In Jean Jacques Rousseau's 'Heloise, Abelard'

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Published in 1761, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s revision of the legend of a famous pair of medieval star-crossed lovers, Heloise and Abelard, titled (Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse) Julie, or the New Heloise : Letters of Two Lovers Who Live In A Small Town At The Foot Of The Alps (referred to as Julie while naming the novel and JOTNH in in-text citations from now on) was extremely popular as well as controversial due to its transgressive content, notably the intense love affair between a young noble woman and her tutor. Although this is the primary theme of this epistolary sentimental, the language of sentiment and virtue serves as vehicle for Rousseau’s ideas on many topics such as politics, family, marriage, nobility, education, religion, morality, …show more content…

This thematic choice is what partially fuels Rousseau’s decision to deploy the sentimental novel form. Rousseau places sentiment as the “guide” of man (JOTHN 262) and the characters in this novel use the sentimental language to proclaim their virtuousness and bolster their ideas about the relationship between society and human beings, particularly when the matter of St. Preux being socially unacceptable as Julie’s suitor is discussed in the novel. The epistolary format works well to showcase this because the language of intimacy and emotion which is what Rousseau uses to gain empathy from the reader which in turn will make the latter more amenable to the radical ideas deployed in the text, such as Lord Edward Bomston’s decrying of nobility when he urges Julie’s father, Baron L’Etrange to accept St. Preux, a bourgeoisie intellectual as his son-in-law (JOTNH 139). Thus Rousseau defends his writing to his publisher in the second preface, by telling him that a love letter “from a truly passionate Lover, will be desultory, diffuse, full of verbose, disconnected, repetitious passages…The strength of the sentiment may not strike us, but its truth affects us, and that is how one heart can speak to another” (JOTHN

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