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Emerson and the Vision of the Child Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 1-1-2011 Emerson And The iV sion Of The hiC ld Matthew cM Clelland Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation McClelland, Matthew, "Emerson And The iV sion Of The hiC ld" (2011). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 614. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/614 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY Department of English Dissertation Committee Robert Milder, Chairperson Iver Bernstein Randy Calvert Gerald Early Vivian Pollak Richard Ruland EMERSON AND THE VISION OF THE CHILD by Matthew McClelland A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 Saint Louis, Missouri } Copyright by Matthew McClelland May 2011 } ACKNOWLEDEMENTS Professor Robert W. Milder, for his intellectual guidance as my dissertation chair. Professors Gerald Early, Vivian Pollak, Richard Ruland, Iver Bernstein, and Randy Calvert, for their generosity of time and critical insight. Dean Robert E. Thach for the financial assistance of a dissertation fellowship. Dorothy Negri and Kathy Schneider, for their administrative help, friendship, and good cheer. And lastly, Katheryn Soleil, whose intelligence and wisdom helped me bring this project to completion. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: The Representative Child ........................................................................... 13 Chapter Two: The Child as Student ................................................................................. 50 Chapter Three: The Child as Teacher .............................................................................. 77 Chapter Four: The Child as Preacher ............................................................................. 102 Chapter Five: The Child as Lover ................................................................................... 128 Chapter Six: The Child as Father ................................................................................... 161 Chapter Seven: The Child as Friend and Mentor ........................................................... 181 Chapter Eight: Emerson and the Eternal Child .............................................................. 202 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 226 iii Introduction “All my Questions are usually started in the infancy of inquiry...” 1 —Ralph Waldo Emerson On May 28, 1820, a seventeen-year-old Ralph Emerson sat in his room at Harvard College and began writing in his journal. Emerson had been keeping the journal—what would be his only life-long literary project—for a mere five months. “I am now sitting before the Pedagogue’s Map of Europe,” the teenage Emerson began, & am startled almost to behold the immense region which Alexander governs. The ample domains of the emperor of Russia are nearly equal to the rest of Europe. One man is insignificant in the extremest degree set down in this mighty land; yet all the millions of population planted in this stretching territory & seemingly bound by no ties but the eternal bands of their common earth bow to the despotism of an individual like themselves. One would think his mind would dilate, “expand with strong conception” to meet the grandeur of circumstance with which God has surrounded him & accommodate himself to his vast commission. The bell rings.2 The Alexander to whom Emerson refers was the first of three Russian Tsars all bearing that name. Known for his startling political ambition and youth as he commenced 1 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Letters of RWE. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk. 6 vols. New York: Columbia U Press, 1939. Vol. I, 137. Hereafter cited in the footnotes as L, followed by the volume and page number. 2 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al., 14 vols. Cambridge: HUP, Belknap Press, 1960. Vol. I, 16. Hereafter cited in the footnotes as JMN, followed by the volume number and page number. Emerson and the Vision of the Child McClelland to rule, by 1820 the nineteen-year old Alexander had already guided Russia through the chaotic period of the Napoleonic Wars. Alexander had succeeded to the throne after his father, Emperor Paul I, was murdered in a coup orchestrated in 1801. By contrast, Emerson’s own young life was beset with a mundane poverty, due largely to his father’s death as Emerson approached eight years old. He had little hope that he would have anything more than a “freshman’s seat in the world,”3 and an Alexander I, young Emerson undoubtedly thought to himself as he responded to the Harvard school bell, he would never be. But consider the mind of this teenage Emerson as he looked at the map. This shy, socially awkward seventeen-year-old boy measured territory (and History itself) by the magnificent man. Young Waldo tells us, “one man is insignificant in the extremest degree set down in this mighty land” that the map represents, and yet he still wonders, with obvious adolescent awe, how “one man” could make “millions…bow to the despotism of an individual like themselves?” Emerson’s eventual answer to this implicit question, pitched upon a sense of his personal inadequacies as he compared himself to young Alexander, would not come until many years later, when as a fifty-one year old man he would write in the pages of Representative Men, “It is natural to believe in great men…The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood.”4 Examining precisely how and why Emerson developed this 3 (JMN 5: 58). 4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Eds. Alfred R. Ferguson, Joseph Slager, and Douglas Emery Wilson. 6 vols. to date. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971—. 89. Hereafter cited in the footnotes as CW, followed by the volume number and page number. 2 Emerson and the Vision of the Child McClelland particular “will to believe” is one aim of the following pages.5 Like most appeals to what is “natural,” Emerson’s mature belief in “great men” was predicated upon his earliest recollections of his personal past. (“Natural” and “Nature” are etymological relations to nasci, which means, “to be born.”)6 But the trouble with examining the origins of any of Emerson’s ideas resides in the fact that he frequently rejected the past on what appeared to be aesthetic literary grounds. “Our age is retrospective,” he insisted in his first book-length publication, Nature, “It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.”7 Two years later, working the same thought in his private journal, he put the rejection more urgently, “Forget the past, be not a slave to your own past.”8 Both public and private literary rejections of the past continued throughout Emerson’s career, but what the following study proposes is that Emerson’s self-conscious literary rejection of the past occurred because forgetting the past helped him to efface the actual reality—the nature—of his own upbringing. The nature of Emerson’s experienced past is best read in his journals and correspondence, where the origins of what would become Emerson’s literature, as well the origins of what would become Emerson the man, are most readily revealed. Of course 5 The phrase belongs to William James, who tells us, “Desire, wish, will are states of mind which everyone knows, and which no definition can make plainer. We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply wish; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we will that the desired feeling, having, or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled.” James, William Psychology: The Briefer Course Ed. Gordon Allport. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985. 283 6 Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) played an important role in elevating Emerson’s natural disposition towards the “great man” into a theory. 7 (CW 1:7). 8 (JMN 7:25). 3 Emerson and the Vision of the Child McClelland it has long been known that Emerson’s journals were the private proving ground for his public lectures, published essays, and poems. But less known and less understood are the personal psychic sources that support and sustain Emerson’s public literary project— Emerson’s “inner life,” as Stephen Whicher once put it.9 Confessional moments of introspection are as scarce in Emerson’s mature journals as they are in his public works. Rarely does Emerson confess or confide in his journal, though when he does, it is often in the context of vocation, role, or sometimes, admissions of emotional coldness. In his mature journals, Emerson’s interests are typically extroverted—personal
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