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86 emerson, friend and guide having just witnessed the 10 June 1849 bombardment of Rome, had written him pleading to him for love and understanding—that she should not come home.6 11SThe Search for a Guide In 1836, the year he published Nature, Emerson’s psychological state was marked by a need to generate a life-sustaining philosophy from his lingering grief over the loss of his wife, Ellen Tucker, and his cherished brothers, Charles and Edward, a philosophy more satisfying to him than was either “an effete, superannuated Christianity” or the reason-based beliefs of New England Unitarianism. Selfreliant fortitude was imperative to him in light of his haunting memory that both of his brothers, before their deaths from tuberculosis, had exhibited signs of mental instability—Edward’s mind having “collapsed” to such an extent that Emerson had to have him committed to McLean’s Asylum in June 1828. If ever there was for Emerson an outward sign of the terrible uncertainty of the inner life, it was his brilliant brother’s mental instability and fatal illness.1 Still, for all his foreboding about this “gloomy epoch,” Emerson had reason to feel good about life. In September 1835 he had married the earthy and effusive, punctilious and intense Lydia Jackson, whom he called “Lidian” and describes in a letter as having “a noble heart & an ingenious mind” but no “brilliant genius for Economy.” Despite her apparent inability to stay within a budget, Lidian would prove to be managerially efficient when it came to raising their children, tending to her mother-in-law, and entertaining a constant flow of Waldo’s houseguests. Cheering Emerson immensely was the fact that Lidian, in October 1836, would bear their first child, Waldo. Moreover, Emerson was able to eke out a decent living as a public lecturer, a kind of lay preaching he enjoyed, a profession made possible in part due to the inheritance bequeathed him by Ellen, whose father had been a well-to-do merchant. And, too, as Joel Porte has said, his life was brightened when 1836 brought into his “orbit” Margaret Fuller.2 From the first, the “superabundant” Fuller unsettled the usually reserved Emerson . Emerson had always been reticent in expressing affection for others, half suspecting that “the presence of real emotion” in relation to a loved one “is a sign” (as he had just written in Nature) that he or she will be “withdrawn from our sight in a short time.” Emerson had learned this lesson in loving Ellen. He had loved her tenderly, yet death had stolen her just sixteen months after they married. Even the mere thought of loving again made him anxious.3 Such anxiety in relation to a “real” human touch does suggest, as some critics say, not only how profoundly he had been wounded by death but also how insecure Emerson felt. His was a fundamental insecurity grounded in feelings of uncertainty about his mental as well as his physical (including, presumably, sexual ) prowess. Critics have long noted that the dominant mood of Emerson’s early journals is a sense of impotence, an awareness of a “defect of character” that made him uneasy “in the company of most men and women.” After all, of all the Emerson sons, he had been the “silly one,” having graduated thirtieth in a class of fiftynine from Harvard, whereas Edward and Charles had both been at the top of their class. That he fell so deeply in love with the poetically talented but tubercular Ellen suggests that he may have found it easier to love a traditional albeit witty, bright female than a brilliant, bold, unconventional woman, just as it was easier for him to idealize the dead Ellen than it ever was for him to write a passionate love letter to his second wife, who had “a gift” (according to Emerson) “to curse and swear,” and who shared his bed for forty-seven years. As he himself later wrote Lidian, who frequently lamented her husband’s lack of passion for her, he could not easily change from a “photometer” to a “stove.”4 Biographers note that Emerson’s mother, Ruth, a calm and deeply religious woman, believed discipline should be stressed over affection and hence rarely showed her sons signs of her love. The aim of her child-rearing practices, they say, was to instill in her children “the kernel of Calvinism in its most fundamental, preverbal form.” Emerson nevertheless kept her close to him until her...

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