Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
cognition—and things in themselves. Rejecting John Locke’s view of the mind
as a tabula rasa and passive receptor, these Transcendentalists saw instead an
interchange between the individual mind and nature (nature as animated and
inspirited), an interchange that received and created a sense of the spirit, or the
Over-soul. They rejected institutions and dogma in favor of their own individuality
and independence as better able to maintain the inherent goodness in themselves
and perception of goodness in the world around them.
Emerson was early introduced to a spiritual life, particularly through his father
William Emerson (1769–1811), a Unitarian minister in Boston. He died in 1811,
when Emerson was eight. His mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson (1768–1853), kept
boardinghouses to support her six children and see to their education. Emerson
was educated at the Boston Latin School in Concord and at Harvard College. From
1821 to 1825, he taught at his brother William’s Boston School for Young Ladies
then entered Harvard Divinity School.
In 1829, Emerson was ordained as Unitarian minister of Boston’s Second
Church; he also married Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died two years later from
tuberculosis. Her death caused Emerson great grief and may have propelled
him in 1832 to resign from his church, which he came to see as institutionalizing
Christianity, thereby causing church-goers to experience Christianity at a remove,
so to speak. Emerson later armed his views and broke permanently with the
Unitarian church in his “Divinity School Address” (1838), protesting the church’s
having dogmatized and formalized faith, morality, and God. Emerson thought the
church turned God from a living spirit and reality into a xed convention, evoking
only a historical Christianity—making God seem a thing of the past and dead.
From 1832 to 1833, Emerson traveled in Europe where he met such inuential
writers and thinkers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
Thomas Carlyle (1795—1881). He and Carlyle remained life-long friends. When
he returned to America, Emerson settled a legal dispute over his wife’s legacy,
through which he ultimately acquired an annual income of 1,000 pounds. He began
lecturing around New England, married Lydia Jackson, and settled in Concord, at
a house near ancestral property. In 1836, he anonymously published—at his own
expense—his rst book, Nature. It expressed his spiritual and transcendentalist
views and drew to Concord such like-minded friends as Bronson Alcott (1799—
1888), Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. They started The Dial (1840—
1844), a Transcendentalist journal edited mainly by Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau.
Staying true to his individualist views, Emerson often visited but did not join
the utopian experiment of Brook Farm (1841–1847), a co-operative community
whose residents included Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Unitarian minister George
Ripley (1802—1880). Emerson did continue to lecture across America and abroad
in England and Scotland. He publicly condemned slavery in his “Emancipation
of the Negroes in the British West Indies” (1841) and later attacked the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850. He also supported women’s surage and right to own property.
Emerson published a number of prose collections drawn from his lectures,
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