Emile: l'ens idéal

66 AUBREY ROSENBERG If I have emphasized its shortcomings, I have nevertheless done so while recognizing that The Development ofEnglish Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century is an important book, a welcome addition to that small list of essential studies of Restoration drama. Hume has demonstrated the inadequacy of our understanding of late seventeenth-century drama, provided an invaluable annal for the period, and superseded earlier attempts at historical analysis. He has brought together more information, and more accurate information, than is to be expected in a single volume. And his brief discussions almost always get right to the heart of whatever controversy surrounds a play or author in question. His study should thus prove an invaluable reference tool, and it should point the way to future work in the field. The demands of an annal and a history are perhaps incompatible; Hume's success as an annalist should facilitate necessary further work in the history of late seventeenth-century drama. His publisher's comparison to Nicoll is thus well founded. Hurne provides a useful compendium of the state of scholarship and criticism at the present time, and, like Nicoll, advances that state significantly in the process. One final caviL Serious students of Restoration drama would wish to own their own copy of Hume's book. The Oxford University Press has made it prohibitive for them to do so. Even though it has been handsomely printed (complete with two exceptionally full, admirable indexes), surely its price is exorbitant. Emile: I'ens ideal AUBREY ROSENBERG Madeleine B. Ellis. Rousseau's Socratic Aemilian Myths: A Literary Collation of 'Emile' and the 'Social Contract' Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1977 1978 is the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Rousseau. It is most appropriate, therefore, that Madeleine B. Ellis's latest contribution to Rousseau studies should come to our attention at this time. 1 And it is likely that of all the publications destined to appear in commemoration of the bicentenary none will occasion more discussion than this important book which proposes a wholly new reading of two of Rousseau's major works, Emile and the Social Contract. To the general reader Emile has always seemed a somewhat farfetched treatise on the education of children, containing methods that are excellent in theory but unworkable in practice. The fact that the author consigned his own children to an orphanage has been less than helpful to his cause. Furthermore, Rousseau's apparent advocacy of an inferior education for girls, and a submissive role for women in marriage and society, was found to be offensive even before the voice of the feminist was heard in our land. As for the Social Contract, it has generally ROUSSEAU'S Emile 67 been regarded as a rather dry, theoretical tract about an ideal political system based on principles both difficult to understand and impossible to institute. Unlike the general reader, the serious student of Rousseau has long been aware that much more than the education of children is at stake in Emile, and scholars, particularly over the last thirty years, have been paying increasing attention to what Rousseau himself said about his own writings. 2 They have noted that he regarded Emile as his most important work, that he incorporated into its final section a summary of the Social Contract, and that he considered the two works together to form a whole. Various attempts have been made to interpret these works in the light of his observations. The most widely accepted interpretation is that the child Emile represents natural man (postulated in the Discourse on Inequality), and that in Emile Rousseau gives an account of how such a being could be brought up to take his place in a corrupt society, while still preserving the integrity with which nature endowed him when he first entered the world. The city of the Social Contract is seen by some as the ideal environment in which an entity such as Emile could best fulfil himself and his obligations to his fellow men. But, while scholars have dissected Rousseau's writings to reveal his ideas on politics, sociology, anthropology, theology, and the like, hardly anyone has considered them seriously as works of...