Certain elements of Sophie's depiction that related to the deployment of feminine taste within the marital relationship and domestic setting had their own attractions. While scholars have often noted the mixed feelings of contemporaries in responding to Rousseau's portrait of Sophie, we need not resort to Julie alone to explain his appeal to women. These inherited assumptions help explain the attractiveness of Rousseau's ideas to women and to those men seeking ready, facile solutions for complex contemporary conditions, which they experienced as troubling and destabilizing. I contend that this appeal was rooted in assumptions about women's transformative civilizing abilities, which derived (ironically enough) from progressive honnête and Modern discourse. While most feminists then and since have rightly found that Rousseau unjustly limited women's capabilities, his treatment of feminine aesthetic capacities had an undeniable charm to many contemporaries.

This discursive heritage also informed the reception of Rousseau's ideas in the next century under different circumstances. His discursive appropriation within this mid-century environment explains the shape of his reforms and how his ideas could be attractive not only to male detractors of feminine taste, but also to eighteenth-century Frenchwomen. By shifting feminine taste's site and purview into the domestic realm, he further undercut the honnête vision and refocused the discussion. He thus contributed to an ongoing discursive evolution away from the honnête understanding of women's taste which he both inherited and altered. Beyond this immediate context, though, Rousseau was intervening in a long-running debate about feminine taste. Clearly, Rousseau intended his comments, which were embedded within a complex, anxious, mid-century cultural context, to be reformist. This article seeks to better historicize Jean-Jacques Rousseau's discussion of women's taste in Emile (1762).

Rousseau emile sophie