Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Transcendentalism

This has been a remarkable year for philosophical considerations of Ralph Waldo Emerson's work with the publication of several full-length studies, including Herwig Friedl's Thinking in Search of a Language: Essays on American Intellect and Intuition (Bloomsbury Academic) and Benedetta Zavatta's comprehensive Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson (Oxford). Having been outpaced by his older friend this year, Henry David Thoreau can still boast an impressive amount of quality scholarship, including Rediscovering the Maine Woods: Thoreau's Legacy in an Unsettled Land, ed. John J. Kucich (Massachusetts). Meanwhile, Margaret Fuller's socialist thought receives important new consideration in Phyllis Cole's "Fuller and the French Socialist Women's Movement: New Evidence in a Transatlantic Conversation" (Resources for American Literary Study [RALS] 40: 72–89).

i Ralph Waldo Emerson

a. Editions and Reference

Walt Whitman Speaks, ed. Brenda Wineapple (Library of America), distills nine volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden into one keepsake edition. Although short on source notes, it does a fine job introducing readers to Whitman's thoughts on Emerson (including the memorable line, "Emerson's face always seemed to me so clean—as if God had just washed it off") as well as other Transcendentalists, including Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and Henry James Sr. My annotated listing of Emerson scholarship, "An Emerson Bibliography, 2018," appears in Emerson Society Papers [ESP] (30, ii: 21–22).

b. Biography and Contemporaries

Digging deeply into letters, journals, and contemporary reminiscences, Jeffrey S. Cramer's Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Berkeley: Counterpoint) strives for a nuanced portrait of a friendship scholars have long known to be rich, troubled, and contradictory. The book includes three sections—one each on Emerson and Thoreau comprised of extracts on friendship from essays, journals, and letters; and a biographical essay also with sizable quotations from primary sources. Although the general contours of the story are well known (budding friendship, shared personal losses, disillusionment, and final memorialization), the level of detail that emerges will reinforce how vitally important meaningful society was for these devoted individualists.

Two studies consider the edifying quality of Emerson's work when read in context of contemporary individuals and historical developments. Susan Lee Dunston's "A Source for Ralph Waldo Emerson's 'Terminus' in William Henry Furness's 'To Columbus Dying'" (RALS 40: 30–50) is far more than a source study. Dating the origins of "Terminus" to 1844 allows Dunston to go beyond usual interpretations centering on acquiescence to aging and on to such compelling themes as profound personal loss, the strength of lifelong friendship, the desire for new vision and creation, and the restorative power of poetry. François Brunet's The Birth of the Idea of Photography (MIT), newly translated by Shane B. Lillis, includes a short chapter highlighting Emerson's endorsement of daguerreotype technology because in adopting it "everyone is responsible for their [sic] own image" as opposed to an artist intermediary.

Several other scholars present problematic aspects of Emerson's thought, some more convincingly than others. In "Emerson Attuning: Issues in Attachment and Intersubjectivity" (American Literary History 31: 369–94) Theo Davis puts a new and compelling spin on the old argument that Emersonian self-reliance is fundamentally pathological. Using Daniel Stern's attachment theory, Davis argues that as a child Emerson did not experience the safe and consistent nurturing necessary for healthy intersubjectivity as an adult, and his struggle to establish relationships is evident throughout his major works. Davis further suggests that, since Emerson is "one of the central theorists of liberal subjectivity" in 19th-century America, his pathology is endemic in the culture. One deeply insightful chapter in Geoff Hamilton's A New Continent of Liberty: Eunomia in Native American Literature from Occom to Erdrich (Virginia) argues that, while Emerson's Nature heedlessly erases the horrific history of Native American displacement, William Apess's writings reinscribe it in order to show Native Americans the way toward Eunomia, or healing and traditional lifeways in harmony with community and the nonhuman environment. In Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American...