Based on the love story of a young woman, Elo Si Qi, and her teacher, Aboul, in the12nd century, the novel wrote the love tragedy of a young French couple, Julie and Saint-Proud, in the18th century.
St. Puler is a civilian intellectual, who works as a tutor in a noble family and falls in love with his student, Miss Julie. Julie's father's class prejudice is very deep, and Julie is not allowed to marry St. Pule, just because this young man is not of noble birth. St. Puller was forced to leave, and Julie was forced to marry Fermat, a nobleman. After the marriage, she confessed to her husband her past love with St. Puler. Fulma expressed her trust and took St. Puler home and treated her as a guest. Julie and St. Puler met each other morning and night, and both of them suppressed their inner feelings and felt very painful. Finally, Julie died of a serious illness. Before her death, she once again revealed her feelings for St. Puler and asked him to educate her son.
Rousseau devoted all his sympathy to this love tragedy. He makes the love between young people sincere, touching and reasonable. In Rousseau's view, "the combination of sincere love is the purest of all combinations." However, the feudal hierarchy prevented the young couple from combining and became the source of their misfortune.
Here, from the standpoint of bourgeois humanitarianism, Rousseau put forward the ideal of marriage based on true natural feelings and the opposition of feudal marriage based on class prejudice, and protested feudal hierarchical marriage through this tragic love story.
In Rousseau's works, Saint-Puler is an intellectual with excellent character and knowledge. As far as his actual conditions are concerned, he is much better than the people around him. According to Rousseau's human rights principle, he "fully deserves Julie's love." However, their love is not recognized by society. That society only recognizes "aristocratic descent" and aristocratic titles. Julie's father is really a feudal defender. He doesn't measure a person's value from actual virtue and political integrity at all. Therefore, he stubbornly opposed his daughter's marriage to a commoner, St. Pule, and forced her to marry her noble friend. From this, Rousseau raised a question, what is the real value of aristocratic titles? He answered in the 62nd letter in the first volume of the novel. In this famous chapter, Sir Edward, who represents the enlightenment thought, had a heated argument with Julie's father, and Rousseau completely denied the whole aristocratic class through the mouth of the characters:
Noble, this is just a harmful privilege of a country. What's so respectable about your noble title? What contribution has your aristocratic class made to the glory of the motherland and the happiness of mankind! You are sworn enemies of law and freedom. Any country with a prominent aristocratic class has nothing but autocratic violence and oppression of the people.
The novel also criticizes the customs and fashions of the aristocratic upper class through what Saint-Puler saw and heard in Paris, which is in sharp contrast with the novel's praise of the simple thoughts, feelings and moral customs of the people in Laishan, China, and shows Rousseau's consistent thought of denying the noble class civilization and praising the "natural state" of mankind, so that the novel's criticism of reality is not limited to narrow love issues, but has a wider social content.
The New Ai Luo Si Qi is a representative work for freedom of love during the bourgeois anti-feudal struggle. Its two protagonists have some anti-feudal spirit. St. Puler does not recognize feudal morality, but regards free love as a basic human right, and constantly proves to Julie that their love itself has "the character of virtue"
Julie's thoughts are more bound by class status, so there are more contradictions in her heart: love and reputation, family values, feudal ethics and so on. But after a fierce struggle, she finally accepted the love of St. Puler. When her tyrannical and rude father forced her to marry her friends, she complained indignantly to the feudal parents: "My father betrayed me. He regarded his daughter as a commodity and a slave, a savage father and an inhuman father!
But the whole novel is based on the idea of bourgeois personality liberation, so the hero's resistance to feudal society is very limited. At first, they were afraid to have an open relationship. When the feudal parents forced them, although they provided them with material conditions to live in the United States, they did not have the courage to run away from home through fierce resistance to feudal society. Later, Julie became a "good wife and mother" of the aristocratic family, and suppressed her deep feelings with religious thoughts. St. Puler also acted according to the ethical code. In short, their behavior basically did not exceed the norms of feudal morality. They are not rebels of feudal society, but victims of feudal society, which also reflects that the author can't see the future of this kind of love ideologically.
The story of the novel unfolds in the correspondence of the characters, and the plot progresses slowly. The form of epistolary enables the author to let the hero pour out his feelings in large quantities, and describe in detail and fully render all kinds of pains, grievances, contradictions, disappointments and worries in the situation where there is no freedom, oppression and bondage in love. In addition, the protagonist's inaction and their love ending in tragedy make the whole work sentimental. The author's description of natural scenery such as Laishan, Lemmon Lake and Clarence County left some fresh and beautiful chapters for the novel.