Rousseau's Exemplary Life

IMAGINING THE PENITENTIARY 417 brings to their most detailed realization' enhances his fascinating exploration into the sociology of incarceration while paradoxically confining his account of all the splendid variety and experimentation of eighteenth-century fiction within the reductive terms of 'sequence' and 'moral causation.' Thus, Moll Flanders's profound experience in Newgate Prison cannot be seen as the occasion of her repentance and salvation but only in the modernist terms of a 'secular rehabilitation ,' a process wrought by 'Time, sequence, and causation - the predicates of novelistic narrative.' The novel that in many ways best exemplifies Bender's thesis is Amelia, which opens with the imprisonment of Booth in old Newgate, where he remains for a quarter of the novel. A prisoner of his own mistaken notions, Booth is in need of a reformation that the 'liminal' (a word mercilessly overworked in this study) prison is unable to supply. But Booth's redemption is brought about by a process analogous to that of the penitentiary regime. Dr Harrison is the moral jailer who 'exercises judgment and manipulates narrative resources in order to yield reformative punishment for Booth. The plot substitutes supervised confinement with reformative purpose for the corrupt institutions of liminal justice that are obsessively reduplicated in the manifest content ofthe novel's realistic surface.' In other words, Dr Harrison's remoulding of Booth's character is more efficacious than the old-style system of justice could possibly be. Although the case for the causal link between fiction and prison reform is sometimes pushed too far, or found in verbal coincidences, this study is important for its emphasis on the literary origins of the great reformative movement in the second half of the eighteenth century. The novel is only one of the forces for institutional reform, but its importance as a subtle moulder of channels of thought has never been so thoroughly or so wittily investigated before. Rousseau's Exemplary Life AUBREY ROSENBERG Christopher Kelly. Rousseau's Exemplary Life: The 'Confessions' as Political Philosophy Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 1987. xviii, 262. us $29.95 Those unfamiliar with Rousseau and his work, and even those unacquainted with recent scholarship on the subject, may be shocked to learn that Rousseau considered himself superior to Socrates, Cato, and Jesus, and believed that his own life was a better model for men to follow than the lives of these illustrious predecessors . Of course, he did not spell out such comparisons in so bold a fashion. On the contrary, in order to discover these profoundly held convictions of Rousseau it is necessary to read attentively between the lines. And this is what Christopher Kelly has ,,"one in a new, important interpretation of the Confessions and also of other writings of Rousseau where one finds the comparisons referred to above. 418 AUBREY ROSENBERG The two main goals of the Confessions are, according to Kelly, to provide a portrait of someone that corrupt men might be persuaded to emulate and to show that, although society denatures individuals, it is not impossible to regain and preserve elemen.ts ofone's original, uncorrupted nature. The book's title provides a clue to Kelly's reading ofRousseau's most famous or notorious autobiographical work. Just as Plutarch, whom Rousseau admired above all the historians, wrote his Lives for the edification of those who would aspire to virtue, so Rousseau, in the absence of a modern Plutarch to immortalize him, assumed the mantle of the Greek and wrote, not about the lives of others but about his own as a standard whereby ordinary mortals could assess their deficiencies and seek to better themselves. The Confessions, then, is a portrait of human nature in which Rousseau presents himself as both a unique person and yet, at the same time, as a peculiarly representative specimen of mankind. In Rousseau's discussion of exemplary figures lies the key to his assessment of his own place in history and his role as a model for others. Socrates, Cato, and Jesus all transcended the confines of the corrupt societies in which they lived but none ofthem found a way to change men's morals or to reform their communities. Cato, the ideal patriot and man...