RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE EVER-EVOLVING ART OF ...

ABSTRACT
Self-reliance is a significant component of contemporary Emerson scholarship,
but few scholars have examined the way in which reading—almost unarguably
Emerson’s favorite pastime—can contribute to this canonical Emersonian idea. By
delineating a passage in Emerson’s journal which purports to entail the “secret” to self-
reliance, I suggest that a key aspect of generating self-reliance is making your “supposed
deficiencies redundancy” (Emerson, Journals VII: 521), which is the gradual abdication
of self-doubt, and that this secret is manifest in passages that describe the act of reading
throughout Emerson’s Essays. However, that secret—like many of Emerson’s
concepts—evolves over his career and takes on new shades of meaning, and my project
attempts to trace that evolution to arrive at a sketch of how reading can inform self-
reliance. I use the essays “History”, “The Poet”, and “Experience” to demonstrate this
evolution and also self-reliant reading’s limitations. Ultimately, I hope to suggest that
it’s these very limitations that create the possibility for ethical conduct in an
indeterminate world, thereby demonstrating the necessity of reading for living “the good
life”.
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