The Sepulchres of the Fathers Revisited

In common retellings of the development of the American Renaissance, transcendentalism has taken on a "transcendent" quality. Rather than relying on continental Romantic discourse and antiquated aesthetic standards, it purported to do something new: in Emerson's words, to convey an "original relationship to the universe."¹ Emerson's predecessors, namely Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, only appear to reinforce the self-directed empowerment that transcendentalism affords. Democratic ideology appears to flourish in Emerson's calls to self-reliance now, of course, that popular culture has preserved Emerson's more inspiring natural aphorisms at the expense of the rest of his oeuvre. But as Richard Hardack clarifies in his latest book, "Not Altogether Human": Pantheism and the Dark Nature of the American Renaissance, "common perceptions of Emerson as a champion of self-reliance misread his understanding of 'self' and 'reliance'" (40). As Hardack convincingly argues, Emerson's transcendental turn emerged from a deeply embedded nexus of cultural tensions, including debates about the nature of democracy, representation, and the constitution of bodies, exposed through the once-again emerging doctrine of pantheism.

In true Emersonian style, Richard Hardack unfolds his intricate argument from this fundamental premise: transcendentalism is not the philosophy of self-reliance and interconnection through Nature that readers frequently interpret it to be (13). Emerson's connection with Melville, which Hardack describes as "parallel and a form of call and response" in reference to pantheism, is perhaps a more salient connection for understanding the complications of transcendentalism in its historical moment than Emerson's other contemporaries (11). Hardack roots this critique in a change of terms: instead of focusing on outmoded assumptions about transcendentalism, Hardack addresses pantheism, which he defines as: "a distillation of Emersonian transcendentalism that deified a 'racialized' nature as universal natural law" (3). Hardack initially identifies direct references to pantheism in texts by well-known American Renaissance writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, then moves into a broader scope of query, considering pantheistic ideology in a variety of texts produced by well-known authors for both public and private consumption. The frequency of these references to pantheism is notable; perhaps the most compelling example of this lack of critical attention is addressed in Chapter 1, where Hardack discusses Emerson's early reference to Pan in a draft of "Nature," later edited out to read as the term "nature" (54). The embedded ideology of pantheism in Emerson gives him license to explore "the politically unconscious wing of American transcendentalism" and to accomplish its "underlying cultural work" (6). Pantheism allows Emerson to configure the world in terms of established racial and gender hierarchies that reaffirm the authority and posit the cohesiveness of white male identity.

Identifying Leon Chai's The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance (Cornell University Press, 1990) as the precursor to this reinterpretation, Hardack embeds his critique in deft archival work that complements Chai's own expansive, transnational archive. Some of the key players in Hardack's history of American pantheism, such as Goethe, are familiar in light of scholarship by Chai, but other archival discoveries, such as his connection between Jonathan Edwards's influence on Unitarian development and, subsequently, the void for pantheism created in its wake, promise to shape scholarship on the American Renaissance in new and dynamic ways (24, 30). By Hardack's own admission, few scholars are currently examining the impact of pantheism on American literature, and the book, at times, feels removed from the critical conversation on early and nineteenth-century American literature as a result. But Hardack's book does not presume to be following established lines of critical inquiry, and his method, though very current in terms of its use of neo-Marxist theory, diverges from contemporary critical trends in terms of its exacting focus on close reading and its limited scope of interest in terms of primary texts. The argument succeeds because of this intense attention to texts like Melville's Moby Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), Emerson...