THE REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
2.2 (April 2002): 120-128
© 2002 National Communication Association

Recovering Emerson

Jeffrey B. Kurtz

 Sarah Ann Wider. The Critical Reception of Emerson: Unsettling All Things. Rochester, NY: Camden House [Boydell and Brewer Inc.], 2000. ix + 239. Notes, bibliography, index. $59.00.

T. Gregory Garvey, editor. The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. v + 264. Notes, index, photo essay. $40.00.

A true story: At a workshop on fostering students’ interest in social and political problems, the conversation steered toward speculation over why college-aged women seemed more willing to engage such issues, even when these fell outside their programs of study. A colleague confidently remarked: “Well, it’s obvious that today’s college-aged males are guided by an Emersonian self-reliance.” I will not contest this assertion here; its utterance, however, advocates the necessity of Sarah Ann Wider’s signal achievement: Her study reminds us that what we think we know about Emerson may have little to do with his own words. His place in the humanities and our public culture needs to be understood, she maintains, by attending to the criticism following the appearance of Nature (1836) and which has since collected around his work. This book illuminates these myriad voices and explains how they have taught generations of readers to think about Emerson.

Professor Wider has two aims. First, she wishes to include, and explain, past audiences/readers and their insights into Emerson’s ideas. “The temporal inclusiveness of this volume asks its readers to move beyond the ready dismissals that so often characterize the criticism,” she writes. “The denigration of a past audience or a particular group of readers serves no one well” (2). Moreover, “if there is a future for Emerson’s writing—and most would agree there decidedly is—who would care to envision its reading occurring within a closed circle? We need to consider the various audiences of the past in order to imagine future counterparts” (7). Alongside this democratic examination, she presses for the expansion of Emerson’s canon beyond Nature, “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” “Fate,” and a “wild card fourth essay” (2). These aims are buttressed by the prospectus for the Camden House series, Literary Criticism in Perspective, of which Wider’s volume is a part. Intended to “illuminate the nature of literary criticism itself,” the text seeks to “gauge the influence of social and historic currents on aesthetic judgments once thought objective and normative” (n.p.). About the Emerson criticism of the 1990s and its concern with pragmatic philosophy, power, and moral action, for example, Wider remarks: “[This] emphasis clearly reflects the decade in which we stood: our concern for ethical thought and action arose at a time when ‘small’ wars weighed heavily upon our individual and collective consciences, when the consequences of scientific and technological developments were and are still poorly imagined. . . . We inflect our reading with our own concerns, and yet those very concerns are clearly connected to our predecessors” (5).

Demonstrated over seven well-executed chapters, these connections, for our discussion, may be divided into two parts. The first four chapters examine biographies about Emerson, critical essay collections, assessments of his poetry, and the efforts of “rising intellectual cadres” in the early twentieth century to “establish their clear difference from Emerson’s ideas and the reading communities to which such writings still so widely appealed” (84). Within each chapter Wider points readers to the assumptions and values that informed the scholarship. Biographers’ efforts to chronicle incidents from Emerson’s varied life, for example, have been “singular” (10). Between George Willis Cooke, who suggested in 1881 that “The life of Mr. Emerson has been in this thoughts, and these are in his books” (qtd. in Wider, 10), and Stephen Whicher’s insistence seventy years later that “few men, few writers even, have lived more entirely in the mind” (qtd. in Wider, 10), biographers perpetuated the image of Emerson the recluse. Despite Ralph Rusk’s well-crafted alternative (1949), Whicher’s acquiescent sage would give no quarter. Not until Robert D. Richardson, Jr.’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995) do we finally encounter a study that, in Wider’s words, “creates a verbal world in which Emerson’s words form only one part. He seamlessly weaves together the household details with Emerson’s ongoing reading projects with his various conversations and their continuation across various genres” (22).

Examinations of recent critical essay collections and nineteenth-century critics’ efforts to reconcile the images of Emerson as philosopher and poet comprise chapters 2 and 3. Noting that essay collections have become a staple in literary criticism, Wider succinctly justifies their examination: “[Such collections] provide, or hope to provide, a manageable view of the past and/or current criticism. But to create such manageability, the editors must follow their own well-defined selecting principles. These principles articulate the critical tenor of the times” (40). Antagonisms among critical perspectives during the nineteenth century inform the questions of chapter 3, particularly Emerson’s relationship to Transcendentalism, how reviewers characterized his readers, and the criticism levied against his experimental, unsystematic poetry.

Chapter 4 chronicles the exclusion of Emerson from early twentieth-century philosophical study. Wider recapitulates the key debates and speculates about these arguments’ effects upon readers’ perceptions. “The cultural critics in the first forty years of the twentieth century found Emerson most useful by way of rejection,” she contends. “This story dominated Emerson studies: the voices of writers such as [T. S.] Eliot and H. L. Mencken were powerful. Their critical frameworks shaped the century’s understanding of literature” (90-91). Beginning in the 1930s other New Critics would take those frameworks, and Emerson, to task.

Part 2 demarcates the contention that has distinguished Emerson criticism from 1930 to the present. Between 1930 and 1960, for example, critics employed three lines of attack. These are traced in chapter 5, where we witness a generation acutely critical of Emerson’s timid response to evil, the “ugly consent” he gave to American materialism (112), and his optimism, judged untenable in a post-Holocaust world. Wider fortifies the stakes that buttressed these battle lines, remarking that to reviewers of this era, “Self-reliance was equated with a predatory individualism in which the bottom line was all too powerfully present. [Emerson] provided the voice of capitalist exploitation. . . . And even art could not save him” (112). The chapter profiles the insights of some of the principal combatants, including Frederic Ives Carpenter, Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen, Vivian Hopkins, and Stephen Whicher. Taking issue with Emerson’s apparent lack of structure and concentration in his poetry, for example, Matthiessen, in a judgment representative of the era, remarked: “The ease with which he could abandon the details of the plan, in both life and art, is a symptom of why, in spite of all the scattered evidence of his close appreciation of poetry, he so generally failed to write sustained poems” (qtd. in Wider, 124). With the growing availability of Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (JMN) and his early lectures and sermons, however, a new generation of critics would draw portraits of Emerson remarkably different from the failure upon which Matthiessen and his contemporaries fixated.

Chapters 6 and 7 project Emerson into the recent present. Pointing to the new editions of his work and the myriad interpretations these have invited, Wider describes how JMN and the Early Lectures “drew increasing attention to Emerson’s method and practice of composition”; we see that “the ideological focus of the criticism shifted” from the history of his ideas back to his texts (142). Diverse critical studies after 1960 widened the locus of inquiry to include the Journals and other neglected texts, and provided balanced treatments of text and context. Recent book-length studies by Len Gougeon, David Robinson, and Albert J. von Frank, among others, “firmly ground Emerson’s language of reform . . . [in] eye-opening contextualizations which carefully reconstruct the web of related events in which [his] words appeared” (165). The renewed appreciation of philosophers, literary critics, and democratic theorists for Emerson is the focus of the concluding chapter. Stanley Cavell, Richard Poirier, and George Kateb have “approached Emerson’s political engagement from a largely theoretical point of view . . . [in order to] concentrate on the revealing play of language within and between [his] essays” (166). This critical tack has yielded “insight where a blind, or blinded, dismissal once operated. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Emerson [is a] scientist, philosopher, pragmatist, ethicist and above all, a writer whose prose emerged from relationship” (169).

Undergraduates in upper-level seminars will learn from the way Wider’s text models fair and generous scholarship, as well as how it balances description and evaluation in a concise, readable style. Graduate students wanting an overview of the critical literature would do well to earmark a portion of their laundry money toward its purchase (the chronological list of works consulted alone will prove an invaluable resource). Professors of English, American Studies, or Communication may wish to assign excerpts. Each chapter is a demonstration of a well-crafted literature review. Some will quibble with the text’s insularity; the attention to generations of critical commentary is tedious in places, and readers may wish to hear more of Wider’s original voice. Others will observe that, though democratic to the last, Wider enacts her own principles of selection and exclusion. Recent works by John Carlos Rowe and Anita Haya Patterson, which have provocatively contested Emerson’s significance and influence as a reformer, are cursorily treated. The exclusion of insights from communication scholars such as Herbert Wichelns, Anthony Hillbruner, John Sloan, Roberta Ray, Edwin Black, and Frederick Antzcak into Emerson’s ideas reminds us that the circle of inquiry must be opened still more broadly. Communication studies and literary studies have much to teach each other; that nexus is not represented in this volume. But these complaints are not deterrents. To the contrary, Wider invites us to think about what book-length studies of our criticisms of presidential rhetoric, nineteenth-century public address, civil rights discourse, or the rhetoric of film, to identify just some possibilities, might look like. Such studies could pull back the veil of inquiry to show how political and cultural contexts, as well as professional machinations, shape our critical conversations and generate academic knowledge. The seed of scholarship, as Emerson knew, is continued provocation.

One recent provocative example is The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, which explores the relationship between Emerson’s reform activism and his transcendentalist ideals, the ways in which, as editor T. Gregory Garvey writes in the introduction, Emerson “sought a mode of advocacy that would merge his ideal of individual autonomy with the practical political power that is gained through collective action” (xii). Central questions to this dilemma include: How could Emerson speak as a reformer if he was unwilling to act as one? How could he promote an agenda of individual reform while forsaking involvement in movements that sought the changes he desired? In acting distant toward reformers, was he subtly complying in oppression? Or was his silence a recognition of his powerlessness to affect change in public affairs (xii)? These queries are plumbed in four parts: Part 1 sounds the impulses of Emerson’s “other inner life” and how these pulled him toward and away from active participation in reform (xxii). Part 2 examines his views on women in the public sphere. The “turning points in Emerson’s abolitionism” are considered in part 3 (xxiv). Part 4 weighs his contributions to political theory.

Susan L. Roberson’s examination of the personal and political subtexts in a series of sermons Emerson delivered toward the end of his ministry refreshingly extends Stephen Whicher’s dictum. Roberson locates the palpable moral and rhetorical power of these early texts in how Emerson “expanded discussion of the diseased body to the national arena,” a trope she convincingly links to the suffering of his first wife, Ellen Tucker (9). At the center of the analysis is continuity. “What [Emerson] preached in 1832, that institutions and rituals must be rejected and reformed to more nearly constitute the true relation between moral substance and external form, he continued to preach in his antislavery writings” (13). In the remaining essays of part 1, Garvey traces the ways in which Emerson “home[d] in on the gap between the values for which reformers speak and the language through which they promote their causes” (15). Surveying “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Poet,” “Experience,” and Representative Men to identify how “[Emerson’s] reform activism also grows out of logics that are internal to his intellectual life” (15), Garvey concludes that “once Emerson explicitly recognized the coexistence of fragmentation, language, and society as philosophical facts, political ethics became a question of speaking for the good rather than for the whole” (32). Although bitter toward Thoreau’s choice in 1846 to go to jail rather than pay his poll tax in de facto support of the Mexican War, Emerson, as Linck C. Johnson shows, became more involved with abolition than his “Civil Disobedience” protégé between 1846 and the late 1850s. Johnson locates their different stances toward reform in the conclusion of Walden, where Thoreau admonished readers to turn inward, whereas “Emerson, at the end of ‘The Fugitive Slave Act’ [1854] insisted that the disastrous events of the 1850s made it the duty of all men to turn outward” (62).

Phyllis Cole recounts the roles of Emerson’s wife Lidian and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in “bringing the urgencies of reform into the private Emerson family circle” (67) in the first essay of part 2. Exercising a “politics of pain” (69), these women sustained the dynamics of a conversation—which Cole meticulously reproduces from their extant letters and diaries—that contributed “decisively to drawing forth Emerson’s public voice as a reformer from his earliest gestures to his final pronouncements” (67). A reconsideration of Emerson’s views on women’s social and political influence is the subject of Amanda Gilbert’s essay. Attending to Margaret Fuller’s influence on Emerson’s thought, Gilbert maintains that he staunchly supported women’s rights. Although testimony from certain suffragists and an analysis of his 1855 lecture “Woman” bolster the thesis, a curious assertion burdens the essay: “Emerson’s full ideas on women’s rights were not stated publicly but must be inferred from the incidents of his life and his response to women who dared to carry out the radical ramifications of his ideas for women” (109). Just what methods and materials does one use to draw inferences from a life? The analysis fails to stake parameters over this speculative ground. Jeffrey Steele provides a spirited counterpoint. While acknowledging Fuller’s influence on Emerson, he identifies a glaring omission in the former minister’s thought: “Woman” suppresses a vital part of her “feminist program,” specifically “the demand that women be given an equal role in the religious institutions and theological practices of nineteenth-century America” (115). This omission, Steele argues, deprived Emerson of the “means to theorize the ideological foundations of gender inequality in America . . . [and] marked the limits of his political sympathy towards the woman’s rights movement” (116).

Tracing Emerson’s earliest writings, Michael Strysick argues in part 3 that Emerson’s “inevitable antislavery activity did not mark the beginning of his evolution as an abolitionist, but was instead the evolution of the principle of self-reliance—indeed, was an extension of self-reliance” (141). Concentrating on the two Bowdoin Prize essays Emerson wrote at Harvard, the “Wide World” journals begun during his second year at Harvard that span four years, and culminating with the later antislavery writings, Strysick concludes, “Slavery presented Emerson with a visible form of literal enslavement. When he appreciated the difference between internal and external prisons, between those of the soul and mind and those of the body, Emerson understood his duty to address the prisons in which others were held, not just those in which he was sentenced” (166). Less sweeping, and more rigorous, Len Gougeon considers Emerson’s preparation for his 1 August 1844 address, “On the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies.” Attending to primary sources, including a previously unpublished Emerson letter, Gougeon shows how he “was profoundly affected, both emotionally and intellectually, by his preparation for this address, as well as the historical developments that prompted him to give it” (171). Readers will likely concur that Emerson’s “active commitment to organized efforts at social reform had its origins in [this] stirring address that he presented on an August morning in Concord” (188). Harold Bush casts that commitment in interesting relief in his examination of Emerson’s reaction to John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. This “endorsement and indeed his mythologization of Brown’s raid must be understood,” Bush maintains, “as transcending the mere public policy issue of slavery in the United States. . . . Emerson’s championing of Brown . . . responded to and fostered the emerging American ideology, one that itself championed the Declaration of Independence as redemptive entrance into a purely American repentance” (202). Pertinent to this “American political religion” was that Americans be “doers of the word” (213), a principle illuminated in a nuanced reading of Emerson’s 1859 “Speech at a Meeting to Aid John Brown’s Family.”

Emerson’s potential implications for contemporary political theory and practice round out the volume. David Robinson describes how “American Civilization” (1862) “establishes an historical framework from which slavery can be viewed and builds to an argument for immediate emancipation, a policy that Emerson presented as both a moral and political necessity” (222). “Emerson saw the American political crisis as a crisis in human civilization itself” (224), Robinson maintains, and the subsequent analysis invites readers to reconsider the stimulating dimensions of this and other later writings. Questions of democratic citizenship occupy Stephen L. Esquith, who wonders, “What skills, habits, and dispositions do citizens need to generate political power democratically and to share in democratic public life?” (234). He labels this political virtue “Emersonian,” and maintains that it may offer succor to the “platitudes and clichés that pass for a national debate” (249). The central tenets of the Emersonian virtue Esquith envisions are power, and the odd sobriquets poise and place (235). After serving cursory treatments of a broad range of Emerson’s works, Esquith presents no systematic demonstration of his thesis. Instead, we are fed this: “National politics can be heady, and to avoid being either enchanted or repelled by power on such a large scale, Emersonian poise must first be developed locally” (246). Bon mots like this stand as ersatz analysis, leaving readers to settle for the unsatisfactory conclusion that “More still remains to be done if Emerson’s treatment of power, poise, and place are to form the basis of a theory of democratic citizenship” (249).

Concerned with the tension between Emerson’s social activism and his transcendental contemplation, The Emerson Dilemma is marked by a dualism of its own. One set of scholars offers sustained analyses of provocative texts located in salient interpretative and historical contexts. Roberson, Cole, Steel, Gougeon, Bush, and Robinson have generated exemplary pieces that will shape conversations about Emerson and reform well into the twenty-first century. Another group does not display the rigor that should attend a volume of such noble aspiration. Garvey’s Introduction relates that “the trajectory of Emerson’s psychology in relation to reform” was one of the guiding ideas for this collection. Unfortunately, these latter scholars seemed more concerned with Emerson’s psychology than with the canons of diligent scholarship. The sympathies of Garvey, Gilbert, Strysick, and Esquith are sincere, but these sympathies obscure their craft. Careful readers also will observe editorial errors: misattributing the date of Emerson’s 1862 eulogy “Thoreau,” misspelling Anita Haya Patterson’s name in the commentative notes, confusing the pedigree of two of Emerson’s early addresses (after discussing language and mediation in the “Divinity School Address” [1838], Garvey remarks that Emerson “briefly returns to the problem” in “The American Scholar” [1837]). Finally, the volume lacks coherence; the contributors seem unaware of one another’s essays. This fault is likely related to editorial constraints. A more dialogic spirit, however, like the one loosely displayed between Gilbert and Steele, would have enhanced readers’ experience with this collection. This volume, however, will be welcomed by students of Emerson’s reform activities, for it demonstrates that “Though antislavery fully compelled Emerson to set aside his ambivalences, his wide-ranging thought about and discussion of reform underscores that the tensions in his thought were not occasional or early aberrations” (xxvi). We would do well to remember these words.