American Renaissance: Transcendentalism and Literary Giants
An American Renaissance
In the 1830s and 1840s, the frontier of American society was quickly moving toward the west. Following in the path of Brackenbridge and Cooper, writers were beginning to look at the western frontier for ideas for a literature about American life. The feeling was that the cultures of Massachusetts and Virginia ought to be the models of national culture. At this time, Boston and its neighboring towns and villages were filled with intellectual excitement and activity.
The Rise of Transcendentalism
Among the younger people, there was much talk about the “new spiritual era”. They wanted to explore the inner life. In the center of this activity were the Transcendentalists. They formed a movement of feelings and beliefs who rejected both the conservative Puritanism of their ancestors and the newer, liberal faith of Unitarianism. They tried to find the truth through feeling and intuition rather than through logic. The Transcendentalists found God everywhere, in man and in nature.
In 1836, RALPH WALDO EMERSON founded the “Transcendental Club”. Its magazine, The Dial, was the true voice of their thoughts and feelings. For a time, the movement had an experimental community, the Brook Farm Institute. But this came to an end when the Transcendentalists divided into two groups: those interested in social reform, and those (like Emerson and Thoreau) who were more interested in the individual. Emerson published Nature, the clearest statement of Transcendentalist ideas. In it he stated that man should not see nature merely as something to be used; that man’s relationship with nature transcends the idea of usefulness. He saw an important difference between understanding (judging only according to the senses) and reason. He began his career as a Unitarian minister and after he left, turned away from Christianity, he remained a kind of “preacher”: he was an enormous popular lecturer. First he would “deposit” ideas in his journal and then he developed his lectures from the notes in his journal. Next he rewrote them into essays. Self-Reliance is one of the most famous of these lecture/essays and is filled with memorable lines, familiar to most Americans. Equally important is Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul. The Over Soul is “that unity…within which every man’s particular being is contained and made one with all things” In his essay The Poet, Emerson describes the poet as the “complete man”. The poet frees us from old thoughts. Emerson felt that the form of a poem grow out of its thought. As much as Walt Whitman, Emerson helped open American poetry to new possibilities. His poetry is often criticized as being awkward and unmusical. He also introduced the nation to entirely new poetic material, such as the Hindu idea that we are always reborn into this world each time we die. This is the theme of his Brahma.
Henry David Thoreau: A Pure Transcendentalist
Another literary giant was HENRY DAVID THOREAU. He had been deeply influenced by reading Nature and he remained a pure Transcendentalist all his life. Emerson often remarked that the younger man’s ideas seemed like continuations of his own. Like Emerson, Thoreau created his lectures and books from notes in his carefully kept journal. But it was written in a far more lively style than Emerson’s. Emerson wrote about nature in the abstract. Thoreau’s works, however, are filled with details about plants, rivers and wildlife. He wrote about his experience in jail in his essay Civil Disobedience. The theme of this work is “that we should be men first and subjects afterward”. It is probably the best-known American essay outside the United States. In 1854, Thoreau wrote his world-famous Walden, about his stay in the pondside hut. On the surface, it speaks only of the practical side of living alone in the woods, of the plants, animals and insects one finds there, and of the changing seasons. But in fact, it is a completely Transcendentalist work. He rejects the things ordinary people desire in life. Instead, he emphasizes the search for true wisdom. Walden is a hopeful book, encouraging people to lead sincere, joyous lives. Thoreau’s poetry is far less important than Emerson’s. Around 1850, Thoreau became deeply interested in the Abolitionist movement. He was an active member of a group which helped slaves escape to freedom.
Other Transcendentalist Figures
There were other, less important Transcendentalist poets and writers. One of these was AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, an important pioneer in American education and the author of Conversations with Children on the Gospels. His greatest success was with his own daughter, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, writer of Little Women. MARGARET FULLER, editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial. Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century was a powerful call for equal rights for women. WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, his Thoreau, The Poet-Naturalist is a masterpiece of American biography. GEORGE RIPLEY and THEODORE PARKER were Transcendentalist writers who tried to lead the movement toward social reform.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Critique
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE also attacked the Transcendentalists for ignoring those doubts which “darken o’er the world”. His Celestial Railroad is an ironic short story about Christian. In his tale, Christian’s journey to the Celestial City (heaven) is far simpler: the railroad takes him straight there. The railroad symbolizes the Transcendentalists’ failure to deal with such difficulties as doubt and sin in human life. Hawthorne’s stories usually have a strong allegorical quality.
Hawthorne always writes about man in society, rather than simply about man in nature. His characters are troubled by pride, envy, or the desire for revenge. This interest in the dark part of the human mind causes Hawthorne to create tales similar to those of the Gothic novelists. Loneliness and waste are the themes of his first novel, Fanshawe. With the publication of Twice-Told Tales, he showed his mastery of the short story. The Minister’s Black Veil contains themes of aloneness and evil which run through his whole work. Mosses from an Old Manse, in which The Celestial Railroad appears, contains some of Hawthorne’s best and best-known tales. The Birthmark and Rappaccini’s Daughter are early examples of the ‘mad scientist‘ story in American fiction. Both tell of intellectual men who are ruined when they interfere with the sacred mysteries of life.