Julie, or the New Heloise, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Translators:Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché
Publication date:1761
Edition: University Press of New England, 1997
# of pages: 612
Source: Local library
Back of the book: Rousseau's great epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, an immediate continental sensation when it first appeared in 1761, was one of the most popular novels of its time. The story follows the fates and smoldering passions of Julie d'Étange and St. Preux, a one-time lover who re-enters Julie's life at the invitation of her unsuspecting husband, M. de Wolmar. Framed within the wider context of eighteenth-century French history and politics, their letters chronicle personal lives: meetings and partings, marriages, births, illnesses, accidents and deaths. As the characters negotiate a complex maze of passion and virtue, their purity of soul and honest morality reveal, as Rousseau writes in his preface, "the subtleties of heart of which this work is full."
This is a simple love story with five main characters who write prolix letters to one another. There are eight other minor characters and the novel extends over thirteen years (with a four year break in the middle.)
That takes 612 pages at 550 words per page (330,000 words) of text plus Introduction, 6 appendixes, Editors Notes (hundreds of them, dutifully indicated with little numbers throughout the text) and index for a grand total of 760 pages. A real doorstop.
I pushed myself through this book at the rate of 50 pages or so a day, without ever being drawn in or feeling a need to find out how it ends. I think I would not have finished it were it not an assignment. After a lot of thought, I think my ideas about this book boil down to three main points of dislike:
The writing is old fashioned and very wordy.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the first letter:
I must flee you, Mademoiselle, that I can see: I should not have waited nearly so long, or rather it were better never to have laid eyes on you. But what is to be done at present? How should I go about it? You promised me friendship; behold my confusion, and counsel me.
You know that I entered your house only at the invitation of your worthy Mother. Knowing that I had cultivated some agreeable talents, she believed that they would not be without usefulness, in a locale wanting in masters, toward the education of a daughter she adores. Taking pride, for my part, in adorning such a fine natural temperament with a few flowers, I ventured to assume this dangerous charge without foreseeing the peril, or at least without fear of it. I will not tell you that I am beginning to pay the price for my temerity: I hope I shall never so forget myself as to say to you things that are not suitable for you to hear, and fail in the respect I owe even more to our morals than to your station and your charms. If I suffer, I have at least the consolation of suffering alone, and I have no desire for a happiness that could diminish yours.
What does this even mean? Well, it's the start of a three page letter to say this:
First Letter, to Julie: Her schoolmaster, having fallen in love with her, declares to her his tenderest sentiments. He reproaches her for her formality when alone with him, and her familiar tone in front of everyone.
Perhaps it made sense in 1761, and perhaps people had fewer books and more time to read them, but it really drags for me here in the 21st century.
Just one more example, the "hot" bit of the book:
Oh let us die, my sweet Friend! let us die, well beloved of my heart! What use can we make from now on of an insipid youth of which we have exhausted all the delights? Explain to me, if you can, what I have felt during this inconceivable night; give me a notion of a life spent thus, or let me depart this one which has nothing left of what I have just experienced with you. I had tasted pleasure, and thought I could conceive happiness. Ah, I had felt but an empty dream and imagined but the happiness of a child! My senses deceived my coarse soul; only in them I was seeking supreme happiness, and I have found that their exhausted pleasures were but the beginning of mine. O unique masterpiece of nature! Divine Julie! Delightful possession for which all the transports of the most ardent love scarcely suffice! No, it is not those transports I miss the most: ah no, take away, if you must, these intoxicating favors for which I would give a thousand lives; but give me back everything that was not they, and outshone them a thousand times. Give me back that intimate union of souls, that you told me to expect and made me taste so. Give me back that gentle fatigue filled with the effusions of our hearts; give me back that enchanting sleep found on your breast; give me back that still more delightful awakening, and those halting sighs, and those sweet tears, and those kisses whose voluptuous languor we slowly savored, and those tender moans, during which you pressed against yours this heart made to unite with it.
So OK, it's the only night they spend together, and I can understand a little overwrought prose but this is really excessive and it goes on for another two pages.
The story is unbelievable.
So boy meets girl, they fall in love, the father disapproves, the boy goes away. Pretty simple so far.
After some fumbling around, the boy takes a trip around the world. It's 1740, so that means several sailing ships, many adventures, ships are lost, years pass (four to be exact). But the book isn't about that, so the trip is dispensed with in a few paragraphs in one letter.
Then the girl's husband (who has never met the boy) asks the boy, now a young man, to come live with them and educate their two sons! The husband knows that the boy and girl were lovers. The father is still alive. Excuse me, this makes no sense.
Finally, the girl has an accident, lingers for a bit and dies at age thirty. So no happily ever after.
There are a couple of silly subplots as well, but the whole thing is basically an excuse for Rousseau to expound on why country people are more virtuous than city people and to explain how to run your farm, your family and educate your children. His ideas are fine-if you're a wealthy male.
I don't care about the characters and don't care to learn about their attitudes and ideas.
The first half of the book is taken up by the lovers' travails, all because the girl's father has some small aristocratic title and won't accept the boy as suitable. It isn't a princess and a pauper (or peasant), just a less well-to-do non-aristocrat. It seems as if they have a little sex, which is probably rather daring for the time but there really isn't much actual interaction presented, just extended epistles of anguish. Their love and anguish is all that they have and 326 pages of that is more than enough.
The second half of the book expands to include Julie's husband and children, with the lover improbably becoming part of the family circle. Many of the pages are given over to the wisdom of the husband, all of whose ideas but one Julie enthusiastically endorses. Julie's husband's one fault is that he is not a Christian, and she hopes to "cure" him of that flaw.
There are 25 pages given to child-raising, including how to manage the governess, which could only have been written by someone who hadn't actually raised children. Though it isn't considered in the same detail in this book, boys and girls are to be educated completely differently (a Editor's Note advises us to read Rousseau's Emile for the details.)
There are many pages devoted to the proper management of servants and helping them to understand their proper place in the operation of the estate and a long discussion of a private garden which Julie has created all by herself-with the help of her servants and her husband. Finally, there is much verbiage expended on overcoming the attraction that the two lovers still feel toward each other and the tests which they undergo to prove that they are now just friends and lovers no longer.
All in all, the whole book is just a vehicle for Rousseau to expound his views on the world. I'm sure there are scholars who are interested in what this all tells us about civilization in the 18th century. It doesn't make much of a novel to my mind. I personally think this book is of historical interest only, and frankly NOT one that you "Must Read Before You Die."
Publication date:1761
Edition: University Press of New England, 1997
# of pages: 612
Source: Local library
Back of the book: Rousseau's great epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, an immediate continental sensation when it first appeared in 1761, was one of the most popular novels of its time. The story follows the fates and smoldering passions of Julie d'Étange and St. Preux, a one-time lover who re-enters Julie's life at the invitation of her unsuspecting husband, M. de Wolmar. Framed within the wider context of eighteenth-century French history and politics, their letters chronicle personal lives: meetings and partings, marriages, births, illnesses, accidents and deaths. As the characters negotiate a complex maze of passion and virtue, their purity of soul and honest morality reveal, as Rousseau writes in his preface, "the subtleties of heart of which this work is full."
This is a simple love story with five main characters who write prolix letters to one another. There are eight other minor characters and the novel extends over thirteen years (with a four year break in the middle.)
That takes 612 pages at 550 words per page (330,000 words) of text plus Introduction, 6 appendixes, Editors Notes (hundreds of them, dutifully indicated with little numbers throughout the text) and index for a grand total of 760 pages. A real doorstop.
I pushed myself through this book at the rate of 50 pages or so a day, without ever being drawn in or feeling a need to find out how it ends. I think I would not have finished it were it not an assignment. After a lot of thought, I think my ideas about this book boil down to three main points of dislike:
The writing is old fashioned and very wordy.
Here are the first two paragraphs of the first letter:
I must flee you, Mademoiselle, that I can see: I should not have waited nearly so long, or rather it were better never to have laid eyes on you. But what is to be done at present? How should I go about it? You promised me friendship; behold my confusion, and counsel me.
You know that I entered your house only at the invitation of your worthy Mother. Knowing that I had cultivated some agreeable talents, she believed that they would not be without usefulness, in a locale wanting in masters, toward the education of a daughter she adores. Taking pride, for my part, in adorning such a fine natural temperament with a few flowers, I ventured to assume this dangerous charge without foreseeing the peril, or at least without fear of it. I will not tell you that I am beginning to pay the price for my temerity: I hope I shall never so forget myself as to say to you things that are not suitable for you to hear, and fail in the respect I owe even more to our morals than to your station and your charms. If I suffer, I have at least the consolation of suffering alone, and I have no desire for a happiness that could diminish yours.
What does this even mean? Well, it's the start of a three page letter to say this:
First Letter, to Julie: Her schoolmaster, having fallen in love with her, declares to her his tenderest sentiments. He reproaches her for her formality when alone with him, and her familiar tone in front of everyone.
Perhaps it made sense in 1761, and perhaps people had fewer books and more time to read them, but it really drags for me here in the 21st century.
Just one more example, the "hot" bit of the book:
Oh let us die, my sweet Friend! let us die, well beloved of my heart! What use can we make from now on of an insipid youth of which we have exhausted all the delights? Explain to me, if you can, what I have felt during this inconceivable night; give me a notion of a life spent thus, or let me depart this one which has nothing left of what I have just experienced with you. I had tasted pleasure, and thought I could conceive happiness. Ah, I had felt but an empty dream and imagined but the happiness of a child! My senses deceived my coarse soul; only in them I was seeking supreme happiness, and I have found that their exhausted pleasures were but the beginning of mine. O unique masterpiece of nature! Divine Julie! Delightful possession for which all the transports of the most ardent love scarcely suffice! No, it is not those transports I miss the most: ah no, take away, if you must, these intoxicating favors for which I would give a thousand lives; but give me back everything that was not they, and outshone them a thousand times. Give me back that intimate union of souls, that you told me to expect and made me taste so. Give me back that gentle fatigue filled with the effusions of our hearts; give me back that enchanting sleep found on your breast; give me back that still more delightful awakening, and those halting sighs, and those sweet tears, and those kisses whose voluptuous languor we slowly savored, and those tender moans, during which you pressed against yours this heart made to unite with it.
So OK, it's the only night they spend together, and I can understand a little overwrought prose but this is really excessive and it goes on for another two pages.
The story is unbelievable.
So boy meets girl, they fall in love, the father disapproves, the boy goes away. Pretty simple so far.
After some fumbling around, the boy takes a trip around the world. It's 1740, so that means several sailing ships, many adventures, ships are lost, years pass (four to be exact). But the book isn't about that, so the trip is dispensed with in a few paragraphs in one letter.
Then the girl's husband (who has never met the boy) asks the boy, now a young man, to come live with them and educate their two sons! The husband knows that the boy and girl were lovers. The father is still alive. Excuse me, this makes no sense.
Finally, the girl has an accident, lingers for a bit and dies at age thirty. So no happily ever after.
There are a couple of silly subplots as well, but the whole thing is basically an excuse for Rousseau to expound on why country people are more virtuous than city people and to explain how to run your farm, your family and educate your children. His ideas are fine-if you're a wealthy male.
I don't care about the characters and don't care to learn about their attitudes and ideas.
The first half of the book is taken up by the lovers' travails, all because the girl's father has some small aristocratic title and won't accept the boy as suitable. It isn't a princess and a pauper (or peasant), just a less well-to-do non-aristocrat. It seems as if they have a little sex, which is probably rather daring for the time but there really isn't much actual interaction presented, just extended epistles of anguish. Their love and anguish is all that they have and 326 pages of that is more than enough.
The second half of the book expands to include Julie's husband and children, with the lover improbably becoming part of the family circle. Many of the pages are given over to the wisdom of the husband, all of whose ideas but one Julie enthusiastically endorses. Julie's husband's one fault is that he is not a Christian, and she hopes to "cure" him of that flaw.
There are 25 pages given to child-raising, including how to manage the governess, which could only have been written by someone who hadn't actually raised children. Though it isn't considered in the same detail in this book, boys and girls are to be educated completely differently (a Editor's Note advises us to read Rousseau's Emile for the details.)
There are many pages devoted to the proper management of servants and helping them to understand their proper place in the operation of the estate and a long discussion of a private garden which Julie has created all by herself-with the help of her servants and her husband. Finally, there is much verbiage expended on overcoming the attraction that the two lovers still feel toward each other and the tests which they undergo to prove that they are now just friends and lovers no longer.
All in all, the whole book is just a vehicle for Rousseau to expound his views on the world. I'm sure there are scholars who are interested in what this all tells us about civilization in the 18th century. It doesn't make much of a novel to my mind. I personally think this book is of historical interest only, and frankly NOT one that you "Must Read Before You Die."