Rousseau had stated, “Use force with children and reasoning with men; this is the natural order; the wise man needs no laws” (Rousseau 8), which I think means that when you want children to do something or to stop doing something you can forcefully control them, but you have to talk it out with a man. It means that when you want children to listen to you, you can scream at them, punish them or hit them to make them obey you, but with a man you can’t do that because a man is grown up and you have to explain to them and answer the “WHY” of the situation. This can be seen in A Lesson Before Dying when Miss Emma says, “I want the teacher visit my boy. I want the teacher make him know he’s not a hog, he’s a man. I want him know that ’fore he go to that chair, Mr. Henri” (Gaines 18), from this I think she’s treating him like a child by saying ‘make him know’ which is aggressive and forceful, instead if she really wants Jefferson to die a ‘man’ then she should let the teacher explain it to him and reason it out with him rather than demand him. Through Rousseau’s idea Miss Emma is basically treating Jefferson as a child rather than a man which she wants him to be before he is executed.
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This post is interesting. What I like is how you’re really have a specific scope. You’re looking at a specific moment in ALBD and thinking about it through the lens of a specific moment in Rousseau. I might even use this post as an example in my next class if you don’t mind.
One thought I had: I think that when Rousseau says you can use force over children he doesn’t necessarily mean you ought to be a tyrant, but he is saying that the child is dependent on you physically. If a young child refuses to come to you, you can go pick up the child and put them in the place you want them to be into. You can’t do that with a fully grown man. I don’t know if he is saying that you should slap the child to get in place (you can I suppose, but I don’t think he is saying you should). Indeed you can rule a grown man by force too (with a gun or a whip or just being bigger than him), but he won’t obey when any of that force lets up.
I am however interested in your honing in on the idea that Miss Emma wants to “make” Jefferson a man and she wants to “make” him do something. These are two different uses of the word “make,” and indeed they seem contradicting in this scenario as you point out. I wonder if the contradiction might ask us to consider what it means to “make” a person. Can you “make” a man? I don’t mean “make” a man do something, but can you even “make” a man? These questions are very abstract I know, but your post has got me thinking!