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4 SAXONS AND SLAVERY Corporeal Challenges to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Republic of the Spirit That is morning, to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of this sickly body, and to become as large as nature.—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Literary Ethics" In the spring of 1832, the twenty-eight-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson took his daily walk to visit the grave of his first wife, Ellen. Known for her beauty and intelligence, she had died more than a year earlier after a prolonged case of tuberculosis. Her death devastated Emerson. That day he went beyond communing "with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he opened the coffin/7 The gesture , one ofEmerson's recent biographers believes, "was essential Emerson. He had to see for himself." Later, in 1857, after he had remarried, fathered a family, and established a considerable professional reputation, Emerson would repeat this act for his first son, Waldo,whose death at the ageoffive had left him, once again, deeply distraught. Fifteen years after Waldo's death, when the coffin of his son was moved, Emerson had it opened to gazeupon the remains ofhis boy. As Robert D. Richardson notes, "[virtually all of Emerson's creative life was lived in the first twenty-five years between those glimpses not simply of death but of his dead."1 Although dramatic, these episodes are not atypical for Emerson, whose life was interrupted by moments of suffering, periods when his body or the bodiesof those he loved seemed to frustrate the soul's potential.2 When he was a student and early in his career, Emerson was often plagued by physical ailments that blocked his ability to work. As David Leverenz notes, "Emerson's body continually betrayed him, with eye diseases, diarrhea, pain, and simple awkwardness" and, as a result, "Emerson lumped his body together with everything else that wasn't his mind. It was his 'NOT ME.' His body took him sprawling into the world, and the world continuously made him feel inadequate, foolish, vulnerable, S A X O N S AND SLAVERY IO5 and open to attack/'3 No wonder, then, that when Emerson's brother Charles died in 1836, Emerson and Charles's fiance, Elizabeth Hoar, struggled to separate "the best of Charles—what he stood for, the meaning of his life—from the actual physical person."4 The body's mortality and susceptibility were problematic to Emerson on a personal level, a fact that probably influenced his tendency to divorce corporeality from identity, especially in Nature and his early essays.5 Although Emerson certainly experienced corporeal pleasure as well as pain, he often distrusted corporeality as a site of identity or knowledge and at times tried to transcend theoretically the embodied state. It seems understandable , for example, that after having peered at the rotting remains of the wife he had loved sensually and passionately, Emerson could more quickly endorse a philosophy in Nature that labeled the body "Not Me."6 The first section of this chapter argues that Emerson's philosophical insistence on transcendence in his early essays necessitated a subordination ofcorporeality to spirituality and therefore was often aligned with an implicit or explicit assumption of the basic unity of humankind, what we could call a republic of the spirit. When this assumption is juxtaposed to the divisive science ofrace that came to fruition in the 18305 and 18405, it has radical political implications. However, Emerson's romantic philosophy is not without contradictions . The "metaphysical selfhood" that Emerson proposes in his essays written during the 18405 and 18505 relies upon a dynamic that often traps women and "other" races in an embodied identity. As the second section of this chapter argues, Emerson was reluctant to apply his radical theory ofidentity to women, often portraying them as incapable of surmounting their embodied status. In the chapter's final section, I argue that this reluctance may stem from Emerson's anxiety over the position ofAnglo-Saxonmen in antebellum America. When we juxtapose Emerson's travel book English Traits (1856) with his antislavery lectures, we see how Emerson's definition of national identity endorses stereotypical conceptions of Anglo-Saxon masculinity and derives, in part, from his fear of becoming a "parlor soldier." In effect, his call for a new manhood was a racialized call for a Saxon brotherhood, a move that aligns him with the dominant culture's construction of a white national identity in the 18505. The past several years of Emersonian scholarship evidence an...

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