Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise

There's a couple of things I found quite interesting reading in and around Rousseau's Julie, or the New Heloise.

Section I: Rousseau's milieu and its influence on later writers.

I see in Rousseau's emphasis on making the 'personal political' and the 'private public' what is seen later in the works of Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Gorky's emphasis on the life of the commoner. Rousseau has taken the life of relatively common people in Julie, Claire, and Saint-Preux and turned it into a complex melo-drama. In his opera, Le devin du viallge ("The Village Soothsayer"), Rousseau presents two otherwise ordinary people in love, Colin and Colette, and their inability to trust one another and raises it to a complex drama. The same can be said of the lives of Julie, Claire, and Saint-Preux: otherwise innocuous people whose pedestrian trials and tribulations revolving around love denied Rousseau raises into (700+ pages worth) of complex drama. This raising of the common to centre stage was not unknown before Rousseau did it, but Rousseau can be seen, because of his broad popularity and appeal as a turning point in raising the common to being a worthy subject of discussion.

Their private lives--until Rousseau a decidedly un-common topic--are made public. The shared, common, yet rarely discussed private tensions and conflicts of people were not seen as topic worthy of public discussion let alone consumption. It seemed to be a received wisdom that such topics simply were of little interest. Rousseau would change this. In Julie there is no great moral upheaval, great events, or renowned figures. There's only the lives of a few people and their conflicts; people who Rousseau's audience would be comprised watching their lives unfold before them. In this sense his characters are unifying: a group of everyman, and woman. It is also, at least in some respect, egalitarian in that, although the subjects in the opera were not people King Louis XV was likely to run into (perhaps over in his carriage...not that he'd stop), but the sensibilities that these characters struggled with would be one that king and queen--as well as miller's wife and miller--could identify with. That king and queen, miller's wife and miller, could all share in these 'private affairs' are shared--thus, by presenting characters as lowly as he does, Rousseau is levelling the playing field, as it were.

Rousseau, in making the private public, is also making the personal political. Readers do not have to look closely to see didactic messages in Rousseau's tale. The epistolary novel is, in fact, a roman a these: a novel with a thesis.

At the centre of the story the characters all struggle with being 'virtuous'. Julie, after her early tryst with Saint-Preux, struggles with being virtuous, but stands by virtue (to her detriment one could say) to her end. Julie, overall, keeps the corrupting forces of society at bay, unlike Saint-Preux who falls almost the minute he enters the city (or is liberated, depending on your point of view).

By exposing their personal lives, Rousseau is making political statements.

Before moving into the later writer's, I found it quite interesting that Rousseau--although he respected and appreciated the work of Moliere--viewd him as dealing with immoral sunjects. In this, I'm not so sure I agree with Rousseau as I see the work of Moliere, The Misanthrope, for example, and Rousseau's, Julie, as being quite similar in several key regards. Both authors present worlds that are everyday and common--even, perhaps, pedestrian; yet, these are also glimpses into the characters private and personal worlds. As such then, both are embarking on making the private public and, thus, the personal the political. Moliere simply did it before Rousseau using worlds, characters, and situations certainly more macabre and grotesque than Rousseau, but no less didactic.

Ralph Leigh, professor of French at Trinity, Cambridge notes the following and, in thinking of Leigh's words, I would ask that you read it twice: once thinking of his words as they certainly are reflective of Rousseau, but then a second times considering, for example, Moliere's, The Misanthrope, as I cannot see how the observations are equally applicable:

"Julie is first and foremost a novel: it is about human beings locked into a number of intractable situations, which drive them to the verge of nervous collapse, and, indeed, sometimes beyond. These situations involve five different people, most of them continually developing, expressing not only the immediacy of their reactions, but also constantly interpreting and reinterpreting their experiences (sometimes wrongly), sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes saying what they think and sometimes not, converted in the course of the work to values very different in many ways from those which they began."

I don't think one would want to take a comparison between Rousseau and Moliere to far or to deep; however, I do think they had more in common than at least Rousseau seemed willing to admit. In topic, in milieu of the characters--and, I would add, in at least some extent, in the authors 'project'--they appear to have things in common, at worse, they clearly overlap (I think the same can be said between Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade, of which I'll say a bit about pater). I think this quote by Leigh could also be read in conjunction with the authors whose work I suggest is influenced by Rousseau.

It is in this common, private, and personal sense, then, that I see the work of later writers who would present common characters front and centre in ways shifting between the pitiable (highlighting injustices) in Dickens, to glorification in Tolstoy, to the cautionary in Dostoyevsky, and, finally, wallowing in the misery as Gorky would do.

In Dickens' Hard Times, I am reminded of the characters Stephen Blackpool and Rachael. Both characters live amongst the lowest of the low within in the world of Coke Town. Yet, the deep respect between the two of them demonstrates a camaraderie and a virtue that exceeds any of those from the higher social castes. Stephen won't, irrespective of any great need he may have for support, even allow himself to be seen too long with Rachael for fear of tarnishing her name. His admiration for her is unwavering:

"He looked at her with some disappointment in his face, but with a respectful and patient conviction that she must be right in whatever she did. The experession was not lost upon her; she laid her hand lightly on his arm a moment as if to thank him for it."

Although the Russians would delve into the world of the commoner in ways Rousseau probably could not--or would not--ever conceive does not, I believe, deny the approach of his influence upon their works. I do not think readers have to look too far into the likes of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Gorky to see the influence of Rousseau and his emphasis on the common--it may be, perhaps, only vetigial in their works, but I believe it there none-the-less.

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, like Rousseau's Julie, loves one man, Count Vronsky,, but is constrained (for awhile) to remain with Alexei Karenin, out of virtue to social norms as well as her own indecision. Although Anna does decide on the affair with Vronsky, we may see in her decision the fate that may have awaited Julie and Saint-Pereux if the had decided to elope. In the end, like Julie (and foretelling Edna Pontillier yet to come in our readings), Anna's only real release is in death. Perhaps in Anna we see the unification of two separate people--Claire and Julie--into one..?

In Dostoyevsky's,  The Idiot, we meet Prince Lev Myshkin who find himself in the middle between two women--one kept and one virtuous. In his innocence and goodness ends in disaster and in the ironic position of him finding sanity inside the walls of a sanitarium. In his character we can perhaps see what a single-minded adherence to virtue can end in.

Finally, there's Maxin Gorky's, The Lower Depths. I see similarity him and Rousseau not so much in their characters per se, rather in the private and personal struggles each of the characters engages in, and struggles that are otherwise very common. Perhaps what these two authors share most commonly is their desire for an 'ethics of authenticity', or what Gorky would hold as a primacy of harsh truths over comforting lies. I think where Rousseau may, in this sense have balked is in taking such authenticity to its natural ends: self-destruction.

Certainly, in comparing these writers to Rousseau one would best not look for exact matches, rather the hints--the vestiges--of an approach that began with Rousseau and who follow a similar path, but blaze it into very different--if not radically different--territories.

Section II: Sharing at least some common ground with the Marquis de Sade.

I found two overlapping areas between Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade. On the one hand, there's the shared political conviction regarding the problem of property ownership.



Rousseau, in his Discourse On Inequality (1754), states that the "first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."


Although he was writing some 43 years after Rousseau (and was known to have read Rousseau), in his novel, Juliette, de Sade states that when "[t]racing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft."

There is also the interesting--perhaps better stated as morbidly interesting--connection between Rousseau's self-confessed pleasure (Confessions, 1782) and interest in what de Sade would, in his writings, coin sado-masochism. Whether or not Rousseau's probable need to have Therese help him with his *gulp* ivory catheter (don't lie guys: every one of your flinched when you heard that!?!) could/can be seen as a possible fetish remains to be seen...figuratively speaking, of course!

In looking at the overlap between Rousseau and de Sade one must realize that the comparison is only superficial. As much as Voltaire heckled Rousseau's writings as being pretentious and pompous, de Sade went much further and completely inverted the character of Julie in his novel, Justine; and, further inverting the idea of goodness 'winning' in his novel, Juliette (much as Moliere's Alceste and Célimène do).

Section III: My kingdom for...viagra..?

As a final note, I think it is interesting, building on my comparing de Sade and Rousseau,when we note that Rousseau probably had significant problems with his kidneys and urinary system. In turn, it is quite likely that, given this condition, he would suffer at least sporadic bouts of sexual dysfunction. If we add to this Rousseaus conviction as presenting himself as text, and considering one of the two sub-titles to Julie is the New Heloise, I think it quite reasonable to see at least some of Rousseau's identification with this romanticized duo as not simply focusing on Heloise, but on himself as a Abelard. Abelard would, of course, have to find some solace in the Platonic love with Heloise after, to quote Austin Powers, his 'twigs and berries' were so unceremoniously lopped off (like the catheter doesn't make a guy flinch!?!), I think it equally reasonable to see--between Rousseau's predilection to sado-masochism in conjunction with his possible dysfunction (and, if not dysfunction, the fact that he would be quite vulnerable if it was, indeed, Therese who administered his catheters)--Rousseau as identifying figuratively with Abelard's literal castration.


Section IV: Final note

I think one of Rousseau's most interesting works is his Letter to M. d'Alembert (1758). I say interesting because it seems to highlight one, of the many, paradoxes that is reading (if not being) Jean Jacques Rousseau. In this letter Rousseau is disagreeing with d'Alembert regarding the opening and use of a theatre in Geneva. For a man so stepped in Salon culture, a writer, a musician, and a playwright (if we consider opera's writing aspect loosely for a moment) that he would describe the "artificial emotions" a danger that theatre represents. And, as such, that would, in turn, corrupt the minds and morality of that society.

Perhaps this shouldn't come as much of a surprise at it first seems, however. It is important to remember that even in the preface to his own novel, Rousseau states that he is critical of literature in general.

Like his characters, their situations, and the milieu's he chose to present them in, we need remember Leigh's comments that Rousseau's, Julie, is about "human beings locked into...intractable situations" that see these characters "interpreting and reinterpreting their experiences (sometimes wrongly)" [emphasis added]. If Rousseau the person was trying his best to re-present himself in and as a text, then such interpretations and reinterpretations of himself should neither be seen as contradictory nor surprising...