Jean-Jacques Rousseau Section From Confessions the Primary

Jean-Jacques Rousseau Section From Confessions

The primary confession that Jean Jacques Rousseau makes in this excerpt from his work of literature entitled Confessions is the fact that he was inadvertently responsible for the death of his mother. Evidently, his mother died during or shortly thereafter giving birth to him, because the author writes, "I was born, a poor and sickly child, and cost my mother her life. So my birth was the first of my misfortunes" (Rousseau 167). This confession is extremely deserving of the reader's sympathy, and the author certainly inspires sympathy in me after making this revelation. It is extremely difficult for children to lose their mother; I believe that it is even worse for children to grow up without ever having a mother. This difficulty is inherently exacerbated by seeing other children's mothers, and seeing how valuable they are to the lives of their children, and realizing that some twist of fortune has made it so that a particular child cannot have such a valuable presence in his or her life.

Moreover, in the case of Rousseau, it appears as though his mother was quite a woman in her own right, so that his loss must have been doubly arduous to endure. The author spends the duration of this excerpt detailing the relationship between his parents. After beginning by informing the reader that everything heretofore will be true, he begins by detailing the intimacies of his parent's relationship, which began when they were in childhood. The author informs the reader of the depths of the love that they had for one another, which spanned travel on at least two occasions, and tells the reader the parallel circumstances of their marriage with that of their forebears. The author also writes about how devastating the loss of his mother was to his father, and alludes to the fact that as a sickly child, he only lived due to the nursing of an aunt who he "cannot repay" (Rousseau 167) as she reaches old age. He concludes by describing the way his father taught him to read.

Although some may have charged that both Rousseau and this particular piece of literature he wrote are responsible for creating a "confessional culture," I am not sure that such sentiment is wholly accurate. This work of Rousseau's was largely renowned, and considered distinct from those others that preceded it, due to the amount of detail he included within his personal life. In that respect Confessions "has no precedent" (Rousseau 166). Thus, the author can more accurately be described as launching a culture in which the intimacies of one's personal life become public. Although Rousseau was not a celebrity, this piece of literature helped to spur the movement of "celebrity culture" that is present today, and so vital to the economics of numerous countries. He was able to produce this effect by providing so much information about facets of his life that no one else would know -- which was, of course, highly personal events and subject matter that shaped his personality and the man he was at the time of the writing. This wealth of information about personal details is fully exploited in today's popular culture, in which all aspects of an actor, musician, or even talentless reality television 'star' is fair game to be publicized by the media and brought to the attention of the public.

The primary difference between this celebrity culture and the purported confessional culture that some believe Rousseau engendered is that there is actually little confessing taking place in the celebrity culture of the contemporary world -- until such a celebrity is caught in the act of doing something. Confessing, of course, was at the heart of Rousseau's literary work -- he was elucidating all of his faults (while seemingly downplaying his virtues). This confessional aspect of Rousseau's work is not prevalent in today's celebrity culture, which has simply retained and encourages the exposure of large amounts of personal information about individuals.

The main reason why I selected this reading was because of the fact that the text book stated that it "foreshadowed the romantic sensibility of the next century" (Matthews et al. 483). The romantic period (particularly as it relates to British poets) is one of my favored periods in Western Civilization. I was curious to see how the values espoused within Rousseau's work could have produced this sweeping movement that emphasizes nature, truth and beauty.

After reading the excerpt from Confessions in the textbook, I see that the answer is simple. Rousseau helped to spawn the sentiment that fueled Romanticism by writing about love. His depiction of his mother and father as lovers at various stages in their lives certainly reinforces the values that Romanticism championed, and has everything to do with a love that was spawned as naturally as possible -- within childhood, originally. Those mores that are so important to finding and fostering true love, and which are at the heart of the Romantic movement, are actually personified within this text by the author's parents. The following quotation in which Rousseau describes them indicates this fact. "Both, being affectionate and sensitive by nature, were only waiting for the moment when they would find similar qualities in another" (Rousseau 167). Affectionate and sensitive are also used within this work of literature to describe the author himself, particularly the latter of these adjectives. As such, the reader is able to see how there is a direct correlation to the ideals represented within this text and those that would go on to define the Romantic epoch.