I’m going to use this post to compare two of the passages from The Confessions that we discussed in class with a passage from Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility. I’m hoping that the narrative structure of the scenes that I’ve chosen will show a demonstrable enough likeness to make the comparison between the imaginary human Marianne Dashwood and the concrete man Jean-Jaques Rousseau interesting. The scenes that I’ve chosen both represent a situation of affective overflow (of shame in Rousseau and of sympathy in Marianne). Whereas Rousseau is aware of an imperative to conceal the erotic pleasure that he feels subsequent to his moment of visibility and assertiveness before Mlle de Breil and other dinner guests (p 97), Marianne feels no such imperative to conceal feelings of sympathy that are considerably amplified by her own assertions before a drawing room crowd. She is shame-free (at least at this moment in Sense and Sensibility). Following up on a suggestion that de Man makes in Excuses, I want to (tentatively) suggest that the presence of restraint—Rousseau’s awareness of an imperative to to keep his fantasies concealed from those in proximity to him—is essential to the discourse of “inner truth” through with Rousseau excuses himself to the reader. Without restraint, Marianne’s feelings are wholly externalized; she possesses no “inner truths” that the narrator and reader have special access to.

The scene that I want to draw attention to in Sense and Sensibility takes place at a dinner held by the wealthy but unlikable Fanny Dashwood. Much like the scene set at the dinner in the household of the Count de Gouvon in The Confessions (p 96), the drawing room scene in Sense and Sensibility is one where positions within the social hierarchy are abruptly and surprisingly reversed by the assertions of a person subordinate to the hosts. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne speaks as a guest of the guests for whom the dinner is held and, as a servant, Rousseau speaks from the bottom end of an even more asymmetrical power structure.

When Marianne’s hosts mean-spiritedly re-direct praise from her sister Elinor’s decorated screens to the “style of painting” of Miss Morton, an absent rival of Elinor’s who they deem a more suitable connection, Marianne is “provoked…immediately to say with warmth, ‘This is admiration of a very particular kind!—what is Miss Morton to us?—who knows, or who cares, for her?—it is Elinor of whom we think and speak” (177). Marianne’s “strong impulse of affectionate sensibility” (177) prompts the speech. Any possible distinction between Marianne’s feelings of sympathy for her snubbed sister and the external expression (the dialogue) that those feelings elicit collapses when, shortly after Marianne speaks, the narrator tells us that she “could say no more; her spirits were overcome…she burst into tears” (178). Marianne’s verbal denouncement is both an automatic effect of a feeling that she has no wish to contain and an intensification of that feeling, which finally overflows in tears. What the reader and the narrator know about Marianne—that she is “provoked” by her host’s petty and mean-spirited behavior–is revealed to the fictional characters that surround her. There is no sense here of an inner quality or possession of Marianne’s that the reader and narrator have exclusive access to. (Elinor, Marianne’s sister and foil, does have such possessions and they are mediated for the reader through free indirect style) The banal moral of Marianne’s bilding in Sense and Sensibility is delivered as she internalizes of the value of self-regulation. But, curiously, Marianne’s reformation happens just where the novel ends and we can have no access to the “new” Marianne. Where Marianne’s self-restraint might lend the narrator something to confide about her to the reader alone, she is given up.

Rousseau does have an “inner truth” to convey about himself, one that circuits between himself at the “scene of writing” and his reader. In Sense and Sensibility a comparable sort of inner truth is attributed to Elinor, Marianne’s emotionally restrained sister, and mediated by way of free indirect style, which speaks from a nowhere between the writer/narrator and the character’s psyche rather than from a a temporal distance. One of the most obvious differences between Rousseau’s experience in the house of the Count de Gouvon and Marianne’s in the Dashwood’s Harley Street residence is that, for Rousseau, shame follows his moment of moral rectitude. The uncontrollable excitement that Rousseau feels upon being recognized as an independent voice in front of his employers is explicitly sexual whereas the reader is invited to consider Marianne’s “strong impulse of affectionate sensibility” as first and foremost moral (though desire may be present as subtext). Whereas Marianne’s moral authority arguably remains intact because her loss of control is a mere extension of her powerful moral feelings, Rousseau’s moral authority gets undone by his loss of control (as we discussed in class). Rousseau’s erotic feelings are externalized when he overfills Mlle de Breil’s glass, “spilling some water on her plate, and over her” (97). Whereas Marianne’s failure to contain her feelings is evident to all around her, the significance of Rousseau’s physical “trembling,” which causes the spill, is unintelligible to Mlle de Breil’s brother.  The brother’s stupidity (as Rousseau puts it) is important because it adds a private, or yet unexposed, dimension to Rousseau’s experience. Mlle de Bruil shares Rousseau’s embarrassment but the reader alone has full access to the structure of his desire.

The knowledge of Rousseau’s desire that may inform the reader’s understanding of his “trembling” is constructed in another scene discussed in class, one where Rousseau retrospectively reflects on the lifelong effects of his exposure before Mlle Lambercier (26). As Rousseau exposes the youthful sexual fantasies that developed from his punishment, he characterizes the fantasies as private, internalized, unsharable: “I kept myself pure and unsullied…[but] feasted feverish eyes on lovely women, recalling them ceaselessly to my own imagination, but only to make use of them in my own fashion as so many Mlle Lamberciers” (26). Mlle de Bruil is surely readable as one of these “lovely women” who Rousseau “uses” as a substitute for Mlle Lamberciers. It may help here to quote de Man, who writes: “The more there is to expose, the more there is to be ashamed of; the more resistance to exposure, the more satisfying the scene, and, especially, the more satisfying and eloquent the belated revelation, in the later narrative, of the ability to reveal” (285). What I want to emphasize is Rousseau’s “resistance to exposure”: even in the moment where Rousseau spills water on Mlle de Bruil and she shares in his embarrassment, the fantasy that it is reasonable to suppose prompts his trembling is unavailable to her, just as the imaginative use that Rousseau makes of so many “lovely women” remains unknown to them. If Rousseau didn’t withhold something in the moment of affective overflow, or exposure, then there would be no retrospective ‘inner truth’ to reveal in the “later narrative,” or the reflective mode that works to establish sympathy between reader and writer.

What I’m getting from all of this is that the discourse of “inner truth” gives a reader privileged access to something (knowledge, an emotion, a psychic characteristic) that is withheld from others within a narrative. It is, as de Man points out, a form of discourse that is not verifiable. Of course, nothing in an Austen novel is verifiable and there is doubt as to whether the events that Rousseau narrates would be backed up by evidentiary fact. But, provided we suspend our disbelief, fictional dialogue shares with the verifiable aspects of the autobiography the quality of something unquestionable (Rousseau really did overfill Mlle De Bruil’s glass because everyone saw him do it).  In The Confessions, the fitness of the inner truth to the external circumstance is up to the reader to gauge. I’m willing to excuse Rousseau for his loss of control if I grant that his (unverifiable) sexual proclivities caused his hand to tremble. The spill is readily excusable because it’s hardly a big deal, but the discourse of “inner truth” is on shakier ethical ground where more is at stake than a mess and a moment of embarrassment. Perhaps more on this next week…