The Fate of Rousseau’s Heroines
Rousseau was acutely aware, perhaps more than any other political philosopher, of the conflicts of loyalties in people’s lives, and the incompatible demands made by the various personal and group relationships in which people participate. A moderate degree of self-love, love of another individual, love of one’s family, of one’s fellow countrymen, of humanity as a whole—all these he perceived as by no means easily reconcilable. All, however, he valued as important in their own way, and it was his ultimate conviction of their incompatibility that made his philosophical conclusions so deeply pessimistic. After outlining the denouements of Emile and Les Solitaires (its unfinished sequel), and La Nouvelle Héloise, I will draw on the fates of Rousseau’s characters to explore the repercussions of his ideas about women on the already conflicting demands of the human condition as he perceived it.
In accord with his tutor’s plan, Emile on attaining adulthood rejects all existing governments and chooses to be an independent man.1 All he wants, he says, is a wife and a piece of land of his own, and the one chain he will always be proud to wear is his attachment to Sophie. However, Rousseau points out that it is not so easy to be an independent man, since although his need for a mate and companion is perceived as natural, in becoming the head of a family, he becomes necessarily the citizen of a state.2 “As soon as a man needs a mate, he is no longer an isolated being; his heart is no longer alone. All his relations with his species, all the affections of his soul are born with this one. His first passion soon makes the others develop.”3 Moreover, citizenship of a state is not treated, even in the case of Emile, as a necessary evil. Rousseau convinces Emile that he owes much to the laws of the country in which he resides, however far they may fall short of that genuine law that originates in the social contract and popular sovereignty. He is indebted to them not only for protection, but also for “that which is most precious to man, the morality of his actions and the love of virtue.”4 While a man in the depths of the forest might have lived more happily and more freely, “having nothing to struggle against in order to follow his inclinations …, he would not have been virtuous….” In civil society, on the other hand, a man can become motivated for the common good: “He learns to struggle with himself and to win, to sacrifice his interest to the general interest.”5 The laws do not prevent man from being free; rather they teach him to govern himself.
With this introduction of virtue and civic duty as ideals, not just necessities, for Emile, one wonders just what has happened to the natural man whom Rousseau had set out to educate. In the last part of Book 5, he seems to be trying to do what he had said was impossible—to make Emile into a natural man and a citizen at the same time. It is decided that Emile should live where he can serve his fellow men best, which is not, in this corrupt world, by immersing himself in town life, but by presenting an example of rural simplicity.6 The important point is that the rural life is not decided on simply because it is best for Emile and Sophie themselves, but because of the example it will provide others. Moreover, while it is unlikely that he will be called upon to serve the state, since a corrupt world has little use for such a man, if he is called upon, like Cincinnatus he must leave his plow and go.7 Thus Rousseau clearly attempts to make of Emile a citizen, as well as a natural and independent man.
The impossibility of these demands—that the naturally educated man should also fill the roles of husband, father and citizen—is clearly asserted by Rousseau in the two letters that were all he completed of Les Solitaires. It very soon becomes apparent that it was only through, the covert authority of the tutor and his continual manipulation of the environment that the illusion of Emile’s success as a natural man in society was maintained. The adult Emile is in fact still hopelessly dependent on his tutor, and when left by him to lead his own life he fails as a husband, a father and a citizen, and feels unequivocally free only when he has divested himself of all these attachments and responsibilities and become an emotional isolate. The conclusion that he eventually draws from his experience is a complete confirmation of the irreconcilability of the man/citizen dichotomy. “By breaking the ties that attached me to my country,” he says “I extended them over all the earth, and I became so much more a man in ceasing to be a citizen.”8 And, as Judith Shklar has noted, “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.”9 Rousseau’s conclusions about the man and the citizen could not be more clear.
Emile’s education, however, is both a failure and a success. It has failed to make him into both a natural man and a citizen, but Rousseau had already told us at the outset of the work that this was impossible.10 As Emile himself acknowledges, he cannot fulfill his duties as a husband and father without the constant help of his tutor. He is fitted neither for emotional closeness and dependence nor for the loyalty of a patriot, as his desertion of his family and his country makes clear. On the other hand, however, the end of his story shows that, in the sense of forming an autonomous, internally free man, his education has been a success. When he becomes literally enslaved, it is vitally important to him that, although his work and his hands can be sold from one master to another, his will, understanding, and real essence are inviolable.11 He rejoices that, because of his unique education, he has, as Rousseau intended, internal freedom, of which no one can deprive him. His personal, moral autonomy renders him essentially free even when his body is enslaved. His education has failed to do the impossible; but it has, Rousseau concludes, succeeded in making Emile into a universal man, adaptable to any situation and free of all restricting attachments.
What, though, of Sophie? Her ideal female education, as we have seen, was designed to endow her with that combination of alluring charm and chaste modesty that befits the wife of the patriarch. Like Emile, she “has only a natural goodness in an ordinary soul; every way in which she is better than other women is the result of her education.”12 The outcome described in Les Solitaires is therefore undeniable testimony to the failure of the ideal female education, just as it is to the failure of the attempt to make a natural man fit for social life.
First, Sophie, who has not been taught like Emile how to accept necessary evils, is so upset by her daughter’s death that Emile has to take her to Paris in order to distract her from her grief. Inevitably Paris, the cesspit of civilization, proves their downfall. Emile, corrupted by the city, breaks his marital vows by faltering in his love and devotion for Sophie. She, whose whole life has been made to revolve around love, whose entire self-esteem depends upon whether she is pleasing to men, cannot cope with her feelings of rejection, commits adultery, and finds herself with child by another man. Even though Emile is convinced by her honesty and remorse that Sophie’s heart has remained pure throughout, and he is aware that the temptations she faced were greater than any he could ever be expected to resist, he is unable to see any alternative to leaving her and their surviving child. Neither is it conceivable that she could accept his pardon, were he to offer it; she sees herself after her adultery as irredeemable. Instantaneously, in her own eyes, and in those of Emile and Rousseau, she has fallen from the pedestal of the madonna to the gutter of the prostitute. Having fallen once, there can be no possible guarantee that she will not do so again, since when a woman has lost her chaste reputation, she has no virtue left to preserve: “the first step toward vice is the only painful one.” Emile does, in fact, consider whether, being such an independent man, he should ignore that social prejudice which holds a wife’s crime against her husband’s honor. He concludes, however, that it is indeed a reasonable prejudice that deserves to be heeded. For any such crime is her husband’s fault, either for choosing badly or for governing her badly. Though thus acknowledging that he is largely to blame, Emile decides that it is impossible for him to take Sophie back as his wife. The final decision is made when he reflects on the horror of her being the mother of another man’s child, for in sharing her affection between the two children, his son and this usurper, she must likewise share her feelings between their two fathers. His feelings of revulsion against this are such that he exclaims: “I would sooner see my son dead than Sophie the mother of another man’s child.”13
Here we are presented with a very clear case in which the feelings of the natural man and the interests of his family and country are in direct conflict. His feelings prevailing, Emile is of course far better able to cope with the consequences of the break-up of his family than is Sophie, with the responsibility for two dependent children. Though saddened by what he sees as the irreparable loss of the woman he loves, he leaves his family and country and goes off, independent and self-sufficient, to be a real “solitaire.” Soon reveling in his new-found independence, he owes no one anything, and finds himself at home and self-supporting wherever he goes. “I told myself,” he relates to his tutor, “that wherever I lived, in whatever situation I found myself, I would always find my task as a man to do, and that no one needed others if each lived agreeably for himself.” “I drank the waters of forgetfulness, the past was erased in my memory.”14 Sophie, however, is in no position to forget the past; she has two children, of whom one soon dies, no status in society, and no respectable means of support unless she relies on Emile. Surely neither her self-respect and shame nor his obvious lack of responsibility make this a viable solution. She has no alternative but to die, which she obligingly does, charming to the end.15
The importance of this fictional denouement arises, of course, from the fact that Emile and its sequel are not just novels, but the account of the fates of a man and a woman educated to be paragons of their respective sexes. Sophie’s adultery, which together with what is regarded as Emile’s inevitable reaction to it destroys this ideal family, is of supreme importance because, after all, not to commit adultery was the aim of her entire education. As Emile acknowledges, “If Sophie soiled her virtue, what woman can dare rely on hers?”16 Sophie’s failure is indicative of the failure in the society of Rousseau’s time, of the best possible education he thought a woman could have. She is designed to be very conscious of her charms, “consumed with the single need for love,”17 and ruled by the judgment of public opinion. As Burgelin has pointed out, it is Eucharis, the seductive nymph, with whom Sophie identifies when she fantasizes about Telemachus, not the chaste wife, Antiope.18 It is hardly surprising, then, that, neglected by her husband in a licentious city, she acts according to its lax moral code. The narrowness of what is considered to be her proper sphere, and the contradictory expectations placed on her—not least that she behave like a concubine with her husband and like a nun with all other men—make it inevitable that she will “fall” as she does. The corrupt city certainly compounded the problems that resulted from Sophie’s education, but an examination of the fate of Julie, who never leaves the idyllic countryside, reveals that the issue is more complex than this.
Julie is Rousseau’s ideal woman—the kind of woman he himself would love.19 She is extremely sensitive and emotional; she abounds in those qualities—modesty, romanticism and sexual attractiveness—without which Rousseau considered a woman to be worthless. The central theme of La Nouvelle Héloise is the conflict between her feelings and her duty which Rousseau believed a sensitive woman must confront. Julie is torn between her passionate feelings for her tutor, Saint-Preux, and her strong sense of duty to her mother, and to her impossible father, who will have nothing to do with the commoner and wants to marry his daughter to a noble friend.20 When Julie’s violent love for Saint-Preux overpowers her devotion to her duty to preserve her virginity, as one would expect of such a passionate character, she feels that she is utterly destroyed. In a desperate letter to her cousin and confidante, she writes: “Without knowing what I was doing I chose my own ruin. I forgot everything and remembered only love. Thus in a wild moment I was ruined forever. I have fallen into the depths of shame from which a girl cannot recover herself; and if I live, it will be only to be more wretched.”21 Having lost her virginity, she feels that she has no further worth as a person, and, overwhelmed with guilt, cries out to Saint-Preux, “Be my whole being, now that I am nothing.”22
Through Julie, who in spite of her exaggerated piety is a far more real and intelligent character than Sophie, Rousseau acknowledges to the reader that her plight is a terrible one, and one that no man could ever suffer from. As Julie writes to her lover:
Consider the position of my sex and yours in our common misfortunes, and judge which of us is more to be pitied? To feign insensitivity in the turmoil of passion; to seem joyful and content while prey to a thousand sorrows; to appear serene while one’s soul is distressed; always to say other than what one thinks; to disguise what one feels; to be obliged to be false and to lie through modesty; this is the customary position of all girls of my age. Thus we spend our finest years under the tyranny of propriety, which is at length added to by the tyranny of our parents’ forcing us into an unsuitable marriage. But it is in vain that they repress our inclinations; the heart accepts only its own laws; it escapes from slavery; it bestows itself according to its own will.23
Apart from forced marriages, all of these misfortunes are regarded by Rousseau as inevitable consequences of being born female. While Saint-Preux is affected as much emotionally by their enforced separation, he is not, like Julie, degraded by shame or obliged to hide his feelings. Neither is he forced to marry someone whom he does not love, but instead can go off on journeys and exploits, and enjoy an autonomous existence insofar as he can without the woman he loves. Since Julie was not married when she committed her terrible crime, and the child she conceives miscarries, there is still hope for her moral redemption. Whatever course of action she chooses, however, she cannot herself be happy, and the choice is never put in terms of what she wants to do, but always as a contest between the wills of the three men who surround her—her lover, her father, and later her husband. “Whom shall I give preference to, out of a lover and a father?” she asks, when deciding whether to elope or to marry the man of her father’s choice; “… whichever course I take, I must die both wretched and guilty.”24 Again, while she cannot marry Saint-Preux without her father’s consent, she promises her lover that she will not marry anyone else without his consent.25 On the occasion of her reluctant marriage, Julie describes her fate in this male-ruled world in which she lives: “Bound by an indissoluble chain to the fate of a husband, or rather to the will of a father, I am entering into a new way of life which must end only with death.”26
By placing her duty to her parents before her love for Saint-Preux and marrying the man her father forces on her, in Rousseau’s eyes Julie has redeemed herself. The whole of the rest of the novel, however, consists in her never-ending struggle against her feelings, and her repeated attempts to convince herself that she has conquered her passion. Slowly, she recovers her honor and virtue, in the role of wife and mother which, she says, “elevates my soul and sustains me against the remorse resulting from my other condition.”27 Nevertheless, by her own account she is not happy, despite the worthy Wolmar, her husband, who treats her like a delightful child, despite her healthy children, her religion, and her reunion (on a strictly non-physical level) with Saint-Preux. Though the rural domestic situation in which she lives is described as the happiest possible life on earth,28 and Julie herself as the perfect mother and most tasteful mistress of the house, she confesses to Saint-Preux, toward the end of her life, her inexplicable unhappiness. Though she sees only reasons for happiness around her, she says, “I am not content,” and then “I am too happy; happiness bores me.” Tormented by a “secret regret,” she laments “my empty soul reaches out for something to fill it.”29 The final denouement, Julie’s pseudo-accidental death, and her posthumous confession of her still unconquered passion for Saint-Preux, can only be seen as tragic commentary on her deluded sense of victory over her feelings. As she at last realizes, “Great passions can be stifled; rarely can they be purged.”30
Julie has behaved as she ought to have done, ever since her first great sin. She has preserved her virtue intact throughout her marriage, although she was deluded in believing that she was cured of her love. When, therefore, she realizes that she has always been and still is in danger of succumbing to temptation, her death is the only way out of the dilemma. Any reunion between her and Saint-Preux from that point on would be so dangerous that God takes the matter out of their hands. Indisposed after saving her son from drowning, Julie loses the will to live. Thus her passion has escaped destroying the ideal Wolmar family, but only by destroying her instead.
As Judith Shklar has asserted, Julie, as the human sacrifice, is a Christ figure.31 Since, however, she is the ideal woman, loving and lovable, honorable, kind, and struggling always to be virtuous, the fact that she is sacrificed has profound implications for Rousseau’s whole theory of women. Julie is his heroine, it must be recognized, because in spite of her rigid and repressive upbringing and her love of virtue, she is passionate and, like the original Héloise, “made for love.” However, given this personality, she is doomed to spend her entire adult life fighting her natural feelings, for the sake of her all-important chastity, her duty to her class-conscious parents, and her obedience to the prejudices of an inegalitarian world. Rousseau asserts in Emile that “in our senseless conditions, the life of a good woman is a constant struggle against herself,”32 but his own ideas about women’s education and proper position in society, taken together with his convictions about love and marriage, make it clear that in any conditions he was prepared to envisage, the kind of woman he idolized would not only be condemned to perpetual struggle, but might very well be required (not only in the corrupt city, but even in the pure countryside) to sacrifice her life for the sake of virtue. The ancient two-fold demands made of woman—that she be both the inspiration of romantic, sexual love, and the guardian of marital fidelity—are seen at their most tragic in Rousseau.
There are three important sets of conflicting claims on the human individual which are discussed in Rousseau’s works, and which must be reviewed in the light of his theories about women and the examples of ideal womanhood that he created. The first is the conflict between the impulses of the individual and the requirements of the republican state. Rousseau says that men must be educated as either individuals or citizens, but his education of women does not fit them to be either. The second is the conflict between the consuming commitment to a dyadic love-relationship and the needs of the wider world—whether family, state, or mankind as a whole. The third set of claims, which Rousseau considers but ultimately does not acknowledge to be in conflict, consists of the demands made by the family and those made by the ideal republic. It is my contention that, however problematic these second and third conflicts of loyalty are for man, it is woman, educated and defined as Rousseau would have her, who will opt for what he considers to be the less valuable of each pair of alternative commitments, and whose inevitable tendency will be to subvert both of his ideal institutions—the patriarchal family and the patriotic democratic republic.
The central theme of Rousseau’s social theory is the conflict between the ideal of the independent, natural man, and that of the man who is part of a large whole, his country—between the man and the citizen. At the beginning of Emile, he frankly states the dilemma which to him is the necessary starting point of any honest social theory: no person can be both man and citizen: “The natural man is altogether for himself; he is the unit, the absolute whole, who has no relation to anyone but himself or those like him.”33 In educating the natural man, the essential thing is to let nature take its course: “The whole [education] consists in not spoiling the natural man by making him conform to society.”34
The education prescribed for the citizen, however, is very different. Rousseau considered that he had proved through his construction of an hypothetical state of nature that man’s natural tendency is to be good, in the sense that he finds it pleasant to be kind to his fellows, so long as they do not thwart his needs or desires. The citizen, however, is required to have far more moral fiber than this. Living in close proximity to and mutual dependence on others, he will be required to perform duties that may well be disagreeable to him and involve considerable sacrifice. Thus it is not sufficient for him to rely on his natural tendency to be kind because it makes him feel good; he must, in short, learn to be virtuous.
The citizen is but the numerator of a fraction which belongs to the denominator, and whose value is in his relationship with the whole—the social body. Good social institutions are those which best know how to denature man, to take away his absolute existence and to give him a relative one, and to move the individual self into the community; so that each does not think of himself as one, but as part of the whole, and has feelings only as a member of that whole.35
The education of a real citizen, such as Rousseau considered the Spartans and the Romans to have been, thus involves no less than the destruction of most of man’s natural tendencies, and the transformation of his personality. As examples, he cites Brutus, who condemned his sons to death for their betrayal of the Republic; Pedaretes, who was rejected for membership of the Spartan Council and rejoiced that there were three hundred citizens better qualified than himself; and the Spartan mother, who ran to thank the gods for her country’s victory though her five sons had all been killed in the process of attaining it.36 The citizen socialized as Rousseau advocates would live for his country; he would think neither of his individual self nor of humanity as a whole, but solely of his fellow-citizens. He would be a patriot “by inclination, with passion, by necessity.”37
Rousseau held up Plato’s Republic as the outstanding account of true public education. In the Discourse on Political Economy and in Considerations on the Government of Poland, we have his own treatments of the subject, and in the Letter to d’Alembert he asserts that the only way of proving that education has improved is by showing that it makes better citizens. In Emile, however, stating that there are neither fatherlands nor citizens in his time, he argues that there can therefore be no public education, and that he will discuss the other alternative—private and domestic education.38 His essential point is that the choice must be made; the socialization process must combat either society, in order to make a natural man, or nature, in order to make a real citizen.
He who wishes to preserve the supremacy of natural feeling in civil life does not know what he is asking. Always in contradiction with himself, always fluctuating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either a man or a citizen; he will be no good to himself or to others.39
At this point in his argument, Rousseau poses the problem of how a man educated for himself, as he intends to educate Emile, could live with others. He says that “if perhaps the double aim proposed could be reunited into a single one, by getting rid of man’s contradictions one would remove a major obstacle to his happiness.”40
Rousseau’s denial of the possibility of such a reunion of the two aims is expressed by what becomes of Emile. For Emile is not intended to be by any means an isolate, but rather to be “a natural man living in society, … a savage made to live in town.”41 He must know how to live, if not like its other inhabitants, at least with them. His choice to be a husband and father entails the obligations of the citizen.42 Emile’s failure in all these three roles is the proof of the irreconcilable conflict between manhood and citizenship. His education has fitted him to be his own man, but not to tolerate any attachments, personal or patriotic. The denouement of Emile’s story is simply a confirmation of what was stated at the beginning of Book I—one must choose to educate a man or a citizen, but not both.
There is, however, for Rousseau, only one possible method of educating a woman. She is not, like Emile, educated to be her own person, with independent judgment, economic self-sufficiency, and an acquired ability to accept necessity and adapt to any situation in which she finds herself. Neither is she, like the Polish children, to be first and foremost her country’s citizen, socialized so as to think of the fatherland in every waking moment and to subordinate her wishes always to the public welfare. There is no mention of such alternatives with respect to Sophie’s and Julie’s educations. They are educated, instead, to be the appendages—the obedient and submissive daughters, wives, and mothers—of the men on whom they will depend for livelihood and for self-respect. The relationships they are prepared for are entirely personal ones; because their only proper means of influence or power are through the men who are closest to them, they are taught to manipulate them for their own ends.
It seems extraordinary, therefore, that Rousseau should have expected the Genevan women to utilize their single means of power in the world to expedite civic virtue and the public interest. For them or any other women educated in the mode he regarded as proper—having had no public socialization and sharing no part of the duties or rights of the citizen—to place the public welfare before their own or that of the persons closest to them, would certainly be remarkable, according to Rousseau’s own reasoning. At the beginning of The Social Contract, he attributes his conviction that it is his duty to study governments and public affairs to the fact that he was born a citizen of a free state and voting member of the sovereign.43 No woman he could envisage would ever be so motivated. Nothing in his prescribed education for girls leads to the expectation that patriotic loyalties will take precedence over personal or selfish ones.
The second conflict of loyalties that Rousseau’s social theory confronts is that between the exclusiveness of intimate love and the welfare of the outside world—whether family, fatherland, or humanity. Although he admired romantic love and pined for it, he depicts it as founded on mere illusion.44 It creates its own love objects, by covering those in the real world with a veil of fantasy. “We are,” as Julie says, “far more in love with the image we conjure up than with the object to which we attach it. If we saw the object of our love exactly as it is, there would be no more love in the world.”45 The one time Rousseau himself fell in love, with Mme. d’Houdetot, was the result of his investing her with the qualities of Julie, whom he was currently creating. Similarly, Emile is carefully prepared in advance for his meeting with his future wife by having an idealized Sophie presented in detail to his imagination, and it is not, we notice, on their first meeting that he falls in love with her, but on hearing her name and realizing that this girl is indeed the embodiment of his fantasies.46 Based as it is on illusion, love is necessarily evanescent. As Julie writes to Saint-Preux, though one may feel it so violently that it seems indestructible, love will inevitably fade, and boredom and oversaturation follow. Love “wears out with youth, it fades with beauty, it dies under the iciness of age, and since the beginning of the world two lovers with white hair have never been seen sighing for each other.”47 (The love of Julie and Saint-Preux, of course, is no exception, since they were parted at such an early stage that there could be no question of oversaturation. The tone of their letters, indeed, suggests strongly that their passion was kept alive by being thwarted.)
While love lasts, however, Rousseau does not question its intensity. How exclusive and all-consuming he considered a dyadic love-relationship to be is clearly expressed in The Confessions as well as in his other writings.48 Plato is referred to as the true philosopher of lovers because of his conviction that “throughout the passion, they never have another.”49 The exclusive nature of love is clearly illustrated in the melodramatic outbursts of Saint-Preux, who lives for his passion alone. After he and Julie finally contrive to spend the night together, he writes to her: “Oh, let us die, my sweet friend! Let us die, beloved of my heart! What is there to do, henceforth, with an insipid youth, now that we have exhausted all its delights”50 He gives up himself and his will totally to Julie’s disposal, discounting any connection except with her. When separated from his love, he cries out to her cousin, Claire, “Ah, what is a mother’s life, what is my own, yours, even hers, what is the existence of the whole world next to the delightful feeling which united us?”51 The anarchistic tendencies of exclusive love are pointed out by Lord Bomston, Saint-Preux’s confidant, as he talks of the bond between two lovers. “All laws which impede it are unjust,” he says, “all fathers who dare to form or break it are tyrants. This chaste or natural bond is subject neither to sovereign power nor to paternal authority, but only to the authority of our common Father, who can govern hearts…,”52 The rights of the family and of the state are seen by Bomston as having no precedence over those of love.
It was the absolute demands made by love, as Rousseau conceived of it, and as described by Bomston and exemplified by the complete self-abandonment of Saint-Preux, that led him to see it as such a threat to the other loyalties required of us. The worth of a man who speaks in the way Saint-Preux is quoted above, as a member of a family, a country, or even of the human race, is surely questionable. All he can think of is his passion for Julie. However, although Rousseau conceives of romantic-sexual love as so all-consuming and intense, his conclusion seems to be that, like all passions, love is good if we are the masters of it and do not let it master us. A man is not guilty, he tells Emile, if he loves his neighbor’s wife, so long as he controls his passion and does his duty; but he is guilty if he loves his own wife so much that he sacrifices everything else to that love.53 In a letter, his thoughts on the subject are summarized, thus:
We are justly punished for those exclusive attachments which make us blind and unjust, and limit our universe to the persons we love. All the preferences of friendship are thefts committed against the human race and the fatherland. Men are all our brothers, they should all be our friends.54
If even friendship is a theft, then love and wider loyalties are far more liable to clash. Where there is opportunity to devote oneself to groups and causes outside the narrow circle of intimacy—to fatherland or humanity—then exclusive dyadic love is to be eschewed as a threat to civic or humane loyalties. This is why Rousseau was so opposed to introducing the romantic love of the theater into Geneva, since he believed that city to have a level of morality and civic feeling that could only be lowered by the fostering of personal and sexual intimacy.55 For although “it is much better to love a mistress than to love oneself alone in all the world … the best is he who shares his affections equally with all his kind.”56
Because he perceived romantic love to be so exclusive and marriage to be an essential and functional social institution, Rousseau was by no means sure that the continuation of intense passion was compatible with marriage. Certainly at times he expresses the wish that they were. He laments the fact that, although if the happiness of love could be prolonged within marriage we would have a paradise on earth, this has never been seen to happen. Unfortunately, “in spite of all precautions, possession wears out pleasures, and love before all others.”57 He advises Sophie to forestall the fading of Emile’s amorous interest in her as long as possible, both by continuing to be alluring and by granting her sexual favors sparingly. In spite of this, however, the time will inevitably come, as in any marriage, when the husband’s ardor will cool. Thus, the feelings on which marriage is based must ultimately be tenderness and trust, mutual esteem, virtue, and the compatibility of the partners, strengthened by the extremely important bond that children form between their parents—“a bond which is often stronger than love itself.”58
In La Nouvelle Héloise, however, Rousseau has Julie argue not just that romantic love cannot last in marriage, but that it has no place in a good marriage. As she writes,
Love is accompanied by a continual anxiety over jealousy or privation, little suited to marriage, which is a state of joy and peace. People do not marry in order to think exclusively of one another, but to fulfill together the duties of civic life, to govern their houses prudently, and to bring up their children well. Lovers never see anyone but themselves, are concerned only with each other, and the only thing they can do is love each other. This is not enough for married people who have so many other cares to attend to.59
Marriage, then, is a serious social institution, which by no means succeeds easily; it should be based on honor, virtue and compatibility, and is indeed better off without the disturbances of passion. While Saint-Preux has been an ideal lover, Julie (and her creator) doubt that he could be a good husband, for Rousseau believes that the combination is extremely rare.60 Between Julie and her husband, Wolmar, a man totally without passion, there is none of that illusion which maintains such a state of heightened tension between her and Saint-Preux. It is Wolmar, moreover, who is billed as the ideal husband, father and head of household. The marriage of the Wolmars is depicted as admirable and orderly, and the family they form as a model for others. However, the achievement of this model is founded on the overriding of passionate love, which entails the sacrifice of Julie’s feelings, and eventually of her life.
Thus, while in one respect Julie’s impossible position might have been alleviated if the laws and customs which gave fathers so much power over their daughters were different, the important conflict between love and marriage would not thereby be resolved. Without the despotism of fathers and the requirements of the property system, Julie would have married her lover, but we are not given the impression that such a solution would have been either a happy or a socially useful one. After all, at the height of their passion, what they had thought of as the climax of their relationship was to die together, more than to live together, and Rousseau was very skeptical about the fate of their kind of love if it was subjected to the trials and disillusionments of many years of day-to-day life. It is made very clear to us that although it was Saint-Preux whom Julie always loved so passionately, Wolmar was undoubtedly the best man to be her husband and her children’s father. In fact, then, for the sake of virtue and her social duties, the only alternative for Rousseau’s ideal woman is to do exactly as she does, even without the coercion of her father. She must marry, without love, a worthy and dispassionate man, and make an orderly and happy home for him and his children, even though she is all the while in torment herself, and finally her only means of victory over love is to die.
Julie, however, is an exceptional paragon of virtue—a Christ figure. This is why, though she must be destroyed, she is able to place her duties to her family and to society above the feelings of love which possess her. Sophie, on the other hand, though she has received the ideal education for her sex, succumbs to the temptation of illicit love after marriage, thereby dooming both herself and her family. The attempt to create a woman in the image of a seductive nymph, Eucharis, and then have her behave like the virtuous wife, Antiope, is as much a failure as the attempt to make a natural man into a citizen. The ideal woman’s need to please and to be loved continually, and her dependence on men’s approval for her self-esteem and on public opinion for her moral code, make it virtually certain that in conditions of stress, sexual love will prevail over the demands of monogamy, which is the basis of all social order. Since “love is the realm of women,”61 and virtually their sole means of power, they can only be expected to exaggerate its importance, whether at the expense of the calmer affections on which marriage should be based, or to the detriment of their families, fellow countrymen or fellow humans.
Rousseau’s conviction that intimate dyadic relationships are threatening to the larger community has been asserted by many other leaders or theorists of groups which demand their members’ undivided loyalty. As a recent sociological study by Lewis Coser documents, libidinal withdrawal has been perceived as a threat by close-knit communities and sects as diverse as the Church and its religious orders, the early Bolsheviks, and many of the early American Utopias. In order to prevent the drawing off of energies and affections from the common purpose, such groups have tended to require of their members either celibacy or promiscuity, which, as Coser points out, “though opposed sexual practices, fulfill identical sociological functions.”62 Citing much evidence of this type of reasoning from the writings of theorists of the three groups named above, Coser also points to a finding that all except one of the successful nineteenth-century American Utopias practiced either free love or celibacy at some time in their history. Of the twenty-one unsuccessful communities, however, only five did so, and of these, four permitted couples to form if they wished.63 Thus, for the type of community in which total allegiance of the members is perceived as essential, it would seem that there is good reason to place controls on dyadic relationships.
Rousseau gives a small scale example of such practice, in the sexual segregation in the Wolmar’s household at Clarens. Masters who are at all concerned with being well served by their servants should realize that “too intimate relations between the sexes never produces anything but evil,” and that therefore, “in a well-regulated household the men and women should have little to do with each other.”64 The ruin of the richest families, he warns, has been brought about by the intrigues of the men and women in their service. Thus segregation, in addition to pre serving the chastity of the female servants, will also ensure that servants of both sexes perform their duties to the household faithfully and without distraction. On the republican level, arrangements such as the Genevan clubs perform the same function of preventing the distractions of sexual intimacy from harming the greater cause of civic life.
It is important to note, at this point, that those “greedy” communities which Coser analyzes are not only antagonistic to intimate sexual love relationships but also decidedly hostile to the family. The Catholic priesthood, the early Bolshevik militants and the successful utopias in America either bluntly prohibited, or at least strongly discouraged, their members from committing themselves to the demands of family life. A number of philosophical creators of utopian communities made similar recommendations. Plato in the Republic, Campanella in his City of the Sun, and Fourier in his projected Phalansteries, all extended their wariness of intimate relationships to the family.65 In the light of this fact, Rousseau’s treatment of the possible conflicts between the family and the republic and his conclusion that the family must indeed be preserved as the basis of society, are extremely interesting. Almost alone among creators of close-knit utopian communities, Rousseau was so far from hostile to the family that he idealized it.
In spite of his distinction between the natural basis of the family and the conventional basis of political society, Rousseau envisaged his ideal, small, democratic republic as, in many respects, like a big family. In the Letter to d’Alembert, for example, he refers to the public balls which he regards as so salutary for the peace and preservation of the republic as “not so much a public entertainment as … the gathering of a big family.”66 Again, he recommended to the Poles that republics should be small enough so that the citizens’ behavior can be supervised by their rulers and their peers alike, which is far closer to his description of a family than to that of a political society.67 Finally, in a single noteworthy sentence in the Discourse on Political Economy, he refers to the state as a loving and nourishing mother, and its citizens when children as each other’s “mutually cherishing” brothers, and when adult as the fathers and defenders of their country.68 While the metaphor is somewhat strained, its implication is unmistakable. The highly community-oriented method of socialization administered to the citizens of the ideal republic was intended to produce a family, a brotherhood, rather than a collection of individuals.
While discussing the dilemma that one cannot be both a man and a citizen, Rousseau had made a sociological observation, very like the arguments put forward by other utopians, about the functioning of groups and their tendency to demand all of their members’ loyalties and emotions. “Every partial society,” he writes “when it is close-knit and well united, alienates itself from the larger society. Every patriot is harsh toward foreigners; they are only men, they are nothing in his sight…. The essential thing is to be good to the people with whom one lives.”69 Moreover, just as patriotic loyalty detracts from one’s love for humanity as a whole, one’s membership of and loyalty to subgroups within one’s country was recognized by Rousseau as being likely to detract from the patriotic loyalty required of the true citizen. Thus, since “the same decision can be advantageous to the small community and very harmful to the large one,” it follows that “a person could be a devout priest, a brave soldier, or a zealous professional, and a bad citizen.”70 In The Social Contract, therefore, since the aim is to develop real citizens joined in one “moral and collective body”71 with a general will, and the ascendancy of particular interests over the common interest is perceived as an ever present danger, the existence of partial societies is distinctly frowned upon. For “when particular interests begin to make themselves felt and the smaller societies to have an influence over the greater, the common interest changes and finds opponents, unanimity of opinion no longer reigns, the general will is no longer the will of all… With the growth of particular and group interests, each will come to focus on his own particular benefit, and will neglect the decline of the public welfare.72
It would seem that one of the most obvious applications of this theory of conflicting interests would be to the family. This is a group, surely, which requires its members to have a very strong loyalty to its needs and wishes, which may well conflict with the good of the greater society. Since the family’s “principal object,” as Rousseau says, is “to preserve and increase the patrimony of the father, in order that he may one day share it amongst his children without impoverishing them,” and since private property and inheritance are regarded by him as the most sacred rights of citizenship,73 there must obviously be many occasions on which the interests of individual families will be opposed to the needs of the country as a whole. Any circumstances requiring taxation, the absence of the breadwinner for public duties, or the regulation of private property for the general good, for example, are more than likely to cause conflict between family and patriotic loyalties. However, in spite of the fact that Rousseau’s conflict of interest theory is applied to the level of patriotic feelings versus humanitarian ones, and to some partial groups within the republic, he refused explicitly to recognize that it can be applied also to the tension between the demands of the greater society and those of the family.
It is important to point out, at this point, two occasions in his writings when Rousseau does come very close to recognizing the potential conflicts of interest between his two ideal institutions—the democratic republic and the property-owning patriarchal family. First, the most striking examples he cites of Spartan and Roman patriotic devotion are those of citizens who subordinated their family feelings and attachments to the requirements of their fatherlands. Even though Brutus and the Spartan mother must have privately grieved over their children’s deaths, they were undoubtedly citizens before they were parents. These two real citizens were sufficiently able to abstract themselves from their family feelings to hold the state always dearer, but the conflict of interest and loyalties was undeniably present in both cases.
Second, and even more significantly, Rousseau did not consider the family to be a trustworthy dispenser of the education required by the citizens of a republic. He regarded public socialization of children from the earliest possible age as “one of the most fundamental principles of popular and legitimate government.”74 It is by this means that the young citizens will develop in such a way as to transcend that individualism which is so threatening to the general will. In the rough draft of the Discourse on Political Economy, moreover, Rousseau was more explicit than in the final version as to why this type of socialization could not be entrusted to families. In the final draft, the reasons given are that, just as his civic duties are not left up to the individual to decide upon, so the education of children should not be left up to the individual father’s ideas and prejudices, since its outcome is of even more importance to the republic than to the father. He, after all, will die, and often does not experience the fruits of his work, but the state endures forever, and the effects of its citizens’ education are its lifeblood.75 However, the significant reason that is not included in the final version, but was written and subsequently crossed out in the earlier one, is that fathers cannot be entrusted with the task of education in a republic because “they could make [their children] into very good sons and very bad citizens.”76
In these two examples, then, Rousseau was to some extent in agreement with those other utopia builders who recognized the threat of the family to the cohesion of the larger community. In general, however, his theory of the relations between the family and the state is in direct opposition to this tendency. He refers to marriage as “certainly the first and holiest of all the bonds of society,” an institution which “has civil effects without which society cannot even subsist.”77 Thus in a republic it is inconceivable that it be left to the clergy alone to regulate.78 His belief in the central place of the family in society was what made Rousseau so disgusted by the plots of Greek drama. Oedipus and other such plays depicting incest and parricide were likely to corrupt the spectator’s imagination with “crimes at which nature trembles.” Moliere’s comedies were equally deplorable, because so satirical about the very most sacred of relationships. By ridiculing the respectable rights of fathers over their children and husbands over their wives, he “shakes the whole order of society.”79
In Book 1 of Emile, Rousseau makes it clear that he regards the family as the principal socializing unit for the preservation of social order. It is with mothers that one must begin, in order to “restore all men to their original duties.” When mothers resume nursing their children, “morals will be reformed; natural feelings will revive in every heart; the state will be repopulated; this first step alone will reunite everybody.” The best counterpart to bad morals, he asserts several times, are the attractions of domestic life.80 When mothers become devoted to their children again, men will become just as good in their roles of husband and father, which is crucial. For a “father, in begetting and providing nourishment for his children accomplishes only a third of his task. He owes men to the species, sociable men to society, and citizens to the state.”81 In agreement with this, Saint-Preux affirms that the principal duty of man in society is to rear his children well and provide them with a good example. The Wolmar family is certainly a model in this respect, laying great stress on the education of its young.
This whole trend of thought, which seems so inconsistent with Rousseau’s insistence that one must choose to educate a child to be either man or citizen, and with his acknowledgment that educating him to be a loyal family member by no means coincides with making him into a loyal citizen, is brought to a climax in the attack, in Book 5 of Emile, against Plato’s proposal that the family be abolished. This objectionable suggestion, Rousseau claims, constitutes the
subversion of the tenderest natural feelings, sacrificed to an artificial feeling that cannot exist without them; as if one had no need of a natural attachment in order to form the bonds of convention; as if the love that one has for those nearest to one were not the basis for that which one owes to the state; as if it were not through the little fatherland that is the family that one’s heart becomes attached to the great one; as if it were not the good son, the good husband, the good father who makes the good citizen.82
Here, no tension is seen to exist between family interest and republican interest, and the arguments for public education seem to be completely undermined. Given Rousseau’s belief that human nature had to be deformed in order to make men into citizens, his calling upon natural feelings to aid in the development of the artificial ones of patriotism is highly puzzling. An individual reared in a very private atmosphere, with affections for and loyalty to just a few people, is scarcely likely to grow up feeling that all his compatriots are equally his siblings, the state his mother, and all the members of its ruling generation his fathers.
If the men who are members of nuclear families will have difficulties in becoming the sort of citizens Rousseau requires for his republic, the conflict for women, as he would have them, must inevitably be worse. Since the family is regarded as their only proper sphere of influence, and they receive no preparation for civic participation, it is not reasonable to expect them to use the powers that they have over their husbands for the promotion of any but the most narrow interests—those of their immediate households. Since their children are explicitly seen as their vital link with a husband whose affections may be otherwise inclined, they are hardly likely to sacrifice the interests of these children, let alone their lives, for the sake of a republic which can have very little reality in their own purely domestic lives. No woman educated and confined as Julie and Sophie are would ever be able to behave like the Spartan mother whose patriotism Rousseau so much admired.
Thus, Rousseau’s women are even more vulnerable than men to the conflicts of loyalties that he was so much aware of in the human condition. They were, moreover, almost bound to lend their support to the side he considered the less desirable. For in spite of his yearnings for isolation and independence, he believed that the wider one extended one’s affections, the better one was as a person. “The most vicious of men” he asserts, “is he who isolates himself the most, who most concentrates himself in himself; the best is he who shares his affections equally with all his kind.”83 Women, however, socialized in the restricted way he considers suitable for them, and placed in the only position he believes proper, have no reason to choose their country before their families, and have few defenses that would make them able to prefer any wider sphere of loyalty than that of sexual love, which provides them with their only means of power. Thus, in addition to the fact that Rousseau’s prescriptions for women are in flagrant contradiction with those values, equality and freedom, which he regards as so crucial to humanity, the women he envisages are not only likely to be destructive of themselves, but are also likely to be subversive of his two most idealized institutions, the patriarchal family and the small democratic republic.
Rousseau’s philosophy as a whole is by no means optimistic. What he asserts is the ultimate insolubility of the dilemma of being a man in society. However, he did construct a republic of denatured men, transformed into devoted patriots, and his intentions that this should not be considered simply an intellectual game are manifest in his works on Corsica and Poland. On the other hand, the end of the story of Emile is not totally pessimistic either. Emile survives the abortive attempt to make him into a husband, father and citizen, and becomes what he was always intended to be—a natural and autonomous man. The fates of Rousseau’s women, however, could not be more tragic. Though ideals of their sex, they cannot be allowed to live in the patriarchal world, since there is no way they can fulfill the totally contradictory expectations it places on them. At least Rousseau allows that a man can be either an individual or a citizen. He does not allow a woman to be either.