This is my peer response to Jenny’s post.

I agree with Jenny on how Joseph Zobel’s novel, Black Shack Alley, challenges Rousseau’s idea of education for children age five to twelve. Rousseau says should not be subjected to a cruel education at such a young age. They should be able to live their childhood happily and freely. Rousseau says a child’s education is tormented if, “the age of harmless mirth is spent in tears, punishments, threats, and slavery” (Rousseau 4).

In the novel, Black Shack Alley, Jose Hassam’s childhood was tormented. According to Rousseau, a child should not be living in threats while still young. However Jose felt terrified and threatened each time he was in Mme Leonce’s house, “Mme Leonce and her always invisible husband seemed to me capable of doing me any possible evil… I was constantly afraid of Mme Leonce whom, without wishing it, I detested because of the unending humiliation I underwent at her house” (Zobel 69). The time Jose spent at Mme Leonce’s house also “preventing me from meeting Raphael, was the most mortifying of all” (Zobel 69). Jose felt that this torture was never going to end.

Jose and his friends childhood was full of punishments. Mam’zelle Fanny would whip them whenever they could not recite or answer her questions. Jose was punished by Mam’zelle Fanny:  “tapping it out on my shoulders with her whip” (Zobel 94). No one could escape these punishments of Mam’zelle Fanny. Jose’s friend JoJo especially lived a childhood that was full of unhappy moments. JoJo lived his childhood in fear and tears. JoJo was punished for crying at home and whipped as a punishment in school. JoJo was often threatened by his stepmother. Overall, Jose’s and his friends childhood was filled with bitterness which contradicts Rousseau’s idea of how a child should be raised at a young age.