Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism, p. 3-24

On the eve of the Emerson Bicentennial, which promises an extensive reassessment of Emerson's legacy, the year 2002 brings several important scholarly works on Transcendentalism, most notably Dean Grodzins's biography of Theodore Parker and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis's edition of volume 8 of Thoreau's Journal, encompassing 1854, the year of the publication of Walden. Also deserving particular attention are Gregg D. Crane's important study of Emerson's articulation of the "higher law" theory in the antislavery debate and Caleb Crain's astute summation of Fuller's cultural significance.

i Emerson

a. Emerson and Politics

The political character of Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement has been the predominant critical concern in this field for several years, and critical discussion in 2002 is keyed to Emerson's antislavery and racial politics. By returning to Emerson's development of a "higher law" theory of jurisprudence in the early 1850s, Gregg D. Crane in Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge) has provided a persuasive new assessment of Emerson's political identity and influence. Crane describes Emerson and Frederick Douglass as proponents of a "cosmopolitan constitutionalism" based on a conception of "higher law" as less a static code than "an ongoing attempt to put moral inspiration into political dialogue and legal practice." Crane reconstructs the legal research that Emerson undertook to support William Seward's use of the term "higher law" as a counter to constitutional defenses of the legality of slavery, noting the profound impact of Ainsworth Rand Spovord's The Higher Law Tried by Reason and Authority (1851). Through this research Emerson developed "a visionary and inventive approach to the Constitution" in which legal principles were understood to be "inherited from the past but not circumscribed by history or race, a fluid, universal political poetic in which diverse peoples could articulate new visions of justice." His theory of law, like his theory of literature, affirmed the need for continual revision, but a revision that remained grounded in ethical principle. "Justice and its component concepts, such as freedom, equality, and the rule of law, are permanent, though we revise our concrete instantiations of these concepts all the time." Emerson's theory informed his own engagement with antislavery and also provided important support for Moorfield Storey's progressive legal work on behalf of civil rights. I strongly recommend Crane's illuminating study, which should become a touchstone for future assessments of Emerson's political influence.

A different assessment of Emerson's treatment of the politics of race is offered by Carolyn Sorisio in chapter 4 (pp. 104-42) of her Fleshing Out America (see also the discussion below under Fuller). While the general critical consensus has been that Emerson's political importance grew as his work became less idealistic and more engaged with antislavery, Sorisio believes instead that Emerson's early understanding of "all human beings as creations and representations of the same source" was undermined by his later treatment of gender and race, important corporeal aspects of experience. In essays such as "Character" (1844) and "Manners" Emerson "conflates calls for women's rights with notions of an essential female nature," thus undermining his principle of the unity of humankind. Such essays, when compared with Fuller's Woman, show him "not overly concerned about, or sensitive to, the particulars of women's embodied oppression." Emerson's racial politics are similarly tarnished by his recourse to racial consciousness. Although Emerson made it clear that the possibility of racial amalgamation undercut the leading racial theories of his day, Sorisio points out that his antislavery writings coincide with his specification of America as a Saxon nation in English Traits and other works. "If Emerson sang the praises of racial mixing," Sorisio writes, "he did so believing that the superior race would control the outcome of the mixture." In this sense, the Civil War promised not only the "freeing of the slaves" but "a new white American race" in which "the place of the emancipated slave" is "uncertain."

Peter S. Field traces Emerson's development as a social thinker and public intellectual in Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic...