Redressing Passion: Sophie d'Houdetot and the Origins of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse

Abstract

Redressing Passion: Sophie d’Houdetot and the Origins of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise SUSAN K LE M JACKSON Few critical judgments adhere more tightly to a literary work or hold greater sway over its public than Gustave Lanson’s famous line on Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise. Generations of readers have by now been predis­ posed to regard Rousseau’s novel as “un reve de volupte redresse en in­ struction morale.”1 Even encounters with Julie which do not take the formula’s validity for granted tend to position themselves by taking ex­ ception to it. Widespread suspicions that the “redressing” remains incon­ clusive are confirmed by Paul de Man’s deconstruction of a polarity which could easily have been named, in Lanson’s terms, “reve de volupte”/ “in­ struction morale.” Rather than in a permanent awakening, Julie’s pivotal conversion would result only in a displacement of the initial fantasy, in a failure of past errors to instruct effectively.2 It is sometimes forgotten in the elaboration of responses to Lanson that he claims to account, not for Julie’s actions, but for Jean-Jacques’, not for the definitive text of Julie, but for the process of its composition. “La Nouvelle Heloise est sortie d’un reve de volupte redresse en instruction morale” (my emphasis). Christopher Frayling further reminds us that the formula privileges a version of that process told, compellingly and in great­ er detail than is reserved for the genesis of any other work, in Book Nine of the Confessions.3 As an eminently quotable summary, Lanson’s for­ mula sustains belief in the accuracy of that genetic narrative. In turn, the formula derives staying power from a pleasing capacity for reducing the novel as written and the writing of the novel to a single plot line. The heroine’s conversion would replicate the author’s, and thereby proclaim 271 272 / JACKSON the primacy of the empirical self; the genetic narrative would escape redun­ dancy by actualizing the epistolary novel’s potential for storytelling in general and for telling a specific story of redressing. Lanson’s line emerges from this referential confusion endowed with two mutually reinforcing truth claims: it is true to the novel because true to (Rousseau’s) life, and vice versa. If the adequacy of the formula to the novel is open to question, so too is the historical accuracy of the genetic narrative which it summarizes. In some quarters, faith in the narrative’s essential truth remains unshaken, despite the discovery of discrepancies between the chronology of Rous­ seau’s life and his rendering of that chronology in the Confessions. Ber­ nard Guyon at one point taxes the autobiographer with confusing “deux moments differents de la genese de son oeuvre,” but still affirms, when commenting on the prefaces to Julie, that: “les vraies explications de la genese de son oeuvre ne seront avouees que dans les Confessions" (my emphasis).4 Frayling concludes, however, on the basis of manuscript study, that the Confessions fundamentally misrepresent the early acces­ sion to the novel of elements belonging to the category of “instruction morale”: some measure of redressing would have been underway long be­ fore the erotic fantasy had run its course. “Not only Lanson’s conclusion— that La Nouvelle Heloise increasingly came to resemble a book of ‘instruc­ tion morale’—but the conclusion of recent commentators—that the in­ troduction of religious themes constituted an ‘afterthought’ on Rousseau’s part —need to be reconsidered in the light of this previously unpublished brouillon” the draft in question being that of Julie’s recapitulative letter on the occasion of her marriage (III, xviii).5 Extension of the field of inquiry in another direction challenges the authority of the Confessions on more theoretical grounds. Christie V. McDonald reads a cautionary tale into the interplay between the episodes of the genetic narrative and intervening materials recounting Jean-Jacques’ relationship with Sophie d’Houdetot. Coming into his love life when much of La Nouvelle Heloise had already been written, Sophie cannot by defini­ tion have served as an artist’s model for Julie. On the contrary, the real woman is said, repeatedly, to have replaced the novel heroine as the...