Martryed Mothers Never Die: The Legacy of Rousseau's Julie (original) (raw)

2002, Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research …

In his autobiography, The Life ofHenri Brulard (1973), the French novelist Stendhal tells a story that exemplifies the impact of Rousseau's (1967) preromantic novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Hkloiie, on the reading public of his time. Stendhal's grandfather recalls that, in 1760, the year of the novel's publication, a close friend of his, the Baron des Adrets, did not come down to dinner one evening. His wife sent a servant to look for him, whereupon the normally cold and formal gentleman appeared with tears streaming down his face. His wife, rather alarmed, asked: 'What's wrong, my friend?"' and he replied simply, "Ah, Madame, Julie is dead!"2 (1973: 184). Perhaps no other novel in the history of literature has so affected the attitudes, values, and sensibilities of its generation, not to mention those of generations to come. From its romantic beginnings to its tragic dknouement, Julie, ou /a Nouvelle Hkloiie serves as a practical manual for women, telling them how to act, how to think, and even, perhaps most importantly, how to die. Readers took the implicit masochistic values of female self-sacrifice as source of fulfillment or salvation as a model for a mythology of the ideal mother that perpetuates female abnegation. As we will see, it was Julie's death even more than her life that fired the imaginations of eighteenth-century readers and subsequently affected the lives of countless generations of women who would become mothers in the Western world. In her essay entitled "Stabat Mater," French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva speaks of "the self-sacrifice involved in becoming anonymous in order to pass on the social norm" (1986: 183). Kristeva calls such self-effacement a ''pikeversion," a form of officially sanctioned masochism for which women are offered the reward of sainthood in exchange for total powerlessness in the symbolic world of patriarchy. As Kristeva writes: