- After Acknowledgement:Theodore Parker as Representative Man
"Conversation," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is a game of circles" (408). Yet Theodore Parker, sitting everywhere but inside a circle of canonical texts, is a voice that's hard to hear. Ironic, perhaps, for a man whose tombstone reads "The Great American Preacher" and whose extensive list of lifetime correspondences includes figures such as Lydia Maria Child, Charles Sumner, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Peabody. "Near, but not within, New England transcendentalism," (Dirks 136), he is a manifestation of Emerson's new and therefore unapproachable American.1 Indeed, Parker looms largely silent in present American literary history. Wholly committed to intuitive philosophy, but accused by Henry Steele Commager and others of "systematically ransacking of the facts of history with the tools of science" ("Dilemma" 269), Parker is at once hailed and defamed by his contemporaries. His obsessive reading habits, dogged religiosity, and allegiance to ordinary words, compose his uniquely simultaneous reliance on the "method of the natural philosopher . . . [and] the method of the metaphysician" (World 234). In the heart of the 1933 New England Quarterly article, "The Dilemma of Theodore Parker," the 1950 article asking, "Was Theodore Parker a Transcendentalist," and the 2002 book-length American Heretic lies Parker's seemingly incommensurate practice and theory.2 It might be said that America's conception of "self-reliance" institutes the polarity of his reception. Buried overseas in Florence, Italy, he is, quite literally, foreign in America. Representations remain, yet, as Parker would show, we have yet to come to terms with representation. "In our schools as our farms, we pass over much ground, but pass over it poorly" (Parker, "Political Destination" 158), [End Page 1] he observes, and our failure to engage his liberal critique is precisely what he himself critiques. Neglecting to make an account of Parker's words, we neglect to take account of our own.
As Emerson asks, "Where do we find ourselves?" (471), Parker, negotiating a personal library of over 13,000 volumes, seems to ask, "How do we find ourselves?" Emerson presupposes a constituted self, a self that upon reflection finds itself upon a stair. A modest revision of Emerson's classic question, Parker's hypothetical query would assume no such self. Indeed, each of ourselves must find itself represented before we can ask where where our selves are found. Self-conscious subjectivity and an identifiable community require each other. From Parker's view, the condition of estrangement from ourselves and from the world, as navigated in American literature by Thoreau and Emerson and best recounted by Stanley Cavell, becomes, necessarily, a condition of estrangement from representative power. That is, we are separated from ourselves and lost to the world because we have lost faith in representation itself. The ultimate skeptic, Parker inquires:
You look at this manifold doing and driving, the great stream of activity that runs up and down the streets and lanes, and you think how very unimportant, insignificant even is any one man . . . . What am I, say you, an individual man? I might die outright, and what odds would it make to the world? . . . I am one hundred and fifty thousandth part of Boston, one twenty-three millionth part of America, one thousandth millionth part of the whole human race . . . . If all the world of men were brought together, who would miss me when the poll of the human race was taken?
(Lessons 89-90)
"One twenty-three millionth part of America," does an individual voice effectively exist or fall insignificantly silent among the human race's "manifold doing and driving"? Elaborating the question in different terms, Parker regards a nineteenth-century America ignorantly "hesitat[ing] between two principles":
The [one principle] was slavery . . . [which] leads at once to a military despotism . . . . The other was freedom, which leads at once to industrial democracy—respect for labor, government over all, by all, for the sake of all . . . I saw that these four social [End Page 2] forces were advising, driving, coaxing, wheedling the people to take the road to ruin; that our "great men," in which "America is so rich beyond all other nations of the earth," went strutting along that path to...