The Confessions of the Countess Merlin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Essential Adventure of Their Lives

This chapter explores the profound influence that Rousseau exerted among women writers in Latin America and argues that Mes douze premiéres années and Souvenirs et Memoires de Madame La Comtesse Merlin (1831, 1836) by the Franco-Cuban Countess Merlin constitute her own project to construct an autobiographical Female Self based upon memory and sentiment. As argued by Jean Starobinsky, the Self possesses an intuitive way of knowing itself through feelings and Rousseau’s enterprise is one of self-construction that spans many of his works. By comparing tropes present in both Rousseau and Merlin such as birth as the beginning of suffering, the brief paradisiacal childhood, the extreme romantic sensibility, autodidactic education and autobiography as justification, this study makes explicit Rousseau’s influence and Merlin’s appropriation of those same tropes.