Feeling as Illusion: Rousseau to Proust

Abstract

If some Victorian writers show a growing recognition of something at stake in sexual love which cannot be defined in purely ethical terms this is distinct from the continental myth of romantic passion as illusory and in conflict with social being. It is a passional ethic and is therefore different from other forms of romantic myth which incorporated the impact of eighteenth-century sentiment. Where the English tradition preeminently transposes sentimentalist instability into a dramatic means of understanding feeling, the French tradition typically treats emotion with suspicion and exploits the fictive as an emblem of its illusory nature. Rousseau’s Julie re-enacts the decision of Lafayette’s Princess of Cleves a century earlier. She rejects her lover, Saint-Preux, for the commitment to social reason enshrined in her marriage to Wolmar. If Rousseau’s internal conflicts and external impact arise partly from the epochal literalism of his emotional psychology, it may be that if he had sought mainly literary, poetic expression for his strongest emotions and commitments, as Schiller suggested, it might have muffled some of his most significant impact. Instead, his desire to find practical realization in the external world helped to force the issues, and this in turn revealed how much his own emotions were in themselves an inner world. His own account of the composition of La Nouvelle Héloïse acknowledges its partial origin in compensatory fantasy arising from his triangular relationship with Mme d’Houdetot and her accepted lover, Saint-Lambert.¹ His greatest literary success was conceived partly as an emotional indulgence or desperate overflow.