Innocence of Experience: Rousseau on Puberty in the State of Civilization

Yes I maintain . . . that a child who is not malformed, and who has conserved his innocence until twenty, is at that age the most generous, the best, the most loving, and the most lovable of men.Rousseau, EmileThe pride of place accorded Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the first modern autobiographer is based in great part on the sexual explicitness of the opening six books of his Confessions (1782), in which Rousseau recounts, among other famous episodes, the arousal he experienced as he was spanked by one of his guardians, Mile Lambercier, and his subsequent habit of exposing his buttocks to passing women in the street.1 In this article, I focus on an incident in which Rousseau is the object of an aggressive sexual advance on the part of another young man, in the course of converting to Catholicism in a Turin hospice. This episode has received surprisingly little critical attention, although it includes details considered so scandalous that they were omitted from editions of the Confessions well into the nineteenth century.2 In the description of the young man's masturbatory activities following his failure to engage Rousseau in a shared experience, for example, we are told of the "sticky white substance" that jets forth toward the fireplace as the aggressor reaches the end of his "exertions."These apparent euphemisms, rather than an attempt at rendering the account more acceptable, are to be understood as part of a retrospective claim of innocence that is this episode's most salient feature, for the reader is assured that Rousseau's sixteen-year-old self is left utterly ignorant of the sexual nature of the encounter. As I argue, it is this unlikely claim to innocence that makes this neglected story significant to current scholarly work on the relationship between sexuality and selfhood. As Charles Taylor has argued, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the development of a moral identity built on the ideals of self -governance and autonomy, in which self-control, rather than obedience to a transcendent authority, plays a fundamental role.3 In a recent history of "solitary sex," Thomas Laqueur builds on Taylor's argument to label masturbation "the sexuality of the modern self," as reflected in the hysteria surrounding the practice beginning in the early eighteenth century, and displayed most paradigmatic ally in the Confessions.* What makes the hospice episode of interest to such reflections is that it is specifically designed to be read outside the paradigms of selfcontrol and indeed of sexuality, for as Rousseau takes care to establish elsewhere in his autobiography, he was still a prepubescent at the age of sixteen. He had not yet, that is, experienced his first ejaculation, and could thus still claim the status of "innocent child."The major similarity between the sixteen-year-old child Rousseau and his future, sexually active adult self, as described in the Confessions, is a lack of conformity with cultural expectations. Rousseau's independent lifestyle before he arrived in the hospice makes his claim to absolute ignorance of sexuality quite unlikely, at least in the light of eighteenth-century child hygiene theory, and certainly according to his own pedagogical treatise, Emile (1762). He would surely have been exposed to talk of sex, to sexualized images, and so on, and the knowledge such exposure would have imparted, in a clear if secular analogy to the Garden of Eden, was believed to be enough to bring on puberty, defined as first ejaculation, in a young boy. Rousseau's claim that, even following the hospice episode, he remained absolutely unenlightened as to the mechanics of male sexuality seems yet more absurd, but this very absurdity is, in typically Rousseauvian fashion, the point of his tale. By stressing his unique immunity to understanding such an inherently enlightening experience, Rousseau transforms a potentially damning tale of licentiousness into an example of his exceptional, but above all innate, moral superiority. …