Romanticism and Rousseau: Books 1-6

Romanticism and Rousseau: Books 1-6 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions

Books 1-6 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions chronicle the author's life as a young man. Along the principles of Romanticism, this emphasis on the author's youth as a formative time in his existence reflects a philosophy that childhood is a supremely important part of the formation of a unique individual sense of self, before the constraints of socialization are imposed upon the adult consciousness. Even the young Rousseau's parents enjoy a romance that is an expression of childlike innocence, as their love begins at age eight or nine. Romanticism looked with great fondness and nostalgia upon the lives and attitudes of children and primitive peoples, and sought to tap into some of the creative energy and natural innocence of this time of life.

However, Rousseau sees his own life as marked, in many respects, with a kind of premature adulthood and darkness, because of his keen intellect and the circumstances of his birth. Although Rousseau was blessed with being the favored child, as compared to his brother, he was ill as a young child. His birth as destructive, as it ended his mother's life. He was also not above childish 'transgressions,' he notes, even though he was seen as perfect in the eyes of his father, despite his occasional lying, greed and gluttony.

Rousseau's individualism also marks him as quintessentially Romantic in style: although he is not a poet, his proclamation of uniqueness echoes that of Byron or Shelley: if his Confessions are not good, he tells the reader, it does not matter. It is singular and expressive of the self and that is just as important as literary quality. In fact, the value of formal literacy is something that is questioned again and again in the Confessions. Rather than praise his childhood self for his facility in reading, Rousseau sees it as dangerous. This idea reflects Rousseau's concept of what constitutes the ideal education for a male child -- physical rather than mental exertion during the early stages of life.

Rousseau portrays becoming absorbed in intense philosophical inquiry and study as a kind of fall from grace. He shifts from the instinctual world of the emotions to a cerebral existence, and loses a sense of what is truly meaningful in life. In Romantic thinking, which also idealized a pastoral, earthy lifestyle, being separated from the world of the emotions was seen as negative. Rousseau describes his feelings for books as a child as a kind of romance, and he felt equally as intensely about Ovid's Metamorphosis and the characters in Moliere's plays as he did about aspects of his real existence. But his imitation of Greeks and Romans, which some people might admire as precocious, Rousseau sees as false, much like the false dogmatism of many Catholics, which he chronicles in Book 2, regarding his theological education. Anything that takes a person away from nature was negative, according to the Romantics: Rousseau describes a rustic feast as better than fine Parisian fare, and sees the beauty and uncomplicated sexuality of peasant girls in Book 4 as just as lovely as that of sophisticated women.