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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
An Emersonian notion of originality and autonomy has over the last century and a half evolved into an enduring part of our cultural heritage. In a nation fractured by racial or class barriers, this assertive individualism continues for many to hold forth the hope of a fundamental principle overlapping our cultural divisions. Of course, this self-reliance has not gone unquestioned in an age of postmodern skepticism. If once a defiance of history and society seemed the American Adam's heroic gesture, recent critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Donald Pease have pointed out the Emersonian self s inescapable ties to the overdeterminate world of discourse. Not only have recent critics dismissed the plausibility of Emerson's idealism, they have disavowed its ideology of solipsistic independence that repudiates collective life. What I would like to do is to pose the problem of Emersonian individualism differently, to frame the terms of the debate less according to false oppositions between authenticity and culture, self and society, or freedom or fate, than in terms of complex negotiations about social authority undertaken in response to the “age of reform's” blurring of traditional distinctions between the public and private. In the second quarter of the 19th Century, the push toward state-sponsored education, specifically, was refiguring power in terms of socialization. Within his essays, Emerson acknowledges that identity is, and could only be, a social construct. Rather than trying to elude the fate of circumstances, Emerson, it might better be argued, attempts to redefine the nature and limitations of freedom in a world where, as he says in his lecture on “Culture” (March, 1851), “education” has superseded politics.
1. Lentricchia, Frank, After the New Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 334Google Scholar; and Pease, Donald, “Sublime Politics,” in The American Sublime, ed. Arensberg, Mary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 47.Google Scholar
2. See Quentin Anderson's critique of Emerson, 's “secular incarnation” in The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 58Google Scholar; and Bercovitch, Sacvan, The Office of The Scarlet Letter (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 148.Google Scholar
3. In The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Midnineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, Michael Katz has studied at length the status anxieties and desires for social control behind Massachusetts' educational reform. See also Ketts, Joseph, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic, Books, 1977), p. 105Google Scholar; and Hall, Peter Dobkin, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900 (New York: New York University Press, 1982), pp. 85–86.Google Scholar
4. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Culture,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Porte, Joel (New York: Library of America, 1983), p. 1020.Google Scholar Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Emerson's essays will be from this edition.
5. Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 136.Google Scholar
6. Mann, Horace, Ninth Annual Report, in The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, ed. Cremin, Lawrence A. (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1957), p. 57.Google Scholar
7. For a discussion of Mann's theories of education and the regulatory practice of “disciplinary intimacy,” see Brodhead, Richard, “Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum America,” Representations 21 (1988): 75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8. Mann, Horace, “The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government,” in Lectures on Education (Boston: Lemuel N. Ide, 1850), p. 121.Google Scholar
9. In The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 36Google Scholar, Daniel Walker Howe argues that Whig politicians looked to education and character formation as a means to discipline a diverse population.
10. Emerson's notion of self-culture evolved as part of a larger cultural shift, as Raymond Williams notes, in the meaning of culture as a “process of ‘inner’ or ‘spiritual’ as distinct from ‘external’ development” (see Marxism and Literature [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 14).Google Scholar For a discussion of the Unitarian roots of Channing's theory of self-culture and its influence on Emerson, see Robinson, David, Apostles of Culture: Emerson as Preacher and Lecturer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), pp. 16–22.Google Scholar My purpose is not to argue that a self of becoming represented a distinctly Emersonian — or even American invention - but to look at the immediate cultural events that would have created Emerson's sympathy toward Romantic and Unitarian notions of self-cultivation.
11. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Gilman, William H. et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), vol. 7, p. 237Google Scholar; hereafter documented in the text as JMN.
12. Thomas, John L. (“Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,” American Quarterly 17 [1965]: 656–81)CrossRefGoogle Scholar argues that the course of reform after 1830 shifted toward romantic perfectionism (p. 659). While both Mann and Emerson would approach education out of mixed motives of millennial hope and elitist fear, Emerson would publicly denounce education as a measure toward social control.
13. Quoted in Mann, Mary Peabody, Life of Horace Mann (Boston: Walker, Fuller, 1865), p. 96.Google Scholar
14. See Messerli, Jonathan (Horace Mann: A Biography [New York: Knopf, 1972], pp. 347, 421)Google Scholar for a discussion of Emerson, 's “misgivings”Google Scholar about Mann and Mann's own timidity regarding Emerson's radicalism.
15. Cremin, , American Education, p. 140.Google Scholar
16. As a result of Mann's public denunciation of the Fugitive Slave Law, Emerson would in 1852 declare Mann, “one of the four powerful men in the virtuous class in this country” (JMN, XIII, p. 49).Google Scholar Abolition, if not school reform, would finally unite the great educational reformers as spiritual friends.
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24. Mann, Horace, “Lecture on Education,” in Horace Mann, His Ideas and Ideals, ed. Morgan, Joy Elmer (Washington, D.C.: National Home Library Foundation, 1936), pp. 75–76.Google Scholar
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26. Greven, Philip, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child Rearing, Religious Experience, and Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977), p. 33.Google Scholar
27. While Puritan psychology also urged self-examination, the students of mid-19th-Century Boston were no longer asked to counterbalance self-assertion with humility and self-hatred. See Bercovitch, Sacvan (The Puritan Origins of the American Self [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975], p. 18)Google Scholar for a discussion of the “dilemma of Puritan identity.”
28. Rieff, Philip (The Triumph of the Therapeutic [New York: Harper and Row, 1966], p. 56)Google Scholar contrasts the modern psychological quest for well-being to the rigid character ideals of the premodern period. Within Mann's discourse on education, a devotion to ideas and to self-fulfillment were, however, complementary goals.
29. Mann, , “Necessity of Education,” p. 117.Google Scholar
30. Mann, , Fourth Annual Report, in Republic and the School, p. 51.Google Scholar
31. Mann, , “Lecture on Education,” pp. 75–76.Google Scholar
32. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Hurley, Robert (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 43.Google Scholar
33. Mann, , Tenth Annual Report, in Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology, ed. Davis, David Brion (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1979), p. 42.Google Scholar
34. The county schoolhouse and the new public high schools were not, I would argue, “ideological state apparatuses,” from which individuals would receive their true nature. To define the relation between the state and the government as a mirror structure without taking into consideration the individual's complex needs for self-definition presumes a population of passive subjects already alienated from their critical consciousness (see Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Brewster, Ben [London: NLB, 1971], p. 137).Google Scholar
35. Halttunen, Karen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 40.Google Scholar
36. Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, pp. 170–75.Google Scholar
37. Rantoul, Robert Jr., Memoirs, Speeches, and Writings (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1854), p. 83.Google Scholar
38. See Lasch, Christopher, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), p. 206.Google Scholar
39. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Address on Education,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Whicher, Stephen E., Spiller, Robert E., and Williams, Wallace E. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), vol. 2, p. 201.Google Scholar
40. Whicher, Steven, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), p. 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
41. Burkholder, Robert, “The Radical Emerson: Politics in ‘The American Scholar’,” Emerson Society Quarterly 34 (1988): 47.Google Scholar
42. See Gilmore, Michael (American Romanticism and the Marketplace [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985])CrossRefGoogle Scholar for an analysis of how the leading writers of the American Renaissance registered in their idealistic thinking the conceptual shifts brought about by the Marketplace Revolution.
43. See Porte, Joel, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 153.Google Scholar
44. For a discussion of Emerson's fear of the mob and its influence on his notion of the ideal state, see Gonnaud, Maurice, An Uneasy Solitude: Individual and Society in the Work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, trans. Rosenwald, Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 203–9.Google Scholar In Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of New England, 1800–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Mary Kupic Cayton also discusses Emerson, 's denial “of conflict and diversity in the ideal realm” (p. 179).Google Scholar
45. Michael, John (Emerson and Skepticism: The Cipher of the World [Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1988], pp. 77–80)Google Scholar argues that Emerson attempted to deny that “the self never absolutely exists, but is always found in the eye and voice of its relation.” While an excellent reading of Emerson's own personal crisis about the status of the self, Michael ignores how this notion of a relational self might have affected Emerson's response to his audience.
46. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Eloquence,” in Works of Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), vol. 7, p. 97.Google Scholar
47. See, by contrast, Marr, David (American Worlds Since Emerson [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988], pp. 63–64)Google Scholar, who argues that Emerson saw a situated reason as a way of maintaining a “link between inner freedom and outer authority.”
48. For a provocative discussion of Emerson's essays as a response to the “want of social confidence” that foreign observers such as Harriet Martineau observed in an “other-regarding” antebellum society, see Packer, Barbara, Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretaton of the Major Essays (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 90–91.Google Scholar
49. Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “The Present Age,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Williams, Wallace E. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1972), vol. 3, p. 303.Google Scholar