Thoreau and Others

Thoreau andOthers Richard Bridgman.Dark Thoreau. Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1982. 306 + xvipp. Phihp Gura.The Wisdom o( Words: Language, Theology, and Literature 111 theNewEngland Renaissance. ~hddletown, Conn.: WesleyanUniversity Press. 1981. 203+ x pp. .\nne C.Rose. Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850. NewHaven: Yale UniversityPress, 1981. 269+ xii pp. Henrv DavidThoreau. Journal, Volume I: /837-1844. ed. John C.Broderick et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. 702pp. William G.Heath Onepoint these four new books have in common isThoreau. In the Journal, hespeaksto us directly about the self he knew better than any other: his own.In Richard Bridgman's near-polemic, Thoreau appears in unfamiliar garb,and to some who thought they knew him he may not be recognizable atall.PhilipGura saveshislongestand most stimulatingchapter for Thoreau, subjectingWalden to a fresh look. Finally, in Anne Rose's study of TranscendentalismThoreau is not present at all, conspicuous by his absence. His exclusionraises the question of whether it is possible to write a study of Transcendentalismand omit Thoreau. The Transcendentalists continue to fascinate. In fact, scholarly interest inthem has never been higher. Over a century after the sputtering of their briefprotest-what Emerson inan odd understatement called·'an interesting hour& group in American cultivation"-we continue to ask of the Transcendentalists ,who were they? why were they? and what was their legacy to Americanlife and literature? In the last ten years, at least three new studies have attempted to answer thesequestions. Lawrence Buell's LiteraJJ' Transcendentalism: Style and Visionin the American Renaissance (1973)concentrated on the literary and estheticside of the movement. Buell's point wasnot that the Transcendentalistsare mainly important as writers, but that "the spirit of the Transcendentalistmovement is best understood by taking a literary approach toward Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 4, Winter 1983, 447-455 448 William G.Heath what the Transcendentalists had to say about the issues that preoccupied them, because their way of looking at those issues is markedly poetic rather than analytical and because they attached great value to creativity and self. expression." 1 Prior to Euell's study our thinking about the Transcendentalists was probably conditioned mainly by Perry Miller, who stated in his anthology of Transcendentalist writings that "the Transcendental movement is most accurately to be defined as a religious demonstration." Miller added, in his best Edmund Wilsonian authoritative manner, "Unless this literature be read as fundamentally an expression of a religious radicalism in revolt againsta rational conservatism, it will not be understood." 2 What Buell provided was a new slant, a fresh look, and his aim was ultimately to produce a "balanced study," one that took into account the Transcendentalists' "simultaneous commitment to beauty and truth, without scanting either" (p. 13). Paul Baller's book the following year, American Transcendentalism, 18301863 ,3 gave us a short, compact overview of the movement. Scholars have been calling for years for a history of Transcendentalism, one that will update and supersede 0. B. Frothingham's Transcendentalism inNewEngland (1876).Boller's book was a step in that direction, but it had.its limitations. It was simply too general and too brief to stand by itself as the work historians have been calling for. Joel Myerson's TheNewEngland Transcendentalistsand the Dial4 augments our knowledge of the movement through a combination of history and biography. The vivid portraits of the contributors to the Dial go far beyond those in George Willis Cooke's Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany the Dial (1902). Against the background of these works, then, comes Anne Rose's Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, which she calls a "frankly revisionist" (p. viii) study because it goes against the grain of previous scholarship by seeing the movement as activist and reformist rather than intellectual and literary. Her aim is to show that the essence of Transcendentalism lies in the application of the views of its leading figures to a cluster of social concerns, including economic, educational, feminist and domestic issues. It should be noted that the stereotype of the Transcendentalists as aloof and misty-eyed dreamers-the stereotype against which Rose is reacting in her book- has probably not been as widely held as she implies. One early study of...