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
Dead Poets…back to 1989
Sounding a barbaric YAWP:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLFQY
bjYsso&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?

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))
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).
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!

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).

“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/ros
ecrans.html
A theology of “self-culture”: in his address on selfculture, 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."
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).
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
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).

Readerly Self-Reliance

How would Emerson have wanted to be
read? What might it mean to avoid
“historicizing” his work?
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

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)
Thoreau’s (and Emerson’s) legacy
and influence
See Charlotte Forton and Caroline Dall on AfricanAmerican regimens led by T.W. Higginson (and Robert
Gould Shaw) during the Civil War (Buell 531, 552)
 Non-violent resistance: “Whether expressed at a sitin 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”?

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)

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)

Implications for Your Writing



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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)
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)