Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood

Rousseau Redux: Romantic Re-Visions of Nature and Freedom in Recent Children’s Literature about Homeschooling

claudia mills • Rousseau Redux Romantic Re-Visions of Nature and Freedom in Recent Children’s Literature about Homeschooling “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man” (37). With this famous opening line of Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau delivered what is arguably the most famous statement of the creed of childhood innocence, that children are naturally good and are corrupted only through improper education at the hands of inept parents and imperfect social institutions. Published in 1762, Émile presents Rousseau’s educational program for rearing a child who can escape societal corruption, insofar as this is humanly possible, a child who is educated to be man before he is educated to be citizen. Rousseau’s prescriptions for this fictitious child’s comprehensive rearing are enormously detailed, from recommendations for maternal breastfeeding and against infant swaddling, to elaborate preparations for Émile’s choice of his ideal mate. Supervised throughout his education by a wise and cannily manipulative tutor, Émile is to be educated in harmony with nature, following the impulse of his own childish curiosity rather than overt adult imperatives , subjected only to the natural consequences of his own poor choices rather than made to bend to the dictatorial will of others (although these seemingly natural consequences are often arranged through the machinations of Émile’s tutor). Allowed to be a child during the protected space of 170 Claudia Mills childhood, Émile will then grow to be a man who is able to be as free in society as any man can be, simultaneously both “savage” and “citizen.” Despite its vigilant condemnation by the church and Rousseau’s subsequent persecution for its more inflammatory doctrines (particularly concerning Émile’s delayed and rationally grounded religious instruction), Émile proved to be enormously influential both in Rousseau’s own time and, I will argue here, in our own. The second half of the eighteenth century witnessed a fad for raising children “à la Jean-Jacques,” with decidedly mixed results. While “a certain number of notable figures did emerge from this progressive experiment, for instance the physicist Ampère, who gave his name to the ampere, and the liberator Bolívar, who gave his name to Bolivia” (Damrosch 345), a certain number of disasters emerged as well. Eighteenth-century children’s author Thomas Day “legendarily attempted to follow Rousseau’s teachings in life, making two attempts, both failures , to guide a young preteen girl along Rousseauvian lines in order to make her into a suitable wife for him and dying as the result of an attempt to bring Rousseauvian principles to an apparently unimpressed young horse” (Stevenson 190). Perhaps even greater than his influence, for good or for ill, on childrearing practices has been Rousseau’s influence on children’s literature. Although Rousseau did not permit Émile to learn to read until his teen years, and limited him initially to only one book, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the influence of Rousseau’s concept of childhood and of his prescriptions for children’s education was felt throughout children’s literature as it emerged as its own distinctive field of literary endeavor, mirroring Rousseau’s treatment of childhood as its own distinctive stage of life. In her book-length study of Rousseau’s impact on eighteenth-century children’s literature, Sylvia W. Patterson writes that “Almost all histories of children’s literature in England mention the impact of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially Émile,” published “at a time when children’s literature was in its infancy” (7). Patterson catalogs some of the most common features of Rousseau’s Émile adapted by other writers such as Thomas Day (The History of Sandford and Merton - 1783), Maria Edgeworth (Moral Tales - 1800), and Mary Wollstonecraft (Original Stories from Real Life - 1788). Here readers can see such Rousseauvian inspirations as: the presence of a model, “allknowing and ever present” tutor; the presentation of totally good child Rousseau Redux 171 characters (contrasted to those corrupted by wealth or position); children who learn from (deliberately staged) experience rather than through adult moralizing or punishment, or only from punishment that “fits the crime” as a seemingly natural consequence of the problematic behavior; children who learn what they want to learn through their own natural curiosity; children who learn extensively about the natural world, led by their love of nature. John Rowe Townsend distills Rousseau’s influence on early children’s...