“A HIGHER SPHERE OF THOUGHT”: EMERSON’S USE OF THE EXEMPLUM AND EXEMPLUM FIDEI By CHARLA DAWN MAJOR Master of Arts Oklahoma State University Stillwater, Oklahoma 1995 Bachelor of Arts The University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, Texas 1990 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December, 2005 “A HIGHER SPHERE OF THOUGHT”: EMERSON’S USE OF THE EXEMPLUM AND EXEMPLUM FIDEI Dissertation Approved: _______________Jeffrey Walker________________ Dissertation Adviser _____________William M. Decker_______________ _______________Edward Jones________________ ________________L. G. Moses_________________ ______________A. Gordon Emslie_______________ Dean of the Graduate College ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my sincere appreciation to my advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Walker, for his guidance, support, and friendship, not only during the considerable duration of this work but throughout the entire course of my graduate studies here at Oklahoma State University. No one could ask for a better teacher, advisor, mentor, and friend, and I have gained immeasurably from this long association. I consider myself extremely fortunate and blessed. My gratitude extends to my committee members. Dr. William Decker has been a continual source of guidance and resources and has consistently perpetuated my interest in both this subject and literary period. Dr. Edward Jones, who has been there from the very beginning, has been a great source of guidance, assistance, encouragement, and friendship and has demonstrated a welcome propensity for being available to me at critical points in my education. And Dr. L. G. Moses, my most recent acquaintance, has offered a unique intelligence and wit that made this dissertation a truly enjoyable learning experience. I also wish to express my sincere appreciation to the Digital Library Services staff at Edmon Low Library for providing resources and assistance that have enabled me to accomplish this work at a distance. I would also like to extend my special gratitude to my husband, David Major, for his suggestions, guidance, and limitless encouragement before, during, and following this long process. Finally, I wish to thank the Department of English, and especially Ms. Dale McLaughlin, for its support during the years of this study. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION . 1 II. NATURE AND THE POST-MINISTERIAL MESSAGE. 7 III. THE DOMINION OF THE ORATOR: THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY . 40 IV. THE VISION OF PRINCIPLES: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR AND THE DIVINITY SCHOOL ADDRESS . 64 V. THE SEEN TO THE UNSEEN: ESSAYS, FIRST SERIES . 101 VI. THE POET AND OTHER REPRESENTATIVE MEN . 166 VII. CAUSE, COUNTRY, AND AGE: THE HEROIC EXEMPLAR, ABOLITION, AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR . 212 VIII. CONCLUSION . 288 NOTES . 295 WORKS CITED . 313 iv LIST OF SYMBOLS AW Emerson's Antislavery Writings. Ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995). EL Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 3 vols. Ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964-72). JMN The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vols. I-XIV. Ed. William H. Gilman, Alfred R. Ferguson, George P. Clark, Merrell R. Davis, Harrison Hayford, Ralph Orth, J. E. Parsons, Merton M. Sealts, and A. W. Plumstead. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960-78). L The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk, 6 vols. (New York: Columbia UP, 1939). W The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. Ed. Edward W. Emerson. (Boston: Houghton, 1903-1904). Y Young Emerson Speaks, Unpublished Dissertations on Many Subjects. Ed. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Jr. (Boston: Houghton, 1938). v Introduction Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently in- viting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one, on that side all obstruction is taken away and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. -- “Spiritual Laws,” 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson likely seldom lived a day in which his works were not subject to review. From the moment he could put pen to paper, his parents, his Aunt Mary Moody, and his brothers were available to offer their criticism of the thoughts and the words he put forth. His teachers, his professors, and other mentors chimed in, and later, clerics, colleagues, and members of his congregation. As time went on, orators, editors, and authors added their voices, as did publishers, activists, other writers, and friends. Emerson’s was a life saturated with external input; from his earliest days as a minister’s son and student at Boston’s Latin School, he received tutelage and indoctrination from a variety of disparate sources from both within and beyond the limits of prescribed curricula. When combined with a natural curiosity and interests in a wide range of subjects, these and other factors converged to create a mind alive with activity and prone to intense periods of contemplation, correspondence, and creativity. The mature Emerson became a prolific writer whose body of works spanned six decades of his own life and continue to be reprinted and studied within the historical distance of our own. When a writer continues to generate criticism and interest two centuries removed from the initial production of his work, questions of influence invariably arise, as they have in the case of Emerson. Emerson scholarship has enjoyed numerous studies devoted to the many influences upon his work, including 1 historical factors such as Puritanism, neoPlatonism, and democracy, and the literary effects of other writers such as Shakespeare, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Goethe. The criticism and scholarship of more than a century and a half has revealed a wide variety of Emersons (the theologian, the visionary, the philosopher, the Transcendentalist, and the American) who have played a variety of public roles (the minister, the essayist, the orator, the poet, and the patriot). The essential expansiveness of the character in question precludes convenient pigeonholing: all of these Emersons, and many others as well, can be readily identified and explored within the contexts of his biography, works, and career. Although critical studies of Emerson’s philosophy enhance our ever-expanding knowledge of the man and his material, very few make more than a passing acknowledgment of the influence of Emerson’s first career. Despite the availability of works such as Jonathan Bishop’s Emerson on the Soul, Evelyn Barish’s Emerson: The Roots of Prophecy, and David M. Robinson’s The Spiritual Emerson: Essential Writings, critical focus remains primarily on influences other than that of Emerson’s time as a clergyman. Although Emerson continues to inspire inquiry that reenergizes interest in his life and work and attests to the vitality of his words and the enduring veracity of his message, the fact remains that scholars are still trying to determine exactly who Emerson was. Not that Emerson himself necessarily knew. As he acknowledges in “Experience,” Emerson “accept[ed] the clangor and jangle of contrary tendencies” (W 3: 62). Having dutifully followed family tradition by becoming a Unitarian minister, he resigned his position with Boston’s Second Church after only three years in the pulpit. His departure from the church, which closely coincided with the death of his first wife, Ellen Tucker, initiated a period of intense introspection that culminated in Emerson’s redefinition of many of his personal perceptions as well as his goals for his life and career. The Emerson who 2 published Nature was not the intellectually restless cleric who had questioned the need for sacraments and fallen passionately in love with Ellen; in 1836, Emerson had a new wife, a new profession, and a significantly transfigured approach to articulating the wide range of philosophical concepts he elected to engage. Freed from the intellectual restraints of ritual and dogma, Emerson reconsidered a variety of subjects and recast them within the frameworks of friendlier and more flexible media. Emerson the essayist and humanistic lecturer emerged as a result of this process. For many scholars, this period in Emerson’s life allows his transcendentalist philosophy to evolve; the implication of the “death” of the minister unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, accompanies the notion of the “birth” of Emerson the writer and speaker. A customary emphasis on the apparent secularization of Emerson’s message in Nature and subsequent publications effectively, if not necessarily intentionally, reinforces this assumption by dividing his career into “before” and “after” segments that frequently fete the transcendentalist philosopher while relegating the former minister to the realm of honorable mention. Combined with long-established pedagogical structures that initiate students of American literature with the Emerson of Nature and the Essays, such arguments often obscure a fundamental facet of Emerson by implicitly suggesting that he renounced religious faith as he embraced transcendentalism. However understandable such a conclusion appears, categorization replaces an in-depth study of Emerson and forges consideration in favor of oversimplification. Emerson’s redirection of his career away from the ministry and toward the pen and the podium did not signal an abandonment of God, or faith,