Emerson and Nature

If you want to believe that Nature is sentient, and both loves and cares for humans, then it helps to live in an area like Concord, MA. The countryside there ripples in gentle folds, dotted with farms and generally prosperous. In Emerson's day, it was a bucolic paradise, close enough to Boston to attract a sophisticated population, and far enough away to be safe from the corrupting influences of civilization.
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Emerson's house, The Old Manse (see the painting above), was an attractive one, large enough for his four children, plus servants, plus friends. Thoreau lived there for years, off and on. From the house, Emerson could stroll through peaceful woods and fields, where "Nature, red in tooth and claw" was rarely visible. Instead, his vision of Nature was one of peace and plenty, tamed by farms and made productive by farmers. Emerson could walk philosophically through rain and snow, knowing that his warm, snug abode lay nearby. That takes a lot of the sting out of the cold.

From this comfy position, it's possible for Emerson to write that Nature is a human being's spiritual guide, moral teacher, and source of wisdom. He can advocate contact with Nature as a cure for mental and physical disease, and can, without any sense of hypocrisy or irony, proclaim that Nature directs itself always to the good of humans, with a human-like benevolence. He doesn't mean, of course, that Nature "thinks" the way people think, but he does believe that it was designed (by exactly who or what, Emerson is vague) to benefit people.

Later in the 19th Century, people like Ambrose Bierce looked at this view of nature and scoffed mightily. They found it at best naive, and at worst, unforgiveably anthropocentric. In Emerson's world, humans are at the center of Nature, its point and focus. Nature reasons like a human, behaves like a human, and focuses creative energy on teaching humans and helping them develop sound bodies and minds. Nature functions a lot like a Boy Scout leader, to be honest. It's easy to believe in the utter goodness of Nature when one lives in Concord, and has scenes like the Old North Bridge, above, to comfort one. I still wonder, what would Emerson have thought if he'd lived in Canada and routinely been chased by mad walruses, or perhaps had his aunts nibbled by polar bears? I'm betting Nature wouldn't be so cuddly . . .
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Henry David Thoreau, the Iconoclast of Concord, took Emerson at his word and set off, once, into the Maine woods, where he almost died from an overdose of Nature. The awareness that -- gasp -- Nature was indifferent to him created a crisis in his philosophy and a bit of a breach between himself and Emerson. Thoreau remained a Transcendentalist, but he backed way off from the idea that Nature is aware of humans and wants to help them. I think this is the saner, and safer, position.

Transcendentalism!

Who is this man, and why is he staring off into the middle distance? It's a young-ish Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Sage of Concord, whose philosophy, articulated in a series of essays, spawned the movement we know as Transcendentalism. Emerson looks so calm and assured because nothing really bad ever happened to him.

Transcendentalism has its roots in Romanticism and its head in the clouds. Its heyday was from roughly 1835 to 1845, but its influence permeated the 19th Century. We can see its Romantic roots in the following tenets:

* People are basically Good.

* Nature is Good and the source of all Goodness.

* People can be perfect, and have unlimited potential.

* Individual experience is the only experience that matters.

It differed from Romanticism in that it taught that men and women were equal, and that the mind controlled the world, not the other way around.

The Transcendentalists' view of religion gave rise to Unitarianism as we know it. It differed significantly from earlier views, and was a complete rejection of Puritanical Calvinism. In short, it taught:

* God can be known, through nature and individual experience.

* God is in everyone, and everyone is in God.

* Everyone is part of a universal "over-soul" that unites all of humanity in Goodness.

* All religions hold some truth, and no one religion is right or wrong. Religion, however, is not necessary for a relationship with God.

* The Bible is unnecessary, because it is too narrow.

* Jesus is unnecessary, because people are Good and don't need a savior.

* Miracles don't happen, and never have.

* Human religious traditions are unnecessary and harmful.

Transcendentalists had a very Platonic idea of the world -- they believed that Truth existed outside our physical sphere, and could be found out there, along with idealized versions of things that our reality merely copies. Perfection could be dragged, presumably kicking and screaming, because that's always how things are dragged in literature, into reality by study, solitary contemplation of nature, and the exercise of optimism.

As a philosophy, Transcendentalism was positive and optimistic. It affirmed the worth of every person, and the dignity of humankind. As a practice, Transcendentalism, well, sucked. The 19th Century is replete with stories of communities founded to create (does this sound familiar at all?) perfect societies. The trouble was, people didn't behave in those "Good" ways that they were supposed to. It is a tribute to the firmness of the Transcendentalists' beliefs that they didn't turn cynical sooner, as one utopian community after another failed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson stands out as the primary articulator of Transcendental thought, but he had lots of company. Margaret Fuller was his co-editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, and had a very interesting literary (and personal) career. Henry David Thoreau went into the woods to find himself, and his chronicle of that experience has inspired generations of solitary thinkers and environmentalists. Bronson Alcott embodied the belief that people were Good and could have perfect societies, and even though he failed to create any, he managed to hang onto that belief. He also fathered Louisa May Alcott, whose Little Women books continue to charm their readers.

A Disjointed Series of Things to Think About

Okay, only for a given value of "Romantic," because we have to make certain we define it correctly, but here are some pre-test things to think about that might prove profitable on Thursday.

What makes Edgar Allan Poe "gothic" as opposed to merely another overwrought Romantic, staring down the abyss? The concept of the sublime only sort-of comes into play with Poe. I'd venture to say that none of his settings fall into the "sublime" category of nature that Romantics were so fond of, but his storms do. The thunderstorm in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is definately siblime. And, happily, it scares the mortal poo out of everyone. I digress. "Ligeia" has so many gothic elements, it's hard to list them all, but you can't go wrong with dead women, weird turreted bedrooms, Medieval wall hangings, and the suggestion of madness and decay. Don't forget ghosts, suspected vampires, and unreliable narrators.

Yet another Poe question intrigues me. He writes in the first person so that he can show the interiority of his narrators -- their emotions, thoughts, fears, and insanity -- in ways that you just can't do with an external narrator. This limits him, though, because it means that his narrators always have to survive. You know at the beginning of a first-person story that the narrator isn't going to croak at the end of it; otherwise how would that person finish the tale? Does this survival-of-the-narrator strategy hurts the overall horror factor of Poe's tales? I kind of think it does, because I'm always thinking, "If this was so scary, how did you make it out?" I suppose this is a good place to remember the differences between terror and horror.

One of the characteristics of literature of this period is its unwillingness to do all the work for the reader. The endings of everything from "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to "Ligeia" leave the reader with questions. Why do these writers refuse to tie up all the loose ends, and how does that reflect the ideas of literary Romanticism?

Let's see, we might also find ourselves discussing the condition of women in the 19th Century and the things that shaped that condition -- Romanticism, Christianity, and the American legal system come to mind. How do women fare in the stories and poems we read these past few weeks? Which writers seem sympathetic to women, and which are clearly not?

Sojourner Truth can obviously be paired with Phillis Wheatley, although their lives never overlapped. The contrasts between the two are more important than the similarities, but one has to wonder what ST would have been like if she'd had Wheatley's education. Perhaps she would not have been as forceful an advocate for justice; the experience of injustice at the hands of her owners is what made her so adamant to protect others, after all. Wheatley was less an abolitionist because she had no abuse or injustice to protest. This lack of personal experience in injustice is also what kept a number of women quiet on the subject of women's rights. They were comfortable, and felt that other women's discomfort was their own fault.

One of the characteristics of Romantic literature is the unreliable narrator, or the unreliable experience. It would be helpful to think about the ways that Goodman Brown's experiences may or may not be real, and the ways the narrator in "Ligeia" might be unreliable. Come to think of it, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" may be pulling our leg, and so might "The Raven." I see a trend.

Some short takes: It's good to know the ways that the Enlightenment and Romanticism opposed one another. Situate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Fenimore Cooper in the same philosophical box, too, in their treatment of Native Americans. Women and slaves have some of the same problems, but not the same solutions.

Raving about "The Raven"

Here's an interesting thought to ponder: What if Poe was kidding when he wrote "The Raven?"

In an essay entitled "Theme and Parody in 'The Raven,'" Dennis Eddings has made a nicely substantiated case for Poe's most famous poem to have been a tongue-in-cheek criticism of the outrageous gothic poetry of his day. Eddings contends that Poe was too good a poet to make the kinds of mistakes that we see all over "The Raven."

Remember, Poe was a literary critic as well as a poet and short-story writer. He was deservedly famous for his acerbic comments about other people's work and some people read his critiques for the pleasure of his cutting remarks. He saved his particular nastiness for the group of poets who later got named -- hysterically, in every sense of the word -- the Spasmodics.

He accused this group of being overly self-absorbed, hystrionic, unreasonable, sloppy, and careless of rhythm, phrase, and tone. By the 1840's Poe was very much dissatisfied with the Romantics and particularly with Romantic poetry.

If we look at "The Raven" as a parody, some things make sense. All of the little mistakes (like uncertain rustlings of curtains and "tinkling" footsteps on carpet), become deliberate mockery of poets who got those things wrong on purpose. The progression of the narrator from merely gloomy to absolutely plunged into the depths of despair, and all this because he's talking to a bird, takes on a new, and far less sinister, meaning. The narrator is one of those ridiculous Romantics, who cannot keep himself from falling into his own navel.

Poe frequently said, in critiquing poetry toward the end of his life, that the unrestrained imagination leads to a "dead end." Eddings makes the case that, for the narrator in "The Raven," this is exactly what happens -- he gets more and more worked up by his own imagination, and winds up stuck in the dark with a talking bird. Hardly a helpful place to be.

Possibly the most conclusive evidence that Poe is satirizing Romantic poetry lies in the form of "The Raven" itself. It is exactly the same form that Elizabeth Barrett (later Browning) used in her poem "Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Poe had reviewed Barrett's poetry unfavorably, so it's unlikely that he copied the poem for purposes of flattery. Instead, he seems to be doing, in "The Raven," everything that he criticized in Browning.

What did Poe say about the poem? He didn't get a chance to say, "Hey, this is satire!" because when it was published, it became a huge hit, and he never had the nerve to say, "Just kidding."

What "Gothic" Really Means

When we talk about the Romantic temperament, it isn't going to take us long to get to one of Romanticism's biggest contributions to American literature, the gothic horror story. Remember that Romanticism loves the supernatural, the sublime, and the exotic. Gothic literature can combine all of these elements into something that, well, collapses into a pond without a trace, meanwhile leaving us with our skin crawling and our heart rate elevated.

What does "gothic" mean, in this context? Originally, of course, it was a form of architecture and ornamentation, featuring flying buttresses and pointed windows with intricate stained glass in them. The actual term comes from the Goths, that Frankish tribe most notable for sacking Rome, and the architecture is a kind of misnomer; it really has little to do with the Gothic tribes. In literature, which is our area of interest, we have Horace Walpole to thank for the term and the beginning of the genre.

Walpole and The Castle of Otranto. In 1765, Walpole wrote (in England, so don't mistake him for American literature) a novel destined to become hugely popular. Its medieval setting, complete with castle, helpless females screaming in dark, vaulted cellars, and general air of creepy melancholy earned it the name "gothic." The name stuck, and thanks to the popularity of the novel, the genre flourished.

Most of this gothic fiction was bad beyond belief. The amazing ability of humans to glom onto a formula and milk it for all it's worth did not start with 1980's lawyer novels. Walpole's imitators had many elements in common, and here are a few of them. Please note how the correlate to the elements of literary Romanticism.

Ingredients of Gothic Fiction

• exotic locations -- look for haunted moors, craggy landscapes, and lots of fog; thunderstorms are popular, too, preferably supernaturally strong ones


• Medieval-ish settings -- castles and manor houses, often haunted, usually dark and foreboding, inhabited by people wearing old-fashioned clothing and looking deathly pale


• helpless women -- think Kate Capshaw's character in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. These women scream a lot, wear filmy nightgowns at inappropriate times, and faint inconveniently.


• supernatural elements -- we prefer, of course, the spirits of the vengeful dead, but any spirits will do. Don't forget the malevolent house, the haunted bridge, and the demonic forest.


• Various mysterious maladies -- think bizarre inherited diseases, curses from beyond the grave, dark family secrets, and all kinds of neuroses, twitches, and nervous tics


• Strange and terrible events -- for a given value of strange and terrible, of course. The 19th C. version of gothic horror can't match modern horror movies, but a good gothic story will suggest all kinds of torments, physical, mental, spiritual.


• Generalized anxiety -- the reader experiences sensations of suspense and dread

Gothic Writers to Cherish When we think about the gothic form in American literature, Edgar Allan Poe is always going to be first in our brains, at least until the early 20th C. when we have H.P. Lovecraft. Poe isn't the only person in the genre, however. Most 19th Century writers experimented with gothic stories, at least a little bit. Even though they're not traditionally considered "gothic," we can see how "Young Goodman Brown," "My Kinsman Major Molineaux," and even "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" have elements of the genre. What they lack in castles they more than make up for in atmosphere.

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In Europe, Sheridan Le Fanu, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and even Charles Dickens contribute to the genre. If you enjoy it, you will enjoy them. Don't forget Robert Lewis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or, at the end of the 19th Century, Oscar Wilde's fabulous (and creepy) The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Thank You For Not Reading

The 19th Century brought about a flourishing of the literary arts in America, for a given value of "flourish." We have literary giants like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, who are still read because they're that good. Then we have the likes of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. Here's a short list of people we won't be reading, and why.

James Fenimore Cooper. Mark Twain wrote (to my mind) an absolutely hilarious piece called "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," that catalogues the awful inconsistencies in Cooper's writing. You should read it. What you shouldn't read is Cooper himself. Caught up in the Romantic view of native Americans, he filled his novels with noble savages who were just short of Godlike in their abilities in the natural world. The main character of his Leatherstocking series is a white man raised by Indians. This person, Natty Bummpo by name, (and yes, it is just ridiculous), has been given amazing abilities by his adopted culture. What he hasn't got is a lick of consistency. He talks like a Boston brahmin in one sentence and like an ignorant redneck in the next. Cooper had a tin ear. I know there's a Fenimore Cooper society out there, but I won't be joining.

Herman Melville. I confess that I actually like Moby Dick, but that's because I enjoy digressions and description. Read Moby Dick and you could probably run a whaling ship yourself. The trouble with Melville is that he's inconsistent. Sometimes he rises to amazing heights of insight, as he does with Captain Ahab. Other times, he wallows in pathos, writes awkwardly, and forgets what he's doing. I put "Bartleby the Scrivener" on the same plane as Charlotte Temple. Melville matters, though, in who he influences. His picaresque novels inspire a whole generation of writers like, well, Mark Twain, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, and their ilk.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. Mrs. Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, was a 19th Century blockbuster, and on the positive side, it brought to light the appalling conditions that slaves and their families faced. It humanized the slaves by showing whites that slaves had emotions that were just like white emotions. This came as a shock to some people, even in the North. The problem is that, on the negative side, the novel is both polemic and sentimental. Stowe also couldn't sustain the effort, and nothing else she wrote reached the pinnacle (if that's what it was) of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Oh, and she wrote in dialect, and did it better than Fenimore Coooper, although a ten-year-old would've been better than Cooper.

Welcome to Romanticism!

The second weirdest thing to come out of Geneva after John Calvin was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We might think of him as the anti-Calvin.

Rousseau's life, spanning the years 1712-1778, was marked with controversy, both because of his philosophy and because he was apparently a really annoying person. In addition to fathering a tribe of illegitimate children for whom he took no responsibility, he quarreled with everybody, even people who agreed with him, sort of like Thomas Paine with better brains.

The Short Course in Rousseau looks like this:

• Modern civilization is bad for people. It makes them soft, lazy, and unnatural.
• People in their natural, uncivilized state, are inherently noble, for a given value of noble.
• All natural appetites and impulses are good and healthy. Attempts to stifle these by "civilizing" are unhealthy and anti-human.
• The only legitimate government is one that has the universal approval of the governed, acting according to their aggregate wishes. (And what planet was Rousseau on where this is even slightly likely?)
• The truly noble, honest human is the savage, whose life has not been blighted by European culture.
• Studying the arts and sciences just produces more culture, which creates weak people.

You can readily see that this is an antithetical reaction to the Enlightenment, with its glorification of science and reason, and its split of body and soul. Not only did Rousseau advocate a "whole" person, but that person was inherently good -- it was society that was bad. (The idea that good humans created this bad society is one that Rousseau comes back to again and again, but never really solves.) This good person flies in the face of Calvinist and Catholic teaching about original sin, and so, Rousseau spends much of his life in conflict with major religious forces.

Rousseau's philosophy increases in popularity after his death, and will inform much of American literature in the first half of the 19th Century. The concept of the noble savage is his, and it creates a renewed interest in the Native Americans, who are in short supply on the east coast of America and therefore safe to idealize. (Nobody suggests that those savages bashing brains on the frontier are noble. They must have been "civilized.") Literary romanticism, with its idealization of the natural world, the natural man, and raw, unfiltered emotions, comes straight from Rousseau. It will lead everywhere from Poe to Whitman, so buckle up.

Rousseau's major works include his Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts, (1750), wherein he explained how the study of arts and sciences perpetuates the corrupting influence of modern society. Anything that could remotely be labeled "cultural" was helping to perpetuate oppression of the individual. The notable exception to this was music, which Rousseau loved, performed, and wrote.

The Social Contract (1762) described the problem of government: we need to be organized somehow, but most of the ways to do it (monarchy for example) are wrong. Government needs to reflect the will of the people, banding together for the common good. Any person who wants can opt out of this system and be free of the government. I over-simplify, of course, but this is the gist. Note the emphasis on the individual, for whom the state exists. This opposes the more common European scheme, where the state exists for the individual to serve.

Emile, or On Education (1762) proposed the ideal education for a young man, one that was directed by his own natural inclinations rather than by a state intent on "civilizing" him and bringing his desires and expectations into line with conventional thought. In this polemical novel, Rousseau also asserts that women exist only to serve and please men, and bear children. Goodbye Enlightenment ideas about equality.