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The Education of Ellen Tucker Emerson The Education of Ellen Tucker Emerson kate culkin Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 N 1852, Ralph Waldo Emerson, considering where to send I his thirteen-year-old daughter Ellen Tucker Emerson to continue her schooling, wrote to Caroline Sturgis Tappan, “The teaching is of something less importance in Ellen’s case, that she is a good scholar & will learn easily and anywhere. But I wish she should have a good, reasonable & well behaved set of schoolmates.”1 The education of Ellen, his elder daughter with Lidian Jackson, over the following eight years included stints at the Sedgwick School in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Concord School, run by Franklin Sanborn. A complete matrix of familial, social, and professional demands drove the choices the family made. Waldo clearly recognized his daughter’s intelligence, and he was often supportive of and engaged with her education. But he also at times privileged his needs above his daughter’s, and his need for someone to run Bush, the family home in Con- cord, because Lidian suffered from physical illness and depres- sion also influenced his ideas of how and where Ellen shouldbe educated. Waldo, in addition, chose schools that solidified his social connections and broadcast his support of the educators. He did not make these decisions alone, moreover, as Ellen and Lidian brought their own desires and concerns to the table. The Emersons’ choices about how, when, and where to ed- ucate Ellen provide an opportunity to examine what Robert 1Ralph Waldo Emerson (RWE) to Caroline Sturgis Tappan (CST), August 26, 1852, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1991), 8:327 (hereafter Emerson Letters). The New England Quarterly, vol. XCIII, no. 1 (March 2020). C 2020 by The New England Quar- terly. All rights reserved. https://doi.org/10.1162/tneq_a_00794. 74 THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 75 D. Habich has called “Emerson’s domesticity.” Habich notes that this domesticity is “a subject yet unexplored by schol- ars and biographers.”2 There are significant exceptions to this statement. Waldo’s relationship with his brothers and his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and, to some extent, his marriage to Lidian, particularly in its early years, have received signifi- cant attention.3 But life at Bush during the Emerson children’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 youth and adolescence, years that are critical to understanding Waldo’s working habits and the family dynamic more generally, is largely unexplored. The window into domestic life at Bush in the 1850s afforded by Ellen’s educational journey does not just illuminate this time period but also helps explain the relationship between Ellen and Waldo in the last years of his life as he struggled with memory loss. While long acknowledged as his caregiver, more recently Ellen’s editorial work with James Elliot Cabot on her father’s essays in his final decade and after his death in 1882 has received growing notice. Ronald Bosco, in the historical in- troduction to volume eight of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Christopher Hanlon, in Emerson’s Mem- ory Loss, analyze correspondence and manuscripts to detail the surprising breadth of Ellen’s contributions.4 Focusing on 2Robert D. Habich, Building Their Own Waldos: Emerson’s First Biographers and the Politics of Life-Writing in the Gilded Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 134. 3On Emerson’s brothers, see: Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, The Emerson Brothers: A Fraternal Biography in Letters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). On Mary Moody Emerson, see: Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Phyllis Cole, “‘Men and Women Conversing’: The Emersons in 1837,” in Emersonian Circles: Essays in Honor of Joel Myerson, ed. Wesley T. Mott and Robert E. Burkholder (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 1997), 127–59. On Lidian Emerson, see: Cole, “‘Men and Women Conversing’”; Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jack- son Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991); Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), esp. 330, 470. 4Ronald A. Bosco, historical introduction in Letters and Social Aims, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), xix-ccxii and Christopher Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). See also: Nancy Craig Simmons, “Arranging the Sibylline Leaves: James Elliot Cabot’s Work as Emerson’s Literary Executor,” Studies in the American Renaissance 76 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Letters and Social Aims (1874) and Natural History of the Intel- lect (1893), Hanlon finds her not only collaborating with Cabot to organize and edit essays, but also “revising and sometimes recomposing” portions. He argues that acknowledging Ellen and Cabot’s strong hand is critical to understanding the focus in Waldo’s later essays on “communal styles of intellection,” rather than self-reliance; this is part of a broader trend he identifies Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 in Emerson’s work after 1850, and he posits identifying the in- terest in collaboration in the later essays helps find seeds of it even in Waldo’s early works.5 Hanlon sees the acknowledgment of Cabot and Ellen’s work, then, not as “a kind of scandal,” but instead as, “a conduit toward a way for reading Emerson anew, from a position that also permits us to activate some- thing in him that would otherwise remain dormant.”6 Ellen re- fused public credit for this work, and Hanlon also notes that his analysis “brings the challenge of discerning someone else in the midst who didn’t want to be noticed as she assisted her father; someone who worked so as to be forgotten, and who consequently barely registers in our discussions of nineteenth- century literary history even as she seems to have had a pro- found effect upon its course.”7 The unique combination of intellectual acuity and eschewal that led to Ellen’s commitment to her father’s work, her ability to contribute to it, and her re- fusal to take credit for it were forged in the family dynamics of her adolescence. Expanding our conception of Waldo as a husband and father is inherent to understanding those dynamics. Waldo’s reflec- tions on marriage and observations by Margaret Fuller regard- ing the Emersons’ partnership have shaped much of the vision of domestic life in Bush. Fuller painted a grim picture on her trip to Concord in August 1842, eight months after the death of the couple’s first child, also Waldo, and less than a year after (1983), 335–89; and Joseph Thomas, “Late Emerson: Selected Poems and the ‘Emer- son Factory,’” ELH, 65 (1998): 971–94. 5Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 3. 6Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 7–8. 7Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss, 45. THE EDUCATION OF ELLEN EMERSON 77 the birth of their second daughter, Edith. Fuller described Lid- ian bursting into tears and reported in her journal on Septem- ber 1 that Waldo said to her, “Ask any woman whether her aim in this union is to further the genius of her husband; and she will say yes, but her conduct will always be to claim a devotion day by day that will be injurious to him, if he yields.”8 Emer- son wrote in “Experience,” published two years later, “Marriage Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/93/1/74/1793442/tneq_a_00794.pdf by guest on 29 September 2021 (in what is called the spiritual world) is impossible, because of the inequality between every subject and every object.”9 Such passages have contributed to what Kathleen Lawrence has de- scribed as the “myth of Emerson as a sterile philosopher liv- ing on an ideal plane” stripped of “the emotion and passion so prevalent in his letters, journals, and poems.”10 Much of the vision of Waldo as a father focuses on this same time period, exploring the effect of his son’s death and his re- flections on the tragedy in “Experience.” In the essay, he writes, “The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is.”11 Scholars such as John Matteson and Robert Richardson have noted that Emerson did in fact grieve deeply, but, in Mat- teson’s words, his dismissal of grief was “the wall he chose to erect around himself.”12 The lasting impact of the young boy’s death on the Emersons is also often stressed, with Richard- son arguing, “Waldo’s death made a deep wound in the entire Emerson family, one that never completely healed.”13 There is certainly ample evidence that the Emersons had a tense, complicated relationship, that they continued to mourn their son throughout their lives, and that Waldo at times 8Quoted in Joel Myerson, “Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emersons,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 21 (1973): 330–31. 9Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Prose, ed. Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 241. 10Kathleen Lawrence, “The ‘Dry-Lighted Soul’ Ignites: Emerson and His Soul- Mate Caroline Sturgis as Seen in Her Houghton Manuscripts,” Harvard Library Bul- letin 16 (2005): 39.
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