Rousseau and Woolf’s Literary Rebellion
By David Redling
Despite living in different eras and countries, the works of writers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Virginia Woolf feature numerous parallels. Both Rousseau’s Confessions and Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own bring to light the struggles one may face on an everyday basis: Woolf meticulously crafts a storyline that best exhibits the barriers that institutions enforce on her and other women; Rousseau confesses candid and bold explanations of the innermost emotions that trouble him.
Woolf creates her settings to convey her emotions, an element of her writing that Woolf is not only aware of, but openly mentions in her work. In addition, she relies on historical evidence to prove just how enduring the societal issue of sexism is. Rousseau bluntly retells his own issues, deciding to be upfront with his feelings, regardless of how likely his confessions risk getting him into trouble. His personal philosophy of championing the beauty of the natural world is what motivates him to embrace being emotionally vulnerable—countering the mainstream beliefs of Enlightenment-era Europe. With A Room Of One’s Own, Woolf popularizes a style of writing where everyday struggles become the focus of the story. She reflects on the emotional baggage she carries as a woman living in late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century England. While their writing styles and reasons for creating such pieces may differ, Rousseau and Woolf both see writing as a medium for explaining the thoughts that troubled them most.
The two texts demonstrate their longing to confront the issues that haunt them—for Woolf, it’s the misogyny promoted in her country’s culture and institutions, while for Rousseau, it’s his own actions he committed in the past. In addition to including underlying messages that promote their ideologies, both rely on their own experiences to convey their message. In doing so, both challenge the idea of gender roles, with Woolf questioning why women aren’t able to be in the same spaces as men, and Rousseau breaking down the “conventional distinctions between [the] masculine and feminine” by being emotionally vulnerable (Damrosch 338). For example, Rousseau goes into detail of how he had stolen a ribbon from a family and blamed a young girl who had never done anything to him. While Rousseau was young himself, he emphasizes how he still feels guilty for his actions; he is “so troubled by this cruel memory,” he lies “sleepless” in bed expecting her to “reproach” him for his actions (Rousseau 352). This revelation goes against the social norms of his time; adult men weren’t expected to disclose childhood traumas and shameful memories.
Unlike most autobiographies from his time, Confessions was meant to help challenge “the most basic expectations about what was relevant to an understanding of the self” (Damrosch 337). His autobiography was bold for its inclusion of taboo topics, such as his pleasure in being spanked that likely was provoked by the lack of a maternal figure in his life (Rousseau 346). As humiliating as these experiences may be, ultimately, they are what have shaped his perspective. Retelling them helps promote his view that becoming more aware and expressive of one’s own natural behavior is what prevents one’s morals from being corrupted.
In A Room Of One’s Own, Woolf creates her own world that allows her personal experiences to become symbols for an issue larger in scale. Weaving in elements of fiction, Woolf creates a space that best represents the institutions which deny her the chance to be around those similarly skilled. Woolf describes fiction as something that allows her to create a space she can control; additionally, to Woolf, fiction can “contain more truth than fact,” as it can be used to best illustrate the underlying dynamics of a situation (Woolf 1086). It’s these elements that allow her to create the imaginary school, Oxbridge (a combination of Oxford and Cambridge). While the school may not be real, its name gives away the real places which influenced this setting, and turns the two prestigious schools into a monolith symbolizing how these establishments share a philosophy rooted in prejudices (Lee 1084). Instead of focusing on one school in particular, Woolf combines the two to show how sexism is a societal problem that reaches across all establishments, even the most respected ones.
The revelations she tells (that were actually experienced in one of these schools) vividly depicts the acts of prejudice committed in academic spaces. She recalls the looks of “horror and indignation” she’s given when in male-dominated spaces like Oxbridge, showing the hostility she receives for merely being present around male scholars (Woolf 1087). With fiction, she doesn’t need to bend the truth; she creates a space to make the underlying issues in the actual institutions more apparent, making their wrongs the focus of her recollections. As a woman, she isn’t afforded the same type of power in a school like Cambridge, where her presence was met with discontent and her concerns over treatment were likely ignored. With A Room Of One’s Own, Woolf can show how these institutions operate through her own perspective.
Rousseau’s writing very much influenced the philosophy that would later influence the Romantic era. Rousseau didn’t agree with the views of many Enlightenment thinkers, as he felt the movement was discouraging people from being connected to the natural world and concerned about morals (Damrosch 334). He stressed the importance of self-expression and preserving the beauty of nature. Early into Confessions, Rousseau explains how, as a child, “I felt before I thought,” a revelation that offers context behind his own beliefs; he “conceived nothing” and “had felt everything” (Rousseau 341). He sees this perspective as one shared by all humans and attributes it to shaping his outlook on his relationships with family and other figures.
This connection with his emotions helped him cope with the death of his mother and be more empathetic towards the conflicts of others. He admits to being concerned for his older brother, who was neglected and abused by his father, and, eventually, “ran off and disappeared forever” (Rousseau 342). He shares the pain of his mother’s death with his father, which allows the two to form a bond during his early childhood; he also uses his mother’s romances to connect with her (Rousseau 341). While Rousseau advocates for societal change like Woolf, he expresses concern for a different issue. He wants society to see how countering the Enlightenment movement ideas and becoming more connected to characteristics of the natural world (including one’s natural emotions) is integral to preserving morals. His candid recollection of traumatic childhood memories show how his mindset of expressing his emotions has helped him through his struggles both as a child and as an adult writing his autobiography.
For Woolf, A Room Of One’s Own delivers a more scholarly take on oppressive institutions, as the piece was born out of an earlier lecture she’d given (Lee 1084; Campbell, 2022). Woolf explains the context behind the treatment she receives, mentioning the antiquated exclusionary policy at her university that “has been rolled for 300 years” (Woolf 1087). There are other moments in the text where Woolf relays historical evidence to show that women, particularly in the literary world, have been denied the opportunity to hone and display their skills. At one point, Woolf references Shakespeare’s sister who, unlike William, “was not sent to school” and “betrothed to the son of a neighboring wool-stapler”; when she tried to further her career, men “laughed in her face” (Woolf 1111). Woolf carefully formulates a string of historical references that bring to light the injustices women have faced across time, particularly in English society. Woolf’s struggles are not personal and are instead shared by many others; the literary and academic world alone has a troubled history of excluding women from the spotlight despite their efforts and skills.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Virginia Woolf’s perspectives are shaped by different struggles and ideas unique to their time and gender. Both find their own way of explaining their struggles and both have their own ideas of how to combat them. Consequently, both Rousseau and Woolf share a common goal of using writing as a medium for explaining their perspectives and advocating for their ideologies. The two defy the cultural and societal norms of their times by divulging their traumatic and humiliating memories. Woolf would challenge the conventional roles women in the early twentieth century were forced into, while Rousseau would challenge the ideas being spread by Enlightenment thinkers.
SPRING 2025
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Illustrations were done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Shaima Rini for creating artwork for this piece.
Visit the New Media Artspace at http://www.newmediartspace.info/