Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T17:16:44.063Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Emerson and the Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Amy Schrager Lang
Get access

Extract

Professor Cornelius Felton of Harvard University, reviewing Emerson's Essays, First Series in 1841, predicted that self-reliance “if acted upon, would overturn society, and resolve the world into Chaos.” Since then a long line of Emerson critics have shared Felton's concern over Emerson's radicalism. The more temperate modern version of Felton's charge is that Emerson “brought to full consciousness … the antinomianism latent in the thought of his Puritan forbears.” According to these critics, Emerson is the spiritual descendant of Anne Hutchinson. Removed outside the constraints of seventeenth-century dogma and liberated by Romantic thought, he gives free play to the antinomianism she so cautiously denied. Antinomianism, in this view, lends unity to the disparate writers of the American Renaissance and continuity to the whole of early American literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 7 , October 1982 , pp. 229 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870–72, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo and Forbes, Waldo Emerson (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1909), II, 516–17Google Scholar. Hereinafter cited as Journals.

2. Rusk, Ralph L., The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), p. 284.Google Scholar

3. Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 189.Google Scholar

4. “The Transcendentalist,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Emerson, Edward Waldo (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1904), I, 336Google Scholar. Hereinafter cited as Works.

5. Anderson, Quentin, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1971), p. 14.Google Scholar

6. “Nature,” in Works, I, 3.Google Scholar

7. “The Poet,” in Works, III, 17.Google Scholar

8. “The Transcendentalist,” in Works, I, 333.Google Scholar

9. “Nature,” in Works, I, 10.Google Scholar

10. “Divinity School Address,” in Works, I, 126–27.Google Scholar

11. “American Scholar,” in Works, I, 114.Google Scholar

12. Journals, II, 409.Google Scholar

13. Works, II, 153.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., p. 254.

15. Journals, IV, 449–50.Google Scholar

16. Works, II, 99.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., p. 116.

18. “Nature,” in ibid., I, 40–41.

19. Journals, IV, 128.Google Scholar

20. “Self-Reliance,” in Works, II. 49.Google Scholar

21. Works, II, 128–29.Google Scholar

22. Ibid., p. 132.

23. “Fate,” in ibid., VI, 19.

24. Journal, July 1852, in Whicher, Stephen, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1957), p. 329.Google Scholar

25. “Self-Reliance,” in Works, II, 74.Google Scholar

26. Oxford English Dictonary.

27. Works, II, 99.Google Scholar

28. “Divinity School Address,” in Works, 1, 123.Google Scholar

29. “Self-Reliance,” in ibid., II, 50.

30. Letter to Carlyle, , 12 31, 1844Google Scholar, in Whicher, , Selections, p. 274.Google Scholar

31. “Self-Reliance,” in Works, II, 50.Google Scholar

32. Ibid., p. 70.

33. Bercovitch, Sacvan, Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 174.Google Scholar

34. Journals, II, 522.Google Scholar

35. Ibid., III, 382–83.

36. Journal, December 1849, in Whicher, , Selections, p. 320.Google Scholar

37. “Self-Reliance,” in Works, II, 45.Google Scholar

38. Journals, II, 310–311.Google Scholar

39. Ibid., III, 565.

40. Ibid., IV, 247.

41. Jehlen, Myra, “New World Epics: The Novel and the Middle-Class in America,” Salmagundi, 36 (Winter 1977), 55.Google Scholar

42. For a discussion of inequality and the myth of the classless society in the age of Jackson, see Pessen, Edward, Jacksonian America, Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, Ill,: Dorsey Press, 1969), pp. 39–58Google Scholar. For a discussion of Jacksonian economic doctrine in general, see Meyers, Marvin, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), esp. Chaps. 5 and 6Google Scholar. For the social theory of the Jacksonians, see Blau, Joseph L., Social Theories of Jacksonian America (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1947).Google Scholar

43. Works, II, 114–15.Google Scholar

44. Ibid., p. 111.

45. For this argument, see Bier, Jesse, “Weberism, Franklin, and the Transcendental Style,” New England Quarterly, 43 (06 1970), 179–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Journals, VII, 431.Google Scholar

47. Ibid., III, 388–90.

48. Ibid., VII, 286.

49. See Pessen, , Jacksonian America, pp. 39–58Google Scholar, on the lack of social mobility among all but the privileged.

50. “Fate,” in Works, VI, 11.Google Scholar

51. “Politics,” in Works, III, 212–13.Google Scholar

52. Journals, IV, 431.Google Scholar

53. Ibid., II, 310.

54. Ibid., III, 557.

55. “Nature,” in Works, I, 76–77.Google Scholar

56. For a discussion of American millenarianism in general, see Tuveson, Ernest Lee, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Hole (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar. For an examination of Emerson in this context, see Bercovitch, , Puritan Origins (note 33 above), Chap. 5.Google Scholar

57. Works, II, 253.Google Scholar

58. Ibid., II, pp. 118–19.

59. Federalist Papers (New York: New American Library, 1961), p. 83.Google Scholar

60. “Divinity School Address,” in Works, I, 122.Google Scholar

61. Journals, II, 318.Google Scholar