Margaret Fuller was the daughter of a Massachusetts congressman who provided tutors for her in Latin, Greek, chemistry, philosophy and, later, German. Exercising what Barbara Packer calls "her peculiar powers of intrusion and caress" (P, 443), Fuller became friends with many of the transcendentalists, including Emerson. She organized a series of popular "conversations" for women in Boston in the winters of 1839-44, journeyed to the Midwest in the summer of 1843, and published her observations as Summer on the Lakes. After this publishing success, Horace Greeley, a friend of Emerson's and the editor of the New York Tribune, invited her to New York to write for the Tribune. Fuller abandoned her previously ornate and pretentious style, issuing pithy reviews and forthright criticisms: for example, of Longfellow's poetry and Carlyle's attraction to brutality. Fuller was in Europe from 1846-9, sending back hundreds of pages for the Tribune. On her return to America with her husband and son, she drowned in a hurricane off the coast of Fire Island, New York.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845 ), a revision of her "Great Lawsuit" manifesto in The Dial, is Fuller's major philosophical work. She holds that masculinity and femininity pass into one another, that there is "no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman" (T, 418). Women are treated as dependents, however, and their self-reliant impulses are often held against them. What they most want is the freedom to unfold their powers, a freedom Fuller holds to be necessary not only for their self-development, but for the renovation of society. Like Thoreau and Emerson, she calls for periods of withdrawal from a society whose members are in various states of "distraction" and "imbecility," and a return only after "the renovating fountains" of individuality have risen up. Such individuality is necessary in particular for the proper constitution of that form of society known as marriage. "Union," she holds, "is only possible to those who are units" (T, 419).
Henry Thoreau studied Latin, Greek, Italian, French, German, and Spanish at Harvard, where he heard Emerson's "The American Scholar" as the commencement address in 1837. He first published in The Dial when Emerson commissioned him to review a series of reports on wildlife by the state of Massachusetts, but he cast about for a literary outlet after The Dial’s failure in 1844. In 1845, his move to Walden Pond allowed him to complete his first book, A Week on the Concord and the Merrimac Rivers. He also wrote a first draft of Walden, which eventually appeared in 1854.
Nature comes to even more prominence in Walden than in Emerson's Nature, which it followed by eighteen years. Nature becomes particular: this tree, this bird, this state of the pond on a summer evening or winter morning become Thoreau's subjects. Thoreau takes a receptive stance. He finds himself "neighbor to" rather than a hunter of birds; and a dweller in a house that is no more and no less than a place where he properly sits. From the right perspective, Thoreau finds, he can possess and use a farm, with more satisfaction than the farmer, struggling to feed his family and expand his operations. In Walden's opening chapter, "Economy," Thoreau considers the trade-offs we make in life, and he asks, as Plato did in The Republic, what are life's real necessities. Like the Roman philosophers Marcus Porcius Cato and Marcus Varro he seeks a "life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust (W, 15). Instead, he finds that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (W, 8). Thoreau's "experiment" at Walden shows that a life of simplicity and independence can be achieved today (W, 17). If Thoreau counsels simple frugality--a vegetarian diet for example, and a dirt floor--he also counsels a kind of extravagance, a spending of what you have in the day that shall never come again. True economy, he writes, is a matter of "improving the nick of time" (W, 17).
Thoreau went to Walden Pond on the anniversary of America's declared independence from Britain--July 4, 1845, declaring his own independence from a society that is "commonly too cheap." It is not that he is against all society, but that he finds we meet too often, before we have had the chance to acquire any "new value for each other" (W, 136). Thoreau welcomes those visitors who "speak reservedly and thoughtfully" (W, 141), and who preserve an appropriate sense of distance; he values the little leaves or acorns left by visitors he never meets. Thoreau lived at Walden for just under three years, a time during which he sometimes visited friends and conducted business in town (it was on one such visit, to pick up a mended shoe, that he was arrested for tax avoidance).
At the opening of Walden's chapter on "Higher Laws" Thoreau confesses to once having desired to slaughter a woodchuck and eat it raw, just to get at its wild essence. He values fishing and hunting for their taste of wildness, though he finds that in middle age he has given up eating meat. He finds wildness not only in the woods, but in such literary works as Hamlet and the Iliad; and even in certain forms of society: "The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet" ("Walking" (1862), p. 621). The wild is not always consoling or uplifting, however. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau records a climb on Mount Ktaadn in Maine when he confronted the alien materiality of the world; and in Cape Cod (1865), he records the foreignness, not the friendliness, of nature: the shore is "a wild, rank place, and there is no flattery in it" (Packer, "The Transcendentalists," 577).
Although Walden initiates the American tradition of environmental philosophy, it is equally concerned with reading and writing. In the chapter on "Reading," Thoreau speaks of books that demand and inspire "reading, in a high sense" (W, 104). He calls such books "heroic," and finds them equally in literature and philosophy, in Europe and Asia: "Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares..." (W, 104). Thoreau suggests that Walden is or aspires to be such a book; and indeed the enduring construction from his time at Walden is not the cabin he built but the book he wrote.
Thoreau maintains in Walden that writing is "the work of art closest to life itself" (W, 102). In his search for such closeness, he began to reconceive the nature of his journal. Both he and Emerson kept journals from which their published works were derived. But in the early 1850s, Thoreau began to conceive of the journal as a work in itself, "each page of which should be written in its own season & out of doors or in its own locality wherever it may be--" (J, 67). A journal has a sequence set by the days, but it may have no order; or what order it has emerges in the writer's life as he meets the life of nature. With its chapters on "Reading," "Solitude," "Economy," "Winter," and "Spring," Walden is more "worked up" than the journal; in this sense, Thoreau came to feel, it is less close than the journal to the nature it records.
Emerson's 1838 letter to President Martin Van Buren is an early expression of the depth of his despair at actions of his country, in this case the ethnic cleansing of American land east of the Mississippi. The 16,000 Cherokees lived in what is now Kentucky and Tennessee, and in parts of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia. They were one of the more assimilated tribes, who owned property, drove carriages, used plows and spinning wheels, and even owned slaves. Wealthy Cherokees sent their children to elite academies or seminaries. The Cherokee chief refused to sign a removal agreement with the government of Andrew Jackson, but the government found a minority faction to agree to removal of the tribe to territories west of the Mississippi. Despite the opposition of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall, the Cherokees--many of whom died along the way--were removed under President Van Buren in 1835. In his letter, Emerson called this "a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country; for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our Government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more?" (A, 3).
Slavery had existed in the United States from the beginnings of the country, but when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed by the United States Congress in 1850, it had dramatic and visible effects not only in Georgia or Mississippi but in Massachusetts and New York. For the law required all citizens of the country to assist in returning fugitive slaves to their owners. This extension of the slave-system to the north, the subject of Thoreau's "Slavery in Massachusetts," (1854) was on public view when an escaped slave named Anthony Burns was captured in Boston, tried by a Massachusetts court, and escorted by the Massachusetts militia and U. S. marines to the harbor, where he was taken back to slavery in Virginia. His owner placed him in a notorious "slave pen" outside Richmond, where Burns was handcuffed, chained at the ankles and left to lie in his own filth for four months. Thoreau denounced the absurdity of a court in Boston "trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE," when the question has already been "decided from eternity" (R, 92). In his "Lecture on Slavery" of 1855, Emerson calls the original 1787 Constitution's recognition of slavery a "crime" (A, 100), and he contrasts the written law of the constitution with the "Laws" and "Right" ascertained by Jesus, Menu, Moses, and Confucius. An immoral law, he holds, is void.
The distinction between morality and law is also the basis for Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). Thoreau was arrested in 1846 for nonpayment of his poll tax, and he took the opportunity presented by his night in jail to meditate on the authority of the state. The government, Thoreau argues, is but an expedient by which we succeed "in letting one another alone" (R, 64). The citizen has no duty to resign his conscience to the state, and may even have a duty to oppose immoral legislation such as that which supports slavery and the Mexican War. Thoreau concludes: "I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave's government also" (R, 67). Slavery could be abolished by a "peaceable revolution," he continues, if people refused to pay their taxes and clogged the system by going to jail (R, 76). Thoreau thus envisions nonviolent action in "Resistance to Civil Government," but he later supported the violent actions of John Brown, who killed unarmed pro-slavery settlers in Kansas, and in 1859 attacked the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia. In "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau portrays Brown as an "Angel of Light" (R, 137) and "a transcendentalist above all" (115) who believed "that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave" (R,132). In early 1860, just months before the outbreak of the Civil War, he and Emerson participated in public commemorations of Brown's life and actions.
| A | Emerson's Antislavery Writings, ed. Joel Myerson and Len Gougeon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. |
| J | A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851, ed. H. Daniel Peck. New York: Penguin Classics, 1993. |
| JMN | Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.William H. Gilman et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960-- |
| O | Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Oxford Authors), ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. |
| R | Thoreau, Henry David, Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. |
| T | Myerson, Joel, Transcendentalism, A Reader. New York: Oxford University Pres, 2000. |
| W | Thoreau, Henry David, Walden. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. |
Other Primary Sources:
| Russell Goodman rgoodman@unm.edu |
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