Jean-Jacques Rousseau Condemns Tight Lacing in 'Émile'
Poet involved
What happened
In his landmark educational treatise Émile, ou De l'éducation, published in Paris in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau devoted considerable space to condemning the practice of tight lacing and swaddling infants and children, arguing that constraining the natural body was physically harmful and morally corrupting. His arguments extended to women's corsetry as a form of unnatural distortion at odds with his Romantic vision of nature and authenticity. The book was both celebrated and banned, and its ideas about bodily freedom seeded the later Romantic movement.
Literary impact
Rousseau's critique of the corset became foundational for Romantic poets who celebrated the natural body and rejected aristocratic artifice. William Blake, who despised 'mind-forged manacles,' drew on Rousseau's critique of constraint. Wordsworth and Coleridge's preference for natural diction over the 'artificial' language of Augustan verse was partly rooted in the same Rousseauean philosophy that condemned tight lacing as a violation of nature.
Source: Wikipedia
