Silence and the Passions in Rousseau's Julie

As a remote haven of shared harmonious coexistence and transparency, the Clarens, Switzerland community of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) has been interpreted by some as representing an ideal form of society, while others deem it a dystopia. Lettres de deux amans, habitans d'une petite ville au pied des Alpes, the second portion of the title of Julie (and the title of the original edition), evokes the alpine setting of Clarens, a village on the shores of Lake Geneva, near where Rousseau himself spent his youth. This title emphasizes the passionate love between Julie and her former tutor St. Preux, around which the initial half of the story revolves, preceding Julie's marriage to the nobleman Wolmar, arranged by her father the Baron d'Étange, who disapproves of the middle class rank of St. Preux. Julie and Wolmar raise a family at the Wolmar estate in Clarens, which is often read as a political microcosm, with Julie herself arguing that it is an imitation of the order of political society.¹ Yet there is frequent debate over the contours of participation within this space and over the distinction between domestic and political family, with the two often detrimentally collapsed.

While there is a tendency to align Rousseau's avowed depiction of the feminine with the family, a space of private domesticity, and the masculine with the state, a public realm comprised solely of male citizens, recent commentators have offered more nuanced studies that complicate this opposition. Elizabeth Wingrove suggests that Rousseau makes the nondeliberative, unutterable electoral image of the general will eloquent through his fictional depictions of women, insisting on their agency to offer an alternative version of political participation, and Lori Marso similarly sees Rousseau's female protagonists as offering a broader version of citizenship that ultimately undermines the gender boundaries he elsewhere seems to construct.² Speaking directly to the political implications of Clarens, Juliet Flower MacCannell analyzes it as an ironic representation of a patriarchal order based on the suppression of Julie's female desire, arguing that Clarens is best understood not as a utopic ideal, but rather as a critique of a fundamental fantasy of the "Regime of the Brother," as "farcical repetition of the dream of patriarchy, figured as the utopia of Clarens—the place where desire is never admitted."³ Andrew Billing likewise perceives Clarens as a site where Rousseau attacks despotism by imitating its oppressive elements in order to distinguish between paternal and political power, situating the difference between family and state as an essential tenet of his critique, yet maintaining the affective relational aspect of an adoptive version of the family as what is most political in Clarens, with the state acting as a surrogate parent, educating its citizens by inculcating an affective patriotic sentiment.⁴ Julie's participation in this process may be understood as problematizing the distinction between the domestic space as feminine and the public as masculine by feminizing the political as it is revealed in the contractual relations of Clarens. While following these readings in considering the space of Clarens as emancipatory in its incorporation of Julie in the governance of a private sphere that is simultaneously public, I will shift the focus to explore the politics Rousseau enacts with his silent tableau of friendship, suggesting that it is through the force of this silence that Rousseau reconfigures the social order.

I begin by exploring an ineffable scene of camaraderie, the matinée à l'anglaise in Book V of Julie, which I interpret as a paradigmatic example of how we might read Rousseau's mute eloquence politically, especially if considered in relation to the tacit nature of the general will of Du contrat social (1762). I then consider the transformation from passionate love to friendship between Julie and St. Preux as beyond merely a linear movement, drawing upon Jacques Derrida's notion of aimance to suggest that the friendship Rousseau proposes holds political force as well, in its unique power to transgress and reconfigure previously prohibited stations, as with the shift in sovereignty to the formerly...