Rousseau in drag : Deconstructing gender 978-1-137-01062-9, 1137010622, 978-1-349-34268-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Introduction (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 1-18
Sexual/Political Inequality (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 19-53
The Arts: From the Letter to d’Alembert to The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 55-82
Postoedipal Desire: Reading the Ménage à Trois (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 83-107
Autobiography: Writing the Self, Writing Gender (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 109-136
Conclusion (Rosanne Terese Kennedy)....Pages 137-143
Back Matter ....Pages 145-186

Citation preview

Breaking Feminist Waves Series Editors: LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center GILLIAN HOWIE, University of Liverpool For the last twenty years, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves. This picture has had the effect of deemphasizing the diversity of past scholarship as well as constraining the way we understand and frame new work. The aim of this series is to attract original scholars who will offer unique interpretations of past scholarship and unearth neglected contributions to feminist theory. By breaking free from the constraints of the image of waves, this series will be able to provide a wider forum for dialogue and engage historical and interdisciplinary work to open up feminist theory to new audiences and markets. LINDA MARTÍN ALCOFF is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her books include Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self ; The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy (coedited with Eva Kittay); Identity Politics Reconsidered (coedited with Moya, Mohanty, and Hames-Garcia); and Singing in the Fire: Tales of Women in Philosophy. GILLIAN HOWIE is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Her previous work includes Deleuze and Spinoza: Aura of Expressionism; Touching Transcendence: Women and the Divine (coedited with Jan Jobling); Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (coedited with Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford); Menstruation (coedited with Andrew Shail); and Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education (coedited with Ashley Tauchert). Titles to date: Unassimilable Feminisms: Reappraising Feminist, Womanist, and Mestiza Identity Politics by Laura Gillman Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone edited by Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? edited by Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen Femmenism and the Mexican Woman Intellectual from Sor Juana to Poniatowska: Boob Lit by Emily Hind Between Feminism and Materialism: A Question of Method by Gillian Howie

Resonances of Slavery in Race/Gender Relations: Shadow at the Heart of American Politics by Jane Flax The Many Dimensions of Chinese Feminism by Ya-chen Chen Rousseau in Drag: Deconstructing Gender by Rosanne Terese Kennedy

Rousseau in Drag Deconstructing Gender

Rosanne Terese Kennedy

ROUSSEAU IN DRAG

Copyright © Rosanne Terese Kennedy, 2012. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-34008-4 All rights reserved. First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34268-6

ISBN 978-1-137-01062-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137010629 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kennedy, Rosanne Terese. Rousseau in drag : deconstructing gender / Rosanne Terese Kennedy. p. cm.—(Breaking feminist waves) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712–1778. 2. Sex differences. I. Title. B2137.K46 2011 848⬘.509—dc23

2011025437

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2012 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Jonathan, Eleanor, and Olivia

C on ten ts

Series Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Note on Rousseau Texts

xiii

Introduction Rousseau in Drag Feminist Readings of Rousseau L’Amour à Trois Structure of the Text

1 1 6 13 14

1 Sexual/Political Inequality The Nothingness of Nature Society and Sexual Difference Narcissism and the Waning of Pity Instituting the Exchange of Women: The Levite of Ephraïm The Prostitute The Dedication

19 19 23 26

2 The Arts: From the Letter to d’Alembert to The Reveries of the Solitary Walker Rousseau in Love Tragedy and Comedy Paris and the Theater of “Love” Geneva Reveries of the Solitary Walker Writing New Fictions: Julie, or the Modern Romance Novel 3 Postoedipal Desire: Reading the Ménage à Trois Emile Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires Julie, or the New Héloïse

32 39 43 55 60 63 64 70 73 78 83 85 89 93

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CONTENTS

Sophie d’Houdetot Mme de Warens

103 105

4 Autobiography: Writing the Self, Writing Gender Reading Gender Masochism Heroic (“Masculine”) Rebellions Performing the “Feminine” Exhibitionism: Nonphallic Desire Homosexual Love Refusing the Father (and the Brothers)

109 113 116 118 124 125 128 134

Conclusion

137

Notes

145

Bibliography

173

Index

181

Ser ies For e wor d

Breaking Feminist Waves is a series designed to rethink the conventional models of what feminism is today, its past and future trajectories. For more than a quarter of a century, feminist theory has been presented as a series of ascending waves, and this has come to represent generational divides and differences of political orientation as well as different formulations of goals. The imagery of waves, while connoting continuous movement, implies a singular trajectory with an inevitably progressive teleology. As such, it constrains the way we understand what feminism has been and where feminist thought has appeared, while simplifying the rich and nuanced political and philosophical diversity that has been characteristic of feminism throughout. Most disturbingly, it restricts the way we understand and frame new work. This series provides a forum to reassess established constructions of feminism and of feminist theory. It provides a starting point to redefine feminism as a configuration of intersecting movements and concerns, with political commitment but, perhaps, without a singular centre or primary track. The generational divisions among women do not actually correlate to common interpretive frameworks shaped by shared historical circumstances, but rather to a diverse set of arguments, problems, and interests affected by differing historical contexts and locations. Often excluded from cultural access to dominant modes of communication and dissemination, feminisms have never been uniform nor yet in a comprehensive conversation. The generational division, then, cannot represent the dominant divide within feminism, nor a division between essentially coherent moments; there are always multiple conflicts and contradictions, as well as differences about the goals, strategies, founding concepts, and starting premises. Nonetheless, the problems facing women, feminists, and feminisms are as acute and pressing today as ever. Featuring a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Breaking Feminist Waves provides a forum

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SERIES FOREWORD

for comparative, historical, and interdisciplinary work, with special attention to the problems of cultural differences, language and representation, embodiment, rights, violence, sexual economies, and political action. By rethinking feminisms’ history as well as their present, and by unearthing neglected contributions to feminist theory, this series intends to unlock conversations between feminists and feminisms and to open up feminist theory and practice to new audiences. —Linda Martín Alcoff and Gillian Howie

Ack now l ed gmen t s

I first began reading Rousseau seriously when I took Professor James Miller’s graduate seminar on Rousseau at the New School for Social Research. Before taking this course, I thought I knew Rousseau—or at least knew what Rousseau thought of women. Professor Miller’s seminar challenged my defensive and combative stance toward Rousseau, pointing out ambiguities and complexities that I had previously refused to see. Several years later, when I began to think about a dissertation, Jim Miller suggested and encouraged me to write on Rousseau. When I belatedly wrote the dissertation under his supervision, Jim was an invaluable interlocutor and kept me from making many blunders (those that remain are unquestionably my own). And finally when the dissertation was finished, Jim declared it a “book” and took it upon himself to help me get it published. His efforts went far beyond duty and my expectations. This book, from start to finish (including the suggestion of a title), would not have been possible without him. I am also grateful that Jim introduced me to Helena Rosenblatt. Helena generously offered to sit on my dissertation committee. Her knowledge of Rousseau and comments were invaluable, as was her enthusiasm for my project. She also thought that I had a book and fought to get it published. She introduced me to Anthony La Vopa, who forwarded the manuscript to the Breaking Feminist Waves series at Palgrave Macmillan, where it found a home. Helena’s generosity is rare and much appreciated. I also want to thank Brigitte Shull, the senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for overseeing the publication and editorial assistant Joanna Roberts for walking me through the process. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who kindly and gently pointed out my mistakes, helped me sharpen my arguments, and was such a sympathetic reader. My former professor and now colleague and friend George Shulman has been continuously supportive and an important

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interlocutor in the twenty or so years we have known each other. He has not once but twice, when I needed it, found me a teaching position at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. I am grateful for his always sage advice and acute perspective not just on academics but the everyday stuff. My mother, Patricia Mackey, and her husband Gerald Mackey have been the source of generous and protracted support throughout the years. Patricia Cluck, my friend since I was two years old, has been unwaveringly enthusiastic about my work. She read parts of the work even though it fell outside her area of expertise. My two daughters, Eleanor and Olivia, were unwitting contributors and collaborators on this project. This work was inspired by them and my desire to write something for their future. On a more practical level, they forced me to stick to a strict schedule— albeit their schedule—and taught me patience, perspective, and how to enjoy my time off. My partner for the last ten years, Jonathan Macagba, has undoubtedly been my greatest supporter. He never doubted that I would finish the dissertation, and he never doubted that it would turn into a book. He has been an incredibly patient listener and a tireless advocate. He has sacrificed much of his own ambitions and desires so that I could do what I want. His unselfishness is unparalleled. Most importantly, he has shown me how much pleasure and enjoyment is to be had from our daily life together. It is to him and our two daughters that I dedicate this work. —Rosanne Terese Kennedy Siran, France, 2011

No te on Rousse au Te x t s

I have for the most part relied on the incredibly faithful and readable translations of The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vols. 1–12, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly. This translation project has not only made the majority of Rousseau’s writings available in English but has set the standard for translation projects. Two exceptions: I refer to Allan Bloom’s translation of Emile and my own translation of Les Solitaires. (At the time of writing the section on the latter text, a translation was not yet available.) Throughout, I cite the corresponding reference to the original French Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s Oeuvres complètes, vols. 1–5.

Introduction

Rousseau in Drag Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century political philosopher, essayist, novelist, playwright, and autobiographer, has become (in)famous for his relentlessly gendered political thought. At least, this has been the reigning consensus among his feminist readers.1 This interpretation (despite readers’ different philosophical and political perspectives and aims) has focused on the ways in which Rousseau, the theorist who championed democratic equality, ironically failed to include women— arguing (some theorists would claim with reference to nature, others claiming the appeal was to the political) for a strict binary and hierarchical account of sexual difference and a normative, heterosexual, familial economy. Admittedly, at first I not only agreed with this reading but found it to be patently obvious and irrefutable. For the textual evidence to justify such a reading is plentiful and compelling. The most notoriously hyperbolic accounts of gender inequality can be found in the “Dedication” to Geneva in the Discourse on Inequality (the Second Discourse), the Letter to d’Alembert, the “idyllic” community of Clarens in Julie, and, of course, Book V of Emile. However, as I began to consider the entirety of Rousseau’s work, this interpretation seemed not only inadequate but fundamentally flawed. I was struck by what seemed to be a certain “blindness”— to use Paul de Man’s phrase in regard to the history of Rousseauean studies2 —to what he says elsewhere, a tendency to overlook ambivalences, and a certain inattention to the entirety of his writings. My increasing dissatisfaction with such readings led me to reconsider not only Rousseau’s gender politics but his politics in general. What struck me most in (re)reading Rousseau is that one finds what seems to be the instantiation of a sexual binary and strict gender roles but also, simultaneously, their disruption and

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destabilization. That is, alongside what first appears to be a valorization of strict gender identities (masculinity and femininity) and roles (citizen and mother, public and private), one finds the opposite: the continual undermining, inversion, and critique of said ideals and values. Throughout Rousseau’s writings, we have various examples of “perverse” identifications and the inversion of roles: men who act like women, women who act like men, women who love women, “incestuous” love relations, a privileging of ménages à trois, and the continual denigration of both paternal and fraternal power. Perhaps the best example is Rousseau himself. As the subject and object of his literary endeavors, Rousseau is an exemplary figure of perverse desire, ambivalent gender identity, and the abnegation of masculine and paternal authority. Indeed, Rousseau, as he depicts himself, exemplifies what Kaja Silverman has termed “deviant masculinity.” Deviant masculinities, according to Silverman, are those “whose defining desires and identifications are ‘perverse’ with respect not so much to a moral as to a phallic standard.”3 Although Silverman’s focus is on later nineteenth-century literature and twentieth-century film (as the privileged historical moment of a crisis of normative masculine ideology and representation), Rousseau, I would argue, is a prescient figure of this crisis, both naming it and encouraging it. It is well known that Rousseau’s libidinal investments and identifications were perversely nonphallic. As he repeatedly proclaims in his autobiographical texts and letters (written for the public and publication), he was from an early age masochistic, at times an exhibitionist, an excessive masturbator (by his own account), ambivalent about sexual intercourse, against the institution of marriage, unable to assume paternal authority, and even for a time—while living in exile in Motiers, Neuchâtel—becoming a cross-dresser. (Is it any wonder that the only time he “truly” fell in love was with a woman— “Sophie” d’Houdetot—who dressed like a man?) In two letters written in the summer of 1762, having fled the Parisian and Genevan authorities after the condemnation of both the Social Contract and Emile, Rousseau explains his reasons for adopting “feminine” dress (actually an Armenian, fur-lined caftan and turban) and for taking up the “feminine” practices of ribbon weaving and lace making: “I have thought as a man and have been called bad. Well, now I shall be a woman.” And: “I wear a long

INTRODUCTION

3

robe: I weave ribbons, me voilà more than half a woman. If only I had always been one!”4 Leaving aside the obvious relationship Rousseau implies among the “feminine,” the foreigner, and exile, what is most striking about these passages is that they contradict what he seems to say elsewhere about the necessity (and desirability) of fixed gender identity. Take, for example, the Letter to d’Alembert. The Letter is filled with a veritable plethora of hyperbolic misogynist rants advocating the segregation of the sexes. The Letter, or so it seems, argues that without such boundaries, the commingling of men and women in a “commerce that is too intimate” will lead to a disastrous gender confusion and the inability to tell one sex from another. Men will become “womanly” and women “manly.”5 How does Rousseau’s open and defiant cross-dressing lead us to read the Letter more ambivalently than previously assumed? Consider as well that the love of his life, Mme d’Houdetot, was also a cross-dresser. Rousseau describes the day he fell in love with her in the Confessions. Mme d’Houdetot (married and with another lover) pays him an unexpected visit. This time she is “dressed as a man,” and Rousseau immediately falls in love. “On this trip she was on horseback and dressed like a man [en homme]. Although I hardly like these sort of masquerades, I was taken by the romantic air of this one, and this time it was love.”6 Thus we have Rousseau (who soon after begins dressing like a woman) falling in love with a woman in drag on horseback (his knight?). It would seem that, contrary to what a straight reading of the Letter would suggest, Rousseau was not against a certain gender-bending confusion. In short, we have a man (Rousseau) who dresses and acts like a “woman,” loving a woman who dresses and acts like a “man,” who loves another man. Things will get even more complicated as I outline more fully later. But for now, I merely want to suggest that these examples call into question the orthodox reading of Rousseau’s gender politics as founded on the attempt to instantiate and police strict gender identities and borders based on the binary male/female. How does Rousseau in drag (and his love of Sophie in drag) problematize previous readings? Might this lead us to understand gender in Rousseau to be something that is unstable, contingent, and—to use Judith Butler’s contemporary formulation— performative?7 In Gender Trouble, Butler cites drag as an allegory of the way in which all gender is performative (rather

4

ROUSSEAU IN DRAG

than natural) or an exercise in cross-dressing. Although Butler has more recently cautioned against reading drag as necessarily subversive (it can very well consolidate normative heterosexuality and gender paradigms) or as always political, it still can be thought of as allegory for the problematics of gender itself.8 In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency. Indeed, part of the pleasure . . . is in the recognition of the radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.9

That is, drag highlights the contingency of the relation between sex and gender, denaturalizing this supposed natural relationship of sex to gender by showing that all expressions of gender, whether masculine or feminine, are accomplishments that must be repeated over and over. It would be a mistake, though, to think of Rousseau’s “decision” to cross-dress/become a woman as, well, “decisionist” or voluntary. Nor was it momentary. Rousseau tells us in the first few pages of his Confessions that he always felt himself “floating” ambivalently between what are normatively construed as “masculine” and “feminine” attributes. Such were the first affections from my entrance into life; in this way there began to be formed in me, or to show itself, that heart, at the same time so proud and tender, that effeminate but indomitable character, which— always floating between weakness and courage, between softness and virtue, has put me in contradiction with myself to the bitter end, and has caused abstinence and enjoyment— pleasure and wisdom, equally to escape me.10

Rousseau’s gender identity, as he describes it, was hopelessly and inevitably contradictory. This “contradiction” he labels femininity (“effeminate”) and masculinity (“indomitable”)—though it seems Rousseau is purposely ambiguous on which traits belong to the feminine and which to the masculine. For Rousseau, gender ambivalence rather than stability defined his character and was never (“to the bitter end”) resolved or stabilized.

INTRODUCTION

5

Before continuing, let me address an anticipated objection. It might seem that I am placing an undue emphasis on Rousseau’s autobiographical works or on his “personal” life or idiosyncratic desires. My intention, though, is not to produce a psychobiographical interpretation or reduce his writings to some outside pathology (even in an inverted, positive vein). This is not some sort of case study. I am not searching for what Jacques Derrida has derided as “psychobiographical signified”— something outside of Rousseau’s texts (his sexuality) that would presumably “explain” his work. In writing on interpreting Rousseau and interpretation in general, Derrida states, Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general.11

But to include Rousseau’s autobiographical texts is not an attempt to locate the “real life” of Rousseau or the “flesh and bones” of Rousseau beyond his writings but rather to consider these texts as part of his overall oeuvre, as part of his literary, philosophical statement. As Thomas Kavanagh has remarked, “[T]here is an impossibility in Rousseau’s case of separating textuality from existence. Rousseau’s ‘life’ . . . is itself an act of writing. And Rousseau’s writing is the essential adventure of his life.”12 The autobiographical works do not give us clues to Rousseau’s mental state but can be considered as fictive, philosophical treatises. However, many readers, especially those interested in his politics, have neglected the autobiographical works, considering them to be, at best, a retreat from the political and a lapse into subjectivity, passivity, and negativity and, at worst, an example of his increasing paranoia and even outright madness.13 But we might ask, in what ways does this dismissal of Rousseau’s autobiographical works (and fifteen years of textual production) produce a sort of gendered understanding of not only his writings but also the political itself? To read some of Rousseau’s works as political and others as not is to set up an artificial division among his works

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(those that are rational, active, i.e., “masculine” and those that are passive, hysterical, mad, i.e., “feminine”) as well as to implicitly suggest what constitutes the properly political. This lack of attention to the autobiographical works is especially strange among his feminist readers, since part of the feminist project has been to show the ways in which the political is located beyond legalistic and institutional structures. I argue that the autobiographical works are not just idiosyncratic memoirs (which Rousseau tells us they are not) but themselves political—not anomalous or contradictory to previous works but a continuation and perhaps a culmination of his thought. Rather than works of defeat or madness, these works signify a continuation of his political vision: one of critique, otherness, and exile.

Feminist Readings of Rousseau It is perhaps helpful to briefly survey the feminist literature in order to delineate the specificity of the current argument. As stated earlier, it has become commonplace among feminist readers to view Rousseau as producing works that are the worst example of patriarchal/masculinist excess. Paul Thomas, in his essay “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?,” has summed up the prevailing approach to Rousseau’s sexual/textual politics. The question mark in his title refers not to “if” but to “how.” “The question is not whether Rousseau should be identified as a sexist. The question is how we should set about characterizing him as such.14 Rousseau’s sexism has come to be taken as a given; the only work left to do is explain the form and aim. The main feminist critiques of Rousseau can be divided into two different trajectories. The first has been to understand Rousseau’s theory of gender as a continuation of the patriarchal discourse that permeates all of Western political thought. That Rousseau was able both to be committed to the new values of democratic freedom and equality and to insist on the subordination of women and their exclusion from the public sphere and political life attests, according to these critics, to the persistence and entrenchment of patriarchy despite the progressivism of the politics. As Susan Okin writes in Women in Western Political Thought, “Rousseau argues the commonly held assertions that have, as part of patriarchal culture, rationalized the separation of women throughout the history

INTRODUCTION

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of the Western world.”15 Sarah Kofman comes to a similar conclusion. Kofman asserts that Rousseau’s language is that “of the most traditional phallocratic discourse.”16 Although I would agree that most of the canonical figures (even those considered politically progressive) of Western philosophical/political theory subscribe to some form of repressive gender ideology (whether consciously or not), this interpretation seems misplaced in regard to Rousseau. For, most obviously, patriarchal (and masculine) authority is consistently undermined in Rousseau’s writings. Other feminist readers, though agreeing essentially with the previous verdict (that Rousseau’s thought is based on a hopelessly rigid account of sexual difference), have argued that his writings are not the effect of an entrenched patriarchy but rather constitute and reflect the emergence of a specifically modern perspective. For example, Joan Landes in Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution argues that Rousseau’s thought is emblematic of a particularly modernist “masculinist ideology” that sought to exclude women from political participation through a new understanding of gender based on the theory of incommensurable difference. Thomas Laqueur, in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, concurs with Landes’s theory that the eighteenth century marks a shift (and Rousseau is one of the leading proponents) from a “one-sex” model in which women are lesser men to a “two-sex” model of absolute difference based on anatomy.17 This new biologistic account of gender was used as a justification for the demarcation between a masculine public sphere and a domestic, feminine sphere. Liberal and republican discourses of the eighteenth century were not contradictory (the residual effect of hegemonic patriarchal culture) but rather premised on the exclusion of women from political life. The fear that women might gain access to the new public spaces opening up with reference to the egalitarian rhetoric of liberal and republican discourse engendered new justifications for the exclusion of women based on a model of rigid sexual difference. Moreover, this shift (with Rousseau leading the way), Landes argues, was actually one of regression. Rousseau’s writings (among others) signify “the shift from an iconic, spectacular public life to the textualized symbolic order.” In other words, the shift from iconic, spectacular (absolutism) to the discursive (republicanism/liberalism), according to Landes, represents the shift from a

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“feminine” (stylized, artistic) visual public to one of “masculine” (rational, legalistic, disinterested) discursivity and symbolic representation. The effect of this shift was the creation of a masculine, public sphere and the silencing of women and their relegation to the private, domestic sphere. Rousseau’s discursive elaboration of gender difference and hierarchy, Landes believes, has become “constitutive of the organization of public and domestic life in the post revolutionary world of bourgeois propriety.”18 The modern world thus became one that was organized around the idealization of masculinity, rationality, and legalism and the denigration of femininity, passion, style, and artistry. Although Landes’s argument certainly applies to other Enlightenment thinkers, particularly in terms of the emphasis on reason, objectivity, and universal truth, it seems curious in regard to Rousseau. Reading the Letter and the Second Discourse, Landes claims Rousseau was one of the key figures to advocate for a “masculine,” rational, disinterested public sphere and a “feminine” private, subjective sphere.19 Yet rather than denigrating passion, Rousseau argued in both the Second Discourse and Essay on the Origin of Languages that passion was prior to reason. Or, as he succinctly states in the Confessions, “I felt before thinking: this is the common fate of humanity.”20 For Rousseau, political laws and institutions always remained secondary to customs, beliefs, and passions. People would always be swayed by their passions and interests and persuaded by rhetoric rather than by logic, reason, and objective laws. Numerous feminist readers, though, have reiterated this interpretation of Rousseau as the leading figure responsible for the creation of a gendered public/private split. Even readers who have sought to reevaluate Rousseau’s understanding of gender in a more “positive” vein (by reading him “against the grain” or “turning him on his head”) have fundamentally agreed with the previous assessment. For example, Jean Elshtain, Lynda Lange, Penny Weiss, and Mira Morgenstern 21 have all argued that it is precisely Rousseau’s attention to and idealization of familial and domestic issues— ostensibly to the “feminine” private realm—that makes him conducive to a feminist reinterpretation. As Morgenstern states in Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity, “Rousseau’s location of woman and family at the center of this new worldview supports his insistence that the family is destined to be the harbinger of

INTRODUCTION

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social change.”22 This argument emphasizes the importance of the private realm, the family (albeit the normative, heterosexual, bourgeois family), and the “female subject” (to use Elshtain’s phrase) play in Rousseau’s work. What is problematic about this account is that it reiterates the very gender norms that Rousseau himself purportedly instantiates. Despite the intent to point out the porousness of the private and public spheres (and the importance of the former for the latter), it ends up reiterating a model of the heterosexual couple and idealized bourgeois nuclear family as the inevitable and unquestioned norm. More importantly, this reading ignores the ways in which Rousseau himself is critical of both the heterosexual couple and the bourgeois, nuclear family. It is certainly true that other feminist critics have read Rousseau more ambivalently. For example, both Linda Zerilli in Signifying Woman: Culture, Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill and more recently Lori Jo Marso in (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women have argued that despite his intentions and conscious desire, Rousseau’s writings reveal (perhaps more than his contemporaries) the instability of gender and gender roles he wishes to uphold. That the categories of gender are undermined are, for Zerilli, an inevitable effect of the impossibility of the categories themselves. The signifier “woman” (and “man”) is a phantasmatic production elaborated to keep women in their place (the home) and guarantee the autonomy and privilege of the male subject. According to Zerilli, throughout Rousseau’s writings we find the incessant, hysterical production of the masculine citizen/subject and the expulsion (abjection) and fear of the figure of woman. Yet this attempt to guarantee the borders of sexual difference is undermined by its very rhetorical excess: What Rousseau teaches and fears is that natural man and woman are pedagogical constructions and highly unstable ones at that. There is a profound sense in his writings that gender boundaries must be carefully fabricated and maintained because they have no solid foundation in nature, because what announces “man” and “woman” is not anatomical difference but instead an arbitrary system of signs that stands in permanent danger of collapsing into frightening ambiguity of meaning and a loss of manly constitution. For what haunts the writer Rousseau, above all else is the similitude of his sexual other, his dread of becoming a woman —his

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own terrible recognition that, to borrow Shoshana Felman’s words “femininity inhabits masculinity, inhabits it as otherness, as its own disruption.”23

Although I am sympathetic to Zerilli’s theoretical approach (her antiessentialism) and her semiotic reading of political theory, it seems misplaced in regard to Rousseau. For it seems that Rousseau hardly fears the “loss of manly constitution,” and he certainly does not “dread becoming a woman.” Marso has also noted, but in a different manner, the ambivalence of the figure of woman in Rousseau. For Marso this ambivalence is to be read not in the unconscious excess of Rousseau’s language (as Zerilli maintains) but in the tragic fate of Rousseau’s most famous heroines: Julie in Julie and Sophie in Emile or more specifically in the sequel, Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires. Marso argues that there is, in these two figures at least, the suggestion that Rousseau was self-critical of his own masculine political theory. Thus Marso claims (implicitly critiquing Zerilli) that the ambivalence is more overt and more than just unconscious (a function of language). It is my contention that Rousseau’s ambiguity about his own “solution” (masculine public sphere and the silencing of women) of the social contract points towards a similar recognition. In his impulse to heal the wounds created by the inequalities of the Old Regime, Rousseau seems to advocate a fraternal brotherhood based on male will. But when we shift our perspective to the women the fraternity excludes, Rousseau’s trust in his own solution begins to quake. . . . Is it the case that Rousseau’s women are merely “celestial objects” who inspire men to become manly citizens? Or does a reading of Rousseau from the perspective of his women point elsewhere? These women clearly realize that they cannot live in a man’s world, the model of manly citizen excludes them and their feminine desire. The results of this exclusion are clear from the fate of Sophie and Julie.24

Reading from the perspective of Rousseau’s heroines, Marso argues that it is possible to trace “an alternative conception of citizenship” and an other politics “built on the art of sociability, the value of civil conversation, sensitivity to diversity, and the necessity of engaging radically different perspectives.”25 I certainly agree with Marso that the “fate of Julie and Sophie” should give

INTRODUCTION

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pause to an unequivocal acceptance of Rousseau’s sexism. And indeed, it was largely Marso’s reading of Emile and Julie that led me to reconsider my initial reading of gender in Rousseau. Where I depart from Marso is that I read both narratives as explicitly critical (rather than implicitly) and as a continuation of Rousseau’s thought rather than a last-minute hesitation in which the “trust in his own solution begins to quake.” I contend that in both stories, Rousseau can be seen as putting forth a very explicit critique of the desirability and inhabitability of a strictly masculine economy instead of an unintentional one; Emile and Julie are not extraordinary exceptions. And finally, I read both Julie and Les Solitaires in terms of their overall structure rather than just from the perspective of the female characters (though I do this as well). To my knowledge, there has been only one feminist critic to actually suggest that Rousseau’s writings are overtly and intentionally critical of a masculine, political, and sexual economy and are even protofeminist. In her compelling analysis, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy, Juliet Flower MacCannell, reading Rousseau through a post-Freudian psychoanalytic framework, asserts that he is critical of not only the patriarchal discourse of the ancien régime but also its substitution, what she terms the new Enlightenment “regime of the brother.” MacCannell argues that the effect of Enlightenment discourse was to supplant the oedipal patriarchal framework with a post-totemic one in which the brother has gained ascendancy and thereby excluded not the mother (who was already irrelevant) but the sister. Rousseau’s critique, though, is not a nostalgic call (or even lament) for a mythical matriarchy (perhaps a critique of Derrida’s reading) but rather an ode to the recently excluded sister under the new regime of fraternité. MacCannell’s reading thus coincides oddly with Landes’s (and others) in that both claim that Enlightenment discourse inaugurates a new fraternal order. The crucial difference is that Rousseau, in MacCannell’s view, is neither a contributor to nor an apologist for the fraternal symbolic but rather the first writer (to be followed by Stendhal, Marguerite Duras, and Hélène Cixous) to provide both a sustained descriptive analysis of this transition and a critique.26 I find MacCannell’s argument to be persuasive and exciting and a much warranted intervention in feminist readings of Rousseau. However, I wish to pursue a slightly different line of argumentation

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and within a different theoretical register. As mentioned earlier, MacCannell reads Rousseau via Freud and particularly a Lacanian framework. Though I am not averse to referring to some aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, I am wary of imposing this framework in toto— particularly its insistence on the primacy and intractability of sexual difference. In its focus on a binary account of sexual difference (despite caveats of the emptiness or formality of this difference) as the foundation of culture, it tends to lead to a normative account of sexual and societal arrangements. I am afraid that this focus on the “two” leads to essentialism. Of course, part of MacCannell’s project in reading Rousseau is to show the ways in which the feminine has been symbolically excluded (and the costs of this exclusion, not just for women but for men as well) through a hypervaluation of masculinity. The task thus becomes to revalue the feminine through, as Drucilla Cornell has stated, “the power of refiguration through metaphor and, indeed, fantasy and fable.”27 But this refiguration of the feminine doesn’t necessarily have to lead back to a binary of sexual difference— and this is my central disagreement with MacCannell’s position and reading of Rousseau. Rousseau does sometimes take up the position and voice of woman as the ultimate outsider, the abject, but not to restate a binary of sexual difference; instead it is as a means of creating a dissonance, a rift, or displacement of expected gender roles/stereotypes. Consider also that Rousseau’s female characters/protagonists are often coded “masculine”: the reasonable Julie, the independent Claire, and, of course, Sophie d’Houdetot. These are Rousseau’s most important and positive examples of women who exceed any easy gender identification. The question is, then, in order to revalue the feminine (which has been either devalued or excluded), is it necessary for this reevaluation to keep the old dyadic structure of sexual difference? Might not multiplicity, as Butler has argued, be a more desirable framework? It seems to me that the future symbolic will be one in which femininity has multiple possibilities where it is . . . released from the demand to be one thing, or to comply with a singular norm, the norm devised for it by phallogocentric means. But must the framework for thinking about sexual difference be binary for this

INTRODUCTION

13

feminine multiplicity to emerge? Why can’t the framework for sexual difference itself move beyond binarity into multiplicity?28

This multiplicity Derrida has named the dream of the “innumerable.”29 But this dream beyond the two to multiplicity or the innumerable is not a dream of sexual neutrality or asexuality; it is as John Caputo has remarked “the displacement of the binarity, of the two sexes, of the figure 2, of the oppositional polarity, of the male/female opposition, which is the very form of the ‘war between the sexes.’ ”30 And Rousseau, I would argue, doesn’t just want to include the feminine alongside the masculine but attempts to rethink ways of being and desiring outside of the “two,” the couple. He re-creates throughout his writings new forms of love/desire beyond the familial structure, generating new, possible kinship relationships based on voluntary associations of love and friendship.

L’A MOUR

À

T ROIS

It is no secret that Rousseau had a fondness for threesomes.31 Rousseau’s most important love triangles can be found in Emile, Julie, and the Confessions —though a version of l’amour à trois can be found in almost every single one of his writings. Although there have been numerous commentators that have remarked on the prominence of the ménage à trois in Rousseau’s writings, there has been much less sustained commentary on its significance as other than another of his odd perversions—MacCannell excepted. (Perhaps this more than anything is a testament to the power of the ideology of the couple and nuclear family?) I would like to suggest, though, that the ménage à trois functions in Rousseau’s writings as a critique of both patriarchal and masculine authority and, most importantly, as a possible allegory for new democratic, sexual relationships. As is typical of Rousseau’s writings, we have both negative and positive versions of l’amour à trois. The former can be found in Emile, the second part of Julie, and the Confessions. The latter can be found in the first half of Julie and the Confessions. The first we might term, rather anachronistically, oedipal and an allegory for tyranny (in the case of paternal or fraternal rule) or nostalgic loss (in the case of mother rule). The second is postoedipal (with

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an absence of both the father and mother) and an allegory for democracy. This postoedipal triangulation32 of desire leads to a reformulation of kinship relations beyond the nuclear family. Thus Rousseau, I would argue, is not idealizing the family but perhaps calling for its dissolution— at least in its contemporary form. Rousseau is most critical of the authority of the father figure.33 In a long footnote to the Second Discourse, he writes, “[A]re there not a thousand more frequent and even more dangerous cases in which paternal rights openly offend humanity?”34 The father represents undemocratic, arbitrary power and despotic rule. Rousseau will be less critical of the mother. She will be figured as either absent or without much power. (The death of Rousseau’s mother soon after his birth as described in the Confessions, the motherless Emile, and his relationship with Mme de Warens are the most obvious examples.) Of course, as a boy, Rousseau took pleasure in being punished by a strict mother figure (Mlle Lambercier, Mlle Goton, Mme Basile, etc.), but this was a fleeting passion. In all of Rousseau’s writings circle the same themes: a critique of paternal authority, nostalgia for the (absent) mother and maternal love and an intermittent desire to be punished by her (perhaps a propaedeutic stage of love), a critique of contemporary fraternal power, and lastly the evocation of the possibility of reciprocal, generalized love of others. In sum, Rousseau’s writings contain a critique of paternal/fraternal authority, a brief nostalgic longing/desire/guilt for the (now powerless) mother, and finally the dream of a same generation of equal love of others unmarred by competition, jealousy, or the desire for profit. This Rousseau will figure in terms of a positive ménage à trois in which the oedipal framework will be rethought beyond traditional kinship relationships. Rousseau’s articulation of a positive l’amour à trois will articulate love and desire beyond the couple and child, the nuclear family, in egalitarian relationships that always include more than two.

Structure of the Text In order to elucidate what I have been reading as Rousseau’s critique of paternal/fraternal politics and his gesture toward a protofeminist politics of egalitarian sexual/political relations, I will

INTRODUCTION

15

approach his works somewhat chronologically but mostly thematically. I will begin with a reading of the Second Discourse because it provides the most comprehensive critique of contemporary subjectivity, power relations, and (sexual) politics. The Second Discourse is a fable: it tells the story of the downfall of the human species and provides a critique of contemporary society, particularly sexual relations. The questions Rousseau asks in this text are, Who are we? And how did we get here? I will focus on what he terms amour de soi (love of self) and amour-propre (self-love) and the ascendancy of the latter in the eighteenth century to the detriment of the former. Amour-propre — or narcissism, vanity, a desire for wealth, fame, and an instrumental view of others— has, according to Rousseau, usurped amour de soi— or the love of self. Amour-propre can be coded “masculine” (in that it does away with the need of others) and represents the rapacious avarice of individuals or of governments: despotic fathers/brothers, undemocratic governments, some writers who want only fame or fortune (and by extension some salonnières who mimic this desire), corrupt religious leaders, etc. In claiming that amour-propre or egoism has become dominant, the ostensible “romance” of the eighteenth century can be considered nothing more than an ideological veneer that covers up its own narcissism. The victims will be daughters (and sons), the poor, prostitutes (or women in general, given that they have been reduced to their exchange value), and outcasts. In order to illuminate how women are particularly victims of this culture of egoism, I will then turn to a discussion of Elizabeth Wingrove’s reading of Rousseau’s The Levite of Ephraïm. Wingrove argues that Rousseau’s prose poem is exemplary of what she terms “consensual nonconsensuality,” or how and why women (and men) willingly and knowingly sacrifice their own desires in favor of the interests of the republican polity. The Levite, Wingrove claims, shows women as active participants in their own subjugation and willing participants in their role as exchange value (paradoxical as that might sound). Contrary to Wingrove, I contend that Rousseau, rather than endorsing woman as exchange value, actually provides a critique: the foundation of the “virtuous” community of the Israeli tribes is predicated on rape, violence, murder. As such, it exemplifies the illegitimate and false contract that Rousseau describes the powerful and rich foisting on the

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weak in Second Discourse. I argue that the Levite exemplifies the duplicity and trickery that establishes the first contract Rousseau describes in the Second Discourse — only now women (particularly girls) are the explicit victims. In the Confessions, Rousseau offers another vivid and visceral critique of woman as exchange value by way of the most overt example: the prostitute. Before concluding the chapter with a reading of the “Dedication” to Geneva in the Second Discourse, I will briefly read the three prostitute stories he narrates in the Confessions. Rousseau believed that democracy and democratic institutions, although obviously the best and most just political system, were not self-sustaining nor necessarily the system people would voluntarily choose. Indeed, the opposite was more likely— as the Second Discourse makes clear. To sustain democracy, thus, more than a reasonable argument was necessary. One had to persuade people to choose democracy. One had to have other nonreasonable means of persuasion. One had to transform the culture and beliefs of the people. The Letter is Rousseau’s cultural argument. In chapter 2, I will read the Letter as an attack on contemporary art/theater as either overly nostalgic/irrelevant (the tragedy of “grand politics”) or too petty and complacent (the mockery of comedy and gallantry of romanticism). Both of these genres merely reproduce existing values rather than offer a critique or new possibilities. Furthermore, the contemporary romantic theater of contemporary Paris can even be considered as having negative effects— particularly for women. By putting women on “display,” the “romantic” theatre fetishizes and objectifies both “femininity” (as “spectacle”) and the female body for the benefit of a narcissistic (male) gaze. Many critics have assumed that Rousseau idealized local fetes and circles as the best form of entertainment. I will argue, though, that Rousseau suggests that for a patriarchal culture (i.e., Geneva and Poland), sex-segregated amusement is fine; and for a corrupt, narcissistic culture (i.e., Paris), the theater might be a welcome distraction; but for a true democracy (and egalitarian relations), a different type of art is needed. Literature is Rousseau’s preferred medium. Rousseau privileges writing and reading as the ideal form of entertainment in that it is solitary (as opposed to the communal fetes that erase differences) yet requires active, engaged thinking (as opposed to the passive enjoyment of the theater). But not all literature is equal. In the Ninth Walk of The Reveries of the Solitary

INTRODUCTION

17

Walker and in the two prefaces to Julie, Rousseau indicates specifically the type of writing he has in mind. This (other) writing is one that is critical of the existing culture and at the same time evocative of new possibilities for egalitarian relationships (works that Rousseau himself produced): a new type of “romance” beyond the couple and the family.35 In chapter 3, I will consider the ways in which Rousseau critiques existing gender identifications and kinship relationships and points the way to new postoedipal relationships beyond the heterosexual couple and nuclear family (postoedipal l’amour à trois). In Julie and Emile, I will argue, Rousseau offers a critique (sometimes by anamorphosis) of the dominant culture—whether patriarchal or fraternal. In both of these texts, Rousseau exposes the cost of living in an unfree and unequal society—for both men and women (if these categories continue to make sense in Rousseau). I will conclude the chapter by turning to the positive and negative “real-life” ménages à trois Rousseau discusses in his Confessions. And finally, in the last chapter, I will turn to the autobiographical works as the continued dramatic staging of Rousseau’s critical stance. I will read these works not as memoirs but as an extension of the earlier works: fabulistic, literary works of disidentification and protest. Such a reading will insist that these later works are not “confessional” in any religious sense, not even in a Foucauldian one (the search for the “truth” of the self). Specifically I will focus on the first few books of the Confessions. I emphasize the beginning of the text in that it highlights how identity and in particular sexual identity are an effect of reading (and writing). In the first six books of the Confessions, Rousseau offers himself as an exemplary figure of nonnormative masculinity and desires. As such, he calls into question the possibility of sustaining (or even wanting to sustain) normative gender identities and normative kinship relations. I have been suggesting that Rousseau’s political sympathies lie neither in the ostensibly idealized republics (either contemporary Geneva or Poland or ancient Sparta) nor in the emerging bourgeois politics. Rousseau is critical of both patriarchal and fraternal power. What then does Rousseau propose? I intentionally leave the question open. I do so because I think Rousseau does. Certainly, Rousseau provides us with glimpses of what egalitarian (sexual and social) relations might look like, but they are merely suggestive rather than prescriptive and are not really political communities: an

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ideal society in Book IV of Emile, the Ninth Walk of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and the positive ménages à trois in Julie and the Confessions. Of course, one might point (as I do not here) to what seems like Rousseau’s more prescriptive moment, for example, the Social Contract (his “solutions” for Poland and Corsica are too singular and historically contingent to serve as models). But the Social Contract itself is not without ambivalence— and most importantly is the least relevant, I would argue, to the present study36 (though I do reference it as a contrast to the Second Discourse and the illegitimate contract versus a legitimate contract in chapter 1). Rather, I read Rousseau as essentially deconstructive rather than prescriptive. In the following chapters, my reading of Rousseau will be more anecdotal37 than systematic. The present study is meant as a provocation to an alternative reading of gender in Rousseau rather than a conclusive statement. As such I tend to focus on details, specifics, digressions, and obscurities in Rousseau’s writings. I also tend to refer to the lesser-read and lesser-known writings as a lens through which to (re)read his canonical texts. I do so because I think a very different reading of Rousseau becomes possible— one that contradicts standard interpretations of gender in his writings. I hope that any frustration with the many digressions, the focus on details, and partial readings will be compensated by the alternative reading it engenders.

CH A P T ER

1

Sexual/Political Inequality

The Nothingness of Nature In 1755 Rousseau published the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (the Second Discourse), five years after his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (the First Discourse). The First Discourse was Rousseau’s reply to the Academy of Dijon’s question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” Rousseau had answered of course in the negative (though more ambivalently than usually allowed). His answer was startling given the prevailing zeitgeist and garnered him the prize. In 1754 the academy posed the question, “What is the source of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?” Rousseau’s Second Discourse did not this time win the prize, but it was just as controversial, if not more so. Voltaire was particularly offended and wrote a bitingly sarcastic letter to Rousseau in response. I have received, Sir, your new book against the human race; I thank you for it. . . . You paint with very true colors the horrors of human society from which ignorance and weakness anticipate so many comforts. Never has so much intelligence been used in seeking to make us stupid [bêtes]. One acquires the desire to walk on all fours when one reads your work. Nevertheless, since I lost this habit more than sixty years ago, I unfortunately feel that it is impossible for me to take it up again.1

Voltaire’s critique obviously suggests that the Second Discourse was nothing but a panegyric to nature and a condemnation of civilization. Although Voltaire later refined his reading of Rousseau, his

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first impression of the Second Discourse has continued to characterize subsequent readings of this text and indeed all of Rousseau’s thought: Rousseau advocates (or at least idealizes) a return to “nature” and a more “natural” existence since civilization has been the cause of our downfall and our troubles. This reading of Rousseau has been endlessly repeated— even by his most careful and astute readers. Jean Starobinski, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, dismisses Rousseau’s overt claim that the history he tells is hypothetical. According to Starobinski, Rousseau might have begun and intended the Second Discourse as a fable, but he soon began to believe his own story as actually happening, as actually the truth. In fact, the more Rousseau developed his “historical” fiction, the more it shed its hypothetical character: intellectual prudence gave way to ever-increasing confidence, to a rapture of the spirit. The description of the primordial state, of what was scarcely more than an animal existence, turned into an enchanted evocation of a “place in which to live.” The idea of a “healthy,” nomadic existence, with its sensory equilibrium and proper self-sufficiency, aroused such feelings of nostalgia that it produced an elegy. For Rousseau, the image was too powerful, too profoundly satisfying, not to have corresponded to the letter of historical truth.2

Rousseau, Starobinski asserts, became so carried away with his vision, falling in love with its image, that he actually began to believe that this historical fiction was not a fantasy but truth. There is no denying, of course, the power of Rousseau’s rhetoric in the Second Discourse. And indeed Rousseau’s fantastic historical re-creation of the time before history is meant to persuade. But the persuasion is not meant to be literal. Rousseau repeatedly prefaces his description of the state of nature with explicit cautions that it is not to be read literally. “Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not concern the question,” he says. Or again, “[A] state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist.”3 Here one might compare Rousseau’s text to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals4 or Freud’s Totem and Taboo or even Hobbes’s Leviathan —none of which have ever been read as anything other than fables. That Rousseau too eloquently described his state of nature, and also perhaps because

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he constantly refers to “nature” in his other texts, has led readers to conclude that he actually believed it to have existed or wished it to be so. But the structure of the Second Discourse should lend pause to such a conclusion. The structure of the text is circular: Rousseau begins with the state of nature and ends with the state of nature, the latter being different from the first in that it is a return to a state of nature within history.5 Here is the last stage of inequality, and the extreme point which closes the Circle and touches the point from which we started. Here all individuals become equals again because they are nothing; and Subjects no longer having any Law except the will of the Master, nor the Master any other rule except his passions, the notions of good and the principles of justice vanish once again. Here everything is brought back to the sole Law of the stronger, and consequently to a new state of Nature different from the one with which we began, in that the one was the Stare of Nature in its purity, and this last the fruit of excess corruption.6

Rousseau declares that we have returned to a “state of nature” because we have become “nothing.” We have become nothing other than the cause of oppression or the victims of oppression. This is Rousseau’s (second) state of nature: thought, justice, equality, and reason are lacking; only force and oppression remain. It seems curious to suggest that Rousseau is advocating a return to this state (if such a thing were possible) or even idealizing nature. Instead, the Second Discourse is a critique of the present. Rousseau makes this critique by showing that what we assume to be natural and inevitable, historical progress, is in fact a series of highly disparate and contingent developments. Rousseau’s argument is antiteleological. History is not progressive or rational but, on the contrary, the effect of accidental, haphazard occurrences. He imagines a circular trajectory: the nothingness of the insular, isolated self of the state of nature gives way, returns, and is folded back onto the nothingness of society in which the self is now completely external and thus again nothing. But let us return to the Second Discourse and retrace Rousseau’s argument (I will leave the “Dedication” until the very end of the discussion). Rousseau, as stated earlier, begins by “setting aside

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all the facts.” His task is to discover what, if anything, is the basis for the extreme inequality of contemporary society. In order to do this, he argues, one must distinguish between what is natural inequality and what is social inequality. Thus begins a speculative text on what humans might have been like before the advent of social relations. This speculative history (before the beginning of history) imagines a prehistory in order to delineate the contingency of present institutions, morals (moeurs), and relations. Of course, any discussion of “nature” and what is “natural” could lead to problematic pronouncements. For how can one possibly imagine a state beyond and outside culture without unwittingly imputing cultural values (a problem Rousseau is aware of and makes against his fellow state of nature theorists)? However, Rousseau in the Second Discourse imagines the state of nature as something that is defined by lack rather than positive characteristics. It is neither good nor bad but neutral. Perhaps the most positive definition is that this state is marked by the absence of evil. Rousseau begins by stripping natural being of all attributes of civilized society and those we ordinarily define as human: reason, thought, language, even consciousness. Each individual is isolated, alone, and self-sufficient. Each isolated being is completely self-enclosed, unaware of others because unaware of one’s self as a self. Wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without war and without liaisons, with no need of his fellows, likewise with no desire to harm them, perhaps, never even recognizing anyone individually, Savage man, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, had only the feelings and intellect suited to that state; he felt only his true needs, saw only what he believed he had an interest to see; and his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity. If by chance he made some discovery, he was all the less able to communicate it because he did not recognize even his Children. Art perished with the inventor. There was neither education nor progress; the generations multiplied uselessly; and everyone always starting from the same point, Centuries passed in all the crudeness of the first ages; the species was already old, and man remained a child.7

Each life is lived moment-by-moment, completely self-contained and isolated, except for chance and intermittent encounters with

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others that are nonetheless quickly forgotten. As Tracy Strong has remarked in Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary : “There is literally nothing to humans in the state of nature. Thus the defining quality of the human is not to be defined or fixed: This is what we know as humans. Any definition that we might have is therefore acquired.”8 Unaware of one’s self and unaware of the existence of others, differences are unremarked and, more importantly, irrelevant— particularly sexual difference.

Society and Sexual Difference Sexual relations are intermittent and random. “[I]n the primitive state they, having neither Houses, nor Huts, nor property of any kind, everyone took up his lodging by chance and often for only one night. Males and females united fortuitously, depending on encounter, occasion, and desire . . . they left each other with the same ease.” 9 The family too is not natural. Mothers and their children are together for only as long as the children are dependent. This relationship is temporary and soon forgotten. “The mother nursed her Children at first for her own need; then, habit having endeared them to her, she nourished them afterward for their need. As soon as they the strength to seek their own food, they did not delay in leaving the Mother herself; and as there was practically no other way to find one another again than not to lose sight of each other, they were soon at a point of not even recognizing one another.”10 Thus for Rousseau sexual difference along with maternal love are not natural but the effects of society.11 The two characteristics he does posit as innate to “natural” being are not properly human. That is, all animals share them. The first is self-preservation and the second, pity or compassion. Selfpreservation, or what is referred to as love of self (amour de soi), is a natural instinct that privileges one’s safety and well-being over others. This instinct though is tempered, according to Rousseau, by compassion or pity for others. Pity takes one outside of oneself and allows one to identify with others. It is pity, Rousseau tells us, “which carries us without reflection to the aid of those whom we see suffer; in the state of Nature, it takes the place of Laws, morals, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its gentle voice.”12 Pity is thus likened to a natural, spontaneous,

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moral force— a sort of inner voice or conscience that not only leads one to help others in distress but also prevents one from doing harm or evil to others. Both of these “natural” qualities—amour de soi and pity— as stated already, though, are not unique human characteristics. What is unique to human beings, and constitutive, is the capacity for freedom. The possibility of being a free agent, the ability to choose, to transform the given, defines the human. Humans are born with the possibility to change the given and go beyond mere instinctual response. “[I]t is not so much understanding which constitutes the distinction of man among the animals as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the Beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes he is free to acquiesce or resist.”13 De Man, rightly I think, has compared Rousseau’s understanding of freedom and its potential to transform the given (or nature in Rousseau’s language) to Nietzsche’s will-to-power: Very little distinguishes [Rousseau’s understanding of] power to will, or will to power (puissance de vouloir) from “will-to-power,”, since the power to choose is precisely the power to transgress whatever in nature would entail the end of human power . . . [and] transforms all human attributes from definite, self-enclosed, and self totalizing actions into open structures.14

Freedom—in taking us outside of ourselves, beyond our selfenclosed identities and automatic, mechanical responses— opens up the time and space of human consciousness, historical existence, and the political world. The activation of the dormant capacity to will and choose Rousseau attributes to a series of arbitrary historical developments and climatic changes. Rousseau will label this progression of human development the faculty of perfectability, which is an effect of our freedom. The term perfectability is of course a misnomer—for it is just as much a process of degeneration as it is of progress. On the one hand, it leads to the development of community, cooperation, friendship, love, and notions of justice, love, ethics, and virtue. Yet, on the other, it inspires competition, domination of others and of nature, strife, vanity, violence, alienation, inequality, and stupidity. Rousseau, of course, in the Second Discourse, argues that

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the latter negative developments have outstripped the positive. But how has this come to pass? This first society Rousseau names the family. The first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation which united husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children in a common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to men: conjugal love and paternal love. Each family became a little Society all the better united because reciprocal affection and freedom were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the way of life of the two Sexes.15

This family is unlike the contemporary family in that it is based on freedom and affection rather than patriarchal authority. And it has nothing in common with patriarchal, political society. “Regarding Paternal authority, from which many have derived absolute Government and all Society . . . it suffices to note that nothing in the world is farther from the ferocious spirit of Despotism than the gentleness of that authority which looks more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the utility of the one who commands.”16 Although Rousseau attributes the beginnings of sexual difference to the rise of the family, it is ambiguous what this difference might look like and what its effects might be. This is first of all because, as MacCannell notes, Rousseau’s first families are selfgenerating. That first family “does not preclude—to the contrary it requires—incestuous relations.”17 Rousseau thus stands in contrast to Claude Lévi-Strauss (and contemporary anthropologists and structuralist theorists), who argues that the incest taboo is a universal norm. The universal and thus quasi-natural prohibition of incest, according to Lévi-Strauss, guarantees exogamic relations. This guarantee, according to Lévi-Strauss, not only constitutes women as exchange value, as gifts to be circulated among men (particularly in their role as brides) in order to seal fraternal relations, but also implicitly guarantees heterosexual relations. Gayle Rubin, in her oft-cited essay, “The Traffic of Women,” critiques Levi-Strauss’s understanding of culture as founded on the prohibition of incest and its attendant implications— particularly the explicit constitution of woman as exchange value and implicit

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compulsory heterosexuality. She writes, “[T]he incest taboo presupposes a prior, less articulate taboo on homosexuality. A prohibition against some heterosexual unions assumes a taboo against nonheterosexual unions. Gender is not only an identification with one sex; it also entails that sexual desire be directed toward the other sex.”18 As a counterpoint to Lévi- Strauss’s understanding of culture as based on the universal incest taboo, Rousseau’s first families are dependent on incestuous, endogamic relations. Given that Rousseau’s first families are self-generating and autonomous, women cannot possibly function as exchange. We might also conclude that the injunction to conform to heterosexual norms is nonexistent (though Rousseau makes no comment one way or the other since his explanation is centered on procreation). In short, Rousseau names sexual difference with the advent of “culture” (families) but foregoes assigning any definitive implications: “[T]he first differences were established in the way of life of the two Sexes” is all that is stated.

Narcissism and the Waning of Pity But the question remains, how did human relations and particularly sexual relations change (and I would argue that Rousseau implicitly claims devolve)? According to Rousseau, in the Second Discourse, it is the result of a series of fortuitous events (both natural and human) coupled with the manipulations of those with power. Rousseau states that after a long protracted history in which individual “families” remain isolated, they eventually come together based on shared habits. These families Rousseau compares to small “nations,” “unified by morals and character, not by Regulations and Laws but by the same kind of life and foods and by the common influence of Climate.”19 And although living in common with others introduces notions of difference, comparison, and competition, these differences are not yet institutionalized. Rousseau calls this period the “golden mean”: “Thus although men had come to have less endurance and although natural pity had already undergone some alteration, this period of the development of human faculties, maintaining a golden mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch.”20

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Yet further developments—notably those of agriculture and metallurgy and the consequent introduction of private property, the division of labor, and the accumulation of wealth—would be the catalysts that destroy equality, change history, and create political society. Rousseau describes a state of upheaval and war with the wealthy pitted against the poor. Seduced by the promise of security, the people hand over their freedom to the rich and powerful, who in turn magnify their power and wealth. But this political society will be for the benefit of the rich and the enslavement of the poor. The first political society is based on a lie, on the trickery of the wealthy over the poor. As human society develops and becomes transformed, so too does human consciousness. Increasingly, amour de soi becomes amour-propre21 and pity becomes silenced. In society, or what Rousseau terms the State of Reasoning, reason will lead to excessive self-love. “It is Reason that engenders amour-propre and it is reflection that fortifies it; reason turns man back upon himself, it separates him from all that bothers and afflicts him.”22 Reason quiets and cancels out innate pity. In Of Grammatology, Derrida reads pity in Rousseau as a feminine operation that is perverted and abused by women in “moral love.” The amorous passion is thus the perversion of natural pity. Unlike the latter, it limits our attachment to a single person. As always in Rousseau, evil here has the form of determination, of comparison, and of preference. That is to say of difference. This invention of culture denatures pity, deflects its spontaneous movement, which would carry it instinctively and indistinctly toward everything living, whatever may be its species and sex. Jealousy, which marks the gap between pity and love, is not only a creation of culture in our society. As a ruse of comparison, it is a stratagem of femininity, an arresting of nature by woman. What is cultural and historical in love is at the service of femininity: made to enslave man to woman.23

In Derrida’s reading, the good, feminine, natural, maternal voice of pity is usurped by the artificial (cultural), feminine passion of desire and moral love. This reading of Rousseau’s sexual/textual politics has been little challenged. It is commonly understood that Rousseau valorizes

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the maternal at the expense of the feminine: maternal authority (the “gentle voice of nature”) is both natural and good while the artificial femininity of culture is both detrimental and unnatural. The natural maternal body is pitted against the devouring, enslaving seductress who controls both men and society. According to this reading, Rousseau then makes the political claim that women’s authority should be confined to the home and domestic duties in order to limit their corrupting influence on men, politics, and culture. Yet this interpretation is problematic for several reasons. First the claim that pity is a (maternal) “feminine” operation is contradicted by Rousseau’s text. Derrida contends that the privileged example in Rousseau’s writings in regard to pity refers “almost always to the mother-child relationship” or is “illustrated archetypically by the relationship between mother and child.”24 Natural pity thus, in Derrida’s reading, is linked to the maternal and maternal solicitude. Yet curiously enough, Rousseau goes out of his way not to cite the mother-child dyad as exemplary of pity: “Without speaking [“Sans parler ”] of the tenderness of Mothers for their young and of the perils they brave to guard them.”25 Rousseau does so precisely because the mother-child dyad would not only be too obvious but it would particularize pity, attach it to the maternal, rather than make pity a universal (including nonhuman) virtue. Rousseau then goes on to cite other examples: animals uneasy at the sight of death, animals “crying” as they are lead to the slaughterhouse, infirm old men, defenseless children, and so forth. The one time Rousseau actually mentions the motherchild relationship it is not even his own example but is taken from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. And this example is not really about a mother’s “natural”/instinctive love/pity for her child. Rather it concerns the pity an onlooker has for both the mother and the child: One sees with pleasure the author of the Fable of the Bees, forced to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive Being, departing from his cold and subtle style in the example he gives in order to offer us the pathetic image of an imprisoned man who sees outside a wild Beast tearing a Child from his Mother’s breast, breaking his weak limbs in its murderous teeth, and ripping apart with its claws

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the palpitating entrails of this Child. What horrible agitation must be felt by this witness of an event in which he takes no personal interest! What anguish must he suffer at this sight unable to bring help to the fainting Mother or to the dying Child.26

It is the spectator/witness that feels pity and projects the feelings of maternal affection/love and infant helplessness onto the mother and her child. Furthermore, directly following the Mandeville example, Rousseau emphasizes pity’s generality by listing its visible effects in society. In fact, what are generosity, Clemency, Humanity, if not Pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the human species in general? Benevolence and even friendship are, rightly understood, the products of a constant pity fixed on a particular object: for is desiring that someone not suffer anything but desiring that he be happy? Even should it be true that commiseration is only a feeling that puts us in the position of him who suffers— a feeling that is obscure and lively in Savage man, developed but weak in Civilized man—what would this idea matter to the truth of what I say, except to give it more force? In fact, commiseration will be all the more energetic as the Observing animal identifies himself more intimately with the suffering animal.27

Thus, contrary to Derrida’s reading, pity trained or fixated on a singular other is not a perversion (usurping passionate love) but rather the (positive) workings of pity in modern society. Identifying with an other and not wishing to see an other suffer—whether named love, benevolence, or friendship— are the effects of pity. However, the ability to identify with others—to not just observe but to put one’s self in an other’s place—has dramatically diminished in modern society. The cause, Rousseau argues, is reason/ philosophy. It is Philosophy that isolates him (the philosopher); because of it he says in secret, at the sight of a suffering man: perish if you will, I am safe. . . . His fellow can be murdered with impunity right under his window; he has only to put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a bit to prevent Nature, with revolts within him, from identifying with the man who is being assassinated. . . . In Riots or

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Street fights the Populace assembles, the prudent man moves away; it is the rabble, the Marketwomen, who separate the combatants and prevent honest people from murdering one another.28

It is reason that allows one to disidentify and to separate oneself from others. Reason, or self-love, allows one to keep one’s distance and cancels out pity.29 The weakening of pity in society is thus the effect of reason. And contrary to Derrida’s reading, it is reason taken to the extreme that is responsible for destructive amorous passion (to be distinguished from love). This might appear, at first, to be a strange thing to say—that excessive reason leads to amorous (excessive) passion— but it follows Rousseau’s logic and his very specific understanding of both reason and amorous passion. Every negative aspect of civilization Rousseau traces to the transformation/degeneration of amour de soi to amour-propre, including amorous passion. In order to understand how the two are linked, it is necessary to understand that amorous passion in the Second Discourse is not the passionate love of another; quite the contrary, it is an excessive love of the self, the narcissistic desire to be preferred to all others, the narcissistic desire to be looked at and admired. Thus amorous love in modern society, for Rousseau, is not the recognition of difference or of preference of an other, as Derrida has argued, but rather the annihilation of all differences because it is narcissistic—it is the love of self over all others. The transformation of amour de soi (self-preservation) to amourpropre marks a chasm, and the two have little in common: It is necessary to not confuse amour-propre with amour de soi; two different passions in both their nature and their effects. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amourpropre is only a relative sentiment, artificial and born in Society, which inclines each individual to have a greater esteem for himself than for anyone else, inspires in men all the harm they do to one another, and is the true source of honor.30

The difference between the two marks the difference between instinctual self-preservation and narcissistic self-love.

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But how does this transformation take place? According to Rousseau, it is born out of sociality. As people begin to socialize, they begin to make comparisons. Each one began to look at the others and want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a price. The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered; and that was the first step toward inequality and, at the same time, toward vice. From these first preferences were born on the one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.31

The desire to be “looked at,” to compare oneself to others, to be admired by others, and to prefer oneself to others is the real root of amorous passion. MacCannell has very astutely articulated this transformation from self-love to narcissism in Rousseau: Repressing the recognition of the other as other rather than as the same is figured as mimetic doubling, or more precisely, as egomimesis. It produces the effect of eroticism, love of the other, but it is only an effect— a mirroring, narcissism. Rousseau’s Second Discourse show[s] that the cultural transformation of bodily needs into “desires” (new needs) and of familial love into love as a “mad” passion is the result of forming culture on the model of self-love or egotism (amour propre).32

The appearance of amorous passion appears to be directed toward an other but is really just an effect of self-love. It appears, though, that Rousseau blames women for exploiting and exacerbating amorous love to gain advantage over men, to “usurp their rights”: Let us begin by distinguishing between the moral and the Physical in the feeling of love. The physical is that general desire which inclines one sex to unite with the other. The moral is that which determines desire and fixes it exclusively on a single object, or which at least gives it greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to see that the moral element of love is an artificial feeling born of the usage of society, and extolled with

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much skill and care by women in order to establish their empire and make dominant the sex that ought to obey.33

Derrida has interpreted this passage as the following: “Within the ‘moral’ that substitutes itself for the natural, within the institution, history, and culture, female perfidy, thanks to social usage, works to arrest natural desire in order to capture its energy so that it may be directed to a single person. It thus makes sure of an usurping of control.”34 At first glance, Rousseau’s meaning seems to be clear: women have exploited moral love in order to gain control over men, to dominate men (Derrida’s reading). However, if we understand modern, passionate love to be narcissistic rather than the love of an other (or specific other), then Rousseau’s meaning takes on a different interpretation. Women may appear to gain power over men in “moral love,” but it is an illusory power. Women remain the object of men’s desire rather than becoming a desiring subject. Judith Still has described this “dialectic” of the male/master and female/slave in Rousseau’s writings in this way: Male preference (the tyranny of the male gaze constituting women as passive objects) inevitably, in Rousseau’s dialectical thinking, provokes a reactive female preference: in other words, the already chosen woman may then choose among the rivals for her possession. The chosen chooses, the enslaved becomes tyrannical, but is nevertheless constituted by the masculine other in either of these roles—that of chosen or that of chooser.35

The supposed “tyranny” of women in moral love is merely reactive, a disempowered power within a restricted male economy.

Instituting the Exchange of Women: T HE L EV ITE OF E PHR AÏM Rousseau’s most graphic, violent account of the institutionalization of gender inequality can be found in his prose poem The Levite of Ephraïm (1762). Replicating the narrative of the Second Discourse, the Levite begins with an idyllic “first family” that is disrupted with the sudden appearance of the Levite, who convinces one of the “sisters” to leave her family and come live with him in

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the mountains of Ephraïm. (Marriage is forbidden, we are told, either because she comes from another tribe or because she has no brothers.)36 The consequences of her decision to leave and step outside the bounds of the self-enclosed family are catastrophic. Rape, dismemberment, murder, and finally the “most horrible state of war”37— similar to that described in the Second Discourse —follow. Peace is attained through the duplicitous discourse of those in power: only this time the victors are not the rich and strong and the victims the poor and weak. Instead, the illegitimate contract is one in which specifically patriarchal/fraternal power is triumphant and the subjugation of women institutionalized. In arguing that the Levite is critical of the institutionalization of hierarchical relations based on the binary of sexual difference, I am offering an alternative reading to that proposed by Elizabeth Wingrove in Rousseau’s Republican Romance. Wingrove contends that rather than providing a critique, the Levite does just the opposite— it condones the institution of gender hierarchy and the exchange of women. However, what is more, Wingrove proposes, women are not merely passively constituted as exchange value in Rousseau’s text but persuaded to actively participate in their own subjugation. “It is not only the systemic imperative of a social order that constitute women as objects, as in Rubin’s account. They are also constituted as desirous, willing subjects through the political imperatives of republicanism: in their transformation from maidens to wives, the Israelite women recapitulate the process of moral and social maturation experienced by Julie and Sophie.”38 Thus, the foundation of the political community (before this act, the tribes of Israel were not yet unified) is dependent on what Wingrove terms “consensual nonconsensuality.” Wingrove’s phrase of course echoes Rousseau’s paradoxical imperative of the Social Contract in which citizens are “forced to be free.” Consensual nonconsensuality, according to Wingrove, highlights the ways in which women (and men) in Rousseau’s sexual/textual politics must not only sacrifice their desires for the good of the republic but must be encouraged to do so willingly. That there is no small amount of pleasure or “romance” in submission is central to Wingrove’s argument. Women (and men) are encouraged to perform and enact the heterosexual contract through “romantic” appeals to the self-sacrificial presuppositions of normative gender roles and duties.

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What is unique in Wingrove’s reading is that she complicates any simple narrative of passive victimization. She argues that the women in the Levite are shown to choose their own domination rather than merely serve as objects in a masculine economy. The female characters (at least in the final Canto) are subjects who voluntarily sacrifice themselves for the good of the political community. What I find problematic in Wingrove’s account is not that she “blames the victims” (a charge that she anticipates and easily deflects) but the assumption that Rousseau fully endorses the “republic”39 founded at the end of the Levite as legitimate. The narrative (violence, murder, war, persecutors, victims, tyrants, slaves) and passionate rhetoric of the Levite is much closer to that of the Second Discourse than the parsimonious and nonaffective language of the Social Contract. Rather than a legitimate “social contract,” the Levite replicates the illegitimate contract of the Second Discourse. The contract agreed upon in the Second Discourse is not for the benefit of all but for the few, the rich and powerful who concoct a “deliberate project” (“le projet le plus réfléchi ”)40 to protect and consolidate their power. In the Levite, however, it is not the rich and powerful but fathers and, to invoke Carole Pateman’s phrase, literally a “band of brothers”41 who convince the women in the last Canto of the narrative to submit to the paternal/fraternal contract with false maxims and appeals to duty and virtue. Let us turn to the Levite. Rousseau’s narrative is a retelling of the last chapters of the Book of Judges and is, with a few notable embellishments and digressionary authorial asides, fairly faithful to the original. As stated earlier, a Levite falls in love with a beautiful young woman (who remains nameless), “marries” her, and takes her back to his home in the mountains of Ephraïm. Initially, their life is portrayed as idyllic. Eventually, though, the girl becomes “bored” and “homesick” and “flees” back to her family. Rousseau writes, “The young girl grew bored with the Levite, perhaps because he left nothing for her to desire. She slips away and flees to her father, to her tender mother, to her frolicsome sisters.”42 As Thomas Kavanagh points out, Rousseau’s version diverges from the original in two notable ways. Original versions suggest that the young woman leaves because she is either “angry,” unfaithful, and/or “whorish.”43 In Rousseau’s account, her reasons are the exact opposite: rather than too much desire or passion (in the most

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stereotypical categorization of being a slut/whore), she leaves from a lack of desire—“boredom.” Judith Still (rightly I think) reads Rousseau’s version of the girl’s departure as noncritical: “This statement need not necessarily be understood as criticism by Rousseau of the girl; it is, on the contrary, an accurate perception that it is intolerable to be refused existence as a desiring subject.”44 Rousseau’s characterization of the relationship as one in which desire is lacking (at least on the part of the young woman) indicates that the relationship is one modeled not on sexual love; rather, it is modeled on that of idealized paternal affection (which the description of the Levite’s overwhelming solicitous behavior suggests). In structure, the relationship replicates Rousseau’s own real-life relationship with Mme de Warens (which is discussed more fully in chapter 3), except of course the Levite functions as a substitute father rather than mother. Second of all, Rousseau diverges from the original story by changing the makeup of the young woman’s family. In the original, the girl had only a father. “Rousseau,” Kavanagh writes, “adds a mother and a number of folâtres soeurs.”45 The addition of a mother and particularly sisters—which Kavanagh mentions but foregoes further commentary about—indicates why the girl might prefer to live at home than with the Levite in the mountains of Ephraïm: the existence of equal relations and friendships (the “frolicsome sisters”). Also the addition of a family (rather than a girl and her father) refers us back to the happiness and innocence of the self-sustaining “first families” Rousseau described in the Second Discourse.46 The Levite, a substitute (and later, a bad) paternal figure,47 signifies and portends a negative and disruptive influence. Distraught that the girl has left him, the Levite follows her to her home in Bethlehem, determined to bring her back. The girl, “touched by the return of her husband,” agrees to return to the mountains of Ephraïm. Yet the girl’s father is particularly reluctant to give her up and tries repeatedly to prevent her from leaving. His reluctance indicates that he has not yet assumed the paternal function and consequently does not yet subscribe to the cultural prohibitions: the incest taboo, compulsory heterosexuality, and imperative to exogamic relations. He does not conceive of his daughter as a “gift” to be exchanged/circulated. The Levite, though, understands it differently. “Why should she live alone and

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abandoned? Who other than I can honor as his wife the one whom I received a virgin?” the Levite demands. Already under sway of cultural prescriptions, the Levite cannot possibly understand how the young woman can be happy outside the required “marital” relation. And he cannot consider her to be worth much or desirable to others now that she is no longer a virgin. She has lost her worth in terms of exchange value. However, Rousseau also indicates— similarly to the structure of the Second Discourse —that regression is not possible. The girl cannot “return” to the “innocent pleasures of her childhood.”48 Or as Still states, “The time of incest is past.”49 Tellingly, Rousseau in another authorial digression suggests that this historical “progression” will have disastrous consequences. “Happy family, whose peaceful days flow in the most perfect union from the bosom of friendship, and that seems to have only one heart for all its members. O innocence of morals, sweetness of soul, antique simplicity, how lovable you are! How has the brutality of vice been able to find a place amidst you? How is it that the furies of barbarism did not respect your pleasures?”50 This interjection foretells the girl’s fate. On their way back to Ephraïm, the couple stops to rest in the town of Gibeah. After a protracted wait for hospitality to be offered, the pair is finally given lodging for the night by a fellow native of Ephraïm. A group of Benjamite men (who had earlier seen the Levite in the square and were taken with his “beauty”) circle the house and demand that he be turned over “so as to do him violence” (i.e., rape him). The Levite shockingly substitutes his “beloved companion” for himself, indicating how quickly idealization turns into its opposite: [T]aking his beloved companion, without saying a single word to her, without raising his eyes to her, drags her to the door and gives her up to those cursed men. Straightaway, they surround the halfdead young woman, seize her, and fight over her without pity; in their brutal fury they were like a pack of hungry wolves returning to a watering place at the foot of the icy Alps that surprises a weak heifer, throws itself on her and tears her to pieces.51

In “giving” his “wife,” the Levite institutes the first (violent) exchange of women: he pays off his debt to the Benjamites (for

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their “hospitality”) by giving them his “bride” and thereby substitutes heterosexual for homosexual desire. The next morning, the Levite is filled with regret. His regret, though, turns to rage when he realizes the girl has not only been subject to multiple rape but murdered: “[L]ove, regret, pity— all were changed into fury in him.” Rape would have been forgivable, but her death is not (for they have, in effect, destroyed his property). In a state of fury, he cuts up her body in twelve pieces and sends them to the tribes of Israel in a graphic and material call for justice. “Without hesitating, without trembling, the barbarous man [the Levite] dares cut that body into twelve pieces; with a firm and sure hand he strikes without fear, he cuts the flesh and the bones, he separates the head and the limbs.”52 From these twelve bodily missives (the woman literally functions as a sign),53 a bloody war ensues against the Benjamites that finally ends with the decimation of all but 600 Benjamite men. “On this day of anger and of murder, almost the whole Tribe of Benjamin . . . perished under Israel’s sword. This beautiful country, formerly so lively, so peopled, so fertile, and now reaped by flame and by iron, no longer offered anything but a frightful solitude covered with ashes and bones.”54 In the aftermath of this carnage, the remaining tribes realize that the Benjamin tribe will not survive without some sort of intervention. Brides will have to be found for the remaining Benjamites if they are to regenerate. Since each of the tribes has vowed not to allow their daughters to marry a Benjamite, an alternative must be found. The tribes enact two successive plans. The first plan will be one of astonishing violence and retribution. The remaining tribes suddenly realize that the tribe of Jabesh-gilead ignored the call to arms against the Benjamites. This refusal, their “unjust pity,” the rest of the tribes punish by massacring the entire community of Jabesh (“men, women, children”) with the exception of 400 virgins. These virgins are then forced to wed Benjamites. As Wingrove acknowledges, Rousseau’s condemnation of the violence of this act and of forced marriage is without question. Rousseau writes, “What weddings for the timid young virgins, whose brothers, fathers, mothers, had just been slaughtered before their eyes, and who received ties of attachment and of love from hands filthy with the blood of their near ones!”55

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However, what is even more significant than Rousseau’s unqualified opprobrium of the violence is a subsequent pronouncement that is interjected immediately afterward: “A sex always slave or tyrant, that man oppresses or adores, and that nevertheless he cannot make happy nor be so himself except by letting it be equal to him.”56 Rousseau’s interjection contains an explicit prescriptive norm: until women are granted equality (granted existence as desiring subjects rather than objects in a male economy), neither peace nor happiness (for men or women) will be possible. This statement also indicates how we should interpret and judge the supposed resolution at the end of the Levite. Let us return to the Levite. Despite the preceding carnage, there still remain 200 Benjamites without brides. A second plan is enacted (suggested by “an old man from Lebona”) to have the Benjamites sneak up on a festival of Shiloh virgins, capture them, and take them home as brides. The plan fails when the community of Shiloh overhears the virgins’ cries and intervenes. But the community is divided on what should be done— some are moved by compassion for the Benjamites, others (particularly some “good” fathers) are moved by a sense of equity for the young virgins. In the end, it is decided that it is the girls who must choose. Rousseau, now completely departing from the Book of Judges, introduces the figure of Axa (who happens to be the daughter of the “old man from Lebona”), a young virgin already engaged to someone else— Elmacin. At first, Axa refuses to go with the Benjamites. Only after the intervention of her father does Axa change her mind and “willfully” go with the Benjamites. Her father convinces her by stating, “Do your duty, my daughter, and save me from disgrace among my brothers.” Significantly, Rousseau describes her as “halfdead ” (a term that invites the reader to compare her to the original victim of the Benjamites—the Levite’s concubine) as she “falls into the arms of the Benjamite.”57 Soon after, the rest of the Shiloh virgins follow. Elmacin, her fiancé, also makes a sacrificial gesture, vowing to remain celibate. The community rejoices: “Virgins of Ephraïm, through you Benjamin is going to be reborn. Blessed be the God of our fathers! There are still virtues in Israel.”58 In the Second Discourse, Rousseau writes that the first (illegitimate) contract was agreed upon through the seductive language of peace and justice: “All ran to meet their chains believing they ensured their freedom.” In the Levite, the Shiloh maidens are

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persuaded to submit to the community’s injunction with reference to daughterly duties and virtues. Yet Rousseau describes their choice as differing little from that of the Second Discourse: “Young beauties, where do you run? In fleeing the oppressor who pursues you, you fall into the arms that enchain you.”59 Both are illegitimate in that they are the outcome of violence, war, oppression, and chaos and are premised on the false promises of peace. Both flee violence and uncertainty and run straight into new bonds of servitude. Wingrove is certainly correct, though, in drawing a comparison between Axa and Rousseau’s other notable heroines, Julie and Sophie. However, such a comparison does not lead us to assume Rousseau felt that the community founded upon Axa’s (and St. Preux’s double, Elmacin’s) sacrifice was legitimate. Instead, given the fate of both Julie and Sophie, not only the legitimacy but also the desirability and durability of such a political arrangement are called into question. The deaths of both Julie and Sophie (which I discuss in chapter 3) and the subsequent collapse of their respective “communities” allow us to extrapolate that this community will be just as unstable (and just as unhappy). But we need not look outside of the Levite to judge the ending. We only need recall Rousseau’s interjection in the middle of the text that happiness/peace (for women and men) will never be achieved as long as men continue to objectify women: to constitute them as either “tyrant” or “slave” (in an endless reproduction of the master/slave dialectic) rather than “equals.” Both the “wife” of the Levite and Axa function at different moments as either “tyrant” (in the sense of courtly love) or “slave” (forced to submit to the will of the other), but neither attains the status of equal (desiring) subject. We can presume then, according to Rousseau, that neither happiness nor peace has been achieved. Instead, the “contract” at the end of the Levite is illegitimate and puts in motion the institutionalization of the exchange and objectification of women.

The Prostitute Carole Pateman in the Sexual Contract writes, “When women’s bodies are on sale as commodities in the capitalist market, the terms of the original contract cannot be forgotten; the law of male sexright is publicly affirmed, and men gain public acknowledgement as

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women’s sexual masters—that is what is wrong with prostitution.”60 Rousseau has quite a lot to say about prostitutes and prostitution. Rousseau states that he had “always been disgusted by prostitutes (les filles publiques).”61 Readers of Rousseau have generally interpreted his fear and/or distaste of prostitution as symptomatic of an underlying (misogynist) fear of sexually aggressive women and his own impotence. The idea that Rousseau was perhaps putting forth a critique of the institution of prostitution, and more generally unequal sexual relations and particularly the exchange of women, has been little considered. The Second Discourse (and indeed all of Rousseau’s writings) is a diatribe against the domination of the powerful and wealthy over the weak and poor. The prostitute for Rousseau becomes one of the dominant symbols in his writings for the ways in which women are exchanged and exploited in contemporary society. In the Confessions, Rousseau tells three different stories of his relations with prostitutes while living in Venice. At first glance, these stories, which appear one after another, seem to be linked only in that they all concern an encounter with a prostitute. Yet on closer reading, the juxtaposition is more than thematic; it is critical. The first is the story of his encounter with the courtesan Giustina Padoana. The second is the well-known story of Zulietta and her “malformed nipple.” And the third narrative is that of Anzoletta, sold by her mother to Rousseau and his friend Carrio. The story of Zulietta has garnered a fair deal of commentary on its own (thanks to Starobinski).62 Rarely have the three episodes been read together, though this is clearly Rousseau’s intention.63 Taken together and alongside the previous reading of the Levite, these three stories offer another critique of the exchange of women— only now Rousseau turns to the overt buying and selling of women. The first narrative is rather pedestrian. An acquaintance of Rousseau’s chides him for his lack of interest in the celebrated courtesans of Venice. In order to tempt Rousseau, this acquaintance teasingly sends him the well-known courtesan Giustina Padoana. Out of embarrassment, Rousseau goes along with it. But he remains disinterested: he orders sorbet, asks her to sing, and tries to go away while nonetheless leaving her money. However, she refuses to take money she did not earn: “[S]he had the singular scruple of not wanting what she had not earned, and I had

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the singular stupidity of removing her scruple.”64 This is a rather unsurprising story, even banal, in which all the stereotypes are reaffirmed: the exchange of women among men is written as not only a norm of society but endorsed by the women themselves. The only caveat is Rousseau’s reluctance (which he overcomes with an even greater reluctance to be the subject of mockery) and his subsequent hypochondriac illness. For weeks afterward, Rousseau is certain that he has contracted a sexual disease, despite the doctor’s repeated assurance to the contrary. Rousseau only becomes convinced he is disease-free after the doctor suggests that Rousseau has a rare deformity of the penis that makes contracting a sexual disease especially difficult.65 The second tale concerns his relations with Zulietta and her supposed deformed nipple. (Rousseau’s purported deformity is obviously transferred to Zulietta.) The story begins much like the one of Padoana. Rousseau is invited to dine on the boat of Captain Olivet. Rousseau brings along his friend Carrio, the secretary of the embassy of Spain. Given the position of the latter, Rousseau expected a cannon salute and an ostentatious welcome. Disappointed and feeling slighted, Rousseau begins to sulk. The captain, though, has arranged a surprise for Rousseau and his guests: a gondola arrives with the very young courtesan Zulietta. Rousseau becomes smitten with her and arranges to meet her privately the next day. The account that follows, Rousseau states, is indicative of his “natural disposition,” and if one “wishes to know a man, dare to read the two or three pages that follow; you are about to know J.-J. Rousseau to the full.”66 Rousseau is at first enchanted by and overcome with desire for Zulietta. But suddenly, Rousseau begins to “feel a mortal coldness running through my veins; my legs shake me, and ready to faint, I sit down, and I weep like a child.”67 The sudden change in Rousseau is due to his realization of the situation—that he has bought Zulietta.68 This object which I dispose of is the masterpiece of nature and love; the mind, the body, everything about it is perfect; she is as good and generous as she is lovable and beautiful. Nobles, Princes ought to be her slaves; scepters ought to be at her feet. Nevertheless, here she is a wretched trollop abandoned to the public; a merchant Ship Captain disposes of; she has just thrown herself at my head, at me

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whom she knows as nothing, at me whose merit—which she cannot know—must be nothing in her eyes.69

Finding the situation to be incredulous (that Zulietta has been reduced to an object: bought, sold, and exchanged by men), Rousseau convinces himself there must be something wrong with her— she must be a monster. He searches and searches and finally convinces himself that she has a “malformed nipple.” Readers of this episode, such as Starobinski, have reversed the causality: Rousseau’s waning desire is caused by the “malformed nipple”; “discovering” the “deformity” leads to a lack of desire, rather than the other way around. In other words, Starobinski implies that it is Zulietta’s “defect” that is the catalyst for Rousseau’s lack of desire: a spontaneous and abrupt retreat, not the consequence of a deliberate and protracted justification. Starobinski writes, “The best example of the negative magic that transforms into a monster or creature who only a moment before had been supremely desirable is that of Zulietta and her malformed nipple.”70 Notably, Starobinski reads the episode as one of self-castration and a pretext for Rousseau’s inhibitions rather than a tale of political, sexual relations. “Rousseau symbolically castrates himself, taking as his pretext an insignificant imperfection in Zulietta’s body, which he turns into a decisive sign. But he might just as well have chosen any other detail as a pretext for his inhibition.”71 In reading the episode of Zulietta as a personal, sexual failure, Starobinski ignores Rousseau’s explicit overarching anxiety: the impossibility of reconciling “the perfections of that adorable girl with the unworthiness of her condition.”72 That is, the political dimension in which women are bought and exchanged is completely effaced. The third tale is more explicit. Rousseau and his friend Carrio decide to buy a young girl (a practice that was not uncommon in Venice, a city Rousseau notably came to disdain). The girl, Anzoletta, was eleven or twelve at the time and sold to them by her mother. Rousseau and Carrio planned to keep the girl until she was “mature.” Yet Rousseau’s feelings (and Carrio’s we are told) change: “Imperceptibly my heart became attached to the little Anzoletta, but with a paternal attachment, in which the senses has so little share that as it increased I would have been less and less able to make them enter, and I would have been horrified at approaching that girl when she became nubile, as at an abominable

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incest.”73 This third narrative is an episode in which Rousseau actually transforms the relationship from one of instrumental utility to one of solicitude and care. The “fathers” are transformed from those that buy and exchange women (and young girls) to those in the benevolent “parental” role of protector. This last narrative, though, doesn’t quite provide the redemptive status it suggests, for the narrative is quickly broken off and left unfinished. Rousseau is forced to quit Venice and thus unable to finish his “good work.” Therefore, rather than a nostalgic return to the first society—the self-enclosed, loving “family” that Rousseau describes in the Second Discourse (and The Levite of Ephraïm)—we are merely provided with a foreshortened (and nostalgic) glimpse of how contemporary relations based on money and power have been corrupted.

The Dedication As is well known, Rousseau dedicates the Second Discourse to his birthplace, the Republic of Geneva. In his “public homage,” Rousseau describes Geneva as exemplifying the best possible answer to the problematic relation between individuals and society that he delineated in the Second Discourse. Geneva, Rousseau states, has created the best balance between individual freedom and happiness on the one hand and “public order” on the other. While seeking the best maxims that good sense could dictate concerning the constitution of a government, I was so struck to see them all in practice in yours that even had I not been born within your wall, I should have believed myself unable to dispense with offering this picture of human society to that People which, of all others seems to me to possess society’s greatest advantages and to have best prevented its abuses.74

And in the ultimate compliment, Rousseau writes that even if he had not had the “good fortune” of being born in Geneva, it is exactly the place he would have chosen if he had been given the choice. Readers of the “Dedication” have been struck by the obvious hyperbole. The excessive praise, coupled with the fact that Rousseau does not in fact choose to live in Geneva, has led

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readers to question what Rousseau’s aims and intentions actually were in writing the “Dedication.” Was he being sincere? Or was the “Dedication” simply an idealized version of his birthplace? Alternatively, can one read the “Dedication” instead as a thinly veiled political critique of recent development in his homeland?75 Feminist readers of the “Dedication,” in contrast, have been less inclined to read Rousseau’s intention as ambivalent. For it seems certain that despite perhaps the overall ambivalence of the dedicatory epistle, in terms of his gender politics the aim is clear: the privatization of women (a message that seems to be even more forcefully articulated in the Letter to d’Alembert). In the following, though, I would like to suggest that the ambivalences other readers have found in the “Dedication” as a whole might be extended to the gender politics (and place of women) in the text. In order to show the ways in which we might read Rousseau’s supposed praise of domesticated women more ambivalently, I first consider the context of its composition. Next, I consider the ways in which Rousseau’s description of Genevan women, like that of the artisanal class, is an effort to politicize them rather than one of depoliticization and privatization. And finally I consider the ways in which, clearly, Geneva is not— despite Rousseau’s overt claims—his ideal. This will be especially clear in that Rousseau chooses, when the choice is his, not to live there. The dedicatory epistle to Geneva was written after Rousseau had completed the body of the text, in Paris in the spring of 1754. Although Rousseau had formed the idea of the “Dedication” and sketched the outline while still in Paris, the final draft was completed in Chambéry en route to Geneva. According to Rousseau in the Confessions, this trip to Geneva was made rather spontaneously. Rousseau’s “extremely close” friend (at least at the beginning of the trip), the Genevan Gauffecourt, had business in Geneva and suggested that Rousseau accompany him. Gauffecourt’s proposition came at a propitious moment. Rousseau had become thoroughly fed up with Paris. “The pace of Paris among people of pretensions was so little to my taste; the cabals of literary people, their manner in society were all so odious to me, so antipathetic, I found so little sweetness, openness of heart, frankness even in the company of my friends.”76 Thus, even though Rousseau was experiencing one of his recurring bouts of illness, he readily accepted Gauffecourt’s proposal. The party of three (Gauffecourt,

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Rousseau, and Rousseau’s companion, Therese le Vasseur) left for Geneva in June 1754. They did not, however, travel all the way to Geneva together. Rousseau and Therese took leave of Gauffecourt in Lyon. The overt reason for separating was Rousseau’s desire to make a detour through Savoy to visit his former benefactress/lover Mme de Warens in Chambéry. (However, this was not the sole reason for parting from Gauffecourt, as we shall see.) On June 12, while in Chambéry, Rousseau finished writing the “Dedication,” signing it peremptorily “Citizen of Geneva.”77 In the “Dedication,” Rousseau singled out two groups in particular who deserved admiration: artisans and women. Rousseau extols both and, in doing so, offers a rather transparent critique at the prejudices of the ruling elite.78 Immediately after praising the magistrates for their “virtues and talents,” “enlightenment and reason,” in governing a “free People,” Rousseau cites his father as the exemplary citizen. His father, Rousseau insists, was not extraordinary but rather typical of those of his class: Such are those educated and sensible men of whom, under the name of Workers and Common-people, those in other Nations have such base and false ideas. My Father, I joyfully admit it, was not distinguished among his Fellow Citizens, he was only what they all are; and such as he was, there is no Country where his company would not have been sought after, cultivated, and even profitably, by the most respectable men. It does not behoove me and, thank Heaven, it is not necessary to speak to you of the consideration which can be expected from you by men of that stamp: your equals by education as well as by the rights of Nature and of birth; your inferiors by their will and by the preference they owe your merit, and which they have accorded it, and for which you owe them in turn a kind of gratitude.79

Notable in this passage is Rousseau’s insistence on the equality of the artisans with other citizens, not only in terms of rights but also in terms of education. However, as is well known, Rousseau’s father was no longer living in Geneva and had not been for quite a while. When Rousseau was a young boy, his father had a dispute with a M. Gauthier, an officer in the French Army with connections in the Genevan Council. Isaac Rousseau, threatened with imprisonment, decided

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to exile himself in protest of what he considered unfair and prejudicial treatment because of his lower status (a decision that we shall see later Rousseau considered “heroic”). Rousseau’s praise of his father in the “Dedication” is surely meant to redress a wrong against his father (that his father was not treated with respect or shown the “gratitude” he deserved for being a good, respectable, and educated citizen). The claim that the Genevan magistrates were free of the “base” and “false” prejudices that other nations had toward the “workers” and “common people” was surely meant as a reproach. Rousseau then turns to a discussion of Genevan women. He writes, Could I forget that precious half of the Republic which creates the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good morals? Amiable and virtuous Countrywomen [Citoyennes], the fate of your sex will always be to govern ours. It is fortunate when your chaste power, exercised solely in conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the State and the public Happiness! Thus did women command at Sparta and thus do you deserve to command at Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honor and reason in the mouth of a tender wife? And who would despise not vain luxury seeing your simple and modest attire which, from the luster it derives from you, seem the most favorable to beauty? It is for you to maintain always, by your amiable and innocent dominion and by your insinuating wit, love of Laws in the State and Concord among the Citizens; to reunite, by happy marriages, divided families; and above all to correct, by the persuasive sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation, the extravagances our young People adopt in other countries, whence instead of the many useful things from which they could profit, they bring back, with a childish tone and ridiculous airs adopted among debauched women, only admiration for I know not what pretended grandeurs, frivolous compensations for servitude, which will never be worth as much as august freedom.80

Rousseau’s praise of Genevan women has not been well received by feminist readers. Such “praise” has been interpreted as Rousseau’s attempt to sequester women in the private sphere and limit their political role to cajoling adviser, at best. Landes, for example, has argued,

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Women and children in Rousseau’s discourse are being yoked to a conservative and ultimately passive function— that of serving the state. Women’s duty consists in subordinating her independent aims and interests to a higher goal, the ethical life of the community. But unlike her male companion, of whom Rousseau also demands the sublimation of particular interest on behalf of a desire for the public good, woman is barred completely from active participation in the very sphere that gives purpose to all her actions.

What is worse, according to Landes, subtending Rousseau’s adulatory view of Genevan women is the bifurcation of women into two stereotypical camps. Virtuous republican women, unlike the women whom Rousseau has observed within the absolutist public spheres of his day, are distinguished by their sexual innocence and chastity. His terms of approbation are derived from a strong moral vocabulary, a kind of double standard of female existence: pure or impure, chaste or unchaste, conjugal partner or adulteress, domestic or public. . . . Her confinement to the private realm functions as a public sign of her political virtue.81

Rousseau’s praise of Genevan women is thus, according to Landes, a means of privatizing and domesticating women in the name of public good and the virtue of the polity. And he does so by creating a division between “good,” modest, private, Genevan women and unchaste, public women elsewhere (i.e., Paris). However, Rousseau’s praise can be read as an attempt to correct the dominant opinion of Genevan women and revalorize their importance to the republic (similar to the attempt to correct and redefine opinions of his father and by extension the artisan class in general). The women of Geneva were the ones most likely to be accused of violating sumptuary laws.82 Rousseau’s discussion of Genevan women can thus be seen as a means of correcting prejudicial opinions by asserting an alternative view: modest, selfless, and oriented toward the public good (a less extreme version of the Spartan “female citizen”). Rousseau defends the women of Geneva from contemporary opinions (much as he defended his father, Isaac) by showing their importance to the future of the republic (we might here add that Rousseau calls them pointedly “citoyennes” even though women were barred from voting).

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Even before the “Dedication,” Rousseau insisted that women were often overlooked in their contributions to history. In a brief text from the 1740s titled, “Essay on the Important Events of Which Women Have been the Secret Cause,” Rousseau suggested that an important future historical project would concern the ways in which women have been influential behind the scenes in some of the most important historical events. In this essay, Rousseau proposes that the role of women, since outside of the boundaries of standard legislative and political roles, has been grossly underestimated. He writes, “I am not claiming to speak here about all the affairs that women have managed by themselves, either by virtue of their birth, or even by virtue of the posts to which their merit and their talents had raised them.” Instead, Rousseau suggests that events attributed to men should be reconsidered by future historians in terms of the role of women. “I shall limit myself solely to giving some idea of the memorable events the production of which peoples have attribute to the most sublime causes and that nevertheless owed their origin only to the secret instigation of women.”83 Of course, this could be interpreted as merely confirming Landes’s assessment that women can only act from within the sphere of domesticity. Yet Rousseau seems to be arguing something quite different. First, some of the most important events in history have their source not in overt political life (government, legislation, etc.) but in “hidden” passions (i.e., the influence of women). Secondly, Rousseau claims that women’s covert role in history is the effect of men’s refusal to allow women to participate (except for the few, exceptional women). In a humorous parody of a conte de fée written just after the “Dedication,” “La Reine Fantasque” or “Queen Whimsical” (1756), Rousseau suggests that women are prevented from entering political life by the irrational and absurd prejudices of men. “Queen Whimsical,” a veritable parody of essentialist notions of gender,84 mocks the opinion that men should invariably rule women (or that men are wiser or more reasonable by nature). Scholars will prove that is better for the people to obey blindly the rabid men that fate can give them as masters, than to choose reasonable leaders for themselves, that although one prohibits to a madman the government of his own possessions, it is good to leave him the supreme disposition of our possessions and of our lives, that the most insane of men is still preferable to the wisest of

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women, and that, even if the male or the first born is a monkey or a wolf, it would be a good policy for a Heroine or an Angel born after him to obey his wishes.85

Men would rather be governed by a madman than by a woman, even the “wisest of women.” Or as Kofman states, “They (men) prefer the stupidest man, even an animal, ‘a monkey or a wolf,’ to the wisest woman, since they (men) think women should always be subject to men’s will.”86 As noted, Rousseau, despite his exaltation of Geneva, in the end chooses not to live there— even after converting back to Protestantism and regaining his rights of citizenship. It seems certain that Rousseau seriously considered returning permanently to Geneva. Encouraged by his kind reception and by his Genevan friends, most notably Jacques-François De Luc, Rousseau states that he “resolved” to make Geneva his home: “[P]ressed by the good man De Luc whom importuned me ceaselessly and even more by my own inclination, I thought of returning to Paris only to dissolve my household, put my little affairs in proper order . . . and come back with Therese to establish myself at Geneva for the remainder of my days.”87 Of course, Rousseau never returns and chooses to remain in France. What happened? Did Geneva disappoint or did Rousseau just prefer France? The answer is both. Certainly, politically Rousseau believed that Genevan republicanism (no matter how limited or corrupt) was preferable to absolutist France. However, aesthetically and culturally, he was passionately attached to France. This attachment, Rousseau tells us in the Confessions, began when he was a boy and lasted throughout his life. Rousseau first became aware of his partiality in 1733 while living in Chambéry during the War of Polish Succession. Rousseau began to take an interest in political matters and found himself unaccountably, and against his interest, rooting for a French victory. [I] became impassioned for the success of this war, as if it concerned me very much. Until then I had not yet taken it into my head to think about public matters, and I began to read the gazettes for the first time, but with such a partiality for France that my heart beat with joy at its slightest advantages, and its reverses afflicted me as if they had fallen on me. If that madness had only been transient

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I would not deign to speak about it; but without any reason it became so rooted in my heart, that when I later played the antidespot and proud republican at Paris, in spite of myself I felt a secret predilection for that same nation that I found to be servile, and for that government which I affected to criticize. . . . I love them in spite of myself even though they mistreat me.88

At first, Rousseau is unaware of what causes him to madly and unaccountably love the French nation— despite his politics, despite his beliefs, and even against his interest. He finally realizes that his passion for France is a result of his passion for reading— and in particular French authors: For a long time I have sought the cause of this partiality, and I find it only in the occasion that saw it born. A growing taste for literature attached me to French books, to the Authors of these books, and to the country of these Authors. . . . [M]y continued readings always drawn from the same nation nourished my affection for it, and finally gave me a blind passion for it that nothing was able to overcome.89

Rousseau’s love affair with French literature (in spite of his “republican” diatribes against the French government) not only drove him to abandon Geneva as a boy (in search of “romance”) but, perhaps, kept him from returning to his native land. We might also consider that despite Rousseau’s praise of Geneva, he always felt his birthplace to be somewhat lacking. Undoubtedly Rousseau was taken with the natural beauty of the area (“the indefinable” beauty of Lake Geneva) but was disappointed by the inhabitants. When Rousseau periodically thought of returning to the vicinity of his native land and to a simple life, he became struck by the incongruity of the fantasy and the reality. When the ardent desire for that happy and sweet life which flees from me and for which I was born comes to enflame my imagination, it always settles itself in the Pays de Vaud, near the lake in the charming countryside. I absolutely need an orchard by the side of this lake and no other; I need a firm friend, a lovable woman, a cow, and a little boat. I will not enjoy a perfect happiness on earth until I have all that. I laugh at the simplicity with which I have gone to that country several times solely to seek this imaginary happiness on earth until I have all that [my emphasis].

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That Rousseau’s desire is imaginary is evident from the discrepancy between his dream and the reality. “I have always been surprised to find inhabitants there, above all the women, of a completely different character from the one I seek. How ill-matched! To me the country and the people with whom it is covered have never appeared to be made for each other.” 90 (Are the women, then, too “domestic” for Rousseau’s taste?) No wonder Rousseau’s fondest memory of the summer of 1754 was a seven-day trip he took with De Luc and others around the lake of Geneva (a trip, incidentally, that would inspire the setting for Julie).91 Rousseau always found the landscape and natural beauty of the area to be more inspiring than the people or way of life. Rousseau thus believed that he should want to live in Geneva and that he should desire a simple, conventional life, given his politics. But he could never reconcile himself to actually doing so. After returning to Paris, Rousseau was presented an ideal situation that put to rest any latent plans to return to his native country. Mme d’Epinay offered Rousseau a small lodging on her estate. The cabin, the Hermitage, fitted Rousseau’s desires and needs perfectly. Situated at the edge of the forest of Montmorency, the Hermitage provided the rustic countryside Rousseau desired and evoked pleasant memories of his younger years in Les Charmettes with Mme de Warens. It also gave him financial security and stability. Rousseau would be able to support himself by copying music part-time and still have time to pursue his various writing projects. In short, Mme d’Epinay’s generosity gave Rousseau the opportunity to have the life he wanted but could ill afford on his own: a tranquil life in the countryside, near Paris and his friends, but isolated enough to enjoy solitude. And finally we might consider two events that occurred en route to Geneva that Rousseau assigned in the Confessions premonitory status (albeit retrospectively). That is, we can (along with Rousseau) read these two events as portending Rousseau’s eventual disappointment (and regret) in an overidealization of Geneva and its virtuous (“masculine”) politics. The first concerned Rousseau’s traveling companion, the Genevan Gauffecourt. Gauffecourt, as it turns out, was uncommonly lecherous, attempting by any means possible to seduce Rousseau’s companion, Therese. Rousseau marks this event— seemingly somewhat trivial— as one of momentous

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import. Indeed, in retrospect it becomes a pivotal moment in his view of the world. “I must mark this trip as the epoch of the first experience which, up to the age of forty-two which I was at that time, damaged the fully trusting natural disposition with which I was born, and to which I had always abandoned myself without reserve and without disadvantage.” When Rousseau learns from Therese what Gauffecourt has been up to, he states that he is absolutely shocked and dismayed. I believed I was dreaming. I fell from the clouds when I learned that since our departure my friend M. de Gauffecourt, more than sixty years old, gouty, impotent, worn out from pleasures and enjoyments, was laboring to corrupt a person who was no longer beautiful or young, who belonged to his friend, and that he did so by the basest, most shameful means to the point of presenting her his purse, to the point of trying to excite her through reading from an abominable book, and through the sight of the filthy pictures it was full. . . . For the first time in my life I, who until then had believed friendship to be inseparable from all the lovable and noble feelings that make all its charm, saw myself forced to join it with disdain, and to remove my trust and my esteem from a man I love and by whom I believe myself loved! Sweet and holy illusion of friendship, Gauffecourt first raised your veil from my eyes.92

The significance that Rousseau (later) assigns to this event could be read in different ways. It could signify the first of the many betrayals that Rousseau would feel himself to be the victim of in the future (by both his Genevan and Parisian friends). But it could also be interpreted as an omen, the first sign of Rousseau’s future disillusionment with the virtuous, “masculine” Republic of Geneva. Might not Gauffecourt represent the disparity between Rousseau’s idealized vision of Genevan masculine virtue and the reality signified by the real-life Genevan—the “gouty” and “impotent” Gauffecourt? This event alone would seem to be rather insignificant in itself. However, immediately following this narrative, Rousseau recounts another. This other account is also one of betrayal, only this time the guilty party is Rousseau. Stopping off to see Mme de Warens, he is shocked by her state of poverty. Although Rousseau gives her money and entreats her (unsuccessfully) to come live with him and Therese, he feels guilt over abandoning her.

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I should have left everything to follow her, to attach myself to her until her last hour, and share her fate whatever it might be. . . . I groaned over her and did not follow her. Of all the instances of remorse I have felt in my life this is the most lively and most permanent. Because of that I deserve the terrible chastisements that have not ceased to weigh me down since then; may they atone for my ingratitude.93

Of course, if Rousseau had followed Mme de Warens, he would have never gone to Geneva. Does Rousseau in later years and upon reflection consider his return to Geneva a mistake? Can we read Rousseau’s guilt on a symbolic level: of (temporarily) abandoning the “feminine” in favor of the “masculine” republic of Geneva? Though Rousseau will never set foot in Geneva again, he will not yet give up his republican dreams. Geneva, for the next few years, will continue to function as a somewhat ambivalent alternative to absolutist France. Paternal benevolence and affectionate familial relations remain preferable to the rapacious narcissism of Parisian society. In the next chapter, I consider the ways in which Rousseau’s nostalgic turn toward Geneva continues to operate in his works but, more importantly, how he begins to offer a critique of this ostensible ideal. This critique will suggest an alternative— one that is coded neither “masculine” nor “feminine” but is based on egalitarian and reciprocal relations.

CH A P T ER

2

The Arts: From the Letter to d ’Alembert to The Reveries of the Solitary Walker

Four years after the “Dedication,” Rousseau again turns his attention toward Geneva. However, this time Rousseau’s focus is the arts rather than politics. In 1757 an article written by Jean le Rond d’Alembert on the Republic of Geneva appeared in the seventh edition of the Encyclopedia. In his essay, “Geneva,” d’Alembert argued that the theater which was not permitted in Geneva at the time, should be. The theater, d’Alembert claimed, would give Genevans “a fineness of tact” and help them acquire a “delicacy of sentiments, which is very difficult to acquire without the help of theatrical performances.”1 When Rousseau read the article, his response was swift. In a flurry of just three weeks, despite being sick and ill housed, Rousseau composed his reply, the Letter to d’Alembert (1758). Rousseau’s rejoinder took offense at d’Alembert’s suggestion that a theater in Geneva would improve the sensibilities of the citizenry. Instead, Rousseau argued that the establishment of a theater would be catastrophic for the republic. Rousseau’s reaction was not surprising given that he had previously argued in the First Discourse (1749) and subsequently in the (somewhat more nuanced) “Preface to Narcissus” (1753) that the arts and sciences did not improve morals or lead to progress. In the First Discourse, Rousseau writes, While Governments and Laws provide for the safety and well-being of assembled men, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sentiment of that original liberty for which they have been born, make

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them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples.2

In the “Preface to Narcissus,” Rousseau rhetorically asked what we had gained by the increase in the arts. His answer: “Much babble, some wealthy people, and some argumentative people, that is to say, enemies of virtue and common sense.”3 Thus the Letter ’s stance against the theater was not unexpected. What was shocking, however, was Rousseau’s seemingly vicious attack on women, and particularly the women of Paris. D’Alembert, in his response to the Letter, decried Rousseau’s “violent outburst” against women.4 This “violent outburst” against Parisian women has since become notorious among feminist (and even nonfeminist) readers. Joel Schwartz, for example, argues that the Letter signals a change in Rousseau’s position regarding women. In earlier works, Schwartz writes, Rousseau “stresses the injustices done to women [and] the legal restrictions limiting their freedom,” which “seems to indicate the existence of an earlier, feminist Rousseau.”5 In the Letter, however, Rousseau reverses his position. “Now,” Schwartz states, “he favors the separation of the sexes, so as to encourage their differentiation and their mutual dependence. . . . Rousseau’s concern [is] to accentuate the sexual division.”6 Feminist readers have concurred with Schwartz’s assessment (again with the exception of MacCannell). The Letter has come to be considered by feminist readers as Rousseau’s harshest and most overt attack on women and the “feminine.” Since there are far too many feminist critics to name and far too many passages to cite, I will briefly point to just a few that are characteristic of this reading. Nicole Fermon, for example, in Domesticating Passions writes, “In the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau’s praise for the morals of Genevan women contrasts sharply with his insistence that the moral degeneration of any people originates with women.”7 Similarly, Sarah Kofman states, “Thus when she assumes the right to command, woman fails to heed the voice of the master; seeking to usurp his rights, she unleashes disorder, misery, scandal, and dishonor. Far from guaranteeing his freedom, the new empire of women enslaves, deforms and emasculates man.”8 And finally Linda Zerilli writes, “Only the sex segregated circles and societies can protect the masculine subject against his female double.” 9

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In short, the Letter has come to be the key text cited by Rousseau’s feminist readers as evidence of his nefarious sexual politics in which women and “femininity” are cast as having disruptive, emasculating, and degenerative effects on both men and the political order. Only sex segregation and the banishment of women from cultural and political life can serve as remedy. And the Letter has been consistently read as an exaltation of the “masculine” republican virtue (Geneva) at the expense of the “feminine” culture of Parisian society. Undoubtedly, a quick reading of the Letter would seem to make the previous interpretations irrefutable; certainly it is unquestionable that in the Letter, Rousseau praises Genevan culture and disparages Parisian society. This has, as these comments attest, been interpreted as Rousseau’s fear of powerful and public women/salonnières of Paris and (another) idealization of the “chaste” and domestic women of Geneva. I would like to suggest, however, that another reading is possible. First, it seems questionable whether Rousseau believed that women in eighteenth-century France had actually gained power and, as such, that France could be considered “feminine.” Instead Rousseau suggests that the “public display” of women, their “spectacularization,”10 is not indicative of newly gained power in the “public sphere” but the opposite. Thematically, the Letter reiterates much of what Rousseau has already stated in previous writings, particularly the Second Discourse. However, the Letter substitutes proper nouns (Paris, Geneva) for the historical epochs of the Second Discourse. Paris signifies the last stage of history, the “second” “State of Nature” at the end of history in which each individual has again become “nothing.”11 The relatively brief allusion to Geneva’s similarity with Sparta in the “Dedication” to the Second Discourse is now fully codified. Geneva is cast as the modern interpretation of the Lacedaemonian city-state— or alternatively, it resembles the first societies of the mythic “Golden Age” articulated in the Second Discourse. It is noteworthy that, although Geneva is the professed topic of the Letter, it occupies relatively little space in the text. Instead, nearly two-thirds of the essay is devoted to a discussion of a history of the theater and its effects on contemporary Parisian society. Rousseau cites the reason for this as a “repugnance to putting

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my fellow citizens on Stage.”12 Rousseau’s language—“putting on stage”—not only signifies his hesitancy in “displaying” Geneva to the world but also alerts the reader that the (eventual) portrayal of Geneva, if not the absolute “methodological fiction” of the state of nature in the Second Discourse, will be to a degree a theatrical production, a fictionalized account. This fictional status will be reinforced by Rousseau’s continuous anachronistic comparisons of Geneva with both ancient republics and mythic first societies. This fictional and idealized account of Geneva is also apparent in Rousseau’s frequent admissions that he is describing a Geneva culled from his boyhood memories and that what he describes no longer exists (if it ever did).13 Indeed, at several points in the text, Rousseau will concede that his description of Geneva is far removed from reality.14 But more importantly, Rousseau will suggest, somewhat obliquely, that the ideal itself is problematic. I will begin reading the Letter by first considering the context in which it was written. Rousseau wrote the Letter in the aftermath of his one and only great love affair. The effects of the affair and its consequences, Rousseau tells us, can be read throughout the text. In particular, Rousseau marked the Letter as a significant turning point and departure from his earlier “republican” writings. Rousseau considered the Letter to be less “austere” and more “tender” than his earlier works, a “romantic” work— a suggestion that seems contrary to his ostensible diatribe against love and women. In order to fully grasp Rousseau’s critique of Parisian society, I will refer, alongside the Letter, to the letters of St. Preux about Paris in Julie, written around the same time. These fictional love letters (and significantly they are love letters) will reinforce and extend Rousseau’s argument made in the Letter that Parisian society is characterized by an absence of love. I will then consider why Rousseau privileges the (sex-segregated) cercles and public fetes (in which the traversal of sexual boundaries is not only authorized but demanded) of Geneva. In particular I will focus on the fetes. Rousseau advocates the extension of public festivals not only as a means of providing entertainment but also as a means of consolidating community feeling. Rousseau suggests that such public entertainments, focused on communal, public pleasures, encourage and solidify (equal) relations with others, the community, and the republic. These popular festivals thus stand

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in stark contrast to the private pleasures of the theater, which only serve to atomize individuals. “People think they come together in the theatre and it is here they are isolated. It is there that they go to forget their friends, neighbors, and relations in order to cry for the misfortunes of the dead, or to laugh at the expense of the living.”15 At the end of the Letter, the reader is left with what seems a rather untenable choice: the annihilation of difference (extreme individualism, narcissism) and inequality of modern society or the creation of differences (sexual difference, otherness) through sex segregation and gender-defined roles for the good of the state and the community. However, we can read in the Letter an alternative to this absolute dichotomy between individualism and community, public and private, good and bad entertainment. This alternative is suggested most poignantly in a boyhood memory: a carnivalesque celebration in which social, sexual boundaries are spontaneously lifted. Although this example is merely suggestive rather than conclusive in the Letter, in Rousseau’s last work, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, this alternative is revisited. In the Reveries, Rousseau considers a variety of popular entertainments that produce different effects on sexual/political/social relations: regressive, negligible, or positive. Rousseau displaces the dichotomous structure of the Letter between the benevolent paternalism of Geneva and the rapacious narcissism of absolutist France by offering a third alternative. This third alternative is one in which women/girls are included and even given power. It is important to note that although the Reveries focuses on popular entertainments, it is literature that will be privileged as the ideal medium and ideal form of entertainment. This is apparent not only in that Rousseau, in his most “positive” account, will turn to literary metaphors, but also in that he writes it down, makes the story “public”— that is, he publishes it. The privileging of the literary model— and particularly romantic fiction—is best exemplified in Rousseau’s own work and particularly in Julie. I will end the discussion with a brief consideration of Rousseau’s justification for the romantic novel as a preferable form of pleasure and entertainment (since it combines both passion and the political, pleasure and edification) in the two prefaces to Julie.

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Rousseau in Love As indicated at the end of the last chapter, just after his trip to Geneva, Rousseau moved into the Hermitage, the house that Mme d’Epinay had refurbished specifically for him on the grounds of her Chateau de la Chevrette. Rousseau, it would seem, had the ideal setup: a charming house set in the countryside, no worries about money, time to work and write at his leisure. Yet despite having “friends of both sexes to whom [he] was attached by the purest friendship”16 and despite having Therese as a companion, Rousseau felt lonely and that something was lacking. At first, Rousseau blames his melancholy on the social obligations he was, out of politeness and gratitude, forced to fulfill not only to Mme d’Epinay but also to the public and visitors from Paris. “I had an isolated residence in a charming solitude; as master of my home, I could live there in my way without there being anyone to control me: but this habitation imposed duties on me, sweet to fulfill, but indispensable.”17 He begins to compare his present state negatively with the freedom of his youth and to compare the Hermitage with les Charmettes (and his time with Mme de Warens). Memories of his youth lead him unawares to begin to take stock of his life. He suddenly realizes the source of his feelings of melancholic lack: Jean-Jacques has never been in love. How could it be that up to then, even though I had a naturally expansive soul for which to live was to love, I had not found a friend entirely my own. . . . How could it be that with such inflammable senses, with a heart entirely full of love I had not at least one time burned with its flame for a specific object? Devoured by the need to love without ever having been able to satisfy it very well, I saw myself reaching the gateway of old age, and dying without having lived.18

This realization at first strikes the reader as strange. For doesn’t Rousseau have a companion and a lover? Is he not in love with Therese? Or, at the least, wasn’t he at one time? Rousseau provides a startling answer in the Confessions. Not only was he not then in love with Therese; he never was. Despite having lived with Therese for twelve years, and despite even marrying her many years later, Rousseau states that he never “felt the slightest spark of love for her.” Moreover, Rousseau, alone with Therese, realizes

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that he has made a mistake in not educating her. “It was then that I keenly felt the wrong I had committed during our first relation of not taking advantage of the docility her love gave her in order to adorn her with talents and knowledge, which, by keeping us closer in our retreat, would have filled up her time and mine pleasantly without ever letting us feel the tediousness of tête-àtête.” They have nothing to talk about. “It is above all in solitude that one feels the advantage of living with someone who knows how to think.”19 Feeling isolated, Rousseau, despite his efforts, cannot control his melancholic reveries. “Everything cooperated in plunging me back into that too seductive slackness for which I was born but which I should have been freed forever by the harsh and severe tone to which a long effervescence has just raised me.”20 The “long effervescence” Rousseau refers to began with his epiphany on the road to Vincennes and the writing of the First Discourse. But now this long effervescent focus on “truth, freedom, and virtue” is over. Living away from Paris, Rousseau becomes less harsh and less indignant and begins to contemplate himself. Passion reasserts itself. He begins to dream. His reveries conjure up visions of the girls/ women of his youth. I saw all the objects that had given me emotion in my youth assembled around me, Mlle Galley, Mlle de Graffenried, Mlle de Breil, Mme Basile, Mme de Larnage, My pretty students, and all the way to the piquant Zulietta. . . . I saw myself surrounded by a seraglio of Houris from my old acquaintances, the most lively taste for whom was not a new feeling for me. My blood catches fire and sparkles, my head turns in spite of my already greying hair, and behold the grave Citizen of Geneva, behold the austere Jean-Jacques nearly fortyfive years old suddenly becoming the extravagant shepherd again.21

Rousseau becomes “intoxicated” with the desire for love; an “intoxication” that will last for the next six years (during which time he will write not only Julie, Emile, and the Social Contract but also the Letter.) Too aware of how ridiculous he might appear to so belatedly attempt to play the lady’s man and not wishing to upset his domestic arrangement, Rousseau sublimates his desire by inventing and fantasizing about two women.

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The impossibility of reaching real beings threw me into the country of chimeras and seeing nothing existing worthy of my delirium, I nourished it in an ideal world which my creative imagination soon peopled with beings in accordance with my heart. Never did this resource come more opportunely and never was it to found so fecund. In my continuous ecstasies I intoxicated myself with torrents of the most delightful feelings that ever entered the heart of a man.22

He begins devoting whole days to his reveries, extending and embellishing them: he imagines what these two girls (“the two idols of my heart”) might look like, how they would act, and where they would live (he chooses Vevey, “maman’s”—Mme de Warens’s—native home). “After many useless efforts to ward off all these fictions, I was finally completely seduced by them, and I no longer occupied myself with anything but trying to put some order and sequence in them in order to make a sort of Novel out of them.”23 He knows that people will be critical, but he has no choice; the compulsion is too great, and he is powerless to resist: “Being completely subjugated, I had to submit at all costs, to brave the ‘what will people say.’ ”24 He begins to write everything down, and the beginning of his romantic novel, Julie, is thus formed. During the writing of Julie and in the midst of his dreaming of Julie, Claire, and St. Preux, Rousseau will meet his only “love,” Sophie d’Houdetot (who will become Rousseau’s model for Julie, significantly after the fact, with reality following fiction). In the aftermath of this love affair, Rousseau will write the Letter. His “fatal” (though platonic) love for Sophie will lead Rousseau to leave the Hermitage after a falling out with not only Mme d’Epinay (who became enraged over his preference for Sophie) but also Grimm and eventually Diderot (who both sided with Mme d’Epinay). “Without me noticing it, I described my present situation; in it I depicted Grimm, Mme d’Epinay, Mme d’Houdetot, St. Lambert, myself. How many delightful tears did I shed while writing it! Alas! In it one feels only too much that the love, that fatal love which I was exerting myself to cure, had not yet departed from my heart.” This work’s “peculiar tone” (so very different from the “harsh and severe tone” of his earlier work) will have as its “secret causes” all that has transpired between him and Sophie and the troubles this relationship has stirred up among his friends. “Full of everything that had just happened to me, still

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alarmed by so many violent movements, my heart mixed the feeling of its pains to the ideas that meditation of my subject had caused to be born in me; my labor felt the effect of his mixture.” Yet Rousseau’s Letter, he states, was not a bitter document but rather one full of “tenderness and gentleness of the soul” and the first work in which he “found charms in the labor” ( Julie was only half finished at the time).25 The Letter, MacCannell has significantly pointed out, can be described thus as a sort of “love letter” to Sophie d’Houdetot.26

Tragedy and Comedy Let us turn to the Letter. In his answer to d’Alembert’s enthusiastic support for a theater in Geneva, Rousseau begins by questioning the role and effect of the theater in general. Contrary to d’Alembert’s claim that the theater can have positive effects on society, Rousseau insists that the theater has no edifying role whatsoever. The theater merely reflects or exacerbates the existing values and opinions of a society. “Let no one,” Rousseau writes, “then attribute to the theater the power to change sentiments or morals, which it can only follow and embellish. An author who would brave the general taste would soon write for himself alone.”27 The theater cannot change public opinion or values because it is public opinion that dictates what is shown in the theater. Its function is specular. “Opinion does not depend on the theatre, since, rather than giving the law to the public, the theater receives the law from it. And, as to the pleasure that can be had in the theater, its whole effect is to bring us back more often.”28 If the theater is a mirror of society, there is also the danger that it will take the place of any real emotions or relations. To those who claim that tragedy has an edifying effect on the audience by teaching lessons of virtue and compassion, Rousseau replies, “In the final accounting, when a man has gone to admire fine actions in stories and to cry for imaginary miseries, what more can be asked of him? Is he not satisfied with himself? Does he not applaud his fine soul?” The theater substitutes an admiration of virtue for real virtue and compassion for fictional beings for real compassion. “In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves.”29

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If tragedy is ineffectual in promoting virtuous acts because of its distance from the present, it luckily has just as little effect on encouraging vices. “Happily, the tragedy such as it exists is so far from us, it presents beings so enormous, so bloated, so chimerical, that the example of the vices is hardly more contagious that that of their virtues is useful; and, the extent it wants to instruct us less, it does us also less harm.”30 The scenes of tragedy have become too far removed from the modern era to have any great effect, either good or bad. The same cannot be said of comedy. Comedy, according to Rousseau, is much more dangerous. The ostensible function of comedy is self-critique, to point out the foibles of one’s era. However, the problem with comedy is that it can only mock and “make fun of the vices, without ever making virtue loved.”31 Furthermore, even the virtuous are mocked. Rousseau cites Molière’s Misanthrope as an example. Alceste, the main character, is presented as “ridiculous” since he lacks the “worldliness” contemporary society is so fond of. In post-Molière theater, comedy has become even more hateful. Without the “genius” or “probity” of Molière, eighteenth-century comedic writers dedicate themselves to “flattering debauched young men and women without morals.”32 Of course, Rousseau concedes that more instructive plays could be written. But they would be, like religion, boring. No one would come see them. “Our contemporary authors, guided by the best intentions, write more refined plays. But what happens then? They are no longer really comic and produce no effect. They are more instructive, if you please; but they are even more boring. One might as well go to a sermon.”33

Paris and the Theater of “Love” In the wake of tragedy’s irrelevance and the increased depravity of comedy, the eighteenth-century theater, Rousseau argues, has turned to romance. In the decadence of the theatre, we are constrained to substitute for the true beauties, now eclipsed, little pleasurable accessories capable of impressing the multitude. No longer able to maintain the strength of comic situations and character, the love interest

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has been reinforced. The same has been done in tragedy to take the place of situations drawn from political concerns we no longer have, and of simple and natural sentiments which no longer move anyone.34

In the Letter, as is well known, Rousseau is critical of this development and warns of the disastrous effect such a theater would have on the Republic of Geneva. Feminist readers have interpreted his critique as the fear of the new visibility and power of women in eighteenth-century France, not only on stage but in the public sphere. His critique is read as an effort to keep women in the home and protect the “masculine” culture and politics of Geneva from a “feminine” influence. And at first glance this seems to be the case, for directly after the previous excerpt, he states, “[A] natural effect of this sort of play is to extend the empire of the Fair Sex, to make women and girls the preceptors of the public, and to give them the same power over the audience that they have over their lovers. Do you think, Sir [d’Alembert] that this order is without its difficulties; and that in taking so much effort to increase the ascendancy of women, men will be the better governed for it?”35 However, as MacCannell has noted, “When Rousseau gives the woman-onstage the ‘same power over her audience as she has over her lover,’ he is, of course, not giving her much in the current system of relations.”36 If we recall our argument in the previous chapter on the Second Discourse, “moral love” (or the love relation) in contemporary society is not relational at all but based on self-love (or amour-propre). Thus, if the “current system of relations” is modeled on (male) amour-propre (or narcissism), on the absence of love relations (or relations in general), then it would seem that the power of women in contemporary Parisian society and/or over her (non)lover is negligible. And indeed, this is what Rousseau repeatedly insists upon in both the Letter and Julie. Despite the emphasis on love both in the theater and in society, love is essentially absent.37 Love relations have been supplanted by the appearance of love, its theatrical double: gallantry (“galanterie”). “They [women] are flattered without being loved; they are served without being honored; they are surrounded by agreeable persons but they no longer have lovers; and the worst is that the former, without having the sentiments of

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the latter, usurp nonetheless the rights . . . the general spirit of gallantry stifles both love and genius.”38 And Rousseau adds, I find it hard to conceive how men can honor women so little as to dare to address these stale amorous speeches ceaselessly to them [women], these insulting and mocking compliments to which they do not even deign to give an air of good faith. When we insult women by these evident lies, does it not amount to declaring to them rather plainly no obliging truth can be found to say to them? It happens only too often that love makes illusions for itself about the qualities of the one who is loved; but is there a question of love in all this tedious jargon? Do not all those who use it use it equally for all women?39

St. Preux, in his portrait of Parisian women in Julie, makes the same point: “The heart has nothing to do with these liaisons, only convenience and certain surface formalities are considered. . . . A liaison of the gallant type lasts little longer than a social call; it is a collection of pretty conversations and pretty letters filled with portraits, maxims, philosophy, and wit.” And in a passage that explicitly recalls the Second Discourse and the second “state of nature”—“the last stage of inequality,” in which “all individuals become equals again because they are nothing”40 —Rousseau (via St. Preux) claims the “love relation” has been reduced to convenience and physical need in which “all are equally good”: “[T]he first woman, the first man to pass by, one’s lover or another, a man is after all a man, they are all almost equally good.”41 The system of relations Rousseau describes is one of nonrelation, simulacra of real relations that cover up its own (male) narcissism. The place of women in this system is either “spectacle”/ object (actresses or society women) of the male gaze or man’s mimetic double (les salonnières). In “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” Luce Irigaray has argued that these are the two conventional “roles” available to women in a masculine economy. It seems that two possible roles are available to her, roles that are occasionally or frequently contradictory. Woman could be man’s equal. In this case she would enjoy, in a more or less near future, the same economic, social, political rights as men. She would be a potential man. But on the exchange market— especially, or

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exemplarily, the market as sexual exchange—woman would also have to preserve and maintain what is called femininity. The value of a woman would accrue to her from her maternal role, and in addition, from her “femininity.” But in fact that “femininity” is a role, an image, a value, imposed upon women by male systems of representation. In this masquerade of femininity, the woman loses herself, and loses herself by playing on her femininity. The fact remains that this masquerade requires an effort on her part for which she is not compensated. Unless her pleasure comes simply from being chosen as an object of consumption by desire by masculine “subjects.” And, moreover, how can she do otherwise without being “out of circulation”?42

As Irigaray notes, both of these “roles” are actually premised on the exclusion of women. The first in that it suggests women transform themselves into copies of men: adopt their way of thinking and being and, in Rousseau’s parlance, their amour-propre. In the second “role,” women are barred from the position of “subject” and relegated to an object of (male) desire and fantasy. The objectification of women (and construction of woman as object), in particular, is exacerbated by the contemporary theater’s emphasis on love and romance (and explains Rousseau’s particularly vociferous critique of “romantic” theater). Recall Rousseau’s argument that the theater can only “embellish” or “reflect” a given culture’s “morals.” The very medium of the theater—visual spectacle, display—reinforces the current structure of relations along a specular model: spectator/subject and object. Akin to Irigaray’s argument on “feminine” masquerade, Rousseau suggests that women (in particular, but not always) will function as objects in this libidinal economy of narcissism, put on “display” and exhibited before the male gaze.43 In a passage that recalls Rousseau’s critique of prostitution/prostitutes (les filles publiques), he writes, “[T]he exposition of the Ladies and the Maidens all tricked out in their very best and put on display in their boxes as though they were in the window of a shop waiting for buyers.”44 Actresses (and actors for that matter), according to Rousseau, are perhaps the perfect exemplars of this new objectification. Not only are actresses on “exhibition,” but they have lost any trace of subjectivity: they merely speak the words that men “dictate” to them.45 Of course, it could be objected that the salonnières are more than just ventriloquists of masculine desire; they speak their

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own opinions and desires. That is, one might claim, as Zerilli does, that they are a different sort of “public” woman and that Rousseau’s critique of the women of the salon has nothing to do with objectification but is instead a barely concealed fear of powerful women. Zerilli writes, “To talk about women is scandalous. Far more scandalous, however, is the woman who talks, who steps out of her function as sign, as the signifier of a ‘common brotherhood.’ Masculinity dissipates in the acoustic field of female voice.”46 However, it seems that Rousseau does not fear the woman who talks, for indeed, this is what he most desires. (Recall Rousseau’s regret at not having educated Therese and thus being unable to have serious discussions with her, to talk to her. This lack leads him to fall in love with the educated Sophie, with whom he spends all of his time discussing and exchanging letters on “grave and serious” matters.47) We can thus read Rousseau’s critique of the salonnières as something other than a (barely sublimated) fear of powerful women but rather a critique of the metaphoric and literal exclusion of women. In Paris . . . women like spending their time only with men, only in their presence are they at ease. In each society the mistress of the house is almost always alone in the middle of a circle of men. . . . So that is where a woman learns to speak, and act, and think like them. . . . That is where, sole recipient of their petty gallantries, she placidly enjoys those insulting compliments to which they trouble not to lend even an appearance of good faith. But so what? Seriously or in jest, they pay attention to her and that is all she wants.

Rousseau portrays a single woman alone (and if another woman joins the group, a “ceremonious” tone and a certain “unease” between the two women becomes evident)48 amidst a group of men. She mimes their gestures, their speech, their manner of thinking in order to gain a semblance of power. She excludes other women in order to be the sole attention of the male gaze. But the power she gains is illusory. Her role is arbiter rather than subject. Her compensation is attention and flattery. Of course such flattery and attention, Rousseau concedes, is not without its pleasures and can appeal to a certain base and childish vanity. “All of this, in truth, is to make fun of them [women],

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to tax them with a puerile vanity; and I do not doubt that the prudent among them are indignant about it.”49 Thus, Rousseau at times seems to blame women for encouraging and taking advantage of such gallantry in the Letter. However, in Julie, he states the opposite: “[T]hey (women) do evil impelled by men, and good on their own initiative.”50 Indeed, Rousseau (via St. Preux) argues that it is Parisian women who do the most public good and are the most involved with the public: helping the people with legal issues and taxes, giving money to the poor, doling out advice to neighbors and friends.51 As Nicole Fermon in Domesticating Passions asserts, we can view Rousseau as “mak[ing] a claim both for women’s superior social conscience and for the activist approach they bring to political life.”52 Nonetheless, no reading of the Letter can ignore what appear to be Rousseau’s most blatant condemnations of the intellectual and artistic capabilities of women. Notoriously, Rousseau states that women are incapable of creating artistic or intellectual works of merit and are not worth listening to.53 However, his most infamous and vitriolic comments on women, I would argue, need to be read ironically. For after each of these passages, Rousseau is quick to counter with an exception, suggesting that he is parroting the dominant “masculine” view rather than his own: Sappho (who wrote homoerotic poetry), the (protofeminist) Françoise de Graffigny, and the love letters Lettres portugaises (which were believed at the time to be the work of a seventeenth-century nun).54 All were works of love and sentiment similar to Rousseau’s work in progress, Julie. And in granting exceptions, Rousseau explains, “It is not to a woman that I refuse the talents of men, but to women.”55 This statement clearly suggests that Rousseau is not speaking about a natural or essentialist conception of “woman” but the specific construction of women in eighteenth-century France (as vain, superficial objects of desire) and the consequent construction of femininity itself as “spectacle” and display. We might also consider the six real-life “love” letters Rousseau wrote to Sophie d’Houdetot just prior to the Letter to d’Alembert. In the “Moral Letters” (1757–58), Rousseau, as Christopher Kelly points out, believed that exchanging letters with an educated woman was more useful and productive then all of his previous works for the general public.56 However, Rousseau also hoped and considered that these letters would be published and the merits of

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his friend “publicized,” indicating that he was not against a certain “publication” of women. He writes, These letters were not written to be made public and I do not need to tell you that they never will be without your assent. But if circumstances allow you to grant it someday, how willingly would the purity of the zeal that attaches me to you make its declaration public. Without appearing in this work, perhaps neither your name nor mine would escape the suspicions of those who knew us; as for myself, I would be more proud than humiliated by this acuteness and from it I would only obtain more esteem by showing the esteem that I have for you. With regard to you, lovable Sophie, although you do not need my approbation to be honored, I would like the entire earth to have its eyes on you. . . . They will say that I have bestowed neither my attachment nor my esteem lavishly, particularly to women.57

One could then argue that Rousseau wishes to put Sophie on “display,” to exhibit her. However, such a display is qualitatively different from that of the theater. First of all, it is discursive rather than visual, suggesting de-specularization. Second, as textual it requires the engagement and participation of the reader rather than the passive, visual absorption of the spectator. Third, it is an idiosyncratic and subjective (yet idealized) portrait of her character rather than a reflection of the dominant values (unlike comedy, tragedy, or the modern, gallant theater). And finally, it is accessible to all rather than the exclusive few— and thus open to emulation.

Geneva Let us turn to Rousseau’s counter example, Geneva. In contrast to the atomized society of Paris, Rousseau portrays Geneva as a republic of hardworking (male) citizens devoted to humanity, fatherland, and family. Almost completely other-directed, the Genevan citizen stands in stark contrast to his narcissistic French counterpart. Of course, such devoted citizens can only be fashioned by extreme measures: sex segregation and the sequestering of women in the home. The stability, coherence, and equality of the citizens are maintained by keeping differences (including sexual difference) to a minimum through forced isolation. The

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women and men of Geneva, just like their ancient counterparts in Sparta, live almost completely separate lives. Even leisure time— or perhaps, especially leisure time— is spent separately. The men have their circles or clubs to go to after a day’s work. These circles, Rousseau writes, “still preserve some image of ancient morals among us.” In these circles, the men can engage in “grave and serious” discussions, drink, and participate in vigorous games and exercise (hunting, boating, swimming, etc.). In a sense, these circles provide the perfect training for producing the “manly” citizen. “In a word, these decent and innocent institutions combine everything which can contribute to making friends, citizens, and soldiers out of the same men, and in consequence, everything which is appropriate to a free people.”58 The women too have their “societies,” though with less noble pretensions. The circles for the women essentially provide a place to gossip, sew, and drink tea. (Genevan women, it seems, have lost the moral and political status Rousseau bestowed on them in the “Dedication” to the Second Discourse.) In place of the theater, “which close[s] up a small number of people in melancholy fashion in a gloomy cavern,” Rousseau proposes other entertainments for Geneva, specifically, the expansion of public festivals. In the summer, there will be various sporting events and feasts; in the winter, public balls. The latter will be a time when the sexes can come together freely, with the aim of marrying off those of age. These occasions for gathering in order to form unions and for arranging the establishment of families would be frequent means for reconciling divided families and bolstering the peace so necessary in our State. Without altering the authority of Fathers, the inclinations of children would be somewhat freer; the first choice would depend somewhat more on their hearts; the agreements of age, temperament, taste, and character would be consulted somewhat more; and less attention would be paid to those of station and fortune which make bad matches when they are satisfied at the expense of others. The relations becoming easier, the marriages would be more frequent; these marriages, less circumscribed by rank, would prevent the emergence of parties, temper excessive inequality, and maintain the body of the People better in the spirit of its constitution; these Balls, thus directed would bring the people together not so much for a public Entertainment as for

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the gathering of a big family [“une grande famille”] and from the bosom of joy and pleasures would be born the preservation, the concord, and the prosperity of the Republic.59

Thus, in Rousseau’s idealized version of what Geneva could be, we have the exact opposite of Parisian society. Rather than self-interest, greed, and vanity, the Genevan republic is one of benevolent paternalism. In fact, Geneva, in Rousseau’s vision, comes to resemble not so much a political entity as a “big family.” Individual interests are subsumed for the good of the whole. Reciprocal affections replace rivalry and competition. Everyone works for the good of the republic/“family.” Although this might appear at first glance to be Rousseau’s ideal (and indeed he presents it as such), it is also problematic. For in his recasting of Geneva along the lines of familial and kinship relations, it no longer resembles a political entity, nor can it. If we recall what Rousseau argued in the Second Discourse, the family can never serve as a political model—the two have nothing in common. We are also given a clue at the end of the Letter that this ideal might also be, well, less than ideal. In a famous footnote, Rousseau recalls a boyhood memory in which the ideal of sexsegregated Geneva is called into question. Rousseau describes an event from his childhood when in a spontaneous, carnivalesque, almost Bakhtinian incident, the existing social and sexual boundaries are breached. A regiment from Rousseau’s boyhood quartier, Saint- Gervais, after having finished their exercises and dined together, spontaneously began to dance around the square. The women, awakened by the noise, began to watch the men from their windows. Notably, Rousseau describes it in theatrical terms: “Soon the windows were full of female spectators who gave a new zeal to the actors.” (And it is notable that women are given the role of “spectator.”) But the women do not merely watch; they participate (along with the servants and children). “[T]hey [the female spectators] could not long confine themselves to their windows and they came down; the wives came to their husbands, the servants brought wine; even the children, awakened by the noise, ran half-clothed amidst their fathers and mothers.” But this traversal of social and sexual boundaries is merely temporary (similar to the festival of the vendages in Julie). Boundaries

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(between sexes, stations, ages) are temporarily lifted, only to be immediately reinstated—“each withdrawing peaceably with his family.”60

R EV ER IES

OF THE

S OLITARY WALK ER

Significantly, as Eli Friedlander in J.J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words has noted, the Ninth Walk of the Reveries of the Solitary Walker begins with a reference to d’Alembert.61 This reference of course turns the reader’s attention back to the Letter and Rousseau’s praise of the Genevan fete over the Parisian theater. Unsurprisingly, much of the Ninth Walk is concerned with a discussion of popular entertainments and fetes. However, unlike the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau is not focused on comparing two different forms of entertainment (theater vs. popular fetes or circles) and two different political systems (republicanism or monarchy). Rather, the Ninth Walk is dedicated to a discussion of various different types of popular fetes and public amusements— some spontaneous, some structured. As mentioned earlier, Rousseau recounts both positive and negative examples. The first takes place one evening while Rousseau and Therese are sitting in the Bois de Boulogne. A group of young girls with their governess (“a sort of nun”) come to play nearby. While they are playing, a waferman, looking for takers, happens by. Some of the girls have money to play; others are not so fortunate. Rousseau intervenes, giving the waferman enough money so each girl might have the opportunity to take a spin and the chance to win a few wafers. What is more, “to make the party still gayer,” Rousseau gives the waferman extra money to ensure that each of the girls has a winning spin. Throughout the game, Rousseau and Therese preside. The couple makes the girls line up in an orderly fashion. Rousseau makes sure that each girl gets a sole turn (“on that point I was unrelenting, not wanting anyone to take unfair advantage or to show preferences which would produce dissatisfaction”). Therese oversees the distribution of wafers (“gently persuad[ing] those who had good spins to share with their companions”), and finally Rousseau acts as judge, adjudicating disputes (“during this whole operation, disputes arose which were brought before my tribunal”).62

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This scene could be interpreted as reinforcing traditional roles that Rousseau seems to support in parts of his earlier works (notably the Letter and the dedication of the Second Discourse). For example, on the one hand, Rousseau takes on the role of lawgiver and paternal judge who dispassionately adjudicates disputes. Therese, on the other hand, plays the role of the maternal figure who “gently persuades.”63 Yet what is curious is that the “citizens” are little girls—boys are completely absent. Rousseau in effect rewrites his earlier script in which the citizens are not men (in a “republic men are needed”) but girls/women. However, Rousseau’s failure to reproduce the scene in which he and Therese govern a nascent feminine citizenry (he revisits the same site “several times” at the “same time”) suggests that this model is unsustainable. That is, the substitution of girls/women for boys/men under the same conditions of patriarchal rule is simply a reversal of unequal relations (by which women are given power within the same economy). (We might consider this scene to share a certain commonality of Rousseau’s childhood masochism in which power is temporarily abdicated entirely to a feminine figure but fails to transform political relations.) Immediately following the story of the girls in the Bois de Boulogne, Rousseau describes a much more disagreeable incident that occurred years earlier when he was part of the Parisian literary world and was invited to a celebration at la Chevrette. No expense or extravagance was omitted in entertaining the guests: “Games, pageants, banquets, fireworks, nothing was spared. We had no time to catch our breath and instead of having fun, our heads were spinning.” Despite Rousseau’s feelings of unease with the extravagance of the event, he becomes much more disturbed with what follows. The party group goes out onto the avenue and discovers a sort of fair in progress. One of the men in the party decides to buy gingerbread and throw it into the crowd. And the others took so much pleasure in watching all these oafs rush headlong into each other, fight with each other, and knock each other over to get some gingerbread that they all wanted to procure the same pleasure for themselves. Gingerbread flying right and left, girls and boys running, piling up on each other, mangling each other— that appeared charming to everyone. I did as the others through mortification, although I did not find it as entertaining as they.

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Rousseau soon gets disgusted at watching people trample each other for a few pieces of muddy gingerbread and walks away. “For what sort of pleasure could one take in seeing herds of men degraded by abject poverty pile up on each other, choke each other, brutally mangle each other to grab avidly at some pieces of gingerbread trampled underfoot and covered with mud?”64 Rousseau contrasts this scene of “mockery” and disdain, the “exclusive pleasures of the rich,” to another one at the same fair, but this one he authors. Rousseau happens upon several young boys gathered around a stall with a young girl selling apples. The boys obviously desire the apples but haven’t enough money among themselves to purchase any. Rousseau, amused by the standoff between the girl and the boys, describes it in terms of the Garden of the Hesperides and the Golden Apples: “This tray was the garden of the Hesperides for them, and the little girl was the dragon guarding it.”65 Rousseau finally intervenes in this “comedy,” bringing about its “denouement” by purchasing the apples from the girl and allowing her to distribute them among the boys. (It is noteworthy that Rousseau shifts his language from the political metaphors of the Bois de Boulogne scene to literary ones, suggesting that cultural laws will have to be “rewritten” in order for political and economic equality to be achieved.) Not only does the Garden of the Hesperides episode stand in stark contrast to the malicious gingerbread scene by its happy and equitable ending, but it also indicates, again, Rousseau’s role as a writer. In the gingerbread story, Rousseau is merely a spectator and a very brief and reluctant participant (perhaps an analogy to his brief and reluctant participation in Parisian society itself?). He takes no pleasure in it and certainly does not author it. The gingerbread episode is clearly based on a series of divisions: rich and poor, author and spectators, men and women. This last dichotomy is evident in that the men and women of the party remain separate. “There was dancing; the gentlemen deigned to dance with the peasant girls, but the Ladies kept their dignity.”66 It is a “young man” who buys the gingerbread, and it is men who throw it into the crowd. The women of the party absent themselves. Thus, in contrast to the festival in Saint-Gervais, sexual and social boundaries are not even momentarily transgressed but instead consolidated. The episode, in fact, widens and solidifies the gap between rich and poor, spectator and audience, women and men. In short, it constructs identity.

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In contrast, the girl with the apples tells a different story with a different aim. First, the tale begins with a consciously fictive reference (the Garden of the Hesperides), signaling to the reader that this tale will be allegorical, that it will have a “moral.” (The gingerbread episode is not even good fiction.)67 Secondly, Rousseau’s intervention is one that rewrites “the denouement” and gives the “Comedy” a happy and equitable ending. (Of course, Rousseau “rewrites the ending” as well in the Bois de Boulogne story, but he merely gives pleasure rather than transforming relations.) In “paying the little girl for the apples and having her distribute them to the little boys,” Rousseau gives the little girl the power of distribution. It would be tempting to interpret the apples as symbolic of the first apple (knowledge). However, this seems unlikely. Much more likely, the apples, as Swenson has argued, are signs of love.68 Thus Rousseau writes an ending to the story in which the girl distributes equitably gifts of love. Undoubtedly, Rousseau’s text was intended as a critique of the gap between rich and poor, yet it also provides a possible rewriting of gender relations: the little girl (the “Dragon”) is given the power—it is not a power used for domination, though, but for giving. So remarkable was this ending to the standoff between the girl and the boys that it moved not only Rousseau but also those who witnessed it. I then experienced one of the sweetest sights [“spectacles ”] which can gratify a man’s heart, that of watching joy united with the innocence of age spread all about me. For even those who were looking on [“les spectateurs ”] shared it as they watched it; and I who shared this joy so cheaply had, in addition, that of sensing that it was my handiwork [“mon ouvrage ”].69

In (re)writing the story, Rousseau generalizes the joy that is shared among the recipients as well as the entire community of onlookers (spectators). Of course, this is not the first time that Rousseau refers to the Garden of the Hesperides to allegorize/narrativize an episode of his life. In the Confessions, while he was still an apprentice, Rousseau attempts to steal some apples from his maître DuCommun’s pantry. The “precious fruit in the garden of the Hesperides” is locked in the pantry that Rousseau can see through blinds in the kitchen but cannot access. He concocts an elaborate system to retrieve an

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apple; first he spears one on a cooking spit, but it is too large to fit through the slats of the blinds. He then decides to cut the apple in two, hoping to lift the two halves one by one. Unfortunately, the halves fall back on the pantry floor. Running out of time, Rousseau decides to return the next day, forgetting that the apple halves lying on the floor “were testifying against [him] in the pantry.” When he returns the following day, DuCommun is waiting for him behind the pantry door. “[U]nfortunately the dragon was not asleep. Suddenly the pantry door opens; my master comes through it, crosses his arms, looks at me and says to me, ‘Bravo.’ ”70 In contrast to the episode in the Reveries, the one in the Confessions ends in failure. Rousseau is prevented from retrieving the apples by the interference of the unyielding patriarchal figure DuCommun (“the Dragon”), who catches him in the act. It would be tempting to read the episode in the Reveries as one in which Rousseau places himself in the position of DuCommun (the father figure, the master), thus rewriting the first, unfortunate episode as one in which he gains (authorial) power. But this is clearly not the case, since it is the little girl in the Reveries who occupies the position of power, that is, “the Dragon.” Let us quickly recapitulate the two scenes. In the Confessions, Rousseau writes from the position of the little boy fighting paternal power. He attempts to steal the apple by splitting it in two. Swenson has argued that this splitting of the apple (in which the French word partager means simultaneously “to split” and “to share”) can be read as an act of reading itself. That is, the split apple— or, more precisely, the act of partage (splitting and sharing)—indicates two ways in which the text can be read: as either one of identification (in which the reader completely identifies with Rousseau and “shares his afflictions”) or a “divided reading” in which the contradictions and discontinuities of Rousseau’s oeuvre are exposed. “Rousseau’s story separates the two senses or two kinds of reading and narrates a movement from one to the other, mediated by the loss of the apple.”71 According to Swenson, Rousseau’s writing can be read as both simultaneously: a continuous oscillation between identification and distance, between a reading that emphasizes continuity and one that is discontinuous and necessarily contradictory (within texts and between early and late works, fiction and politics, reason and passion, and, I would add, “masculine” and “feminine”).

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Undoubtedly, the interpretive benefit of Swenson’s argument is that it accounts for the divergent and contradictory readings that Rousseau’s writings have engendered. These divergent readings can to a degree, as Swenson claims, be thought of as the difference between a sympathetic reading in which Rousseau’s work is seen as a totality and a reading that emphasizes contradiction and discontinuity. (Swenson favors the latter but as part of a Rousseauean statement rather than a failure to be coherent.) However, what Swenson’s interpretation— especially in terms of the “stealing of the apples” narrative in the Confessions —neglects is a consideration of how this episode is refigured in the Reveries. In the Confessions, when Rousseau attempts to steal the apples (to split the apples in two), the scene is one of constitutive divisions: between the power of DuCommun and the boy, Jean-Jacques; between Rousseau’s desire and reality (or fiction/reverie and reality); between servitude and freedom; and so on. Might the split apples refer to such divisions that Rousseau is unable to rewrite at the time? And consider also that it is the reader who is asked to “share” Rousseau’s afflictions/predicament. In the Reveries, though, Rousseau rewrites this scene (as the reference back to the Garden of the Hesperides suggests).72 The Reveries calls into question the divisions and binarisms of the earlier episode. However, it must be noted that by calling these (arbitrary and socially constructed) dualities into question, Rousseau is not suggesting that one can simply transcend these oppositions. He is not— as Joel Schwartz intimates— advocating a “wholeness,” “bisexuality,” or “asexuality” that would place one (and particularly Rousseau) outside of (or before) power relations.73 Instead, Rousseau proposes that it is possible not only to expose these dualities as fictions but to rewrite them, not with recourse to a prior time (Sparta and by extension Geneva) or a time before division (natural wholeness) but by substituting new fictions.74

Writing New Fictions: JULIE , or the Modern Romance Novel Julie might be considered as exemplary of this substitution—that is, a fictional rewriting of current and past relations.75 In two prefaces to the novel, Rousseau discusses and defends the “purpose”

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of the letters.76 Rousseau distinguishes Julie from other modern forms of entertainment. As a novel, Julie differs from the theater in that it is available to all—not just the privileged few living in “great cities”77 who entertain themselves by watching their image and values mirrored on stage. Unlike other modern artistic representations (particularly theatrical ones but also some novels), Julie does not reflect or mirror the dominant culture. It has nothing to do with “the smart crowd, fashionable ladies, the high court and might, the military,” or the “comedy of civilities.”78 Absent are “[t]he refinement of city tastes, the manners of the Court, the paraphernalia of luxury, Epicurean morality.”79 Instead Julie portrays “average” people (yet highly idealized and literary). Julie was written with the multitude in mind—“real folk”—living outside the rarefied confines of the metropolis. As such, its language and concerns reflect “solitary folk.” “Writings intended for Solitary Folk must speak the language of Solitary Folk; to instruct them, they must please them, and engage them.”80 He envisages provincials (“inhabitants of the field”) reading his book in the evening after a long day’s work.81 Rousseau, though, imagines Julie not just pleasing and entertaining the multitude but instructing them. He says, “I like to picture a husband and wife reading this collection together. Finding in it a renewed source of courage to bear their common labors and perhaps new perspectives to make them useful.”82 But Julie, Rousseau claimed, was not just different from contemporary values; it was actually critical — as “useful” novels should be. “They [novels] must combat and destroy the maxims of large societies; they must expose them as false and contemptible, that is, as they really are. In all these respects a Novel, if it is done well, at least if it is useful, is bound to be hissed, hated, decried by fashionable people, as an insipid, extravagant, ridiculous book.”83 Julie is not just critical of the “maxims of large societies” (i.e., Paris). Though set in the bucolic, provincial setting of the Pays de Vaud, Julie does not simply replicate the values of patriarchal power (i.e., Geneva). Instead, the novel is implicitly critical of the (patriarchal) family and the bourgeois romantic “couple.” That the text was intended as a critique of the power of the father (and to a lesser extent the mother) is expressly stated in the Second Preface.

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Ever since all sentiments of nature have been stifled by extreme inequality, it is from the iniquitous despotism of fathers that the vices and misfortunes of children arise; it is in forced and illmatched unions that young wives, victims of their parents’ avarice or vanity, undo, through a disorder in which they take pride, the scandal of the original honesty. . . . If there is some reform to attempt in public morals, it must begin with domestic morals, and that depends absolutely on fathers and mothers. But this is not how the instruction is aimed; your cowardly authors preach only to the oppressed; and the moral of books will always be vain, because it is merely the art of flattering the strongest.84

Additionally, though a “romance” novel, Julie is not really (or only) about the couple (a man and a woman). This point is repeatedly made in the Second Preface in describing the main characters: “[T]he small sphere of two or three Lovers or Friends” and “Two or three simple but sensible youths.”85 The “or” points to the deliberate ambiguity of just whom the love affair includes and how many are involved in the love relation (“two or three”), placing the conventional dyadic structure of the romantic relation in question. (This aspect of the novel will be more fully developed in the next chapter.) Another telling aspect of the novel is its language. The language, we are told, is not representational (it does not represent any given reality) but figurative, creating “another universe.” In these sort of letters, though the thoughts are commonplace, the style nonetheless is not familiar, and should not be. Love is but an illusion; it fashions for itself, so to speak, another Universe; it surrounds itself with objects that do not exist, or to which it alone has given being; and as it renders all its sentiments by images, its language is always figurative. But such figures lack precision and sequence; its eloquence is in its disorder; it convinces more when it reasons less. Enthusiasm is the final degree of passion.86

The language of Julie persuades through passion and feeling rather than reason or logic; it convinces through enthusiasm rather than philosophy. In doing so, “they [the characters] detach themselves from the rest of Creation; and inventing among themselves a little world different from the rest of Creation; and inventing themselves

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a little world different from ours, there they create an authentically new spectacle [un spectacle véritablement nouveau].”87 However, Rousseau’s statement that Julie constitutes an “authentically new spectacle” should be read with caution. As is well known, much of the discussion in the two prefaces revolves around questions of authenticity itself (despite Rousseau’s overt suggestion that the subject and text were “illusory”): Is the text fiction or fact? Is Rousseau the author or merely the publisher? In both prefaces, Rousseau refuses to answer the question.88 The dialogic Second Preface is particularly ambivalent in that it suggests the answers to these questions (the veracity of the text, the question of authorship) are unknowable. “R” (the purported author or editor of the letters) responds to his interlocutor “N” (a man of letters) by stating, “Who can say that I am not in the same doubt as you? That all this air of mystery is not perhaps a feint to conceal from you my own ignorance of what you are trying to find out?”89 Thus the refusal to answer the question, it is suggested, is due not to a willful obfuscation but to the effect of a radical doubt. But what does it mean to say that one is uncertain whether or not one is the author of a text? Paul de Man has suggested in his reading of Julie —“Allegory ( Julie)” in Allegories of Reading — that the uncertainty of authorship in the Second Preface indicates Rousseau’s questioning of the referential authority of language itself. De Man focuses in particular on the discussion between “N” and “R” concerning the epigraph on the title page of Julie. The epigraph by Plutarch—“Non la connobbe il mondo, mentre l’ebbe: Connobil’ io ch’a piager qui rimasi” (which Rousseau translates as “Le monde la posséda sans la connaîtra, et moi je l’ai connue, je reste ici-bas à la pleurer”)90 —“N” cites as “proof” that “R” really knew Julie. But as de Man (and “R”) points out, the epigraph is far from “proof,” given that it is a citation of a citation and so on, without end. As de Man states, “The authority of the quotation is, of course, anything but decisive: it is highly ambivalent in itself; it is not Rousseau’s statement but is borrowed from a complex context; it is not even Petrarch’s statement, since Petrarch borrows it freely from John the Evangelist where it refers to God as Logos, etc. . . . and it is impossible to say where quotation ends and “truth” begins, if by truth we understand the possibility of referential verification.”91

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In a sense then, what Rousseau tells us is that Julie is not “true” in that it replicates what is already given—whether “nature” or empirical beings. It is not reflective of what is already given. Nor is it absolutely “original” since it is constitutes a continuing dialogue with past and current “fictions” that construct our world. The novel does not refer back to an origin (to real events or people nor to an individual author) but to other texts/writing. Julie critiques existing (fictional) norms (whether the narcissism of Parisian culture or the patriarchy of Geneva)—not with reference to real people/events or with a reference to the “truth” or “nature”92 or even the powers of an authorial imagination, but by creating an alternative fiction that is critical of both and, “perhaps,” evocative of “new perspectives.”

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Postoedipal Desire: Reading the Ménage à Trois

It might seem, at first, a bit peculiar to regard the ménage à trois in Rousseau’s writings as an allegory for democracy, or at least as the possibility for reconfiguring sexual relations and as a consequence democratic relations. Of course, there has been no shortage of critics who have remarked on the significance of the ménage à trois in Rousseau’s writings. Typically, though, these critics have considered the frequent appearance of l’amour à trois in his work as symptomatic of personal pathology. The psychoanalyst René Laforgue, for instance, reads the ménage à trois as Rousseau’s attempt to overcome the guilt he feels for having caused his mother’s death. (Rousseau’s mother died a few days after he was born as a result of childbirth complications.) According to Laforgue, Rousseau’s relationship with Mme de Warens (and Claude Anet) was a means of atoning for his guilt by becoming the dutiful son. Starobinski, in contrast, comes to exactly the opposite conclusion. In looking at the l’amour à trois in Emile and the triangular relationship of Rousseau–Sophie d’Houdetot–St. Lambert, Starobinski argues that the ménage à trois in Rousseau’s writings is an attempt to gain mastery and become the all-knowing father figure. Rousseau, Starobinski writes, “seeks to become the teacher, the master, in sole possession of knowledge and happiness.”1 And finally, Kavanagh has claimed that, on the contrary, the love triangle in Rousseau functions not as a means of restoring the lost intimacy and symbiosis with the mother nor to accede to the paternal function; rather, it is a sort of revision of the oedipal drama so that the children, the brothers and sisters, can enjoy each other in a nonsexualized dyadic relationship under the benevolent gaze of the inactive

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father. According to Kavanagh’s argument, the real-life l’amour à trois of Rousseau–Mme de Warens–Claude Anet and the fictional love triangle of Julie–St. Preux–Wolmar are exemplary.2 Obviously, each of these critics reads the ménage à trois in relation to the Freudian oedipal drama in contradictory ways: whether Rousseau’s desire to return to a preoedipal, symbiotic relationship with the mother, or to become the paternal figure, or to occupy the position of the son (with the daughters) under the eyes of a benevolent and silent father. The reference to Freud is of course not without foundation—yet not in the sense formulated in the previous paragraph. The love triangle in Rousseau is not symptomatic of personal desires or complexes but provides the dominant metaphor for critiquing sexual and political relations and suggesting an alternative ideal. Rousseau, I would argue, prefigures and anticipates Freud but also, furthermore, offers a critique of the Freudian model. The ideal love triangle in Rousseau’s work is postoedipal. Of course, to suggest that Rousseau offers a critique of the Freudian model before the model exists is to implicitly argue that the model itself is not—as some might claim—universal and transhistorical but instead historically contingent. Writing between the ancien régime of arbitrary, patriarchal power and the emergent bourgeois order (rational, legalistic authority and the patriarchal nuclear family), Rousseau is critical of both. That is, Rousseau is critical not just of the arbitrary authority of the ancien régime (which is waning anyhow) but of the new forms of domination and power emerging alongside the promises for democracy—most notably the entrenchment and consolidation of sexual difference and the new “rational,” fraternal family. Part of the problem in interpreting l’amour à trois (and what accounts for the quite contradictory readings and misreadings) in Rousseau’s work is that there is not just one but multiple love triangles. It should be no surprise to readers of Rousseau that he offers both negative and positive examples. Negative examples are those that are based on either overt or concealed relations of inequality, coercion, and domination. Positive examples of l’amour à trois are those based on reciprocal and equal relations without the intervention or authority of either maternal or paternal authority. Rousseau’s most positive constructions of the ménage à trois are those that indicate a way to move beyond the couple (or even

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family)—a purely domestic, private relationship—to a more generous, open (and political) relationship. In the following, I will discuss the various triangular relationships in Emile, Julie, and the Confessions as both an exposition and critique of past and present social, political, and sexual organization and a provisional attempt in reimagining those relationships in a future ideal. That is, I will argue that Rousseau’s writings are critical not only of mother rule (as too nostalgic because it has already been overcome) but also, and especially, of tyrannical, paternal/fraternal rule (in both its aristocratic and bourgeois incarnations); in addition, they are an attempt to imagine a relationship to others (in the plural) that is based on equality and thus suggestive of a democratic future.

E MILE Critics of Rousseau have been divided on the “success” or “failure” of Emile. Tzvetan Todorov in Frail Happiness, for example, finds Emile to be Rousseau’s best statement on how to reconcile the individual and the political. According to Todorov, Emile offers a “third way” in between the completely other-directed political position of the Social Contract and the isolated individual presented in the autobiographical works. Todorov’s conclusion, that Emile is Rousseau’s best answer on how to reconcile (or at least deal with the contradictions between) the self and community, is surprising. It is surprising because, first of all, Todorov, who is careful to note Rousseau’s use of free indirect style elsewhere, reads Emile literally as Rousseau’s own voice/position.3 And second of all, despite an otherwise very thorough reading of Rousseau’s work (in an amazingly concise study of a mere sixty-six pages), ignores the sequel, Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires.4 Judith Shklar, in contrast, in reading Les Solitaires in conjunction with Emile, finds Emile to be a categorical failure in which the pupil becomes neither a “man” nor a “citizen.” According to Shklar, Les Solitaires exposes the impossibility of Emile: “What is impossible for the perfectly reared Emile, who possesses every virtue except the quality that controls men and events, is certainly not possible for lesser men.”5 But perhaps the question of whether Emile is successful or not is the wrong question. The question is rather why Rousseau deemed

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it necessary to offer an explicit critique of a supposedly perfect education. Is there already in Emile an implicit critique that only becomes overt in the sequel? And in what ways is this implicit critique tied to a critique of the dyadic, sexually differentiated education that Emile supposedly promotes and upholds? Emile begins rather strangely with a lengthy preface, in which the tutor lectures the reader about the urgency of mothers and fathers to resume their parental duties. Mothers are entreated to resume the practice of breast-feeding and raising their own children, fathers to resume their paternal duties in raising and educating their offspring. A return to the family will restore morals and prepare the children for societal obligations that have degenerated and been forgotten in modern society, in which wet nurses, governors, and boarding schools have replaced the duties of mothers and fathers. There are no longer fathers, mothers, children, brothers, or sister. They all hardly know each other. How could they love each other? Each thinks only of her/himself. . . . But let mothers deign to nurse their children, morals will reform themselves, nature’s sentiments will be awakened in every heart, the state will be repeopled. The attraction of domestic life is the best counterpoison for bad morals.6

Fathers’ duties must also be expanded: “A father, when he engenders and feeds children, does with that only a third of his task. He owes to his species men; he owes to society sociable men; he owes to the state citizens. . . . He who cannot fulfill the duties of a father has no right to become one.”7 Yet oddly enough, Emile is the story of a “single father” who takes on the responsibility of raising an imaginary child from infancy to adulthood. The tutor, an “artificial father,” has a greater and lesser role than a parental figure: he is teacher, mentor, master, and “friend” of the student/“son,” Emile. It is curious and worth asking why Emile, against the principles and advice of the tutor, is taken from his family and raised by the rational, all-knowing “father” after the previous passionate plea for the need of family, mothers, and fathers. Is it because the family—and particularly mothers and women—have become irrelevant? Is the tutor a metaphor for the new rational authority of the Enlightenment that has supplanted the emotionally invested and irrational, arbitrary,

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patriarchal authority/family? The tutor’s authority is much greater than any witnessed under the familial model. And it is much more insidious and covert: the tutor models all of Emile’s tastes, inclinations, and development through various highly controlled experiments and “lessons,” while at the same time effacing any trace of intervention. Throughout the first four books of Emile, the tutor subjects his pupil to various lessons that appear to be natural and haphazard opportunities but are in reality tests and experiments organized and orchestrated by the tutor to attain the desired result. To raise a “natural” child, it seems, requires quite a deal of artifice and a manipulative hand (a theme that will be repeated in the figure of Wolmar at Clarens in Julie). Emile’s education until he reaches adolescence concerns solely the boy’s relations to things and objects rather than others. “He considers himself without regard to others and finds it good that others do not think of him. He demands nothing of anyone and believes he owes nothing to anyone. He is alone in human society; he counts on himself alone.”8 Emile’s education is one designed to replicate that of “natural man”: completely autonomous without relations to others (this, of course, is transparently false, given that Emile is wholly dependent on the tutor). In Book V, Emile learns to love. Prior to Sophie’s introduction, the tutor discourses on the difference between the sexes. The tutor states, “In everything not connected with sex, woman is man. She has the same organs, the same needs, the same faculties. The machine is constructed in the same way; its parts are the same; the one functions as does the other; the form is similar; and in whatever respect one considers them the difference between them is only one of more or less.” And here it seems the difference between the sexes is negligible. The text, though, goes on to state, In everything connected with sex, woman and man are different. The difficulty of comparing them comes from the difficulty of determining what in their constitution is due to sex and what is not. On the basis of anatomy and even just by inspection, one finds general differences between them that do not appear to connect with sex. They are nevertheless connected with sex but by relations which we are not in a position to perceive. We do not know the extent of these relations. The only thing we know with certainty is that everything which distinguishes them belongs to

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the sex. . . . These relations and these differences must have a moral influence.9

Although the differences between the sexes, the tutor argues, are not knowable or perceptible, these differences must have moral (cultural) effects. And from these differences—which one cannot know—the tutor then goes on to construct a “moral” (i.e., cultural and historical) argument for sexual differentiation. The tutor’s (and not necessarily Rousseau’s—the two are not same) argument will proceed to create the perfectly compatible couple (i.e., one that is based on absolute sexual difference). The couple will come together through the backstage maneuvers of the tutor. Emile will think he has made a love choice, but the choice was made long ago by the tutor, the substitute and all-powerful father. “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 my choice.”10 Emile “chooses” Sophie because the tutor has long ago set her up as Emile’s ideal. Sophie will “choose” Emile because he is billed as replicating her literary ideal, François Fenélon’s Telemachus. The tutor not only arranges their first meeting; leaving nothing to chance, he continues to direct the two lovers. The tutor oversees every aspect of their courtship (Sophie’s parents are given little or no authority): he determines when they will see each other, enforces absences, plays the role of adviser and “confidant” for both parties, determines the date of their wedding, and even dispenses rules and regulations for their sexual relations. This ménage à trois of the tutor, Emile, and Sophie is one in which the father figure constitutes and enforces an “ideal” man and “ideal” woman to carry out their sexually differentiated roles. It is surprising that no reader I am aware of has suggested that Book V is ironic or even critical of the sexually differentiated education that the tutor proposes. Both feminist readers and nonfeminist readers not only have read Book V as absolutely sincere but have little considered that the voice of the tutor and that of Rousseau might not be the same. What makes such a reading even less plausible it that it is preceded by an absolutely contrarian ideal at the end of Book IV, in which an alternative utopia critical of not only the patriarchal family but all relations of authority and domination, is put forth.

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In the section on “If I were rich,” the ideal is rather a society of friends. The tutor (or more likely Rousseau here)11 in supposing he was rich tells us how he would live. He would choose a country house, and “[t]here I would gather a society that was select rather than large, composed of friends who love pleasure and know something about it, and of women who are able to leave their easy chairs and take part in pastoral games—women who will sometimes take up, instead of the shuttle and cards, fishing lines, bird snares, the haymaker’s rake and the harvester’s basket.”12 This utopia, clearly unmarked by sex segregation and difference, provides a sharp contrast to that which Rousseau supposedly embraces elsewhere.

E MILE

ET

S OPHIE ,

OU

L ES S OLITAIR ES

Emile ends with the couple newly married and waiting for the arrival of their first child. The tutor proclaims his educational experiment a success. Emile has become a “good man, a good husband and a good citizen.” (It is interesting that, as MacCannell has noted in another context,13 Rousseau uses similar phraseology to describe what he might have become if he had stayed in the sex-segregated Republic of Geneva. “I would have been a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a family, good friend, good worker, good man in everything. I would have loved my station.”)14 Yet the “success” of Emile, Les Solitaires makes plain, is transitory and fragile. In the fragmentary and unfinished sequel, the tutor’s life work unravels in a very short time. In the sequel composed of two letters, the narrative voice belongs to Emile, who describes what has passed in the tutor’s absence. The subject of the first letter is the disintegration of his marriage and loss of his family. The second is his travels and subsequent enslavement by a dey in Algiers. For our purposes, the first letter is most relevant. After the death of her parents and especially the death of her daughter, Sophie is distraught and depressed. (Interestingly, Emile seems to be unaffected by his daughter’s death. Is it because it is the death of a daughter rather than a son?) Hoping to distract her, Emile suggests they go live in Paris. Both Emile and Sophie, though, become too distracted and begin to live separate lives, each pursuing their own individual pleasures. “We were no

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longer one, we were two: the noise of the world had divided us, and our hearts were no longer close. It was only when at one of our neighbors in the country or friends in the city that we sometimes reunited.”15 Within the sequel, one finds a brief but crucial reference to another ménage à trois. Neglected by Emile, Sophie begins to spend her time with a woman friend and her husband. Sophie is unfaithful and becomes pregnant. It has been little remarked that Sophie is seduced not by another man but by another woman (and the woman’s husband). Sophie is befriended by the woman and her husband, and the three, for a time, become inseparable. Emile, from his perspective, writes, “The woman, after having often made advances—to which I did not always resist easily—rebuffed me, and attached herself completely to Sophie and became inseparable from her. The husband had a strong friendship with his wife and consequently with mine.”16 The implication is that Sophie is seduced by the husband with the consent and aid of his wife. Emile places blame on the couple’s “maxims”: Their external conduct was regular and decent, but their maxims should have frightened me. Their great understanding came less from a true attachment to each other than from a common indifference to the duties of their married state. Little jealous of the rights that they had over each other, they claimed to love each other so much more in giving in to all of their tastes/pleasures freely, without being offended if they were not the object. May my husband live happily above all else, said the wife; that I have my wife for my friend, I am content, said the husband. . . . Each does everything they can for the happiness of the other. Can one love better those dear to us than wanting everything that they desire? One avoids the cruel necessity of fleeing each other.17

Here the couple offers alternative “maxims” to those dictated to Sophie and Emile by the tutor. The couple’s maxims are not those of exclusive possession of the other or rights over the other but are based on the individual happiness of each. Neither Emile nor Sophie can live with the consequences of her betrayal. Sophie, educated to believe that her virtue is dependent upon Emile’s valuation, is distraught. Emile, raised to believe that Sophie belongs exclusively to him, is insanely jealous. Particularly unbearable for Emile is the thought that Sophie will share her love

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between his son and another. He would rather, it seems, see his son dead. What! Nature itself will authorize this crime; and my wife, by sharing/dividing [partageant] her tenderness between two sons will be forced to share/divide [partager] her attachment with two fathers! This idea, more horrible than any which had passed through my mind/spirit [esprit] embraced me with a new rage; all the furies came back to tear at my heart when thinking of this frightful sharing/division [partage]. Yes, I would prefer to see my son dead than to see Sophie have one with another father.18

Above all else, the thought that Sophie, loving both of her sons (and here Emile notably assumes Sophie will have a son), will in turn love (or at least think of) both fathers through the sons is intolerable to Emile. He refuses to share/partage his love for Sophie with another, even if indirectly. Emile flees to the country (and from Sophie and his son) and reassumes his trade as a carpenter. Unable to decide what to do, he variously considers taking his son from Sophie, leaving the son with Sophie and never seeing both of them again, or even depositing the son in an orphanage (since Emile believes he does not have the mental capability to raise the child). Emile constructs and considers various plans according to what will make Sophie suffer the most. If he takes her son, she will suffer an obvious loss; if he leaves the son with Sophie, the son will make her suffer by being a reminder of the past and of Emile. But Emile changes his mind, stating that he had been “blinded” by his anger and jealousy. “It is certain that the resolution to take my son from his mother had been the effect of my anger. On this point alone, passion had blinded me, and it was on this single point also that I changed my resolve.” But in a peculiar passage, just after this declaration, Emile states that the child has died anyhow. The cause of the child’s death is ambiguous. Emile seems to blame his family (who are abruptly introduced), implying that his family took the child from Sophie, against the wishes of Emile, and he died as a consequence. “If my family had followed my intentions, Sophie would have raised this child, and perhaps he would still be alive.” But what is more peculiar is that the death of the child, Emile claims, allows him and Sophie to reunite. For without the presence of the child, Emile (and Sophie

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presumably) can forget the past. If their son had lived, “maybe also then Sophie would have been dead to me; consoled in this dear half of myself she might no longer thought to rejoin the other, and I would have lost the most beautiful days of my life. What sufferings we had to endure to expiate our faults before our reunion made us forget them.”19 The absence of the child allows Sophie to remember and return to Emile, restoring the unity of the dyadic couple. The text leaves ambiguous when and for how long this reunion takes place—or whether it was really Rousseau’s intention to leave this episode in. However, in the second letter, Emile is alone. With the intention of leaving everything behind—country, possessions, but especially memories, Emile begins an aimless journey (similar to that of St. Preux in Julie). Going south, away from Paris, Emile boards a ship in Marseilles by feigning to be a sailor. Soon after, off the shores of Sardinia, the ship is captured by pirates, and Emile is enslaved—a position he excels at. So successful is Emile that he soon becomes the “leader” of a group of slaves and eventually becomes the principal slave of the dey of Algiers. Curiously but not surprisingly, Emile finds his enslavement to be paradoxically liberating: “[T]he time of my servitude was that of my reign, and never did I have so much authority over myself than when I wore the chains of barbarians.” And he even decrees that servitude is necessary for his identity. “To not fall into nothingness I need to be animated by the will of an other to the default of my own.”20 Unable to live without the authority of a patriarchal figure, Emile replaces the tutor with another. The success of the couple Emile and Sophie was evidently dependent on the presence of the tutor. Without the presence of the tutor, the couple disintegrates. The disintegration of the couple without the authority of the tutor suggests that neither Sophie nor Emile have gained the autonomy their education was supposed to grant them. The “children” have not learned to live on their own. Their original “success” at the close of Emile was an effect of the tutor’s absolute control over all decisions. The absolute paternal authority kept the couple intact. Without the third partner to mediate and direct them, the couple implodes. The failure of Sophie and Emile to sustain their relationship leads the reader to reevaluate the educational methods and goals of the tutor. This carefully crafted education designed to

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lead simultaneously to autonomy, freedom, and interdependence achieves none of these goals. Why? First of all because it was an education that was based on the despotic rule and authority of one person: the tutor. And second of all, it was an education based on the absolutely different educations of the sexes. This sexually differentiated education authorized by the “artificial” father cannot survive his absence. In short, the original ménage à trois of Emile, Sophie, and the tutor is a failure because of its despotic, tyrannical underpinnings, and it engenders the tragic failure of the couple.

JULIE ,

OR THE

N EW H ÉLOÏSE

In Julie, there is the juxtaposition of two quite different love triangles. The first is that of Julie, St. Preux, and Claire in the first half of the epistolary novel. This ménage à trois is characterized by the shared love St. Preux and Claire have for Julie. There is no paternal authority (nor even maternal) that oversees and authorizes their love. Quite the contrary, their love is one of equals who love each other and are loved equally. The first three books of Julie are concerned with the first l’amour à trois. The novel begins with a letter from St. Preux, the tutor of Julie and Claire, declaring his love for Julie. Julie responds in kind, and thus the clandestine affair begins with Claire as participant and confidante. The first half of the novel is mostly an exchange of letters among these three, with long discourses on love and virtue and elaborate plans to keep the affair secret from Julie’s tyrannical, violent father and weak and powerless mother. However, the reciprocal relationship among the three protagonists is dissolved by the intervention and prohibition of Julie’s father. Suspecting that Julie is in love with St. Preux, her father becomes violently enraged and beats her “mercilessly,” causing her, it is implied, to miscarry St. Preux’s child. In writing to Claire, Julie describes the beating: [F]or the first time in my life, I received a box on the ear which was not the last, and yielding to his transport with a violence equal to what its containment had cost in effort, he beat me mercilessly, although my mother had thrown herself between us, covered me with her body, and received some of the blows that were intended

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for me. Recoiling to elude them, I stumbled, fell, and my face hurtled into the foot of a table, making me bleed.21

Julie’s father has promised her to his old military friend, Wolmar (who once saved his life), and the mere suspicion that his daughter might be going against his wishes sends him into a fury. Julie is the currency of exchange between the two friends, with Julie’s father repaying his debt to his old friend with the life of his daughter. Considering that St. Preux is without title, family, and money, Julie’s father refuses to entertain even the suggestion that he might make a suitable partner for his daughter. Indeed, Julie’s desires are ignored by her father as irrelevant. At first, Julie refuses to give in to her father’s demands to marry his friend. She briefly considers elopement with St. Preux, then considers keeping him as her lover if forced to marry Wolmar. In the end, though, she accedes to the role of dutiful and faithful wife. Ostensibly, Wolmar “cures” Julie of her overly passionate love for St. Preux. Instead of passionate lover and friend, Julie is transformed into an obedient wife and mother and dutiful daughter through the rational and dispassionate “tutoring” of her husband, Wolmar. And here Wolmar’s similarity to the tutor becomes evident, particularly after he invites St. Preux to come to Clarens. Wolmar—the rational, “enlightened” father—supplants Julie’s irrational, tradition-bound father. In inviting St. Preux, the former lover, to come live with them, Wolmar seeks not only to show how transformed (and docile) Julie has become but to apply this same “education” to St. Preux. Wolmar acts as the “father” of both Julie and St. Preux and seeks to transform their previously passionate desire into a brother-sister love. Shortly after St. Preux’s arrival at Clarens (after an eight-year absence), Wolmar takes his guest’s and his wife’s hand, saying, “Embrace your sister and your friend; treat her always as such; the more familiarly you act with her, the better I will think of you.”22 That Wolmar assumes the paternal function is underlined by his language, frequently addressing Julie and Saint-Preux as his children (mes enfans). And St. Preux in turn begins to look at Wolmar not only as an authority figure but as a father figure: “He spoke to me as would a father to a son.” And again: “O my Benefactor! O my Father.”

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By transforming Julie into a loving wife and doting mother (from Julie d’Etang to Mme de Wolmar) and St. Preux into a fraternal and filial figure, Wolmar has, it seems, brought reason and “brotherly” love to supplant their former passionate desire. Wolmar’s paternal benevolence is not limited, though, to Julie and St. Preux but extends to the entire community. Everything at Clarens is contrived and manipulated by Wolmar. And everything and everyone has its place. What is unique (or insidious) about Clarens is that the machinations of the patriarch are erased (and here comparisons with the tutor of Emile are inevitable). The aviary and Elysium are two obvious examples. Both appear to be natural and spontaneous, but both are of course the work of intense artifice in order for them to appear natural. The festival of the vendanges gives the appearance of equality of servants and master (which by definition is an impossibility) while maintaining the absolute authority of the patriarch. What is interesting is that commentators such as Starobinski and Kavanagh have assumed that Clarens is somehow (even if somewhat ambiguously and from different perspectives) Rousseau’s ideal. But as feminist theorists such as Marso and MacCannell have pointed out, Julie’s death at the end of the novel, rather than merely rendering Clarens less stable, exposes it as the horror that it is.23 On an outing along the banks of Lake Geneva, Julie’s youngest son, Marcellin, trips and falls into the lake. Julie immediately jumps in after him, saving him, but falls ill, never to recover. The immediate cause of her illness is the love of her son, but her death is the result of her continued and impossible passion for St. Preux. As Wolmar senses, Julie wants to die. And her deathbed confession, a letter to St. Preux, confirms it: she is still in love with St. Preux. In revealing that she still loves and desires St. Preux and has always done so—despite herself, despite Wolmar’s careful education and paternal attention—calls into question the principles Wolmar espouses. Although there also have been some feminist commentators, notably Lisa Disch and Marso, who have noted the importance of Claire’s love for Julie, Claire’s role in the novel has been mostly neglected.24 However, the first half of the novel is an exchange among three writers rather than two. Claire participates in the relationship as confidante (to both) and enabler. Claire loves Julie

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who loves St. Preux, and thus Claire loves St. Preux (which in the end of the novel will become more explicit). On the eve of her marriage (which duty and propriety prescribe), Claire writes a letter to her future husband, Monsieur d’Orbe, indicating that her first and most passionate love will always be for her friend/cousin, Julie. “[E]steem and friendship are already yours. . . . But make no mistake; as a woman I am sort of monster, and by I know not what quirk of nature friendship for me takes precedence over love. When I tell you that my Julie is dearer to me than you, you merely laugh, and yet nothing is more true.” Claire refers to herself as “monstrous,” as the effect of a “quirk of nature,” implying that her passionate love for her cousin, Julie, exceeds normative (read: heterosexual) relations. Claire’s love for Julie, though, is not one of possessiveness, for it extends to everyone and everything Julie loves and particularly to St. Preux. It is not a jealous love but a love that is inclusive. “I [Claire] am so attached to all that is dear to her that her lover and you have about equal rank in my heart, though in different manners.”25 That is, through Julie, Claire is also in love with St. Preux. And later, when Julie contemplates eloping to England with St. Preux, Claire states that she will abandon her marriage plans, her family, and her country and gladly follow: “As for me, although I have high regard for his character [her fiancé], do not lack attachment for his person, and regret losing in him a most honorable man, he is nothing to me next to my Julie. Tell me, my child, does the soul have a sex? In truth I cannot perceive one in mine.”26 And here again, Claire makes it clear that the “rules” of normative, heterosexual relations and sexual difference don’t apply to her. In the second half of the novel, the love of Claire and Julie becomes even more pronounced. Julie invites the newly widowed Claire and her daughter, Henriette, to come live with her and Wolmar and their sons at Clarens. In her letter to Claire, Julie complains of a “void” in her life, despite the supposed fulfillment and contentment Clarens and Wolmar promised. The void, she states, is the effect of the loss of her mother and her lover, St. Preux (or more accurately of being in love)—losses that Wolmar is unable to fill. She mourns her previous identities as daughter and lover. “My mother, my tender mother is no more; I now have nothing but tears to give her memory. . . . love is dead, it is dead forever, and

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that again is a spot that will not be filled.” And her sons (because they are boys?) are also unable to console her for her losses. If my sons were older, a mother’s love would fill all these voids. But that love, as well as all the others, requires communication, and what reciprocity can a mother expect from a child of four or five? We cherish our children long before they can sense it and love us in return; and yet, one has so great a need to tell how much one loves them to someone who can understand us! My husband understands me; but he does not respond enough to me for my fancy.27

Julie makes it clear that being a mother and wife are not enough for her—she needs a friend. On her part, Claire had been planning all along to rejoin Julie. Now that she is widowed, she is essentially free. I told you a hundred times when I was a maiden, I was not meant to be a wife. Had it been up to me, I would not have married. But in our sex, we purchase freedom only through slavery, and we must first be servants in order one day to become our own mistress. Although my father did not constrain me, I suffered vexations within my family. To free myself from them, I therefore married Monsieur d’Orbe.28

For Claire, marriage was a means to escape her family and gain independence. Now that her husband has died, she is free to rejoin her first love, Julie. The two women make plans to live together and raise their children together. In essence, alongside the carefully crafted patriarchy of Clarens, Claire and Julie attempt to create an alternative matriarchy—but with two mothers. Indeed, Claire and Julie are interchangeable in their role as mother, particularly in regard to the daughter Henriette. St. Preux remarks on the dual role of Claire and Julie: I have no doubt that Henriette will benefit immensely from all the cares of which one of her mothers has relieved the other. I say her mothers; for to see the way they behave with her, it is difficult to make out which one is genuine, and some strangers who came here today are or appear to be still in doubt on that score. Indeed, both call her, Henriette, or, my daughter, indifferently. She calls the one maman, and the other petite-maman; the same tenderness

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is in evidence on either side; she obeys both equally. If they ask the Ladies to which one she belongs, each replies, to me. If they question Henriette, it turns out that she has two mothers; which is enough to bewilder anybody.29

So Henriette (and Julie’s two sons) will be raised by two mothers. Yet that is not the entire story. It is not simply a coexistent matriarchy that I suggested earlier—for St. Preux will be asked to participate as the tutor of the three children. Thus the three friends—Julie, Claire, and St. Preux—will assume parental duties, with Wolmar merely looking on. When St. Preux first sees Julie as a wife and mother, he feels regret and sadness that he will never have the opportunity to marry or have children. Madame . . . you are a wife and mother; these are the pleasures that are yours to know. At that moment Monsieur de Wolmar taking me by the hand and pressing it said to me; You have friends, and these friends have children; how could a father’s affection be foreign to you? I looked at him, I looked at Julie, both looked at each other and returned to me a look so moving that embracing them first one and then the other I said to them tenderly: they are as dear to me as they are to you.30 Wolmar, it seems, extends the role of father and coparent to St. Preux. Yet St. Preux is not really a father figure, although he may be coparent or comother (along with Claire and Julie). That is because St. Preux is cast as a “feminine” figure—or at least as a figure whose gender identity is ambiguous (he is often portrayed as excessively passionate and lacking reason). This is apparent upon his arrival at Clarens: St. Preux is the first male allowed into the women’s quarters and invited to partake of their collation (“dairy foods, waffles, pastries, merveilles”): “So far I am the only man to have been so privileged.” Julie alludes to St. Preux’s ability to traverse geographical and sexual boundaries with reference to his gastronomical tastes. “Julie laughed at my appetite. I see, she said giving me another plateful of cream, that your stomach does itself credit everywhere, and that you do as well by women’s fare as you did with Valaisans.”31 That St. Preux can indulge and has an equal appetite for both dairy and wine signifies his ambiguous gender identity or the ability to traverse normative boundaries.

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This is also clear in St. Preux’s ability (in contrast to Wolmar) to fully participate and share the rapturous joy of Julie and Claire when the latter finally moves in to Clarens. St. Preux describes the ecstatic scene: “Claire had prepared a big speech after her manner laced with sentiment and levity; but as she set foot on the threshold of the room, the speech, the levity, were all forgot; she flew to her friend shouting in an indescribable rapture: Cousin, forever, forever until death!” St. Preux also becomes overcome with emotion. He writes, “For my part, seized, transported, out of my senses, I strode erratically about the room not knowing what I was doing, with broken exclamations, and in a convulsive spasm I was unable to control.”32 All three—St. Preux, Julie, and Claire—are so overwhelmed with joy that they forget to celebrate the occasion that day. “Julie was beside herself and I had never seen her in such a state of agitation; it was impossible to turn our mind to anything all day long but seeing and embracing each other endlessly with renewed transports.” When they finally remember and are composed the next day to mark the occasion with a celebratory dinner and dance, St. Preux plans a surprise. Placed at each setting in the salon are the cousins’ initials “fashioned from flowers.” A wedding celebration, perhaps? Claire plans the evening and St. Preux decorates. Everything is done for Julie, who as the “guest” of Claire and St. Preux is again unable to contain her emotions. “Frequently one could see tears of joy flowing from her [Julie’s] eyes; she watched her Cousin with a sort of enthrallment; she liked to think of herself as the stranger who was the object of the celebration, and look on Claire as the housemistress who staged it.”33 It is unclear who Julie imagines herself to be exactly. However, in fantasizing that she is a “stranger” and not the “housemistress,” it is certain that she dreams of being someone other than the wife of Wolmar. For his part, the rather “cold” Wolmar merely observes—a voyeur, who enjoys himself by watching the others enjoy themselves. Rather than participate, Wolmar is like a spectator in theatre who enjoys by looking. In fact, Wolmar describes his only true passion to be that of watching and observing others. My only active principle is a natural taste for order, and the right concurrence of the play of fortune and of men’s acts pleases me exactly like a beautiful symmetry in a tableau, or a well-contrived

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play in the theater. If I have any ruling passion it is that of observation. . . . I observe composedly and disinterestedly . . . and that is my whole compensation for self-love in my continual studies; for I do not like playing a role, but only seeing others perform. I enjoy observing society, not taking part in it. If I could change the nature of my being and become a living eye, I would gladly make that exchange.34

As a “living eye,” Wolmar wishes to be omniscient, godlike, observing those around him. He doesn’t participate, he doesn’t like to “play a role,” but rather he likes to watch the others playing their part in the drama. Wolmar is a dispassionate being who takes enjoyment out of organizing and instructing those around him, so all of his knowledge is empirical, an effect of his vision and sight. It never occurs to Wolmar to be jealous of Claire or consider her a rival for Julie’s affection. Wolmar, the “living eye,” cannot see the relationship of Julie and Claire as possibly crossing the boundaries of mere friendship (well, at least not yet) because he can see only St. Preux as his potential rival. Caught up in the empirical, what he can see and observe (the visibility of “natural” sexed bodily differences), Wolmar misrecognizes Claire’s desire or at least fails to recognize that it might be more extravagant than he suspects. Order and nature are Wolmar’s guide, yet Claire has admitted to being a “monster of nature”—which is to say outside the bounds of normative rules and regulations. At moments though, Wolmar realizes that observation is not always sufficient to discern motivations and intents, particularly in relation to his wife. Much more confident in his observations and understanding of St. Preux, he admits to being unable to clearly “see” his wife’s heart. Indeed, Wolmar suggests that even Julie does not clearly know herself. A veil of virtue and honesty makes so many folds around her heart, that it is no longer possible for the human eye to enter it, not even her own. The only thing that makes me suspect that she still has some misgivings to overcome is that she never ceases searching within herself what she would be if she were entirely cured, and does it so intently that if she were truly cured she would not do it so well.35

Thus Wolmar admits that not only is Julie’s state of mind opaque and impenetrable to his all-knowing observation; Julie is an

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enigma to herself. The doubt that she is “cured” of her love for St. Preux is installed as a possibility that will become fulfilled in the tragic end. Julie’s “suicide,” similarly to Sophie’s death in Emile, calls into question the project of Wolmar and the success of Clarens. Julie, on her deathbed, writes a letter to St. Preux confessing that she never stopped loving him and, since this was no longer possible, was content to die. “We were planning to reunite: this reunion was not good.” Now that Julie is about to die, she no longer needs to fool herself or others. She no longer needs to “dissemble.” I say too much, perhaps, at this moment when the heart no longer dissembles a thing. . . . Ah why should I shrink from expressing all that I feel? It is no longer I who speak to thee; I am already in death’s embrace. When thou seest this Letter, worms will gnaw thy lover’s face, and her heart where thou shalt no longer dwell. But would my soul exist without thee, without thee what felicity should I enjoy? Nay, I leave thee not, I go to await thee. The virtue that separated us on earth shall unite us in the eternal abode.36

Dying, Julie no longer needs to dissimulate and can finally reassert her desire. But dissimulation has been necessary her entire life. In a very early letter, she responds to a letter from St. Preux in which he complains of their separation and secrecy. Consider the situation of my Sex and yours in our common misfortunes and decide which of us is the more to be pitied? To feign insensibility in the throes of passions; to appear joyous and content when a prey to a thousand woes; to have a serene appearance and a troubled soul; always to say something other than what one thinks; to disguise everything one feels; to be false for the sake of duty, and lie for the sake of modesty; such is the usual situation of any maiden my age. One’s finest days are thus spent under the tyranny of propriety, which that of parents only compounds in the case of a mismatch. But it is vain that our inclinations are countered; the heart takes orders only from itself; it evades slavery; it offers itself as it chooses. Under an iron yoke not imposed by Heaven only a body without the soul can be subjected: the person and her truth remain separately committed, and an unfortunate victim is forced into crime by being forced to fail on one side or the other in the sacred duty of fidelity.37

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Julie complains (as Claire did earlier) that the rule of fathers enslaves women; the rules of propriety make them feign modesty and dissimulate their desires. Julie, though, insists that despite this veneer of obedience to the laws of the father, her desires remain her own. Julie’s marriage to Wolmar and the birth of her two children are first presented as a means of overcoming her passionate desire for St. Preux. She has regained her virtue through eight years of marriage and appears to conform to the rules of propriety and her new (albeit benevolent) “father,” Wolmar. The one passionate attachment she is allowed to keep and express openly is her relationship to Claire, as it violates no apparent rules of propriety. Unable to consider that this relationship might be an erotic one—since it is outside the norms of “nature”—Wolmar encourages it. It is only the night before Julie’s death that an indication of its possible erotic nature is revealed. Having stayed up with Julie for two straight nights, Claire is exhausted but refuses to leave her. Julie thus proposes that Claire spend the night with her. “Well then, said Julie, have them set up a little bed for her in my room, unless, she added as if by way of afterthought, she wants to share mine. What say you, Cousin? My illness is not catching, you do not find me repulsive, sleep in my bed; the proposal was accepted.” Wolmar is sent off to his room to sleep alone. After a restless night alone, Wolmar gets up early, “anxious to learn what had taken place during the night.”38 As he enters the bedroom, he finds Claire “seated in an armchair, haggard and pale, or rather livid, her eyes leaden and almost lifeless”; Julie’s condition, in contrast, seems to have improved. “She appeared less weak . . . she seemed to have taken on her Cousin’s animation.” This transference of energy Wolmar attributes to the progression of Julie’s fever rather than an erotic cause. However, he does notice something. “But,” he writes, “I also saw glimmering in her eyes I know not what secret joy that might have contributed to it, the cause of which I could not determine.”39 The cause of Julie’s “secret joy” takes place away from the allseeing Wolmar and remains—at least to him—unfathomable. The novel ends with a letter to St. Preux from Claire entreating him to hurry back to Clarens to share in her grief as only he can do; the children are too young to understand and Wolmar is defeated. The death of Julie has led to much speculation from

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Rousseau readers. Is it a superfluous tragic ending for the sake of drama that fails to question the ostensible ideal of Clarens? Or is her death, rather, an implicit critique of this supposed ideal, as Marso has argued?40 Following the interpretive lead of Marso’s reading of Rousseau, I have contended the latter. However, I have also suggested that the critique is more explicit than implicit and it is structural (which MacCannell also argues in a different manner).41 Reading Julie (and Emile) through the framework of a postoedipal ménage à trois, rather than just from the perspective of the fate of the female characters, Rousseau can be seen as providing a critique of both aristocratic privilege and the bourgeois family. The first half of the novel is a critique of the censoring of desire among the three protagonists by a patriarchal father who pays off his debt to an old friend with the exchange of his daughter. The Baron d’Etang represents the old aristocratic world in which name, title, and position are privileged. It is indeed ironic that he forces his daughter to marry someone who is without name, or rather has been forced to change his name. Although Wolmar is without a recognizable name, he is not without means and as such represents the new emerging bourgeoisie and the rational, fraternal power. Yet this power is even more insidious, for not only must Julie, St. Preux, and Claire appear to follow the dictates of society; they are called upon to internalize those rules. Clarens is not only the regulation of desire but the end of desire and literally ends in death.

Sophie d’Houdetot It is significant that the l’amour à trois in Julie (of Julie–Claire– St. Preux), Rousseau tells us in the Confessions, was reproduced in his own life (with reality following fiction). Soon after creating Julie, Rousseau (who was then living with Therese le Vasseur) fell in love with the (married) Sophie d’Houdetot (who dressed as a man), who was in love with another man, St. Lambert. What is notable about this relationship is that it was not one of jealousy. Rousseau did not consider St. Lambert to be his rival: I found her [Sophie] so lovable while loving St. Lambert, that I hardly imagined that she could be as much while loving me, and without wanting to trouble their union, all I most genuinely

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desired from her in my delirium was that she let herself be loved. In sum, however violent was the passion with which I burned for her, I found it as sweet to be the confidant as the object of her loves, and I never for a moment looked at her lover as my rival, but always as my friend.42

Rousseau loved Sophie and particularly loved Sophie loving St. Lambert. His love for Sophie was not one of possession or jealousy even though it was one characterized by sexual desire. MacCannell is the only reader I am aware of to provide a positive interpretation of the love triangle in Rousseau’s writings. My own argument obviously owes much to her divergent and insightful understanding of the triangular relationship of desire in Rousseau. She writes, For the relation of Sophie to Jean-Jacques and to St. Lambert is an after-effect of Julie, and what Julie has produced, or even reproduced, is a model for desire, which allows the participation of everyone. What permits this triplicity is the realization of the reduced or empty role of the mother and fathers as symbolic or imaginary mediators of desire. . . . Sophie’s staging of her desire for St. Lambert for Rousseau (and the convertibility of the grammaticality of the “for” here is indicative of the structure) permits a strong reformulation of desire-in-common, a sort of homosexual eros entirely dependent upon the existence of the feminine, sexually different, desiring subject, who is one who affirms her identity by and through the nature of her desire.43

My only disagreement with her reading is the insistence that this triangular structure is dependent on the “sexually different.” Although, of course, in a sense it is—especially if Rousseau is advocating more than just a fraternal republic, as his feminist critics have charged. But this is only part of the story. Rousseau writes woman and the feminine back in, only to unwrite/undo the categories of gender themselves at the same time. What is most important in Rousseau’s reformulation of a triangular structure of desire outside of an oedipal framework is that it displaces the dyadic structure of sexual difference and complementarity. Consider this: Rousseau is a man who becomes a woman who loves a woman playing a man who loves another man. Thus we have the complete confusion of gender categories and identifications that exceed any

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possible empirical identification until they no longer (as if they ever did) make sense.

Mme de Warens Of course, this was not the first time Rousseau found himself to be part of a triangular relationship. Throughout the Confessions (and Reveries), Rousseau finds himself involved in one ménage à trois after another. The most well known, of course, was that of Rousseau–Mme de Warens–Claude Anet. At first this might seem to be Rousseau’s ideal, especially given his loving tribute to Mme Warens in his last book, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. And at first Rousseau describes this ménage à trois as the perfect society: “[T]here was established among us three a society without another example perhaps on the earth.”44 Yet despite his love for Mme de Warens, the relationship was destined to fail precisely because of its unequal nature. The inequality of the relationship was not solely, or primarily, due to age (the eleven years between the two), for it seems that Rousseau considered her as much a sister figure as a mother figure (despite their penchant for addressing each other as “maman” and “le petit”).45 The inequality was instead structural between Anet (the father figure) and the irresponsible children (Rousseau and Mme de Warens). “Although he [Anet] was as young as she [Mme de Warens] was, he was so mature and so serious that he looked at us almost as two children worthy of indulgence, and we both looked at him as a respectable man whose esteem we had to take into consideration.”46 That Rousseau privileges a love relationship among equals (and more than two) is clear in the problematic relationship among these three and its subsequent permutations. After Anet’s death (a possible suicide), Rousseau tries to take on his duties and position. That Rousseau attempts briefly to occupy this position is apparent in a much-cited passage in which he asks to “inherit” Anet’s clothes. “The next day I was speaking about him with Mamma with the most lively and most sincere affliction, and suddenly in the middle of the conversation I had the low and unworthy thought that I might inherit his some of his togs and above all a fine black suit whose looks I had a taste for.” Immediately ashamed, Rousseau nonetheless tries to accede to the position of authority and caretaker previously occupied by Anet. “When he was no

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longer, I was forced to take his place, for which I had as little aptitude as taste. I filled it badly.”47 And it is at this point Rousseau regresses, becomes a child, and becomes ill, and the relationship with Mme de Warens changes. From their first sexual encounter, Rousseau had felt “as if he committed incest,” but this “incestuous” relationship (while Anet was alive) was tolerable as long as it was configured as one between brother and sister. After the death of Anet, Rousseau, unable to accede to head of the household, reimagines their relationship as one of mother and son. The needs of love devoured me in the bosom of enjoyment. I had a tender mother, a dear friend, but I needed a mistress. I imagined one in her place; I created her for myself in a thousand ways in order to mislead myself. If I had believed I held mamma in my arms when I was holding her there, my embraces would not have been less lively, but all my desires would have been extinguished; I would have sobbed with tenderness, but I would not have enjoyed.48

Without Anet, Rousseau no longer desires Mme de Warens, who now is no longer a mistress but a mother. He can no longer enjoy her (sexually) unless he imagines her to be someone else.49 This new state of affairs makes Rousseau increasingly ill, and he begins to suffer from the hysterical, “feminine” condition—vapors. Rousseau’s hysterical illness leaves him on the verge of death. Mme de Warens nurses Rousseau back to health. After he recovers, they “return to one another” and their relationship is absolutely transformed into one of mother-child. “If there is a delightful feeling in life, it is the one we experienced at being returned to each other. Our mutual attachment did not increase from it, that was not possible; but it acquired an indefinable something that was more intimate, more touching in its great simplicity. I became completely her child and more than if she had been my true mother.” This new relationship is characterized by the absence of desire. Their relationship was one which “was not at all, as I have said, that of love; but a more essential possession which—without depending on the senses, on sex, on age, on looks—depended on everything which one is oneself and which one cannot lose without ceasing to be.”50 It is a perfectly self-enclosed symbiotic relationship unmarked by difference or otherness.

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But Rousseau’s respite is short-lived. And continuing to remain ill, he suggests to Mme de Warens that they retreat to the country. Mme de Warens suggests a “milk cure.” Yet, tellingly, Rousseau can no longer tolerate milk. “Nevertheless, the country air did not give me back my former health at all. I was languishing; I became worse. I could not bear milk, I had to give it up.”51 Believing himself now to have a “polyp on the heart,”52 Rousseau sets off to Montpellier to find a cure. On the way, he has an affair with his traveling companion, Mme de Larnage. Underscoring his illness as a symptom of his relationship with Mme de Warens, Rousseau temporarily fully recovers. Although Mme de Larnage, who was twenty years older than Rousseau, might also be considered a mother figure, she was not. The affair, entirely contrary to the one with Mme de Warens, was one of desire and sensual pleasure. Upon his return to Mme de Warens, Rousseau finds that she has taken on a new, younger lover—Witzenreid. This new triangular relationship, though, is untenable for Rousseau. Rousseau refuses to “share” Mme de Warens with Witzenreid. Instead, “from that moment I no longer saw that so dear mamma except with the eyes of a genuine son.” Although Rousseau assumes and continues to occupy the position of son in regard to Mme de Warens, he nonetheless attempts to accede to a position of paternal authority in regard to Witzenreid. “I wanted sincerely, to attach myself to this young man, to form him, to work at his education, to make him feel his happiness, to render him worthy of it if that was possible, and—in a word—to do for him everything that Anet had done for me on a similar occasion.” However, “parity between the persons was lacking.”53 Rousseau’s attempt to assume the role of tutor and mentor is an absolute failure; Witzenreid refuses to regard Rousseau as either. Useless, Rousseau soon departs. Both of these triangular relationships ultimately fail because each is based on the unequal relationships of the participants. In the first, Anet is the father figure who oversees and authorizes the relationship between Rousseau and Mme de Warens. And in the latter, expected to fulfill the paternal function, Rousseau utterly fails. Unable either to sustain the role of dutiful son or to assume the paternal function duties, both ménages à trois collapse. We can read each of these two models of triangular desire as one based on paternal authority and the other on maternal—both of which are untenable for Rousseau because they require unequal relations.

CH A P T ER

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Autobiography: Writing the Self, Writing Gender

Rousseau was famously a prodigious autobiographer. Beginning in 1762 with the Letters to Malesherbes and ending with his death in 1778, Rousseau dedicates much of his time to “giving an account of himself.”1 Within this period, Rousseau writes no less than three autobiographies: the expansive, detailed Confessions ; the defensive Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues ; and the lyrical, unfinished The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Each of these works has generated varying degrees of commentary. The Reveries has incited a great deal of commentary and interest mostly in the fields of literature and philosophy. The Confessions, which has been an important historical reference for Rousseau’s life, has also received a large amount of attention from a variety of disciplines (literature, philosophy, psychology); it can even be considered to have generated its own—memoir writing. The most obscure of Rousseau’s autobiographical works remain the Dialogues, no doubt because of its strange structure, not to mention the unusual circumstances of its publication.2 All of this is not surprising. Different works appeal to different audiences— and clearly this is a testimony to the range of Rousseau’s writings. It is thus not unexpected that Rousseau’s more evidently political works (e.g., the Social Contract or the Second Discourse) would garner more attention (with notable exceptions) from political theorists than his other works.3 However, what is surprising, and somewhat of a mystery, is that feminist readers of Rousseau have shown relatively little interest in the autobiographical works— surprising, since it is precisely the artificially imposed boundary of the public and private that

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feminists have challenged elsewhere (and that has indeed been a consistent theme in feminist reviews of Rousseau) that would seem to necessitate a reading of the autobiographical works. Yet there has been little sustained commentary.4 The question, of course, is why: Why would feminist readers ignore Rousseau’s autobiographical writings, which are the most potentially feminist of all? Although this can be nothing more than conjecture, one possible response has more to do with the history of Rousseau interpretation than with the autobiographical texts themselves. It has become commonplace to view Rousseau as a theorist who most loudly proclaimed the notion of a true, authentic, and natural self. This conception of the self is without a doubt antipathetic to a great deal of recent feminist discourses, particularly those that seek to undermine the naturalization of gender. As feminist theorists have repeatedly argued, discourses of authenticity, nature, and truth have led to a justification of sexual difference that is immutable, fixed, and unavailable to reinterpretation.5 We might also consider the effect of Foucault’s influential work, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Foucault argued that, contrary to conventional understanding, “sex” has not been silenced or repressed by a modern prudery (the “repressive hypothesis”), but actually endlessly spoken about, written about, and analyzed with microscopic attention. These new discourses of sexuality, according to Foucault, constitute a new modern technique of power in the service of control and normalization. In particular, Foucault points to the secularization of confession as a new technique of power in which the subject is incited to tell all. In revealing one’s secret desires, one is not only admitting guilt or innocence but ostensibly revealing the hidden “truth” of one’s being. [C]onfession became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth. We have since become a singularly confessing society. The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships, and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites; one confesses one’s crimes, one’s sins, one’s thoughts and desires, one’s illnesses and troubles; one goes about telling, with the greatest precision, whatever is most difficult to tell. One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits in

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pleasure and pain, things it would be impossible to tell anyone else, the things people write books about.”6

“The things people write books about.” This statement might be an apt description of Rousseau’s autobiographical texts— and particularly his Confessions (though Foucault never, curiously, makes this reference).7 Rousseau’s ironic appropriation of Augustine’s title seems to reinforce Foucault’s claim that confession has become thoroughly secularized in modernity.8 Rousseau is not concerned with sin and salvation but the minute recounting of the details of his life in what might be considered the first (now all too familiar) tell-all book.9 Rousseau describes what would seem the most personal and private details of a life: his “peculiar” sexual desires, proclivities, habits, and every sexual encounter (no matter how trivial or obscure). Indeed, the first four books of the Confessions read as a veritable catalog of sexual perversions. Thus one might be tempted to read Rousseau’s autobiographies (and particularly the Confessions) as exemplary (and perhaps one of the inaugurating influences) of a new modern regime of discipline based on secular confession. However, several caveats are necessary. First, Foucault in later works began to rethink the role of confession/autobiography outside of a normalizing framework. As Judith Butler, in (the coincidentally titled) Giving an Account of Oneself, has interpreted this “turn” in Foucault’s work, In the consideration of the practice of confession that he conducted in the early 1980s, he rewrote his earlier position, finding that confession compels a “manifestation” of the self that does not have to correspond to some putative truth, and whose constitutive appearance is not to be construed as mere illusion. On the contrary . . . Foucault reads confession as an act of speech in which the subject “publishes himself,” gives himself in words, engages in an extended act of self verbalization—exomologesis — as a way of making the self appear for another. . . . Confession becomes the verbal and bodily scene of its self-demonstration. It speaks itself, but in speaking it becomes what it is.10

In other words, autobiography/confession is not necessarily revelatory but perhaps productive. That is, autobiography doesn’t reveal the truth of the subject but rather constitutes the subject through writing.

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In this context then, we might consider what Rousseau was doing in his autobiographical works was not revealing an underlying, immutable “truth” of the self but constituting his self by publishing his life. (The compulsion to write and rewrite his autobiography attests to his awareness of the always-unfinished project of self-constitution.) Moreover, we might also consider that despite Rousseau’s selfascribed motto “vitam impendere vero” (“to consecrate one’s life to truth”),11 the truth he has to tell is not one of factual or literal truth. In the Fourth Walk of the Reveries, Rousseau writes, [T]he commitment I made to truthfulness is founded more on feelings of uprightness and equity than on the reality of things, and that in practice I have more readily followed the moral dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of the true and false. I have frequently concocted fables, but very rarely lied. In following these principles, I have given others many openings to criticize me. But I have wronged no one at all, and I have never given myself any more of an advantage than was due me. It is solely in that, it seems to me, that truth is a virtue. In every other respect it is only a metaphysical entity for us from which neither good nor evil results.12

Truth is thus not for a Rousseau a metaphysical proposition but an ethical one. Since the “truth” for Rousseau is not merely descriptive but prescriptive/critical, we can read the autobiographical works as other than representational (how well they conform to a “real” past or a “real” person) and other than merely psychological. Kavanagh has argued, rightly I think, that the autobiographical works (just like Rousseau’s other writings) are directed toward the future. In describing his own approach to reading Rousseau as future-directed, Kavanagh states, Rather than approach Rousseau’s works as reflections or results of influences in his biographical past I present these attempts to “write the truth” as bridges to the future, acts carried out to determine what would come. To approach Rousseau’s work from this perspective means accepting writing itself as the principal arena of a desire aimed at the future, a desire to make that future something different from both past and present.13

To consider the autobiographical works as critical and directed at the future (i.e., productive) is to read the works as more than

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simply memoirs (i.e., rooted in the past). In the following, I will consider Rousseau’s autobiographical works as, well, not entirely autobiographical. That is, the life and character of “Jean-Jacques Rousseau” are to a degree a fictive life and character invented by the writer Rousseau. (This seems to be particularly evident in the Dialogues.) The autobiographical genre deployed by Rousseau can be understood as merely another form of writing in which to continue his critique of contemporary society. Such a claim is not as outrageous as it might first appear. Indeed, as James Swenson points out in On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it was not unusual for some of Rousseau’s more astute eighteenth-century readers to consider the Confessions (ostensibly the most evidently factual and “true” autobiographical account) as allegorical and fabulistic.14 With this in mind, I will consider the Confessions as a selfconscious literary/political work that questions existing relationships and particularly sexual relations. The Confessions, I will argue, provides Rousseau’s most apparent critique of the binary “masculine” and “feminine.” As Rousseau makes evident throughout the Confessions, gender binarism is the effect not of “nature” (an inner “truth”) but of literature and as such is a fictive construction available to reinterpretation and critique. Rousseau provides such a critique by describing a series of sexual encounters (especially in the first few books) that invariably portray manifold “deviant masculinities” (to use Silverman’s phrase again) that implicitly call into question normative masculinity and, particularly, paternal power.

Reading Gender As Wingrove points out, the Confessions “foregrounds the experience of reading.”15 Rousseau’s first memories are not of events or actions but memories of reading: “I am not aware,” he writes, “of what I did up to the age of five or six: I do not know how I learned to read; I remember only my first readings and their effect on me. This is the time from which I date the uninterrupted consciousness of myself.”16 Rousseau does not exist prior to reading. Reading would take up most of Rousseau’s time: from an early age, he stays up all night with his father reading romantic novels (that belonged to his dead mother). When his mother’s library is exhausted, he and his father moved on to the library left behind

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by Rousseau’s maternal grandfather, reading Plutarch, Ovid, la Bruyère, Fontenelle, and Molière. These two different forms of literature would be, Rousseau tells us, constitutive of his character. But that character was one that would remain contradictory: “From this [his readings] informed in my heart that heroic and romantic taste which has done nothing but increase up to the present.”17 Rousseau’s simultaneously “heroic and romantic taste” (which are construed as correspondingly “masculine” and “feminine”) would be his most lasting characteristic. In one of his earliest works, Le Persiffleur (1749), Rousseau declares, When Boileau said that man in general changed from black to white, he painted my portrait in two words; in terms of my individual portrait, he would have been more accurate if he had added all the other colors and intermediary nuances. Nothing is more dissimilar to me than myself, that is why it would be useless to try and define me other than by this singular variety. . . . In one word, a protean, a chameleon, a woman are beings less changing than me.18

This chameleon-like nature is repeated and insisted upon in every subsequent autobiography. In the Letters to Malesherbes, he describes himself as “[a] lazy soul that gets frightened at every effort, a temperament that is ardent, bilious, easily affected and excessively sensitive to everything that affects it do not seem capable of being joined together in the same character, and nevertheless these two opposites make up the basis of mine. Although I cannot resolve this opposition by means of principles, it exists nevertheless, I feel it, nothing is more certain.”19 The same thought is echoed in the Confessions : “While going back this way to the first traces of my sensitive being, I find elements which, although they sometimes seem incompatible, have not failed to unite forcefully to produce a uniform and simple effect, and I find others in appearance the same, which through the concurrence of certain circumstances have formed such different combinations that one would never imagine there was any relation between them.”20 And again, in the Dialogues : “He [Rousseau] is active, ardent, laborious, indefatigable; he is indolent, lazy, without vigor. He is proud, audacious, foolhardy; he is fearful, timid, awkward. He is cold, disdainful, rejecting to the point of harshness; he is gentle, affectionate, easygoing to the point of weakness.”21

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Rousseau defines these two different aspects of his character (“romantic” and “heroic,” passionate and reasonable, “masculine” and “feminine”) as the conflicting legacies bequeathed to him by his mother and father. That this legacy is not literal (some sort of biological or genetic inheritance) but metaphorical is clear in that the inheritance is passed down through an already culturally constituted medium: books and/or reading. His absent mother’s novels make him passionate and give him “bizarre and romantic concepts about human life, from which experience and reflection have never been able to cure me completely.” Later, after passion has already asserted itself, he will receive his father’s inheritance. Reading his deceased grandfather’s “good” books with his father allows Rousseau to identify with his father’s patriotic, republican values. From these interesting readings, from the discussions they occasioned between my father and myself, was formed that free and republican spirit, that indomitable and proud character, impatient with the yoke and servitude. . . . Ceaselessly occupied with Rome and Athens; living so to speak, with their great men, myself born the Citizen of a Republic, and son of a father whose love of the fatherland was his strongest passion, I caught fire with it from his example; I believed myself to be Greek or Roman; I became the character whose life I read.22

In many ways, this schema of Rousseau’s development repeats his argument of the Second Discourse and Emile (which again should highlight the fictive nature of the Confessions): passion precedes reason and reason in turn modifies our passions. However, there is a caveat: both are, according to Rousseau in the Confessions, culturally constituted. That is, the instinctive passions of “Savage Man” are no longer, if they ever were, available. Sexual desire is always already the effect of culturally constructed models. Another caveat is also necessary. In outlining the schema of Rousseau’s heritage or legacy from his parents, I suggested that Rousseau’s self-described conflicting character was descended metaphorically from his parents, with his mother bequeathing to him his passionate nature and his father his independent reason. The problem with this overly neat schema is that Rousseau’s father was not actually a father figure. In the few descriptions of his father, Rousseau’s relations with him are described as one of companionship and consolation (for the loss of the mother). And he describes his father as

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treating him with “gentleness.” (Rousseau’s brother was, though, not so fortunate.) Isaac Rousseau is also described as being “more of a child” than Rousseau.23 In place of the paternal figure of power, Isaac Rousseau is cast as the rebellious son/citizen fighting the established powers. Consider Isaac’s departure from Geneva. Rousseau recounts the circumstances of his father’s self-imposed exile as an uncompromising heroic deed. Isaac quarrels with an officer and during the quarrel strikes the officer. The officer, who has political connections, accuses Isaac of drawing his sword. Rousseau’s father is about to be sent to prison but demands that the officer also be imprisoned in accordance with the law. Since this demand is refused, Isaac decides to leave Geneva, preferring to “be expatriated for the rest of his life, rather than to give way on a point in which honor and freedom appeared to him to be compromised.”24 Throughout the first few books of the Confessions, Rousseau recounts several different episodes of his early life that oscillate between these two defining traits: “romanticism” and “heroism.” But again, as we shall see, these two characteristics are less contradictory than presumed and share a certain similarity: namely, a critique of the authoritarian, paternal figure. Rousseau’s “heroism,” similar to his father’s, shows itself in an intransigence against paternal authority; his “romanticism” reveals itself in an eroticism that not only is what we might term conventionally “feminine” but one that implicitly critiques paternal authority.

Masochism Two well-known episodes from his childhood are exemplary. Rousseau and his cousin are sent to Bossey to live with M. and Mlle Lambercier. Rousseau’s vague “romanticism” takes an unexpected turn after an average childhood spanking by Mlle Lambercier. “Just as Mlle Lambercier had the affections of a mother for us, she also had the authority of one, and sometimes carried it to the point of inflicting children’s punishments on us, when we deserved it. For a rather long time she confined herself to the threat, and this threat of a punishment that was completely new to me seemed very frightening.”25 However, after the punishment is finally inflicted, Rousseau “bizarrely” finds it to be actually pleasurable: “I found the experience of it less terrible than the expectation had been, and

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what is most bizarre in this is that this punishment increased my affection even more for the one who had inflicted it on me . . . for I had found in the suffering, even in the shame, an admixture of sensuality which had left me with more desire than fear to experience it a second time from the same hand.”26 This spanking, Rousseau tells us, was determinative. “Who would believe,” he asks, “that this childhood punishment received at eight years of age from the hand of a woman of thirty determined my tastes, my desires, my passions, myself for the rest of my life, and this, precisely in the opposite sense to the one that ought to follow naturally?”27 Rousseau will deem his erotic taste as “unnatural” since it is a turn away from genital or reproductive sexuality. Rousseau claims that as a boy, although he had only a faint idea of sexual intercourse, the notion he had filled him with disgust. Not only did I not have any distinct idea of the union of the sexes before my adolescence; but also that idea never offered itself to me except in an odious and disgusting image. I had a horror of street walkers that has never worn off; I could not see a debauched person without disdain, even without fright: for my aversion to debauchery went that far, ever since the day, while going to Little Sacconex by a sunken road on both sides I saw the holes in the ground where I was told that people copulate. Also what I had seen of the couplings of dogs always came back to mind when I thought of these debauched people, and this memory alone made me sick to my stomach.28

Although Rousseau’s aversion to “normal” sexual relations (i.e., copulation) lessened “when the passage of years finally made me a man,” his masochistic desires always remained primary. Instead of vanishing, my old childhood taste was so much associated with the other one that I never could detach it from the desires inflamed by my senses; and this madness joined to my natural timidity, has always made me very unenterprising with women, either from not daring to say everything or from not being able to do everything; the sort of enjoyment (for me, the other was only the final consummation) could not be usurped by the one desired it nor guessed by the woman who could grant it.29

Rousseau’s timidity prevents him from directly asking for what he wants (would not asking directly prevent the enjoyment that

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he desires?). He thus seeks pleasure indirectly and through fantasizing. “Not ever daring to declare my taste, at least I beguiled it through relationships which preserved my idea of it. To be on my knees before an imperious mistress, to obey her orders, to ask her for forgiveness, were very sweet enjoyments for me, and the more my lively imagination inflamed my blood, the more I had the appearance of a faint-hearted lover.”30 Most commentators of Rousseau have either ignored his masochism as an unfortunate and embarrassing predilection or produced a psychological reading (i.e., the symptom of a perverse mind). Surprisingly, no readers of Rousseau that I am aware of have considered his masochism as a political critique—that is, a critique of normative masculinity. This is particularly surprising given the amount of attention male masochism has recently received as a means of disrupting a phallic economy of sexuality. For example, Silverman suggests “[m]asochism works insistently to negate paternal power and privilege.”31 And Gilles Deleuze in his classic study, Coldness and Cruelty, also suggests that male masochism is an attempt to debase the paternal figure within. We have to ask ourselves, he says, Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? The masochist feels guilty, he asks to be beaten, he expiates, but why and for what crime? Is it not precisely the father-image in him that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed and humiliated? What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father.32

Thus we can read Rousseau’s masochism, to use Silverman’s phrase, as a means of “phallic divestiture.” His pleasure in being beaten by a woman (and even, as we shall see, potentially a boy) is the pleasure in humiliating paternal power and elevating the historically degraded feminine figure— or of at least giving back power to the figure of woman.33

Heroic (“Masculine”) Rebellions That Rousseau’s erotic preference is one that challenges phallic power is evident from another (unpleasant) beating scene.

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Rousseau is accused of breaking one of Mlle Lambercier’s combs that were drying in the fire. Rousseau denies it. He is accused of lying. No one else was in the room. He is punished: “[But] this time it was not inflicted on me by Mlle Lambercier. They wrote to my uncle Bernard; he came.” The punishment thus comes not from the powerless who is granted power but from powerful, paternal authority. This time power relations are not critiqued but consolidated. Despite the punishments, Rousseau refuses to budge and admit what he has not done. “They could not extract the admission they demanded from me. Reprimanded several times, and reduced to the most frightful condition, I was unshakable. I would have suffered death and I was resolved to do so. . . . Finally I emerged from this cruel test in pieces but triumphant.”34 This episode might be construed as illuminating Rousseau’s “heroic” side. And indeed it does. But it is a heroism that shows itself only in the face of traditional authority, in favor of the weak and oppressed. Indeed, Rousseau states that this episode was determinative for the rest of his life. In recalling this event, Rousseau again becomes agitated. While writing this I feel my pulse beat faster again; these moments will always be present to me if I live a hundred years. This first feeling of violence and injustice has remained so deeply engraved on my soul, that all the ideas related to it give me back my first emotion; and this feeling, relating to myself in its origin, has taken such a consistency in itself, and has been so much detached from all personal interest, that my heart is inflamed at the spectacle or narrative of all unjust actions—whatever their object might be and wherever they are committed—just as if their effect fell on me. When I read the cruelties of a ferocious tyrant, the crafty foul deeds of a cheat of a priest, I would willing set off in order to stab those wretches, even if I were obliged to perish a hundred times in doing so. I have often gotten myself bathed in perspiration, by pursuing at a run or by throwing stones at a rooster, a cow, a dog, an animal that I saw tormenting another one, solely because it felt itself to be stronger.35

Thus a certain coincidence between what we have been calling Rousseau’s “romanticism” and “heroism”: both are in the service of those who are deemed weaker or disadvantaged. Women

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become the masters, children stand up to parents, the weaker fight the strong; in all, patriarchal authority is questioned and/ or ridiculed. Consider another final “beating” example. At the age of thirteen, Rousseau is apprenticed to the “loutish” and “violent” engraver M. DuCommun. This apprenticeship encompassed some of the unhappiest years of Rousseau’s childhood. It is not the profession that distresses him, which he might have enjoyed under a different master. “In itself the trade did not displease me; I had a keen taste for drawing; using the chisel rather amused me, and since the talent required of an engraver for watch making is very limited, I hoped to attain perfection in it.” But he becomes repelled by the work because of the tyrannical nature of DuCommun. “My master’s tyranny ended by making unbearable to me work that I would have loved.”36 At first DuCommun’s treatment comes as a shock: “I had,” Rousseau writes, “been accustomed to a perfect equality with my superiors in the manner of living.” “Brutalized,” Rousseau quickly forgets his former life. Forgetting his books, education, and noble pretensions, Rousseau begins to degenerate. [DuCommun] in a very short time completely tarnished all the brilliance of my childhood, brutalized my loving and lively character, and reduced me in mind as well as fortune to my genuine station as an apprentice. My Latin, my antiquities, my history, everything was forgotten for a long time: I did not even remember that there has been Romans in the world. . . . Despite the most decent education, I must have had a great penchant to degenerate; because it happened very rapidly, without the slightest difficulty, and never did such a precocious Caesar so promptly become Laridon.37

Rousseau is overcome with a sense of “covetousness” and “powerlessness”: “I saw objects of enjoyment only for others and privations for me alone, where the image of the master’s and journeyman’s freedom added weight to my subjugation, where I did not dare open my mouth in disputes about the things I knew the most, finally where everything I saw became an object of covetousness for my heart solely because I was deprived of everything.” Rousseau begins to steal and lie: “That is how I learned to covet in silence, to hide myself, to dissimulate, to lie, and finally to steal.”38

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Rousseau continues to steal and lie despite harsh punishments. He becomes insensitive to DuCommun’s beatings. Indeed the beatings, rather than prevent Rousseau from further thefts and further lies, only propel him on. “I judged that being beaten like a rogue authorized me to be one. I found that stealing and being beaten went together, and in some way made up a single condition, and that by fulfilling the part of that condition that depended on me, I could leave the part to my master.”39 Obviously these beatings are far removed from any sense of pleasure (such as those of Mlle Lambercier). Indeed, Rousseau reverses the causality: he is not beaten because he steals but steals because he is beaten. Stealing becomes an act of “vengeance” for DuCommun’s ill treatment— a continuous and stubborn rebellion against tyrannical authority. As he states, “Instead of turning my eyes back to the rear and looking at the punishment, I brought them forwards and looked at the vengeance.” He refuses to give in to the unfair (arbitrary) patriarchal authority. What is interesting is that Rousseau steals not money or valuable objects but trifles: food, his master’s tools, impressions and drawings (in the belief he was “stealing his talents along with his productions”), a beautiful sheet of drawing paper. Valuable objects and money in particular do not tempt him. At one point, Rousseau tries to assert his freedom by “stealing time” from his master. He engraves “medals to serve as orders of chivalry for myself and my comrades.” DuCommun accuses Rousseau of trying to counterfeit money. (“My master surprised me in this contraband work, and thrashed me, saying that I was practicing to make counterfeit money, because our medals had the coat of arms of the Republic.”) Rousseau protests: “I can swear that I had no idea of counterfeit money, and very little of the genuine sort. I knew better how the Roman As was made than our three sous piece.”40 DuCommun immediately assumes that Rousseau’s efforts are instrumental, for profit and personal gain. He cannot understand that Rousseau would be making something decorative, superficial, without exchange value. DuCommun’s misunderstanding of Rousseau’s aims signals the difference between the two characters. DuCommun presumes that Rousseau is interested in what he himself is: money, exchange, profit, and utilitarianism. But as Rousseau makes clear in a digressionary aside (as well as in his

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other texts, most notably Emile), money has never held much interest for him. Rousseau’s lack of interest in money has been interpreted as his desire for unmediated pleasure. As Starobinski writes, for Rousseau “[m]oney is in effect something that cannot be enjoyed immediately: all the pleasures it can buy are necessarily mediated pleasures. A pleasure acquired by means of money no longer has the purity of immediacy: it is poisoned.”41 This interpretation seems irrefutable since this appears to be precisely what Rousseau states in the Confessions : “To me money has never seemed to be as precious a thing as it is usually found to be. Further; to me it has never seemed very convenient; it is good for nothing by itself; one must transform it in order to enjoy it.” However, it seems that Rousseau’s dislike of money has less to do with immediacy—for he will go to great lengths to achieve his desires (one has only to think of his extended efforts to steal DuCommun’s apples); rather, money symbolizes abstract, universal power. As a symbol of exchange, money can be thought to be homologous to that other signifier of exchange, the phallus.42 That Rousseau finds money to share a certain affinity with a phallic display of power/desire is evident from his overwhelming (sexual) shame in spending even money that he has rightfully earned. Rousseau writes, A thousand times, during my apprenticeship and since, I have gone out with the plan of buying some delicacy. I approach a pastry shop: I notice some women at the counter; I believe I already see them laughing and joking among themselves about the little glutton. I pass in front of a fruit vendor, I cast a glance out of the corner of my eye at some fine pears, their odor tempts me; very nearby two or three young people are looking at me; a man who knows me is in front of his shop; from afar I see a girl coming; isn’t she the maid of the house? My near-sightedness causes me a thousand illusions. I take everyone who passes for someone of my acquaintance: everywhere I am intimidated, held back by some obstacle: my desire increases with my shame, and I finally return like a fool, devoured by covetousness, having enough in my pocket to satisfy it, and not having dared to buy nothing.43

Let us return to DuCommun and Rousseau’s apprenticeship. Rousseau states that though he “passed from the sublimity of

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heroism to the baseness of a good-for-nothing” while an apprentice, he was unable to “adopt its tastes completely.” Rousseau becomes bored. It is then that he rekindles his “taste” for reading. This taste soon becomes an all-consuming passion. Rousseau gorges himself on books. He borrows everything he can get his hands on from the book lender, La Tribu: “Good and bad, all were acceptable, I did not choose at all; I read them all with equal voracity. I read at the workbench, I read while going to do my errands, I read on the toilet and in this way forgot whole hours, my head turned by the reading, I could do nothing but read.”44 Rousseau uses all of his spending money to buy books. When he runs out of money, he gives his personal belongings, even his clothes, as security. (Interestingly, Rousseau stops stealing at that point—just when it would seem the most necessary.) He endures beating after beating from DuCommun. But nothing can stop him from reading. The effect of all this reading is to return Rousseau to his former self. Reading allows Rousseau to accede to feelings above the tastes of his station. “Cured of my childish and roguish tastes by the one for reading, and even by my readings, which— although they were chosen unselectively and were often bad—nevertheless led my heart back to nobler feelings than the ones given to me by my station.”45 However, Rousseau soon depletes La Tribu’s entire stock. Rousseau then finds his present condition even more unbearable: his readings have simply highlighted the disparity between his actual situation and that of his desires. “Disgusted with everything within my grasp, and feeling everything that might have tempted me to be too far from me, I saw nothing that could gratify my heart.”46 Without any books left to read, Rousseau turns to his imagination. Indeed, Rousseau would credit his imagination with saving him: In this strange situation my restless imagination made a choice that saved me from myself and calmed my nascent sensuality. This was to nourish itself on the situations that had interested me in my readings, to recall them, to change them, to combine them, to appropriate them to myself so much that I became one of the characters I imagined, that I always saw myself in the most agreeable positions in harmony with my taste, that finally the fictive condition into which I had just thoroughly placed myself made me forget my real condition with which I was so discontent.47

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Involuntarily (“my restless imagination made a choice”), Rousseau moved from reading books to creating/writing his own stories/ fictions, in which he will be the central character.

Performing the “Feminine” It is noteworthy that when Rousseau runs away from DuCommun and Geneva at the age of sixteen, he had an image in mind of what his future might look like: a vision of freedom certainly (from his harsh apprenticeship) but most importantly one that focused on women. Rousseau turns from his “station” in life, giving up “[his] religion, [his] fatherland, [his] family, and [his] friends” in search of adventure and, specifically, romance. I would enter safely into the vast space of the world; my merit was going to fill it: at each step I was going to find feasts, treasures, adventures, friends ready to serve me, mistresses eager to please me: by merely showing myself I was going to occupy the universe with me: not however the whole universe; I would exempt it to some degree. . . . A single Castle circumscribed my ambition. Favorite of the Lord and Lady, lover of the Damsel, friend of the brother, and protector of the neighbors.48

Rousseau hopes to attain his romantic ambitions through his beautiful singing voice and his “fine appearance.” He begins his first days of freedom trying to attract the ladies. He stops at the first few chateaux he comes across and, too shy to knock on the door, decides to sing under the most “promising” window. Rousseau laughingly recounts his ridiculous naïveté when these performances fail to attract: “I sang under the window that seemed most promising, very surprised, after having shouted myself out of breath for a long time, not to see either Ladies or Damsels appear attracted by the beauty of my voice or the piquancy of my songs.”49 Even more interesting, Rousseau describes his appealing appearance as what could be more characteristically described as “feminine” rather than “masculine”: “Without being what is called a handsome boy, I had a pretty foot, a fine leg, an open manner, an animated physiognomy, a delicate mouth, black eyebrows and hair, eyes that were small and even deep-set, but which forcefully cast forth the fire with which my blood was inflamed.”50

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And indeed, throughout the first half of the Confessions Rousseau engages in a series of romantic encounters in which he adopts a submissive “feminine” role, waiting to be chosen by a more sexually adventuresome female (and sometimes male). As MacCannell notes, “Rousseau could be called ‘Mademoiselle.’ ”51 Thus, it seems not so much that Rousseau was transformed by his adventures outside the gates of Geneva but that he never quite fit into that masculine republic (if we remember, “in Geneva one will find only men”52).

Exhibitionism: Nonphallic Desire At the start of Book III, a year after Rousseau had left Geneva and is living in Turin, his imagination continues to fill his “brain with girls and women.” Hoping to reenact earlier pleasures he had received from Mlle Lambercier’s spankings (or from his childhood friend, the “strict schoolmistress,” Mlle Goton) but too timid to ask for what he wants, Rousseau resorts to the “most extravagant maneuvers”—that is, exhibitionism. My agitation grew to the point that, not being able to satisfy my desires, I stirred them up by the most extravagant maneuvers. I sought out dark alleys, hidden nooks where I could expose myself to persons of the opposite sex in the condition in which I would have wished I could be near them. What they saw was not the obscene object [l’objet obscene], I did not even dream of that, it was the ridiculous object [l’objet ridicule]. The foolish pleasure I had in displaying it to their eyes cannot be described. There was only one step to take from that to feeling the desired treatment, and I do not doubt that some bold one would have given me this amusement while passing by, if I had had the audacity to wait.53

Rousseau’s exhibitionism does not take the expected form—he does not expose the sexual organ (“the obscene object”) but rather his behind with the hope of provoking a spanking. In other words, Rousseau’s gesture is not aggressive (a show of potency) but rather a passive one in which he hopes a “bold girl” will come along and fulfill his desire. Rousseau’s quest ends in humorous disaster. He is caught by a “big man wearing a big moustache, a big hat, a big sabre, escorted by four or five old women each armed with a broomstick,

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among whom I perceived the little hussy [“la petite coquine”] who had betrayed me, and doubtless wanted to see me face to face.” Rousseau gets out of the situation with a little “novelistic expedient”: he claims to be the “deranged” son of a noble family from whom he has escaped because they wanted to lock him up. This little fiction persuades the “big man” to let him go after a warning. Yet the women were not, Rousseau realizes, so willing: From the manner in which the young woman and the old women saw me leave, I judged that the man whom I had feared so much was very useful to me, and that with the women alone I would not have gotten off so cheaply. I heard them murmuring something or other that I hardly cared about; for as long as the sabre and the man did not become mixed up in it, I was very certain, nimble and vigorous as I was, of soon saving myself from both their cudgels and themselves.54

A certain ambivalence inheres in this description that has been overlooked by readers of Rousseau. Generally it has been accepted, following Starobinski’s interpretation, that “castrating punishment comes in the form of ‘big man.’ ”55 But according to Rousseau’s description, it is the “big man” who saves him from the women and “gently” lets him go. But from what does he save Rousseau? Wasn’t it Rousseau’s desire and aim to attract the attention of the girls/women? Rousseau’s fear seems to lie elsewhere. Rousseau’s fear is that he might be expected to perform sexually— particularly in reference to the “la petite coquine” who undoubtedly wanted to see him “face to face” (“qui vouloit sans doute me voir au visage”). Thus the “big man” does not symbolically castrate Rousseau, for in a sense he is already castrated—that is, his pleasure/desire was never phallic in the first place. This is clear from a similar episode Rousseau recounts that took place roughly six months earlier. Rousseau had fallen in love with Mme Basile, who was guarded by a clerk while her jealous husband was away. Rousseau gained entry to the household with the offer of his engraving services. One day, Rousseau found her alone in her room. Overcome with desire, Rousseau prostrates himself at the threshold of the room. Glimpsing Rousseau through a mirror on the mantel, Mme Basile points to the mat at her feet. Rousseau immediately rushes to the mat and drops himself at her

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feet, remaining immobile until interrupted by the sounds of the maid entering the next room. Rousseau recalls this encounter as one of the most pleasurable of his life. He writes, Nothing of all the feelings caused in me by the possession of women is worth the two minutes I spent at her feet without even daring to touch her dress. No, there are no enjoyments like the ones that can be given by a decent woman whom one loves: everything is a favor with her. A little sign of the finger, a hand lightly pressed against my mouth are the only favors that I ever received from Mme Basile, and the remembrance of such slight favors still carries me away when I think about them.56

Rousseau attempts to re-create this tête-à-tête but is prevented by the clerk’s diligence as well as by the unexpected return of Mme Basile’s husband, “a big and handsome man.” Rousseau is banned from the household. He tries to see her again by returning several times to her street. But instead of Mme Basile, he encounters only the husband and the clerk. The clerk, Rousseau writes, “when he noticed me, made a gesture with the shop’s measuring stick that was more expressive than enticing.”57 Both stories share a certain similarity. However, there are also significant differences. In the episode with Mme Basile, Rousseau gets what he desires (since Mme Basile seems to understand what it is he desires) but is prevented from further encounters by the return of the husband and the insinuations and threats of the clerk. When he later tries to repeat the structure of this encounter by exposing himself in the streets of Turin, he is misunderstood, thought to be provoking a (conventional) sexual encounter, and is paradoxically rescued by the “big man.” A similar misunderstanding occurs when his friend Mlle Merceret asks Rousseau to accompany her on a trip to her father’s house in Fribourg. Despite Merceret making it clear that she desired Rousseau (arranging it so they shared a room), he is not the least interested. My simplicity was such that, although Merceret was not unpleasant, there did not even enter my mind during the whole trip, I do not say the slightest gallant temptation, but even the slightest idea related to it, and if this idea had come to me, I was too foolish to

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know how to take advantage of it. I did not imagine how a girl and a boy could come to sleep together; I believed that centuries were needed to prepare this terrible arrangement.58

Rousseau drops off a disappointed Merceret in Fribourg. Rousseau retrospectively adds that he could have very easily married Merceret and lived a pleasant life. “She had a real taste for me; I could have married her without trouble, and followed her father’s profession. . . . I would have settled at Fribourg. . . . Doubtless I would have lost great pleasures, but I would have lived in peace up to my final hour.”59 But Rousseau, as he makes clear throughout his writings, foregoes what is expected of him and the roles society and normative masculinity dictate: becoming a husband, father, and worker. Instead Rousseau chases “great pleasures” and extravagant desires, outside the boundaries of what are normatively construed as both masculine desires and position (both symbolically and socially).60 What Rousseau seeks is a dephallicized pleasure that is outside the boundaries of normative masculine sexuality. As a child and adolescent, this pleasure takes the form of supplication or obedience to a female figure. This boyhood predilection so central to the first few books of the Confessions has led to quite a few normalizing judgments (even from those theorists who disavow such motives).61 For example, René Laforgue considers Rousseau’s “feminine” behavior a sign of latent homosexuality and attributes it to the desire to be punished by the father for “killing” his mother.62 Rousseau’s latent homosexuality, according to this reading, is apparent not only from his exhibitionism (in which showing his backside is directed at potential pederasts) but also from his overt homophobia.

Homosexual Love Rousseau’s homophobia is ostensibly evident by his depiction of various unpleasant homosexual encounters in the Confessions. First there is the false Moor who pretends to be Jewish in order to make a mock conversion to Catholicism and gain some financial support from the Church. He accosts the young Rousseau one day when they are alone in assembly hall. Rousseau’s description of the “Moor” masturbating in front of him is the only explicit sexual scene in the entire Confessions.

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The next day rather early in the morning the two of us were alone in the assembly room. He began his caresses again, but with such violent motions that they made him frightful. Finally he wanted to pass by degrees to the most filthy liberties, and to force me to do the same by making use of my hand. I vehemently shook myself free uttering a cry and making a leap backwards, and without showing either indignation or anger, for I did not have the slightest idea what it was all about; I expressed my surprise and my distaste with so much energy that he left me there: but while he was finishing tossing about, I saw flying off toward the chimney and falling to the ground something sticky and whitish that turned my stomach.63

The explicitness of the description and the horror Rousseau feels at the sight of the “false African” deserve commentary. Rousseau describes the male body as that which is not self-contained, clean, proper— one that is, to use Julia Kristeva’s term, abject,64 out of control. (Rousseau says he believed his attacker was having an epileptic fit.) In Male Matters, Calvin Thomas argues, with reference to Luce Irigaray and Kristeva, that a masculine economy works not only by denying its own bodily functions but by projecting its bodily anxieties onto marginal others: “The cultural logic of abjection, of the anxiety of production, demands that the male subject’s anxieties about what comes out of his body be phantasmatically projected onto others who are already socially, culturally, and economically marginalized, jettisoned from the symbolic system.”65 In his description, Rousseau reverses the usual trajectory of an assignation of abjection: here it is the male body that is abject, out of control, and literally uncontained.66 Although Rousseau claimed that this attack put him on the alert against “knights of the cuff” (pederasts), this was not the last time that he found himself the victim of unwanted male attention. Rousseau recalls two other incidents. A silk worker joins Rousseau on a bench in the town square and invites him to masturbate with him. Rousseau flees: “I was so frightened by this impudence that I hurriedly got up without answering him and began to run away as fast as my legs could carry me, believing that this wretch was at my heels.”67 A few days later, Rousseau has another unpleasant adventure. Homeless, Rousseau decides to sleep on a bench in the town square. He meets an abbé who offers to share his lodging with Rousseau. Unaware of his intentions, Rousseau accepts and

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the abbé unsuccessfully tries to seduce him. Again, Rousseau is horrified. All three of the aforementioned encounters would seem to give credence to the claim/interpretation that Rousseau was homophobic and consequently a latent homosexual. Yet what this conclusion neglects is that Rousseau openly recounts several positive homosexual experiences. It is curious that no critic I know of (even those who claim Rousseau was a “latent homosexual”) have commented on Rousseau’s positive homosexual relations.68 (Perhaps this is more indicative of the heterosexist bias of readers of Rousseau than of Rousseau himself.) Indeed, two of Rousseau’s greatest boyhood “crushes”/love affairs he tells us were with boys: namely Bâcle and Venture de Villeneuve. Rousseau first meets Bâcle, an old “comrade” from Geneva, in Turin while employed by the Comte de Gouvon (just following the tale of his exhibitionist folly). Rousseau describes his friend as such: “This Bâcle was a very amusing boy, very gay, full of farcical sallies which his age made agreeable. Behold me all at once crazy about M. Bâcle, but crazy to the point of not being able to leave him.”69 Rousseau becomes “completely obsessed.” He begins to neglect his work. His is forbidden to see Bâcle. Rousseau ignores the order and sneaks out, spending whole days with Bâcle. As a consequence, Rousseau is dismissed from the household. Rather than feeling dismay, Rousseau is overjoyed: now he can spend more time with his friend. Bâcle plans to return to Geneva. Rousseau agrees to travel with him up to the gates of Geneva. They concoct a plan to lengthen their travels— perhaps indefinitely. They will entertain people along the way with Rousseau’s Hiero-fountain, given to him a few weeks back by the Comte. With this new plan in place, Rousseau abandons all of his previous dreams, ambitions, and desires to travel with his new friend. Such was the plan on which I set to work, abandoning without regret my protector, my teacher, my studies, my hopes, and the expectation of an almost assured fortune, in order to begin the life of a true vagabond. Farewell to the capital farewell to the Court, ambition, vanity, love, the beauties, and all the great adventures the hope for which had led me the year before. I leave with my fountain and my friend Bâcle, with my purse lightly garnished, but

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my heart saturated with joy and thinking of nothing except enjoying this ambulatory happiness to which I had suddenly limited my brilliant projects.70

But this happy plan is soon interrupted. The fountain breaks, money runs out. When they begin to approach Chambéry and Mme de Warens’s home, Rousseau rebuffs Bâcle, and the latter continues on alone. The ostensible reason for sending Bâcle away is Rousseau’s desire not to burden Mme de Warens’s with his friend. However, it is worth noting that Rousseau describes his return to Mme de Warens’s home as a return to the “paternal household.” “I envisaged,” Rousseau writes, “her house exactly as my paternal house.”71 Thus, it would seem that Mme de Warens, peculiarly at this point in time, figuratively occupies the place of paternal power. As standing in for the paternal figure, Mme de Warens symbolically forbids Rousseau to continue his relationship with Bâcle. Rousseau’s second homosexual love relation occurs shortly after Bâcle departs. Mme de Warens sends Rousseau to live with and study music with the music master of the cathedral, M. le Maître. One night, a traveling musician, Venture de Villeneuve, comes looking for work. Rousseau again becomes “infatuated.” He even compares his new friend to Bâcle. “I am sure it will be agreed that after having become infatuated with M. Bâcle, who everything considered was only a boor, I was capable of becoming infatuated with M. Venture who had education, talents, wit, experience of the world.” Although Venture had more qualities that were to Rousseau’s liking (education, talent), his infatuation was less extreme. My taste for M. Venture, more reasonable in its cause than the one I had acquired for M. Bâcle, was also less extravagant in its effects, even though it was more lively and more durable. I loved to see him, to listen to him; to me everything he did appeared charming, to me everything he said seemed to be oracles: but my infatuation did not reach the point of making me incapable of being separated from him.

This is because, as Rousseau states, “Nearby [à mon voisinage] I had a good preservative against that excess.”72

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Rousseau’s passion is held in check by the nearby presence of and simultaneous passion for Mme de Warens. However, Rousseau also offers another reason: Venture doesn’t share the same sexual desires as Rousseau. “Moreover (“d’ailleurs ”), finding his maxims to be very good for him, I felt that they were not intended for me; I needed another sort of sensual pleasure [une autre sorte de volupté ] about which he had no idea, and about which I did not even dare to speak to him, certain that he would make fun of me. Nevertheless, I would have liked to combine this attachment with the one that dominated me.”73 The “volupté” that Rousseau refers to, and which he would have liked to share with Venture, is ambiguous. Is he again referring to his love for Mme de Warens? If so, why does he begin the sentence with “moreover,” signaling the introduction of further/alternative reason? Is he referring to his masochistic desires (which the use of the word dominated would seem to suggest), which he would like to share with Venture? But this reading would seem to contradict what was implied earlier—namely that Rousseau’s masochistic desires were always directed toward a “feminine” figure. However, if we recall that Rousseau, at this point, had come to see Mme de Warens as representing the “paternal home,” it is not surprising that he turns toward a more equal love relationship, forbidden by the “father” figure; for it is Mme de Warens who (again) intervenes and forbids the relationship.74 She sends Rousseau away. When Rousseau returns, he finds Mme de Warens has left. He goes to live with Venture. “[H]e [Venture],” Rousseau writes, “almost made me forget Mme de Warens.”75 While living with Venture, Rousseau has another significant (masochistic) sexual encounter. One day when Venture is at work, Rousseau meets two girls— Mlle Graffenried and Mlle Galley—who take him “prisoner” for the day. The encounter leads to nothing more than a chaste kiss on the hand. However, for Rousseau this is everything. “Those who read this will not fail to laugh at my gallant adventures, remarking that after many preliminaries, the most advanced ended with a kiss of the hand. Oh my readers, do not deceive yourselves. Perhaps I have had more pleasure in my loves which ended with that kissed hand, than you will have in yours, which begin with that at the very least.” 76

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Notably, on seeing Venture the next day, Rousseau’s fondness for the former has diminished. Rousseau recalls that “[t]his time I did not see him with the same pleasure as usual.” But more importantly, Rousseau keeps quiet on what has transpired between him and the girls. “I kept myself from telling him how I had passed my day.”77 Rousseau’s fascination with Venture is temporarily suspended. Venture cannot give Rousseau what he desires. However, later, when Rousseau finds himself broke and stranded in Lausanne, he recalls Venture. Rousseau comes up with the idea to imitate Venture. “[W]ithout thinking that I had neither his engaging manner nor his talents, I took it into my head to play the little Venture at Lausanne, to teach music which I did not know, and to say I was from Paris where I had never been.” Soon and without conscious effort, Rousseau becomes completely “venturized.” “I have already noted some moments of inconceivable delirium in which I was no longer myself: here is yet another of the most clear-cut instances of this. To understand to what point my head had turned at that time, to what point I was venturized so to speak, it is necessary only to see how many extravagances I heaped up all at the same time.”78 Rousseau begins to actually believe he can become Venture. He changes his name to Vaussore (an anagram of Rousseau) de Villeneuve; he brags about his musical abilities; he goes so far as to give a concert. The concert is of course a failure, and Rousseau is exposed as an imposter. This episode in the Confessions can be read in several different ways, as it is purposely ambiguous. Rousseau’s desire to become Venture (to have his “rare talents” and possess his “great merits”) can be seen as the expression of Rousseau’s great love for Venture that he was unable to express directly. Rousseau literally sacrifices his own self to become an other, Venture—thus perhaps allowing Rousseau to fulfill his masochistic desires vis-à-vis Venture. Or perhaps, Venture represents for Rousseau a “masculine” ideal (gallant, charming) that temporarily transfixes him. However, Rousseau’s momentary idealization of “masculinity” and his (failed) attempt to assume the masculine subject position are later called into question (in terms of not just possibility but also desirability). First of all, it is uncertain that Venture himself is not an imposter. (“He told us he was called Venture de Villeneuve.”)79 It is revelatory that the ideal Rousseau impersonated was itself an

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impersonation/masquerade. Secondly, Rousseau’s idealistic view of his friend is completely negated when they meet again years later. “How changed he appeared to me! Instead of his [Venture’s] former graces I no longer found in him anything but a crapulous air.”80 The boyhood fascination and fleeting idealization of the “masculine” subject has been effaced.

Refusing the Father (and the Brothers) Rousseau’s disastrous concert in Lausanne is only a temporary failure, for Rousseau would eventually become a celebrated composer. In a parabasis, Rousseau addresses the reader. “Poor JeanJacques; at the cruel moment you would hardly hope that one day in front of the King of France and all his court your sounds would excite murmurs of surprise and applause, and that in all the boxes around you the most lovable women would say to themselves in a low voice, ‘What charming sounds! What enchanting music! All these songs go to the heart.’ ”81 Rousseau is referring to the later triumphant reception of the Le devin du Village (“The Village Soothsayer”) before the French king and court. The audience this time responds with rapture, and Rousseau describes his reaction to the audience as one of sexual pleasure: “I am sure at this moment the pleasure of sex entered into it much more than an author’s vanity, and surely if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured, as I was ceaselessly, with the desire to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow.”82 Rousseau for a moment becomes the “lady’s man.” He finally becomes fully venturized. However, there is a difference: Rousseau’s pleasure is via an intermediary, a fiction, an opera. But Rousseau’s pleasure is short-lived. The king has requested Rousseau’s presence the next day. It seems that Rousseau will be offered a pension. But Rousseau refuses to go. He cites two reasons. The principal one is his “infirmity”—his frequent need to urinate. His condition, he tells us, has kept him from social life (and consequently women). “This infirmity was the principal cause that kept me isolated from the social circles, and which prevented me from shutting myself up in a room with women. The mere idea of the situation into which this need might put me was able to give it to me to the point of making me ready to faint or cause a scandal to which I would have preferred death.” Rousseau

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is afraid that he will involuntarily urinate in front of the king. The second reason Rousseau gives is his timidity: he is afraid he will commit a “blunder,” that is, say something stupid or disgraceful. “This danger alarmed me, frightened me, made me shudder to the point of making me decide not to expose myself to it at any risk.”83 In both excuses, Rousseau fears that he won’t be able to control himself—whether physically or linguistically. But paradoxically, Rousseau reveals a different reason: rather than fearing bodily or discursive excess, he fears containment and silence. If he accepts the king’s invitation and the anticipated pension that will be offered, Rousseau will be silenced and imprisoned. “It is true that I was losing the pension that in some manner was being offered to me; but I was also exempting myself from the yoke it might have imposed on me. Farewell truth, freedom, courage. . . . Upon receiving this pension I would have to do nothing any longer but flatter or be silent.”84 Rousseau refuses the invitation and the pension because it would place him in the position of dutiful servant and son. Again Rousseau refuses to submit (this time, literally) to the patriarchal authority of the king. But it is also noteworthy that Rousseau’s refusal to respond to the king’s injunction is also linked to a sexual refusal of sorts. If we recall, Rousseau describes the pleasure he takes in the reception of his opera as one of sexual enjoyment rather than pride. He has become the object of desire and specifically the object of women’s desire (“if there had only been men there, I would not have been devoured . . . [with the desire] to collect with my lips the delicious tears I was causing to flow”). In becoming the object of women’s adulation, he is consumed with pleasure. Notably though, he refuses the reverse position, the traditional masculine position of admirer. In essence, he refuses to take up the masculine subject position of “flatterer,” idealizer of women, and proprietor of the male gaze. We can read Rousseau’s refusal not only as a rejection of the father/king’s injunction but also as a refusal to join his fraternal brothers in their masculine games of courtly tyranny. Throughout the Confessions (and particularly in the early books, which have been my focus), Rousseau provides a critique of paternal/fraternal authority and unequal sexual relations through the recounting of perverse pleasures and unstable gender identities. By implicitly arguing that (sexual) identity is culturally

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passed down (via books, literature, reading), Rousseau shows also the ways in which these identities can possibly be rewritten and reimagined. Rousseau does so by privileging a nonnormative, masculine identity in which the figure of the masculine authority (whether inhabiting a male or female figure) is incessantly critiqued. Thus Rousseau’s “perversities” (his masochism, exhibitionism, nonphallic desire, homosexual love) can be read as a critique of normative masculinity and its claim to power rather than the effect of a personal, psychological peculiarity.

Conclusion

Rousseau has elicited a great deal of feminist commentary— undoubtedly because women and sexuality are so central to his writings. Although there have been some disagreements among feminist thinkers concerning various aspects of his thought, there has been much more consensus. Rousseau is sexist. My aim was not to dismiss previous scholarship— such readings not only piqued my original interest in Rousseau but have constantly been the background context of the present study. Nor was I animated by the desire to rehabilitate Rousseau’s reputation among his feminist audience. Rather, my intent was to show the ways in which what first appeared to be very stable categories and constructions in Rousseau were highly and willfully unstable. The exposition of such instability was intended to indicate the instability of the very categories “masculine” and “feminine.” Furthermore, I wanted to reconsider (as Rousseau does) the possibility of rethinking our most basic assumptions concerning kinship relations— the “couple,” the family— and the relationship of these to the political/state. Paul de Man has suggested that Rousseau’s writings are characterized by radical ambivalence, that is, an ambivalence that is “itself a part of the philosophical statement.”1 Tzvetan Todorov also emphasizes the (willful) ambivalence of Rousseau’s writing, though in a different sense. Part of the difficulty, according to Todorov, is that Rousseau often effaces his position and withholds judgment (using a free indirect style) to show the possibilities and consequences of various positions. As Todorov has stated, “Rousseau is so powerful a thinker that he immediately foresees the most distant premises and ultimate consequences of each assertion, and he communicates them all to us. But this does not mean that he simply accepts everything he says.” Todorov continues by adding that this simplicity can be misleading. “I had been misled precisely by the apparent simplicity of his language: I

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believed that I understood each phrase in itself and forgot to ask myself about its place in Rousseau’s overall system.”2 In my reading, I have attempted to be alert to these two different senses of ambivalence that inhere in Rousseau’s writings: a fundamental and essential ambivalence and the ambivalence that is due to the seemingly contradictory nature of single statements. In doing so, I have sought to consider Rousseau’s work as a whole and to be attentive to the overall “system” of his thought. Rousseau, it has been assumed, offers only two political and cultural models: either the model of rapacious individualism of the modern state or the republican model (whether Sparta or Geneva and arguably that of the Social Contract) of wholly other-directed citizens whose energies and desires are directed and sublimated into the community and state. And it has been taken for granted that the republican model is Rousseau’s ideal—whether ancient Sparta or contemporary Geneva. It is without question that Rousseau employs the republican model as a positive contrast to the modern state (and particularly absolutist France). However, as I have argued, this republican model is not without its ambiguities, and Rousseau is certainly not uncritical. At times, Rousseau suggests that this model requires the complete politicization of the people (both men and women) for the good of the (military) state. The privileged example is the ancient republic of Sparta. For example, in Emile, Rousseau paraphrases Plutarch: “A Spartan woman had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. A Helot arrives; trembling, she asks him for news. ‘Your five sons were killed.’ ‘Base slave, did I ask you that?’ ‘We won the victory.’ The mother runs to the temple and gives thanks to the gods. This is the female citizen.”3 In this extreme example, personal preferences and personal relations are completely absent. The relationship to the state (to all others) takes precedence over any other relationship (including the purportedly “natural” relationship of mother and child). That both men and women (although in different ways) are devoted to the state in some ways suggests a more equal though incredibly harsh and certainly unrealistic demand.4 At other times, though, Rousseau argues that the republican model replicates the family and is characterized by a benevolent paternalism. However, as I suggested, Rousseau in the Second Discourse contends that this is impossible, given that the family

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(characterized by paternal/maternal affective ties) has nothing in common with political relations. One might argue, however, that Rousseau revises the earlier position of the Second Discourse in the Social Contract. “The family is therefore, if you wish, the first model of political societies. The leader is the image of the father, the people are the image of the children and since all are born equal and free, they alienate their freedom for their utility.” Yet this similarity is imaginary. The “entire difference” (which makes all the difference) is that the first is based on solicitude and affection and is “voluntary.” Patriarchal political power— the “pleasure” of power— has nothing in common with paternal solicitude.5 Thus, when Rousseau invokes the familial model, or perhaps more aptly groups of families (societies), during the “Golden Mean” (the “imaginary” time before the institution of the political and prior to the institution of hierarchized gender identity), it is not to point to a political model but to indicate how our contingently constructed political models have corrupted human relations. Thus Geneva (in Rousseau’s best version) does not serve as a political model to emulate but as a counter example to the severe and harsh polities of the present (e.g., Paris). This is apparent in the “Dedication” to the Second Discourse when Rousseau addresses himself to his fellow citizens, his “brothers”— not just figuratively but literally—“since the bonds of blood as well as the Laws unite almost all of us.”6 The father in this model functions as passively benevolent (or equal— and thus not really a “father” figure). For example, in the spontaneous fete of Rousseau’s boyhood in the quartier Saint- Gervais, the women and children interrupt the fathers’ celebration of their military prowess. In the Confessions, Rousseau describes his relationship with his “childish” father as a relationship of equals; his later “substitute” father, Claude Anet, passively complies as Rousseau takes his place as Mme de Warens’s lover. And finally, it must be noted that Rousseau himself foregoes assuming the paternal function at all costs (except for brief moments— perhaps this is why he describes himself as an “elderly child”7). However, Rousseau describes how easily the benevolent father is deformed and perverted in real relations (not just metaphorically in the political but in the familial situation) and thus is always a dangerous figure.

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How many talents are buried and inclinations forced by the imprudent constraint of Fathers! How many men would have distinguished themselves in an appropriate status who die unhappy and dishonored in another status for which they had not taste! How many happy but unequal marriages have been broken or disturbed, and how many chaste wives dishonored by this order of conditions always in contradiction with that of Nature! How many other bizarre unions formed by interest and disavowed by love and reason! How many even honest and virtuous spouses torture one another because ill-mated! How many young and unhappy victims of their Parents’ avarice plunge into vice or spend their sad days which gold alone has formed! Happy sometimes are those women whose courage and virtue tear them from life before barbarous violence forces them into crime or despair.8

This description, of course, anticipates Rousseau’s narrative in Julie and The Levite of Ephraïm and serves as a perfect summary of both texts (including Julie’s suicide and Axa’s sacrifice). That Julie and the Levite both take place in intense pastoral settings calls into question an unqualified idealized view of the countryside, rural life, and the benevolent father figure. For both of Julie’s “fathers”—the Baron d’Etang and Wolmar— are cast as malevolent doubles of the good, paternal father: the former as arbitrary, despotic control and the latter as a much more rational but insidious authority. And in the Levite, we have a similar structure. The Levite is transformed from a “tender” father/husband into a despotic and cowardly tyrant who willingly hands over his wife/daughter to be raped and murdered in order to save himself. And Axa’s father cajoles his daughter with the rational discourse of community, duty, and brotherly love to give up her own desire and submit to “rape.” Rousseau though, as noted, reserves his harshest criticism for contemporary urban relations and particularly eighteenth-century France. French society (or at least the male citizens) may have become liberated from paternal authority, but they have become much more enslaved by the opinions of others and their own amour-propre. Amour-propre or egotism, preached and exacerbated by contemporary philosophy and the arts (and the consequent need to distinguish oneself by any means), has become the dominant character of contemporary society. In the Dialogues, Rousseau writes,

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But this [century] is particularly hateful and malevolent in character. This cruel and wicked spirit makes itself felt, in every group, in all public affairs, it is sufficient by itself to make those who stand out in that way fashionable and brilliant in society. The proud despotism of modern society has carried the egotism of amour-propre to its furthest extreme. . . . This taste for domination has not failed to arouse all the irascible passions related amour-propre. . . . From this come the hateful tendencies that distinguish this generation. There is no longer moderation in souls or truth in attachments. Everyone hates everything that is not himself more readily than he loves himself. People pay too much attention to others to know how to pay attention to themselves. The only thing still known is hating.9

Rousseau’s description of his century as one that is “hateful” and “malevolent” is a characterization far removed from its selfdescribed “romanticism.” Instead of an era focused on romance, love, and a “feminine” aesthetic and sensibility, Rousseau describes his century as the opposite: hatred for all others but one’s self— (male) narcissism out of control. Despite the overall ambiguity of Rousseau’s message and despite what appears an intermittent nostalgia, he clearly states that one can never go “backward.” (“But human nature does not go backward.”)10 If a return/regression is impossible (recall the Levite’s concubine), we must start from where we are; we must begin in the present. Rousseau does this by finding the “remedy in the poison.” He turns toward the arts and specifically toward writing and literature (since theatre as mimesis, as we have seen, is incapable of transforming relations and exacerbates amour-propre and unequal relations). According to Rousseau, we have to create new fictions and illusions (suggesting that our current and even past “truths” are themselves fictions) to supplant and counter those of the contemporary age. Rousseau’s stories are not just critical of existing relations but, obliquely and sometimes by anamorphosis, indicative of how such relations can be rewritten and reimagined (particularly our most entrenched notions of sexual and familial relations) in the future. He does so by exposing our existing history as not only contingent (Second Discourse) but also an effect of the stories we tell about ourselves and the histories we construct.

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For example, in narrativizing his own history, his own story, in the Confessions, Rousseau insists that his “true self” is an effect of first reading, then writing. Even what are considered to be most the most “personal” or “natural” aspects of a self— sexual desires/ orientation and gender identity—Rousseau insists are themselves an effect of literature, of cultural transmission. Rousseau publishes his “perverse” pleasures; he turns them into the subject of a literary text, not to shock or titillate but to offer an exemplary critique of normative masculinity and, consequently, gender identity in general. Though Rousseau never explicitly offers a direct prescriptive formula for the future (not even in the Social Contract) and refuses the role of legislator (he does not pass down new laws or norms), future possibilities can be glimpsed throughout his texts. What is noteworthy is that each of his various allusions to an ideal consists of a society of equals: “men” and “women.” (The scare quotes are to indicate the ambiguity of presumed gender identity for Rousseau. The men in Rousseau’s narratives are not necessarily “masculine,” the women are not necessarily “feminine.”) The couple is both literally (as in privileging the ménage à trois) and figuratively (the binary model of gender identity) eclipsed. Consider Rousseau’s happiest and most exemplary models: the spontaneous fete of Saint-Gervais, the “society of friends” at the end of Book IV of Emile, the girl selling apples in the Reveries, and the ménages à trois of Julie–St. Preux–Claire in Julie and of Rousseau–Sophie–St. Lambert in the Confessions. Each is marked by the absence of a parental figure (whether paternal or maternal) and the absence of the “couple.” And each depends on equal, affective, and (often) sexual relations. It might be argued that there is little, if anything, explicitly political in these models. However, Rousseau repeatedly insisted that in order to change the political order (the laws), one first had to change the society, the culture, the people. What one finds in Rousseau’s writings— in his novels, histories, political treatises, plays, and even autobiographies— is just such an attempt. Throughout his writings is a continuous critique of existing norms and relations, including those that we consider the most “natural” and intransigent— that is, gender identity and kinship relations— in the hopes of a more just future of equal relations. I would like to conclude by reinvoking Rousseau’s statement in

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The Levite of Ephraïm in which he plainly states that future happiness (for both men and women) can only occur when women are neither idealized nor enslaved but granted equality (as desiring subjects): “A sex always slave or tyrant, that man oppresses or adores, and that nevertheless he cannot make happy nor be so himself except by letting it be equal to him.”

No tes

Introduction

1. Even nonfeminist readers have concurred with this assessment— though to justify it rather than critique it. See, for example, Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Allan Bloom’s introduction to Emile (New York: Basic Books, 1979). 2. Paul de Man, “Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–41. 3. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 1. 4. Cited in Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 33–34. 5. See Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (2004), vol. 10 of The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 12 vols., ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007) [hereafter Letter], 325–26; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95) [hereafter OC ], 5:92–93. 6. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly (1996), vol. 5 of Collected Writings [hereafter Confessions], 369 (OC , 1:439). Translation modified. 7. I am certainly not the first to read gender in Rousseau as performative. Several recent feminist readers also make this claim. See Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6–12. A similar reading is also put forward by Nicole Fermon in Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, and Nation (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997) and by Linda Zerilli, Signifying

146

NOTES

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)—which I discuss briefly further on. But in the earlier readings, Rousseau’s awareness of gender as performative leads to a political and cultural enforcement and justification of norms and roles rather than their subversion. See, for example, Judith Butler’s “Preface (1999)” in Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2006), vii–xxvi. Butler, Gender Trouble, 187. Butler’s emphasis. Confessions, 10–11 (OC , 1:12). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. Derrida is of course making a greater critique against the metaphysics of presence (and mistakenly, I would argue, a critique of Rousseau as exemplary of the desire for pure presence). Derrida’s point is that it is impossible to have access to a reality before, beyond, or outside of language/writing. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), x. Kavanagh’s emphasis. For a review of such works, see Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 201–67. A notable exception is Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). Kelly argues that the Confessions can be read as a political work similar to Emile — only Rousseau has substituted his own life for the fictional one of Emile. Paul Thomas, “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?” Feminist Studies 17, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 195. Susan Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 99. Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 231. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 149–50, 198–200. Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 11–12. Ibid., 66–89. Confessions, 7 (OC , 1:8). Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

NOTES

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

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Press, 1981); Lynda Lange, “Rousseau and Modern Feminism,” in Lange, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 24–42; Penny A. Weiss, Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1993); Mira Morgenstern, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity: Self, Culture and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). Morgenstern, Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity, 245. Zerilli, Signifying Woman, 18. My emphasis. The reference to Felman is “Rereading Femininity,” Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 42. Lori Jo Marso, (Un)manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 76–77. Marso’s emphasis. Ibid., 7. See Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Cited in John D. Caputo, “Dreaming of the Innumerable,” in Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, ed. Ellen K. Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson, and Emily Zakin (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 154. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 196–97. See Derrida and Christie McDonald, “Interview: Choreographies,” in Diacritics 12, no. 2 (Summer 1982), 76. Caputo, “Dreaming of the Innumerable,” 156. The title of Caputo’s essay refers to and is an extended meditation on Derrida’s comments in the previously cited interview, “Choreographies.” My reading of the ménage à trois in Rousseau— particularly what I have termed a “positive” formulation— is indebted to MacCannell’s reading in Regime of the Brother, 87–89. This term is Judith Butler’s. See Undoing Gender, 134. Recent feminist thinkers have sought to rethink the oedipal drama that invariably (or ideally) unfolds with the aim of achieving gender complementarity and heterosexual love. For example, Jessica Benjamin adds an addendum to the oedipal drama, calling for another stage of development she calls “postoedipal.” The postoedipal, as the term suggests, comes after the oedipal and incorporates the preoedipal (imaginary) stage prior to gender differentiation, thus allowing for more fluid gender identifications and nonheterosexual love relations. See Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Difference (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1995) and Shadow of the Other:

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33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis (New York and London: Routledge, 1998). For Butler’s critique of Benjamin, and her attempt to rethink a triadic notion of desire that does away with the oedipal altogether, see Undoing Gender, 134–51. Rousseau also literally refuses the role of the father, admitting to having placed his five children in the foundling home. Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993) vol. 3 of Collected Writings [hereafter Second Discourse], 77 (OC , 3:205). In a sense, my argument is thus in agreement with Landes’s earlier: Rousseau does advocate a move away from the “spectacular” pleasures of the theatre of absolutist France toward textual, literary pleasures. However, the main difference is that I do not consider the former to be “feminine” and the latter “masculine” (nor, I contend, did Rousseau). For a comprehensive reading of Rousseau’s reasons for privileging literature (though without a consideration of the role of gender), see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). The ambiguity of the Social Contract is apparent in the multiple and contradictory interpretations it has generated. Furthermore, although the Social Contract is seemingly Rousseau’s most political work, even this has been called into question. De Man posits, for example, that the Social Contract can be considered a novel, whereas Julie is a political work; Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979). But in regard specifically to the question of women and Rousseau’s political philosophy, the Social Contract is obviously the least relevant text: women and the family are barely mentioned. And I am not entirely convinced that this is, as feminist readings of Rousseau argue, because women are implicitly excluded from the social contract and from the political. I mean “anecdotal” in the sense that Jane Gallop describes in Anecdotal Theory (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–12. 1

Sexual/Political Inequality

1. “Letter from Voltaire to Rousseau,” in Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993), vol. 3 of The Collected Writings,

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

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ed. Roger Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007) [hereafter Second Discourse], 102. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 14–15. Second Discourse, 19, 13; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95), 3:132, 123. De Man makes this point in his critique of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 132. Interestingly, as Tracy Strong points out in his study of Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002), Rousseau himself understood the Second Discourse to be a genealogy of morals (41–42). See also Lettres à Beaumont, in OC 4:936. Wingrove also remarks on the “circular movement from animality to humanity and back again.” Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 29. Second Discourse, 65 (OC , 3:91). Ibid., 40 (3:160). Strong, Politics of the Ordinary, 44. Second Discourse, 30 (OC , 3:147). Ibid. As Wingrove remarks, “Rousseau imagines a natural feminine indifference—toward babies and men.” Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 157. Second Discourse, 37 (OC , 3:156). Ibid., 26 (3:142). Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 140. Second Discourse, 46 (OC , 3:168). Ibid, 57 (3:182). Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 52. Though Rousseau does not explicitly state this in the Second Discourse, he does so in the Essay on Origins of Language: “They became husband and wife without having ceased being brother and sister.” Essai sur l’origine des langues, in OC 5:406. My translation.

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18. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 180. 19. Second Discourse, 47 (OC , 3:169). 20. Ibid, 48 (3:171). 21. Of course amour-propre can also be directed toward the good. For example, one can develop pride in doing good, in honoring oneself and others. For commentary on good amour-propre, see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 191–97. 22. Second Discourse, 37 (OC , 3:156). Translation modified. 23. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 175–76. Derrida’s emphasis. 24. Ibid., 173. 25. Second Discourse, 36 (OC , 3:154). My emphasis. 26. Ibid., 36 (3:154–55). My emphasis. 27. Ibid., 37 (3:155). 28. Ibid., 36 (3:156). Translation modified. 29. Wingrove describes this as the “failure of pitié.” See Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 175. 30. Second Discourse, 91 (OC , 3:219). Translation modified. 31. Ibid., 47 (3:169–70). Translation modified. 32. MacCannell, Regime of the Brother, 49. 33. Second Discourse, 38–39 (OC , 3:157–58). 34. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 177. 35. Judith Still, “Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm: The Imposition of Meaning (on Women),” French Studies 43 (1989): 17. 36. Rousseau, “The Levite of Ephraïm,” trans. and ed. John T. Scott, in Rousseau on Women, Love, and Family, ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2009), 180n (OC , 2:1209n). 37. Second Discourse, 53 (OC , 3:176). 38. Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 226. Wingrove’s emphasis. 39. Wingrove uses the term republic to describe the political community formed at the end of the Levite. However, as she notes, it is not a republic at all but a monarchy. See Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 209. Furthermore, it is a monarchy established by (some of) the fathers to guarantee brides for the brothers (the Benjamites) and thus exemplifies the triumph and excesses of both paternal and fraternal power.

NOTES

151

40. Second Discourse, 53 (OC , 3:177). 41. Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997), 102. 42. Levite, 182 (OC , 2:1210). 43. For Kavanagh’s discussion of original versions, see Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 113, 202n6. 44. Still, “Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm,” 18. 45. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, 113. 46. As such, one can read the sisterly relationship as possibly more than just sisterly. 47. Interestingly, as Judith Still notes in her reading of the Levite, Rousseau describes the Levite as a bad mother in addition to being a bad father. See Still, “Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm,” 21. In the passage she describes, Rousseau writes, “The young Levite followed his route with his wife, his servant, and his baggage, transported with joy in bringing back his heart’s friend, and uneasy about the sun and the dust, like a mother who brings back her son from the nurse’s and fears for him the air’s ravages.” Levite, 183 (OC , 2:1212). 48. Levite, 181 (OC , 2:1210). 49. Still, “Rousseau’s Lévite d’Ephraïm,” 18. 50. Levite, 182–83 (OC , 2:1210–13). 51. Ibid., 185 (2:1214). My emphasis. 52. Ibid., 186 (2:1215). 53. But she is not a sufficient sign, contrary to what Rousseau states in On the Origin of Languages (OC , 5:377). In this later version, the Levite travels to Mizpah to appear before the Elders to “explain” beforehand what the parcels they are about to receive actually mean. The (mutilated) body of the girl has no meaning in and of itself— its meaning has to be explained/interpreted by the Levite. Furthermore, the Levite’s misrepresentation of events (his exculpatory account) signifies not only that the body must be interpreted but that often the meaning imposed upon the biological evidence is one of willful misinterpretation (or at least in the service of self-interest). 54. Levite, 189 (OC , 2:1217). 55. Ibid., 191 (2:1221). See Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 227. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid, 192 (2:1223). My emphasis. 58. Ibid, 193 (2:1223).

152

NOTES

59. Ibid, 191 (2:1222). 60. Pateman, Sexual Contract, 208. 61. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly and ed. Christopher Kelly, Roger D. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman (1996), vol. 5 of Collected Writings, 265 (OC , 1:316). 62. See Starobinski’s interpretation in Transparency and Obstruction, 158–59. Readings influenced by Starobinski’s can be found in, for example, Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 103–4, and Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 26–27. 63. A notable exception is Christopher Kelly. Kelly reads in-depth all three and reads them as a whole. However, he reads them primarily in terms of the problem of the imagination. What brief reference that is made to the (obvious) sexual politics is further downplayed by Kelly’s interpretation that Rousseau’s critique is implied rather than explicit. See Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life, 176–83. 64. Confessions, 266 (OC , 1:317). 65. Ibid., 266–67 (1:317). 66. Ibid., 269 (1:320). 67. Ibid. 68. In an early passage from the Confessions, Rousseau writes, “If my aroused blood demands women, my tender heart also demands love even more. Women who can be bought with money would lose all their charms for me. I doubt whether I would even have it in me to take advantage of them.” Ibid., 31 (1:36). 69. Ibid., 269 (1:321). 70. Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, 158. 71. Ibid., 159. Starobinski’s emphasis. 72. Confessions, 270 (OC , 1:322). 73. Ibid., 271 (1:323). Although Rousseau finds “incestuous” relations between equals—“brothers” and “sisters”—undisturbing, those between “parents” and “children” he finds intolerable because of their unequal relations. Of course, it goes without saying (I hope!) that Rousseau is not literally advocating incestuous relations among siblings. For Rousseau’s metaphoric incestuous relation and its changing relation from brother/sister love to mother/son with Mme de Warens, see chapter 3. 74. Ibid., 3 (1:111). 75. James Miller, for example, argues that for Rousseau, Geneva was a sort of willful fantasy, a deliberate and conscious idealization of his birthplace. See Miller, Rousseau: Dreamer of Democracy

NOTES

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84.

85. 86.

153

(New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1984), 14–25. Helena Rosenblatt, on the other hand, has contended that Rousseau was well informed on the current politics of his homeland and the “Dedication” was meant as an explicit critique of the direction of Genevan politics. See Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749– 1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 84–88, 159–63. I do not find these two views to be necessarily incompatible. Throughout his writings, Rousseau willfully mixes facts and fiction, truth and fable, fantasy and reality. Confessions, 327 (OC , 1:389). Rousseau would not regain his rights of citizenship until after he arrived in Geneva and converted back to Protestantism. On the specific political critique Rousseau puts forth in the “Dedication,” see Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 159–63. Second Discourse, 8–9 (OC , 3:117–18). Ibid., 10 (3:119–20). Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 69. See Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, 155, 84n. Rousseau, “Essay on the Important Events in Which Women Have Been the Secret Cause,” in Rousseau on Women, Love, and Family, ed. Christopher Kelly and Eve Grace (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 2009), 175 (OC , 2:1257). It is also significant that Rousseau started working on the play Death of Lucretia during his summer in Geneva. Julia Kristeva interprets “La Reine Fantasque” (and Emile) as exemplary of the eighteenth century’s fictional portrayal of gender confusion. She writes, “If we peruse the novels of this era, we see that the eighteenth century explicitly formulates the notion of sexual difference as an unresolved, if not impenetrable, concept.” And in explicit reference to “La Reine Fantasque,” she states, “Rousseau’s short story seems to enjoy exploring the possibilities of sexual confusion— confusion, that is, and not infantile asexuality. This philosophical tale covers sexual hybridization, the double, and twins.” Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 144–45. Rousseau, “Queen Whimsical,” in Women, Love, and Family, 50. Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean–Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 231.

154

NOTES

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

However, Kofman considers this writing to be exceptional and aberrational among Rousseau’s writings. Confessions, 330 (OC , 1:393). Ibid., 153 (1:182). My emphasis. Ibid., 154 (1:183). Ibid., 127–28 (1:152). My emphasis. “Of all [the] amusements the one that pleased me the most was an excursion around the Lake that I made in a boat with Deluc the father, his daughter-in-law, his two sons, and my Therese. We put seven days into this tour in the most beautiful weather in the world. I kept the lively remembrance of the sites that had struck me at the other extremity of the lake, and whose description I made several years later in the Nouvelle Héloïse.” Ibid., 330 (1:393). Ibid., 327–28 (1:390–91). Ibid., 328 (1:391). 2

The Arts: From the L ET T ER T O D ’A L EMBERT to T HE R EV ER I ES OF THE S OL I TARY WA LK ER

1. D’Alembert, “Geneva,” in Rousseau, Letter to d’Alembert, and Writings for the Theater, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, Charles Butterworth, and Christopher Kelly (2004), vol. 10 of The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 12 vols., edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007), 244. 2. Rousseau, Discourse of the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse) and Polemics, vol. 2 of Collected Writings (1992), 5; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95), 3:6–7. 3. “Preface to Narcissus,” in First Discourse, 191–92 (OC , 2:965). 4. “Letter of d’Alembert,” in Letter, 369. However, d’Alembert also remarked that the extremity of Rousseau’s position indicated a certain ambiguity, that perhaps it was Rousseau who suffered from an obsessive and excessive interest and susceptibility to love rather than women. “Through your reproaches is seen to pierce the very pardonable taste that you have preserved for them, perhaps even something more lively.” And furthermore, d’Alembert thought that this would endear him rather than estrange him from women. “[T]his mixture of severity and weakness— excuse me for this last word—will get you pardoned easily; they will feel at least, and they will be grateful to you for it, that it cost you less to declaim against them with warmth, than to see and judge them with a philosophic indifference.” Ibid.

NOTES

155

5. Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56. 6. Ibid., 68. 7. Nicole Fermon, Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, and Nation (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 75. 8. Sarah Kofman, “Rousseau’s Phallocratic Ends,” in Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Lynda Lange (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 238. 9. Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 35. 10. This term is coined by Abigail Solomon- Godeau in reference to the construction of femininity as “spectacle” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Desire,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Graza and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 114. 11. See Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993), vol. 3 of Collected Writings, 65 (OC , 3:191). 12. Letter, 319 (OC , 5:84). 13. D’Alembert, in his response to Rousseau, mocks him for portraying Geneva in such an idealized and romantic fashion. Instead of portraying Geneva, d’Alembert argues, Rousseau is actually depicting the rural mountain villages of the Valais. Geneva, d’Alembert sarcastically adds, is no longer in the “Golden Age” as Rousseau suggests, but closer to a “Silver Age.” “First you transport yourself into the mountains of the Valais, into the center of a little country of which you write a charming description; you show us what is perhaps found only in this corner of the Universe alone, people who are quiet and satisfied in the bosom of their family and their labor; and you prove that Drama would not be fit for anything but disturbing the happiness they enjoy. No one, sir, will claim the contrary. . . . What will you conclude from this for Geneva? Is the present state of this Republic susceptible to the application of these rules? I want to believe that there is nothing exaggerated or romantic in the description of this fortunate canton of the Valais, where there is neither hatred, nor jealousy, nor quarrels, and where nevertheless there are men. But if the golden age has taken refuge in the rocks near Geneva, your Citizens are at least in the silver age.” “Letter of d’Alembert,” in Letter, 374.

156

NOTES

14. For example, Rousseau writes, “Never in a Monarchy can the opulence of an individual put him above the Prince; but, in a Republic, it can easily put him above the laws. Then the government no longer has force, and the rich are always the true sovereign. On the basis of these incontestable maxims, it remains to be considered whether inequality has not reached among us the last limit to which it can go without shaking the Republic. I refer myself on this point to those who know our constitution and the division of our riches better than I do.” Letter, 336 (OC , 5:105–6). Rousseau in essence admits that Geneva has already strayed far from the egalitarian ideal that elsewhere in the text it supposedly exemplifies. But he can only plead ignorance. 15. Ibid., 262 (5:16). 16. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly, vol. 5 of Collected Writings (1996), 357 (OC , 1:424). 17. Ibid., 357 (1:425). 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 348, 353–54 (1:414, 421–22). 20. Ibid., 350 (1:416). 21. Ibid., 358–59 (1:427). My emphasis. 22. Ibid., 359 (1:427). 23. Ibid., 365 (1:434). My emphasis. 24. Ibid., 365 (1:435). 25. Ibid., 415 (1:495–96). 26. Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 73. My reading owes much to MacCannell’s observation that the Letter is really about love (or its absence) and led me to (re)consider the context of Rousseau’s text. 27. Letter, 264 (OC , 5:18). 28. Ibid., 266 (5:21). 29. Ibid., 269 (5:23–24). 30. Ibid., 275 (5:31). 31. Ibid., 275–76 (5:31–32). 32. Ibid., 284 (5:42). 33. Ibid., 285 (5:43). 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 285 (5:43–44). 36. MacCannell, Regime of the Brother, 73. 37. In fact, Rousseau states clearly that if love relations actually existed in French society, this would be an improvement in “morals.” He writes, “The most wicked of men is he who isolates himself the

NOTES

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

157

most, who most concentrates his heart in himself; the best is he who share his affections equally with all his kind. It is much better to love a mistress than to love oneself alone in all the world. . . . On this principle, I say that there are countries where the morals are so bad they would be only too happy to be able to raise themselves back up to the level of love.” Letter, 337–38 (OC , 5:107). Ibid., 327–28 (5:93–95). This passage and Rousseau’s insistence that gallantry/romance has usurped love anticipates Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s argument in “The Culture Industry,” summed up in the phrase, “It [the culture industry] reduces love to romance.” In Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schimi Noerr; trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 111. Letter, 328 (OC , 5:95–96). This passage alludes to Rousseau’s insistence that love is always illusory or based on a fiction. However, this does not contradict his assertion that “love” in Parisian society is false (based on self-love and masked with gallantry). Some fictions/illusions are better than others. Second Discourse, 65 (OC , 3:191). Rousseau, Julie or the New Heloise, trans. Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, vol. 6 of Collected Writings (1997), 222 (OC , 2:271). Luce Irigaray, “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 84. Irigaray’s emphasis. As Rousseau alludes to throughout the Letter, previously it was the male body that was considered to be the erotic ideal. SolomonGodeau argues that the turn toward a visual culture in which “femininity” and the female body are fully exploited as “spectacle” in the nineteenth century was first articulated by Rousseau in the eighteenth century in the Letter to d’Alembert. SolomonGodeau, “Other Side of Venus,” 128. Letter, 333 (OC , 5:101). This objectification is particularly clear in the modern fetishization of the female body. Rousseau cites two extreme examples. The first is of Lacedaemonian girls who could dance naked in the streets without causing the slightest disturbance. In the second, Rousseau refers to the chaos a single extended foot causes in Peking (alluding not only to foot fetishism but also, it seems, to the cruel practice of foot-binding): “A young Chinese woman extending the tip of her foot, covered and shod, will wreak more havoc in Peking than the most beautiful girl in the world dancing stark naked on the banks of the Taygetus.” Of

158

45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

NOTES

course, Rousseau does not believe that one can or should give up wearing clothes. Rather, he suggests that clothes have a symbolic and political meaning. This is why he pays so much attention to fashion throughout his writings. Ibid., 350 (5:123). Ibid., 287 (5:45). Zerilli, Signifying Woman, 31. Rousseau uses this phrase in connection with the men’s circles: “Our circles still preserve some image of ancient morals among us. By themselves, the men, exempted from having to lower their ideas to the range of women and to clothe reason in gallantry, can devote themselves to grave and serious discourse without fear of ridicule.” Letter, 328 (OC , 5:96). Obviously, Rousseau himself preferred to talk to women. Julie, 221 (OC , 2:270). Letter, 287 (OC , 5:45). Julie, 226 (OC , 2:275). Ibid., 226–28 (2:276–78). Fermon, Domesticating Passions, 89. For example, he writes, “It is possible that there are a few women worthy of being listened to by a decent man; but, in general, is it from women that he ought to take counsel, and is there no way of honoring their sex without abasing our own?” And: “Women, in general, do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no Genius.” Letter, 287 (OC , 5:327). Ibid., 327n (5:94–95n). Ibid., 286 (5:44). Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 102. “Moral Letters,” in Rousseau, Autobiographical, Scientific, Religious, Moral, and Literary Writings, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly (2007), vol. 12 of Collected Writings, 179. My emphasis. Letter, 328–29 (OC , 5:96–97). Ibid., 347–48 (5:119–20). My emphasis. Ibid., 351n (5:123–24n). See Eli Friedlander, J.J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 95. The discussion of the Ninth Walk, like the Letter to d’Alembert, is a response to a writing by d’Alembert. This time it is to d’Alembert’s obituary of Mme Geoffrin. Rousseau reads d’Alembert’s praise of Geoffrin’s love of children as an indirect insult, as a critique of Rousseau’s abandonment of his children. Thus, much of the Ninth Walk revolves around children (and Rousseau’s defensive claim that he loves children). However, what is also notable is that

NOTES

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

159

the Ninth Walk ends with the same quote (now foreshortened to just one couplet) from Plutarch as the Letter : “Formerly, we were Young, valiant, and Bold.” The Letter ended with Rousseau as a boy watching generations of soldiers and future soldiers celebrating their power and country in the quartier Saint-Gervais. The Reveries ends, in contrast, with a discussion of disabled veterans around the Ecole Militaire. The Ninth Walk can thus be read perhaps as an obituary of patriarchy and patrilineal power. See Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières, trans. Charles Butterworth, Alexandra Cook, and Terence Marshall and ed. Christopher Kelly (2000), vol. 8 of Collected Writings, 86–88 (OC , 1:1095–97). Reveries, 83 (OC , 1:1091). Ibid. Significantly Rousseau, while playing the judge, finds none of the girls to be especially “pretty”— signifying his lack of preference or interest. Ibid., 83–84 (1:1092). Ibid., 84 (1:1092). Ibid. Rousseau writes in the Fourth Walk, “Fictions which have a moral purpose are called allegories or fables; and as their purpose is or ought to be only to wrap useful truths in easily perceived and pleasing forms, in such cases we hardly care about hiding the de facto lie, which is only the cloak of truth; and he who merely sets forth a fable as a fable in no way lies. There are other purely idle fictions such as the greater part of stories and novels which, containing no genuine instruction, have no purpose but amusement. Stripped of all moral usefulness, their worth can be assessed only in terms of the intention of the one who invents them.” Ibid., 32 (1:1029). See James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 131–33. Reveries, 84 (OC , 1:1093). Confessions, 29 (OC , 1:34). Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 130. Although Swenson is undoubtedly correct that in the episode of the Confessions the word partager is used alternatively to mean “to split” and “to share,” this is somewhat of an exception. For the most part, Rousseau uses partager (one of his favorite words) in the sense of “to share.” Indeed, in the rather concise Ninth Walk (a mere ten pages), Rousseau employs partager in the sense of “to share” at least seven times.

160

NOTES

73. Schwartz translates this dual nature as Rousseau’s bisexuality. For Schwartz, Rousseau’s bisexuality is an attempt at “wholeness,” an attempt to transcend sexuality altogether, to remain absolutely independent. Schwartz thus reads Rousseau’s self-ascribed “femininity” not as a critique of normative identities but as an attempt at transcendence, to be the exception to the rule. See Schwartz, Sexual Politics, 106–9. 74. One can read already in the Letter itself Rousseau’s preference for literature and novels as a form of entertainment. He writes, “From this common taste for solitude arises a taste for contemplative readings and the Novels with which England is inundated. Thus both [sexes], withdrawn more into themselves, give themselves less to frivolous imitations, get more of a taste for the true pleasures of life, and think less of appearing happy than being so.” Letter, 311 (OC , 5:75). 75. The subtitle itself, La Nouvelle Héloïse, signals that Rousseau’s text will be a rewriting of an already existing text: the love letters between Héloïse and Abélard. 76. Notice (Avertissement), in Julie, 5 (OC , 2:9). 77. Rousseau begins the (first) preface by stating, “Great cities must have theaters; corrupt peoples, Novels.” Julie, 3 (OC , 2:5). This statement recalls Rousseau’s argument in the Letter that the theatre is a positive distraction for those in large cities. But it adds explicitly that for all others (since we are all “corrupt”), or those outside the metropolis, novels are the preferable form of entertainment. 78. Second Preface, in Julie, 10 (OC , 2:15). 79. Ibid., 13–14 (2:19). 80. Ibid., 15 (2:22). 81. Rousseau, however, was absolutely mistaken about Julie ’s audience. In the Confessions, he indicates, “It is peculiar that this book succeeded better in France than in the rest of Europe although the French, both men and women, are not treated extremely well in it. Completely contrary to my expectation, its least success was in Switzerland and its greatest in Paris. . . . If, for example, Julie had been published in a certain country I am thinking of [presumably Geneva], I am sure that no one would have finished reading it, and that it would have died at birth.” Confessions, 456–57 (OC , 1:545–46). 82. Second Preface, in Julie, 16 (OC , 2:23). My emphasis. 83. Ibid., 16 (2:22). 84. Ibid., 17–18 (2:24). 85. Ibid., 9, 11 (2:14, 2:16). My emphasis. 86. Ibid., 10 (2:15). This passage is similar to what Rousseau claimed in Essai sur l’origine des langues : that the first language was

NOTES

87. 88.

89. 90.

91.

92.

161

figurative rather than literal. “[T]he figurative word is born before the literal word, when passion fascinates our gaze. [T]he first idea it conveys to us is not that of the truth.” OC , 5:381. My translation. Second Preface, in Julie, 11 (OC , 2:16–17). My emphasis. Christopher Kelly has noted that what is interesting about Rousseau’s refusal to answer is not a coy attempt to suggest that the text is true (a common enough ruse) but his “refusal to deny his book was a novel.” Rousseau as Author, 113. Second Preface, in Julie, 21 (OC , 2:29). OC , 2:1338. My translation of Rousseau’s translation: “The world possessed her without knowing her, me, I knew her and remain here below to cry for her.” Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1979), 204. It is noteworthy that the interlocutor, “N,” claims that the characters in Julie could not possibly exist (that is, if they did not actually exists), since they are too “unnatural.” “R” responds by saying, “Why do you decide it so? Do you know how vastly Men differ from each other? How opposite characters can be? To what degree morals, prejudices vary with the times, places, eras? Who is daring enough to assign exact limits to Nature, and assert: Here is as far as Man can go, and no further?” “R’s” response recalls Rousseau’s argument in the Second Discourse on nature and freedom—nature being “nothingness” or “lack” and freedom the possibility to transform what is given. It is also worth mentioning in this context that “N” intimates that the relation of the “two women friends” (Claire and Julie) is one of the most unbelievable or “unnatural,” perhaps even “monstrous” (to cite not only “N’s” but Claire’s own self-description in Julie). This point will also be elaborated in the next chapter. 3

Postoedipal Desire: Reading the M ÉNAGE

À

T ROIS

1. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 177. 2. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), chapter 1. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001).

162

NOTES

4. See Todorov, Frail Happiness, chapter 4. On the implications of ignoring Les Solitaires, see my review in the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 35, no. 4 (December 2002): 960–962. 5. Judith Shklar, Men and Citizens : A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 150. 6. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 46; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95), 4:258. Translation modified. 7. Ibid., 49 (4:262). 8. Ibid., 208 (4:488). 9. Ibid., 357–58 (4:692–93). 10. Ibid., 407 (4:765). 11. I am inclined to believe the narrative voice here is Rousseau’s rather than the tutor’s. First of all, this utopia differs so much from the tutor’s discourse on sex segregation in Book V. And secondly, I believe this because of the desire to have “a shed full of cows, so that I would have the dairy products I like so much.” Rousseau was known to have a penchant for dairy products— — as do Emile and St. Preux, unlike the tutor, who prefers more “manly” treats (i.e., meat and wine). 12. Emile, 351 (OC , 4:687). 13. See Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 70. 14. Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly, vol. 5 of Collected Writings (1996), 37 (OC , 1:43). 15. OC , 4:887. My translation. 16. Ibid. My translation. 17. Ibid., 4:887–88. My translation. 18. Ibid., 4:904. My translation. 19. Ibid., 4:909. My translation. 20. Ibid., 4:917. My translation. 21. Julie, 143 (OC , 2:174–75). 22. Ibid., 349 (2:424). 23. See Lori Jo Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), and MacCannell, Regime of the Brother. 24. Lisa Disch, “Claire Loves Julie: Reading the Story of Women’s Friendship in La Nouvelle Héloïse,” in Hypatia: A Journal of

NOTES

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 4

163

Feminist Philosophy 9, no. 3 (Summer 1994): 19–45; and Marso, (Un)Manly Citizens, 52–78. Julie, 146 (OC , 2:179). Ibid., 169 (2:206). Ibid., 328 (2:399). Ibid., 334–35 (2:407). Ibid., 492 (2:601). Ibid., 392 (2:477). Ibid., 371–72 (2:451). Ibid., 490 (2:599). Ibid., 491 (2:601–2). Ibid., 403 (2:490–91). Ibid., 417 (2:509). Ibid., 610 (2:743). Ibid.,173 (2:212). Ibid., 583 (2:710). Ibid., 582–83 (2:710). As Marso writes, “Could the ‘secret joy’ glimmering in Julie’s eyes be attributed to a lesbian liaison with Claire?” (Un)Manly Citizens, 70. Marso, (Un)manly Citizens, chapters 2 and 3. See MacCannell, Regime of the Brother, 85–101. Confessions, 387 (OC , 1:462). MacCannell, Regime of the Brother, 82. Confessions, 169 (OC , 1:201). This is the conclusion of Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, 6–11. Confessions, 169 (OC , 1:201). Ibid., 172–73 (1:205–6). Ibid., 183 (1:219). That Rousseau’s relationship to Mme de Warens, in the absence of Anet, is transformed to one of mother and son is underscored by the “sympathetic ink” episode. Rousseau’s attempt to make invisible ink ends up blowing up in his face, temporarily blinding him for six weeks. Like Oedipus, Rousseau punishes himself for sleeping with his mother. See ibid., 183 (1:218). Ibid., 186 (1:222). Ibid., 190 (1:226–27). Ibid., 208 (1:248) Ibid., 221 (1:265). Autobiography: Writing the Self, Writing Gender

1. In the second letter to Malesherbes, Rousseau describes the aim of the letters as to “give you [Malesherbes] an account of myself.”

164

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

In Rousseau, The Confessions and Correspondence, Including the Letters to Malesherbes, trans. Christopher Kelly (1996), vol. 5 of The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, 12 vols. (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007), 574. The Dialogues takes place among three participants (again a nod to a ménage à trois): a “Frenchman,” “Rousseau,” and “J.J.” (though the latter never speaks or makes an appearance). As is well known, Rousseau tried to deposit his text on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame out of fear that it would fall into the hands of his “enemies.” See “History of the Preceding Writing,” in Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly, vol. 1 of Collected Writings (1990), 246–47; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95), 1:977–92. As stated previously, Kelly argues in Rousseau’s Exemplary Life that the Confessions are a work of politics. Miller uses the trope of reveries/imagination to discuss Rousseau’s politics in Rousseau Dreamer of Democracy. And Strong in Politics of the Ordinary devotes considerable attention to the Confessions. There are, of course, others. Some recent feminist political theorists have been more likely to consider the autobiographical works, particularly the Confessions, in greater detail. See, for example, Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), and Nicole Fermon, Domesticating Passions: Rousseau, Woman, and Nation (Hanover, NH, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1997). However, none have read the autobiographical works as calling into question the stability of gender purportedly sustained in his other works. Penelope Deutscher in “Woman, Femininity: Distancing Nietzsche from Rousseau” argues that the significant difference between the two thinkers is that Rousseau bases his concept of femininity on nature, whereas Nietzsche does not. In Nietzsche, Feminism, and Political Theory, ed. Paul Patton (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 162–88. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 59. My emphasis. Foucault, though, did write an introduction to Rousseau’s Dialogues. “Introduction to Rousseau’s Dialogues,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Vol. 2 , ed. James D. Faubion; trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 1998), 33–51.

NOTES

165

8. This was not the only time that Rousseau appropriated a title of a previous work and “rewrote” it. Consider Letters from the Mountain and La Nouvelle Héloïse. 9. Of course, Rousseau often feels guilt over his failures or wrong choices (sometimes contrary to what the reader would expect), yet he never calls them “sins.” On the differences between Augustine’s Confessions and Rousseau’s, see Christopher Kelly, Rousseau as Author: Consecrating One’s Life to Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 103–6. 10. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 112–13. Butler’s emphasis. 11. First inscribed on the title page of Letters from the Mountain (1764). 12. Rousseau, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Botanical Writings, and Letter to Franquières, trans. Charles Butterworth, Alexandra Cook, and Terence Marshall, vol. 8 of Collected Writings (2000), 39 (OC , 1:1038). 13. Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), x. 14. James Swenson, On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 127. Swenson cites two eighteenth-century historians, Pierre-Louis Ginguené and Sébastien Mercier, who both read the Confessions as a series of mini allegories or cautionary fables, though the two disagreed on which part of the Confessions was more allegorical/fictional than the other. Ginguené focused on the first half while Mercier believed the latter half to be more so. What is perhaps more incredible is that many eighteenth-century readers were absolutely convinced that Julie was a true story. See Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 215–57. Thus we have throughout Rousseau’s writings a continuous (deliberate) ambiguity of what is fact and what is fiction. 15. Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 134. 16. Confessions, 7 (OC , 1:8). 17. Letters to Malesherbes, in Confessions, 574. In both the Letters to Malesherbes and the Dialogues, Rousseau reverses the order of his readings. He begins with Plutarch and then moves on to “romantic novels.” The ambiguity of which reading comes first (heroic or romantic works) underscores the impossibility of giving

166

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

NOTES

priority to either. In the Dialogues, describing his early readings (in the second person), Rousseau writes, “Plutarch’s famous men were his first reading at an age when children rarely know how to read. . . . These readings were followed by that of Cassandra and old novels which tempering his Roman pride, opened this nascent heart to all the expansive and tender feelings to which it was already only too well disposed.” Dialogues, 123 (OC , 1:819). Furthermore, the specific examples of Plutarch and Cassandra in turn refer us back to the tutor’s lesson on what makes good history in Book IV of Emile. Rousseau cites Plutarch as exemplary in this regard for “an inimitable grace at depicting great men in small things.” For rather than great actions or events, Rousseau states, “I would prefer to begin study of the human heart with the reading of lives of individuals; for in them, however much the man may conceal himself, the historian pursues him everywhere. He leaves him no moment of respite, no nook where he can avoid the spectator’s piercing eye; and it is when the subject believes he has hidden himself best that the biographer makes him known best.” Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 240. Historical novels, such as Cleopatra or Cassandra, in contrast, “pile fictions on fictions to make reading more agreeable” and “yield” to the author’s “imagination” in order to have a “moral goal.” Emile, 238. It is possible to read Rousseau’s own methodology in the Confessions as itself a combination of these two historical methodologies: (auto)biography of “low” and “intimate” details and novelistic re-creation. OC , 1:1108. My translation. Letters to Malesherbes, in Confessions, 574. Confessions, 16 (OC , 1:18). Dialogues, 122 (OC , 1:817–18). Confessions, 8 (OC , 1:9). Ibid., 7 (1:8). Ibid., 11 (1:12). Ibid., 13 (1:15). This passage has led commentators to presume that Rousseau’s masochism was a result of his guilt over his mother’s death. That Mlle Lambercier and later Mme de Warens (at least for a while) were mother figures seems to indicate that Rousseau’s masochism was the desire to be punished by the mother. However, Rousseau’s most enjoyable masochistic relations were always with girls his own age—for example, Mlles Goton, Galley, and Graffenreid. Ibid. Ibid., 13–14 (1:15).

NOTES

167

28. Ibid., 14 (1:16). 29. Ibid., 15 (1:17). We might also consider that Rousseau’s penis is a never-ending source of physical pain. Throughout the Confessions, he complains of the inability to urinate. Unable to trace the cause, Rousseau resorts to the frequent use of catheters. His condition, coupled with the fear of getting his companion Therese pregnant again, leads him to abstain from sexual intercourse. “I had noticed that intercourse with women made my condition sensibly worse.” Confessions, 498 (OC , 1:595). Might we not read Rousseau’s “illness” as a hypochondriac excuse to forego “normal” sexual relations? Might we not also consider Rousseau’s frequent use of catheters— often administered by Therese— as a means of indirectly attaining his masochistic desires (of being painfully “penetrated” by a woman)? This suggestion is made by Jaromír Janata in Masochism: The Mystery of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Danbury, CT: Rutledge Books, 2001), 264. This work, however, is an example of the most reductive, pathologizing, and normalizing reading of Rousseau. 30. Confessions, 15 (OC , 1:17). 31. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 211. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 60. 33. Zerilli does allude to the possibility of reading Rousseau’s masochism as described in the Confessions in a Deleuzian vein (that is, as the exaltation of the mother/female figure and the denigration of the paternal figure). However, since this suggestion is relegated to a footnote, it remains just that— a possibility that is never explored in the body of the text. See Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 163n. 34. Confessions, 16 (OC , 1:19). 35. Ibid., 17 (1:20). 36. Ibid., 26–27 (1:31). 37. Ibid., 26 (1:30–31). 38. Ibid., 27 (1:32). 39. Ibid., 29 (1:34–35). 40. Ibid., 30, 26 (1:35–36, 1:31). Obviously this passage can be read in a multitude of ways. One of the first that comes to mind is in terms of writing— and of the writing of the Confessions in particular. Rousseau’s writing is not a counterfeit, nor is it “genuine.” That is, it is not representational. Rather, it is literary— a romantic fable that generates its own truth. Derrida cites this passage in its

168

41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

NOTES

entirety in Of Grammatology in a footnote, suggesting that here Rousseau surreptitiously acknowledges the “originarity of lack that makes necessary the addition of the supplement.” However, Derrida does not expound further than citing the passage. I am suggesting that what Derrida claims is “not made explicit” (i.e., originary lack) is continually proclaimed by Rousseau. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 214, 346n. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 106. See also Christopher Kelly, Rousseau’s Exemplary Life: The “Confessions” as Political Philosophy (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 102–9. Kelly concurs with Starobinski that Rousseau’s distaste for money stems from his desire for unmediated pleasure. On the homologous relation of money and the phallus, see JeanJoseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Goux writes, “The institution of FATHER, PHALLUS, and LANGUAGE, of the major ‘signs’ that regulate the values market, in fact stems from agenesis whose necessity and whose limits are doubtless most pronounced, theoretically, in the origin of MONEY” (13). We might also consider what Rousseau writes in the Dialogues against the instrumental use of women. “The debauched see in women merely instruments of pleasure that are as contemptible as they are necessary, like those receptacles used daily for the most basic needs.” Dialogues, 23 (OC , 1:688). Confessions, 31 (OC , 1:37). Ibid., 33 (1:39). Ibid., 34 (1:40). Ibid., 34 (1:40–41). Ibid., 34 (1:41). Ibid., 37, 38 (1:43, 1:45). Ibid., 40 (1:48). Ibid., 40 (1:48). My emphasis. Juliet Flower MacCannell, The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 77. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993), vol. 3 of Collected Writings, 11 (OC , 3:121). Confessions, 74; OC , 1:88–89. Ibid., 75; 1:89–90. Translation modified.

NOTES

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

169

Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, 173. Confessions, 64; OC , 1:76–77. Ibid., 66; 1:79–80. Ibid., 121; 1:144. Ibid., 122; 1:145–46. Again, for Rousseau this regret is similar in structure to the one cited earlier that he expresses upon leaving Geneva—notably, that if he stayed he might have been “a good Christian, good citizen, good father of a good family, good friend, good worker, good man in everything.” Starobinski, Transparency and Obstruction, 173. René Laforgue, for example, writes, “Here it is then formulated for the first time, this reproach by which Jean-Jacques felt himself persecuted. It is as if his father, the paternal superego, were saying to him: ‘You killed your mother, give her back to me, replace her by abandoning your virility.’ Thereafter, instead of exposing ‘the obscene object,’ that is to say, the penis, which he qualifies as obscene, he exposes the anus that pederasts substitute for the female organ. Moreover, he seems to have spent whole nights with his father developing a sentimentality that, by all accounts, had nothing in common with that of a normally turbulent and aggressive boy.” “Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” in Psychopathologie de l’échec: l’échec dans la vie des hommes et des peuples (Geneva: Editions du Mont Blanc, 1963), 127–28. My translation. Confessions, 56 (OC , 1:67). See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2–5. Calvin Thomas, Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 63. In the chapter “The Mechanics of Fluid,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, Irigaray argues that, part of a masculine economy founded on rationality and clear borders (male and female, subject and object), “sperm fluid” must be hidden/denied or rendered “solid” through the birth of a (male) child. That is, in denying its own “fluidity,” the male body (and male discourse) is idealized. “[W]e might ask (ourselves) why sperm is never treated as an object a? Isn’t the subjection of sperm to the imperatives of reproduction alone symptomatic of a preeminence historically allocated to the solid (product)? And if, in the dynamics of desire, the problem of castration intervenes—fantasy/reality of an amputation, of a “crumbing” of that solid that the penis represents— a reckoning with sperm-fluid as an obstacle to the generalization of an

170

NOTES

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

economy restricted to solids remains suspension.” Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 115. Irigaray’s emphasis. Confessions, 139 (OC , 1:166). MacCannell devotes a fair amount of attention to Rousseau’s homosexual encounters but completely ignores those that could be considered “positive.” This neglect is due, I think, again, to MacCannell’s insistence on “sexual difference” or the inclusion of the “sexually different” for a positive sexual politics. See MacCannell, Regime of the Brother, 74–80. Wingrove also discusses Rousseau’s “negative” homosexual encounter with the Moor in Turin but likewise neglects his positive examples. I certainly don’t think this is due to any heterosexist bias on Wingrove’s (or MacCannell’s) part but rather is a result of her reading of Rousseau as instantiating and upholding heterosexist norms. See Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance, 223–25. Confessions, 83 (OC , 1:99). Ibid., 85 (1:101–2). Ibid., 86 (1:102). Ibid., 105 (1:125). Ibid., 105 (1:126). Mme de Warens has a particularly mobile, figurative power. As noted in the previous chapter, she was variously a sister and a mother figure. Here, in the earlier years, she can be seen to represent the father—perhaps because of being Genevan? In any case, this fluidity indicates that, for Rousseau, identity is a function of power rather than an intrinsic essence or even an effect of one’s corporeality. Confessions, 112 (OC , 1:133). Ibid., 116 (1:139). Ibid. Ibid., 123–24 (1:147–48). Rousseau’s emphasis. Ibid., 104 (1:124). Ibid., 334 (1:398). Ibid., 125 (1:149). Ibid., 318 (1:379). Ibid., 318–19 (1:380). Ibid., 319 (1:380). Conclusion

1. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Blindness,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 111.

NOTES

171

2. Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 3. 3. Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 40. 4. It is somewhat curious that feminist readers have been so aghast at Rousseau’s “idealization” of Spartan women, given that the women of Sparta reputedly enjoyed a measure of equality and freedom unknown to their contemporaries or even their modern-day counterparts (education, property rights, freedom of movement). 5. Rousseau, Social Contract, with Discourse on Virtue of Heroes, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (1994), vol. 4 of The Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 12 vols., edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1990–2007), 132; Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1959–95), 3:352. 6. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), Polemics, and Political Economy, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Terence Marshall (1993), vol. 3 of Collected Writings, 7 (OC , 3:115). 7. Rousseau, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues, trans. Judith R. Bush, Roger D. Masters, and Christopher Kelly (1990), vol. 1 of Collected Writings, 108 (OC , 1:800). 8. Second Discourse, 77n7 (OC , 3:205n). 9. Dialogues, 179 (OC , 1:890–91). 10. Ibid., 213 (1:935).

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Rosenblatt, Helena. Rousseau and Geneva: From the First Discourse to the Social Contract, 1749–1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna. R. Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975. Scott, Joan Wallach. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Shanley, Mary Lyndon, and Carole Pateman, eds. Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Shklar, Judith. Men and Citizens : A Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Schwartz, Joel. The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Desire.” In The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, edited by Victoria de Graza and Ellen Furlough. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Starobinski, Jean. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Still, Judith. Justice and Difference in the Works of Rousseau: Bienfaisance and Pudeur. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. “Rousseau’s Lévite d’Epraïm: The Imposition of Meaning (on Women).” French Studies 43 (1989): 12–30. Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. Strong, Tracy. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. Swenson, James. On Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Considered as One of the First Authors of the Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thomas, Calvin. Male Matters: Masculinity, Anxiety, and the Male Body on the Line. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Thomas, Paul. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?” Feminist Studies 17, no 2. (Summer 1991): 195–217.

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Todorov, Tzvetan. Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau. Translated by John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Trachtenberg, Zev M. Making Citizens: Rousseau’s Political Theory of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Viroli, Maurizio. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the “Well-Ordered Society.” Translated by Derek Hanson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Weiss, Penny A. Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Wingrove, Elizabeth Rose. Rousseau’s Republican Romance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Zerilli, Linda. Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Inde x

actresses, 67–68 Allegories of Reading (de Man), 81 “Allegory (Julie)” (de Man), 81 amour de soi (love of self), 15, 23, 30–32 amour-propre (self-love, egotism), 15, 27, 30–32, 65, 140–141, 150n21 apple stories, 75, 76–78 artisans of Geneva, 45 authenticity, 81–82, 110, 161n92 autobiographical works, 109–136; as confessions, 110–111; as constituting the self, 111–112; as literary works, 17; as political, 5–6; punishment in, 116–121; Rousseau’s early life in, 113–124; Rousseau’s homosexual experiences in, 128–134; Rousseau’s relationships with women in, 124–128 Bâcle (Rousseau’s boyhood friend), 130–131 Basile, Mme, 126–127 Benjamites, 36–38 betrayal, 51–53, 90 bodies, deformities of, 41–42 brothers, 11, 13–14 brother-sister relationships, 94, 105–106 Butler, Judith, 3–4, 12–13, 111 Caputo, John, 13 Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze), 118 comedy, 64

confession, 110–111 Confessions (Rousseau): apple story in, 76–78; as autobiographical work, 109; as fictional, 165n14; France and, 49–50; gender and, 4, 17; homosexual encounters in, 128–133; ménages à trois in, 13; money and, 122; passion and, 8; as political work, 113; prostitute stories in, 16, 40–43; Rousseau’s characteristics in, 114 consensual nonconsensuality, 15, 33 Cornell, Drucilla, 12 couples, 80, 89–92, 142. See also ménages à trois cross-dressing, 2–4 d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 55, 154n4, 155n13. See also Letter to d’Alembert (Rousseau) death: of Julie, 101, 102–103; in Levite, 36–37 Deleuze, Gilles, 118 De Luc, Jacques-François, 49 de Man, Paul, 24, 81, 137, 148n36 democracy, 16, 83–85 Derrida, Jacques, 5, 27–28, 32, 167–168n40 desire: in Levite, 34–35; Rousseau and, 61, 104, 135. See also passion deviant masculinities, 2 Le devin du Village (“The Village Soothsayer”) (Rousseau), 134 Dialogues (Rousseau), 109, 114, 140–141, 164n2 Disch, Lisa, 95

182

INDEX

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men (the Second Discourse). See Second Discourse (Rousseau) Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (the First Discourse) (Rousseau), 19, 55–56 Domesticating Passions (Fermon), 56, 69 drag, 2–4 DuCommun, M., 120–124 economic relations, 75, 76. See also exchange value of women education, 61, 68, 86–87, 92–93, 94 egalitarian relationships. See equal relations egoism. See amour-propre Elshtain, Jean, 8 Emile (Rousseau), 1, 10–11, 13, 17, 85–89, 138 Emile et Sophie, ou Les Solitaires (Rousseau), 10–11, 89–93 Enlightenment, 11, 86–87, 94–95 entertainment: public festivals, 58–59, 71–76; theater, 16, 55, 59, 63–73 Epinay, Louise d’, 51 equal relations: in Emile, 88–89; as future ideal, 142–143; in Geneva, 45–46; incestuous relationships and, 152n73; in Julie, 93; in Levite, 35; ménages à trois and, 13–14, 84–85; politics and, 17–18; public festivals and, 58–59; waferman story and, 74. See also inequality “Essay on the Important Events of Which Women Have been the Secret Cause” (Rousseau), 48 Essay on the Origin of Languages (Rousseau), 8 exchange value of women: egoism and, 15–16; femininity and, 66–67; in Julie, 94; in Levite, 32–39; as prostitutes, 39–43

exclusion: in gingerbread story, 75; of women, 7–10, 66–69 exhibitionism, 2, 125–126, 169n62 familial model, 138–139, 142 family: feminist readings and, 8–9; Geneva as, 72; in Levite, 34–36; republican model and, 138–139; in Second Discourse, 23, 25 fantasies: of Geneva, 50–51, 152n75, 155n13; of love, 61–62 fathers: Anet as, 105; as dangerous, 139–140; duties of, 86; in familial model, 139–140; Levite as, 35; ménages à trois and, 83–84; Mme de Warens as, 131, 132; prostitution and, 42–43; Rousseau’s, 45–46, 115–116; tutor as, 86–88. See also paternal authority fear, 9–10, 68, 126, 134–135 femininity: exchange value and, 66–67; modern world and, 7–8; objectification of, 157n43, 157n44; of Parisian society, 57–58; pity and, 27–28; revaluing of, 12; Rousseau’s, 124–125, 160n73; Rousseau’s works and, 5–6; St. Preux’s, 98. See also masculinity feminist readings, 1, 6–13, 55–57, 109–110 Fermon, Nicole, 56, 69 fiction: autobiographical works as, 113; Confessions as, 165n14; in Fourth Walk, 159n67; Geneva as, 58; Julie as, 81–82, 165n14; new selves and, 141–142; Rousseau’s love life and, 61–62; Second Discourse as, 20–21 First Discourse (Rousseau), 19, 55–56 Foucault, Michel, 110–111 Frail Happiness (Todorov), 85 France, 49–50, 57–58, 140–141. See also Parisian society

INDEX

fraternal power, 11, 13–14 freedom, 24, 97, 134–135 Freudian model, 83–85 Friedlander, Eli, 73 gallantry, 65–66 Garden of the Hesperides, 75, 76–77 Gauffecourt (Genevan friend), 44–45, 51–52 gender identities: binary model of, 142; in Confessions, 113; instability of, 9–11, 104; Rousseau’s, 2–4; of St. Preux, 98. See also femininity; masculinity; sexual difference Gender Trouble (Butler), 3–4 Geneva, 43–53; “Dedication” and, 43–47; as fantasy, 50–51, 58, 152n75, 155n13; France and, 49–53; in Letter, 57–58; sex segregation in, 70–73; theater in, 55, 65, 70–73; women of, 46–47, 51 “Geneva” (d’Alembert), 55 gingerbread story, 74–75 Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler), 111 the Hermitage, 51, 60 heroism, 114–116, 119–121 history, 20–22 The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (Foucault), 110 homosexuality: in Julie, 96–97, 102; in Levite, 36–37; Rousseau and, 128–134, 170n68 Houdetot, Sophie d’, 3, 62, 69–70, 83, 103–104 illegitimate contract, 15–16, 33–34, 38–39 impersonation, 133–134 incest taboo, 25–26 incestuous relationships, 23, 28–29, 94, 105–106, 152n73

183

inequality, 1; love relation and, 66; in Rousseau’s relationships, 105, 107; Second Discourse and, 15–16, 19–23. See also equal relations Irigaray, Luce, 66–67, 169–170n66 jealousy, 27, 90–91, 100, 103–104 “Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sexist?” (Thomas), 6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Politics of the Ordinary (Strong), 23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction (Starobinski), 20 J. J. Rousseau: An Afterlife of Words (Friedlander), 73 Julie, or the New Héloïse (Rousseau): audience for, 160n81; authenticity of, 81–82, 161n92, 165n14; Claire in, 95–97; as critique of social relations, 78–82; equal relations in, 93; exchange of women in, 94; father figures in, 140; gender relations in, 1, 10–11; as instructive, 79; literature and, 59; ménages à trois in, 13, 93–103; mothers in, 96–98; new relationships and, 17; Parisian women in, 66; paternal authority in, 79–80, 94–95, 103; writing of, 62 Kavanagh, Thomas, 5, 34, 35, 83–84, 95, 112 Kelly, Christopher, 69 Kofman, Sarah, 7, 49, 56 Laforgue, René, 83, 128, 169n62 l’amour à trois. See ménages à trois Landes, Joan, 7–8, 46–47 Lange, Lynda, 8 Laqueur, Thomas, 7 Letters to Malesherbes (Rousseau), 114 Letter to d’Alembert (Rousseau), 55–73; cross-dressing and, 3; feminist readings of, 55–57;

184

INDEX

gender inequality in, 1; Geneva and, 57–58, 70–73; introduction to, 55–59; as love letter, 58, 62–63; theater and, 16, 63–70 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 25 The Levite of Ephraïm (Rousseau), 15–16, 32–39, 140, 143 literature, 16–17, 50, 59. See also writing love: absence of in society, 65–69; in Emile, 87–88; in Julie, 95–97, 102; Letter and, 58 love letters, 58, 62–63, 69–70 love of self. See amour de soi love triangles. See ménages à trois

Merceret, Mlle, 127–128 milk, 98, 107, 162n11 model of modern state, 138 money, 121–122 “Moral Letters” (Rousseau), 69–70 moral love (love relation), 31–32, 65 Morgenstern, Mira, 8–9 mother-child relationship, 23, 28–29, 105–106 mothers: critique of, 14; duties of, 86; in Julie, 96–98; masochism and, 166n25, 167n33; ménages à trois and, 83, 84; pity and, 27–29; Rousseau’s, 83, 115 multiplicity, 12–13

MacCannell, Juliet Flower: on fraternal order, 11–12; on homosexual encounters, 170n68; on Julie, 95; on Letter, 63; on love triangles, 104; on narcissism, 31; on women’s power, 65 Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Laqueur), 7 Male Matters (Thomas), 129 manipulation, 87–88, 95 marriage, 71, 97 Marso, Lori Jo, 9, 10–11, 95, 103 masculinity: deviant, 2; idealization of, 133–134; modern world and, 7–8; “perversities” as critique of, 135–136; Rousseau’s works and, 5–6. See also femininity masochism, 2, 116–118, 132, 166n25, 167n33 master/slave dialectic, 32, 38, 39, 92. See also submission masturbation, 2, 128–129 ménages à trois, 83–107; in Confessions, 13; in Dialogues, 164n2; in Emile, 85–89; Freudian model and, 83–85; in Julie, 93–103; in Les Solitaires, 89–93; politics of, 13–14; in Rousseau’s life, 83–84, 103–107

narcissism, 26–32, 66–67, 140–141 nature, 19–23, 161n92 Ninth Walk of Reveries (Rousseau), 16–17, 73–78, 158–159n61 nonphallic desire, 2, 125–128 nothingness, 19–23 objectification of women, 65–68, 157n43, 157n44 oedipal drama, 11, 83–84, 147n32 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 27 Okin, Susan, 6–7 On Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swenson), 113 Parisian society, 56–58, 65–66. See also France partage (splitting/sharing), 77, 91, 159n72 passion, 8, 29–32, 102, 115. See also desire Pateman, Carole, 39–40 paternal authority, 2; in apple story, 77; in Confessions, 135–136; first families and, 25; in Julie, 79–80, 94–95, 103; masochism and, 118; ménages à trois as critique of, 13–14; punishment and, 118–120;

INDEX

Rousseau’s attempt to assume, 105–106, 107; Rousseau’s father and, 115–116; of tutor in Les Solitaires, 92–93. See also fathers; patriarchy patriarchy: challenges to, 118–122; Ninth Walk and, 158–159n61; Rousseau and, 6–7; waferman story and, 74. See also paternal authority perfectability, 24 Le Persiffleur (Rousseau), 114 pity, 23–24, 26–32 Plutarch, 81, 138, 158–159n61, 165–166n17 political/cultural models, 138–139 “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine” (Irigaray), 66 “Preface to Narcissus” (Rousseau), 55–56 prostitutes, 16, 39–43 public festivals, 58–59, 71–76 public/private split, 7–9, 85, 90 punishment, 116–121 reading, 113–115, 123–124, 141–142, 165–166n17 reason, 8, 27, 29–30, 115 The Regime of the Brother: After the Patriarchy (MacCannell), 11 “La Reine Fantasque” or “Queen Whimsical” (Rousseau), 48–49, 153n84 relationships, alternative (postoedipal), 13–14, 17–18, 84–85, 142 relationships, brother-sister, 94, 105–106 relationships, mother-child, 23, 28–29, 105–106 relationships, same-sex, 96–97, 102 republican model, 138–139 The Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau): as autobiographical

185

work, 109; Fourth Walk, 159n67; literature in, 16–17; Ninth Walk, 16–17, 73–78, 158–159n61; public entertainments and, 59; stories from, 73–78; truth in, 112 romance, 64–66, 114–116, 124–128 Rousseau, Isaac, 45–46, 115–116 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: early life of, 113–124; gender identity of, 2–4; homosexual experiences of, 128–134; relationships of, 60–63, 83–84, 124–128; style of, 80–81, 137–138 Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques: Dialogues (Rousseau), 109, 114, 140–141, 164n2 Rousseau and the Politics of Ambiguity (Morgenstern), 8–9 Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Wingrove), 33 Rubin, Gayle, 25–26 sacrifice, 33–34, 38–39 salonnières, 66–69 Schwartz, Joel, 56, 78, 160n73 Second Discourse (Rousseau), 19–32; Dedication of, 1, 43–47; familial model in, 138–139; gender inequality in, 1; illegitimate contract in, 38; inequality and, 15–16; Letter and, 57; Levite and, 34; narcissism and pity in, 26–32; nature in, 19–23; passion and, 8; paternal authority and, 14; society in, 23–26 secrecy, 100–101 self, 111–112, 141–142 self-preservation. See amour de soi sex segregation, 56–57, 70–73, 75 Sexual Contract (Pateman), 39 sexual difference: binary of, 12–13; in Emile, 87–88; exclusion of women and, 7–9; fear and,

186

INDEX

9–10; in “La Reine Fantasque,” 153n84; in Second Discourse, 23–26 sexuality: autobiography/ confession and, 110–111; Rousseau’s, 2, 117–118, 125–128, 160n73. See also homosexuality sharing. See partage (splitting/ sharing) Shklar, Judith, 85 Signifying Woman: Culture, Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Zerilli), 9 Silverman, Kaja, 2, 118 Social Contract (Rousseau), 18, 33, 34, 139, 148n36 Les Solitaires, 10–11, 89–93 Starobinski, Jean, 20, 42, 83, 95, 122, 126 stealing, 120–121 Still, Judith, 32, 35, 36 Strong, Tracy, 23 submission, 33–34, 125–127. See also master/slave dialectic Swenson, James, 77–78, 113 theater: critique of, 16; effects of, 63–64; in Geneva, 55, 65, 70–73; isolation of, 59; Letter and, 63–70; objectification of women and, 65–68; Wolmar and, 99–100 Therese (Rousseau’s lover), 60–61 Thomas, Calvin, 129 Thomas, Paul, 6 threesomes. See ménages à trois Todorov, Tzvetan, 85, 137–138 “The Traffic of Women” (Rubin), 25

tragedy, 63–64 truth, 110–113 (Un)Manly Citizens: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s and Germaine de Staël’s Subversive Women (Marso), 9 utopias, 88–89. See also relationships, alternative (postoedipal) Villeneuve, Venture de, 131–134 Voltaire, 19 waferman story, 73–74 Warens, Françoise-Louise de: identity of, 170n74; in love triangle, 83–84, 105–107; as paternal figure, 131, 132; Rousseau’s betrayal of, 52–53 Weiss, Penny, 8 Wingrove, Elizabeth, 15, 33–34, 113, 170n68 women: “Dedication” and, 44; exchange value of, 15–16, 32–43, 94; exclusion of, 7–10, 66–69; Genevan, 46–47, 51; as influential, 47–49; moral love and, 31–32; objectification of, 66–68; power and, 57, 65–66. See also femininity Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Landes), 7 Women in Western Political Thought (Okin), 6–7 writing, 141–142, 167n40. See also literature Zerilli, Linda, 9–10, 56, 68, 167n33