Reworking Rousseau: Frankenstein as a Critique of Rousseau's Emile

Frankenstein  is most commonly celebrated as a cautionary tale about the dangers of science that allows mankind to transgress the natural order, a warning that humanity may be overreaching with its ever increasing ability to manipulate nature. The understood danger is that mankind may, like Victor Frankenstein, lose control of our scientific creations and may thereby unwittingly cause our own destruction. While such a tale may have seemed fantastic in the Romantic era, today the creation of life is an apple just beyond our grasp and the warning seems well-grounded in reality. The splitting of the atom, the invasion of the heavens as we begin our exploration of space (with the implied colonialism and exploitation of resources that will accompany said exploration), and the decoding and manipulation of the double helix are all marvels of human ingenuity that could conceivably lead to the demise of the human race - and quite possibly, all life on this planet.

Jonathan Bate highlights Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as an early response to man's alienation from nature in The Song of the Earth, Bate's exploration of the Romantic roots of environmentalism and how it informs our present understanding of our relationship with the world we live in. Bate correctly notes that Shelley, in her novel, reworks the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan philosopher who suggested that nature and civilization were diametrically opposed -- a foundational idea for the modern conception of nature as something removed from the sphere of humanity. More specifically, Bate relies upon Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, a work Bate describes as "modernity's founding  myth  of the 'state of nature'  and our  severance  from that  state," to develop a reading of Frankenstein that interprets the creature  as an embodiment of the Rousseau's natural man and the human characters as representatives of the Enlightenment civilization (Bate 28).
. Bate adapts the popular interpretation of Frankenstein as a warning about the dangers of science, interpreting science as a symbol of society, a term Bate equates with the contemporary meaning of culture (Bate 33).  Bate notes that the novel essentially begins with the collision of two attempts by representatives of human culture to unlock the secrets of nature. Robert Walton is an explorer who hopes to find a new trade route, a mission Bate ties to colonialism and deforestation. Walton's secondary goal of discovering the source of the magnetism associated with the North Pole is viewed in terms of providing technological advantages to the British empire. It is on his trip to the arctic that Walton literally collides with Victor Frankenstein, whom Bate aligns with modern chemistry, viewing him as a scientist whose attempt to create life in his laboratory imperils humanity. The creature is held out by Bate as the natural man, independent, alone, and powerful.  The creatures desire to move to South America strengthens his alignment with natural man as Rousseau mentioned people in South America who lived in a natural state in Discourse. In this light,  the novel becomes a warning against the dangers of society encroaching upon nature, an echo of Rousseau's claim that society keeps people from living according to nature.
The problem with Bate's reading is that it relies upon a mistaken assumption regarding Shelley's reworking of Rousseau. Bate provides an apt description of Rousseau as a proto-Green thinker based on the philosopher's central argument that "[s]ociety is the negation of nature" (Bate 33); Rousseau places nature and human culture in a binomial opposition. This is the basis for Bate's understanding of the creature as natural man, Rousseau's ideal, as opposed to the civilized man represented by Frankenstein and Walton. This is typical of critics who find that Shelley's "adoption of Rousseauean ideas is fairly derivative and easily described"  (O'Rourke 543). However, Shelley was not merely regurgitating Rousseau's philosophies, she was responding to them, not only incorporating ideas from The Origin of Inequality in Man, Julie, Confessions, and , most importantly, Emile into her novel, but countering several of Rousseau's arguments with ideas proposed by her mother Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Women, ideas that Shelley develops further in the form of fiction in her novel.  Bate acknowledges that Emile is a variation on Discourse, one that transfers the state of nature to early childhood, but fails to recognize how heavily Frankenstein relies upon Rousseau's seminal tract on education. By anchoring his reading on The Origin of Inequality in Man rather than Emile, Bate misses how Shelley cleverly romanticizes key passages of Rousseau's work on education in a rejection of the Romantic ideal of the solitary genius who live apart from society that originates with Rousseau.
    Instead of interpreting Frankenstein as a binomial opposition between natural and social man, with Emile as an anchor rather than Discourse on the Origin of Man, Shelley's work can be interpreted as an allegory that offers four stories of transgressions and the resulting expulsions in a dialogic manner that emphasizes the role of women in society and the importance of family and community in cultivating a man at peace with nature. Walton was forbidden by his father to take up nautical life, but does so anyway and that transgression leads him to the Arctic and the perilously cryptic ending of the novel. Frankenstein was forbidden to read alchemical works but does so anyway and this forbidden knowledge sparks his grotesque fascination with death. The creature, whose creator abdicates his responsibilities, has only nature to transgress - and does so by desiring something he cannot obtain for himself. The fourth tale of transgression is Safie's, the woman who leaves her father for Felix, bringing him happiness and the means to pursue a better life.
Emile: The Study of Man and His Environment
 Rousseau described the real objective of Emile, or on Education, his seminal book on education, as the study of "man and his environment" (Rousseau 10) The premise of the book is that men and citizens are two different creatures, that a man lives for himself whereas a citizen lives for the state. A man is what existed prior to the dawn of civilization, a time referred to as a "state of nature," a state of purity that invites comparisons to the Garden of Eden. Nature is defined as a habit, by which Rousseau means the default setting for any given thing or being. Removed from the influence of meddling citizens, a man can return to his natural state; the Romantic theme of the return to Paradise. Noting that in antiquity "education" was synonymous with "nurture," Rousseau lays out a system of education that replaces traditional instruction with environmental awareness, allowing the fictional child Emile to learn his role in the world - that of being a man - through guided experience that develops a whole man capable of integrating his natural and civil self.   The product of this education will be a man who will acknowledge no master other than his own desires, desires being the product of instinct, a function of nature. Those desires exist within every person but society trains people to surrender their desires for the good of the community. The natural man is the one who resolves the internal conflict between this two aspects of his identity and lives in freedom wherever he may be.
Rousseau's plan of education is examined in Frankenstein through the prism of variances in the education of the novel's characters, several of whom have clearly been educated according to Rousseau's advice. The citizen of Geneva, as Rousseau styled himself, stated in Emile that the system of education he proposed was likely to need modification to reflect the needs of each nation. Thus Walton represents the way this system of education would work in the United Kingdom, while Frankenstein represents the way the system would work in Rousseau's native Geneva, and Felix represents the results of the system in France. The only one of the aforementioned who has been successfully educated according to Rousseau's precepts is Felix - and he is the novel's example of natural man.

Felix: Man at Peace with Himself
Bate views Felix as a representative of the Enlightenment because he drives the creature from the cottage, the critical moment that determines the creature's unhappy future of solitude (Bate 53). The passage that most explicitly makes it clear that Felix is a natural man is the very same that Bate provides as an example of his interpretation of the creature as a natural man opposed by Felix, a representative of the enlightenment.  This is the passage where the creature reveals itself to the elder De Lacey in the family’s hut, or more particularly when Felix finds the creature there kneeling in front of the elder De Lacey, imploring the blind patriarch for assistance.   Felix believes his father is in danger and reacts appropriately, and “with supernatural force tore me [the creature] from his father, to whose knees I clung” (Shelley 91). The creature, remember, is eight-foot tall and even granting the creature’s expressed desire not to harm Felix, the “supernatural force” required to throw an eight-foot tall being of considerable strength, and therefore considerable muscle mass, seems an expedient rather than a connected passage. This exact moment is a manifestation of a single sentence in Emile where the dialogic thread of education and that of creation collide: “The rebellious angel who fought against his own nature was weaker than the happy mortal who is living at peace according to nature” (Rousseau 53).
  The “rebellious angel” is an allusion to Satan, and the creature himself recognizes himself in that role, telling Frankenstein: “I ought to be thy Adam; but rather I am the fallen angel.”  It is natural for any being to defend itself, it is part of Rousseau's self-love, the desire to stay alive, but the creature does not, accepting Felix’s first set of blows without response before running from the hut. Felix is the man “living at peace according to nature,” Rousseau’s ideal, the sign of a well-educated man according to the principles set forth in Emile. Felix is not torn between the rules of society and his own instincts, as seen when Felix helps Safie’s father escape from jail; he is able to follow his own mind instead of submitting to the rule of mob. Rousseau felt that the natural man would be a better citizen because he was capable of acting against the wishes of the mob, just as Felix did. That Felix’s action led to his sister and father being held in jail is no matter either since “wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention” and Felix does his best to rectify the situation when he learns of the repercussions of his action (Rousseau 51). Felix was living in the city but clearly knows his business as a farmer – another indication he was a natural man; in Emile, Rousseau suggests that “agriculture is the earliest, the most honest of trades, and more useful than all the rest, and therefore more honorable for those who practice it” (Rousseau 170). Furthermore, the name  "Felix" means “happiness” – reflecting that character's status as the “happy mortal” of Rousseau’s sentence.
The romanticization of a single sentence from Emile discussed above is an excellent example of how Shelley incorporates Rousseau's ideas into her novel. However, she not only incorporates Rousseau, she critiques his ideas as well. Felix, perhaps, is more properly viewed as as Shelley's response to Rousseau's ideal man; Felix does not live up to his name before the arrival of Safie, suggesting that man cannot find happiness alone, he needs a female companion.
When the creature first finds Felix and his family, he describes Felix as "melancholy beyond expression" and notes that the young man's "countenance expressed a deeper despondence"  and observes that he has an "air of melancholy" (Shelley 85). It is only with the arrival of Safie that Felix finds happiness. Shelley is demonstrating that Rousseau's natural man is not sufficient in and of himself, that he needs a woman - and not just any woman - to walk the earth alongside him as a coequal partner in life.
Enter Safie: the perfect woman for the perfect man.
Rousseau acknowledges a role for women in the life of his natural man, although women are not expected to have the same desire or need for independence. Rousseau argues that nature intended for women to be subservient to men, as evidenced, according to Rousseau, by the physical power of men as compared to women. Women lack rationality, the basis of reason, which in turn is the basis for human rights; instead they are granted modesty, the right and duty to counsel men on spiritual matters and are acknowledged as having the power to manipulate men into doing their bidding - but only because men wish it to be this way.
Emile contains five books, four dedicated primarily to educating the ideal citizen, Emile. The fifth book of the text is purportedly about raising Sophie, who is designed to be the perfect wife for the perfect citizen of a republic, rather than a perfect citizen herself.  In actuality, the majority of the chapter is spent introducing Emile to his future bride and encouraging their courtship. Rousseau explicitly writes that women were designed to be controlled by men: “The one should be active and strong [men], the other passive and weak [women]. It is necessary that the one have the power and the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance" (Rousseau 258).
Rousseau goes on to suggests that once the principle of might has been established it follows that "woman is made especially to please man," the rationale for this was that it was a "law of nature, which is older than love itself" (Rousseau 258).  Nature was Rousseau’s frequent justification for the differences between the sexes, especially for Rousseau’s assigning women a subordinate role in society (Darling and Van De Pijpekamp 118). Rousseau argued that since women are, by nature, subservient to men, they should be educated with skills that will make domestic life more pleasurable for men. In addition to sewing, cooking, and basic math and reading that are necessitated by household duties, Rousseau called for women to be encouraged to sing and dance for their husbands: “I would have an English maiden cultivate the talents which will delight her husband as zealously as the Circassian cultivates the accomplishments of an Eastern harem“ (Rousseau 337).
    Wollstonecraft was incensed with Rousseau’s arguments, noting in Vindication that he relegates women to the role of sexual slavery: “Rousseau declares, that a woman should never, for a moment feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear to exercise her NATURAL cunning, and made a coquettish slave in order to render her a more alluring object of desire” (Wollstonecraft 55). Wollstonecraft denied that nature had allocated women such a role and mocks Rousseau’s invocation of nature to defend to his misogyny by stating that Rousseau “pretends to draw [his arguments] from the indications of nature”  (Wollstonecraft 55). Rousseau's view of nature is, according to Wollstonecraft, self-serving.
    The above quoted passage that encourages English women to become more like Circassian women, Caucasian women who lived in the far Middle East in an area then dominated by the Ottoman empire who were sometimes raised to join Turkish harems, is found at the beginning of a lengthy passage from Emile that Wollstonecraft addresses in Vindication as an example of Rousseau’s misogynistic outlook. A few paragraphs later, Rousseau writes that: “Every daughter ought to be of the same religion as her mother, and every wife to be of the same religion as her husband.” In her commentary on this paragraph, Wollstonecraft ponders what would happen if the mother and father were of different religions: “What is to be the consequence, if the mother's and husband's opinion should chance not to agree?”
    Here then, is Safie’s mother. She is not an embodiment of Wollstonecraft, as some have suggested, but a fictionalized version of her argument – or rather, a further development of that argument. In Safie's mother, Shelley offers a role model for mothers that is based on Wollstonecraft's response to Rousseau's outrageous remark. Out of all of the mothers referenced in the novel, Safie's mother alone prepares her child to live on her own. Safie’s mother was a Christian Arab who was enslaved and then married a Turk, Safie’s father. It is safe to presume that the marriage required the emancipation of her mother, yet after we are told about the marriage, Safie’s mother is said to have “spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced.” This indicates the bondage that is being spurned is that of marriage. Yet Safie’s mother is no servile wife. In direct contrast to Rousseau, who says that a child should be raised in the religion of the father, Safie’s mother teachers her daughter the tenants of her own Christian faith and also to “aspire to the higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad.” Instead of telling us what would happen in a family of mixed religions wherein the wife is a woman of “independence of spirit,” Shelley has shown us the result and named her Safie, a  close approximation of Sophie, the perfect woman Rousseau introduces as the perfect bride for Emile. While some critics have noted that there is “perhaps” a relation between Safie and Emile’s Sophie, Peter Scott outright declares that Safie is an “androgynously balanced corrective to Rousseau's docile, domestic, and affectionate Sophie, a figure reproved by Mary Wollstonecraft” (Scott 174). While Scott’s remark is a parenthetical that does not receive any elaboration, his characterization is accurate although perhaps is it preferable not to use the term “androgynously” as that might suggest that the docility that is evident in Sophie is indeed a feminine characteristic and that Safie has somehow “unsexed” herself through the assertion of her free will - a quality that Rousseau denies women.
Safie has many of the qualities that Rousseau desires in a woman; she is beautiful, sings well, and uplifts the spirits of the entire family. But the evidence is greater that Safi is the type of woman Wollstonecraft envisioned. She learns not only how to speak French but how to read it as well; her counterpart Sophie had only read one book in her entire life when she meets Emile. Safie has an enormous impact on the finances of the family.  Prior to the arrival of Safie, the creature observes that sometimes Felix and his sister go hungry in order to provide their father with food. After Safie appears, the cottagers have enough excess food to assist the poor that came to their door. It is Safie's money that allows Felix to pay off his landlord and forsake his crops after the creature reveals himself.
In Safie and her mother, Shelley has demonstrated that women are capable and desirous of free will, and that such women are important partners in a marriage. Safie's transgression is that she disobeys her father and leaves him for Felix without his permission. In doing so, she demonstrates not only the capacity for free will but the desire for it. The pair of Safie and Felix together are postlapsarian Eve and Adam - both exiled from their native land, cursed to live by the sweat of their brow, but nevertheless happy that they can celebrate their liberty together, yoked by only the chains they themselves have chosen.

The Flaw in Rousseau's Pedagogy - Mothers
Another way that Shelley critiques the role women play in Rousseau's educational through the character of Caroline Frankenstein. Caroline's implicit role in her son's errant turn towards necromancy, which will be detailed below, was the result of her own poor education, highlighting the flaw in Rousseau’s educational system that Shelley's mother Wollstonecraft warned about  in her Vindication: “How should a woman void of reflection be capable of educating her children? How should she discern what is proper for them? ....She will make them formal coxcombs or ignorant blockheads; but never sensible or amiable” (Wollstonecraft 143).  Rousseau was among those that rejected the notion that women had rational souls, thus condemning them to servitude as it is the rational soul of man that gives him domain over other sentient creatures. Wollstonecraft, and Shelley afterwards, argued that the family is the basis of the natural human unit - women are necessary partners in the survival of the species and are quite capable of developing rational faculties when allowed to do so, a fact that Rousseau conveniently ignores.
When Caroline Beaufort is introduced at the beginning of Victor’s story, the Beaufort family is bankrupt and the father sick. There is no mention of the Caroline’s  mother, presumably she had passed away much earlier, but her absence speaks volumes about societal attitudes towards women.  When her father’s minimal savings are exhausted, Caroline is forced to take “plain work; she plaited straw and by various means contrived to earn a pittance scarcely sufficient to support life” (Shelley 19). While it is not explicitly stated, the reason Caroline must hire herself out as unskilled labor is that she has no job skills and no other means to support herself and her father. As her father gets sicker and requires more of her time and care, Caroline is able to work for hire even less and so when her father passes away she is left “an orphan and a beggar” (Shelley 19). Although Caroline’s age is not given, the two years she spends under a guardian’s care before her marriage to Alphonse Frankenstein suggests that she is eighteen at the time she is married. Alphonse’s age is never given either, but Victor acknowledges that “[t]here was a considerable difference between the ages of my parents”  and says that his father was in “the decline of life” when he started his family. The age difference combined with Alphonse placing Caroline under the care of one of his own relatives gives the impression that Alphonse was storing Caroline away for his own personal pleasure and she had no recourse but to accept the offer. In short, she was powerless because of her lack of education and thus prone to being exploited.  Her lack of skills is in accordance with Rousseau’s educational plan for women and the resulting powerlessness is in line with Wollstonecraft’s argument against this plan. Caroline is never shown to find this arrangement disagreeable; indeed, Elizabeth is her double – when her mother dies she is taken in by the Frankenstein family who raise her with the intention she should eventually marry her cousin Victor. Caroline presents Elizabeth to Victor as a “promised gift, I, with childish seriousness, interpreted her words literally and looked upon Elizabeth as mine--mine to protect, love, and cherish” (Shelley 20). The cycle of storing a wife away until she ripens is repeated.
    Yet as Wollstonecraft warned, the limited education of the mother would also result in a poorly raised child. Again, it is Caroline who misguidedly provides Victor with the books that cement his fate. How would Caroline have known better? There’s no indication that she could even read. As Rousseau repeatedly notes, a mother needs to endear herself to her children in order to ensure their offspring will look after them in the future and so they are likely to indulge their children even when they should not. Shelley demonstrates the likely result of not educating the women who could prove so influential in a child's development in Victor Frankenstein.

Victor Frankenstein: Scientist or Necromancer?
  Victor Frankenstein seems, at first, to best represent the Enlightenment figure that Bate places in direct opposition to natural man. Bate suggests that "after a Rousseauesque childhood in which he [Frankenstein] is at one with his Swiss environment, he falls into scientific knowledge" (Bate 50). In other words, Frankenstein "falls" from the natural state and his geographical relocation from Geneva to Ingolstadt reflects this. Certainly, something did happen that caused Frankenstein fall of the path of the natural man but this occurred long before he left home to attend the university.
As Bate notes, Frankenstein was raised according to the educational precepts Rousseau lays out in Emile.  This is first evident when Frankenstein relates that his father relinquishes many of public duties in order to “dedicate himself to the education of his children” – (19) a suggestion straight from Emile, which urges fathers to always consider the education of their children one of the most important duties.  Frankenstein and Elizabeth were never forced to study anything, as their parents followed Rousseau’s advice about letting children follow their natural inclinations, with occasional hints that would encourage them along the path they were most suited: “by some means we always had an end placed in view, which excited us to ardour in prosecution of them.”  In Frankenstein’s case, his inclinations led him to discover what he calls “natural philosophy” (Shelley 22), but what would more appropriately be called alchemy or necromancy. The forbidden knowledge of necromancy is what leads to Frankenstein's fall. Frankenstein relates how he became interested in natural philosophy by a chance finding of a book by the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa. Frankenstein's father, Alphonse, in accordance with Rousseau's guidelines, forbids his son to read Agrippa without offering any explanation as to why. Frankenstein's response contains Shelley' critique of Rousseau's educational methods:

If, instead of this remark, my father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which possessed much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discoveries. It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin. ( Shelley 23)

This passage illustrates two points. First, as previously stated, Shelley is not simply regurgitating Rousseau, she is critiquing his pedagogy. Victor’s passion for alchemy and necromancy interplays with Emile in three very important interconnected ways. First, by dismissing Agrippa without explanation, Alphonse is adhering to Rousseau’s mandate: “If there is something he should not do, do not forbid him, but prevent him without explanation or reasoning” (Rousseau 61).  Victor clearly disagrees with this approach, noting that instructors often neglect opportunities for “directing the attention of their students” (Shelley 22). Victor’s further complaint that his father should have provided an explanation why Agrippa should be avoided echoes the sentiments of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication: “for unless it [duty owed to parents] be founded upon knowledge, it cannot gain sufficient strength to resist the squalls of passion, or the silent sapping of self-love” (Wollstonecraft 233).  Thus, seeing no reason why he should not read Agrippa, Victor “continued to read with the greatest avidity.”
  Upon his return home, Victor’s “first care was to procure the whole works of this author, and afterwards of Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus.” This was well before the age of allowances and his father would not have bought the books, so it must have been Caroline who enabled her son’s morbid interest in books that profess to teach the secrets of necromancy. This is the second way Victor’s obsession with necromancy interplays with Emile because Caroline’s actions are in accordance with Rousseau’s statement that “mothers spoil their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but it is worse to deprave them as you do. The mother wants her child to be happy now. She is right, and if her method is wrong, she must be taught a better” (Rousseau 3).
Fueled by the books he has read, Frankenstein throws himself into the study of the dark arts, repeatedly attempting to raise the dead and summon ghosts. This is the third way Shelley connects Frankenstein’s dark obsessions to Emile, for Victor now becomes a manifestation of Rousseau’s cautionary words in regards to teaching children about death: “Half knowledge and sham wisdom set us thinking about death and what lies beyond it; and thus they create the worst of our ills” (Rousseau 54). While some aspects of alchemy led to the development of chemistry and other natural sciences, as Bate notes in his description of Frankenstein's path of education - from alchemy to modern chemistry - the alchemists were also known to dabble in magic and necromancy – “half knowledge and sham wisdom” and for Victor, his study of their works would indeed lead to his madness and ultimate destruction. Frankenstein, however, disputes Bate's contention that he has taken up modern chemistry. Note, Frankenstein suggests that if his father has instructed him better in regards to Agrippa, he "should probably have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discoveries." (Shelley , emphasis my own). In other words, Frankenstein should have, could have, would have turned to modern chemistry - but he did not. The forbidden knowledge of necromancy that he obtains despite his father's directives is what sparks the "fatal impulse that leads" to Frankenstein's ruin.

The Creature Represents Pre- and Postlapsarian Man but Never Natural Man
To be certain, Rousseau's natural man plays a prominent role in Frankenstein; the creature, however, is not the natural man that Bate believes. The creature begins as a prelapsarian man, man living in a state of nature, that this is not the same as natural man. In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, first part of of his argument is dedicated to imagining prelapsarian man. Rousseau portrays the man who lived in a state of nature as a person with no property, who subsists primarily as a nomadic gatherer. Like the creature, the prelapsarian man described in Discourse is a vegetarian. He has no wars, no crime, and no obligations other than to fulfill his own desires. This is true of the creature as well. The prelapsarian man hypothesized by Rousseau lived a life of hardship with limited shelter and was able to withstand much harsher conditions than modern man; this created a much stronger being, capable of enduring the extremes of weather without clothing and far stronger than modern man. The creature resembles prelapsarian man in all of these regards as well.
However, the creature falls from grace - he is contaminated by knowledge just as surely as if he had eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. The creature provides a defamiliarizing perspective in regards to education that results from the creation of a being that is essentially born as an adult, echoing Rousseau's hypothetical example of child “born with the size and strength of manhood, entering upon life full grown like Pallas from the brain of Jupiter”  (Rousseau  28). The creature’s education takes place in the center of the novel, and his education is central to the understanding of the work, and his education depends on the acquisition of language.
In Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that language did not develop until after the fall from from, until the advent of social man.  It is language, learned via the Promethean cottagers and their books, that enables Frankenstein to read and learn about the world and most importantly, to learn about love. It is learning about love that causes the creature to desire a life companion of his own. According to Rousseau, neither man in the state of nature nor natural man desires anything he cannot provide for himself - and creation is beyond the creature's ability; therefore the creature is not a natural man.
Furthermore, Rousseau acknowledges in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality that the state of nature he hypothesizes may have never existed, and perhaps it never will. In Emile, Rousseau turns the conversation to postlapsarian man where man is separated from other species by his free will, the ability to overrule his natural instincts, and his penchant for improvement - man is continually striving to improve his environment. This is not always a good thing, as Rousseau notes in the opening sentence of Emile: "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil" (Rousseau 1). However, man's meddling is better than the alternative in the postlapsarian state that we live in, especially in terms of his own improvement. A man left to his own devices would be "more of a monster than the rest" (Rousseau 2); this is the creature - a prelapsarian creature abandoned by his creator in a postlapsarian world, he is left to develop like a weed, lacking the cultivation - or perhaps we should say socialization - necessary to participate in civil life.
In Emile, Rousseau proposes three sources of education: nature, men, and things. The education of nature is related to growth of our bodies and faculties; men teach how to use those bodies and to what end; things teach us experientially, we learn what we need to know about things when we need to know it.  As the creature is "born" a full-grown being, it has been cheated of the most vital developmental stage, it has not been educated by nature. How can such a creature be viewed as anything other than unnatural?  One of Rousseau's more influential ideas in Emile was the need to recognize that children are children, not little men, and should be educated accordingly. That idea informs the character of the creature: "Nature wants children to be children before they are men. If we try to pervert this order we shall produce a forced fruit that will have neither ripeness nor flavor and that will soon spoil" (Rousseau 67 ). The creature is a fruit that ripens for a brief moment in the alps, demonstrating a sensibility and compassion that surpasses the majority of humans, but his ripeness is short lived, and he spoils when he is forced to leave his Garden of Eden.
Conclusion
A  greater understanding of how Shelley incorporated the works of Rousseau into her "hideous progeny" can only strengthen the novel's message to environmentalists. Bate is right to trace the modern conception of nature as something that is apart from mankind to Rousseau, and there is much in Rousseau that both Wollstonecraft and Shelley admired.  Frankenstein does not cast the science of social man against the physicality and sensibility of natural man, but instead highlights flaws in the education, or cultivation, of people in a society that seeks to live closer to nature. If Rousseau is to anchor the discussion about how modern man can find a balance between social man and nature, the flaws Shelley highlights must be addressed. In writing about the rights of men, Rousseau has shortchanged women and in doing so, he has shortchanged humanity as a whole. Humans are social creatures, we are meant to live together, to break bread with each other, and to learn from one another - and that includes women.  The concept of man as a solitary being is a monstrosity.





 Works Cited


Bates, Jonathan. The Song of the Earth. London: Picador. 2001. Web.

Darling, John and Van De Pijpekamp, Maike. “Rousseau on the Education, Domination and Violation of Women” British Journal of Educational Studies , Vol. 42, No. 2 (Jun., 1994), pp. 115-132 JSTOR. Web

O'Rourke, James. "'Nothing More Unnatural': Mary Shelley's Revision of Rousseau." ELH. 56.3 (Autumn 1989) 543-569
Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile, or on Education. Translated by Barbara Foxley. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co: 1948

 Rubenstein, Marc A. "’My Accursed Origin’: The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein.” Studies in Romanticism, 15 (Spring, 1976), 165-94. Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition. Web.

 Scott, Peter Dale. “Vital Artifice: Mary, Percy, and the Psychological Integrity of Frankenstein.” The Endurance of "Frankenstein": Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel, ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1979.172-202.

 Zonana, Joyce. "’They Will Prove the Truth of My Tale’: Safie's Letters as the Feminist Core of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.” Journal of Narrative Technique, 21:2 (Spring 1991), 170-84. Frankenstein: The Pennsylvania Electronic Edition. Web.

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