Transcendentalism and Emily Dickinson: American Literature in the 19th Century

Posted on Aug 26, 2024 in Religion

TEMA 9: Transcendentalism

This eclectic movement involved preachers, educators, artists, writers, and intellectuals. Originating in Boston, Massachusetts, it’s considered an American adaptation of European Romanticism. A Transcendentalist is “one who displays a predominant tendency to respect his intuitions.” What is popularly known as Transcendentalism is idealism.

Chief Intellectual Influences:

• German philosophy: Kant, Hegel
• The poetic expression of European Romanticism: Goethe, Novalis, Wordsworth

The Nature of Transcendentalism:

There is a crucial class of ideas that don’t come from experience but through which experience is acquired.

Key Features:

• A celebration of individualism and the importance of the self
• A celebration of intuition
• A marked tendency towards introspection
• A veneration of nature
• It seemed tailor-made for an emerging democracy based on the Enlightenment.

Transcendentalism:

Emerged as a protest against the state of culture and society, and against Unitarian Churches. Emerson argued that we had no empirical experience of a Creator.

Unitarians vs. Transcendentalists:

Interest in Utopian Experiments:

The Brook Farm community, founded by George Ripley in 1841, aimed to create a “City of God anew.” The purpose of Christianity, they believed, was to redeem society and the individual from sin. This entailed a community based on respect, equality, dignity, and education.

Brook Farm:

• Based on balancing labor and leisure
• Influenced by the French socialist Charles Fourier
• Aimed to ensure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor

Prominent Transcendentalists:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Ellery Channing
• Amos Bronson Alcott
• George Ripley
• Theodor Parker
• Margaret Fuller

Emerson:

Son of a Unitarian minister, raised by his mother. Became the spokesman of Transcendentalism. Influential writings:

• Nature (1836): First essay formulating his Transcendentalist ideas
• Self-Reliance (1836)
• The American Scholar (1837): Considered the American intellectual declaration of independence

TEMA 10: Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): A Life of Principle

American author, Transcendentalist, and naturalist. He was a friend of Emerson but not successful as a writer and lived in obscurity all his life.

Relationship with Emerson:

• 14 years younger than Emerson
• Friendship bloomed in the late 1830s
• Emerson encouraged Thoreau as a writer, praising his poetry and guiding him towards the topic of nature
• Shared political attitudes about slavery and reverence for nature

The Walden Experiment:

• On July 4th, 1845, Thoreau moved to the woods near Walden Pond
• Built his own cabin on property owned by Emerson
• Lived economically for two years and two months
• Experiment in self-reliance
• In 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods was published

The Cabin and the Book:

Matter is expressive of spirit, and conversely, the spiritual is reflected in the material. Like the cabin, the book unites a rustic style with a highly articulated Transcendental agenda and expresses the desire to return to a life of pastoral simplicity, albeit with very high expectations.

Walden:

Autobiographical account, a journey of spiritual discovery, a manual for self-reliance, a treatise of moral philosophy, a book on natural history, a critique of Western values.

Structure of Walden:

• Economy
• Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
• Reading
• Sounds
• Solitude
• Visitors
• The Bean-Field
• The Village
• The Ponds
• Baker Farm
• Higher Laws
• Brute Neighbors
• House-Warming
• Winter Animals
• The Pond in Winter
• Spring
• Conclusion

“I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”: His essay on the experience, “Civil Disobedience,”

explores what a person should do when they feel their government is acting immorally. Published in 1849, in a tense political moment, it’s one of the most influential pieces of literature. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. would later adopt his language of passive resistance.

Main Ideas of Civil Disobedience:

1. Thoreau prefers a laissez-faire government that doesn’t interfere with individual lives.
2. Most men serve the state mechanically and don’t exercise moral judgment about their service.
3. It is man’s duty not to support any wrongs perpetrated by the state.
4. Order and the rule of the majority (democracy) sometimes prevent people from doing the right thing.
5. An honest man can change the state by standing up to it.
6. A man can change an unjust system by refusing to be unjust and by being willing to make a sacrifice.
7. The state should respect the individual.

TEMA 11: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson lived a solitary lifestyle. In 1855, she began to write clean copies of her work, producing around 800 poems—but no one knew of these until after her death.

Formative Influences:

• Benjamin F. Newton: Introduced her to Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emerson.
• Other influences: Charles Wadsworth, Samuel Bowles (owner and editor of the Springfield Republican)

The Life of a Writer:

In the summer of 1858, she started revising her poems, making clean copies and writing in earnest. By 1860, she had withdrawn from social life. The first half of the 1860s was her most productive writing period.

Later Life, Decline, and Death:

Helen Hunt Jackson convinced Emily to publish “Success is counted sweetest” anonymously in A Masque of Poets. This was the last poem published in her lifetime. After her death, her sister Lavinia (Vinnie) sought to have them published.

Dickinson’s radical seclusion was a necessary strategy to free her from ‘feminine’ obligations that might have hindered her art (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination). Her decision to dress in white fictionalized herself into the roles of the little maid, the angel in the house.

Key publications of her work:

• 1890: Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson
• 1891: Poems: Second Series by Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson
• 1894: Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd
• 1924: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi
• 1955: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson

Dickinson’s Poetry is Known For:

• Random capitalization
• Unconventional broken rhyming meter
• Use of dashes
• No titles
• Unconventional punctuation
• Use of metaphor

Dickinson is Considered:

• One of the most original poets of the 19th century
• Placed alongside poets like Walt Whitman and Robert Frost
• Taught in grade school, high school, and college
• A powerful and persistent figure of American culture
• Heralded as the greatest woman poet in the English language