of his life feeling the pain of waiting and desiring.

Thus, it turns out that simply establishing an equilibrium between our desires and faculties cannot possibly suffice to constitute happiness because this does nothing to combat the great displeasure we feel during the long periods of time when we are desiring and, therefore, waiting to satisfy our wishes.

The human experience of longing is, by and large, an unpleasant one (ibid 81). To desire and to wait are both difficult and painful. If the majority of life is spent waiting and wanting,

213 then Rousseau’s suggestion is that humans waste the majority of their lives being unhappy. For a being “whose life is so short and whose time is so precious” this constitutes a tremendous misuse of the brief time we are allotted on this earth (d’Alembert 16). Time for Rousseau is a precious commodity that we must learn to use well (e.g., FD II [18]). Consequently, in the Emile

Rousseau transforms longing so that it is no longer a painful experience but is instead one that man can find enjoyable. Jean-Jacques thus raises Emile not to be primarily a pleasure-seeking or a waiting being but one who is able to experience joy at every turn: the young boy will “enjoy not only the pleasure of desiring but that of going to the object he desires” (Emile 411). The interim periods separating the moments of satisfaction in his life will be made worthwhile and, therefore, will not be wasted in misery. These periods will be filled with enjoyment, not with boredom, regret, or restlessness. Emile’s contentment is to be found, then, not simply in reaching his destination, but the “trip itself is a pleasure” (ibid).167 And thus, Jean-Jacques makes it possible for Emile enjoy the act of longing – even for an imaginary object, as Sophie is for Emile at this point of the story, and even in the absence of any actual pleasure. How appropriate, then, that the passage under consideration here occurs immediately before Emile meets Sophie (their wandering occurs on pages 410-412, and the couple meet on page 414), who he so dearly longs to meet and is on a quest to find. The (re-)reader of the Emile can see the moment of the lovers’ first meeting approaching and certainly Jean-Jacques knows that Sophie is just on “the other side of the hill” (ibid 413). Yet, the tutor prolongs this time and makes certain that it is nevertheless filled with Emile’s enjoyment of some of life’s simplest pleasures. The boy does not experience

167 This approach to life is directly contrary to a hedonistic one. The hedonist’s strategy to overcoming the displeasure one feels during the intervals between moments of satisfaction is to seek to close the bothersome gap that exists between one moment of pleasure and the next. If the experience of longing is unpleasant, then the hedonistic method is not to try to make the act of wanting pleasant, but rather to simply diminish the duration of this period. Such a person would, to the extent that it is possible, try to altogether eliminate those interim periods so that life becomes a series of gratifications after gratifications occurring in rapid succession, that ceases only in death.

214 the unpleasant pangs of a strong, persistent desire or craving for something unattainable or distant. Whatever is already within his reach will bring him joy.168

Given the juxtaposition in the Emile between Rousseau’s male and female pedagogies, I here want to take a brief moment to compare this aspect of Emile’s education toward happiness with that of Sophie’s. Unlike Emile, her lesson regarding happiness comes from her father, not from a specially designated tutor. He teaches his daughter that his goal for her, like Jean-

Jacques’ for Emile, is to make her happy (ibid 399). However, Sophie learns a considerably different meaning of the term happiness than the one that Jean-Jacques teaches to her future husband. The Emile strongly implies that the sexes experience happiness very differently. What constitutes happiness for one does not for the other. Sophie’s father defines the “happiness of a decent girl” as “causing the happiness of a decent man” (ibid). In short, her experience of contentment in life will be contingent on making her husband happy. If, as Rousseau states, a necessary (although not sufficient) aspect of happiness is the equal proportion of one’s desires and one’s capacity to satisfy them, then it would seem that Sophie’s desires must necessarily be limited to those things which contribute toward Emile’s contentment. Since her own happiness

168 This passage in the Emile is powerfully and beautifully stated, and it is a good reminder to enjoy life. After all, what modern reader who has ever flown on an airplane cannot relate to the image of Emile and Jean-Jacques travelling in their carriage “seated sadly, like prisoners, in a small, closed-up cage” (Emile 411)? Indeed, we would all benefit from taking a different view of travelling – to see it as a time that we have to ourselves to do with as we please (within the limits of what is legally permissible, of course), rather than as a time to kill. Indeed, this perspective is how much of this dissertation got written. I am perhaps the only person in Boston who appreciates the time I have to myself on the train during my morning and evening commutes. Yet, there are certainly some critical limitations to Rousseau’s recommendation to essentially “get lost” and to enjoy doing so. First, one cannot simply wander all the time, as Emile does. Social people, such as Emile, do have obligations they must fulfill that are beyond their control, and if they simply ambled about, then they would get very little done. Second, some kinds of waiting are simply unpleasant, and there is no way around this. Rousseau will never convince me to enjoy, for instance, waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Third, Emile’s experience of longing as something pleasant seems unbelievable. Longing is inherently painful, and I simply cannot see a way of making it pleasant. The Greek conception of Eros seems to be a much more relatable experience than whatever mild alternative Emile feels. He seems like such a one-dimensional creature. Insofar as his education is intended to help him achieve his greatest human potential, it seems this goal must come at the cost of some of man’s most complicated, most painful but most beautiful experiences. In this regard, then, the height of human achievement for the ordinary man in the Rousseauian presentation requires the suppression of certain distinctly human experiences, such as erotic longing.

215 depends on making another person happy, the implication is that her life prior to meeting Emile will not present her with the opportunity to experience contentment, except perhaps only to the extent that she finds gratification in her preparations for married life. Until that time comes, the text suggests that Sophie must simply wait to meet Emile before she can experience her first taste of happiness – making the prospect of a happy life for a woman terribly grim. Perhaps this accounts for Rousseau’s heavy emphasis on the joys of family life for a woman. Since Rousseau presents marriage and motherhood as the only avenues to happiness for women, then he must put all his eggs in one basket, so to speak, in order to sell her on this idea. While married life can certainly be a source of great happiness to men and women alike, the fact that Rousseau presents it as the only happy life for a woman should give us pause. Why must the female experience of happiness be so dramatically limited compared to that of the male?

Unlike her husband, Sophie does not seem to learn to enjoy the act of waiting and longing. Indeed, the only occasion in which Sophie is depicted waiting for her husband – during the curious case of the “false” Sophie – the girl is absolutely miserable. While Emile is wandering about with his tutor, enjoying all the beauty that life has to offer, Sophie sits at home biding her time until her beloved finally arrives. She certainly does not enjoy life at every turn as her future husband does. Thus, Sophie does not appear to be an enjoying individual, as Emile is, but a decidedly wanting and waiting one. While this means that Sophie’s happiness will be severely limited relative to Emile’s, one could argue that her experience is perhaps more realistic than her husband’s, as she will need to suffer through a prolonged unpleasant period of longing as all actual humans do. Interestingly, Sophie’s father talks of absolute happiness much the same way that Jean-Jacques does: he claims, “Perfect happiness is not of this earth, but the greatest unhappiness, and the one that can always be avoided, is being unhappy due to one’s own fault”

216 (ibid 400). It is critical to realize that these words are attributable to the father, not to Jean-

Jacques or Rousseau because the two men’s conceptions of pure happiness differ in subtle but significant ways.169 Whereas Rousseau had earlier told us that the meaning of absolute happiness and unhappiness is unavailable to human beings, Sophie’s father seems confident that he knows what these terms mean; where the philosopher expresses doubt, the ordinary father feels certainty. Indeed, Rousseau states on a couple of occasions that doubt is the beginning of philosophy (Reveries CW VIII [259], Emile 267).170 Ultimately, Sophie’s father’s formulation is more pessimistic than Jean-Jacques’, as he claims that the experience of pure happiness is not possible, but that of total unhappiness is – something Jean-Jacques denies. Both men’s perspectives are similar, however, to the extent that they orient themselves negatively in terms of seeking to be the most removed from unhappiness rather than positively in the sense of approaching happiness. From this perspective, both Rousseau and Sophie’s father hold views of happiness that are more reminiscent of the Hobbesian one than that of the ancients in the sense that life is not defined by seeking a teleological peak of happiness, but by escaping unhappiness.

Sophie’s life, then, will be more oriented toward her avoidance of misery than toward the pursuit of happiness.

Ultimately, Sophie is not the only character in the Emile devoted to making Emile happy.

Like Sophie, Jean-Jacques dedicates nearly his entire adult life to his pupil’s happiness (Emile

326). As the boy’s tutor, this is what is required of him, for as Jean-Jacques himself tells us, “the guide is a wise and enlightened man” who commits himself to his pupil’s happiness (ibid 246).

169 Rousseau complained that readers misattributed to him the opinions stated by his characters (Dialogues CW I [70], Beaumont CW IX [100]). 170 To be perfectly clear, the latter citation is actually spoken by the Savoyard Vicar, who is quite different from Rousseau. Yet, his statement about questioning one’s knowledge corresponds to similar assertions Rousseau makes in his own name.

217 The main characteristic of the tutor initially appears to be his selflessness. He is not someone to whom anything happens, who has any personal attachments, who rejoices or suffers, or who acts except on behalf of Emile. In the Second Discourse, Rousseau describes the inherent selfishness of man – the neutral selfishness of the natural man and the exploitative selfishness of modern man. Jean-Jacques’ relentless selflessness represents a dramatic departure from one of the defining human characteristics. One of the apparent requisites of the formation of the natural man of civil society, such as Emile will be, is the guidance of an educator with characteristics that are distinctly unhuman, or perhaps superhuman. Indeed, as we have already noted, we are told that to raise a man properly, the educator “must be either a father or more than a man oneself” (ibid 50). Yet, can we truly say that Jean-Jacques is selfless? Or does he have a self- serving motive? In what remains of our time here, I hope to demonstrate that the tutor is not as selfless as he initially appears. While he dedicates more than two decades of his life to ensuring his pupil’s happiness, he certainly does not forget his own well-being in the process.

In our examination of the tutor, we have thus far left a key question unanswered: what is

Jean-Jacques’ personal motivation for choosing to dedicate more than twenty years of his life to educating Emile? What does he stand to gain from this endeavor? Why does he care so deeply about the happiness of Emile? None of the usual markers that justify this level of deep human affection are present in the relationship between Jean-Jacques and Emile. The boy and his tutor are not consanguineous. Jean-Jacques does not appear to have a close relationship with Emile’s parents (even though he does state that he is friends with the boy’s father [Emile 59]). And he is not mercenary, a quality we are told “presupposes many others,” but what these are is never

218 specified (ibid 49; cf. Letter to the Countess of Boufflers, 7 October 1760 [CC 7:251]).171

Rousseau’s suggestion regarding the tutor’s lack of venality is that teaching, much like fighting in a war, is somehow a deed done as a public service in which one combats an enemy for the sake of preserving one’s city or country – thereby preserving human freedom.172 And just as something higher than money must compel a good soldier to choose to make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of his freedom in battle (cf. Last Reply OC III [82]), likewise something loftier must motivate a good tutor to willingly dedicate (or sacrifice, depending on one’s perspective) his life to teaching an ordinary child.

We should note that Rousseau’s statement does not necessarily preclude the likelihood that Jean-Jacques will get paid for his work as Emile’s tutor. It is still possible – indeed, probable

– that the tutor will be compensated, and perhaps he will be rewarded handsomely given that

Emile’s family is wealthy (Emile 52); and even if Jean-Jacques were not to be paid for his services, because Emile is wealthy it is at least possible that he can live off his pupil’s riches, similar to the manner in which the penniless Socrates benefited from his association with the wealthiest young men of Athens. The only stipulation is that Jean-Jacques cannot “follow [this calling] for the money” (ibid 49), just as, one would imagine, doctors today are discouraged from pursuing a medical career for the high salary generally associated with such jobs; they ought to be drawn to their profession for a variety of other nobler reasons, namely the sense of

171 For discussions of Rousseau’s well-known refusal to accept money, gifts, and patronage from the aristocracy, see Lilti 2005 (196–204, 342–55), Goodman 1991 (171–201). To be fair, Rousseau’s antagonism toward the French elite does need to be taken with a grain of salt, as he remained linked to prominent aristocrats throughout his entire life, even through the final months of his life. 172 Cf. Emile 456-457: Here, Emile is presented with the option of joining the military, which he rejects because he simply finds it unappealing. He instead chooses “Sophie and [his] field” (457). Emile forgoes the battlefield for the wheat field. Also, in the Emile, there appear to be two “enemies” – the first is public opinion, and the second, which develops as Emile nears puberty, is the boy himself. As Jean-Jacques tells his pupil, “In learning to desire, you have made yourself the slave of your desires” (Emile 443).

219 gratification that one gets from helping others and saving lives (cf. SC II [chapter 7]). If Jean-

Jacques’ motivation is something akin to this, then it would appear to suggest that he views his work not primarily as a public service, as mentioned above, but rather as a private good for which he would reap his rewards in the form of his own personal fulfillment.173 Any public benefit would be secondary to this individual reward.174

If he is not Emile’s educator for any of the reasons one might expect, then what compels

Jean-Jacques to devote twenty-five years of his life to raising an homme vulgaire? How else does he benefit from sacrificing decades of his life to acting solely on behalf of an esprit commun? To my knowledge, the matter of Jean-Jacques’ motivation is never explicitly discussed in the Emile

(or in any of Rousseau’s subsequent writings), so it is difficult to attain complete certainty on this matter. The mystery of Jean-Jacques’ motive and total dedication is never fully resolved.

173 Note that Rousseau here emphasizes the nobility of the individual who teaches, not the profession of teaching. The position attracts a certain kind of person who brings a kind of nobility to this career that it appears it would otherwise lack. 174 While I have not found any scholarly interpretation of Jean-Jacques’ motive for teaching Emile, there is much secondary literature on the tangentially related topic of Rousseau’s motive for writing the Emile. Mendham (2015) references statements from a few of Rousseau’s personal letters written while the Emile was being composed to argue that the book is his attempt to atone for the transgression of having consigned his five children to foundling homes. The key evidence for this argument, according to Mendham, comes from two letters. The first is a 1760 letter to Lenieps in which Rousseau’s indicates that his guilt about his children ostensibly motivated him to write the Emile: “There remains an old sin [pêché] to expiate in print; after that the public will never hear of me again” (CC 7 [351]).# The second is found in a 1761 letter to Mme de Luxembourg: “The ideas my fault [sc. having abandoned my children] have filled my mind with have greatly contributed to making me contemplate the Treatise on Education; and you will find, in Book I, a passage which may indicate this disposition to you” (CC 9 [15]). In short, the crucial implication of Mendham’s argument is that Jean-Jacques represents an outlet through which Rousseau can atone for having been a terrible father: having failed at his fatherly duties with his own actual children, he could redeem himself by becoming the best possible father (and mother) figure to a fictional child. This would mean that Jean-Jacques’, and the Emile as a whole, are agents of Rousseau’s guilty moral conscience. By contrast, Jimack (1960) and Spink (Introduction to OC) have both argued against this type of interpretation. Instead of suggesting that Rousseau was prompted to write the Emile because of the remorse he felt over his abandoned children, they focus on the later claims he made in Book XII of The Confessions that it was “while” writing the Emile that Rousseau “felt” or came to feel guilty. Because they find no evidence of Rousseau’s personal regret in the early drafts of the Emile, they contend that the work is not the product of guilt, but rather that the act of composing the work sparked his remorse. Jimack and Spink point to the transformation that the Emile underwent during its composition – beginning as an academic discourse and ending up as a quasi-novel – to suggest that over the course of writing the book, Rousseau began to identify more and more with the tutor, and as a result this caused him to reflect on the great disparity between the fictional world of his creation and the reality of his actual life.

220 Yet, the text does provide clues that may begin to clarify the issue for us. For instance, Jean-

Jacques states that “his pupil is an investment he makes for his old age” from which he will benefit someday (ibid 53). In other words, in nurturing Emile, Jean-Jacques can expect a future return of some kind for his time and efforts. So, while the tutor must make immediate sacrifices to provide for his pupil, ultimately, he does not appear to forget himself entirely. This provides our first suggestion that his motivations may not be entirely selfless after all (cf. ibid 423, 475).

While the “investment” Emile provides may be financial in nature, it need not be. If we read further on in the Emile, the suggestion is that the boy serves as a kind of “investment” that actually yields a non-monetary return. In Book IV of the Emile, near the final stages of the boy’s education, Jean-Jacques imagines himself giving a hypothetical sermon to his student about what he expects to get out of his efforts to raise Emile: his own happiness (ibid 323). He states that in all that he has done for Emile, he has truly done it for himself (ibid). He envisions himself telling his pupil, “You are my property, my child, my work. It is from your happiness that I expect my own. If you frustrate my hopes, you are robbing me of twenty years of my life” (ibid). In this passage, we learn that the ultimate intention of the educational plan presented in the Emile is not only to bring about Emile’s happiness, or even Sophie’s. Above all, it is also intended to cause

Jean-Jacques’ happiness. This, it seems, is his true motivation. Consequently, Jean-Jacques and

Emile are interdependent. While Emile needs Jean-Jacques to become the natural man of society, the tutor also seems to need his pupil, for the boy is the single source of his happiness. The tutor can become happy only by helping his pupil find happiness. Indeed, similar to Sophie, the tutor’s happiness appears to hinge on his ability to contribute to Emile’s happiness.

The tutor’s speech and the entire passage to which it belongs are odd, in part, because they immediately follow an adjacent passage in which Rousseau emphatically proclaims that if

221 one wishes both to sway people by determining their behavior and to communicate in a way they can more readily understand, one must not simply “say it,” but “show it” (322; cf. 180, 251).

Rousseau here emerges as a harbinger of the popular “Show, Don’t Tell” writing technique.175

The method has been used by countless authors, playwrights, and orators throughout the ages, not to mention that Rousseau was himself a florid writer, so his support for “showing” over merely “telling” is not particularly noteworthy on its own. But what is remarkable here is that whereas Rousseau has just stressed the importance of avoiding simple exposition and description, in his hypothetical speech to Emile he has resorted to doing just that. In speaking to

Emile, Jean-Jacques envisions taking his pupil outside to a wooded, mountainous area and there giving a series of short speeches on everything that he has done for the boy. It is at this point that he will reveal to Emile that all his work has been for his own personal happiness, and he prompts his student not to undermine his efforts and rob him of two decades of work. We are not given any reason to believe that Emile will never hear any part of this speech on the tutor’s happiness.

Yet, at the point in the narrative in which the speech is given, even though Jean-Jacques addresses himself to Emile, his words are directed only toward his reader. In communicating to the reader, Rousseau also does not “show” us this incident, but merely tells us about it. By this I mean that not only is the entire passage in the future tense – naturally meaning that he cannot show us something if it has not yet occurred – but he also provides a mere exposition of what he intends to do without ever actually demonstrating it. He diverges from his usual manner of demonstrating his educational techniques in the present tense and instead merely gives us “a pathetic description” that “although eloquent, does not say all that” (ibid 322-333). To borrow

175 For a modern popularization of this technique see, e.g., Lubbock 2007 (1921).

222 Rousseau’s peculiar locution in this passage, he tells us about Caesar’s death, but he never has the body brought in (ibid).

As for his speeches to Emile, we must wonder how effective these will be once the boy eventually hears them. After all, the boy has thus far been raised outside of society and, until he meets Sophie, he is emotionally independent from all other human beings, including even Jean-

Jacques. At this point in the narrative, he has lived only for himself and within himself. He is even his own sole competitor (ibid 184). Because of his emotional detachment, we must question whether Emile will be able to understand Jean-Jacques’ desire for personal happiness, especially since the boy’s own happiness does not appear to be dependent upon that of his tutor or anyone else. Unlike Sophie, Emile has never had to consider anybody else’s sentiments in relation to his own. As someone who is a numerical unity unto himself, Emile has hitherto thought only of himself. It does not seem likely, then, that he will be able to fully appreciate Jean-Jacques’ speech from an emotional perspective. What is more, whereas Rousseau had been speaking up to this point in terms of sight and seeing, he concludes the passage by suddenly switching to sound and hearing: “It is in this way that you get a young man to listen to you” (ibid 323). Emile may indeed listen to Jean-Jacques’ speeches, but will he fully grasp what he is being told from an intellectual perspective? We have strong reason to suspect that he will not because he quite simply cannot. But since Jean-Jacques never actually makes these speeches to his pupil, perhaps this inquiry is not as important as a consideration of the intended effect of this passage not on

Emile but on the only actual audience of this passage: the reader. After emphasizing the author’s need to show not tell, and in such a dramatic manner too, why would he not follow his own dictum, especially on the heels of making this pronouncement? Does this signify that he is contradicting himself?

223 At this point, one could reasonably object that the two passages are disconnected, a view that is to some extent encouraged by Rousseau himself who calls the first passage a “digression” that has carried him “far from his subject” (ibid). Thus, he stops suddenly, asserts, “I therefore return to my subject,” and resumes his prior discussion. Given this statement, one would expect that, in the statements that follow, he would change gears, so to speak, and move on to a new topic or adopt a different approach to the matter at hand, as he does elsewhere when he claims to deviate from the main discussion (e.g., ibid 121-124). Instead, Jean-Jacques carries on with the same subject using strikingly similar language in both passages: for instance, in both cases he speaks of clothing and displays of garments as signs, of appealing to the heart rather than the head, and of stones/rocks, woods/trees, and heaps of rocks/mountains as sacred, inviolable monuments to nature. Despite Rousseau’s proclamation that the two passages are disconnected, because they share the same topic, the same diction, and the same imagery, we are required to reject this suggestion. The strong implication is that they are indeed closely linked.

How, then, do we make sense of this apparent contradiction in this section of the Emile? I would like to suggest that the second passage – the one in which Jean-Jacques tells us of his intentions to make speeches to Emile – does actually quietly “show” us something after all. The

“Show, Don’t Tell” technique is fundamentally one of creative omission. This method of writing is contingent on an author’s artful application of an array of rhetorical devices that lead the reader to deduce the subtext from what is left unsaid, rather than from what is stated outright.

This form of writing requires the reader to develop a feeling for the significance of the text’s action without having its meaning laid bare. It is generally comparable to Ernest Hemingway’s so-called “Iceberg Theory” in Death in the Afternoon, about which he states, “If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if

224 the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (Hemingway 1996 [1932]). In writing this way, an author invites his reader to complete the image in his or her mind, thereby drawing on the reader to become something of a partial co-author of the work.

Rousseau, by creating a situation in which his reader is required to round out the text him- or herself in order to fully understand what is being said, makes us at least partially complicit in concluding a truth that was otherwise “not good to state” outright (Beaumont 51; cf.

Emile 259). As co-authors of sorts, Rousseau and his reader become co-conspirators in the surreptitious act of seeking to discover hard truths and eliminating the tyranny of social prejudices. That Rousseau writes in this manner should not come as a surprise to his attentive reader. By the time we reach the passages currently under consideration, he has already declared that he does not divulge everything outright, and he pointedly tells us, “If you have to be told everything, do not read me” (Emile 137; cf. 248-249, Favre 72). And in a later reformulation of this statement, Rousseau echoes the claim cited above regarding how “you get a young man to listen to you”: “One must always make oneself understood, but one must not always say everything. He who says everything says little, for finally he is no longer listened to” (Emile 248; cf. Last Reply OC III [94]). One is not truly “listened to” by offering sermonizing speeches that reveal everything, as he describes happening in this passage with Emile, but rather by saying and showing what is necessary to “make oneself understood” (Emile 248). When one undertakes to write a book, Rousseau asserts that the good writer must make a “subtle analogy” with a “hidden connection which escapes the vulgar Mind but which true genius always grasps” – and which the author “must take special lengths to hide” (“Composition of a Book” OC II [1243, 1245]). I

225 would like to suggest that the “hidden connection” this passage shows us is Jean-Jacques participating in the act of imagining, of transporting and extending his being into an uncertain future. It is a demonstration of him existing where he is not (cf. Emile 81-83).

Given that the topic of this passage is Jean-Jacques’ happiness, the strong suggestion is that his contentment is somehow related to the act of imagining, and even of looking into the future. His happiness, then, is linked to the very thing he previously stated was a great source of man’s discontent: “Unhappy foresight...makes a being unhappy now in the hope, well or ill founded, of making him happy one day” (ibid 80). Here it is worth quoting Jean-Jacques in full regarding “the true pleasure in seeing” Emile, raised well:

It is that imagination joins to the spectacle of spring that of the seasons which are going to follow it. To these tender buds that the eye perceives imagination adds the flowers, the fruits, the shadows, and sometimes the mysteries they can cover. It concentrates in a single moment the times which are going to follow one another, and sees objects less as they will be than as it desires them because it is free to choose them. In autumn, on the contrary, one can only see what is. If one wants to get to spring, winter stops us, and imagination, frozen, expires on the snow and frost. Such is the source of the charm one finds in contemplating a fair childhood in preference to the perfection of a ripe age. When is it that we taste a true pleasure in seeing a man? It is when the memory of his actions causes us to go back over his life and rejuvenates him, so to speak, in our eyes. If we are reduced to considering him as he is or to supposing what he will be in his old age, the idea of nature declining effaces all our pleasure. There is none in seeing a man advance with great steps toward his grave, and the image of death makes everything ugly. But when I represent to myself a child between ten and twelve, vigorous and well formed for his age, he does not cause the birth of a single idea in me which is not pleasant either for the present or for the future. I see him bubbling, lively, animated, without gnawing cares, without long and painful foresight, whole in his present being, and enjoying a fullness of life which seems to want to extend itself beyond him. I foresee him at another age exercising the senses, the mind, and the strength which is developing in him day by day, new signs of which he gives every moment. I contemplate the child, and he pleases me. I imagine him as a man, and he pleases me more. His ardent blood

226 seems to reheat mine. I believe I am living his life, and his vivacity rejuvenates me (ibid 158-159, emphasis added).

In the event of a coming revolution, such as Rousseau predicted, Emile is the rare individual who will be fit for the society that emerges afterward.176 The young boy represents the hope that the contradiction between natural man and civil man might be reconcilable. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Emile was drafted, the French nobility was in autumn of its existence. Emile depicts the budding of a new human type – the natural man of civil society – who emerges from the decay of the old way of life. As such, he illustrates the “spectacle of spring” and all the human potential that lies ahead, still to be realized. He embodies the hope of a new season. He represents the new youth of man. In him we see a human being as we would desire him to be rather than as men actually are at present. Because Jean-Jacques is, as we stated earlier in this chapter, defined by his deeds rather than his character, his work in shaping this new human type and bringing it to fruition helps to give meaning to his life. His reflection on the blossoming natural civilized individual he cultivates and the boy’s imagined future happiness “rejuvenates”

Jean-Jacques and instills a greater sense of hope than any rumination over the actual debased humans whose way of life is decaying.

One would be justified in asking here: why would not the hypothetical tutor draw his happiness from contemplating that of the hypothetical actual Emile in the present? It seems plausible that he does not do so because reality rarely, if ever, lives up to our imagination of an object. As Rousseau recognizes, the “real world has its limits; the imaginary world is infinite”

(ibid 81). Where the tutor seeks to restrict Emile’s imagination, he appears to expand his own.

The imagination of the future shows us “objects less as they will be than as it desires them” for

176 For more on the impending revolutions that Rousseau foresaw, see the final pages of Chapter Two of this dissertation.

227 the faculty of forming new ideas and images freely “extends to us the measure of the possible” which “consequently excites and nourishes the desire by hope of satisfying them” (ibid 158, 81).

In the passage currently under consideration, Jean-Jacques envisages a future iteration of his pupil precisely as the tutor desires him to be. He claims that there is far greater “charm” in

“contemplating a fair childhood” than the “perfection of a ripe age” (ibid 158). Simply stated, it is more pleasant to muse on the possibilities that lie ahead for Emile, on a future that has yet to become reality. One of the implications of this passage is that, even though Emile is intended to represent the ideal (to the extent that he is educated to be the natural civilized man), it is possible

– nay, likely – that Jean-Jacques’ creation could never eventually fulfill his expectations for the young pupil. One gets the sense from this brief portion of the text that the tutor may expect the fully-grown Emile to fall short of the ideal. As we see in the sequel to the Emile, which depicts the time during which the tutor could reflect on the happiness of the actual, present Emile, the young man’s marriage disintegrates, and the experiment of his education appears to have been a failure. Perhaps the all-seeing, all-knowing Jean-Jacques foresaw this eventuality. In the end, it may be that, while the short-term goals of Emile’s educational project are feasible (in principle, as was discussed in Chapter Two), we see here that the long-term sustainability and happiness of the mature natural civilized man may live only in the tutor’s imagination.

I thus conclude this chapter by leaving aside questions of the desirability of Emile’s education in favor of those of its plausibility. As I mentioned above, Emile’s education represents a kind of new beginning or rebirth of man; the boy resembles primitive man in the sense that he is good and whole, but he also represents something wholly new because his faculties have become fully perfected and his natural selfishness is finally reconciled with his capacity to socialize. After twenty-five years of care, Jean-Jacques is eventually replaced as

228 Emile’s guide by Sophie. The tutor states, “Then I say to my pupil, ‘Dear Emile, a man needs advice and guidance throughout his life. Up to now I have done my best to fulfill this duty toward you. Here my long task ends, and another's begins. Today I abdicate the authority you confided to me, and Sophie is your governor from now on’” (ibid 479). Upon marriage, a man shall leave his tutor, and shall cleave unto his wife. The Emile ends on a hopeful note and stops short of indicating the long-term viability of Jean-Jacques’ work. Yet, if we turn to the book’s unpublished fragmentary sequel, Émile et Sophie, it would appear that the tutor’s work degenerates once it has left his hands. There, in a story that unfolds as a series of letters from

Emile to his former tutor, we learn that Sophie is unfaithful (due to a possible drugged rape).177

Because the emotional pain is too great for Emile to bear, he abandons Sophie and their children, thereby effectively dissolving the family that took Jean-Jacques more than twenty years to create.

As Emile’s initial shock fades, the text suggests that “the chains [his heart] forged for itself” in his domestic life have perhaps not been worth the price he has paid in terms of the pain he has experienced (Émile et Sophie 46). It seems that Rousseau’s ultimate suggestion is that degeneration is an inescapable part of human life, that human nature is similar to the human body in the sense that each “is constantly being used up and needs constantly to be renewed”

(ibid 150). In fact, in the Emile Rousseau explicitly likens Emile’s education to a reinvigorating image of the rebirth of nature powerful enough to revive anyone who witnesses it (ibid 158). The implication of this imagery of renewal is that the desirable human life is present only in each new beginning and every moment beyond that starting point represents an incremental decline.

To again borrow Rousseau’s image of a statue as an image of human nature (SD Preface [124]),

177 Of course, if Sophie were drugged, then it would not truly be infidelity. However, the text is not completely clear whether she is raped or if she is willfully unfaithful. What matters most here is that, regardless of how events transpired, Emile interprets Sophie’s act as one of infidelity.

229 if proper preventative measures are not taken, nature is subject to gradual accretions which are precipitated by an array of recurring causes.178 Over time, the base figure remains, but it becomes encrusted and corroded. The ever-growing external coat – which corresponds to the higher human faculties were not actualized in the original state of nature – covers the surface of the statue – which is analogous to man’s original nature – but it does not supersede the core structure. Stated more simply, our civilized faculties become more prominent than our original nature, but they do not totally replace our fundamental core. Like a precious work of art, man must undergo periodic restoration to recover its original luster. The rehabilitated statue will never be pristine as it was on day one out of the sculptor’s workshop, but it will be as close as possible to its original condition – and it will certainly be better than it was in its disfigured, encrusted state. Then begins the slow process of gradual degradation all over again, until it is finally time to start repairs again. And so seems to be the cycle of human nature’s degeneration and restoration.

Had Rousseau completed Émile et Sophie, it is certainly possible that he might have chosen to revise the work in such a way that the couple’s marriage survived and the two enjoyed a happier ending. After all, Rousseau tended to revise his works extensively and, as we have already noted earlier in this dissertation, the Emile underwent a dramatic rewriting from its initial conception. So, our pessimism here may be undue.179 But even so, we must nevertheless question

178 Grace (1996) astutely observes that Rousseau appropriated Plato’s statue imagery for radically different ends: “The statue of the sea god Glaukos, which is used in Plato's Republic as an image of the soul, is used by Rousseau as a metaphor for mankind in the Second Discourse. But whereas Plato used the image to show that the human soul possesses an unchanging nature, Rousseau uses it to show that the only faculty natural to man is the ability to acquire a human identity” (30 fn77; cf. Republic 611d).

179 I would suggest that Emile’s and Sophie’s love story could never have had a picture-perfect ending. As E. M. Forster (1927) has observed of human relationships, “Love, like death, is congenial to a novelist because it ends a book conveniently. He can make it a permanency, and his readers easily acquiesce, because one of the illusions attached to love is that it will be permanent. Not has been—will be. All history, all our experience, teaches us that no

230 the sustainability of the plan of the Emile across a longer horizon, across future generations.

Emile’s and Sophie’s children likely will not have Jean-Jacques (or anyone like him) as their tutor. In all probability, they will be raised as ordinary eighteenth-century boys and/or girls within a traditional family. In other words, the children will grow to be the very things their parents were raised not to be. And so with them begins the slippery slope of a new cycle of degeneration. It would seem that, from a generational perspective, the benefits of Emile’s education likely begin and end with Emile. To be clear, Emile’s life is certainly beneficial to others in his own lifetime, beginning with Sophie. As we discussed in Chapter Three, Emile’s loving devotion to his wife will reinforce his commitment to their family and affect each individual member’s happiness and well-being. Yet, my point here is that the benefits of his education could not extend as far as creating further Emiles, for that would require further Jean-

Jacques. Thus, the prospects for the future seem grim, and we are thus forced to conclude that, despite the initial optimistic tone of the Emile, Rousseau must have been profoundly pessimistic regarding the fate of modern man. The human problem appears insoluble as a social problem, and the escape from the human to nature – and the possibility of genuine happiness – seems highly improbable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, although the Romantic movement that Rousseau inspired began with his positive assertion of man’s natural goodness and the quest for human happiness, it ended up producing a large body of melancholy literature. As Irving Babbitt (1919) states, “No movement has perhaps been so prolific of melancholy as emotional romanticism. To follow it from Rousseau down to the present day is to run through the whole gamut of gloom”

(307). As one of many examples, he cites the eponymous hero of Chateaubriand’s novella René

human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain. [...] Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams” (86-87).

231 (1805): “A great soul,” as René says, “must contain more grief than a small one.” One should note that Babbitt was a stern critic of Rousseau and Romanticism, so his analysis must be read with some degree of skepticism. Yet, on this point, given the tremendous literary evidence of

Romantic melancholy, this mood certainly does seem to capture the general spirit of the movement’s later period. It is perhaps also little wonder, then, that the so-called “third wave of modernity” (Strauss 1953), ushered in by Nietzsche and influenced by the rise of the philosophy of history, later redefined the sentiment of existence as one not of happiness but of melancholy.

Rousseau’s explicit optimism betrays an underlying inescapable pessimism.

232 CHAPTER FIVE Conclusion

“Above all one must know how to end.”

- “Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Œuvres Complètes II, 1247)180

Now we have reached the last act in our analysis of the Emile, but we are not yet at the denouement, for there are a few questions that remain unanswered and critical issues yet to be addressed. The principal issue under investigation in this thesis has been the function of the novelistic dimension of the Emile for the transmission of Rousseau’s political philosophy. I have argued that (1) the Emile is anti-utopian, (2) Rousseau repurposes Fénelon’s novels to bring about the Rousseauian (i.e., un-Fénelonian) end of bridging the gulf between men and women and strengthening the bond between them, and (3) art is crucial to the proper formation of civilized man because ordinary human development can no longer be surrendered to spontaneous, irrational human impulses and inclinations. In emphasizing these aspects of the

Emile, I have largely positioned myself as dissenting from prevailing interpretations of

Rousseau. Because existing interpretations of the Emile tend to subscribe to the idea that the work was composed in an unsystematic, almost slipshod manner, most scholars to date have contended that the Emile does not represent a clear, coherent articulation of his thought. In sum, my disagreement with the existing scholarship is that Rousseau’s decision to (re-)write the Emile as a novel was carefully considered and that this fictional dimension represents the ideal format to convey the book’s teachings. What is most notable about my reading of the Emile is the

180 Amusingly, in the margins of this work’s manuscript, Rousseau notes that the conclusion written for the essay’s original draft is “trops longue,” meaning, of course, that he has not yet figured out how to end this particular piece. (original manuscript of “Idea of the Method in the Composition of a Book” (OC II [1242-1247]), housed in the special collections and archives at Harvard’s Houghton Library).

233 elevated status that I grant its novelistic aspect. The central chapters in this dissertation – each formally consigned to a distinct theme or problem associated with the book’s novelistic structure

– offer successive treatments of Rousseau’s engagement with the novel form and the significance of this undertaking for his thought. Each chapter elucidates, in turn, Rousseau’s efforts to write a novel, to engage with others’ novels, and to play with his own self-image as a character in a novel. It is my hope that this dissertation has sufficiently presented my case within the established framework not only to vindicate Rousseau’s genius and artistry, but also to advance the scholarly discussion regarding the significance of the novelistic dimension of Rousseau’s novel-treatise.

Yet, even at its present length, issues of enormous importance for understanding

Rousseau’s Emile have inevitably been neglected or have received little or no attention in this dissertation. I lament the absence of any consideration of La Fontaine’s fables, the lack of a chapter comparing Julie to the Emile, and the omission of an interpretation of the influence of stories in the “book of books:” the Bible. Yet, perhaps most of all, I particularly regret that this dissertation lacks a chapter on Robinson Crusoe, the first book that Emile reads. This omission is especially unfortunate in light of my discussion of Rousseau’s appropriation of Fénelon’s novels, for Hans Crombrugge (1955) has described Télémaque as “in many aspects...the antipode of

Robinson Crusoe” (1). If nothing else, an interesting point of comparison is the fact that while

Crusoe’s choice to travel the world is of his own volition and he shows almost no interest in returning to his family, Télémaque (and his father) does not embark on his voyage entirely freely and his primary aim is to return home. One wonders what the full implication of these differences may be for Emile’s education.

234 Further, as we discussed in the introductory chapter, Ian Watt (1957) highlights Hobbes’ and Locke’s importance as “the political and psychological vanguard of nascent individualism” and the significance of this new philosophy for the evolution of the novel in the eighteenth century (61). Watt thus argues that the “connection between individualism in its many forms and the rise of the novel” is most clearly evident in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Crusoe, we notice, acts like a good Lockean – when others arrive on the island he forces them to accept his dominion with written contracts acknowledging his absolute power (even though we have previously been told that he has run out of ink)” (ibid 61, 63). In Defoe’s novel, Crusoe “has a home and family, and leaves them for the classic reason of homo economicus – that it is necessary to better his economic condition. […] The argument between his parents and himself is a debate, not about filial duty or religion, but about whether going or staying is likely to be the most advantageous course materially: both sides accept the economic argument as primary” (ibid

64). As a result, according to Watt, the “fundamental tendency of economic individualism, then, prevents Crusoe from paying much heed to the ties of family, whether as a son or a husband. [...]

Crusoe, one feels, is not bound to his country by sentimental ties, any more than to his family; he is satisfied by people...and he feels, like Moll Flanders, that ‘with money in the pocket one is at home anywhere’” (ibid 65). In the end, Watt contends that “Crusoe is not a mere footloose adventurer,” that his travels and his general freedom from social bonds exemplify the modern pursuit of “economic individualism,” which “has much increased the mobility of the individual”

(ibid 66). Watt further observes that Crusoe’s economic individualism extends to his personal relationships, which are almost entirely utilitarian: he values his wife and children for strictly economic factors and his the advent of new manpower brought by his servant Friday is, for

Crusoe, “a signal, not for relaxation, but for expanded production” (ibid 74). Thus, Watt

235 concludes that “personal relationships generally, play a very minor part in Robinson Crusoe, except when they are focused on economic matters” (ibid 69). In short, for Watt, Crusoe represents the Hobbesian/Lockean economic individualist par excellence.

As I have already stated elsewhere in this dissertation, Rousseau explicitly measured his philosophy against Hobbes’ and Locke’s radically individualistic political philosophy, but his critique is of his modern predecessors, is more complex, more profound than the simple rejection of their political projects. To be sure, though, Rousseau deeply regretted the rise of the debased human type who was the embodiment of Hobbesian and Lockean thought, the bourgeois. As a result, it may seem odd that Emile would be given a copy Robinson Crusoe as part of his education – indeed as the first book to which he is ever introduced. If Crusoe indeed exemplifies the bourgeois type, and if Emile is to be raised not to be this type, then why would Jean-Jacques expose his pupil to Defoe’s novel?

In a footnote in Chapter Three I alluded to one possible reason as to why he is allowed to read Defoe’s novel: Rousseau states that Emile’s copy of it has been “disencumbered of all its rigmarole (fratras), beginning with Robinson’s shipwreck near his island and ending with the arrival of the ship which comes to take him from it” (Emile 185). Thus, Robinson Crusoe has been cleaned or tidied up (débarrassé) to be made more suitable for Emile’s consumption. Stated more directly, it has been heavily censored (likely by the tutor). We are never told the precise nature of these revisions – what was excised and what remained. Yet, we do know that Emile was not exposed to the same version of Robinson Crusoe that you and I have read – and the work has been so heavily edited that, as I suggested earlier, the version presented to Emile may not resemble a novel at all, but rather a treatise. A number of scholars have advanced propositions regarding what the removed fratras could be. The editor of the Pléiade edition of the Emile,

236 Charles Wirz (OC IV [1430, n.1 to p.455]), Thomas Keymar, in his introduction to Robinson

Crusoe (Defoe 2007 [viii]), and Yves Vargas (1995 [109]) take the eliminated “rigamarole” to mean simply the portions of the novel prior to Crusoe’s shipwreck and after his rescue. However,

John Scott (2020) suggests, correctly in my view, that this interpretation is inadequate, as it does not “fully account for the vocabulary, for the term fratras suggests that something is admixed into something else and débarrassé suggests extracting or disentangling something rather than simply curtailing it” (222). Thus, Rousseau’s diction suggests a more complicated extraction than the simple one proposed by Wirz, Keymar, and Vargas. Denise Schaeffer (2002) has suggested that certain parts of Defoe’s novel that seem to contradict Emile’s education — such as Crusoe’s life before and after the island, the numerous passages on religion, etc. —

“exemplify what Rousseau must mean by ‘rigamarole’” (140). Scott, building on Schaeffer’s work, also interprets “rigamarole” to mean “principally the religious dimension of Robinson

Crusoe” (218). Although Schaeffer and Scott each provide thoughtful analyses of the utility of

Robinson Crusoe for both Emile’s and the reader’s educations, in my view, they pay insufficient attention to the ambiguity of the revisions Rousseau says are made to Defoe’s text — all while acknowledging that this uncertainty exists. By this, I mean to say that, even though Schaeffer and

Scott recognize the that Emile’s copy of Robinson Crusoe is modified and that the specific nature of what these revisions entail is never clarified, they nevertheless base many aspects of their interpretation of the book’s significance on mere assumptions regarding what constitutes

“rigamarole” for Rousseau. Yet, the simple fact is that we do not know what Rousseau means by

“rigamarole.” Any suggestion as to what the term does signify is pure speculation, as Rousseau offers no explication of the word. Perhaps Rousseau means to point the reader away from the substance of Robinson Crusoe to an interpretation of the significance of a different aspect of the

237 work that does not depend on our knowledge of what did and did not make the cut in Emile’s version of the book. What this alternative aspect may be, however, I do not yet know. This ambiguity obviously complicates our ability to clearly interpret Emile’s reading of this work, and it is the primary reason I chose to devote a chapter to Télémaque instead of Robinson Crusoe.

The Emile suggests that the copy of Fénelon’s novel that Sophie and Emile read is largely intact, whereas Defoe’s novel is not (in addition to the fact that Sophie does not read Robinson Crusoe, and I wished for my chapter to focus on the young couple’s shared literary experience). Still, a future exploration and clarification of the different purposes served by Télémaque and Robinson

Crusoe for Emile’s education would be, I believe, a worthwhile endeavor and is a study I hope to eventually conduct.

Ultimately, Rousseau’s literary communication and his engagement with the fictional works of other writers are important matters because if we fail to appreciate the full range of his engagement with the novel form, we risk not being able to truly understand his teaching. And since much of Rousseau’s philosophy reflects many of our own perceptions of the world, if we do not adequately grasp his thought, we also risk being unable to mount a cogent, persuasive defense of many aspects of our cultural consciousness. In the end, we ought to continue to examine the novelistic dimension of the Emile in order to better appreciate Rousseau’s unique brand of political philosophy.

238 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rousseau’s Writings

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1959 ff.). Œuvres Complètes, Volumes I-V, eds. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

______(1782). “Projet Pour l'Éducation de Monsieur de Sainte-Marie” in Collection complète des oeuvres, ed. La Société Typographique de Genève, 1780-1789. Volume 14, online edition http://www.rousseauonline.ch/pdf/rousseauonline-0117.pdf, October 7, 2012 version.

______(1924-1934). Correspondance générale de J.-J. Rousseau, Tome I-XXIV, ed. Théophile Dufour. Paris, France: Librairie Armand Colin, 339-340.

______(1965-1991). Correspondance complète de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. R. A. Leigh, Vols. 1-53, Genève: Institut et musée Voltaire.

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