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“In True Relations”: Love, Friendship, and Alternative Society in Emerson
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
Extract
At one point in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” an essay that deals directly neither with the soul nor with socialism, Oscar Wilde quotes obliquely from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
[People] go through their lives in a sort of coarse comfort, like petted animals, without ever realising that they are probably thinking other people's thoughts, living by other people's standards, wearing practically what one may call other people's second-hand clothes, and never being themselves for a single moment. “He who would be free,” says a fine thinker, “must not conform.” And authority, by bribing people to conform, produces a very gross kind of over-fed barbarism among us. (267)
That Wilde was attracted to Emersonian nonconformity is not surprising, and the similarities between the two writers are striking. But my reason for citing Wilde, the ur-homosexual and model of iconoclasm, is that I want to show that Emerson is as innovative a thinker as Wilde, and that indeed on the subject of individualism and personal relationships he is far more so. In fact, Wilde can be seen as taking certain ideas of his teacher Walter Pater and giving them an Emersonian and American cast, expressing more openly Pater's cloistered Oxford radicalism. The “Socialism” essay in particular develops strong connections among aestheticism, individualism, and sociopolitical dissent, revealing a strong desire for alternatives to late-19th-century British society. And of course in the case of Pater as well as Wilde, the need for individualism and the quest for new forms of social connection have obvious links to both writers' alternative sexual orientation. What makes Emerson more radical, more, if you will, “queer,” is precisely that he is not arguing for any sexual orientation, but is attempting — many years before the Oxford aesthetes — to create a free space for alternative forms of gender and new forms of personal relationships to develop. Emerson values dis-orientation more than any orientation.
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