one day be your delights. Form an enclosure around your child’s soul at an early date. Someone else can draw its circumference, but you alone must build the fence” (38; 4:246).
Thus it seems clear that Rousseau’s emphasis on the importance of maternal care reflects his larger emphasis on nature as the proper guide for our judgments and social practices. If mothers would just be mothers again, Rousseau laments, instead of turning their children over to wet nurses and dedicating themselves to the entertainments of the city, all would be well. Indeed, “from the correction of this single abuse would soon result a general reform; nature would soon have reclaimed all its rights” (46; 4:258). Here Rousseau deploys a simple formula that reduces mothering to an activity guided simply by natural instinct rather than expert knowledge. Later in book I, another representative of this simple perspective appears: the figure of the peasant, whose simple, rustic approach to child rearing Rousseau juxtaposes favorably to the corrupt practices of the upper classes (just as the tender mother is contrasted with les sages). With these idealized images of natural parenting, Rousseau seems to suggest that the knowledge of nature required for its preservation is itself naturally available to us. Both of these “natural” perspectives, however, are revealed as incomplete in ways that point to the necessity of good judgment, even within the context of a natural education.
The Tender Mother Reconsidered
While Rousseau effusively praises the mother-child bond as the most natural of bonds, he adds (in a footnote) that what it means to “mother” is not self-evident. “The sense I give to the name mother must be explained; and that is what will be done hereafter” (38; 4:246). Although he seems to want to use the mother figure to pin down the meaning of nature, which he admits is unstable, he then destabilizes the term “mother.” At no point does he explicitly define the term, but we are given some guidance by the adjectives he uses in conjunction with it. From the outset, he addresses Emile to a mother who is both tender and foresighted. This mother is distinguished not only from the frivolous, neglectful mother whom he criticizes for abandoning her duties (and who is, arguably, no mother at all in his estimation) but also, indirectly, from the mother who exhibits “blind tenderness” toward her children, whom he (gently) criticizes in the same note. Tenderness, it seems, can be either blind or foresighted. Rousseau’s project requires “a good mother who knows how to think” (33; 4:241). Rousseau will later refer to his addressee as a “judicious” mother as well (364; 4:701). If the good mother is one who thinks, has foresight, and exercises judgment, what is her relationship to nature? This question can shed light not only on what Rousseau thinks of mothers but, more broadly, on how he understands the relationship between nature and human reflection upon nature, and the bearing of each on the development of the capacity for good judgment.
Much of Rousseau’s explicit practical advice with regard to early childhood suggests that nature clearly and unambiguously indicates the way, and that all we have to do is follow it. For example, children by nature seek freedom from tight clothing and other restrictions, so we should refrain from swaddling them. By nature children suffer a host of painful physical afflictions in their early years, from teething to fevers, from which they emerge stronger and healthier; we should therefore allow them to experience physical hardship in order to harden them. Nature is presented as a given, and the line between nature and nurture as easily discernible. By comparing our original nature to a shrub in the middle of a well-traveled path, Rousseau implies that if protecting the shrub is difficult, it is because social influences are many and strong and begin to operate from the moment of birth, not because the contours of the shrub are hard to see. The analogy works well, to a point, insofar as much of the advice of book I centers on how to care for an infant’s body so that it might be permitted to develop naturally, without artificial restraints such as shoes and swaddling blankets. Human beings are not born physically self-sufficient. It takes about a year for them to become able to walk and feed themselves. During that year, the mother’s task is to protect the “shrub”—the body—from anything that might distort its shape, as it grows into the form that is natural to it. To that end, Rousseau insists that children be bathed in cold water, fed a “natural” (vegetarian) diet, and kept away from doctors, because the natural form of the human body is to be hardy and strong.
When Rousseau focuses on the physical body, his analogy to the shrub works sufficiently well, for just as we can look to the mature plant in full flower to know the form that the young shrub ought to achieve, we can look to the adult human being to set a standard for the infant. At the same time, the fact that human infants are born so physically weak and dependent presents a difficulty for Rousseau’s contention that human beings are by nature physically strong and independent. We have to “catch up” to our natural physical form, more so than other animals. On the level of the individual (if not of the species, though the two problems intersect), there is a tension between the original form and the natural form. This is problematic insofar as Rousseau seeks to draw parallels between the development of the individual and the development of the species.
In the Second Discourse, this difficulty is suppressed. Rousseau covers the months that it takes for the infant to learn to walk (and find its own food, and therefore leave its mother) in a mere sentence or two. Because he is imagining a time before there were swaddling blankets or shoes or wet nurses to distort the natural (physical) maturation of human babies, this brevity may seem justified. Clearly, it was not necessary for the mother to “build a fence” against unnatural influences, because nothing artificial existed to threaten the child’s natural physical development.
It is therefore tempting to think that the only reason we need a book like Emile, and the only reason we need to build a fence, from Rousseau’s point of view, is that Rousseau is trying to reproduce the condition of nature in society. What I referred to earlier as the challenge of Rousseau’s “double object” would again appear to be nothing other than an effect of the already corrupted circumstances in which we cannot help but operate. However, this overlooks an important dimension of the mother’s task as outlined in book I. Her job is simultaneously to allow the unfettered growth of the body and to prevent the growth of unnatural needs and desires. The first task would have been much easier in the savage state than in civil society; the second, however, is likely to have been just as difficult.
Why? If we look carefully at Rousseau’s advice in book I of Emile about preventing the development of unnatural desires (specifically, the desire to dominate others), we see that the transformation of the infant’s physical dependence upon the mother into a psychological need to dominate her and direct her will might easily have been triggered in the state of nature. It is for this reason that Rousseau advises his reader to allow the child to relate only to things, and never to the will of another human being. The experience of the will of another will stimulate the development of the child’s. And since the child is in no position to satisfy his own desires—he is utterly dependent because he is so physically weak—the will that emerges can only be frustrated. The experience of being thwarted will give rise to anger, indignation, and the desire to dominate. It is from a faulty education in infancy, Rousseau suggests, that the corruption, inequality, unfreedom, and unhappiness of civil society all grow.
And yet such a faulty education is just as likely to come from a mother who does nurse her child as from a mother who does not, and just as likely from a mother in the state of nature (insofar as she is attentive and becomes attached) as from a mother in society. Mothers who seek to preserve their children, and to secure their happiness, may do things that, in Rousseau’s view, inadvertently lead to the warping of the child’s sense of self. He notes that the overly attentive mother can be just as harmful as the indifferent mother. “One leaves [nature] by the opposite route as well when, instead of neglecting a mother’s care, a woman carries it to excess” (47; 4:259). For example, Rousseau directs the mother to transport the child to whatever object the child desires, rather than fetching the object and bringing it to the child. Even one deviation from this practice might suffice to cause the child to begin seeing the mother as an instrument to be directed as he wills. And yet Rousseau would be hard pressed to make the case that no mother in the state of nature ever brought a
