Mourning, Manhood, and Epistemology in Emerson's Nature

CHRISTOPHER GAUL Mourning, Manhood, and Epistemology in Emerson's Nature Yet it is certain that the power to ptoduce this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, ot in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For nature is not always tricked in holiday attite, but the same scene which yestetday bteathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs is ovetspread with melancholy today . Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a deat friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down ovet less worth in the population. Emetson, Nature This remarkable paragraph immediately follows the most famous moment in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836)—the "transparent eyeball" passage (Selected Writings 6). The "delight" in question is the pleasure produced when "the fields and woods" suggest "an occult relation between man and the vegetable" (7). These sentences should give us pause because, in registering the loss "by death of a dear friend," they seem to contradict Emerson's earlier assertion that finite human relations are of no matter to one who has become "part or parcel of God": "The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance" (6). And yet this avowal of a keen personal loss fails to give Emerson pause, does not directly challenge the high idealism of the transparent eyeball episode, not to mention the injunction against "build[ing] sepulchres to the fathers" that opens Nature (3).1 Even though the essay's first chapter enigmatically Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 3, Autumn 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-16 10 Christopher Gaul concludes on this dark note, the second chapter ("Commodity") opens with Emerson matter-of-factly contemplating nature's various "uses": "Whoever considers the final cause of the world will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result" (7). It should not surprise us that such incongruous passages exist side-by-side in Nature because, as Sharon Cameron notes, "all critics of Emerson have commented on the contradictory feature of the essays—namely, on the fact that Emerson fails to take account of his own discrepant statements" (16). This essay will address what Cameron calls "the problem of contradiction " in Emerson by linking his equivocal attitude toward grieving to his discrepant formulations of manhood in Nature (31). Near the end of her reading of Emerson's complex representation of grief in "Experience," Cameron herself implies a connection between "the problem of contradiction" and manliness that serves as a useful point of departure. Describing the way in which Emerson "relegates qualifications to the margins when these conflict with [an] essay's polemical thrust," Cameron writes: Obliquity sweeps aside objections, makes them tangential, disabling their ability to interfere with the essay's claims. . . . Power is not so much a consequence of obliquity per se, then, as it is a consequence of the driving force that marginalizes objections to primary claims without ever emasculating those claims. The metaphor is intended, for Emerson's primary claims are always at risk of having their potency threatened. (36) Cameron's self-conscious use of this metaphor points to the way in which Emerson's essays characteristically enact a project of masculine self-fashioning that seems forever in jeopardy ofundermining itself, "always at risk of having [its] potency threatened" by the "objections" and "qualifications" that lurk on the margins of his texts. In the case of the "lost by death" paragraph, Cameron might say that Emerson disables mourning's potential to disrupt Nature's "polemical thrust"—its soaring idealism and concomitant antagonism toward bereavement—by placing his avowal of grief at the end of a chapter, where grief's capacity to render the sky "less grand" is duly noted without "emasculating" the essay 's "primary claims." Grief therefore seems to complicate but never to undermine Emerson...