INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Assignment 18:
RALPH WALDO EMERSON (Part 1)

Emerson's first wife, Ellen Tucker Emerson, died of tuberculosis in 1831. They had been married just 18 months and Emerson was, at age 28, devastated by the loss. There was, however, an unforeseen benefit to him. The settlement of his wife's estate provided him a substantial income and thereby freed Emerson, for the first time in his life, from the necessity of earning a living. Shortly after, he resigned his post as minister of 2nd Church, Boston, and in 1832 he left for a year-long sojourn in Europe. By 1835 he had settled in Concord, Massachusetts, and married his second wife, Lydian Jackson Emerson. During these years Emerson found time, away from his pastoral duties and the discipline of sermon-writing, to think of pursuing a literary career. Yet he had been long concerned about the how and the where of living productively; he had yearned to find truly fruitful work.

The American lyceum movement provided a partial answer. Part of an adult-education movement sweeping the states, the lyceum circuit pooled the money from subscribers in cities and small towns in order to hire itinerant scholar-lecturers. Each speaker was paid to give a course of lectures on particular themes or topics, agreed upon in advance. Audiences were composed of middle and upper-middle class people, drawn from the trades, mercantile and financial backgrounds, local bureaucracies, and professions like law or medicine. Emerson began speaking on this circuit in 1834, at sites in Massachusetts and upstate New York, and for the next quarter-century he stuck with it, eventually travelling as far west as St. Louis, as far north as Montreal. In large measure, his successful career as a writer was built from these grass-roots engagements.

Consider, moreover, the effect on his writing of the audience he was addressing. To halls of assembled middle Americans he spoke in short, declarative sentences, using imagery from ordinary life. The pithy, proverbial phrases readers still remember from reading Emerson--for instance, his claim in the "Self-Reliance" essay that "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," or, in Nature that "Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us"--are stylistic hallmarks of the lyceum circuit.

The easy-to-follow orderliness of his essays (if we pay attention) is the product of both the lyceum, and Emerson's earlier work in composing sermons. Many of Emerson's great essays, published in 1841 and 1844--were the written versions of those lyceum speeches, practiced over and over until Emerson had perfected the rhythm, order, and logic of their arguments. Their high polish is the result of that long practice.

Emerson's first book, Nature (1836), developed out of a lecture series he had been presenting. It was a slim volume, and published anonymously, though everyone knew who had written it. Indeed, an old Boston joke once ran like this: "Who's the author of Nature? God, and Ralph Waldo Emerson." It comes from a long tradition of American nature-writing. Students do well to reflect upon Anne Bradstreet's meditation on Nature, in her poem "Contemplations." Crevecoeur's similar attempts to derive lessons of the heart and the spirit from Nature, and Freneau's poem on "The Religion of Nature," are in the same vein.

The purpose of Nature is to meditate on nothing less than the natural realm in its entirety, what Emerson calls the kosmos, including signs of the supernatural. Its physical presence, the presence in it of man-made forms or "commodities," as well as man-made language, artistic efforts, ideas, and pure spirit: Emerson's "Nature" encompasses all of these. To him, Nature included Culture, as well as Spirit.

But it is for him, at the beginning of the book, a profound riddle: because what is it for, and what are the right uses of Nature? Most of all, Emerson must wrestle with the fact of the "kingdom of man over nature," providentially foretold in Judaeo-Christian thinking. Is Science the principal means of achieving that dominion over Nature? Many of Emerson's contemporaries thought so, and in rebutting them he attempted, as scholar Stephen E. Whicher noted, "to rescue nature from the natural scientists and to sketch instead a human or poetical science."

This is the purpose of his first book. In reading it, pay special attention to the ways that Emerson thinks, and moves us through the organization of his chapters. His main thesis: that physical or commodified Nature is not a be-all and end-all, but the ground on which humans achieve spiritual insight, and thus the ground from which they transcend.

Reading Assignment
  1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (pp. 1069-1101).
Writing Assignment
  1. Begin your study of Nature with a look at its sentences. Jot down several striking examples. How would you compare them with those in Franklin's "The Way to Wealth"?

  2. In his "Introduction," what does Emerson say will be the problem addressed in his book? You can answer by providing a brief quote.

  3. In Chapter 1, entitled "Nature, what is the relationship between Man and Nature that Emerson defines?

  4. In the following two chapters, how are commodities and artworks both outgrowths of Nature, and thus instructive to Man?

  5. Chapter 4, "Language," begins with an interesting syllogism. First of all, paraphrase it in your own words; then, discuss Emerson's theory of language developed on the following pages. Shape your discussion so as to answer this question: What are the best uses of language? (Put differently, when does language achieve the status of Truth?)

  6. In Chapters 5 and 6, how does Emerson get around more specifically to the task of rebutting the claims of Science on Nature? Another way of asking this question: How is it that "Idealism" supersedes, and answers the inadequacy of, scientific "Discipline"?

  7. At one point Emerson says: it is "the invariable mark of wisdom to see the miraculous in the common." If so, then isn't he also implying that, since the "common" man is in daily contact with and therefore best knows "the common," then such a man has-- potentially at least--the best access to wisdom? And isn't that a way of understanding Nature as, itself, an argument in favor of an intellectual democracy? Test this hypothetical reading in a brief essay response, of about 500 words. In writing it, pay special attention to the final two chapters of Nature, but feel free to use the whole text of Emerson's book.

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