ABSTRACT
In 1762, the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote an impassioned educational treatise, called Emile, in which he pontificated that ‘Nature’ is the child’s best teacher. Two hundred and fifty years later, Rousseau’s treatise is still widely regarded as the foundational modern western educational canon, and his ideas can still be traced within contemporary discourses promoting natural childhood. Although his extended treatise is replete with the kinds of contradictions and paradoxes that beset anyone who appropriates Nature as their muse, his crude argument is encapsulated in the opening line: ‘Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Author of Nature; but everything degenerates in the hands of man’ (Rousseau, 2003 (1762): 1). Rousseau staunchly believed that children are born into an originary natural state of essential goodness, but both their affiliation with Nature and the natural goodness and innocence associated with it are threatened by the corrupting influences of society, or what he scathingly referred to as the degenerative ‘hands of man’. Rousseau was not the only Enlightenment philosopher to elicit a singular and essentially good Nature and to distinguish this Nature by counterposing it against essentially corrupt society (Daston and Vidal, 2004; Williams, 1983). However, it was Rousseau who famously used this distinction to align essentially good childhood with essentially
good nature and to argue that children’s natural goodness and innocence could only be ensured by returning them to Nature. Rousseau’s romantic coupling of childhood with Nature has found enduring expression in the figure of Nature’s Child. The seductive appeal of this Nature’s Child figure and the various nature figurations that support it are the main concerns of this chapter. In approaching these concerns, I ponder two broad questions – why the romantic coupling of childhood with Nature makes Nature’s Child so compelling, and how the nature/culture divide consolidates and validates this relationship. I begin by charting the historical emergence of the key nature figurations that constellate within Rousseau’s composite Nature’s Child figure. I then trace the ways in which Rousseau’s original Nature’s Child prototype was taken up by English and North American nineteenth-century Romantic writers in slightly different ways. I conclude by reflecting upon how the differences between European and North American natures have afforded geo-historical variations to these Romantic Nature’s Child figures.
