Abstract
There is way of talking about the New England Transcendentalists that takes solitary departure as their most representative trajectory, focusing especially on Emerson’s retirement from his Boston congregation to his sage’s retreat in Concord. Emerson, it is said, lead a circle of intellectual revolutionaries who rooted out the last vestiges of Puritan conformity and birthed the long-awaited self-creating Individual, the high-toned older brother of the self-made man, the American Adam. This last phrase is borrowed, of course, from the great Americanist R.W.B. Lewis, who described the Transcendentalists as leading the creation of national mythology based on the figure of “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources.” The idea that the Transcendentalist movement was unified by a commitment to individualism rests on a tenacious set of mutually reinforcing assumptions about the movement. Emerson is the major Transcendentalist. Transcendentalism is a philosophy of individualism. Individualism is the ground of American thought. American thought begins with Emerson. Emerson is the major Transcendentalist.1
It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics. It is very true that one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art. A work of art should, in the first place, be judged by its own law, that is, by the law of art. But Marxism alone can explain why and how a given tendency in art has originated in a given period in history, in other words, who made a demand for such an artistic form and not for another, and why.
—Leon Trotsky
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Notes
Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 178. Lewis, The American Adam, 5. There is an inexhaustible flow of new material on the Transcendentalists, both individually and as a group. I will indicate those sources that shape my thought the most strongly. The best synthetic history of the movement is
Barbara Packer, “The Transcendentalists,” in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 331–604.
Octavius Brooks Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 156.
F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), viii, xi.
Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967),
Perry Miller, The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1957), ix–x. For additional examples of the tendency to dismiss the radical Transcendentalists,
see Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 21 and
David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 92.
Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983),
Myra Jehlen, American Incarnation: The Individual the Nation, and the Continent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986),
Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (London: Routledge, 1993), 170.
Carol Colatrella, “Bercovitch’s Paradox: Critical Dissent, Marginality, and the Example of Melville,” in Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, eds., Cohesion and Dissent in America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 229. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, 342–343. For a compelling critique of Bercovitch’s theory of dissensus with specific reference to the self-conscious deployment of nationalist ideas by the utopian socialists of New England,
see Carl J. Guarneri, “Brook Farm, Fourierism, and the Nationalist Dilemma in American Utopianism,” in Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and its Contexts (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 447–470. The notion of a “national symbolic” operates quite similarly in
Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1991).
Jeffrey N. Cox, “Communal Romanticism,” European Romantic Review, 15, no. 2 (June 2004): 330.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, ed., Aesthetic Papers (Boston: The Editor, 1849).
Clarence L.F. Gohdes, The Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1931) documents the vibrant journal culture of the Transcendentalist movement.
E. Malcolm Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (Durham: Duke University Press, 1925), 221. Frederick Robinson, “An Oration delivered before the Trades’ Union of Boston and Vicinity, July 4, 1834,” in Blau, Social Theories, 323.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 273. For histories of the two major antebellum parties,
see Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960);
and Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 11–42.
Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 57–83 and 268–320, shows that electoral politics in the half century following the Revolution were dominated, not by clearly defined party organizations, but by relatively flexible groupings within a small elite electorate who maneuvered to capture the “revolutionary center.”
Philip Gould, Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Persuasion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 176–183, demonstrates the flexibility of republican ideology and how it was appropriated during the early national period by different and often conflicting social formations.
Tamara Plakins Thornton, Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 73–144 provides what is still one of the best surveys of the ideology of agrarian republicanism.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” Dial, 1, no. 2 (October 1840): 148.
Orestes Brownson, “The Laboring Classes,” Boston Quarterly Review, 3, no. 4 (October 1840): 472.
Orestes Brownson, “Review of Chartism by Thomas Carlyle,” Boston Quarterly Review, 3, no. 3 (July 1840): 366. The best social history of the elite radical milieu is
Anne Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981).
Paul F. Boller, Jr., American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: Putnam, 1974) explores the connections between the Transcendentalists’ “intuitional philosophy, idealism, and religious radicalism” and their commitment to social reform. For discussions of the rise of the literary marketplace that made the movement possible,
see Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution to Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 56–83;
William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 3–67;
and Helmut Lehmann-Haupt et al., The Book in America: A History of the Making and Selling of Books in the United States, 2nd ed. (New York: Bowker, 1951).
Orestes Brownson, “Brook Farm,” The United States Democratic Review, 11, no. 53 (November 1842): 481.
Margaret Fuller, “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women,” Dial, 4, no. 1 (July 1843): 14.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). Transcendentalism as a Social Movement. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_4
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