The Old and the New: Double Consciousness and the Literature of Slavery

The Old and the New: Double Consciousness and the Literature of Slavery MAURICE S. LEE A noted irony of Emerson's legacy is that the iconoclast who bucked against the burdens of literary history would himself become a formidable figure in the American canon. The irony is somewhat lessened when Emerson tempers his urge to unsettle , when even as provocative a manifesto as "The American Scholar" (1837) suggests that any fresh literary start must be also a "re-commencement." For Emerson, "the age of Revolution " does not simply break free ofthe past but rather offers a moment "when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared."1 Reexamining the American Renaissance provides a similar opportunity to juxtapose and combine the critical narratives that make up literary history. The possibilities of a more inclusive, more synergistic American Renaissance comprise the subject of this essay, which traces a dualism in the field and suggests that focusing on the slavery crisis admits the potential for comparison not only between old and new canons but between old and new methodologies. A problem ofthe American Renaissance is the problem of "double consciousness"—not exactly W. E. B. Du Bois's Hegelian concept of "two warring ideals," but rather Emerson's struggle with the disjunction between what, in "The Transcendentalist " (1841—42), he calls "materialist" and "idealist" ways of being in the world.2 Emerson's loose usage of such terms is, ESQ I Ii 49 I 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 95 MAURICE S. LEE to quote Lawrence Buell, "cavalier"; and his notion of double consciousness is capacious enough to encompass a host of dualisms .3 "The Transcendentalist" begins with a basic division between Lockean empiricism and Kantian subjectivity. But keeping in mind Bruce Kuklick's claim that nineteenthcentury American philosophy is dominated by "idealism" (insofar as it largely holds that "existence is essentially mental"), Emerson's double consciousness also indicates a more general distinction between the material practices of politics and the theories of ideal philosophy.4 "The Transcendentalist" appeared during a time when Emerson was failing to find common ground for his social and speculative commitments. Having recently declined to join Brook Farm, he confesses in the lecture that idealists "are not good citizens" and tend to resent reformist causes, not least among them abolitionism. Emerson at this moment fears that his thought and real-world experience "diverge every moment, and stand in wild contrast," for they "show very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other." As the slavery crisis became increasingly dire, Emerson would struggle to synthesize this dualism in what "The Transcendentalist" calls a "fuller union," a locution implying both a consensus in politics and an end to philosophical antinomy.5 Whether or not such a union is possible remained a critical question for Emerson and a diversity of United States authors in the years before the Civil War. Moby-Dick (1851) names the challenge of double consciousness in its opening chapter. When Ishmael wonders, "Who aint a slave?" he asks his readers to ponder the question "either in a physical or metaphysical point of view," thereby announcing a distinction that governs much of the book.6 The Pequod is an American ship of state run by a tyrant who masters his multiracial crew. It is also a stage for speculative rhapsodies about freedom, fate, and the tragedy of being enslaved by the quest for philosophical truth. Both an allegory of a nation headed for ruin and a metaphysical ramble, Moby-Dick treats slavery as a practical and a theoretical problem in the course of Melville's attempts to mediate what Evert Duyckinck called the novel's "double character."7 As suggested in the chapter titled "The Sperm Whale's Head—Contrasted View," the white whale 96 DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS can represent double consciousness and its potential synthesis : "Is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction?"8 The hitch, of course, is that the white whale proves profoundly elusive , representing...