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EMERSON'S CROSSING: ENGLISH TRAITS AND THE POLITICS OF “POLITICS”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2008
Abstract
As the American political controversies of the 1850s were as much about the category of the political as about slavery, property, or territorial expansion, so did Emerson's focus shift from a philosophical exploration of politics to a lived experience of conflict and a new poetics of political writing. The essay “Politics,” published in 1844, explored an idealist vision emerging from Transcendentalism, but the engagement with British power and cultural authority that took place during his long visit in 1847 and 1848 opened up an existential challenge to the premises of that essay. Although critical of intellectual rigidity and closed minds, Emerson finds himself drawn to the inner assurance of British society. The marginal status of English Traits (1856), Emerson's account of his travels, is reflected in the relative paucity of critical discussion of the book. English Traits represents, however, not only the confrontation with British pragmatism but a new perspective on the relationship between ideas and power. As the orientation of this text is away from Transcendentalist hermeneutics and toward irony, one way of reintegrating English Traits into American intellectual history is to alter its status as a detour in Emerson's writing career, lacking in real significance, and instead to read it as one of the symptomatic literary productions of the 1850s.
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References
1 In Dred Scott vs. Sandford (1857) the majority of the court found that individuals of African descent in slavery did not enjoy civil or individual rights anywhere in the United States, and had therefore no recourse to law.
2 Melville, Herman, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (repr., New York, 1995), 13Google Scholar.
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4 See Lee, Maurice S., Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 1830–1860 (Cambridge and New York, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 5 (“Toward a Transcendental Politics: Emerson's Second Thoughts”) for a nuanced analysis of Emerson's political thinking as it changed over time. See also Michael Lopez, “De-Transcendentalizing Emerson,” ESQ 34/1 and 2 (1988), 89–90 for a comment on the tensions between idealist and pragmatic vectors even at an early stage in Emerson's career.
5 Emerson's distributes the terms “English” and “British” throughout English Traits in a somewhat idiosyncratic manner, switching between them as he moves from psychological to anthropological to sociological observation. Today Americans continue to use “British” widely, but technically “English” is the correct national or ethnic descriptor, and “British” the constitutional and often institutional one (both Welsh and English travelers carry British passports). In any case, where I cite Emerson's usage, I do so without qualification.
6 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, Essays: Second Series (Cambridge, MA, 1983), 122. Subsequent parenthetical references in the text are to this edition, abbreviation CW, with volume and page numbers.
7 The working definition of “politics” in this article (beyond Emerson's own notations) is that aspect of human activity which involves collective structures of power and representation. As my own background is in literature rather than history or political science, the proposition that state policy, cultural ideas, and literary texts exist on a continuum rather than in rigidly separate worlds is a reasonable one, although I hesitate to assert that it should be so for scholars in other fields. For a valuable discussion of further implications for interdisciplinary work, see Jodi Dean's editorial “Introduction” in idem, ed., Cultural Studies and Political Theory (Ithaca, NY, 2000), 1–19.
8 See Malachuk, Daniel S., “The Republican Philosophy of Emerson's Early Lectures,” The New England Quarterly 71/3 (1998), 404–28Google Scholar, for a useful discussion of Emerson's lecture “Politics,” which pre-dates the 1844 essay by several years. Malachuk sees in particular an Enlightenment-influenced republicanism now infused with what he terms a “cosmic” political sensibility—one could also label it a Romantic concept of politics—coming to dominate Emerson's ideas in the 1840s.
9 Robinson, David M., Emerson and the Conduct of Life: Pragmatism and Ethical Purpose in the Later Work (New York, 1993), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Ibid., 113.
11 For whatever reason, most recent book-length studies tend to touch on English Traits only briefly, if at all. In lengthy, Patrick J. Keane'sEmerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transcendental “Light of All Our Day” (Columbia, MO, 2005)Google Scholar, despite some suggestive comments, there are around eight references but no extended discussion; Sam McGuire Worley's Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic (Albany, NY, 2001) contains no reference at all; while in Lopez's, MichaelEmerson and Power: Creative Antagonism in the Nineteenth Century (DeKalb, IL, 1996)Google Scholar there are precisely two references. This is not in any way to suggest that these books suffer from the absence of a discussion of English Traits—rather, the quality of the work done makes the absence more regrettable. The same applies to Richard Gravil's excellent Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862 (New York, 2000), in which English Traits achieves one brief mention.
12 Colacurcio, Michael J., “Puritans in Spite,” in Doctrine and Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England (New York, 1997), 250Google Scholar. Colacurcio is more concerned with challenging the assumption of a “post-Puritan” sensibility than in asserting the fact of transatlantic literary hybridity, but his essay points in the direction of English Traits.
13 For the inwardly directed moments, see Capper, Charles, “‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” Journal of American History 85/2 (1998), esp. 513–14, 519–23Google Scholar, for discussion of the intermittently nationalist framing of Transcendentalist scholarship. For the outwardly directed moments, see Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason. Also deserving of mention are Lawrence Buell's Emerson (Cambridge, MA, 2003) for its reconfiguring of the status of Emerson as a quintessential American writer; Gustaaf Van Cromphout's Emerson's Modernity and the Example of Goethe (Columbia, MO, 1990), in which he strongly reasserts the importance of Emerson's relationship with Goethe's writings against the backdrop of the intense American interest in German literature between the 1820s and the 1850s; and Reynolds's, Larry J.European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven, CT, 1988)Google Scholar. What deserves to be remembered also is the lucid discussion in Wellek, René, Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a collection of essays written over a period of thirty years. In particular, “Emerson and German Philosophy,” first published in 1943, is still well worth reading.
14 Brownson, Orestes A., The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography (Boston, 1854)Google Scholar. Some elements of the roman à clef can be found throughout the text. In chap. 8 (“A Lesson in World-Reform”), for example, an array of characters—various not especially well-disguised actual individuals such as Emerson and Bronson Alcott—lay down the Transcendentalist and radical-reformer views of the world with an air of imperturbable smugness. In the high Transcendentalist period from 1838 to 1842 Brownson had, ironically, been a keen promoter of root-and-branch social reform himself.
15 Fuller was a friend and colleague of Emerson and a former editor of the journal The Dial. For a thorough account of how Fuller's thinking and writing changed, both as a result of her New York experiences (as a journalist and reviewer for Horace Greeley's Tribune) and during her travels in Europe, see The Public Years, the second volume of Charles Capper's Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life (New York, 2007), esp. chaps. 6, 7, and 8. Capper's analysis of the gradual integration of a radical social vision into her already creatively flexible Romantic aesthetic is particularly detailed, and while considerable differences remain the parallels with Emerson should not be overlooked.
16 Both lectures are included in The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens, GA, 2005).
17 For a useful discussion of this issue see Richard Bridgman, “From Greenough to ‘Nowhere’: Emerson's English Traits,” in New England Quarterly 59/4 (1986), 469–85.
18 For example, both Robinson in Emerson and the Conduct of Life and Carolyn Sorisio in Fleshing out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833–1879 (Athens, GA, 2002) analyze the significance of the lectures of the 1850s as well as English Traits, among other works, while coming to noticeably different conclusions: Robinson sees Emerson moving toward public engagement and a stronger sense of the ethical, while Sorisio sketches an Emerson who is becoming increasingly ambivalent about racial equality even as he is (publicly) more committed to emancipation.
19 See especially Messmer, Marietta, “Reading National American Literary Historiography Internationally,” in Comparative Literature 52/3 (2000), 193–212CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Messmer's article is particularly impressive for its comparativist approach, which considers the relationship between national and international conceptions of literary production.
20 Messmer, “Reading,” 199–201; see Capper, Margaret Fuller: The Public Years, 235–7, 292–3, and passim for a perspective on the ideological tensions discernible in the New York literary scene; see also Gravil's account of the earlier period of fencing over the status of American literary and cultural integrity around 1820 in Romantic Dialogues, 47–59, 209–12.
21 Irving, Washington, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, in History, Tales and Sketches (New York, 1983), 751Google Scholar.
22 For a more extensive discussion of this issue see Paul Giles's comments on Irving in the chapter entitled “Burlesques of Civility” in Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–1860 (Philadelphia, 2001).
23 Nicoloff, Philip L., Emerson on Race and History: An Examination of Traits, English (New York, 1961), 39Google Scholar.
24 Bresky, M. Luke, “‘Latitudes and Longitudes of Our Condition’: The Nationality of Emerson's Representatives,” ESQ 48/4 (2002), 211–45Google Scholar.
25 Pelling, Henry, America and the British Left: From Bright to Bevan (London, 1956), 24–5Google Scholar; Pelling also points out that, in contrast to the Daily Worker in the 1930s, Reynold's News had gained a circulation of 350,000 in 1861 (the figure for The Times was only 70,000—but of the social and professional upper classes, of course). The political significance of the phenomenon remained active for some time; for example, at various points in the London chapters of Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford, 1999) we find Adams meditating on the role a certain idealizing of America played during the Civil War, when the radical reform milieu of John Bright and Richard Cobden gravitated to the Union side at a time when mainstream conservative opinion in Britain tended to regard Abraham Lincoln as a savage boor and the North as the inevitable loser.
26 In respect of the slavery question, however, the model of a free society was more likely to be, as antislavery activists such as Frederick Douglass and others had suggested, Britain. See in Rice, particular Alan J. and Crawford, Martin, eds., Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens, GA, 1999)Google Scholar, for some interesting perspectives on Douglass's relationship with the transatlantic abolitionist connection. However, see also Blackett, R. J. M., Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 2001), 36–47Google Scholar, for an account of the transformation of British antislavery sympathies into more ambivalent attitudes during the 1850s, culminating in significant support for the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War.
27 Worley, Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic, 23–4.
28 Richardson, Robert D. Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), 519Google Scholar.
29 In fact, as Emerson suggests in an 1848 lecture entitled “England” (the embryo of English Traits), it is not only purity of thought that can set the American awkwardly apart: “They notice in the American speech a certain purism, the accent of a man who knows how the word is spelled, rather than the unrestrained expression of a man who is only eager to say what he means.” The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, vol. 1, 1843–1854, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens, GA, 2001), 201.
30 Packer, Barbara L., Emerson's Fall: A New Interpretation of the Major Essays (New York, 1982), 178Google Scholar. Packer makes the memorable comment that the tragedy of “Experience” is embodied in Emerson's recognition that the price you pay for invulnerability “is invulnerability” (170); I would tend to agree, and to suggest that English Traits is his recognition that the price you pay for British engagements is an engagement with Britain.
31 Engels, Friedrich, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. Henderson, W. O. and Chaloner, W. H. (Stanford, CA, 1968), 273Google Scholar.
32 An ethical consistency that Emerson missed, for example, in the response of the New England establishment to Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster's caving before southern threats in 1850; see Robinson, Emerson and the Conduct of Life, 127–32, for a cogent discussion of this topic.
33 The phrase “dominant fundamental group” (as opposed to nonfundamental groups such as intellectuals) is used by Gramsci in the section entitled “Intellectuals and Education” in The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935, ed. David Forgacs (New York, 2000), 307. For a complementary analysis of hegemony, see also “Analysis of Situations: Relations of Force” in ibid., 200–9. There are some remarkable echoes of Emerson in Gramsci's writings, in fact, which remain to be explored.
34 Vigier, François, Change and Apathy: Liverpool and Manchester during the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 212–15Google Scholar.
35 Scholars have been unable to draw watertight conclusions from Emerson's use of the term “race” in this chapter, as Emerson (here and in other writings) seems to embrace both a continuing identity and a universal capacity to change and adapt. As Carolyn Sorisio points out (Fleshing out America, 136), however, if the “Saxon” identity is essential (and not simply descriptive) for the kind of progressive thought that asserts the irrelevance of race as a category, it is difficult to then argue convincingly that race is an irrelevant category; one might also read this chapter, however, as Emerson's presentation of the contingent, even random, development of the “English” race, a successful but accidental product of physical circumstances, cultural convergences, and social history that had no essential identity other than the one it created. See also Ian Finseth, “Evolution, Cosmopolitanism, and Emerson's Antislavery Politics,” American Literature 77/4 (2005), 729–60, for a focused discussion of the complexities of Emerson's understanding of “race.”
36 Cadava, Eduardo notes, in Emerson and the Climates of History (Stanford, CA, 1997), 22Google Scholar, that “the weather in Emerson is in general a principle of articulation among nature, language, and history.” It should be said that Emerson's excursions on climate in English Traits were not eccentric or even particularly original; for some brief but illuminating comments on the role of climate in theories of nation and nationality in mid-century American thinkers such as Francis Lieber, Orestes Brownson, and Charles Sumner see Dorothy Ross, “‘Are We a Nation?’: The Conjuncture of Nationhood and Race in the United States, 1850–1876,” in MIH 2/3 (2005), 347–8.
37 For some observations on Emerson's portrayal of British social and economic life as a type of machine see Ellison, Julie, “The Edge of Urbanity: Emerson's English Traits,” ESQ 32/2 (1986), 106–7Google Scholar.
38 Nicoloff, Emerson on Race and History, 234–8.
39 See Sattelmeyer, Robert, “‘When He Became My Enemy’: Emerson and Thoreau, 1848–49,” in New England Quarterly 62/2 (1989), 187–204CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sattlemeyer also discusses the possibility that Emerson was changed enough by his sojourn in England to broach, perhaps in a blunt “English” manner, some of the intellectual and personal difficulties that had lurked in the interiors of their friendship (201–2). See also Keane, Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason, 83, for a brief but perspicacious comment on how the politics of Emerson's relationship with Thoreau were perhaps also no longer the old politics.
40 From that perspective the trip had been “almost paradise,” as Barbara L. Packer notes in The Transcendentalists (Athens, GA, 2007), 240.
41 The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 10, 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts (Cambridge, MA, 1973), 244.
42 Buell, Emerson, 43–6; Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, 54.
43 See, for example, Matarese, Susan M., American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination (Amherst, MA, 2001)Google Scholar for an analysis of the large volume of utopian political literature in the US at the end of the nineteenth century. The unique moral qualities of American national character were often the prime measure for these writers.
44 Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, 10: 308.
45 In his intriguing article “Postcolonial Counter-discourse in English Traits” in ATQ 20/3 (2006), 565–90, Marek Paryż discusses the potential for reading the book as a fluid, hesitant, and indeed ironic step in the gradual formation of a postcolonial American identity that will not, or at least might not, always require the blessings of British cultural authority for its own coherence and survival.
46 Cavell, Stanley, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago, 1988), 182Google Scholar.
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50 See Whicher, Stephen E., ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology (Boston, 1957), 397Google Scholar.
51 The “telos of the Civil War,” as Lee puts it in Slavery, Philosophy, and American Literature, 210; Lee's final chapter (210–16) offers a brief but comprehensive survey of what the Civil War did to, and for, the ideas of American authors of the 1840s and 1850s.
52 There is a sense in which Bartleby embodies an extreme and distorted mirror image of idealist consciousness, refusing to act in a world in which all action is hopelessly compromised; see especially Joel Porte, “Transcendental Antics,” in Levin, Harry, ed., Veins of Humor (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 179Google Scholar, for the observation that Melville was aware that he had an intellectual affinity with the Transcendentalists despite the uncompromising rigor of his satirical portraits of them and their world view.