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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [132], (1) Lines: 0 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal P PgEnds: [132], (1) 14 William E. Cain Howe on Emerson: The Politics of Literary Criticism William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English and American Studies at Wellesley College, where he teaches courses in American literature, American studies, Shakespeare, and composition. Cain received his B.A. degree, summa cum laude, in 1974 from Tufts University and both the M.A. (1976) and the Ph.D. (1978) from Johns Hopkins University. He became a member of the Wellesley faculty in 1978 and has taught in the American studies program as well as in the English department. The author ofThe Crisis in Criticism (1984) and F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (1988), Cain has edited many books, including William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (1995), The Blithedale Romance: A Cultural and Critical Edition (1996), and A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (2000). He is also the author of a study of American literary criticism, included in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 5, 1900–1950 (2003). Cain met and began to exchange letters with Irving Howe in the late 1980s. His interview with Howe appears in American Literary History 1, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 554–64. Is Emerson to blame? In two important books, Socialism and America (1985) andThe American Newness: Culture and Politics in the Age of Emerson (1986), Irving Howe suggests that the answer is “yes”: to Emerson must be assigned the burden of responsibility for the failure of socialism—or even for a socialist movement—to establish itself in the United States. Howe makes his case with intelligence and insight and with an authority earned from decades of keen reflection and literary and political experience. But it is Howe on Emerson 133 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [133], (2) Lines: 44 to ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [133], (2) puzzling that Howe should identify Emerson as the figure whose work has prevented the United States from achieving a lot or a little socialism, as though he has led Americans astray from a path they might otherwise have taken. As much as I admire Howe, and as much as I have learned from him, in my view to say this about Emerson amounts to failing to read this writer with full attentiveness: it is to equate Emerson with a position that his work itself, his actual writing, does not sustain. In Socialism in America, with a backward glance toward Werner Sombart ’s Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906), Howe surveys the “objective” factors that historians have identified to explain the lack of success of socialism in this country: the absence of a feudal past; the prosperity enjoyed by America’s workers—or at least, Howe adds, the perception that workers here benefit from a higher standard of living and greater social mobility; the availability of land; the complex organizational challenges posed by immigration (i.e., many languages and diverse traditions); and the American political system and the two-party centrism that it has fostered . But in Howe’s judgment the compelling explanation is cultural, not political or economic or sociological, and to characterize it Howe employs the term Emersonianism. For Howe, Emersonianism is the abiding American myth, the ideology that saturates—that is—the culture. “What I mean to suggest,” he says, “is that Emerson, in a restatement of an old Christian heresy, raised the I to semidivine status, thereby providing a religious sanction for the American cult of individualism. Traditional Christianity had seen man as a being like a God, but now he was to be seen as one sharing, through osmosis with the oversoul, directly in the substance of divinity.” “This provided,” Howe continues, a new vision of man for a culture proposing to define itself as his new home—provided that vision by insisting that man be regarded as a selfcreating and self-sufficient being ful...

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