Emerson Didn’t Practice the Self-Reliance He Preached

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Author: Mark Greif
Full Title: Emerson Didn’t Practice the Self-Reliance He Preached
Category: #articles
URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/emerson-transcendentalists-concord-robert-gross/620534/

Highlights

The members of the town establishment meet in the Freemasons’ Hall and in the Social Circle (a club for the rich male elite), and on their own initiative decide to undertake urban redevelopment in the town center. They set restrictions to force out “any blacksmith shop … or building in which any filthy or offensive business shall be carried on,” including carpenters and wagonmakers, the old mainstays of village life; they make way for retail and brand-new banks and insurance companies, to which these rich men supply the chief capital.
The Emersonian vision of mental power and refusal of constraints affected young women too—teenagers who thrilled to his call but knew too well, as his brother’s fiancée, Elizabeth Hoar, told Emerson directly, that “no ‘idealizing girl’ in her experience had ever fulfilled her early promise after coming of age and marrying.” The fate of Martha Hunt—a brilliant young woman sent to Groton to study by her sacrificing farmer parents—was emblematic. “Emerson … encouraged her ambitions and lent her books,” Gross writes, but prospects remained limited. The only paid role commensurate to talents like hers was that of teacher—a job that approximately 20 percent of white women in antebellum Massachusetts held at some point. But “managing sixty children in a cramped schoolhouse” as a summer schoolmistress was demoralizing, and Hunt’s thwarted interests left her “a strange girl,” according to a contemporary, “not content to milk cows and churn butter, and fry pork, without further hope or thought.” At 19, she drowned herself in the river. Nathaniel Hawthorne helped fish out the body.
Gross also shows that most of those who were galvanized by Emerson moved on from him. The few women who truly opted for an independent, risky life—plunging, as Margaret Fuller did, into authorship, feminism, reform efforts—“accused him of settling for a placid suburban existence.” Other townsfolk, like Keyes, settled into family expectations, marriage, and continuity themselves, and remembered the Transcendentalist inspiration fondly but vaguely.
One of Gross’s own quieter formulations captures this truth: “Community was not so much declining as shifting forms.” The contours of this shift are discernible in the rise of ardent moral reforms with wider geographic range, such as abolitionism, the defense of the Cherokees, and women’s participation in the petitioning of Congress. It was as if earlier moral policing in one’s own parish—monitoring sin in oneself and in neighbors, creating tight but short-range bonds—split along two tracks. One led to individual self-improvement and self-realization, and the other to reform of “the nation” or “the people,” each mission cosmic rather than local, yet both with a communal thrust.
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Meanwhile, a surprising hero emerges in his one truly unwavering and stubborn young follower. By the end of Gross’s story, a new vision of Thoreau has taken shape. He is the townsman who turned his withdrawal into a conspicuously individual performance—“his well-built house” by Walden Pond “readily visible to passersby on the carriage road”—in order to take his neighbors and family along on his journey. Thoreau and his family were ardent abolitionists (his sister Helen was a friend of Frederick Douglass’s), and he continued to hide enslaved people on their flight to Canada even while living at the pond. The famous early chapters of Walden—which seem so brutally insulting toward greedy, wasteful, acquisitive farmers and townsfolk—turn out to have been delivered, face-to-face, as lectures to his neighbors in the Concord Lyceum in 1847, by a self-revealing Thoreau under the title “History of Himself.” Such chastisement was in the old New England spirit of calls to the congregation. “Thoreau never sloughed off the heritage of Ezra Ripley and the message of community,” Gross writes. “In his mind he was never alone. The community came with him.”