Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather by Diana Hope Polley (review)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's progeny abound in nineteenth-century American literature. Or, more precisely, his orphans do. As Diana Hope Polley's Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather makes clear, by the late nineteenth century Emerson's "writing came to represent an entire constellation of romantic ideas surrounding the importance of spiritual individualism" (Polley 9). Despite this enduring belief in the radical potential of nature and self-reliance, Transcendentalism's legacy was anything but guaranteed, as realist authors struggled to "negotiate the binaries of Emersonian desire and historical truth in postbellum America" (Polley 109). Echoes of Emerson persuasively demonstrates that Emerson, as something of a metonym for American romanticism and Transcendentalist thought, was both a crucial referent and point of departure for post-1860s American literature, especially Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The House of Mirth (1905), and My Ántonia (1918). There, Emerson's orphans—Huck Finn, Isabel Archer, Lily Bart, and Jim Burden—cling to "a core value of the national ethos: the desire to maintain a sense of the democratic individual above the trappings of society and government" (Polley 81). Such idealism derives from Emerson's canonical essays of the 1830s and 1840s, but by the 1870s and 1880s it had come to seem a bit anachronistic. Rampant urbanization, capitalist exploitation, and racist and misogynist legal infrastructures practically squandered any remaining hope in what Lily Bart refers to in The House of Mirth as an Emersonian "republic of the spirit" (Wharton 71). Against this historical backdrop, the realist novel became the venue in which Emerson's orphans could attempt to reconcile their obstinate attachment to self-reliance with the ubiquitous, oppressive sway of what Twain would term sivilization.

In chronicling "the fraught dialogue between postbellum history and the antebellum Transcendental philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson" (Polley 5), Echoes of Emerson draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogic discourse and heteroglossia, as well as Raymond William's work on residual culture, in order to claim that realism's engagement with Transcendentalism remained unfinished by the turn of the century. If Emerson had been lionized as the nation's preeminent philosopher by the 1870s, then he surely bequeathed to his successors the necessity to grapple with his influence. Crystallized in formative essays such as "Nature" (1836), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), and "Self-Reliance" (1841), his philosophical tenets haunt us to this day, as Randall Fuller's important Ghosts of Emerson has shown. But in confronting antebellum philosophy at a postbellum remove, realist authors beg the question of whether Transcendentalist self-reliance retains its efficacy outside of 1830s New England. Or to phrase it differently, how would, or could, Woman in the Nineteenth Century serve women of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries like Ántonia, Isabel, and Lily?

The American realist novel chronicles this historical transition, narrating the shift from Mark Twain's antebellum Missouri, Edith Wharton's Old New York, and Willa Cather's pioneer prairies to something like the contemporary late nineteenth or early twentieth century. In so doing, it asks us to consider just what has been gained—or sacrificed—in moving from romantic past to realist present. Polley emphasizes the messiness of this transition, contending that "the ubiquitous invocations of Emerson in the realist novel are not simply passive reflections, either of realists' yearning for a romantic past or their unqualified repudiation of a naive and outdated philosophy. Rather, the realist novel becomes the space through which these authors confront and test residual cultural influences in light of dominant historical forces" (Polley 7). Especially with regard to these works' tragic or ambiguous endings, their skepticism regarding self-reliance seems unresolved. These endings shirk direct confrontation by "light[ing] out for the Territory" (Twain 912), suggesting that any possibility of a redemptive individualism is irreconcilable with a rapidly changing social order. Death, evasion, and nostalgia practically insist...