Romantic Education, Concealment, and Orchestrated Desire in Rousseau’s Emile and Frances Brooke’s Julia Mandeville

Abstract

There has seldom been as ambitious a pedagogical project in narrative form as Rousseau’s Emile, or on Education (1762).¹ Ambitious because, despite being interested in the fate of the individual, Rousseau seeks to achieve with Emile nothing less than the formation of a new kind of citizen, the founding element of a society to replace one that he deems perverted. Rousseau’s condemnation of things as they were — and his convictions about how they should be — met with contrasting reactions: Edmund Burke wrote in consternation that Emile was ‘impracticable and chimerical’, ‘highly blameable’ as well as utterly ‘dangerous’ (Annual Register 225), while Germaine de Staël commended it for ‘restoring happiness in childhood’ (qtd in Popiel 6), and Kant compared it to the French Revolution (Bloom 4). Between these poles there lay a mixture of fascination with Rousseau’s grand narrative of education and scepticism about its achievability. The impractical, if not utopian, character of the work was summed up in an otherwise benign Swiss review as follows: ‘It seems to us that an impossible condition underlies Rousseau’s education of his pupil, a small world of only virtuous people from whom the human being should learn virtue from early years on. Indeed, young people acquire the ability to speak, think and deduce from interactions with others, but to learn virtue according to this method requires circumstances which are not available in this world’ (qtd in Speerli 27).²

Those who want to treat politics and morals separately will never understand anything of either of the two.

(Rousseau, Emile, or on Education 235)