Fiction and the Philosophy of Happiness by Norton Brian Michael;

Author:Norton, Brian Michael; [Norton, Brian Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

III

The second half of Julie provides a very different look at the problem of happiness. In the first half of the novel, where the obligations of communal life prevent Julie and St. Preux from following their natural penchants, the protagonists experience a kind of moral self-division that makes happiness impossible whichever way they decide. But if it is society that creates these “contradictions”—and this is one of the few issues in the literature on Rousseau where there is some consensus—perhaps a community could be designed in such a way that these conflicts never arise. Clarens is Rousseau’s attempt to imagine such a community—not on the level of the state or city-state, as in his republican writings, but on the level of the patriarchal family.

Rousseau’s program in the second half of the novel is prepared for by Julie’s marriage to Monsieur de Wolmar at the end of part 3. Julie, who had been thinking about St. Preux even as she readied herself for the wedding, experiences a “sudden revolution” when she enters the church (292). The cause appears supernatural. “I thought I saw the instrument of providence and heard the voice of God in the minister’s grave recitation of the holy liturgy” (291). The changes this brings about in Julie are profound and far-reaching: “It was as if an unknown power repaired all at once the disorder of my affections and re-established them in accordance with the law of duty and nature” (292). The values that had been in conflict in the first half of the novel are now miraculously put back into order. Social duty and natural affection, no longer representing opposing moral systems, are now united under a common law. The shift marks a new beginning, in terms of both plot and Julie’s own character. As Julie declares, “I seemed to feel myself being reborn” (293).

But it is not enough to be personally reordered. Society, which is constitutive of the contradictions that had made happiness impossible in the first place, must also be reordered. In fact, from the moment of Julie’s “felicitous revolution,” as she alternatively calls it, society begins to take on an increased value in the novel’s moral imagination. In stark contrast to the “prejudices” of the d’Étange regime and the artificiality of Parisian life, society is now a moral source in its own right. “I will be faithful,” the new Julie declares, “because that is the first duty which binds the family and all of society” (294). Indeed, marriage itself is no longer seen primarily as an affair of the heart but in terms of social duty. “One does not marry in order to think solely about each other, but in order to fulfill conjointly the duties of civil life” (306).45

Clarens represents this ideally reordered society. Everything in Clarens is thought out, from the architecture and landscaping to the domestic economy and gender relations, from modes of production to forms of recreation. Clarens is designed, above all, to reconcile the interests of the individual with the interests of the community as a whole.

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