American Literature Lecture

Four

The Flowering of New England

1. American Renaissance

In 1941, as America entered the Second World War, F(rancis). O(tto). Matthiessen
published American Renaissance, a groundbreaking study of 5 major American writers:
Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. Their work mark America’s first
coming to literary maturity.
In Matthiessen’s own words, the period was the American equivalent of an
Elizabethan age, when artistic, intellectual and political energy generated a fresh mode
of expression.

If this age may be said to finish with the American Civil War (1961) its beginning is
linked to the name of R. W. Emerson. His essay, Nature (1836) rejected the past and the
‘retrospective age’ and asserted a new vision: I became a transparent eyeball. I am
nothing. I see all. His other essay, The American Scholar (1837) was to become
America’s true declaration of independence.
The innovative spirit of the period reached its climax over five remarkable years
(1850-1855) when several representative works were published:
- 3 of Hawthorne’s novels, including The Scarlet Letter
- 3 Melvillian novels, including Moby Dick
- H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
- Emerson’s Representative Men
- Thoreau’s Walden
- Whitman’s 1st version of Leaves of Grass

This is also the time when several distinctive genres emerged in American literature: the
poem, the essay, the travel tale, the novel and, if we include Poe’s earlier work, the
modern short story.

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Like Poe, Emerson’s essential contribution to American literature was to release the
power of symbolism by engaging the mind in a quest beyond itself, through intuition and
imagination.
Yet, the two are very different; if both are writers of mental adventures, their
visions are opposed:
-Poe was searching for a dark entity, for an elusive beauty, for ‘a secret whose attainment
is destruction’ (cf. the short story Manuscript Found in a Bottle)
- Emerson, on the contrary, was looking for order, for an Oversoul or cosmic force.
Poe had a decadent imagination, Emerson an affirmative one.
In his writings (journals, essays, lectures, poems) Emerson articulated principles that
have become central to the definition of what we consider nowadays traditional American
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values: self-reliance, individual authority and responsibility, strong optimism, moral

idealism, the cult of experience, the return to nature.
He was an intellectual radical that led a public and private life marked by tradition
and conventions
 born in Boston, Massachussets, in a family of nine successive generations of
New England ministers, i.e., an atmosphere marked by religious customs and
social ritual.
 studies at Harvard; after graduation taught for a while; then became a Unitarian
minister [Unitarianism- a liberal movement that flourished in the 18th c. as a reaction
against Calvinism. Unitarians shifted the focus in religious experience from individual’s
innate depravity to his moral capabilities and prospects for salvation. So, it supported
moral democracy instead of moral aristocracy]

As a minister, he attracted attention with his eloquent, but unorthodox sermons. Impatient
with the ceremonial rituals and church structures, he began to look for more direct access
to religious experience: I have sometimes thought that in order to be a good minister, it
was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we
worship the dead forms of our forefathers.
Advocating greater attention to the emotional, subjective elements of faith, he
searched for more intuitive, revelatory religious experiences and left the Church in 1832.
 After a short stay in England, where me met Wordsworth, Coleridge and Carlyle (
a life-long friend), he returned home and settled at Concord, Mass, taking
residence at the Old Manse, the house of his Puritan ancestors and, later, of
Hawthorne.. Here, he cultivated the simple pleasures of country living; worked
on his writings; and gave a series of lectures in Boston that won him the
reputation of an orator.

Nature (1836)

The essays- is Emerson’s most dramatic effort to reject the Old World of values and
build a new one
- provides the theoretical foundations for what will become an indigenous
American literature in the 19th.c
For him, imagination set free in the natural world offered the best way to discover an
original relation to the universe.
The underlying idea of the essay: to substitute nature for America’s lack of a
distinctive natural heritage. Nature was to be the source for articulating a unique
American experience.
Unlike those who considered nature as something to be exploited, Emerson
worshipped it for its spiritual and artistic opportunities. For him, Nature would
replace the Bible, as the greatest spiritual text available to everyone. He always
insisted that God had made the material world (nature) as a sign of His spiritual
world.
Nature= a scripture, more immediate and more accessible than any written
‘statement’. It needed a scriptor, the Orphic Poet who would respond to and
incorporate its language.
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The American Scholar (1837)

The essay was initially a Harvard lecture.

It encouraged the break with the past and concentration on developing the cultural
potential of experience. The true Scholar:
- does not live a repetitive and derivative life, but looks at the present and is
involved in the world of action. It is through experience, instincts and ‘things
near’ that we may discover the unity of the world, the ‘design’
- should rely on the creative power of intuition rather than on knowledge of others
in order to make sense of experience: I ask not for the great, the remote, the
romantic….I embrace the common, I explore… the familiar, the low. Give me
insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds.
Emerson closes the essay by proclaiming America’s literary independence: We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe… We shall walk on our own feet, we will
work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds.
The critic James Russell Lowell offered the most comprehensive view of the
essay’s significance: The Puritan revolt had made us ecclesiastically and the Revolution
politically independent, but we were socially and intellectually moored to English
thought till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of
blue waters.

Emerson enlarged the nation’s cultural horizons by encouraging the scholar to explore the
aesthetic potential of the immediate and the ordinary.
In this respect, much of the late 19th and early 20th c. American literature, art and
popular culture have their symbolic birth in The American Scholar.

Transcendentalism: Emerson’s increasing reputation put him at the centre of a small

group of a young, educated intellectual Bostonians who met frequently to exchange
ideas: Margaret Fuller, journalist, critic and feminist, Theodore Parker, Unitarian
minister, social reformer and abolitionist, George Ripley, a journalist and reformer.
Their detractors called them ‘Transcendentalists’ as they would often discusses
Kant’s transcendental philosophy. But they would also tackle other most pressing issues
at the time and supported efforts at moral reform, abolition od slavery, the temperance
movement or women’s rights. The public result of their discussions was The Dial, an
intellectual journal that appeared for four years (1840-1844).
Discussions in the group often focused on religious controversies; Emerson firmly
believed that the individual could experience God first hand, and was opposed to the
forms and ceremonies of any Church.

The Address: Emerson expressed his religious attitude in a controversial address to the
senior class at Harvard Divinity School in 1838- a lecture that dramatically changed his
life.
Arguing that American ministers practiced religion as if God were dead, he rejected the
importance of miracles, redefined the notions of good and evil and urged ministers to cast
away conformity and the authority of the Church. As a result, he was condemned as an
heretic and banned from speaking at Harvard for the next 30 years.
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Later, in ‘Journal’, he recalled the lecture and the excitement it had caused: In all my
lectures I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infinitude of the private man. This the
people accept readily enough…as long as I call the lecture Art or Politics, or Literature;
but the moment I call it religion, they are shocked…though it only be the explication of
the same truth…to anew class of facts.
One of his contemporaries best summarized this stage in Emerson’s life:
Emerson’s church consists of one member: himself.

Essays: 2 volumes of Essays (1841-1844) which shoe Emerson not attached to any
narrow, simple view of experience. He believed that ‘to define is to confine’, so his
thinking is provisional, democratic, receptive to change and growth, since ‘the mind
insures an order of expression which is the order of nature itself’.
The essays proceed by association rather than by logic, reflecting the way his
mind actually works, always enlarging the context and the range of experience, without
any unifying conclusion or statement.

Lecturer: By the mid 1840s, he spent more and more time as an itinerant lecturer and
became a respected member of the Lyceum Movement- an association that offered
general instruction to adults through a series of lectures and concerts.
His address on democratic self-reliance, repeated all over the country, became an
unofficial national anthem for the integrity of the individual mind.

In 1847-1848 he lectured extensively in England, where he took notes for what would
become Representative Men (1850) and English Traits (1856), a witty and insightful look
at the British culture.
His last years were spent at Concord where, in poor health, he died in April 1882.

3. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Usually associated with the Transcendentalists, although his career is somehow different.
Born and raised in Concord, Mass. In a ‘poor but honest family’ where he
learned, relatively early, that true education meant involvement in the real world of
everyday action.
After graduating from Harvard, he returned to Concord to teach and although he
gave it up soon, Thoreau remained a Teacher all his life.
For a time, he lived with Emerson’s family as a handyman, and so became
acquainted with the spirit of the Transcendentalist group.
1845- the crucial event of his life: he moved out of Concord to live, for 2 years
and a half, in a one-room cabin, erected by himself beside Walden pond, on a stretch of
land that Emerson had given him.

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849

His first, full-length book was an artistic and financial failure. It narrates events of a 7-
day voyage down the river, with his brother and it is a mixture of natural observations,
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histories of the region, contemporary events and many literary allusions and cultural
comments.
Thoreau never believed in traveling far, preferring to cultivate an inner landscape
of ‘home cosmographies. However, hr did travel around the country and abroad, trips that
would result in 3 travel books:
-The Maine Woods, 1864- a collection of three essays describing his trips over a period of
11 years to Maine.
- Cape Cod, 1865- based on several trips to Cape Cod peninsula in eastern
Massachusetts, and originally published a s a series of articles
-A Yankee in Canada, 1866.
By the end of the century, Thoreau came to be regarded as a social reformer,
praised by such political leaders as Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., who both
adopted the doctrine of non-violence resistance: the former in the struggle for India’s
independence, the latter in the 1960’s struggle for Civil Rights.

Thoreau’s posterity rests mainly on two works:

Civil Disobedience, 1849

The main doctrine of the essay is that individual consciousness is more important than
any other sources of moral decision: The only obligation which I have a right to assume
is to do at any time what I think right.
From here, he derives the necessity of ‘civil disobedience’ on critical occasions,
i.e., his refusal to pay taxes which were used to support the war against Mexico.
Underlying his attitude is the Transcendentalist notion of the self-reliant man: I
think that we should be men first and subjects afterwords, i.e., men should never be
passive instruments of state or social structures of power.
He defends his idea of manhood with intensity, defiance and courage, and the
essay can be considered a protest against everything that limits human freedom and
dignity: habit, cynicism and passive obedience to the laws.

Walden, 1854

As for Emerson, nature was for Thoreau ‘the present expositor of the divine mind’, that
space were God was visible and audible. The divine presence was to be discovered by the
human mind through the mediation of the senses: We need pray for no higher heaven
than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. His purpose, in the
contemplation of nature was to achieve a sort of mystical illumination through the senses.
The main concern of Walden is just such an illumination. It is a book about the
attempt ‘to see God’. Walden is both:
- a literal autobiography, a record of what actually happened while he was living at
Walden Pond
- a work of imagination, a re-creation of experience as ordered by conscious
intention. In this second sense, it is also Thoreau’s attempt to create a language
which would embody the mystical illumination he found in natural facts.
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However, the book fails to make clear the relation between man and nature mediated
through the senses, because of Thoreau’s excessive devotion to facts.
Nevertheless, Walden as a whole, does achieve a significance that we usually
associate with a fable, or myth. From this perspective, is basic theme is self-renewal and
it is to be achieved through: withdrawal from society, isolation, the discipline of poverty,
community with the sacred nature and the recovery of a unified and renewed self.