Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

I commented last year on the increasing interest in Transcendentalism and the women’s movement. That momentum was certainly sustained this year, led by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis’s study of Concord’s antislavery women; T. Gregory Garvey’s book on the religious grounding of antebellum reform, in which both women reformers and liberal religion play leading roles; and a collection of new essays on the Peabody sisters. An ongoing stream of essays and book chapters on Fuller continues to highlight her place as a major cultural figure, and Fuller also plays a key role, with Emerson and Thoreau, in Wai Chee Dimock’s call for a reading of American literature that is more capacious both geographically and chronologically. It was an important year for scholarship on Emerson and Thoreau as well, highlighted by Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson’s group biography of the Emerson brothers, the publication of the papers from the memorable Emerson Bicentennial Conference at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and important new work on Thoreau’s aesthetics and on his place in antebellum United States culture.

i Emerson

a. Emerson Studies: An Overview

Emerson Bicentennial Essays (Mass. Historical Soc.), ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, contains 17 new essays, discussed individually in the following pages, on Emerson’s philosophy, historical context, reception, and influence. As further testimony to the productivity of the Emerson Bicentennial year, Barry Tharaud’s Emerson issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose (see AmLS 2003, pp. 3–31) has been reissued as Ralph Waldo Emerson: Bicentenary Appraisals (WVT) with a preface by Lawrence Buell (pp. ix–xi). Buell suggests six trend-lines for future Emerson studies: (1) “the ‘social’ or ‘political’ dimension of his thought,” (2) varied readings of “the ideological character of his thought,” (3) his “claims to philosophic interest,” (4) his links to science, (5) his transnational orientation, and (6) continuing “biographical and critical and theoretical work along more familiarly established lines.” Buell also offers his own program for continuing study in “Saving Emerson for Posterity” (Emerson Bicentennial Essays, pp. 33–47), warning against “unduly restrictive” tendencies of linking Emerson to America or other “particular subnational allegiances.” The “restlessness” of Emerson’s “mosaic” prose suggests a thinker less engaged by historical particularities than oriented toward a “moral universalism.” His theory of “self-reliance,” Buell notes, has important affinities with “modern human rights discourse.” Phyllis Cole’s “Emerson at 200” (RALS 30: 316–30) is also a valuable overview. Recent recognition of Emerson’s later works, Cole writes, has led to explorations of the Jamesian and Nietzschean contexts of his growing philosophical identity, to new attention to his ongoing interest in science, and to a wider appreciation of the depth of his engagement in social issues. “As yet there is neither a full study of Emerson and gender nor one on Emerson in relation to women,” Cole observes, imperatives for future Emerson studies. Essays by Cole and Todd Richardson on Emerson and the women’s movement (see below) take important steps in that direction. The record of Emerson criticism is preserved in the bibliographical work of Joel Myerson, who has now prepared Supplement to Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Descriptive Bibliography (Pittsburgh, 2005), updating his comprehensive 1982 Bibliography (see AmLS 1982, pp. 3–4) with new and newly located titles, editions, and issues.

b. Biography: The Emerson Brothers

Emerson’s reputation as an “individualist” still persists in some quarters, but recent studies of his family history and his political activity have certainly undermined it. Such a view will indeed be hard to sustain in light of Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson’s The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (Oxford). “Only as extensions of each other, the Emerson brothers could think of themselves as whole,” Bosco and Myerson write, presenting a compelling portrait of the bonds that held Waldo Emerson and his brothers William, Edward, and Charles closely together into early manhood. Based on an extensive family correspondence, The Emerson Brothers delineates the potent legacy, and the crushing burden, of Emerson family history and dynamics, a narrative in which Waldo plays an important role yet is overshadowed by...