How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore Page A

of this pastoral idyll soon wore thin.
    Feeling isolated and fed up with the damp English weather, Rousseau grew miserable and anxious. Always a difficult character, who was as hard on his friends as he was on his enemies, he began to suspect that Hume and Davenport were united in a conspiracy against him. He feared that his food was adulterated by servants, his letters were being intercepted by spies and the house was surrounded by French assassins. And so when he was lured out of his hideaway, the grotto beneath the terrace in front of the house, by Darwin, eager to discuss plants and politics with the foreign visitor, Rousseau rightly suspected a trick and was duly infuriated. Although Darwin’s grandson, the founder of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, would later insist that the pair struck up a friendly correspondence, none of their supposed letters have survived. But his British sympathizers should not have been surprised by such apparent ingratitude. Stirring up trouble was Rousseau’s stock in trade.
    In the space of sixteen months, in 1761 and 1762, Rousseau had published three very different but pioneering books that were equally acclaimed and condemned throughout the world. His novel, Julie, or The New Héloïse, outraged prudish critics with its sensational and sensuous story. Readers loved it, and the book became the best-selling novel of the eighteenth century. He followed his success as a novelist with two revolutionary books, The Social Contract, published in April 1762, and Émile, or on Education, which appeared a month later. Both provoked furious debates and sowed profound changes that reverberate still. The founding fathers of American independence would draw inspiration from The Social Contract while the leaders of the French Revolution would likewise be fired by its ideals. Arguably, Émile would launch even more far-reaching change.
    As a child, Rousseau had received no formal education until the age of ten. As a tutor to a wealthy family, while wandering through Europe in his youth, Rousseau had proved a dismal failure. As a father, who gave up all five children he had sired with Thérèse Levasseur to the Paris foundling hospital, he had abdicated all parental responsibility. Yet Rousseau’s views on education were both revolutionary and pivotal. Émile has been described as the most important work on education since Plato’s Republic ; a modern educationalist has argued that all writing on progressive education since Émile is a series of footnotes. Written in the form of a novel, in Rousseau’s characteristically direct style, the book outlines an ideal education for the pupil Émile from cradle to adulthood as narrated by his tutor.
    In Émile Rousseau rejects both the prevailing religious doctrine that children are born with original sin and the more modern view, outlined by John Locke in 1693, that at birth children’s minds resemble “white Paper, or Wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases.” Instead, Rousseau argues that children are born essentially good but are corrupted by the influences of civilization. In a typically arresting first line, Rousseau announces: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.” Education, Rousseau argues, should be the means of protecting and nurturing those original innocent instincts against society’s vices. To achieve such protection,Rousseau advocates a “natural education” that places the child at the center of the educational process. Entirely at odds with the disciplinarian methods in use in classrooms across Europe at the time—where children learned by rote and by rod—Rousseau proposed a free and unconstrained upbringing in which the child learns at a natural pace through play and discovery.
    In accordance with this “back to nature” approach, the infant Émile is breast-fed by his mother, not wet-nursed by strangers; he is left free to kick and squirm,