Psychocritique de Rousseau par Laurence Viglieno (review)

This volume collects eleven essays on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, published by Laurence Viglieno over a forty-year span from 1974 to 2014. Few other writers generate such sustained levels of critical interest as Rousseau—2019 alone saw the appearance of at least five book-length studies and several new translations devoted to the “citizen of Geneva.” Viglieno’s contribution is a noteworthy addition to Rousseauist criticism, since her thoughtful analysis both brings attention to many neglected texts and offers original interpretations of some of Rousseau’s major works. Though the volume is accessible to novices, it is of particular interest to literary scholars and specialists of the eighteenth century. Viglieno does a good job of teasing out some of the nuances in Rousseau’s texts through close readings and the application of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism. While she adapts methods of literary analysis developed by the French literary critic Charles Mauron in L’Inconscient dans l’œuvre et la vie de Racine (1957) and Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel (1962), her approach is also enriched by Melanie Klein’s work on early childhood experiences. The essays combine Freudian and Kleinian hypotheses on the functioning of the unconscious with literary analysis in order to identify and explore the obsessive images and metaphorical networks present in Rousseau’s texts, such as the recurrent fantasy of being buried alive (“Le Fantasme de l’enterré vif dans les Rêveries, ou le ‘complexe du cyclope’” [1979]). However, as Viglieno remarks, it would be presumptuous to base a global interpretation of Rousseau on the identification of recurrent themes in his corpus, or to establish what Mauron calls “le mythe personnel de l’écrivain” (251). In this respect, her study of the evolution of Rousseau’s “dramaturgie interne” is more nuanced and considerate of the uniqueness of his writing than the at-times totalizing Freudian readings of Rousseau by well-known critics such as Jean Starobinski or Pierre-Paul Clément (251).

The collection is divided into two parts. Part 1 groups together five essays on Rousseau’s play Narcissus, his autobiographical writing, and his correspondence. Part 2 comprises six essays, five of which are devoted to the Enlightenment bestseller La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and one to Rousseau’s early work, specifically theatre. The first essay, “Narcisse auteur dramatique ou ‘pour introduire le narcissisme de Rousseau’” (1977), is one of the best in the collection, and its position at the head of the volume is propitious since it scrutinizes Rousseau’s complex relationship to his writing, as well as suggests latent themes that emerge throughout the writer’s later work, themes that are picked up by subsequent essays in the volume. In exploring Valère or the Narcissus’s submission to his fiancée Angélique, “cette femme manifestement maternelle, plus sage, plus mûre que lui,” Viglieno notes the aspiration for a pre-Oedipal fusion with the mother, and the intense need for a protective, maternal love that is revealed by this pursuit. The critic goes further, however, and suggests that the play presents the germ of two “tentations” that Rousseau will alternatively fight against or indulge in his later, better-known works: the return to childhood, and the refusal of sexual difference (31). Rousseau’s interest in childhood is hardly surprising, considering his writing on education and his Bildungsroman-type heroes such as Émile and Saint-Preux, or even his admission in the Confessions that he never managed to grow up. However, the argument that Rousseau’s dream of an absence of sexual difference is accompanied by a violent refusal of his own latent femininity is a striking one in regard to an author whose attitude toward women has been the subject of persistent critical debate.

The fusion with the mother, and Rousseau’s relationship with the maternal body and his own physicality, is explored in another intriguing essay, “Le Fantasme de l’enterré vif.” Some of the more interesting essays in the collection likewise investigate the complicated relationship...