Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile, or, On Education. Allan Bloom translation. New York: Basic Books, 1979.
1. Sophie’s nature
Sophie is “well-born,” born of good though no longer ennobled or wealthy parents. More important, she is well-born in the sense that she is a woman of “good nature” (V.393). Admittedly, she isn’t perfect. Her “very sensitive heart” occasionally “makes her imagination so active that it is difficult to moderate” (V.393). “Her mind is less exact than penetrating; her disposition is easy but nevertheless uneven; her face is ordinary but agreeable; her expression gives promise of a soul and does not lie” (IV.393). Other women may have a greater measure of any of these qualities of mind, heart, and body, “but none has a better combination of qualities for making a favorable character”; indeed, “if she were more perfect, she would be much less pleasing” (V.393). Just as Emile never makes a shining first appearance but gains friends over time, Sophie makes men who meet “forget beautiful women, and beautiful women are dissatisfied with themselves”—perhaps because they are forgotten (V.393). “The more one sees her, the better she looks; she gains where so many others lose, and what she gains, she never loses again” (V.393). She dresses well—that is, modestly and attractively. She has musical taste but no musical talent, which would fit her for display, leave her vulnerable to amour-propre. Her household skills show that “she learns to govern her own household by governing her parents'” household. She practices cleanliness; her diet is moderate because she’s been taught to see the advantage of moderation for her own well-being (V.393).
She has her caprices, since “her disposition, which is a bit too intense, degenerates into refractoriness, and then she is likely to forget herself” (V.396). But not for long. “Leave her time to come back to herself” or, if the mood persists, punish her and she will immediately see the justice of it, submitting docilely; “one sees that her shame comes not so much from the punishment as from the offense” (V.396). She understands human equality regardless of social status, being ready “to kiss the ground before the lowliest domestic” whom she has offended “without this abasement causing her the least discomfort; and as soon as she is pardoned, her joy and her caresses show what a weight has been removed from her good heart” (V.396). In all, “she suffers the wrongs of others with patience and makes amends for her own with pleasure” (V.396). As always, Rousseau finds this not in an amendment owed to the power of the Holy Spirit but in nature, in “the lovable nature of her sex before we have spoiled it” (V.396). Sophie is the natural Eve, untainted by the amour-propre that animates civil society, the animating spirit of what Christians call ‘the world.’ This nature differs from that of men. “Woman is made to yield to man and to endure even his injustice. You will never reduce young boys to the same point. The inner sentiment in them rises and revolts against injustice. Nature did not constitute them to tolerate it.” (V.396). Our own contemporaries would say that boys have testosterone, girls estrogen.
Sophie adheres to the natural religion, with fidelity to morality not doctrine. Her ruling passion is the love of virtue, which she loves because “virtue constitutes woman’s glory and because to her a virtuous woman appears almost equal to the angels”; moreover, virtue is “the only route of true happiness,” whereas vice leads to “misery, abandonment, unhappiness, and ignominy” (V.397). And finally, her beloved father and mother also love it. Virtue is the “passion” that finally rules her desires, “all her petty inclinations” or caprices (V.397). She “will be chaste and decent until her last breath” (V.397). She is no “amiable French woman, cold by temperament and coquettish by vanity, who wants to shine more than to please, and who seeks entertainment and not pleasure”; instead, she is loving, and her dreams of love aim more at “pleas[ing] a single decent man—and pleas[ing] him forever—than [in] gain[ing] the acclaim of the fashionable which lasts one day and then changes into jeers the next” (V.397).
Although by nature physically weaker than men, “women’s judgment is formed earlier than men’s” (V.397). This comes from their very weakness: “almost from infancy women are on the defensive and entrusted with a treasure that is difficult to protect”; like Eve, “good and evil are necessarily known to them sooner” because satans come after them sooner (V.397).
2. A father’s advice on marriage
Her father has counseled her on the conditions of the marriage which will result when she finds the man she dreams of loving. He begins with a dose of realism. “The greatest happiness of marriage depends on so many kinds of suitability that it is folly to want to obtain all of them together”; since “perfect happiness is not of this earth,” be sure to “secure the most important ones” (V.400). Remember that “the greatest unhappiness, and the one that can always be avoided, is being unhappy due to one’s own fault” (V.400).
In a husband, there are three kinds of “suitability”: natural suitability, conventional suitability, and the suitability that “depend[s] only on opinion” (V.400). Parents can judge a suitor’s suitability in terms of convention and of opinion, but their “children alone are the judges” of natural suitability, of what a later generation would call ‘compatibility’ (V.400). Natural suitability is the most important kind because social position and wealth “can change” but “the persons alone always remain” (V.400). “It is only as a result of personal relations that a marriage can be happy or unhappy,” as Father and Mother know, because at one time “your mother had position” and “I was rich”: “These were the only considerations which led our parents to unite us. I lost my wealth. She lost her name and was forgotten by her family. Of what use is it to her today to have been born a lady? In our disasters the union of our hearts consoled us for everything. The similarity of our tastes caused us to choose this retreat. We live here happily in poverty.” (V.400). This is another dimension of the lesson Rousseau would teach aristocrats. Your daughters, like your sons, perhaps like yourselves, will not be ‘titled,’ will not be wealthy, for much longer. Strengthen nature in yourselves as insurance against the coming convulsion in conventions, the revolution in opinions. “The kinds of suitability which caused us to be married have vanished. We are happy due only to those that were counted for nothing.” (V.400).
Therefore, “it is up to the spouses to match themselves,” first by “mutual inclination,” attraction of “their eyes” to bodies and “their hearts” to souls (V.400). From this union there comes their first duty, which is “to love each other”—the natural equivalent to Christ’s spiritual command (V.400). Before the legal, conventional union of marriage this natural union is “the right of nature, which nothing can abrogate” (V.400). “Those who have hindered it by so many civil laws have paid more attention to the appearance of order than to the happiness of marriage and the morals of citizens” (V.400). Your father and mother want you only to be “your own mistress”; we “rely on you for the choice of your husband,” and these are “our reasons for leaving you entirely at liberty” (IV.400). Having done so, “use this liberty wisely” (V.400). True, you are good, reasonable, obedient to natural right and to God; you “have talents which suit decent women, and you are not unendowed with attractions” (V.400). You have “the most estimable goods” but you lack “those which are most esteemed,” money and social standing (V.400). Do not aspire to marry a man above your station; in this, “guide your ambition not by your judgments nor by ours, but by the opinion of men,” who disdain the female arriviste (V.400).
Rousseau approves of Sophie’s father’s advice. “I say her judgment, her knowledge, her taste, her delicacy, and especially the sentiments on which her heart has been fed in her childhood will oppose to the impetuosity of her senses a counterweight sufficient to vanquish them or at least to resist them for a long time” (V.402). The liberty her parents have allowed her will itself give her “new elevation of soul,” making her “harder to please in the choice of her master” (V.402). Sophie has “the temperament of an Italian woman,” an “ardent temperament”; she has “the sensitivity of an Englishwoman,” the Jane Austen of a few decades hence; she “combines with them—in order to control her heart [the Italian] and her senses [the Englishwoman]—the “pride of a Spanish woman, who, even when she is seeking a lover, does not easily find one she esteems worthy of her” (V.402).
This difficulty has intensified, unbeknownst to her parents, thanks to Sophie’s favorite book. Her standards seem impossibly high, unrealistic, not in terms of the social ambitions her father warned her against but in terms of the rectitude he and his wife had always fortified. She seems to have taken as her “model of the lovable man” some ideal beyond the realm of human possibility. “How had this extravagant delicacy been able to take root in her”? (V.404). It is her mother, not her father, who pries the truth out of her. She throws a book down on the table. Mother opens it and finds Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. She wants a man like the son of Ulysses as envisioned by an ordained priest. You have not, she reminds her mother, formed me for a man of her own time, and I am not so base as to adopt, or adapt to, the corrupt ways of a modern husband, nor such a fool as to suppose that I might convert him to my own ways, my own ‘regime.’ “Give me a man imbued with my maxims or one whom I can bring around to them, and I shall marry him. But until then, why do you scold me? Pity me.” (V.405). I know that Telemachus himself “is only a fiction,” but I do seek “someone who resembles him”; we must not “dishonor humanity,” dishonor the nature that must persist in some real man, somewhere (V.405). “Perhaps he is seeking me. He seeks a soul that knows how to love him.” (V.405). I do not know who he is or where he is, but I do know “he is none of those I have seen” and “doubtless…none of those I shall see” (V.405). “If I can love nothing but virtue, the fault is less mine than yours,” as “you made virtue too lovable for me” (V.405). At this, mother must smile invisibly, since she knows the arrangements regarding the arrival of Emile.
3. An excursus on nature as it relates to marriage
The rise of civil society vastly complicates human life, including relationships between men and women. “One must not confound what is natural in the savage state with what is natural in the civil state” (V.406). In the savage state “all women are suitable for all men because both still have only the primitive and common form” of body and mind, but in the civil state social institutions differentiate us in two ways. Each mind receives its own “form” from “the well-ordered conjunction of nature and education”; then, as these characters develop, civil society “distinguishes ranks,” social classes (V.406). These social classes obscure the distinctions among characters, making it hard to establish good matches in marriage. Ill-matched marriages further contribute to social disorder. And so, “the farther we are removed from equality, the more our natural sentiments are corrupted; the more the gap between noble and commoner widens, the more the conjugal bond is relaxed; and the more there are rich and poor, the less there are fathers and husbands” first, because husbands and wives are incompatible and second, because the rich hand off their children to wet nurses and nannies (V.406). There are no more natural families, only masters and slaves.
To counter this derangement, “stifle prejudices, forget human institutions, and consult nature” (V.406). Aim at uniting persons who are suitable according to the civil-social conjunction of nature and education—according, that is, to their characters. “The influence of natural compatibilities”—natural in the second, civil-social sense—is “alone decisive for the fate of married life” (V.406).
This still gives parents and governors considerable work to do, and it is indeed considerable work, work that takes thought. Neither Emile nor Sophie knows that Emile’s governor and Sophie’s parents have not only educated their young charges but found them to be compatible in character, long before they will meet. This, too, is an ‘arranged marriage,’ but one arranged on far different principles than those prevalent among contemporary aristocrats and oligarchs. “There are maxims of prudence that ought to limit the search of a judicious father”—for example, a man should never marry ‘above himself,’ socially, and a woman should never marry ‘beneath herself.’ An upper-class woman will hardly lower herself to obey a bourgeois or lower-class man but will rather act “as a tyrant toward the head of the house” (V.408). But an upper-class man who marries a virtuous woman of lower social rank will make “the natural and the civil order agree,” with far fewer problems (V.407).
What is more, in civil society there are “only two classes which are separated by a real distinction” (V.408). Since “by nature man hardly thinks”—an art learned in civil society along with all the others—the two real classes consist of those who think and those who don’t (V.408). “A man from the first of these two classes ought not to make an alliance in the other, for the greatest charm of society is lacing to him when, despite having a wife, he is reduced to thinking alone” (V.408). “It is a sad thing for a father of a family who enjoys himself in his home to be forced to close himself up and not be able to make himself understood by anyone” (V.408). This doesn’t mean he should take “a brilliant wife” who makes his house into “a tribunal of literature over which she would preside,” a wife who “disdains all her woman’s duties and always begins by making herself into a man” (V.409). Similarly, a man should avoid marrying a beautiful woman. “Such a marriage is hell” V.409). In both cases, vanity, amour-propre, will be sure to ruin everything. A certain Aristotelian ‘mean,’ what Rousseau calls “mediocrity,” should be the man’s aim: a woman with “an attractive and prepossessing face that inspires not love but benevolence”; the graces that “do not wear out like beauty” but are “constantly renewed,” as pleasing after thirty years of marriage than on the wedding night (V.410).
Such a match for Emile is Sophie. Like him, “a pupil of nature,” his “equal in birth and merit” but “inferior in fortune,” her charm will work on him “only by degrees,” over the years, “only in the intimacy of association,” and as a result will impress him “more than anyone else in the world” (V.410). “She has taste without study, talents without art, judgment without knowledge,” and so will happily learn the solid things Emile can teach (V.410). The “feigned search” Emile conducted with the governor in Paris was “only a pretext for making him learn about women, so that he will sense the value of he one who suits him” (V.407). Now, “let us work to bring them together” (V.410).
The two men travel back to the countryside, slowly, on foot, like such philosophers as “Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras” (V.412). Neither the governor nor Emile is in a hurry. Emile has been habituated against boredom, and he enjoys investigating local farms, chipping on boulders to better know their nature, satisfying his curiosity about plants and fossils. “Your city philosophers learn natural history in museums; they have gadgets; they know names and have no idea of nature,” but “Emile’s museum” is “the whole earth” (V.412). His body comports with nature as much as his mind does, exercising vigorously and sleeping well. “When one wants to travel, one has to go on foot” (V.412). As always, the senses are the doors to the library of real knowledge of life itself.
4. The courtship
Rousseau again pauses to criticize writings on education which fail to “the most important and most difficult part” of it, “the crisis that serves as a passage from childhood to man’s estate” (V.415). Courtship and marriage, the formation of a family, may be dismissed as mere ‘romance’ by educationists, but they constitute “the romance of human nature,” the key element in “the history of my species” (V.415). “You who deprave it, it is you who make a romance of my book” (V.415).
Having been introduced to Sophie, having recognized her by the coincidence of her name with that of the name his governor had given to the image of right woman (a coincidence that Emile evidently never stops to think about), Emile wants to settle into her neighborhood, to live as close to her as possible. Bad plan, the governor advises. “Your honor is in you alone” but “hers depends on others”; a woman must consider the opinion of the neighbors (V.418). “What an injustice it would be” to ignore this difference, and “what sensitive man wants to ruin the girl he loves” by scandalizing the town in which she lives? (V.418). Emile immediately retracts, willing “to sacrifice his happiness a thousand times for the honor of the one he loves” (V.418). This natural equivalent of self-sacrificial Christian charity “is the first fruit of the cares I took in his youth to form in him a heart that knows how to love” (V.418).
For her part, Sophie hesitates to continue the romance because Emile is rich. The governor again explains. Sophie worries about “the effect wealth has on the soul of the possessor,” knowing that “the rich all count gold before merit” (V.423). The only way to prove to her that you aren’t the usual Midas is to “make yourself known to her,” over time; that, and constancy, will “surmount her resistance” (V.423). Emile’s “decent heart is delighted that in order to please Sophie” he needs only to be himself (V.423). The governor is equally delighted. “Never in my life have I done anything which raised me so much in m own eyes and made me so satisfied with myself” (V.423). Rousseau addresses not only the parents of ‘the few’ but also the ones they engage as tutors, really mentors of their children.
Progressively reassured regarding the character of her young man, Sophie opens her mind to him. “The art of thinking is not foreign to women,” Rousseau allows, “but they ought only to skim the sciences of reasoning,” concentrating on “ethics and matters of taste” (V.426). “Sometimes on their walks, as they contemplate nature’s marvels, their innocent and pure hearts dare to lift themselves up to its Author. They do not fear His presence. They open their hearts jointly before Him.” (V.426). Do lovers need more physics, more cosmology than that? In her increasing confidence Sophie remains a modest conqueror, anti-imperial to the core, inasmuch as in “triumph[ing] with modesty” she has won “a victory which costs her her freedom,” and happily so (V.428).
Love is exclusive. Will jealousy poison it? Not here: for one thing, Sophie gives Emile no cause for it, having lost interest in her other suitors and placing them firmly in the category of casual friends and acquaintances. What is more, among modern Europeans “jealousy has its motive in the social passions more than in primitive instinct,” as “the lover hates his rivals far more than he loves his mistress” (V.430). Today’s man suffers from the vanity of amour-propre more than from frustrated love. Jealousy is “not as natural as is thought,” and Emile’s esteem for Sophie, his knowledge of her virtue, attenuates any such passion. Insofar as he does feel it, “Emile will be not quick to anger, suspicious, and distrustful but delicate, sensitive, and timid,” “more alarmed than irritated,” paying “more attention to his mistress than to threatening his rival” (V.431). He won’t be offended by a rival—is Sophie not worthy to be sought after?—but “will redouble his efforts to make himself lovable, and he will probably succeed” (V.431).
5. The test
Emile is no daydreaming lover. “On the days when he does not see her, he is not idle and sedentary. On those days he is Emile again. He has not been transformed at all.” (V.435). He continues to explore the countryside around him. He watches the farmers and often lends them a hand. “The farmers are all surprised to see him handle their tools more easily than they do themselves, dig furrows deeper and straighter than theirs, sow more evenly, and lay out embankments with more intelligence. They do not make fun of him as a fine talker about agriculture. they see that he actually knows about it. In a word, he extends his zeal and his care to everything which is of primary and general utility.” (V.435). He balances his utilitarianism with compassion, visiting the peasants’ homes, financing but also taking care to supervise needed repairs; he takes care of the sick, “always do[ing] as much good with his person as with his money” (V.436). And he balances his compassion with justice, serving as an arbiter of disputes between peasants and between peasants and landlords. Finally, he retains an egalitarian spirit: “In becoming the benefactor of some and the friend of the others, he does not cease to be their equal” (V.436). He does not ‘condescend.’ He is Rousseau’s model of what an aristocrat should be, another of his examples of how aristocrats should comport themselves according to what is natural in the civil state, before the coming revolution sweeps their conventions away.
Sophie sees some of this. On one occasion, she watches Emile doing his carpentry work. “This sight does not make Sophie laugh. It touches her; it is respectable. Woman, honor the head of your house. It is he who works for you, who wins your bread, who feeds you. This is man.” (V.437). She expects and demands his love but has no intention of becoming the carpenter of his soul. On the contrary, “she did not want a lover who knew no law other than hers. She wants to reign over a man whom she has not disfigured. It is thus that Circe, having debased Ulysses companions, disdains them and gives herself only to him whom she was unable to change.” (V.439). As Allan Bloom remarks, Ulysses could not be changed by Circe’s witchcraft because he had discovered an antidote to it, the moly root; in uncovering it, Homer tells us, Ulysses saw its nature—reportedly the first instance of the word ‘nature’ in world literature. Symbolically, then, Ulysses’ knowledge of nature triumphs over Circe’s knowledge of art; Rousseau’s theme throughout his writings, one might say, is the need for the triumph of nature, carefully understood and adapted, over such artifices as deface nature, the conventions that de-nature nature, especially human nature.
One point on which Sophie insists is strict timing of Emile’s visits. “To be early is to prefer himself to her; to be late is to neglect her” (V.439). “Sophie is excessively jealous of all her rights and watches to see how scrupulously Emile respects them” (V.439). One day, Emile and the governor are detained because they stop to help an injured peasant. Sophie is indignant—until she learns the reason. Waiting no further, she is the one to propose marriage. Rousseau has his characters reverse the conventional order in favor of a natural rejoicing at a suitor’s acts of natural compassion. Rousseau’s governor remarks to the reader: “Man, love your companion. God gives her to you to console you in your pains, to relieve you in your ills. This is woman.” (V.442).
In reply to the Gospels, Rousseau has his narrator tell us to behold the man and to behold the woman. He maintains that their examples, if followed, will save many lives and enhance the well-being of human beings on earth.
The real test is yet to come. The governor stuns Emile one day, claiming that Sophie has died. He soon reveals his deception, to the young man’s understandable outrage. But the governor’s lie has a benevolent intention behind it. In the theater, Emile, “you saw heroes, overcome by extreme pains, make the stage reverberate with their senseless cries, grieving like women, crying like children, and thus meriting public applause” (V.443). And you criticized them as bad examples, men of false virtue. But now you have become one of those stage heroes. Yes, “you know how to suffer and die,” and “you know how to endure the law of necessity in physical ills, but you have not yet imposed laws on the appetites of your heart, and the disorder of our lives arises from our affections far more than from our needs” (V.443). ‘Virtue’ derives from the word vir, the Latin word for strength. “Strength is the foundation of all virtue” (V.444). Where is yours?
The governor distinguishes between goodness and virtue. You are a good man, and my education has made you so. Goodness, however, requires no pain, no effort. “He who is only good remains so only as long as he takes pleasure in being so. Goodness is broken and perishes under the impact of the human passions. The man who is only good is good only for himself,” sparing himself the struggle of the “painful duties” that only virtue enables him to perform (V.444). “Up to now, you were only apparently free. You had only the precarious freedom of a slave to whom nothing has been commanded. Now be really free. Learn to become your own master. Command your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous.” (V.445). You must learn to take the passion of love and “rule it like a man,” precisely so that you will be able to meet your duties as a husband and father, forsaking all future passions (V.445). Even a good passion, love for a good woman, must be ruled.
Why? “What is forbidden to us by nature is to extend our attachments further than our strength”; Emile learned that in childhood (V.445). “What is forbidden to us by reason is to want what we cannot obtain”; Emile learned that in his youth (V.445). “What is forbidden to us by conscience is not temptations but rather letting ourselves be conquered by temptations. It is not within our control to have or not to have passions. But it is within our control to reign over them.” (V.445). This is the lesson of manhood—the lesson Emile must learn now. If you learn it, “then you will be happy in spite of fortune and wise in spite of the passions”; “you will not, it is true, have the illusion of imaginary pleasures, but will also not have the pains which are their fruit” (V.446). You will know good and evil, as you must, but you will know how to reverse the curse of Adam, and you will do it from your own strength, not from the grace of God. In commanding Rousseau’s book to be burned, the French Catholic Church knew an enemy when they saw one.
Emile listens, apprehensively. “He has a presentiment that, in showing him the necessity for exercising strength of soul, I want to subject him to this hard exercise” (V.446). “What must be done?” he asks the governor; “You must leave Sophie,” the governor replies (V.447). After Emile calms down, he explains. At the moment, in your love for Sophie, “there is nothing beyond what you have felt” (V.447). Much of what you have felt centers on what you have only imagined. Such felicity “always loses its flavor when it is the heart’s habitual state,” as it will be in marriage (V.447). More, only “the single Being existing by itself” is truly beautiful; the beauty of a human being is flawed, and those flaws will become apparent in a few years; you’ve known Sophie for fewer than five months (V.447). But “you must think about a marriage for all seasons” (V.447). You know she pleases you, but does she suit you? If you leave her for a couple of months, she may forget you.
What is more, and even more important, you are both too young for marriage—you, twenty-two, she, eighteen. “What a father and mother of a family! To know how to raise children, at least wait until you cease being children!” (V.448). If she becomes pregnant now, her health and the health of the child will suffer. Would you not “have a robust wife and robust children than satisfy this impatience at the expense of their life and their health”? (V.448).
And what of you? As the head of a family you will become a full citizen, with the duties of a citizen. Do you know what those are? “Do you know what government, laws, and fatherland are? Do you know what the price is of your being permitted to live and for whom you ought to die?” (V.448). In fact, “you still know nothing” of such things (V.448).
You must therefore leave Sophie, “leave in order to return worthy of her” (V.448). This is the only way to “learn to bear her absence” and to “win the prize of fidelity” (V.448).
When told of this course, Sophie—knowing both Emile and the governor too well to be deceived—understands who is demanding it and attempts to flatter him out of the decision. The governor consoles and reassures her, promises that if she remains “as faithful to [Emile] as he will be to her…in two years he will be her husband” (V.449). “I am the guarantor of each for the other” (V.449). She recalls Eucharis, from Fénelon’s Telemachus, the nymph on Circe/Calypso’s island who falls in love with the hero, in vain; “she really believes she is in her place” (V.450). So as not “to allow these fantastic loves to awaken during Emile’s absence,” he proposes that they exchange going-away gifts. She will give him her copy of the Telemachus —thereby removing it from her hands and giving him an image of her imaginary hero—and he will give her a collection of essays from The Spectator, that eminently sober publication written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, with the aid of which she can study “the duties of decent women, and recall that in two years these duties will be yours” (V.450). That is, the governor removes the imaginary romantic hero from Sophie’s mind, replacing it with an image of herself as a real wife even as he gives utilitarian, down-to-earth Emile a book that will elevate his imagination to thoughts of the virtuous and not merely good man his bride has long dreamed of.
“Finally the sad day comes. They must separate.” (V.450). Emile will undertake the young aristocrat’s customary tour of continental Europe in the customary company of his governor-guide. The content of the tour will be anything but customary.
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