American Audacity: Literary Essays North and South

Emerson at Age Two Hundred

Emerson at Age Two Hundred h Two-thirds of the way into Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1900), the rebellious heroine Edna Pontellier ‹nds herself alone in her mansion on Esplanade, her restrictive husband gone on a business trip and all the temptations of New Orleans beckoning at her door. Dressed only in her comfortable peignoir, she devours “a luscious tenderloin,” downs plenty of red wine, and adds a marron glacé for dessert. Then she wanders into her library to curl up with a book. Will she choose Zola’s Nana or some equally wayward fantasy by Maupassant or Gautier? Mais non! Edna—bold transgressor that she is—read “Emerson until she grew sleepy.” But why Emerson? Is Edna—on the verge of a ruinous affair that will eventually drive her to suicide—experiencing a moment of remorse, to be shored up by the edifying Sage of Concord? Or is the apostle of impulse (“I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim”) just the man to con‹rm her liberation from the suffocating constraints of marriage and motherhood ? Two hundred years after his birth in 1803, it remains unclear whether Emerson was the Prometheus of American literature or its Polonius. His status as fatherly advisor is at least secure. When Whitman was “simmering,” Emerson brought him “to a boil.” Thoreau’s ‹rst entry in his great journal records a primal push from Emerson: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’—so I make my ‹rst entry today.” Melville, Dickinson , Henry and William James—one sees the patriarch’s provocation in all their works, the benevolent gift of “courage of treatment ” (what Emerson most admired in Whitman’s extravagant 11 performances). But lost in such celebrations of Emerson’s “legacy” is what to make of Emerson himself—his essays, his poems, his letters and journals—unencumbered by his brood. Does anyone, should anyone, read Emerson now, and if so, why and how? If Emerson seemed scandalous to many of his contemporaries —for walking away from the pulpit after refusing to administer communion; for preaching a secular religion of self-reliance against all calls for social conformity; for dismissing formal education as an impediment to true learning (“Books are for the scholar’s idle times”)—the scandals that now dog his name have a late twentieth-century ›avor. Today Emerson stands accused of going slow on abolition, responding in lukewarm fashion to the death of his young son (“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing ”), writing tame poetry and muddled philosophy, and preaching a creed of self-reliance indistinguishable from American capitalism . If Emerson is the founding white male of American national literature, our younger scholars seem to think, then chipping away at his reputation strikes a blow at the foundation of American national identity. In their different and complementary ways, two recent books on Emerson—timed to coincide with his bicentennial—seek to restore the ‹rebrand, and liberate the liberator. Kenneth Sacks’s subtle and ‹ne-meshed Understanding Emerson examines the circumstances in which Emerson’s ‹rst major public statement, his 1837 Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard—popularly known as “The American Scholar”—took shape. Sacks, a historian at Brown University, shows how complicated the occasion was, and how easy it would have been, with a patriotic and ›attering performance , for Emerson to ful‹ll the expectations of his audience and alma mater. Instead, Emerson heeded the hopes of young friends like Thoreau, and deliberately insulted almost everyone in the audience, criticizing the drill-based education on offer at Harvard and making a plea for the “self-trust” that he would later reformulate as self-reliance. “Breaking with the materialism in which he was raised,” Sacks writes, “Emerson proposed an extreme vision of the intellectual who transcends all convention, including the institutions of one’s own country, to speak the truth 12 that emerges from within.” Sacks gives a thrilling sense of what a thin-ice performance it was, and why Emerson was not asked back to Harvard for thirty years. The idea of the scholar as necessarily lonely and embattled became a watchword for Emerson. “To be great,” he came to believe, “is to be misunderstood.” Emerson as embattled thinker is also central to Lawrence Buell’s wide-ranging portrait, Emerson, which opens with a chapter on Emerson as “public intellectual”—“the ‹rst ‹gure in U.S. history to achieve international standing and in›uence as a speaker and writer...