Phyllis Cole
In his late lecture “Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England,” Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that the Transcendentalists had never followed a common doctrine; instead, the Boston area simply contained “here and there two or three men or women who read and wrote, each alone, with unusual vivacity.” These disparate individuals agreed about little except “having fallen upon Coleridge and Wordsworth and Goethe, then on Carlyle, with pleasure and sympathy.” The friendship among them, he went on, resulted in a club to hold conversation, and from conversation grew a quarterly journal, the Dial, initially edited by Margaret Fuller and distinguished for some of her own best papers (1903–1904, vol. 10: 323–324). Emerson’s words hardly provide a complete definition of Transcendentalism: he declined to name his own leadership in it, or even the publication of highly influential books among its outcomes. But this modest vignette still names several of the elements important in recent assessment of a formative American literary group. Emerson’s definition of membership in it includes both genders and recognizes the vital role of Margaret Fuller; in fact, the journal entry from which he drew this description went even further in declaring her the group’s “real centre,” holding it together through the bonds of friendship (1960–1982, vol. 16: 22). In addition, Emerson proposed a model of engagement for all participants based first upon reading, especially of the European Romantics, and on the interactive communications complementing solitude, from friendship to conversation to periodical publication.
Histories of the Transcendentalist movement have often begun with the theological controversy over biblical authority that derived from German Higher Criticism and divided the communities of Harvard College and the Unitarian church (e.g. Gura 2007; Packer 1995). Emerson remembered such origins as well in “Historic Notes”: after Edward Everett brought Europe’s new scholarship to Harvard classrooms, and as William Ellery Channing exercised his genius from the Unitarian pulpit, a “Movement” was born that rejected the “Establishment” of college and church (Emerson 1903–1904, vol. 10: 308–312). Theology and poetry came together in prompting this enfranchisement of the individual mind, a movement known among its adherents simply as “the newness.” Emerson, as his audiences well knew, had contributed decisively to such change, first by publishing Nature in 1836 and soon after with provocative orations at Harvard. To seniors of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in “The American Scholar” (1837), he urged new freedom from professional self‐definition, so that they might become “Man Thinking” in the broadest sense; in the “Divinity School Address” (1838) he warned student ministers against the deadening effect of traditional preaching and called for a clergy who were “newborn bards of the Holy Ghost” in response to the miracle of nature (1971–2013, vol. 1: 53, 90). Affirmation of intuitive thought, questioning of inherited authorities, and recognition of a divinely charged natural universe must be claimed as central to any description of Transcendentalism. Traditional histories, however, locate the movement’s origin only in the academic and ecclesiastical community that it sought to disrupt, while without question all participants were not Harvard students or potential ministers. Self‐education was the economic necessity of several men in the group, and women were barred at the door of both college and clergy. The advantage of Emerson’s broader account of Transcendentalism, with freelance reading and conversation at its heart, is that it includes those outside the establishment in the group’s early moments as well as outcomes.
Forty years of textual recovery and reinterpretation invite such an inclusive framework. Emerson’s journals, lectures, and antislavery orations have joined his essays and poems in new editions. Since the 1980s, new readings have greatly elevated claims for his stature, often as a pragmatic and proto‐modern philosopher rather than a Romantic and idealist (Cavell 1990; West 1989); and most recently, historicists have been recovering Emerson the idealist in his own context and community (Malachuk 2016; Mott 2014; Robinson 1993; Urbas 2016). Meanwhile, Fuller has risen from obscurity, again through new editions as well as critical and biographical study, to recognition as a potent visionary and challenger of orthodoxy, expanding from Emerson’s orbit to an alternative spirituality and feminist proclamation, then to urban and transnational journalism (Chevigny 1976; Fuller 1991; Steele 2001). As Christina Zwarg points out, the danger is that scholars of Emerson and Fuller underestimate the depth of conversation between them, so that Fuller appears tangential to some Emerson critics, and Emerson is faulted for male self‐absorption by Fuller’s feminist advocates. Instead they might be seen in an “exquisite entanglement” of anti‐canonical utterance (1995: 1–2). But the conversational principle applies still more widely, so that entanglements may also be followed between them and their friends, in and beyond the Transcendental Club and Dial circle. This chapter will offer an overview of Transcendentalism that focuses on Emerson and Fuller while recognizing this variety of participation in the movement’s origins, cultural engagements, and transnational reach.
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes,” Emerson wrote in the introduction to Nature. “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” Such claims to unmediated perception – “insight” instead of “tradition” – offered a manifesto to Boston in 1836 (1971–2013, vol. 1: 7). Perry Miller famously named this year the “annus mirabilis” of Transcendentalism, with not only Emerson but several of his colleagues publishing essays that defined a movement in the making (1950: 106). In addition, two important events preceded the publication of Emerson’s book that September. For three weeks in July and August, Margaret Fuller made her first visit to the Emerson house in Concord; she revealed her mind to him in conversation, and he read the manuscript of Nature to her. Then, just a day before the publication of this manifesto, the Transcendental Club held its first meeting (Capper 1992: 187–189; Richardson 1995: 245–246).
A revisionary history of the movement, however, points to vital articulations of an “original relation to the universe” significantly before Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay of 1836. A unique precursor to Waldo was his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Starting as early as 1804, during Waldo’s early childhood, her “Almanacks” (diary) recorded ecstasies in nature and affirmations of the imagination as well as reflections on reading that crossed from Enlightenment philosophy and poetry into Romanticism, including Germaine de Staël’s influential Germany and the poetry of William Wordsworth (Cole 1998: 102, 120, 151–152 – cf. M.M. Emerson 2013). By the time her nephew was a Harvard student, and then preparing for the ministry, Mary’s letters urged such consciousness upon him; he both responded in kind and recorded excerpts of her writing in a journal, modeled after her own. One such counsel, invoking Byron and Wordsworth in an argument for “Solitude” as the necessary setting for vision, reappeared first in his 1824 journal, then much later (unattributed) in his own published essay “Culture” (Cole 1998: 9; Emerson 1993: 182). Her influence upon him was lifelong. Alienated by some of his early heresies, she returned to dialogue after he poignantly reminded her of their mutual “adoration of the Moral Sentiment” (1939, 1990–1995, vol. 2: 397). He later filled four notebooks with excerpts from her writing, while naming Mary as his greatest friend and “benefactor” (Cole 1998: 9–10, 299–301). But Mary was more than a private influence on Waldo; she also exchanged manuscripts with a circle of women, thus exemplifying how women readers could become part of intellectual culture (Baker 2014: 35–36).
If Mary was an active agent in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s growth, the Unitarian leader William Ellery Channing became his model of eloquence and “moral imagination” as he dedicated himself to the ministry (Emerson 1960–1982, vol. 2: 238). Channing’s Unitarian faith had a broad appeal to the young in its opposition to Calvinist doctrine and encouragement of “self‐culture”; with considerable caution, he even entertained European texts valuing individual insight over scriptural authority. In 1825 Channing shared private study of Wordsworth and Coleridge with the young teacher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody that allowed her affirmation of unfallen infancy, intuitive Reason, and the “social principle” of human sympathy; she immediately wrote on these themes in “The Spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures,” but at first it remained unpublished (Marshall 2005: 162–165; Cole 2014: 137). Only four years after her appropriation of Coleridge’s “Reason,” eventual founders of the Transcendental Club like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Henry Hedge, and George Ripley were able to seize upon this term and draw their own conclusions. Soon, they were buoyed as well by Thomas Carlyle’s essays in British periodicals, which conveyed the claims of Goethe and German philosophy to Americans eager for a gospel of possibility. In 1833 Hedge engagingly introduced both Coleridge and Immanuel Kant to readers of the Unitarian Christian Examiner (Packer 1995: 23–27, 29–35). But controversy soon erupted in the same pages, with conservative Andrews Norton cutting short Peabody’s now‐published series on biblical poetry as the work of an “unlearned girl” and attacking Ripley’s defense of Germany’s “religion of the heart” (Cole 2014: 138; Packer 1995: 54–55).
Life consequences also resulted from these new truths. In 1832 Emerson resigned from the ministry, met Coleridge and Carlyle in England, and began to prepare for a career of freelance lecturing and writing. About the same time Mary Moody Emerson showed her nephew a manuscript by Elizabeth Peabody about the divine “word” of the Bible as one with the “moral truth” of humanity; he asked for both a copy and a chance to converse. “It is pretty plain therefore,” Peabody later claimed, “that this heresy does not belong to his mind alone” (Marshall 2005: 243, 559). Indeed, there were many heresies. Orestes Brownson moved to the Boston area, found kinship with Ripley in study of European social thought, and affirmed “Union and Progress” rather than individualism as key to the “church of the future”; meanwhile self‐educated layman Amos Bronson Alcott founded a school in Boston, assisted by Peabody and based upon their mutual faith that intuitive truth could be drawn from the minds of children (Cole 2014: 143–144; Gura 2007: 75–76). Print publications by Ripley, Brownson, and the Alcott–Peabody partnership marked the controversial background of 1836. Simultaneously, out of hunger for anti‐establishment talk grew the club; only later did its members accept the term “Transcendental,” referring to their shared belief in an ideal realm beyond the phenomena of nature, to describe themselves (Packer 1995: 46–47). Their preferred title, even though playful, was “the Symposium,” a reference to the conversational group around Plato, the ancient idealist they held in highest esteem. At first only young men, mostly clergy, attended; the club never embraced the generation of Channing and Mary Moody Emerson, and only in 1837 did they invite a few women to join them. Although Peabody rarely attended (Ronda 1999: 203), Margaret Fuller joined the group that year and played an active role from the beginning.
Having received a classical education from her father, followed by omnivorous reading of her own, Fuller participated in literary and theological conversation without hesitation. She counted club members William Henry Channing (nephew of the Unitarian leader) and James Freeman Clarke among her close friends, testing her ambitions and ideas in letters to both even before launching her correspondence with Emerson. “I have greatly wished to see among us such a person of genius as the nineteenth century can afford,” she wrote to Clarke in 1830. “[S]uch a man would suddenly dilate into a form of Pride, Power, and Glory, – a centre, round which asking, aimless hearts might rally, – a man fitted to act as interpreter to the one tale of many‐languaged eyes!” (1983–1994, vol. 1: 166–167). Describing such a figure in masculine terms at this point, she was telling of her own nascent ambition.
Interpretation of languages and their tale would provide Fuller with a crucial means to authority. Quickly surpassing her tutor Clarke in mastering German, in 1839 she contributed a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe to Ripley’s series of European works, Specimens of Foreign and Standard Literature. Fuller also articulated the larger value of the movement’s cosmopolitan project in her preface to Conversations with Goethe; consciously moving beyond language translation to criticism, she declared all the things that Goethe was not, countering the common prejudice against him and owning his value to her in a witty first‐person voice. Emerson found Fuller’s preface brilliant, his endorsement signaling the larger respect she was gaining in this community (Capper 1992: 253–256). The same year she also claimed leadership among “thinking women” by initiating “Conversations” of her own to investigate the most fundamental questions: “What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” (1983–1994, vol. 2: 87) Here was a complement and counter to the Transcendental Club. Peabody joined this group and recorded its flow of talk, initially organized around interpretation of the Greek gods and goddesses as a typology of human life. About 25 women were soon called upon to speak and think actively; Fuller led with decisive energy, however, in structuring these classes (Simmons 1994: 198, 200, 204). And when soon thereafter the Transcendental Club decided to initiate a journal, the Dial, she was given the honor and burden of serving as its editor.
Peabody facilitated the new culture of readers and conversationalists by providing a setting for it, her bookshop and “Foreign Library” at 13 West Street in Boston. Here, starting in the summer of 1840, Europe’s latest books and journals were available for sale or loan to readers regardless of gender, generation, or credential. The Transcendental Club held its last formal meeting there, and though Fuller’s Conversations must have begun elsewhere, they continued at the shop through 1844. Peabody also became a publisher of new works by Channing, Fuller, and others, as well as the Dial itself in 1842 and 1843 (Argersinger and Cole 2014: 9, 79). This bookshop, so directly manifesting Peabody’s ethic of service, was ambitious on her part and invaluable to others.
As Emerson later recalled, the Dial (1840–1844) also served as a gathering place for the Transcendentalists, an expression of their interactions with each other and the culture around them. Fuller served as editor for two years but could not afford to continue such work unpaid, so with reluctance Emerson then provided leadership for another two years. In fact, both editors were seriously engaged throughout, publishing each other’s work and defining the project interactively. The first issue began with Emerson’s call to readers for a “new spirit” to meet new times, followed immediately by Fuller’s “Short Essay on Critics,” claiming a vital role for criticism as the friend and observer of literary creation (The Dial 1961, vol. 1: 1–2, 7). Reading the Dial acquaints us with Transcendentalism as a struggling and experimental – as well as formative – enterprise in American literary history. I will survey some of its primary genres and agendas, while also relating them to signposts of Transcendentalist achievement published elsewhere.
Emerson and Fuller offered alternative religious discourses both in the Dial and in their larger bodies of writing in the first half of the 1840s, the high point of Transcendentalism. For Emerson the Dial served as a backdrop to his major theater of production, primarily the first and second series of Essays that would become canonical American literary texts; he did not reprint such work as “Self‐Reliance” and “The Over‐Soul” in the journal, nor did he look back to sermons of the past. His ministerial colleague Theodore Parker offered more direct reflection on and expansion of Unitarian pulpit oratory. And Emerson did contribute pieces from his current lecture series, which deflected ministerial authority from the pulpit to an alternative, quasi‐religious domain of oral eloquence. Fuller’s years at the Dial fell closer to the beginning of her public career and amounted to the chief space where she could improvise and grow, having no public pulpit to diverge from. Instead she generated a voice from leadership of the Conversations and private recording of thought, culminating in the “Great Lawsuit” of 1843.
Within the Dial, critical essays engaged with both the great writers of European Romanticism and the artistic expressions that New England was producing, so that in the first issue Ripley praised Brownson’s genius as manifest in his semi‐autobiographical novel, Charles Elwood: or, The Infidel Converted (1840), while Fuller reviewed the 1839 exhibition of Washington Allston’s paintings; in the second issue Emerson offered more encompassing “Thoughts on Modern Literature” (1961, vol. 1: 22–46, 73–84; vol. 2: 137–58). Translations from beyond America continued to appear, from reviews of Ripley’s Foreign Standard Literature project to an eventual series of “Ethnical Scriptures,” offered by Emerson to convey the wisdom of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian scriptures (1961, vol. 1: 99–117, 315–339; vol. 3: 331–42ff.). An equalizing conversation unfolds through the journal’s composite text, frequently with interesting juxtaposition among individual voices. Parker’s review of “German Literature,” primarily critiquing a German disparagement of Goethe, is followed by Fuller’s declaration of intent to say more about Goethe’s achievements – a goal she would reach two issues later. Parker and Fuller both collaborated and competed. But the additional surprise is that in between pronouncements by the two Goethe critics comes Emerson’s now‐famous poem “The Snow‐Storm,” not only filling out a page but sweeping aside literary controversy in favor of “the frolic architecture of the snow” (1961, vol. 1: 315–347).
As inclusion of “The Snow‐Storm” suggests, the Dial was not only a counter to contemporary theological journals, but a site for publication of creative writing. Poetry appears throughout, virtually all of it new. Emerson had not yet gathered a book of verse, and such major work as “The Sphinx” and “The Problem” also saw print here for the first time (1961, vol. 1: 348–350, 122–123; cf. Emerson 1971–2013, vol. 9: 3–5, 18–20). So too did Fuller’s own poems and those of colleagues, such as Christopher Cranch of the Transcendental Club and her friends in the Conversations, Caroline and Ellen Sturgis, who respectively offered epiphanies of consciousness and more sober reflection and observation (listed by Myerson 1980: 305, 308–309, 310, 313). A few experiments in fiction were either published or reviewed, but the journal did not pursue such leads. A much richer vein of expression was the prose poetry of nature observation and spiritual meditation. Young Henry David Thoreau progressed from poems under Fuller’s editorship to a more direct forerunner to Walden in prose, “Natural History of Massachusetts” under Emerson’s (1961, vol. 3: 19–40). Bronson Alcott won derision for the journal’s opening issue with his overblown, pseudo‐scriptural language in “Orphic Sayings,” but some of his lines succinctly represented the movement’s messages: “Believe, youth, that your heart is an oracle; trust her instinctive auguries, obey her divine leadings; nor listen too fondly to the uncertain echoes of your head” (1961, vol. 1: 85).
By no means was all of the published literature expressing the “newness” contained within the Dial. Such was the case, for example, with women’s exploration of their own consciousness. Fuller did publish some pieces by her colleagues from the Conversations: not only poems by the Sturgis sisters but a somber assessment of “Woman” by Sophia Ripley (married to George), judging a wife as “only half a being” in her own estimation (1961, vol. 1: 364). Emerson solicited and included Lydia Maria Child’s short essay “Beauty” (1961, vol. 3: 490–492). But visionary claims emerged elsewhere as well. Philothea, a full‐length novel by Child dramatizing a Greek woman’s response to Plato, with epigraphs from Coleridge and Wordsworth and an opening description of the moon’s “silent glory” over Athens, had reached independent publication three weeks before Emerson’s Nature. But in the period of the Dial, despite attending Fuller’s Conversations, Child focused her creative energies on the antislavery movement (1836: title page, 9; Myerson 1980: 121–125). Elizabeth Peabody published “A Vision” (1843) in The Pioneer, edited by James Russell Lowell, rather than the Dial. But this meditation’s content clearly locates it within the Transcendentalist circle: her night‐time dream vision rises from reading “a new definition of life” to ecstatic participation in the arts and mythologies of India and Greece, before reconciling with “the way, the truth, and the life” of Christian scripture (Argersinger and Cole 2014: 15, 129–130).
Such literary texts by Fuller’s colleagues offer the best context for her intense visionary imaginings in the Dial from 1840 to 1842: “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” “Yuca Filamentosa,” and “Leila.” All of these women were claiming space for woman’s consciousness, but Fuller went beyond both Child and Peabody by affirming the female principle as intrinsic to nature, as well as by experimenting in highly figurative expression. In “Magnolia” and “Yuca” she dramatized encounters, under night‐time skies lit by the magic of moon and stars, with flowers that represent women’s emergence into full awareness (1961, vol. 1: 299–305; vol. 2: 286–288). In the third and most radical, “Leila,” the narrative voice directly describes a wild force, more goddess than mortal woman, making the earth flower. If the words of this liberator could be fully written, the narrator declares, they would turn “all Bibles […] into one Apocalypse” (1961, vol. 1: 462–677). Child, Peabody, and Fuller (in her Conversations) all turned to Greek philosophy and mythology for forms to augment the Bible, but here Fuller was creating newly to supplant all forms of the past. These were crucial steps toward her feminist vision in “The Great Lawsuit” (Steele 2001: 83–102).
Fuller’s eventual manifesto, however, also kept company with another vein of writing among the Transcendentalists, a growing concern for social reform. In fact, Emerson led the Dial here more than Fuller herself, from his opening letter naming “special reforms in the state” along with literature and philosophy among signs of New England’s current unrest. Less than a year later, his reprinted lecture “Man the Reformer” filled out the meaning of such protest, deploring a system of trade that left all householders in debt to the negro slave and the poor worker (1961, vol. 1: 2, 525, 537). Such an allusion to slavery only acknowledged the current rise of abolitionism; neither Emerson nor his colleagues, apart from Child, committed to the highly organized and rhetorically heated movement. But a trio of Unitarian ministers, all members of the Transcendental Club, moved from reading European social philosophers, especially Charles Fourier, to arguing for communitarian approaches to social justice. Their periodical platforms were largely separate from the Dial, often of their own construction. Fuller’s close friend William Henry Channing moved restlessly between the Ohio Valley, where for a time he edited the Transcendentalist journal The Western Messenger (1835–1841), and New York City, eventually expressing the spirit of “associationist” reform in his own journal, The Present, in 1843 and 1844 (Myerson 1980: 119). Even earlier, Orestes Brownson moved from the 1836 argument for “Union and Progress” to explicitly socialist applications in his Boston Quarterly Review. “The Laboring Classes,” a July 1840 review of Carlyle’s Chartism, argued for the approaching crisis of wealth and labor, avoidable only by government action to control banks and “raise up the laborer” (Gura 2007: 72–77, 137–141; Miller 1950: 438, 441). The same month in the Dial, George Ripley’s review of Brownson praised his friend’s social vision but did not anticipate this overt radicalism. His own conversion to action was soon to come, however: like Channing and Brownson a reader of socialist theory, by the fall of 1840 Ripley began his appeal to the Transcendentalists actually to join in a communal experiment, to be named Brook Farm (Gura 2007: 151–152).
Brook Farm arose directly from the group that supported the Transcendental Club and fostered the Dial, and though none of them actually joined Ripley’s community, founded in West Roxbury in 1841, all necessarily confronted the challenge of associationism. Emerson declined an urgent invitation in a letter that embraced the need for change in domestic economy but not a newly constructed community to drive it: “all I shall solidly do, I must do alone,” he declared, directly confirming the individualism of his contemporary essay “Self‐Reliance” (1939, 1990–1995, vol. 2: 370). Fuller also declined to join the community but made visits to Brook Farm and conversation with its women residents a mutually fruitful means of development throughout its early years; Channing likewise visited often and, after the community’s demise, continued to proselytize for “Christian Union” (Capper 2007: 64–65, 104–106, 133–134; Gura 2007: 167, 228). Alcott declined so as to form his own community, Fruitlands, for a season in 1843. Peabody proved to be Brook Farm’s strongest apologist within the Dial, writing two articles about its promise to fulfill “Christ’s Idea of Society” (1961, vol. 2: 214–228, 361–372). As for Ripley himself, arduous work to sustain the community separated him significantly from Transcendentalists who did not fully support him, especially Emerson. Still, Brook Farm’s six years of life spurred the movement’s reach toward social engagement.
Two essays in the 1843 Dial, “The Transcendentalist” and “The Great Lawsuit,” epitomize Emerson and Fuller as visionaries and reformers. Both evoke the present moment in a context of universal truths, but while Emerson defines and dramatizes a movement in tension with the world around it, Fuller diverts that movement into active work for liberation. Emerson’s essay began as a lecture, but he newly positioned it as the third and final piece in the three‐part series on “The Times” that launched his editorship. It has been valued ever since for its deft evocation of Transcendentalism as both a philosophical position and an act of social prophecy. Defining New England’s “new views” as really the oldest of views, “Idealism as it appears in 1842,” he sets idealism against a materialism that amounts to limitation of both knowledge and ethical insight. The “sturdy capitalist,” Emerson suggests, imagines his bank to be set on blocks of Quincy granite, when in fact this rock rests on a planet which “goes spinning away, dragging bank and banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the hour […] on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness” (1961, vol. 3: 297–298). The radical insecurity of the human condition makes the idealist rely instead on his own consciousness and the spiritual truths that it reveals, in turn questioning the labor, property, and government that materialism cherishes. Transcendentalists, then, are dissenters. But they are solitaries; wishing for valid work in the world, they meanwhile abstain as an act of criticism against “quackery.” A series of negatives sums up their position at least in the present moment: “not good citizens,” not supporters of societies for abolition or temperance, not even voters. But they stand for a higher truth. “Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things,” Emerson asks, “will you not tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable?” (1961, vol. 3: 304, 307–308, 312–313).
“The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller’s argument for the equality of women, also dramatizes the difference between ideal truth, written into the universe and human mind, and the present, radically flawed social world. But her essay is a call to action rather than a rationale for withdrawal. “Knock, and it shall be opened,” she urges like Jesus; “seek and ye shall find” (1961, vol. 4: 4). The imminent achievement of ideal perfection will be a millennial fulfillment of promises long anticipated. Fuller sets the present moment in a vast human history by focusing explicitly on inherited types of womanhood: rather than being sought in the underworld by Orpheus, Eurydice must rise to action and search for him; the ancient goddesses Minerva, Sita, and Isis manifest women’s wisdom, but the fulfillment of women’s potential will also mean the coming of a new Mother Mary (1961, vol. 4: 7, 20, 47). Fuller does not, as in “Leila,” give a new name to the goddess potential of womankind, but the wild energy of that figure continues in her attribution of power to these forms. Individualism is affirmed, but as a strategic step toward possibilities beyond it, whether in marriage or in wider social bonding: “Union is only possible to those who are units” (1961, vol. 4: 44). Indeed, her call for action is civic and legal as well as religious and imaginative, directly urging a “lawsuit,” an active protest in the courts of property rights as well as an appeal to the higher law of ideal truth. The Declaration of Independence, with its “golden certainty” of freedom and equality, undergirds legal argument, while also allowing her to parallel contemporary protests against women’s inequality and slavery in the American republic (Cole 2013: 13–14). While not directly joining the abolitionist cause in “The Great Lawsuit,” Fuller draws upon its spirit of indictment and the example of its women orators, who along with women writers are stepping outside their traditional sphere and calling the world to consciousness (1961, vol. 4: 8, 9–10, 40–41).
Theodore Parker, even while rejecting Fuller’s goddesses and mysticism, told Emerson that her essay was “the best piece that has seen the light in the Dial” (quoted in Capper 2007: 121). Most likely it was her combative tone as well as content that won his favor, as Parker was now in process of shifting his own argumentative prose from theology to the social issues of slavery, poverty, and women’s rights. The first, most idealistic phase of Transcendentalism was ending, even as the Dial ended in April, 1844. Brownson had already merged his Boston Quarterly Review with a paper of clearly partisan politics, while following the corporate arguments of French socialism into that firmest of religious communities, the Catholic Church. In 1844 Ripley reconstituted Brook Farm as a Fourierist phalanx and fought off financial collapse for three more years, but even after that he continued as editor of the associationist periodical The Harbinger (Gura 2007: 217–218, 139–141, 160–168). Meanwhile Emerson and Fuller underwent change as well, taking steps that followed from their best essays in the Dial.
Emerson’s release from editorial labors allowed him to complete and publish Essays: Second Series in the fall of 1844. The volume displayed two, potentially contradictory, shifts in thinking, both of which might be seen as outcomes of the dilemmas that he had described in “The Transcendentalist.” The anxiety of the “sturdy capitalist” flying through cosmic space can, in more nuanced and self‐referential form, be felt at the center of his great essay “Experience.” “We wake and find ourselves on a stair,” Emerson admits in his opening. “[W]e cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. […] All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception” (1971–2013, vol. 3: 27). But the certitudes of idealism do not easily replace this disorientation of the senses, and a new attitude of skepticism permeates the essay. On the other hand, moral individualism stakes new claims in “Politics,” where social institutions are declared less than “aboriginal” and conscience claims the prerogative to deny their demands according to an inherent “power of rectitude” (1971–2013, vol. 3: 117). And the volume of essays ends with a reflection on recent history in “New England Reformers,” another reprinted lecture, which tells of abolitionists and associationists as well as critics of marriage, before opting for the single “just man” as an alternative to collective plans and legislative initiatives (1971–2013, vol. 3: 149–150, 164). Without changing the individualist affirmation that underlay his previous commentaries, Emerson was now giving reform his fullest attention. But how was such affirmation of moral conscience possible if, in the terms of “Experience,” the mind and senses did not fully connect with their world? In fact, the epistemological limits posed by the earlier essay, excluding transcendent knowledge, affirmed a “mid‐world” of limited perception to which the mind and heart still had access, where there could be “a victory yet for all justice” and a “transformation of genius into practical power” (1971–2013, vol. 3: 46). Limitation might actually enfranchise work in democratic America, as recent scholars of the “pragmatic” Emerson have emphasized (Cavell 1990; West 1989).
Indeed, an oration of 1844, not included in Second Series, went beyond any of these essays in its commitments. In an “Address on the Emancipation of the Negroes in the British West Indies,” delivered on 1 August to the abolitionists of Concord, Emerson threw aside former reservations, detailed the horrors of slavery to its victims, and celebrated the British victory of conscience and political process over economic self‐interest. Individualism still held the moral center, but it was a morality of blood rather than mind alone, revolting against the realities of slavery (1995: 10). The greatest breakthrough of this address, however, was to extend moral perception to the liberated slave as well as the liberator: “here is the anti‐slave; here is man; and if you have man, black or white is an insignificance” (1995: 31). In the immediate aftermath of the address, Emerson’s political voice continued to include reservations: two years later one of his most compelling poems, “Ode, Inscribed to W.H. Channing,” articulated the conflict of the poet unable to follow “the evil time’s sole patriot” in abolitionist commitment (1971–2013, vol. 9: 143–153). Still, even as he opted for the muse over activist speech, he registered all the social ills impinging upon that decision.
Fuller’s development was even more a diversion and expansion from her work in the Dial. By the time “The Great Lawsuit” reached print in July 1843, she was at the midpoint of a four‐month exploration of the American West with her friends Sarah and James Freeman Clarke, planned explicitly to provide material for the book Summer on the Lakes, published in May 1844. Much more than a travel book, Summer explores both what Fuller encountered and what she was otherwise ruminating. Ostensibly setting aside gender as her main theme, she recorded the dynamics of her own consciousness before the natural landscape of Niagara Falls and the Great Lakes, as well as critiquing America’s foray into the wilderness (1992: 86). The social justice issue constantly on her mind, rather than slavery, was the displacement of Native Americans, whom she met as remnants and ghosts of the past everywhere she went. But the condition of women also preoccupied her, whether in realizing the hard labor of pioneer wives or assessing the position of women among the Mohawks. And two long digressions focused entirely on women’s emotional and spiritual experience, the fictionalized autobiography of “Mariana” and the biographical record of the clairvoyant “Seeress of Prevorst,” whom Fuller had mentioned in “The Great Lawsuit” but could now explore in depth (1992: 118–132, 144–170). Reintroducing the Seeress, Fuller also staged a conversation as “Free Hope” with friends including “Self‐Poise,” a clear representation of Emerson; to his contention that “the ordinary contains the extraordinary” and should not be forced, she replied that she could not find in his scope “room enough for […] the mysterious whispers of life.” “I feel the pressure of hidden causes, and the presence, sometimes the communion, of unseen powers” (1992: 146–147). In response to the otherworldly as much as in determination to change the world, she was explicitly putting distance between herself and her mentor.
Both impulses also found expression in 1844. Fuller wrote a large body of new poems on mythic and spiritual themes, including one declaring all the ancient goddesses to be children of Leila, her encompassing feminine force (1992: xxxi–xxxiii, 233). But in the same months she decided to accept Horace Greeley’s invitation to become a journalist for the New‐York Tribune and leave Boston behind. Waiting for her position to begin, she retired to the Hudson Valley to revise “The Great Lawsuit” into a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Under that title it has become a classic of American and feminist literature, often without acknowledgment that three‐quarters of the book replicated the 1843 essay for the Dial and arose from conversations with the Transcendentalists. In fact, the large arguments of the 1845 book – for the millennial implication of women’s self‐fulfillment, for the Christian and Greco‐Roman types of womanhood, for a “suit” in the courts of ideal law – had all been generated two years before. But the expansion of such arguments also makes this an expression of her new phase and movement beyond Boston. A visit to New York’s Sing Sing prison allows her to compare the “most degraded of their sex,” women imprisoned for prostitution, with the fashionable; she indicts both groups for their love of dress and flattery, urging her middle‐class readers to act on behalf of their sisters (1992: 328–330). Her new attempt to summarize leading thoughts on woman’s nature includes a call to contemporary women, including her most famous line, “Let them be sea‐captains, if you will.” Most significantly, she turns to her “own place and day,” reports the week’s news of Texas Annexation as sure to “rivet the chains of slavery and the leprosy of sin permanently on this nation,” and appeals for action by women on the national scale: “This cause is your own, for, as I have before said, there is a reason why the foes of African Slavery seek more freedom for women; but put it not upon that ground, but on the ground of right” (1992: 313–318, 345, 341).
Fuller’s new thinking in Woman in the Nineteenth Century also included a self‐defining response to Emerson, her latest turn in a conversation that had long included elements of quarrel. His Essays: Second Series had appeared in October, shortly after Fuller’s departure from Boston, and she made the significant gesture of reviewing it as her first column in the Tribune that December. Judicious and respectful, her essay was still fundamentally a critique: “We could wish he might be thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see if he would not rise again with added powers” (2000: 5–6). But another kind of critique was included within Woman itself, in a self‐characterization that evoked his confession in “Experience” of lethargy at noonday, so that “all things swim and glitter.” In the concluding pages of her new manifesto, Fuller echoed Emerson so as to locate herself quite differently: “I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of the morning. […] Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed” (1992: 348). Commitment to action rose from this clear sight, a new focusing of Romantic intuition, rather than skepticism and modification of high consciousness.
A diaspora of the Boston movement was well under way by the mid‐1840s, resulting in a loss of collective identity but also in multiple wider engagements. New commitments in the social world accompanied new ventures in travel and cosmopolitan reading. From a new, independent ministry in 1846, Theodore Parker became, as Philip F. Gura says, the “social conscience of Boston.” Elizabeth Peabody loved Parker as a “son of thunder” and characteristically tried to engage such activism in dialogue with Emersonian individualism in a new periodical, Aesthetic Papers (Gura 2007: 218). It lasted for only one issue (1849), but that issue saw the publication of Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” now better known as “Civil Disobedience,” justifying the intensely individualist rebellion of refusing taxes to a state at war with Mexico (Gura 2007: 217–220, 222–223). With the bookstore behind her, Peabody critiqued the dominant Transcendentalist mode of self‐reliance in “Egotheism” (1858), but she also returned to her first mission, education, founding the American kindergarten movement for which she won her primary fame (Ronda 1999: 257–258, 271–275). Emerson expanded in new directions both by embracing Asian scripture and by commenting on the social condition of England and America. He phrased his newly pragmatic question in the simplest terms: “How shall I live?” (1971–2013, vol. 6: 1). Fuller devoted two years to New York journalism, continuing conversation with fellow transplants and reformers W.H. Channing and Lydia Child, before sailing to Europe in 1846 as foreign correspondent for Greeley’s New‐York Tribune.
Fuller articulated a principle uniting her new journalism with earlier work as critic and writer in a letter to Clarke from New York: “I never regarded literature merely as a collection of exquisite products, but as a means of mutual interpretation” (1983–1984, vol. 6: 359). Written texts should move author and reader in dialogue toward understanding, whether of ideas or of surrounding realities. And from the Tribune she was addressing 50 000 readers (as opposed to the Dial’s 300), in three columns a week. “I feel as if something new, and good was growing,” she told Channing, at the same time making plans with him, now a minister to the poor in New York, for visits to the city’s public institutions (1983–1984, vol. 3: 257). Hired especially as a literary critic, she also took up commentary on social inequality and the means of remedying it. At the same time, literary reviews could reflect such concerns, as when she saluted the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett and quoted her whole poem “The Cry of the Children,” a lyric lamentation on children in England’s mines and factories. “How rare is it to find a mind that can both feel and upbear such facts,” she commented (2000: 25). Feeling had always accompanied mind in her writing, but now, as Jeffrey Steele points out, a newly “sentimental transcendentalism” was attuned to the structures of shared public feeling (Steele 2014: 217). Ranging widely, Fuller called for leaders so that the nation might be “born again,” demanded redress for the “Wrongs of American Women,” and in a review of the Narrative of Frederick Douglass (1845) declared the account of his childhood in slavery “unspeakably affecting” (2000: 151, 233, 133). In these months, furthermore, she directly contributed for the first time to the antislavery movement, calling in the abolitionist annual Liberty Bell for an “Order of Liberators” to hear ringing in the air whenever “any act of oppression was about to be perpetrated on the earth” (quoted in Argersinger and Cole 2014: 203–204).
If Fuller’s new position in New York signaled one expansion of Transcendentalism, her voyage to Europe in August 1846 allowed for even more transforming cultural and personal encounters. Always a student of European literature, she now sought out the writers and activists she had reviewed. Meeting the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini at Carlyle’s home in London, she began promoting Mazzini’s republican dreams of national liberty. In Paris she sought out the notorious author George Sand, whom in Woman in the Nineteenth Century she had placed among moral “outlaws,” but now formed more favorable impressions (1992: 284; Emerson, Clarke, and Channing 1852, vol. 2: 193–199). Perhaps these were encouraged by also meeting Sand’s friend Adam Mickiewicz; with mystic conviction this political exile from Poland declared Fuller a women uniquely gifted to “have a presentiment of the world of the future,” but he urged her to add sexual liberation to her prophetic wisdom, so as to “live and act, as you write” (quoted in Capper 2007, vol. 2: 318). It was more than accidental that, arriving in Rome a month later, she soon met a young Italian, Giovanni Ossoli, who would become her lover and father of her child.
Other than the meetings with Carlyle and Mazzini, such encounters remained untold in her dispatches to the Tribune, and she wrote even personal letters with circumspection. But there was also a primary European story to tell as Fuller moved from reform‐minded England to socialist France and finally to Italy on the brink of revolution. Her dispatches about the Italian Risorgimento of 1848 offered a means of “mutual interpretation” unparalleled in contemporary American journalism; Barbara Packer calls this newly recovered work “one of the most absorbing, brilliant, and far‐ranging of all texts written by the Transcendentalists” (1995: 214). A characteristic dispatch is eclectic in form: Fuller’s old skills as a translator find new use as she provides whole texts of the speakers and journalists around her, but these combine with a first‐person editorial upon rapidly advancing affairs. Always she stands on the brink of an unknown future, while simultaneously addressing America in a vehement jeremiad upon its own lost ideal. Thus one dispatch begins with translations of speeches by Mazzini and Mickiewicz, proceeds to relate the “dereliction” of Pope Pius from the republican cause, and rises to a rhetorical climax declaring her intent to stay in Italy, where “the Future” is “more alive […] at present” than in her own nation, rapidly “making a President out of the Mexican War” (1991: 217–231). She tells a tragic history, eventually from the perspective of nursing in a hospital for wounded soldiers as the French bombard the city on behalf of counter‐revolution (1991: 280). Yet in defeat she concludes by looking toward rebirth for both America and her adopted Italy, one as the world’s “star of hope” and the other in its potential for a new socialist order. Both are signs of the “advent called EMMANUEL” toward which she has been looking throughout her writing career (1991: 322). Much more directly engaged in events than Emerson, she also more directly persists in Romantic idealism.
After the fall of Rome, forced to flee with Ossoli and their child, Fuller wrote this last dispatch from Florence, where they then stayed for eight months while pondering their future. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Fuller’s conversational partner in Florence, progressed from considering her American colleague “one of the out‐and‐out Reds” to revering her as “truthful, […] not only exalted, but exaltee in her opinions” (quoted in Capper 2007: 481). Presumably Fuller articulated both elements of her radical Romanticism in the manuscript history of the Roman Republic that she worked on during this time. But she, her family, and this final work were all lost to the Atlantic on their return to America in 1850, when their ship struck a sandbar, broke up and sank off Fire Island, just outside New York harbor. The tragedy of such a death has shaped all subsequent interpretations of Fuller, beginning with those of her friends in Massachusetts and New York. Emerson wrote that she had died “within 60 rods of the shore. To the last her country proves inhospitable to her” (1960–1982, vol. 11: 256). Thoreau, sent to Fire Island by Emerson in search of possessions or manuscripts, kept a terse, fragmentary journal of the encounter, which has only recently come to light (2015). Meanwhile W.H. Channing arrived from the city, eventually providing the most influential account of Fuller’s death. His narrative in the Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli reflected immediate conversation with survivors, but he also charged it with the tones of high tragedy: “When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night‐dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders. It was over, that twelve hours’ communion, face to face, with Death!” (Emerson et al. 1852, vol. 2: 338n, 349).
The Memoirs resulted from widely shared shock and mourning for Fuller, hurried into print through the collaborative work of Channing, Clarke, and Emerson. Fuller scholars have been justifiably critical of these friends’ editorial mangling of her manuscripts, not only changing words but cutting actual pages of her journals so as to delete and rearrange as they wished. In addition, all three authors scrutinize their subject in part from an antagonistic male perspective, demeaning her lack of physical beauty, taking as a fault her wish to be a man and (as Emerson comments) her “overweening sense of power” (1852, vol. 1: 202). Most strikingly, Emerson has nothing to say about her actual editing or writing in the Dial, choosing to focus only on her oral conversations, private and public. Even while praising her as a talker, he writes by contrast, “Her pen was a non‐conductor” (1852, vol. 1: 294). Ironically, the most open acknowledgment of Fuller’s public achievement, especially in “The Great Lawsuit,” is a quotation from Horace Greeley, explaining why he hired her in New York (1852, vol. 2: 24–31, 152–153). And though Channing outlines the social and socialistic themes of her journalism, he is even more attuned to protecting her reputation as a woman properly married to Ossoli in Italy.
Yet this memorial to Fuller is historically significant despite its limitations, providing Fuller with a voice previously unknown to the public. Her reprinted journals and letters, as well as her “Autobiographical Romance,” articulated an interior life for the difficult writer and made the Memoirs a bestseller of 1852. This was an important late expression of the Transcendental Club about one of their own, but it also translated her legacy for a wider audience. Christina Zwarg most thoughtfully reads Emerson’s part in the Memoirs as an effort to “stage the complexities of his relationship with Fuller.” The text moves from introductory assertions about her – inability fully to see nature, non‐conducting pen – to lines from her writing that modify or plainly contradict his charges (1995: 243, 249, 251). Emerson is often derided for his apparently self‐serving journal comment at the time of her death: “I have lost in her my audience” (1960–1982, vol. 11: 258). But in the Memoirs he becomes her audience.
Emerson’s characterization of Fuller is an even more significant part of his late work if seen through his journal entries as well as the Memoirs. The published version censored some of his most searching impressions as well as her own words. Soon after the shipwreck, he speculated that Fuller’s memoir would be “an essential line of American history.” But it would not be written easily or quickly: “How can you describe a Force?” Indeed, that power (instead of being labeled “overweening”) now contributed to his own psyche: “A personal influence towers up in memory the only worthy force when we would gladly forget numbers or money or climate, gravitation, & the rest of Fate” (1960–1982, vol. 11: 258, 488, 449). Reflection on American democracy in crisis, as well as on character as “force” against social and naturalistic “Fate,” had been his growing work throughout the years since Fuller’s departure from Boston, and it would engage readers throughout the 1850s.
While Fuller became a journalist of European revolution, Emerson had studied transatlantic culture through a trip to England and an increasingly direct confrontation with America’s slavery crisis. He traveled to England in 1847–1848 to lecture in Liverpool and Manchester, but his mission was to see the world’s capitals of industrial power. As he came home to describe this encounter, first in lectures and finally in English Traits (1856), he concluded that Saxon strength was literally buried by its own modern materialism, and that its future greatness would be in America (Cole 1975: 95–96). But his response to America itself was far from an easy anti‐British nationalism, for he came home as well to the Compromise of 1850, with the capitulation of Massachusetts senator Daniel Webster to the southern slavery interests represented by the Fugitive Slave Bill. This was Emerson’s moment of decisive turn to antislavery oratory, after five years of more tentative response, as he described the weight and “ignominy” falling over Massachusetts; the crisis, he proclaimed, had “forced us all into politics” (1995: 53). His lectures on both England and the slavery crisis coincided in time with reflections on Fuller and her “Force” against “Fate.” Indeed, the latter term – subject of a lecture in his series on the “Conduct of Life” in the winter of 1851 – informed all of his pronouncements. As for Webster, “Fate has been too strong for him”; and England too was in the “stream of Fate” (quoted in Cole 1975: 93, 95). The power of the individual mind and character to resist and prevail was newly the question that “the Times” posed.
Emerson’s year of double crisis – the 1850 Compromise and the death of Fuller – began with his apparently separate, intellectually driven publication of Representative Men, but this series of biographical reflections also fed into the stream of thought about how an individual might address social circumstance. The doubts first articulated in “Experience” now found a sharper tone of urgency in his portrait of “Montaigne; or the Skeptic.” “The astonishment of life,” Emerson wrote in words first addressed to Fuller several years before, “is, the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life” (1971–2013, vol. 4: 101). As David M. Robinson observes, this void epitomizes Montaigne’s skepticism, but the French philosopher counters it with motion and energy proceeding directly from “moral sentiment,” resulting in a balance of forces and achievable human wholeness. Likewise, in “Plato; or, the Philosopher,” while the inquiring mind affirms the “fundamental unity” of the cosmos, it too recognizes the variegated phenomena around it and looks for synthesis (Robinson 1993: 93, 95–96). Emerson was aiming for an additional “representative” portrait of compelling human energy when he began work on the Memoirs later that same year. “The astonishment of life” and the need for a practice of life had been renewed with Fuller’s death.
Paradoxically, as Emerson became more pragmatic he also became more Eastern. The essay on Plato in Representative Men positioned this archetypal idealist not just as the flower of Greece but in his geographical and cultural contact with Asia, the result of years abroad in Egypt and Babylonia (Goto 2016: xiii). Emerson saw Asian religious writing – whether Indian, mid‐Eastern, or Chinese – as a deep resource of metaphysical unity, so that philosophers of either East or West could move between the twin necessities of the one and the many (1971–2013, vol. 4: 25, 28). He had affirmed as early as his 1838 “Divinity School Address” that the “devout and contemplative East” provided a resource to all contemplative minds (quoted in Hodder 2014: 44). But it was not until his months of introducing “Ethnical Scriptures” to the Dial that Emerson began most actively to draw upon this wisdom, recording long passages from the Bhagavad Gita and Vishnu Purana in his journal, translating Sufi poets Saadi and Hafez, and alluding widely to these traditions in a pattern that would, as Alan Hodder comments, “carry him to the end of his life” (2014: 45). Shoji Goto specifies that, in Representative Men, Emerson compares Montaigne the skeptic to Chinese Mencius, who perceives “the flowing power which remains itself in all changes,” and in English Traits he finds England’s quintessential scientific mind, Francis Bacon, consonant with Zoroaster’s definition of poetry as “mystical, yet exact” (2016: 122, 120). Emerson could sometimes think of Asian unity as “a deaf, unimplorable, immense Fate” (1971–2013, vol. 4: 30). But Goto proposes Eastern models of action and flux as well in Emerson’s sense of Heraclitus and Zoroaster, who both lived in the Persian Empire. “Go abroad, and mix in affairs,” Goto summarizes as the motto of Emerson’s syncretic philosophy (2016: 117).
Emerson’s engagement in “the Times” was undergirded by idealism to the end of his career. His last book‐length collection of essays, The Conduct of Life (1860), developed from lectures presented throughout the turbulent 1850s, and its synthesis of principles is thick with observation of modern mills and slavery, as well as of a nature that maims and drowns. The acceptance of fate by the Persian and the Hindu, he suggests, might serve as a model for all aspiring to “fatal courage,” with a search for “Power” the necessary precondition of transcendence (1971–2013, vol. 6: 3, 13, 28). Yet Emerson’s late prose remains in dialogue with his earlier writing, as well as with interlocutors who had affirmed “moral sentiment” as a key to such transcendence. In his chapter on “Culture” in The Conduct of Life he echoed Mary Moody Emerson’s words from 1824 about solitude as a needed withdrawal from society and means of rising to “suns and stars” (1971–2013, vol. 6: 83). Indeed, as he composed his first account of “Fate” in 1851, with Mary once more visiting in Concord, they actually exchanged manuscripts on the subject (Cole 1998: 9, 284–285). As Zwarg discovers, his thinking about fate also recalled Margaret Fuller. At a crucial moment in the lead essay by that name, characterizing the heroic force of human will, he found a use for the words he had first recorded in his journal after her death: “A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate” (Zwarg 1995: 294; Emerson 1971–2013, vol. 6: 16). “Personal influence” could empower him in recollection as well as direct conversation.
“The sect of Transcendentalists has disappeared,” wrote New York Unitarian minister Samuel Osgood in 1876, “because their light has gone everywhere” (quoted in Gura 2007: 303). Despite failing memory, Emerson continued to present lectures in his elder years, including the “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England” that begins this chapter. But in addition, the influence of both Fuller and Emerson continued through another long generation of forums for thought and biographies by disciples. At the New England Women’s Club, Fuller was memorialized as a feminist founder and Mary Moody Emerson recalled by her nephew as a “representative life” of New England (Cole 1998: 3–5; 2010: 234). In the Free Religious Association, a younger generation of Unitarians continued in the spirit of Emerson and Parker for a balance between scientific truth and intuitive faith (Gura 274–277, 298–299). Bronson Alcott, with the financial backing of his daughter Louisa, created a new Transcendental Club in the Concord School of Philosophy, which from 1879 to 1888 drew together a national community of philosophical idealists and invited women as well as men to lecture (Wayne 2005: 107–125). Even after the death of Emerson in 1882, well into the era of literary realism, conversation by and about the Transcendentalists continued. Their legacy remains a key to American culture both in the nineteenth century and since.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 2 (TRAVEL WRITING); CHAPTER 6 (HENRY DAVID THOREAU AND THE LITERATURE OF THE ENVIRONMENT); CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM).