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Resources for Educators

Book Review:
The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism

Joel Myerson, Sandra H. Petrulionis, Laura D. Walls, eds.. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
755 p., $150.00 hardbound. ISBN 978-0-19-533103-5.

Reviewed by Randall Conrad 

          Let it be said: we Thoreauvians and readers of Transcendentalism who matured in the 20th century absorbed influential ideas that were radical in their time, but have declined into received knowledge in the new millennium. Now, in reaction, three of the field’s leading scholars have assembled and edited a new, at times unsettling, collection of essays. Challenging or refining the bulk of now-conventional wisdom, The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism is certain to open future paths of intellectual progress. Heftier than a handbook, it provides fifty original essays on topics from the ancient classics to the digital era (by K. P. Van Anglen and Amy E. Earhart, respectively), ordered in a mere half-dozen categories and composed by outstanding specialists whose names form a who’s-who of contemporary scholarship.¹ Co-editor Joel Myerson supplies a detailed chronology and a multilayered bibliography.

          We thought we knew, for example, how “Civil Disobedience” influenced, nay inspired, Gandhi in South Africa and then King in America’s deep south, so that the prophetic Thoreau seemed single-handedly to have sparked epoch-making, global struggles for civil rights and political freedom. Although both Gandhi and King certainly did read and appreciate Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” it appears that each man chose to overstate its influence, according to Linck Johnson’s case study in the section “Transcendental Afterlives.” King apparently never referred to the work until the crucial civil rights year 1957, when he held it up “as a recognizable and valued precedent in his appeal to white Americans” in an important TV interview that was intended “to legitimize the civil rights movement and to justify its methods to a skeptical public” (636). A half century before, Gandhi too had an interest in exaggerating Thoreau’s influence, not only upon his own thinking but upon American history, no less—asserting in 1907 that Thoreau’s night in jail was “the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America,” though he knew better. Years afterward, Gandhi would concede, “The statement that I had derived my idea of civil disobedience from the writings of Thoreau is wrong” (637). What he actually did was “to explain our struggle to the English readers” by borrowing Thoreau’s useful term “civil disobedience” because the original coinages—satyagraha and “passive resistance”—were not sufficient. In sum, Johnson confirms, these colossal civil rights leaders did not fundamentally need the inspiration of Thoreau’s still-obscure essay to do what they did. Ironically, their endorsements retroactively flavored “Civil Disobedience” with an aura of nonviolence and indeed pacifism, doctrines which are not found in the essay itself.

          Or again—most of us have contrived to gloss over the era’s unsavory constructions of race, and the Transcendental philosophers’ inaction on behalf of Native Americans, even as we were led to admire the radical idealism of Emerson’s 1844 Emancipation Address and Thoreau’s 1850s antislavery jeremiads. A bit like Johnson’s clarification of the legacy of “Civil Disobedience,” Joshua David Bellin counterstates a conventional iconography in his essay, “Native American Rights.” At least since Walter Harding’s well-meaning depiction of Thoreau as a “Friend of the Indian” (as in A Thoreau Profile, 1973), the idea of Thoreau and other Concord prophets as advocates for native rights and cultures has persisted—most recently revived by neoromantic scholars debating Thoreau’s largely unpublished “Indian Notebooks.” A consistent critic of this train of thought,² Bellin dissects the ethnologic racism (the construction of a primitive, inferior, and vanishing race) that lay at the root of the Transcendentalists’ failure to articulate and criticize the oppression of Native Americans, from the Cherokee removal of 1838 to Thoreau’s portrayals of Americanized Penobscots in Maine two decades later. Bellin reminds us that admiration for the Noble Savage, an Enlightenment notion retreaded for the 19th century by Concord’s philosophers, “proved politically inert” as a stimulus toward any advocacy because it produced a dilemma: “to laud the Cherokees as Natural Men was to slight their political achievements, rights, and indeed existence, while to vouch for their nation was to flirt with the prospect of their becoming mere mimicries of white people” (200). On evidence—and despite radical outbursts such as Emerson’s 1838 letter of protest to President Van Buren—Bellin realistically concludes that the Transcendentalists were no more than “acolytes of a wholly traditional order” (207) when it came to Indian advocacy.

          A different example of the Handbook’s concern for the future is co-editor Laura Dassow Walls’s essay on science and technology. In the name of nature itself, Walls asks us to progress beyond (or sidestep) the still-recent literary idea of ecocentrism: “Future ecocritics must teach us how to think of ‘nature’ as … a variously plural and participatory constituent of every act of literary making, not just of overtly ‘green’ texts.” Walls pins very high hope to this new vision, which she predicts will realign science with literature “as that paradoxical process by which nature is simultaneously taken up into social discourse as an active and visible player and set aside as a stable, universal, and invisible fact” (575). As a scholar, Walls has long explored that paradoxical process in Thoreau, Emerson, and (in Passage to Cosmos, 2009) Alexander von Humboldt. She here focuses on Emerson’s strategy of using natural science to more clearly conceive social and moral issues, particularly concerning slavery. Because, she says, Emerson had come to see the principles of equality and justice as inscribed in the equilibrium of nature itself, he could advocate for the equal rights of all races at a time when so-called human science obscured the very idea with a plethora of racist theories. Emerson’s science, Walls affirms, reestablishes nature as “both transcendently untouchable and immanently ‘to hand’” (578). His theory, she writes,

effectively instituted ‘transcendent’ nature as the incontestable source of moral right, which could and must silence the quarrels of scientists and politicians. Religion reconstituted as science was the source for the ‘higher law’ that he and other post-Christian abolitionists appealed to against the “quadruped” politics of 1850s’America (579).

          What to make of Emerson’s famous protégé? Compared with Emerson, today we ordinarily view Thoreau as the better (and far more modern) scientist, conducting meticulous botanical research in the field, practicing the scientific method, recording data in his voluminous journals—an originator of modern ecology and a pioneer voice of today’s urgent moral-environmental concerns. All true, Walls acknowledges, as she provides a deft précis of Thoreauvian science in the same essay. Yet this is exactly the trouble with Thoreau: he “deauthorized” nature (581). For Walls then, surprisingly yet consistently, Emerson emerges as “the winner” of the debate over the uses of science, because he gave us the model that mainstream science has actually followed up to today, “a reified science that can arbitrate human controversies precisely because it is not part of them but transcends them” (581-82). Indeed, Walls notes, Emerson’s epiphany was especially modern in that he was attracted to Michael Faraday’s prescient vision of atoms not as static particles but as focal fields for forces of energy which pervade the universe (578-79). Expounding Transcendentalism’s evolution away from natural theology toward an embrace of natural history, Walls urges us to make use of a dynamic concept of matter—of things considered (etymologically) as “gatherings” (575). A bit like Faraday’s atoms, material things in this world-view come alive, belong to networks and internetworks, and function as matters of both fact and concern. To our vast benefit, Oxford’s ten-pound thing, this 700-page “handbook” generated by the synergy of far-sighted thinkers, assembles in its multiple essays a wide network of force fields, propelling Transcendentalism deep into twenty-first century concerns, while at the same time keeping the movement’s social, historical, literary, artistic and scientific resources “to hand” for refreshing perusal by inquiring intellects.

Notes

1 To single out a dozen contributors almost at random: Co-editor Sandra H. Petrulionis, exploring the philosophy’s multifaceted relation to antislavery reform, explores the reasons that individuals could actually run the gamut of positions, from defense of the Fugitive Slave Law to the intransigence of abolitionists like Garrison and Parker. Lawrence Buell, discussing Manifest Destiny, raises the curious example of “Transcendentalist (especially Emersonian) condonement if not outright advocacy” of aggressive westward expansion in order to examine “the rhetoric of moral imperative itself” (185-86). Alan Hodder, the author of Thoreau’s Ecstatic Vision (2001), surveys Transcendentalism’s embrace of Indian, Chinese and Persian scripture partly as “a corrective” to the pervasive influence of Christianity (27), and notes the spiritual legacy of this influence upon later generations of Americans, including the Beat writers and D. T. Suzuki in the 1950s. Phyllis Cole provides a thoughtful discussion of women’s rights and feminism from the early 19th century to the turn of the 20th. In two separate essays, Albert J. von Frank treats Transcendentalism’s relation to religion and to visual art. Len Gougeon and Wesley T. Mott, respectively, treat political economy and education in the “Social Movement” section, while in the “Literary Movement” section Whitman and Dickinson, journal writing, letter writing, nature writing, and the Dial are treated by Ed Folsom, Robert Sattelmeyer, Robert N. Hudspeth, Philip F. Gura, and Susan Belasco.

2 See especially Joshua David Bellin, “In the Company of Savagists,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 16 (2008): 1-32.

Reprinted, with prermission, from Thoreau Society Bulletin, Number 271, Summer 2010

 

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Updated July 15 2011