A Poetics of Liminality in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman
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The Art of the Threshold: A Poetics of Liminality in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman Joan Wry Department of English McGill University, Montreal August 2010 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy copyright © Joan Wry 2010 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. EMERSON’S FOUNDATIONAL NOTIONS OF SPIRITUAL AND AESTHETIC PROCESS Liminal Poetics and an Emerging System of Thought 27 Patterns of Repetition and Expansion: Key Words and Concepts 35 Liminal Set-Piece Passages in the Essays and Addresses 48 The Legacy of Emerson’s Liminal Poetics 69 III. THOREAU: A WEEK AND WALDEN Emerson’s Key Concepts and the Forms of Thoreau’s Topos 73 Liminal Frameworks in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 79 Walden’s Generative Poetics of Liminality 93 IV. THOREAU: THE MAINE WOODS AND CAPE COD Limited Liminal Contexts in “Chesuncook” and “The Allegash and the East Branch” 114 Allegories of The Maine Woods: Liminal Poetics in “Ktaadn” 120 Threshold Allegories of Opposition in Cape Cod 135 V. WHITMAN’S RESPONSE TO EMERSON’S LIMINAL POETICS Communitas as a Counterbalance to Emerson’s Polarity in the “Preface” to Leaves of Grass 153 Liminal Contexts and Processes in “Song of Myself” 158 Literal and Conceptual Borderlines in the Civil War Poems 165 “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as an Enacted Rite of Passage 186 VI. EPILOGUE 197 VII. BIBLIOGRAPHY 201 iii ABSTRACT Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were all drawn to visions of transition in the natural world as a way to define the passage between world and self, but their focus on the endlessly unfolding potential of the aesthetic ideal in the “space between” gave rise to a poetics of liminality that makes them distinct. Emerson’s foundational conceptions of passage and transition emerge most fully in the writings of Thoreau and Whitman in three interrelated contexts or modes of liminality which parallel—in ascending stages—Arnold van Gennep’s rites de passage, the tripartite process of initiation, transformation, and reintegration so important in Victor Turner’s later theory of liminality. For these three American Romantic authors, liminality can operate in moments of clear vision that stress marked outlines of boundaries or horizons; in transformative moments of interpenetrative exchange that fuse or confuse opposites across the threshold; or in transfiguring moments of sublimity. Here liminality involves a stress both on the physical place that serves as a borderline or threshold and on the process of passage across that threshold—the “limen” in which transformations are seen to be generated. The thesis first addresses the ways in which Emerson’s key concepts and understandings of spiritual and aesthetic process initiated a widely influential vision of nineteenth-century liminal poetics. Thoreau’s very different responses to the Emersonian model of transformation, as it unfolds within the definitive topos of the natural landscape, are then considered—first in the liminal spaces of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, and then in the darker allegorical contexts of The Maine Woods and Cape Cod. The final full chapter examines Whitman’s later response to Emerson’s liminal poetics, especially in the way that the persona of Leaves of Grass becomes a transitioning hero of consciousness and mediating interpreter of human experience— iv leading a community of readers out of stasis and through threshold moments of conversion. The study concludes with a brief epilogue outlining a subsequent trajectory for writing that emerges from Emerson’s liminal poetics—an aesthetic perspective generated by the power (but also the indeterminacy) of continual regeneration and renewal. v ABSTRACT TRANSLATION Emerson, Thoreau, et Whitman ont tous été attirés par des évocations de transition de la nature comme un moyen de définir le passage entre le monde et le moi, mais l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté au potentiel sans limites de l’esthétique idéale derrière le concept de « l’espace entre » a donné naissance à une poétique de liminalité qui les distinguent. Les conceptions fondatrices des notions de passage et de transition chez Emerson émergent en force dans les écrits de Thoreau et Whitman dans trois contextes ou modes inter reliés de liminalité, qui coïncident – en étapes ascendantes- aux Rites de passage d’Arnold van Gennep, processus triparti de l’initiation, de la transformation et de la réintégration, si importante à la théorie ultérieure de liminalité de Victor Turner. Pour ces trois auteurs américains romantiques, la liminalité agit dans des moments de clairvoyance qui soulignent les limites définies de frontières ou d’horizon ; dans des instants de transformation dus à des échanges inter pénétrants qui fusionnent ou confondent les opposés de chaque coté du seuil; ou en transfigurant des moments sublimes. Ici, la liminalité met l’accent sur le lieu physique qui sert comme ligne de démarcation ou seuil et sur le processus de passage de ce même seuil – le « limen » qui donne naissance aux transformations. La thèse s’intéresse d’abord aux façons dont les concepts phares d’Emerson et sa compréhension des processus spirituels et esthétiques ont amorcé une vision influente des poétiques de liminalité du dix-neuvième siècle. Les réponses très différentes de Thoreau au modèle émersonien de transformation, tel qu’il se dévoile dans les topos définitifs du paysage naturel, sont ensuite étudiés – d’abord dans les espaces liminaux de A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers et Walden, puis dans les contextes allégoriques plus sombres de The Maine Woods et Cape Cod. Le chapitre final examine la réponse vi ultérieure de Whitman aux poétiques liminales d’Emerson, notamment avec le personnage de Leaves of Grass, qui devient un héro transitoire de la conscience et un interprète médiateur de l’expérience humaine – guidant une communauté de lecteurs hors de l’immobilisme, à travers des moments critiques de transformation. L’étude se conclut avec un bref épilogue décrivant une trajectoire subséquente d’écriture qui émerge des poétiques liminales d’Emerson — une perspective esthétique générée par le pouvoir (mais aussi par l’indétermination) de la régénération continuelle et d’un renouveau. vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I thank my advisor at McGill University, Professor Peter Gibian, who guided every stage of this thesis and its preparation. I am also grateful for the skilled editing assistance of Tara Arcury, Executive Assistant to the Dean of the College at Saint Michael’s College, and for the French translation editing services of Marisa Ruccolo of the Modern Languages Department at Saint Michael’s College. I am also grateful for the inspiration and advisements that my father, Professor Emeritus John Reiss, provided in the first year of my graduate work at McGill and during the early drafts of this writing. His beloved memory and example have guided me through these final stages as well. 1 I. INTRODUCTION “In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth” Emerson (544). The writers of the American Renaissance are often assessed in light of their perspectives on the relationship between human beings and the natural world, or for the ways they envision a passage between world and self that integrates experience and consciousness. Thoreau and Whitman in particular were inspired by the correspondential analogies between nature and spirit defined in Emerson’s 1836 Nature, but Emerson’s larger focus on the dynamic and continual movement of what he often termed “transition” inspired a broader response that informs the way many writers in the nineteenth century conceived of spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic process. Whitman and Thoreau’s diverse perspectives in their writing yield new understandings when read in the context of the aesthetic vision that emerged in the nineteenth century in response to Emerson’s transitional “cipher”: his vision of what could be termed a ‘liminal poetics.” But if they both begin from the foundational vision of Emersonian process, they each then develop in strongly divergent ways from this shared point of departure. Far more than simply an attention to the omnipresence of change as a foundation of the basic laws of the universe, Emerson’s liminal poetics unfolds as a comprehensive system of thought that both expresses the spirit of the age in mid- nineteenth-century America and expands the energies of that spirit in recognizable ways. Emerson’s distinctive stamp on this poetics—what makes his thinking 2 decidedly different from that of his contemporaries in both Europe and America—is found in his conception of the endlessly unfolding potential of the aesthetic ideal in the “space between,” a potential Emerson first observes in the liminal spaces of the natural world. In short, liminal poetics is an aesthetic perspective—derived from Emerson’s vision of endless process—that calls attention to perceived margins and borderlines as points of active transition and transformation, but also focuses specifically on the “limen,” or spaces between, as areas in which artistic processes and related spiritual transformations are seen to be generated. Anthropologist Victor Turner first referred to the concept of liminality in the 1970’s after reading Arnold van Gennep’s 1908 Rites de Passage, in which the transitional or interstitial phase in a rite of passage is identified as the “limen,” a Latin word meaning “threshold.” Turner subsequently defined the liminal phase or space as “a catalyst for the creative impulse; it frequently generates myths, symbols, rituals, works of art. These cultural forms in turn provide a set of templates, models, or paradigms which are . periodical reclassifications of reality . [that] incite us to action as well as to thought” (Ritual Process 50). Although Emerson did not make use of the specific nomenclature of twentieth-century liminal poetics, his foundational concepts, are, as we shall see, clearly related to later, twentieth-century theories of liminality and modes of transformational allegory—and likely helped to shape aspects of these twentieth-century visions.