Transcendentalism and Its Legacy

1. Transcendentalism and Its Legacy December 13, 2010 “What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.” Emerson

2. Dead Poets…back to 1989 • Sounding a barbaric YAWP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLFQYbjYsso&feature=related • “O Captain, my Captain” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8UL_9R_W-Y • How does the director (Peter Weir) seem to hope a viewer will receive these scenes?

3. The Transcendentalist Response to Puritanism • Jonathan Edwards sought the “images and shadows” of divine things in nature, but could not trust his discoveries because he knew man to be cut off from full communion with the created order because of his inherent depravity. But Emerson, having decided that man is unfallen (except as his sensibilities have been blunted by civilization), announced that there is no inherent separation between the mind and the thing, that in reality they leap to embrace each other (Perry Miller, “From Edwards to Emerson” in Errand into the Wilderness (1956))

4. A short-lived movement,an enduring institution • Transcendentalism never became a social code in the way that Puritanism did (it was not merely a religious creed or theology but a program for society; think “Protestant work ethic”) • One side of Puritan nature hungered for the excitement of finding delight and ecstasy in the doctrine of regeneration and providence—the other, for the ideal of social conformity, law and order, regulation and control (Miller 191-92).

5. Emily Dickinson, once more • Flashback to Al: Why is the speaker in Dickinson’s poem say “I am afraid to own a Body —/ I am afraid to own a Soul —/ Profound — precarious Property —/ Possession, not optional —… Does her reluctance scorn Walt Whitman’s brazenness in his proclamation in Song of Myself: “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul”— can the reader in any way see a virtual literary affront in these two pieces? • Flashback to Zoe: Dying! Dying in the night! Won't somebody bring the light So I can see which way to go Into the everlasting snow? And "Jesus"! Where is Jesus gone? They said that Jesus -- always came -- Perhaps he doesn't know the House -- This way, Jesus, Let him pass! Somebody run to the great gate And see if Dollie's coming! Wait! I hear her feet upon the stair! Death won't hurt -- now Dollie's here!

6. From Puritanism to Unitarianism • Unitarianism first flourishes alongside the capitalistic, practical interests of 18th century society: men are self-determining agents and not passive recipients of infinite power (Miller 199). • Linking the Protestant work ethic to capitalism: “I respect in a rich man the order of Providence.” -Mary Moody Emerson • The ideal of social control is institutionalized in Unitarianism. Dogmas are stripped away and the orthodox theology that teaches that God and nature are not one, that man is corrupt, dissolves. A path is laid for Emerson to celebrate the presence of God in the soul and in nature (Miller 196).

7. “Transcendentalism for a New Age” • A sermon, revisiting major Transcendentalist influences on the Unitarians, given by Jane Rosecrans, February 6, 2005, at the Unitarian Universalist Community Church in Glen Allen, VA: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/rosecrans.html • A theology of “self-culture”: in his address on self-culture, William Ellery Channing defined it by writing, "To cultivate any thing, be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make it grow. Growth, expansion is the end. He, therefore, who does what he can to unfold all his powers of capacities, especially his nobler ones, so as to become a well-proportioned, vigorous, excellent, happy being, practices self-culture."

8. Emerson as “anti-mentor” • “More than any other major writer, Emerson invites you to kill him off if you don’t find him useful. This makes him one of the most unusual authority figures in the history of western culture, the sage as anti-mentor. That in turn makes him a fascinating case study not only of iconoclasm toward pedagogical and cultural authority, but also of the challenges of bringing one’s practice into line with such a theory” (Buell 292).

9. An aesthetic of the suggestive fragment • Can we find examples of Emerson providing only “suggestive fragments” which his listeners must complete? How does he, as Buell observes, avoid “histrionics*..tr[ying] when lecturing not to obtrude his physical personhood”? (312) *theatrical performances

10. An Emersonian “Present” • “[F]irst among the ‘gifts’ he can give his readers [is] ‘the freedom to criticize our condition effectively” (Buell 325). • A loftier goal than nationalism: Emerson, in praising Milton, writes, “Better than any other he has discharged the office of every great man, namely, to raise the idea of Man in the minds of his contemporaries and of posterity” (qtd. in Buell 331).

11. Readerly Self-Reliance • How would Emerson have wanted to be read? What might it mean to avoid “historicizing” his work?

12. Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe • Hawthorne had a close personal relationship with many Transcendentalists, though mocked their impracticality (see The Blithedale Romance (1852)): “But it was impossible to dwell in [Emerson’s] vicinity, without inhaling, more or less, the mountain-atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness—new truth being as heady as new wine” (from Mosses on an Old Manse, in Buell 525). • Melville could not accept that human nature is good and the universe is benevolent (see The Confidence-Man (1857)) • Poe is not as anti-transcendental as Melville but depicts a much darker, psychological modern world of spirit than any of the Concord Transcendentalists

13. Thoreau’s (and Emerson’s) legacy and influence • Anti-materialism: “Man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone” (Walden). • An emphasis on non-conformity that will influence modernist poets like Stevens and Frost, and novelists like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner • Ecocriticism (mixed genre of interpretation that links writing about place with an understanding of the natural world and an emphasis on ecological awareness)

14. Thoreau’s (and Emerson’s) legacy and influence • See Charlotte Forton and Caroline Dall on African-American regimens led by T.W. Higginson (and Robert Gould Shaw) during the Civil War (Buell 531, 552) • Non-violent resistance: “Whether expressed at a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Montgomery, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, it is an outgrowth of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.” Martin Luther King, Jr. • For April: Where do we hear Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” in MLK’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”?

15. Thoreau’s legacy and influence • A “face-to-face” democracy: “How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace…” (CD 235) • Theresa: What does Evan Carton mean when he says, “ ‘Civil Disobedience’ exposes and undoes the psychological training that in one way or another we have all internalized?” (570)

16. Thoreau’s legacy and influence • “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” Sound familiar? Thoreau wrote this in his journal in 1851 (less than a year after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act). • The Walden Woods Project: http://www.walden.org/About_Us (Celebrity members include Sting, Annie Dillard, and Meryl Streep)

17. Implications for Your Writing • The emergence of the non-fiction essay as an American literary prose genre in the 19th century • “the fallacy of normative prose” • “Essay” derives from the French infinitive essayer, "to try" or "to attempt." In English essay first meant "a trial" or "an attempt”…it remains an alternative meaning. • Writing as experiment (taking account of ourselves, in a Thoreauvian sense)

18. Selections for further reading • Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard UP, 1995) • Dickenson, Donna. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Women’s Life (St. Martin’s, 1993) • Gradzins, Dean. American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2002) • Gura, Philip F. and Joel Myerson, eds. Critical Essays on American Transcendentalism (G.K. Hall, 1982) • Howe, Irving. The American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (Cambridge UP, 1986) • Lopez, Michael. Emerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century (Northern Illinois UP, 1996) • Reynolds, David. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (Knopf, 2005) • Richardson, Robert. Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley UP, 1986)