The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [51]
AN OUTLANDISH CUSTOM
In Canton, China, in 1769, memoirist William Hickey wrote of an old Chinese man who “regularly every morning between six and seven o’clock used a cold bath, in which after remaining near an hour, he rolled himself in a loose gown and lay down upon a couch, where the men I saw shampooed him. This is a prevalent custom in China, as well as every part of India… Many Europeans [living in the East] are extremely fond of it.”
Rousseau’s other intimate habits were not particularly delicate. When a urinary complaint made it necessary to void frequently and urgently, he wrote to a friend about his difficulties. When in public, he had to wait to excuse himself until some fine lady stopped talking. Then, after he had repaired to a staircase, hoping to relieve himself there, as was customary in both France and Italy at the time, he would find more ladies. Finally, he would seek out a courtyard, which would turn out to be full of maids and teasing lackeys. “I do not find a single wall or wretched little corner that is suitable for my purpose,” he complained. “In short, I can urinate only in full view of everybody and on some noble white-stockinged leg.”
“Everyone has their own rule for baths: some take one every eight days, others every ten, others once a month, and many every year for eight or ten days in succession, when the weather is most suitable.”
—M. Dejean, Traité des odeurs, 1777
Although Rousseau wrote little that was specific about cleanliness, he commended it warmly when he encountered it and deplored its absence. Again and again in The Confessions, he praises the “charming cleanliness” of a house or a person. Embarrassed about his taste for young ladies as opposed to the daughters of the poor, he admits that their personal cleanliness and delicacy are powerful attractions. Rousseau, who grew up in Geneva, never overcame his first impression of Paris’s “filthy and stinking little streets” and its “air of dirtiness.” For him, cleanliness was part and parcel of the purity and naturalness he associated with the countryside. (Those more intimately acquainted with an eighteenth-century farm than Rousseau ever was might have challenged his image of the clean rural life.)
His most extended discussion of cleanliness comes in the early pages of Emile. Praising Thetis, who plunged her son in the waters of the Styx so that he would become invulnerable, Rousseau urges the same course—symbolically and literally—on modern parents. Follow nature, he commands, who hardens children by all sorts of troubles. Rather than bathing the newborn in warm water with a little wine, as was the French practice, one should return the child gradually to his natural strength.
Wash your children often, their dirty ways show the need of this. If they are only wiped their skin is injured; but as they grow stronger gradually reduce the heat of the water, till at last you bathe them winter and summer in cold, even in ice-cold water. To avoid risk this change must be slow, gradual, and imperceptible, so you may use the thermometer for exact measurements.
This habit of the bath, once established, should never be broken off, it must be kept up all through life. I value it not only on grounds of cleanliness and present health, but also as a wholesome means of making the muscles supple, and accustoming them to bear without risk or effort extremes of heat and cold.
There is no need for doctors, Rousseau insists: “Hygiene is the only useful part of medicine, and hygiene is rather a virtue than a science.”
When Emile grows up and chooses a partner, Sophy, cleanliness is one of her chief virtues. What some might consider over—fastidious—Sophy dislikes cooking because “things are never clean enough for her” and gardening because she imagines the manure heap smells disagreeable—Rousseau sees as a sign of her natural refinement. Sophy learned hygiene at her mother’s knee:
According to her, cleanliness is one of the most necessary of a woman’s duties, a special duty, of the