Imitation and Ideology: Henry Mackenzie’s Rousseau
Kim Ian Michasiw, York University
Volume 5, no. 2, January 1993
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
Any critic who discusses Henry Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigne is likely to consider it an imitation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise. In more general terms the work will be seen as an assimilation of Rousseau’s novel to the tradition of English sentimentalism or sensibility, which Mackenzie’s earlier works had done much to codify. This view, held by such early nineteenth-century critics as Walter Scott, persists among twentieth-century critics: Harold Thompson in A Scottish Man of Feeling, Gerard A. Barker in his Twayne Authors Volume, Marilyn Butler in her Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. More recently the association of Mackenzie and Rousseau has been revived by Janet Todd in her Sensibility: An Introduction. Todd attributes to La Nouvelle Heloise the development of one of four basic types of women of feeling — “the chaste, susceptible and unwilling wife” — and suggests that in English fiction “the Rousseauist novel of family against love is typified by Julia de Roubigne.
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Rousseau” include:
De l’amour électif comme réel absolu: Mémoire et passion dans La Nouvelle Héloïse de J.-J. Rousseau
by JEAN-FRANÇOIS PERRIN (ECF 26.2, Winter 2013-14)
Rousseau’s Crusoe: Or, On Learning to Read as Not Myself
by BRIAN MCGRATH (ECF 23.1, Fall 2010)
“Wholesome Nutriment” for the Rising Generation: Food, Nationalism, and Didactic Fiction at the End of the Eighteenth Century
by LISA WOOD (ECF 21.4, Summer 2009)
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