world depicted in the Confessions of Jean=Jacques Rousseau was more real because the book is an account of a real man's life, but it is still the ability of the writer to process and reshape the material of that life into a narrative which communicates with others that makes the work valuable. Rousseau has deliberately written a book that differs in tone from his other writings and that was written not for his contemporaries but to ingratiate himself to future generations. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a non-dramatic, non-fictional view of male and female roles in the eighteenth century. The subject of this work is the author himself, standing as an example of a man of his time. The women described by the writer are all in traditional female social roles of mother, lover, and nurse. He sees the women--and most of the men--in h
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