Crises of Relationship: Developing Relational Models for the Study of the American Renaissance

Grises of Relationship: Developing Relational Models for the Study of the American Renaissance JEFFREY STEELE If studies of the American Renaissance have been haunted, until very recently, by the pervasive presence of an "Emerson-ghost," signs of that haunting persist in the critical replication of Emerson's possessive investment in individualism. Mystifying the social and ideological origins of the self, Emerson—described by Harold Bloom as our "brave ghostly father" '—repressed the necessities of life in favor of his vision of liberatory power. But perhaps the greatest blind spot in Emerson's own theory of selfhood was the occluded recognition that disseminating his paradigm of personal independence depended on readers and listeners imitating the example of his "exemplary" persona, which was predicated upon the assumption that "the individual can speak for the universal" and, hence, for all others .2 By focusing on moments of solitary insight in his writing, Emerson mystified the intersubjective aspects of the rhetorical relationship between his authoritative persona and members of his audience. According to Joyce Warren, similar omissions have characterized canonical American literature, which has, "for the most part, focused on the individual," especially a "universalized" individual who is "white and male." Reading beyond Emerson, we need to reconstruct what disappears in the Emersonian rhetorical model—"a community of interpersonal relationships" that Warren locates at the center of nineESQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS I 2003 33 Fanny Fern, from o carte de visite photograph-, Frederick Dougloss, from the frontispiece to Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass (Philadelphia: George W.Jacobs, ISO1/); Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1859, daguerreotype by JohnA. Whipple, from the frontispiece to The Conduct of Life, vo/. 6 o/"The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press, 1904); and Margaret Fuller in 1846, from the frontispiece to Thomas WentworÃ-h Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, American Men of Letters (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884)Fern portrait courtesy of the New-York Historical Society. CRISES OF RELATIONSHIP teenth-century American women's writing and that also plays a central role in African American texts. 3 As a means of rethinking the American Renaissance, it is important to theorize the interpersonal and relational structures that dropped beneath the horizon of the Emersonian worldview. In recent years, some of the most ambitious attempts to destabilize such individualistic paradigms of identity have appeared in the writings of René Girard and Jean-Michel Oughourlian, who examine what they term "mimetic desire." According to Oughourlian, self-awareness emerges out of intersubjective networks of imitation—not out of individual moments of perception. In these terms, the imitative position of Emerson's reader (who shapes his or her awareness to Emerson's exemplary model) is a more accurate representation of psychological reality than Emerson's conception of selfreliance , which posits as a founding premise a move beyond social influence and dependence. To "suppose that psychological movement originates within the interior of a 'monadic' subject," Oughourlian argues, "is a mythical illusion," a striking form of the méconnaissance or misunderstanding that suppresses the social origins of the self.4 In contrast to Emerson, contemporaries such as Frederick Douglass and Margaret Fuller attended to the relational structures shaping the self, as they analyzed dysfunctional power relationships that could pinion one in positions of "idolatry" or enforced passivity. For example, Douglass used a relational model of analysis when he discovered in his changing relationship to William Lloyd Garrison the dangers of being a "hero worshiper."5 In similar terms, Fuller resisted the imperial spectacle of white male power by exposing the dangers of an "idolatry " that maintains and mystifies structures of white male privilege . Critiquing the hero worship celebrated by Emerson among others, she wrote of the sense of claustrophobia that gathers when a "great mind has overshadowed us, taken away our breath, paralyzed our self-esteem by its easy mastery."6 It likely never occurred to either writer (as it did to Emerson) that a person could develop his or her character through the frictionless access of an inner power that might move the self almost effortlessly beyond the realm of social demand. The 35 JEFFREY STEELE material conditions of slavery and of women's lives made such triumphant idealism a...