Transcendentalism: Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller

This is Unit Seven of American Literature, part two of two: what the movement built to live in, who argued back, and three ways of placing a passage. Part one ended with Margaret Fuller editing the movement's quarterly and then reporting from a revolution. Now the unit's governing idea pays off in a way that matters for the exam. A movement whose whole claim is that no institution should mediate between a person and the truth is going to have an awkward time building institutions, and Concord built them anyway: a club, a magazine, and a farm where manual labour and intellectual life were supposed to combine. The communities were short-lived and the writing was not. Meanwhile the sharpest criticism came from inside the same circle. Hawthorne lived at Brook Farm and doubted that a person could be trusted with their own conscience, and Melville pushed that doubt further. The next unit is the reply to this one, written by neighbours, and the exam expects the pairing. Then three procedures: separating Emerson from Thoreau on the page, naming the claim a passage is making, and sorting a Romantic passage into this camp or the dark one. By the end you will be able to describe the Club, the quarterly and Brook Farm. To name the critics and say why the pairing matters. To state the movement's afterlife. To tell Emerson from Thoreau. And to identify a claim and sort a passage by camp.

Three entries on what surrounded the doctrine: the gatherings, the objections raised by people who knew them, and what survived.

A club, a magazine, a farm.

AML 0620 Brook Farm and the Communal Experiments

The Transcendental Club, loosely organized in eighteen thirty-six, gathered Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Theodore Parker and others. Some of its members turned to reform and to experimental communities, Brook Farm the best known among them, where the aim was to combine manual labour with intellectual life. The communities were short-lived; the writing was not.

The reply came from next door.

AML 0621 Transcendentalism's Critics

The movement's critics came from inside its own circle. Hawthorne, who lived at Brook Farm, doubted that a person could be trusted with their own conscience, and Melville pushed that doubt further still. The next unit's writers are the argument against this one, and the exam expects the pairing. The critics knew the movement personally.

The postures outlasted the philosophy.

AML 0622 The Movement's Afterlife in American Prose

Transcendentalism supplied later American writing with its most durable postures: the individual set against the crowd, nature as a source of truth, a suspicion of institutions, and the essay as a form for thinking aloud. Whitman takes the first of those and generations of nature writers take the second. The influence outlasted the philosophy that produced it.

Four entries to close: three procedures for an unseen passage, and the unit's capstone on what Concord actually argued.

Principle, or measurement.

AML 0623 Telling Emerson From Thoreau on the Page

Exam passages from the two men are easy to confuse and easy to separate with three tests. First, the level of abstraction: Emerson argues in general propositions about the soul, society and the scholar, while Thoreau argues from a specific and usually physical instance, a bean-row, a cost in dollars, a night in a cell. Second, the sentence: Emerson's are declarative and aphoristic and can be lifted out whole, while Thoreau's are longer, drier, and full of pun and understatement. Third, the subject of complaint: Emerson complains that people borrow their opinions, while Thoreau complains that people waste their lives buying things. Both preach self-reliance; only one of them keeps accounts. Both write first-person prose full of natural imagery, so the pronoun and the trees decide nothing. The test is whether the passage reasons from a principle or from a measurement.

Four claims, and the distractors sort themselves.

AML 0624 Reading a Transcendentalist Passage for Its Claim

A Transcendentalist passage will usually make one of four claims, and identifying which one answers most questions. The claim of direct access says a person can reach truth without a mediating institution, and it shows up as an attack on churches, books or custom. The claim of correspondence says the natural world answers to the human mind, and it shows up as nature described in the vocabulary of spirit. The claim of self-trust says one's own intuition outranks other people's approval, and it shows up as an attack on conformity and consistency. The claim of simplification says a life is improved by reducing what it depends on, and it shows up as an inventory of costs. Find the claim and the distractors sort themselves, because most wrong options assert something the movement explicitly rejected, such as deference to authority or the mind as a passive receiver. A passage praising nature is not automatically arguing correspondence; if the natural description is doing economic work, the claim is simplification.

Where is the evil located?

AML 0625 Sorting a Romantic Writer: Transcendental or Dark

American Romanticism splits into two camps and the exam asks which one a passage belongs to. The Transcendental side treats human nature as sound and institutions as the corruption, sets its scenes outdoors, uses light and morning as its habitual imagery, and ends by affirming. The dark side treats human nature as flawed at the root, sets its scenes in closed rooms, in forests at night, in houses with histories, uses shadow and decay, and ends without a rescue. The test is where the evil is located. If the passage blames custom, church, market or crowd, it is Transcendental. If it locates the trouble inside a person or inherited through a family, it is dark Romantic. Both camps are Romantic in method, valuing intuition, symbol and the individual, so the shared vocabulary decides nothing. The two camps knew each other, and a passage can borrow Transcendental language in order to reject it.

Direct access, and a doctrine lived.

AML 0626 Self, Nature, and Conscience: What Concord Argued

Transcendentalism is the first American philosophy to produce a literature, and it states in one proposition: an individual can reach the truth directly, through intuition and through nature, and every institution offering to do it for them is in the way. The materials came from outside, from German and British Romanticism, from Kant and German Idealism, from the higher criticism of the Bible, and from a New England Unitarianism that had already softened Calvinism. What the Concord writers added was the insistence that the mind is active. Against Locke's tablet receiving impressions they described an exchange between a mind and an animated nature that both receives and creates the sense of spirit, and gave that shared spirit the name Over-soul. Emerson wrote the founding statement in *Nature*, told American thinkers to stop deferring to Europe in "The American Scholar", and gave self-trust its permanent formulation in "Self-Reliance", where society is a conspiracy against its own members and a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Thoreau took the same doctrine and tested it by living: two years at Walden compressed into one turning year, a cabin priced to the half-cent, and the claim that the cost of a thing is the life exchanged for it. His refusal of a poll tax produced an essay that outgrew its occasion entirely. Fuller edited the quarterly and extended the principle to women, which is the application Emerson's own formulations imply and do not make. This unit states what the movement claimed, not what the course holds, and the next unit is the reply written by their neighbours.

That closes Concord. The next unit is the answer three of their contemporaries wrote. You can describe the Transcendental Club of eighteen thirty-six, the quarterly Fuller edited first, and Brook Farm, where manual labour and intellectual life were meant to combine, and you can say that the communities were short-lived while the writing was not. You can name the critics who came from inside the circle, Hawthorne doubting that a person could be trusted with their own conscience after living at the farm, and Melville pushing further. You can state what later American writing kept: the individual against the crowd, nature as a source of truth, a suspicion of institutions, and the essay as a way of thinking aloud. You can separate Emerson from Thoreau by asking whether a passage reasons from a principle or from a measurement. You can name which of four claims a Transcendentalist passage is making. And you can sort any Romantic passage by asking where it puts the evil, outside in custom and crowd, or inside a person and inherited through a family. Unit eight takes the second answer.