Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism and politics, in a shifting variety of formulations and iterations, continued to be a key issue for the field in 2008, as best represented in John Michael's astute essay on Emerson, liberalism, and justice and in Richard J. Schneider's well-informed study of Thoreau and 19th-century ethnography. Perception of Transcendentalism as a literary movement seems to be ebbing, as greater emphasis is placed on Transcendentalist political theory and practice and on Emerson's place in the history of philosophy. Several important biographical studies appeared this year, including William Rossi's analysis of the problematics of the Emerson-Thoreau friendship, Robert D. Richardson's account of Emerson as an impassioned "writer," Joel Myerson's sourcebook on Fuller's early reputation, and Meg McGavran Murray's psychologically oriented Fuller biography. While some readers of this chapter may still consider the term minor Transcendentalist redundant, Thomas Went-worth Higginson has suddenly become a "major" minor Transcendentalist, receiving serious reconsideration in Brenda Wineapple's narrative of his friendship with Emily Dickinson, and playing an important role in Leslie Butler's important study of transatlantic Victorian reform.

i Emerson

a. Emerson, Friendship, and Self-Culture

Always the property of English departments, Emerson has been steadily rehabilitated as a "philosopher" over the past two decades. The work of Stanley Cavell has played a major role in this shift, as has the revival of interest in American pragmatism, opening links between Emerson and William James. This growing philosophical interest in Emerson is reflected in John Lysaker's significant study Emerson and Self-Culture (Indiana). As his initial chapter, "Taking Emerson Personally," suggests, Lysaker is interested in the living of Emerson's ethic of self-culture in the modern world. He approaches Emerson's texts as "their secret addressee," commenting on their ability to reinvigorate language and make abstract concepts come to life in ordinary experience. The "self" to be cultivated, Lysaker argues, is a "relational self," one that "neither stands nor proceeds alone, but only with the support of others." Lysaker is less sanguine about compensatory justice than Emerson, resisting the notion that "final causes persist in a world of metamorphosis," and he is also wary of the theological underpinnings of Emerson's thought, invoking Nietzsche's recognition of the "collapse of theistically grounded orders of meaning" as an alternative to Emerson's "ameliorative theodicy." He embraces, that is to say, those energies in Emerson that are inclined to modernity over those rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, and values Emerson's "flirtation with a Satanic lineage" for its intense and unwavering affirmation of individual integrity. Such individual integrity is not isolating, Lysaker believes, but is instead crucial to Emerson's pursuit of self-culture through friendship, and thus of high importance to his modern relevance and significance. Friendship requires, and nurtures, "patience, alertness, sincerity, humility, tenderness, and worship," virtues that keep the metamorphic self alive and resistant to "what is usual and settled." In this sense "friendship and self-culture converge," Lysaker contends, "meeting in what is really a double consciousness."

Lysaker's stress on self-culture and friendship reinforces from a philosophical perspective the biographical importance of the complicated network of friendships among the Concord group. William Rossi's illuminating description of the dynamics of the Emerson-Thoreau friendship in "Performing Loss, Elegy, and Transcendental Friendship" (NEQ 81: 252–77) calls attention to Thoreau's letter of consolation to Emerson on the loss of his son, written while Thoreau himself was in mourning over the loss of his brother. Seeing Thoreau's letter as a response to Emerson's recently published "Friendship," Rossi explains how Thoreau attempts to embrace Emerson's unattainable ideal of pure friendship while also encoding in the letter his longing for a deeply personal "reciprocal intimacy" with Emerson. That "Friendship" has become a key text in the Emerson canon is further confirmed by Thomas Constantinesco's analysis of the jarringly paradoxical tensions in the Transcendentalist theory of friendship, "Discordant Correspondence in Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Friendship'" (NEQ 81: 218–51). Constantinesco describes Emerson's view of friendship as a condition "whose perfection lies in...