Autobiography and Modern Self-Representation

Autobiography and Modern Self-Representation

The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau

Jean-Jacques Rousseau completed The Confessions in 1770, but they remained unpublished until several years after his death. The book remains one of the most influential and provocative texts of the Enlightenment and one of the formative early documents of European Romanticism. Earlier attempts at the self-analysis and self-advertising of autobiography had taken other forms. The Confessions of St. Augustine, for example, were clearly exemplary in exploring the religious experiences of the writer the author interpreted his own life and errors so that others might learn valuable lessons from them. Such was not Rousseau's aim.

He was much more concerned with defining his personal identity, with the operation of memory, with trying to pin down exactly what sensations and feelings were most important to him, and, although the experience is mediated through the process of narration, he resolutely refuses throughout his long book to moralize or sensationalize events. In putting before the reader his shabby exploits as well as his more noble deeds, frankness (or at least the illusion of frankness) seems to be his guiding principle.

Rousseau's work is highly individualist, not just in the sense that it carries a personal stamp, but also in its belief in the intrinsic interest of his own personality. It is not because of his renown that he writes, but because he places value on introspection as a process of self-discovery. He sees himself not as integrated within society, living a predominantly public life which is communal and shares it's most important features with others, but as a unique feeling individual, whose most valuable experiences are complex interior and private emotions. By chronicling his emotional responses, dwelling on his sensitivity and sensibility, Rousseau concentrates upon his personal development, upon the growth of his being, in a way that profoundly influenced many later Romantic writers, equally concerned with their own inner states Wordsworth's The Prelude, subtitled "the growth of a poet's mind" is perhaps the best-known inheritor of Rousseau's mantle.

Also deeply influential was the way Rousseau emphasized the importance of childhood experience. In the first part of The Confessions, his own curious childhood is nostalgically presented as a special period of innocence, in need of protection and preservation against the enfeebling compromises and pressures of maturity. The sudden death of his mother in childbirth, Rousseau was brought up by his father, and he turned inward, finding comfort in books, which he saw as giving insight into feelings at the expense of rational understanding: "I had grasped nothing. I had sensed everything."

Yet although he talks of the "serenity" of his childhood, and although it is recollected with great tenderness, it still seems overshadowed by a sense of imminent loss, by a consciousness that this brief period of life is the most precious and the most vulnerable. In this, Rousseau not only influenced many subsequent writers on the formative period of childhood, but also acted as a precedent for the introspective narration of Proust and others. Indeed, the vast body of subsequent writing on subjectivity and the "self" owes a great debt ...