Jean-Jacques Rousseau has been called a great many thing, both during his life and after his death – a philosopher, a political theorist, a humanist, a hypocrite, a wild man, and a few dozen others. In “Julie, Or The New Heloise,” his first novel and a tremendous contemporary success, we can see in him each and every one of those roles. No wonder it's so long.
“Julie” starts off with letters between the titular Julie, the daughter of a wealthy father, and the tutor hired by that father, whose name we later learn is St. Preux. This tutor has fallen in love with her, and we quickly learn that she loves him too. All of which, incidentally, explains the book's title. Heloise was a Frenchwoman of the early 12th century who fell in love as a teenager with her tutor, Peter Abelard. By comparison, St. Preux is a lucky man, because when Heloise's father learned of her love for Abelard, he had Abelard castrated.
So far so good, except that large chunks of Julie and St. Preux's exchanges are terrifically academic in nature, on subjects like love itself, what lovers' duties to each other and to their society might be, how one can love another person and virtue both at once, various countries' national characters, and so on. Naturally, when the father learns of this great love, he immediately forbids it and sends St. Preux away, for two reasons. First, St. Preux, brilliant as he seems to be, has no aristocratic ancestry and is therefore unworthy of Julie. Second, Dad has already promised Julie in marriage to a friend of his, a man she's never met.
How tragic, though not uncommon, at least in the literature of 1761, the novel's publication date. We might expect the rest of the story to tell us how Julie and St. Preux battle the prejudices of her father and get married anyway. Nope. The strain of the fight between Julie and her father quickly kills her mother, and Julie feels so guilty at this proof of her sin in disobeying her father that she marries her father's choice. St. Preux leaves Europe and spends the next several years abroad with the army. When he returns, Julie is happily married with two sons and a good-sized estate in Switzerland. St. Preux agrees that his love for Julie was sinful, but visits her and her husband and comes to appreciate and admire the way they live.
As I said, both before and after these events, Julie and St. Preux spend most of their letters talking about virtue and theories of how one should live, when they're not bemoaning how painful it is to be separated or ecstatically describing how happy she is in her marriage. Pages and pages of description – of the natural world, of Julie's life and theories – go by before the enormous event that brings the novel to a close. We probably wouldn't find that a very entertaining read today, but as I said, in 1761 it was a bestseller.
Rousseau's work in "Julie" has been credited with kicking off both the taste for romances and the taste for travel writing. Apart from that, one of the most interesting techniques in “Julie” is the frequent use of contradiction in its descriptions of the characters' activities. Several times, characters will say that although their circumstances seem to mean one thing, those circumstances actually mean the opposite. A good example of this comes late in the story, when Julie recommends a certain course of action to St. Preux that he previously declined. Because of new circumstances, she tells him, the reasons he previously cited for declining her advice are now the precise reasons that he can take it.
This strategy of describing circumstances and motives in terms of their opposites produces an interesting effect. Despite the characters' certainty that they know best, for themselves and each other, the constant use of opposites leaves the reader with the distinct sense that they don't know as much as they think they do. That's true of most of us in real life too, of course – in “Julie,” the story begins to draw to a close when many of the various characters come to acknowledge that they do not, in fact, know as much as they think they do. For all the academic, philosophical content here, it's that acknowledgment, as much as anything else, that makes “Julie” a novel rather than a philosophical essay – the characters grow and change from beginning to end, especially the title character. For someone like Rousseau, who spent much of his writing life theorizing, the novelistic nature of “Julie” is quite an accomplishment. Maybe that's a reason it sold so well.
Benshlomo says, It can help to tell your ideas in story form - people will listen more closely if you do that.
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