Rousseau Confessions, Research Paper Example

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 – 2 July 1778) was a writer, philosopher and composer of the 18th-century. Among his most noted works, was his autobiography, “The Confessions” which was completed in 1770, but they remained unpublished until several years after his death. This book contains a genre of the most provocative and influential text of the Enlightenment and one of the formative early documents of European Romanticism. As the very onset, Rousseau explicitly sets his terms of intention for the reference: “My purpose is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray shall be myself… simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike anyone I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”

Earlier attempts at the self-analysis and self-advertising of autobiography had taken other forms. The Confessions of Augustine, for example, were clearly exemplary in exploring the religious experiences of the writer—the author interpreted his own life and errors so that others might learn valuable lessons from them. Such was not Rousseau’s aim. He was much more concerned with defining his personal identity, with the operation of memory, with trying to pin down exactly what sensations and feelings were most important to him, and, although the experience is mediated through the process of narration, he resolutely refuses throughout his long book to moralize or sensationalize events. In putting before the reader his shabby exploits as well as his more noble deeds, frankness (or at least the illusion of frankness) seems to be his guiding principle (Bell)

The French-Swiss writer, whose contribution is no less comparable to the historical importance of Marx or Freud, portrays a life full of contradictions in his book, the Confessions. He was a proponent for rights of little children only to consign his five illegitimate children to a foundling organization. Though he gained a promiscuous role as an educationist, his formal educated ended at the age of twelve. Again he is said to have a quarrelsome and unsociable nature in contradiction to his writings championing the cause of man’s goodness.

Also deeply influential was the way Rousseau emphasized the importance of childhood experience. In the first part of The Confessions, his own curious childhood is nostalgically presented as a special period of innocence, in need of protection and preservation against the impelling pressures and compromises of maturity. His mother died in childbirth while his father, a watchmaker, abandoned his son to the care of relatives when he was exiled for brawling in 1722. Rousseau loneliness turned him into an introvert, finding solace in reading books, which he saw as giving insight into feelings at the expense of rational understanding: “I had grasped nothing. I had sensed everything.”Yet he talks of the ‘serenity’ of his childhood, and although it is recollected with great tenderness, it still seems overshadowed by a sense of imminent loss, by a consciousness that this brief period of life is the most precious and the most vulnerable. In this, Rousseau not only influenced many subsequent writers on the formative period of childhood, but also acted as a precedent for the introspective narration of Proust and others. Indeed, the vast body of subsequent writing on subjectivity and the `self’ owes a great debt to Rousseau. As a young man Rousseau under great distress and poverty had to relent to undertake various menial works, but walked his way through education. By the patronage of wealthy women he established his position as an intellectual.

The first part of The Confessions covers the period between 1712 and 1741, taking Rousseau through pastoral accounts of a relatively uneventful youth and young manhood, dealing with the growth of affecting feelings and many tender episodes between the sexes. The pleasures of a comfortable life in the country amid agreeable companions like the attractive Merceret and the urbane Marshal de Luxembourg figure prominently. The candour with which he recounts his sexual exploits also shows a remarkable freedom of spirit, even if his highly-charged responses to small stimuli now seem rather tame. Rousseau believes that according to the original state of nature, the perfect state for man is when he is born free but is everywhere in chains (The Social Contract, 49). In this state man lives alone in innocence and is virtuous. However, with social assimilation and interaction man becomes greedy and aggressive leading to losing of innocence.

In a number of cases, Rousseau associates his youthful self with a kind of innocence in such matters that has something in common with the appeal in Henry Fielding’s fictional hero Tom Jones. In such episodes as his brief encounter with Madame Basile, for example, there is a kind of disarming candor in the telling: in spite of the encouragement, he remains frozen with timidity at her knees, unable even to touch her dress, in a state simultaneously “ridiculous and delicious” until interrupted by her husband’s return (Porter 55 )

Confessions cover a lot of ground – among the chief concerns are the moral and emotional lives of the author from infancy through childhood, youth, manhood and middle age. The work touches on affections, love, friendships, seduction, enmities, triumph, betrayals, search for a place in society, the search for a vocation and the commitment to a moral cum socio-political cause. At the core of the confessions, and the subject of many of the most brilliantly related anecdotes, however, is the narrative of the protagonist’s complex sentimental and sexual relations with women.

References

Porter, D “Rousseau’s Legacy”: Emergence and eclipse of the writer in France, Oxford University Press, 1995

Bell, Ian A. “The Confessions: Overview” Reference Guide to World Literature, Ed. Lesley Henderson, 2nd ed. New York: St. James Press, 1995.

Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Les Confessions), 1970, published in 1972