Summary
Rousseau begins his Confessions by claiming
that he is about to embark on an enterprise never before attempted:
to present a self-portrait that is “in every way true to nature”
and that hides nothing. He begins his tale by describing his family,
including his mother’s death at his birth. He ruminates on his earliest
memories, which begin when he was five, a dawning of consciousness
that he traces to his learning to read. He discusses his childhood
in the years before his father left him and his own decision to
run away to see the world at the age of sixteen. He often dwells
for many pages on seemingly minor events that hold great importance
for him.
Throughout the Confessions, Rousseau
frequently discusses the more unsavory or embarrassing experiences
of his life, and he devotes much of the early section to these types
of episodes. In one section, he describes urinating in a neighbor’s
cooking pot as a mischievous child. He also discusses the revelatory
experience he had at age eleven of being beaten by an adored female
nanny twice his age—and desiring to be beaten again, which he analyzes
as being his entry into the world of adult sexuality.
Rousseau continues to describe his life and eventually
reaches adulthood. The narrative continues in a similar vein in
the later sections, with Rousseau focusing less on places traveled
and jobs held than on his personal trials, unrequited loves, and
sexual frustrations. He speaks at length of his significant relations
with women, including his rather unremarkable longtime companion
Thérése le Vasseur and the older matron Madame de Warens, at whose
home he often stayed as a young man.
In the last of the twelve books that make up the work,
Rousseau speaks about his intellectual work, his writing, and his
relations to contemporary philosophers. Rousseau concludes the Confessions in
1765, when he is fifty-three. At this point, all his major philosophical
works have been published, and his fears of persecution are growing.
Analysis
A few notable autobiographies existed in Europe before
Rousseau published the Confessions, but his work
in many ways represented an entirely new literary form. Although
works such as St. Augustine’s own Confessions (a.d.397)
had previously been widely read and celebrated, religious works
of that kind differed greatly from Rousseau’s own, since they sought
to convey an inspirational story of religious virtuosity. By contrast,
Rousseau’s Confessions sought to bare the entire
life of its author subject, detailing all his imperfections, virtues,
individual neuroses, and formative childhood experiences as a means
of explaining and justifying the views and personality of his adult
self.
Although Rousseau states that The Confessions should
not be read as an unerring account of dates and events and admits
that most likely he often gets such factual data wrong when his
memory fails him, dates and exact events are not the point of the
work. He says that though he may mix up the dates of certain happenings,
he will never get wrong his feelings about them, and his feelings—and what
his feelings have led him to do—are the subject of his story. He does
not engage in the comprehensive unburdening of his whole self, with
all its frailties, prurient desires, and natural failings, as an act
of pure humility and self-deprecation. Rather, he does it as a way of
saying that even with all his weaknesses, he is, as we all are,
fundamentally a good and honest being. This principle is at the
heart of Rousseau’s entire philosophy, and it connects The
Confessions to the rest of his work. The Confessions is
key to understanding Rousseau’s work as a whole.
