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Our town: the invention of Literary Concord

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Our town: the invention of Literary Concord

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Content OUR TOWN:
THE INVENTION OF LITERARY CONCORD

by

Erika Wenstrom

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements of the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

August 2015

Copyright 2015 Erika Wenstrom

ii

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge several people without whom I could never have completed
this dissertation.

I am grateful for the tremendous support that I have received at the University of
Southern California. In particular, I wish to thank my advisor and mentor, John Carlos
Rowe. I first became acquainted with Professor Rowe before attending USC when I
wrote him a fan letter that, amazingly, he answered. Little did I know at the time that
such thoughtful care for aspiring scholars was a hallmark of his personality. I have been
very fortunate to work so closely with such a brilliant and generous individual. He will
always be the model to which I aspire in my own career. I would also like to thank the
other members of my committee – Karen Halttunen, Leo Braudy, and Tony Kemp – for
their many important insights into my project and their tireless patience with my writing
process. It has been a tremendous honor to work with all of them.

I have also greatly benefited from the unfailing support of my wonderful family in both
Canada and the United States. I especially wish to thank my mother, Barbara Craig-
Wenstrom, and my sister-in-law, Roberta Rasmussen-Vinkhuyzen for advising me on
critical aspects of my argument. I also wish to thank Duncan Rasmussen for his patience
with his busy, distracted mother. Most of all, I wish to thank my husband, Chris
Rasmussen, for the many and various ways in which he supported my work every day,
year after year. He is my dearest friend, and I could not have done any of this without
him.

This dissertation is for Leslie Wenstrom.

iii

Abstract

Almost immediately, unsympathetic critics labeled Ralph Waldo Emerson and his
circle of writer-friends Transcendentalists, a jibe aimed at the philosophical eccentricities
they supposedly shared. Most literary scholars are aware of the name’s origin story;
however, few question the ongoing use of this unifying term despite the way that it elides
differences between the group’s members – and even its readers – in a way that distorts
both their individual impacts and their relationships with each other. This dissertation
argues instead that these writers did not group around Emerson to push a pseudo-religion,
but rather as a strategic response to specific mid-century social changes affecting both
writers and readers. Specifically, by self-consciously fashioning public personae for
themselves and inviting their audience to join them vicariously, these writers together
constructed an imaginary community – Literary Concord – which provided readers with
the kind of community identity largely lost in the breakdown of traditional structures of
association during this period.
To reconstruct Emerson and his peers’ strategy, this dissertation analyzes the
tactics they used to develop the idea of Literary Concord in their published works, private
writings, publicity materials, and in-person performances. It examines peer reviews of
their work for insights into audience response and uses these accounts to show how both
writers and readers worked together to give Literary Concord its unique shape. It also
contextualizes this evidence through research into the antebellum literary market,
contemporary writing conventions, and larger cultural trends.
By downplaying the importance of Transcendentalism and focusing instead on the
emotional value of place and community as the key to understanding the cultural impact

iv

of this particular group of writers, the idea of Literary Concord resists the common
narrative that Emerson and his friends stood apart from the rest of antebellum society in
self-imposed intellectual isolation. Moreover, this approach highlights the unique roles
each coterie member played in creating the group’s identity, as well as the role of its
audience, in a way that is lost when we understand them merely as Transcendentalists.

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract iii

Introduction 1
Project Outline 13

Chapter One: “He is easily King of us all:” Emerson as First Man 20
of Literary Concord

Chapter Two: Walking in Fairyland: Thoreau as Adventure Guide 87

Chapter Three: Margaret Fuller as Elder Sister: The Role of a Lifetime 146
Chapter Four: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Family Man and Peeping Tom 196
Chapter Five: Writing Back to Emerson: Frederick Douglass and 266
Literary Concord

Coda 309

Bibliography 317

1

Introduction

Seventy-nine. Like a sobbing child, the heaving church bells counted out the
years of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life. The great man, their great man, was dead. Three
days later, Concord’s citizens draped their homes and public buildings in black and
festooned them with thousands of black and white rosettes. Children lined his waiting
grave with fragrant sprays of hemlock, and additional trains ran from Boston all day to
accommodate the endless stream of mourners pouring into the small town for the funeral.
The First Parish church quickly filled to capacity, leaving many trying to glimpse the
proceedings from its broad front steps. Inside, E. Rockwood Hoar’s practiced voice filled
the room: “Wherever the English language is spoken throughout the world his fame is
established and secured; from beyond the sea and throughout this great land will come
innumerable voices of sorrow for this great public loss. But we, his neighbors and
townsmen, feel that he was ours…our friend, brother, father, lover, teacher, inspirer,
guide, is gone” (qtd. in Ireland 133). Hoar’s eulogy, in its rhetorical juxtaposition of
Emerson’s international renown with his local reputation, pinpoints the nature of
Emerson’s appeal with an exactness that may not be apparent at first glance. Certainly,
Hoar’s possessiveness – “he was ours” – stems from a desire to separate the private
friend from the public celebrity and to assert the primacy of the former in defiance of the
hoards of strangers arriving by the hour to mourn the latter. After all, for Hoar and
Emerson’s other friends, it was a familiar battle. Hoards of strangers had been making
pilgrimages to Concord for years to catch a glimpse of their hero. But Hoar’s insistence
on jealously claiming Emerson for the local community, ironically, also tells us quite a

2

bit about how Emerson succeeded in becoming a hero to so many people outside of
Concord. Emerson made his Concord, like Hemingway’s Paris, a moveable feast
available for cultural consumption to an audience starved for the emotional, intellectual,
and aesthetic experience that – if Emerson and his cohort were any example – Concord
seemed almost magically to offer.
Emerson’s unusually powerful cultural impact during the antebellum era is a
provoking question for scholars of American literature. During his lifetime, he became –
apart from Abraham Lincoln – the most famous and beloved American on the planet.
More importantly, he directly influenced a number of contemporary writers whose
combined impact on American literature remains arguably unmatched. And yet the
source of Emerson’s power remains unclear. He was neither a best-selling author, nor an
intellectual innovator. Indeed, as most Emerson scholars readily admit, and as his
greatest twentieth-century champion, F.O. Matthiessen, himself asserts, he “was neither a
great poet, nor a great master of prose, nor a great philosophy-maker” (5). The latter
charge – that is, that Emerson was not a profound philosopher – is particularly difficult to
reconcile with the persistent tendency in the study of American letters to see
Transcendentalism as the primary bond holding Emerson’s influential coterie together.
In truth, while Emerson and his friends (most notably the Alcotts, and protégés Henry
David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller) contributed to the mid-century dissemination of
Transcendentalist ideas in America, their individual commitments to Transcendentalism’s
intellectual and moral program varied considerably, and characterizing them primarily as
Transcendentalists elides these differences in a way that distorts both their individual
careers and their relationships with each other. While many of their individual works do

3

bear the marks of their intellectual conversations as a group, the topics are wide-ranging
and the direction of influence is frequently unclear. Moreover, making Transcendentalism
the group’s common root leaves no place to discuss the less well-recognized coterie
participation of writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Frederick Douglass, whom
audiences did not readily associate with Transcendentalism.
Instead, I argue that – despite the name-calling of their critics – these writers did
not group around Emerson to push a pseudo-religion, but rather as a strategic response to
specific mid-century material and social changes affecting both writers and readers. By
the 1840s, the industrial revolution had transformed the American literary market.
Patronage and even subscription lists were becoming outmoded. With the invention of
steam-driven printing presses and railroads, mass-produced books, newspapers, and
magazines poured across the United States, so that even rural bookshelves swelled with
new editions. Although printers began implementing the Koenig steam press as early as
1814 (with improvements over the next few years), Emerson’s generation was the first to
truly feel the effects of accelerated print production on market practices. Additionally,
the massive mid-century expansion of the railroad system throughout the eastern states,
and later into the west, combined with federal funding incentives for trains willing to
deliver the mail, ensured that distribution potential would quickly reach a historic high.
Robust federal funding of the postal service made sure not to squander that potential. For
comparison, in 1823 when James Fenimore Cooper published The Pioneers, only a little
over four thousand post offices operated in America; by 1842, Emerson could rely on
almost fourteen thousand post offices to carry copies of his first essay collection (and any
newspapers, journals, or pamphlets needed to promote it) to markets across the country

4

(USPS). As book production and distribution became easier, cheaper, and more
profitable, the number, size, and clout of publishing houses also increased accordingly.
Moreover, the 1840s saw the beginning of organized book promotion. James Fields (of
the Ticknor and Fields publishing house), in particular, pioneered several new methods of
promoting his clients. In Reading Books: Essays on the Material Text and Literature in
America, Jeffrey D. Groves notes, as only one example, that the firm began inserting
“extensive lists of its publications in its publications [sic]” so that, in effect, “the Ticknor
and Fields book had [itself] become an advertisement” (n.31, 98). The impact of these
innovations on book sales was enormous. To illustrate, Washington Irving’s 1819-1820
The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, at the time considered an American bestseller, sold
5000 copies in its first two years. By contrast, in 1852 alone, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
bestseller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sold 300,000 copies in America and more than three times
as many overseas. These changes in production and distribution, in turn, transformed
literature, itself, increasingly democratizing and professionalizing the publication
process. For the first time, a writer without a patron had a chance (albeit still a small one)
to make an actual living by his or her pen.
1
As a result, the literary marketplace exploded
with ambitious authors, all vying for a share of the new wealth. By mid-century, aspiring
writers from a range of backgrounds competed with the gentlemen authors of the earlier

1

The lack of an international copyright law for most of the nineteenth century
complicated these new opportunities for American writers, however, because fledgling
American writers had to compete with the increasing availability of cheap printings of
(often famous) British works. While the “courtesy principle,” championed by most of the
major, midcentury, American publishers, mitigated the impact of the lack of copyright for
a while, the “cheap books movement” of the 1870s quickly put an end to this century-old
agreement. On the other hand, the lack of copyright also allowed for a greater spread of
some American works abroad – a situation that helps account for the early popularity of
Emerson and many of his literary peers overseas. For more information on the
nineteenth-century evolution of copyright law, see Vaidhyanathan.

5

generation, previously the only scribes with the time, money, and connections necessary
to contend for a readership of any size.
In this increasingly competitive milieu, Emerson and his friends’ decision to
repeatedly highlight their association with one another helped them to distinguish
themselves in an overcrowded industry. Group portraits of Emerson’s writing set,
scholarly and otherwise, have been on the rise in the last decade, but few of these have
paid much attention to the practical professional advantages these writers gained from
their membership in the group. One notable exception is the work of David Dowling,
which focuses on the so-called Transcendentalists’ promotion of their group to potential
readers. Having pushed beyond Michael Gilmore’s initial doubts about the group’s
purported anti-market sensibility to a complete rejection of the premise in his 2009
Capital Letters: Authorship in the Antebellum Literary Market, Dowling, in his 2011 The
Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, goes on to explain how
forming coteries helped writers like Emerson and his friends position their work in the
antebellum literary market. Coterie membership, argues Dowling, was “[l]inked to
regional authorial identity” and “directly shaped an author’s reputation in the market”
(20). “The coterie name alone,” he asserts, “represented a form of symbolic capital by
which the author might be associated with the prestige of the circle, and as cultural
capital, reflected in the specialized knowledge and skill one was assumed to possess as a
member of that group” (20). Dowling makes an excellent case for the ongoing association
of Emerson and his friends based on a shared recognition of contemporary market forces
and individual self-interest. Moreover, he rightly questions the extent to which these
champions of individualism and self-reliance actually practiced what they preached.

6

Thoreau may have played the virtuous hermit, may have even believed his own
performance, but when it came time to get Walden published, he resumed his public
membership in Emerson’s group. The value of the coterie’s name, Dowling argues, was
enough to make writers like Thoreau and Fuller continue to identify themselves as
Transcendentalists long after they had ceased to believe in the tenets of
Transcendentalism.
Despite this instinct to question the extent of the group’s intellectual lockstep,
however, Dowling leaves its origin story unquestioned. Although he fundamentally
recognizes the importance of place, the writers’ “regional authorial identity,” to the
formation of all of the antebellum literary coteries, he continues to assume that
Emerson’s belief system formed the core of his group and that heresies only emerged in
the group’s later works. In reality, writers like Thoreau and Fuller distinguished their
intellectual commitments from Emerson’s from the beginning, and perhaps more
importantly, so did their readership. Indeed, many of Emerson’s own loyal fans are on
record admitting that, not only did they not agree with him on the subject of
Transcendentalism, they didn’t even understand him. Thus, in light of the heterogeneity
of thought within the group and the intellectual indifference of its audience,
Transcendentalist – while certainly a powerful brand name – becomes a virtually empty
term when used to describe the uniting mechanism behind Emerson’s literary coterie.
Ultimately, the group’s true market value did not lie in its members’ various engagements
with Emerson’s unusual system of belief, but rather their sustained, semi-coordinated
engagement with his hometown and what his hometown meant to their readers.

7

Specifically, by mid-century, Concord had become a precious remnant of an
imagined Edenic past and, as it had been during the Revolution, a rallying point for the
defenders of the ideals it represented. And, for the antebellum audience, this new battle’s
importance seemed to be increasing every year. While the new railroads springing up
throughout the country brought the farmers reading materials and other city goods, these
same engines also took their children back with them, as droves of country youth moved
to the cities looking for work. With this exodus, the old villages of extended families
disappeared and the old ways of life with them – a novel situation that left many in both
town and country unsettled, upset, and in search of coping mechanisms. “In an age of
unprecedented growth,” Gilmore explains in American Romanticism and the
Marketplace, many Americans “looked wistfully toward the stable agrarian order of the
past, torn between the old republican virtues and the acquisitive ethos of society based on
the pursuit of self-interest” (8). The result, as critics such as Mary Saracino Zboray and
Ronald Zboray have noted, was that readers of this generation frequently turned to
literature for consolation. Building on the work of Gilmore and the Zborays, I argue that
the antebellum writers working in and around Concord together responded to their
readers’ perceived loss by constructing an imaginary community, what might be called
“Literary Concord,” that exploited nostalgia, whether real or imagined, for the revered
New England towns of the revolutionary era, while – at the same time – it offered, by its
very existence and by the explicitly progressive views of its participants, an optimistic
vision of future models of community. Their creation of Literary Concord, like the
popular fraternal organizations and utopian projects of the time, aimed at providing loyal
readers with the kind of community identity and belonging largely lost in the ongoing

8

breakdown of traditional structures of association. These writers, led by Emerson’s
example, constructed Literary Concord by self-consciously fashioning themselves as the
inhabitants of a virtual village and inviting their readers to join them vicariously.
Moreover, by combining these comforting roles with both critiques of modernity and,
conversely, with “sign of times” progressive messages, Literary Concord’s members
helped their readers reconcile themselves to the rapid changes of the period.
The idea that writers like Emerson and Thoreau developed characters for
themselves as writers – their authorial personae – for a target audience, and used specific
tactics to sell these personae, builds on the work Stephen Railton began in his 1991
publication Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American
Renaissance. Inspired by reader response theory, Railton develops what he calls a
“dramatic theory of writing” that looks at the American Renaissance authors as
performing artists. To make his case, Railton revisits canonical texts like Thoreau’s
Walden and Emerson’s “The Divinity School Address,” alongside the authors’ private
writings, in terms of how they anticipate audience expectations and reflect authorial
anxiety about these expectations. He explores the reasons they choose the personae they
do, and how they develop them for their individual audiences. Railton sees Emerson, for
example, as playing the role of the secular prophet, moved by the spirit of the Great
Awakenings to shake his audience out of their spiritual lethargy, and he carefully outlines
Emerson’s various tactics for winning his audience over to his way of thinking.
Conversely, while Emerson is bent on softening his readers’ feelings towards his difficult
ideas, in Railton’s eyes, Thoreau’s performance in Walden is deliberately melodramatic
and antagonizing. Railton points out that Thoreau thrived off of adversity and nursed a

9

grudge about the reception of his earlier book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers, and he argues that Thoreau’s misanthropic hermit persona emerged out of a desire
to provoke those who had previously disrespected him. Instead of reading these authors
on their own terms, Railton draws our attention to the deliberate construction involved in
the authors’ public images. This recognition that “Emerson” and “Thoreau,” for
example, are roles crafted for a specific audience with a specific end in mind is an
essential premise in my own argument.
But, while my methodology owes a great deal to Railton’s “dramatic theory of
writing,” it also differs from his model in several crucial respects. Railton is largely
interested in how the writers’ authorial performances satisfied their private psychological
desires; I am primarily interested, on the other hand, in how these writers used their
individual authorial performances as part of a larger strategy to position themselves in the
literary market. In other words, while Railton sees these personae as reflections of their
creators’ own inner dramas, I see them as at least partially outward looking, as strategic,
creative responses to the emotional needs of their readers. Additionally, Railton’s
approach ignores the ways in which these authors coordinated their performances and
instead re-inscribes the myth of the solitary writer, while I, following the lead of Dowling
and others, wish to highlight the collaborative aspects of their enterprise. I also extend
the meaning of the term performance beyond Railton’s use of the idea. For Railton,
performance is merely a hermeneutic, a means of bringing the relationship between the
author and his audience to the fore in the analysis of a text or body of work, whereas I
take the idea of authorial performance in both this sense and quite literally. Neal Gabler
makes a similar argument in his 1998 publication Life the Movie: How Entertainment

10

Conquered Reality when he writes, “What [Roth and Boorstin] recognized was that life
itself was gradually becoming a medium of its own, like television, radio, print and film,
and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audiences for a grand,
ongoing show...” (4). Gabler and I also differ from Railton in our willingness to see such
personae within a larger narrative. In other words, personae aren’t merely fixed icons, but
rather characters with dynamic storylines. As a result, I include both evidence of what
Railton calls the audience’s “horizon of expectations” (10), as well as analysis of the
authors’ evolving public appearances. Finally, I look at the effects of these performances
beyond just the relationship between reader and writer. I argue that Literary Concord
also created relationships between the readers themselves based on their shared
identification with the central group: developing what is now called a fandom, in
contradistinction to the more generalized term audience. In other words, while Railton
emphasizes the private, psychological work of these authorial performances, I emphasize
their public, community-building functions.
The strategy behind Literary Concord was based on Emerson and his friends’
intuitive grasp of the affective power of what sociologists now call “para-social
interaction.” Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl first established this concept in their
seminal 1956 paper “Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on
Intimacy at a Distance.” Defining “para-social interaction” as a “seeming face-to-face
relationship between spectator and performer [whom they later prefer to refer to as a
“persona”],” Horton and Wohl argue, “The spectacular fact about such personae is that
they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds of strangers, and
this intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant by that

11

word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly
receive it and share in it” (216). One of the key characteristics of para-social interaction,
and that which I argue gives it particular power over Literary Concord’s uprooted and
insecure audience, is the persona’s “dependability.” Ironically, the very dynamism of
their attached storylines underscored this dependability. Margaret Fuller might move to
Italy, but her behavior there – for example, her championing of the over-matched,
idealistic, Italian revolutionaries – would still reflect her established character. By
maintaining recognizable authorial personae and regularly producing publications that
satisfied their audience’s expectations of these personae in this way, the primary
members of Literary Concord could “be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the
routines of daily life” in comforting contrast to the swirling changes that tended to
characterize life in antebellum America.
Although succeeding sociologists have argued that instances of para-social
interaction can be found in all civilizations, Horton and Wohl’s original focus on the
effects of mass media on such relationships is also worthy of special consideration in
terms of its application to Literary Concord. While Horton and Wohl limit their analysis
to the study of this social phenomenon in the twentieth century, viewing television and
radio as the ideal media for the creation of para-social relationships, their idea that para-
social interaction thrives on mass reproduction – repeated reading of the persona’s words,
repeated viewing of the persona’s face, repeated listening to the persona’s voice, and
repeated framing of the persona in ways that emphasize the illusion of intimacy – also
sheds light on the means with which Emerson and his coterie established their bond with
their audience. For example, all of the coterie members that I examine made ample use

12

of the increasingly popular nineteenth-century lecture circuit, a multi-state system of
entertainment and instruction facilitated by the expansion of the railroad, to market
themselves as public intellectuals. Lecture tours provided opportunities for writers to add
a face and a voice to the words on the page, and especially skilled lecturers such as
Emerson and Fuller exploited their stagecraft to add welcome luster to their authorial
personae. Indeed, as Bonnie Carr O’Neill notes in “‘The Best of Me Is There:’ Emerson
as Lecturer and Celebrity,” eyewitnesses of Emerson’s lectures attest to “the audience’s
intense interest in his physical person” (740), an obsession consistent with Horton and
Wohl’s later findings. Additionally, the era saw an explosion in the number and
influence of periodicals, both at home and abroad, and the members of Literary Concord
regularly turned to these publications to help raise their public profiles. Not only did they
sometimes contribute their own articles, they also relied on networks of friendly (and
even unfriendly) reviewers to keep their name, their words, and occasionally their face, in
front of their readers. Indeed, more than ever before, mid-century writers had numerous
and varied means at their disposal for getting their image and ideas in front of their target
audience.
This line of investigation continues a now decades-long tradition in American
literary studies to understand the work of Matthiessen’s favored five, as well as that of
several related authors Matthiessen neglects, as fundamentally entrenched in larger
cultural trends. In his seminal 1988 response to Matthiessen, Beneath the American
Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville, David
Reynolds shows how the so-called American Renaissance writers borrowed elements of
contemporary popular culture in the creation of their most famous works. His project

13

challenges the assumption that the works of writers like Emerson and Thoreau existed on
some rarified plane, separate from those of best-selling authors like Susan Warner and
Maria Susanna Cummins, by identifying the traces of popular trends found in the penny
press and crime literature, etc. in both. But Reynolds takes for granted that canonical
works continue to be read today, while the pop culture sensations of the nineteenth
century have been relegated to the status of academic curiosities, because the former
significantly improved on the latter’s raw material. In Reynolds’s formulation, this
improvement takes the form of synthesis or some kind of higher level of thematic or
stylistic sophistication, and this assumption of the innate superiority of the canonical
works re-inscribes the very error he identifies in Matthiessen. Thus, while this project
extends Reynolds’s work by continuing to explore the ways that contemporary culture
influenced Emerson and his writing peers, I step away from evaluations of their work’s
innate quality and the extent to which that value influenced the shape of their writing
careers. Instead, I focus on the impact of their transactions with their audience: the ways
in which they sought and secured an audience, the ways in which their relationship with
their audience evolved and how that evolution guided their careers, and the roles other
industry professionals played in that ongoing negotiation.

Project Outline
To reconstruct Emerson and his peers’ strategy for the creation of this imaginary
community, I analyze the tactics they used to develop the idea of Literary Concord in
their published works alongside supplementary evidence in their private writings,
publicity materials, and in-person performances: For example, I look for manifestations

14

of coterie identification and role-playing. I also contextualize this evidence through
research into the antebellum literary market, contemporary writing conventions, and
larger cultural trends: For example, my project is sensitive to the impact of periodical
criticism on these writers’ reputations, the ways in which their works both conform to
generic conventions and play with them, and the crucial influence of contemporary
cultural phenomena, such as the rise of the confidence man or the cult of domesticity, on
the rhetoric they employ. Finally, where applicable, I explore similarities in parallel
markets, such as the theater, for potential crossover tactics at work.
My first chapter “‘He is easily King of us all:’ Emerson as First Man of Literary
Concord” examines Emerson’s role as the creator and de facto leader of Literary
Concord. By putting Karen Halttunen’s analysis of the nineteenth-century figure of the
confidence man in conversation with the work of celebrity theorists such as Leo Braudy,
I show how Emerson used personal charisma, a talent for satisfying his audience’s social
needs, and an uncompromising attitude towards personal control to cultivate the influence
necessary to establish and maintain an imaginary community like Literary Concord. To
demonstrate Emerson’s influence, I turn to contemporary eyewitness accounts of
Emerson’s lecture hall performances, the personal reminisces of Emerson’s friends and
admirers, and contemporary critical reviews of his work. Additionally, I locate traces of
the various tactics that comprise his charismatic leadership strategy in several of his most
popular essays, including “Friendship,” “Self-Reliance,” and “The Poet.” Throughout, I
also turn to Emerson’s personal journals and letters to clarify Emerson’s personal stakes
in the project and his evolving relationship with his creation.
In my second chapter, “Walking in Fairyland: Thoreau as Adventure Guide,” I

15

turn to Emerson’s most famous protégé, Henry David Thoreau, and argue that, among the
many ideas that Thoreau imbibed from Emerson, the one that helped define Thoreau’s
writing career the most was Literary Concord. As the only true Concord native in
Emerson’s coterie, Thoreau’s role in the development of the imaginary community was
crucial to its success – and this despite its yielding little professional gain for Thoreau,
himself. Thoreau, more than any other member of the group, gave Literary Concord life
by making it clearly both an intellectual or moral idea and a real, explorable place. And
Thoreau’s community role was obvious from the beginning: He would be the readers’
local guide.
By studying his two major works, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
and Walden, several of his lectures, as well as accounts of his sometimes-befuddling
personal behavior in the context of the idea of Literary Concord, I trace the development
of Thoreau’s guide persona. In this guise, I argue, Thoreau established rules and goals
for the imaginary community and served as the kind of stern gatekeeper that Emerson
temperamentally could never be. His works on the subject assume a select reader, whom
he patterns after his model of the ideal friend – for Thoreau, the only welcome inhabitant
of his fairyland.
2
For those inside, Thoreau offered his services as a pathfinder, showing
them by example how to navigate Literary Concord.
My third chapter, “Margaret Fuller as Elder Sister: The Role of a Lifetime,”
explores the part Literary Concord’s first – and until Louisa May Alcott’s début, its most

2

Not only does Thoreau refer to Concord vaguely as “fairyland” in works like A Week,
the town of Concord also boasted an actual Fairyland Pond, about half a mile north of
Walden Pond. The pond’s name dates back to the 1850s and is generally attributed to
Louisa May Alcott and Emerson’s children. For further information, see Walden Pond:
A History.

16

prominent – female member played in the development of the imaginary community.
Membership in Literary Concord was a natural fit for Fuller, who – as her creation of her
Conversations, her association with (if not full-fledged membership in) Brook Farm, and
her participation in Hedge’s Club suggest – had been trying to find, or herself establish,
such a community of like minds for years. A natural leader, Fuller chose a community
role for herself with powerful, uniquely feminine associations for a readership raised on
conduct literature and obsessed with the cult of domesticity: the Elder Sister.
To reconstruct Fuller’s development of her authorial persona, I turn primarily to
her two main early works, Summer On the Lakes (especially the roman a clef “Mariana”)
and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, as well as her journals and voluminous
correspondence. Particularly, I examine the character-defining moves Fuller makes in
these texts in terms of how she manipulates the applicable conduct-literature conventions
and blends them with those of Romanticism to her advantage. Drawing on the work of
Fuller scholars such as Charles Capper and Bell Gale Chevigny and, more skeptically,
from the accounts of several of her contemporaries (many of whom were advancing their
own agendas in describing Fuller), I also attempt to reconstruct how Fuller’s audience
received her Elder Sister persona.
My fourth chapter, “Nathaniel Hawthorne: Family Man and Peeping Tom,”
moves away from the center of the group to examine the participation of a relative outlier
in Literary Concord. While Hawthorne, the professional writer, chose to associate with
Literary Concord for several reasons, including for the benefit of its members’ extensive
publishing and periodical network, I argue that his ambivalent relationship with Emerson
and his friends primarily reflected a subtle double-dealing strategy: By positioning

17

himself as a relative insider who, at the same time, reserved his critical distance, he
situated himself, like Nathaniel Parker Willis had recently done with great success while
working as the New York Mirror’s foreign correspondent, as the “spy who came to
dinner” (Baker 61-85). In this position, Hawthorne not only trafficked in gossip about his
controversial associates, he also presented an alluring dramatic narrative of his own
uncertain loyalties. Would he be won over by the batty, yet beguiling Transcendentalists,
or would he keep his head and maintain his commitment to more down-to-earth values?
Hawthorne generated a great deal of interest in his own work by stimulating such
discussion in his readership.
Evidence of Hawthorne’s strategy of using his first-hand knowledge of the
members of Literary Concord appears in almost all of his major works: From his explicit
use of Literary Concord and its inhabitants in the 1846 Mosses from an Old Manse, to
what Thomas R. Mitchell and I contend is a troubled, ill-concealed meditation on Fuller
in the wake of her death in the 1850 The Scarlet Letter, to his lampooning of his friends’
(and briefly his own) hopes for the utopian community Brook Farm in the 1852 The
Blithedale Romance, to arguably his return to Fuller, in a fantastical reimagining of her
scandalous life in Rome, in the 1860 The Marble Faun, Hawthorne repeatedly traffics in
gossipy innuendo about his famous friends. In an extension of Mitchell’s Hawthorne’s
Fuller Mystery, I particularly focus on the literary uses to which Hawthorne puts Fuller in
the context of this manufactured drama. Arguing, as Mitchell does, for Fuller as the
prototype for characters such as Zenobia, Miriam, and Hester Prynne, I show how he
exploits his friend both for her immense appeal as a mid-century figure of gossip and as a
foil for his own family-man authorial persona. Finally, a study of Hawthorne’s 1852

18

biography of Franklin Pierce shows how, faced with a rare opportunity of securing a
patron, the writer used both the specific tactics and the authorial persona he developed
through Literary Concord to support his friend’s presidential bid.
Drawing on Sandra Petrulionis and Larrry Reynolds’s studies of the mid-century
rise of political activism in Concord, my fifth chapter, “Writing Back to Emerson:
Frederick Douglass and Literary Concord,” analyzes Literary Concord’s embrace of the
celebrated abolitionist. I argue that the late 1840s saw Douglass searching for new
audiences in the wake of his defection from William Lloyd Garrison’s team of
abolitionists. At the same time, Literary Concord’s interpretative community – the
readers and audience members who sustained Emerson and his collection of writer-
friends in their professional endeavors – was feeling increasingly underserved by
Emerson’s conservative resistance to social activism, particularly in regards to
immediatist abolitionism. Douglass offered Emerson’s fans more of what they loved
about the Concord Sage – mesmerizing charismatic leadership, a rebellious streak, and a
commitment to self-reliance and self-culture. But he also promised much of what
Emerson appeared to lack – a warm, open personality that invited sentimentality, a clear
commitment to social justice (not only as a champion in the battle to end slavery but also
as an ally in the struggles of other oppressed peoples), and a willingness to back up his
words with real action.
To establish how Douglass fashioned himself as a new-and-improved Emerson, I
examine the rhetoric and stagecraft of Douglass’s lectures. I also compare his first
autobiography, the 1845 Narrative, written while Douglass was still a Garrisonian, with
his follow-up autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, written ten years later while

19

Douglass’s romance with Emerson’s audience was blossoming, to show how he altered
the persona therein to conform more closely to Literary Concord’s shifting values and to
critique Emerson’s failures in this regard.
The account of Emerson’s ascendance as America’s premier writer and public
intellectual and his personal and professional relationships with his writing coterie has
been rehearsed many times at this point. Indeed, before any of Literary Concord’s
writers had even retired, literary and cultural critics were busy setting down, and as often
as not, mythologizing their story. But despite this attention, or perhaps even because of
it, surprisingly few literary historians are willing to challenge the coterie’s
characterization as primarily an intellectual or even pseudo-religious collective.
Assuming the centrality of Transcendentalism to this group, however, is problematic.
Not only does it undermine the unique contributions of its individual members, conflating
all with Emerson’s early productions, it mischaracterizes the antebellum culture that
produced them. The fact that millions of antebellum Americans embraced Emerson,
Transcendentalist excesses and all, as their representative man, and that he was
recognized as such abroad, tells us a great deal about how his contemporary American
audience wished to be regarded, but little about the actual cultural conditions under which
he and his peers worked. Rather than take Emerson, his fellow writers, and his
audience’s story at face value, then, this work aims at unearthing – through careful
analysis of the conditions of production, the cultural climate, and the individual
contributions of several major actors – the history of the storytelling, itself.

20

Chapter One
“He is easily King of us all:” Emerson as First Man of Literary Concord

“To some of us, that long-past experience remains as the most marvelous and fruitful we
have ever had. Emerson awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. Were we
enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth
something for once in our lives….” (Lowell qtd in The Radical 476).

Ralph Waldo Emerson was the undisputed leader of Literary Concord. In the
summer of 1843, in a letter to Elizabeth Hoar, Emerson shared his plans to assemble
“half a dozen rare persons” in Concord to create a “Sacred Phalanx” (Selected Letters
293). And, indeed, a few years later he had succeeded virtually single-handedly in
rechristening the venerable Revolutionary-era battle theater as the headquarters of a new
band of writers bent on their own American revolution in the realm of letters. From the
start, literary critics had mockingly labeled this loose association of acquaintances the
“Transcendentalists” for their perceived philosophical excesses. There is some merit in
grouping these writers together in terms of their shared intellectual inheritances.
However, the concept of Transcendentalism problematically elides significant differences
between the individual writers who chose to associate themselves with Literary Concord.
A number of the most famous so-called Transcendentalists – including Emerson himself
3

– even launched explicit critiques of the tenets that made up their supposed philosophy.
Thus, I argue, a shared belief in Transcendentalist ideas was not primarily responsible for
bringing these writers (and their readers) together, but rather the charismatic leadership of

3
See, for example, Emerson’s essays “The Transcendentalist,” “New England
Reformers,” “Man The Reformer,” and arguably “Transcendentalism” (in which he
argues against Transcendentalism as a distinct system of values, showing instead how the
underlying ethos of the so-called Transcendentalists was fundamentally no different from
the “liberal thought of intelligent persons” around the world and at different times in
history).

21

Emerson. In part, Emerson engineered Literary Concord by wooing desirable writers to
the area with straightforward gifts of money, land, and professional introductions. But
more importantly, many writers and readers wished to join him in the intellectual
conversation he had started – learning from Emerson, perhaps challenging him, mutually
refining each other’s ideas, and generally satisfying their desire to commune with genius.
Some writers opportunistically (and correctly) saw an association with Emerson as a
means of getting ahead in their shared profession, but most of the members of Emerson’s
intellectual community were simply star-struck and infatuated with the Concord Sage.
By the end of the 1830s, Emerson had a substantial share of both fame and
money, and he used both to lure promising writers to what was becoming Literary
Concord. Indeed, he was the only member of his circle with such resources at his
disposal. While Emerson ended up cultivating unique relationships with each of his
chosen companions, his method of recruitment to Literary Concord remained remarkably
consistent: to different degrees, he helped them. The most famous example, of course,
was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau loved Concord and did not require much prodding
to return to his hometown, but Emerson also wanted to make him a citizen of his
intellectual community. To this end, he set about helping the younger man professionally
before Thoreau had even settled on his vocation or finished college. As Harmon Smith
recounts in My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau's Relationship with Emerson,
when due to a poorer-than-usual academic performance Thoreau fell off Harvard’s
scholarship list, Emerson sent a letter to his old friend, Josiah Quincy, at that time the
president of Harvard, to have Thoreau reinstated. After Thoreau graduated, Emerson
made sure to introduce him to many influential people and sponsored Thoreau’s

22

membership in the elite Transcendentalist Club (also known as Hedge’s Club). Although
Emerson’s advice to Thoreau regarding the self-publication of his first book, A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, turned out to be wrongheaded, he did take concrete
steps to win his own publisher’s cooperation in the project and to get copies of the
volume into the hands of several of his most powerful friends, both in America and
abroad, in the hopes of generating publicity for Thoreau’s work. Moreover, Emerson
continuously pressured his friends to publish Thoreau’s writings, notably Margaret Fuller
during her tenure as the Dial’s editor, and even published one of Thoreau’s poems in the
journal without her explicit permission. Emerson also frequently provided Thoreau with
the financial resources he needed to pursue his craft: he employed him, he convinced
others to employ him, he lent him money, and most critically, he lent him his property on
Walden Pond. But Thoreau wasn’t Emerson’s only pet project. He similarly supported
his colleague, Amos Bronson Alcott, by lending him large sums of money (often with the
realization that Alcott could never repay him)
4
and by promoting his works with his
powerful friends. He repeated the same pattern of behavior to a lesser degree with
several other protégés, including Ellery Channing and Jones Very.
5

Even the more independent members of the circle accepted Emerson’s patronage
to some extent. For example, after failing to secure a home for Fuller and her mother in
Concord, Emerson simply put Fuller up at his own home, often for long periods of time,

4
One of Emerson’s bigger financial outlays to Alcott came in the form of a $500 loan to
purchase a house in Concord. Emerson also suggested that the Alcotts simply move in
with his own family as Thoreau eventually did. For more details about Emerson’s
assistance to the Alcotts, see Schreiner.

5
For details of Emerson’s assistance to Ellery Channing, see Harmon 84-85. For details
of Emerson’s assistance to Jones Very, see Carlos Baker 90-99.

23

whenever she cared to visit. Although he was unable to make good on his promise of
$500 for her work on the Dial, giving her the editorship helped her secure a position at
Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune: at the time, a high-profile job for any writer, but
especially for a woman. Like Thoreau, Fuller also owed many of her professional
connections to Emerson who, among other services, initiated her into the previously all-
male Transcendentalist Club (aka Hedge’s Club). Even Nathaniel Hawthorne, who
resisted identification with Emerson from the beginning, accepted the latter’s help on
occasion. For example, while serving as the secretary of the Salem Lyceum, Hawthorne
convinced Emerson to appear as a lecturer. Emerson was a coveted speaker at the time
and his addition to the roster would have benefited Hawthorne and the lyceum’s
reputation greatly. Emerson also convinced (and probably paid) Thoreau to plant a
vegetable garden for the cash-strapped Hawthornes upon their arrival to Concord. And
like so many others, Hawthorne used his personal knowledge of Emerson, presumably
with at least his tacit permission, to help sell works such as Mosses from an Old Manse.
Such generosity, of course, contradicted Emerson’s own famously unsparing
position on the subject of charity in “Self-Reliance.” “[D]o not tell me, as a good man
did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations,” he snarls at his
imagined enemy. “Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge
the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do
not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and
sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which
many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies” (Works 2: 52).

24

Although he concludes this tirade with the admission: "I confess with shame I sometimes
succumb and give the dollar,” he ends by reinforcing his original position by swearing
that, “it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold” (2: 52).
While it is tempting to see Emerson’s gifts to his friends as merely examples of his
admitted tendency to fall short of his uncharitable ideal – and indeed there may be an
element of uncontrollable softheartedness involved – if we are to take this passage
seriously at all, it would seem that his firm statement on the subject of philanthropy
points to an important difference in the way Emerson saw these donations to his friends.
Supporting his friends was a means to an end for Emerson. In order to build Literary
Concord, he needed the right people. And to build Literary Concord to his own
specifications, he needed control of those people. Putting these persons of “spiritual
affinity” in his debt was an excellent way to ensure that control.
While Emerson’s generosity contributed a great deal to the success of his
imaginary community, as Hawthorne’s exploitation of the market for insider information
on him suggests, one of the key factors behind Emerson’s ability to build Literary
Concord was his status as an American celebrity. Thus, a breakdown of how celebrities
functioned in antebellum America is critical to understanding Emerson’s power in this
situation. Antebellum Americans understood a celebrity to be a person who, generally as
a result of some combination of personal merit, charisma, and luck rather than noble
birth, elicits tremendous interest from the public and becomes a powerful figurehead for
certain sets of values. As Leo Braudy points out in his seminal work The Frenzy of
Renown: Fame and Its History, this definition of the celebrity conveniently conceals the
important role that the machinery of fame – that is, the matrix of influential critics,

25

publishers, promoters, and other tastemakers – has on the celebrity’s creation. Indeed,
the partial illusion that the celebrity’s rise to fame is organic in nature is a crucial element
of his power. Unlike the royal or nobleman, the celebrity appears to be an elected leader,
and thus an emblem of democratic values. That is why, despite the fact that the concept
of fame is as old as culture itself, the idea of celebrity as potentially both a trait and a
social role only begins to take hold in the public consciousness in the nineteenth century.
It is intimately tied to both the industrial revolution and the rise of democracy (which are
themselves arguably inextricable from each other), beginning in the late-eighteenth
century.
6

As this timeline suggests, the idea of the celebrity grew up alongside of Emerson
himself, and by the time Emerson had come into his own as a star at mid-century, the
celebrity’s role in the community was still being refined and the limits of his power were
still untested. The examples of Lord Byron, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and other early
nineteenth-century celebrities, however, had taught Emerson’s generation that celebrity
power, in its own way, was potentially as real as that of political and military leaders.
This idea is what Emerson attempts to articulate in his essay “The Poet” when he calls
poets “liberating gods” (Works 3: 32). Specifically, according to Emerson’s definition,
the poet “stands among partial men for the complete man” and, most significantly
considering his own aims, Emerson claims that the poet has the power to “draw all men

6
For additional in-depth treatments of the history of the celebrity as a distinct public role,
and this figure’s relationship with the technological advancement and social upheavals of
the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Brock, Roach, Rojek, and Thomas N.
Baker.

26

sooner or later” (3: 5). As numerous scholars have noted, Emerson’s description of the
poet’s potency in this essay recalls Percy Bysshe Shelley’s more explicit assertion that
“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (“A Defence of Poetry” 90). It
is easy to caricature this notion of the powerful poet as the dreamy and unrealistic fantasy
of two ambitious writers, especially given the demonstrable muscle of military and
political leaders such as Napoleon or Andrew Jackson. But if one looks at Emerson and
Shelley’s position in light of the rapidly growing clout of the celebrity in the industrial,
democratic era, one can better understand how both writers could see unlimited potential
in the poet – a figure who, if he achieved a level of renown, could hypothetically combine
the affective power of the celebrity with the moral power of a seer to become a
charismatic leader of the masses. Dowling argues that Emerson’s position “aggressively
dissociates poets and their poems from the urban social networks of economic and
political business” (Capital Letters 95), but this view exaggerates the boundaries between
different types of power at this time or, at least, Emerson and his contemporaries’
perception of the impermeability of these boundaries. On the contrary, as Dowling
himself recognizes, most antebellum Americans believed that they lived in an unusually
improvisational time in which a proliferation of new power players was rapidly
undermining and even replacing traditional authorities. It was therefore not outlandish
for Emerson and Shelley to claim that an opportunity had come for the poet to seize his
own share of power.
Indeed, not only did the still-potent democratic ideology of the Revolutionary era
open a space for celebrities like Emerson to seek influence in any realm they wished,
including the political arena, it explicitly authorized them to do so. Although, as I have

27

mentioned, the idea that the celebrity is a self-made man is a myth, his appearance of
being so makes him a potent symbol of democratic values. Moreover, to say that in the
nineteenth century one can now be a celebrity does not mean that celebrity is an
ontological status. Celebrities, like democratically elected officials, depend on the
ongoing support of their audiences – i.e., the will of the people – for their title and power.
Emerson’s embrace of his new moral prerogative as a celebrity figure is evident in his
defense of the representative man in Representative Men. Unlike Carlyle’s hero, who
imposes his will on the people, Emerson’s representative man obeys a divine will that,
while manifestly his own, is actually self-identical to that of the people he represents.
While writing of Shakespeare as a representative man, for example, he argues, “The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and votes for
thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now invisible channels by which the
senator is made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by
correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes and estimates,
and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of their impressiveness.
As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands;
and so there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they
drew…” (Works 4: 198). By explicitly comparing philosophers and poets to political
leaders, Emerson shows his own understanding of how the representative man or
celebrity derives his power from the same democratic principles that underlie John
Locke’s notion of representative government in Two Treatises of Government and that
inform the structure of the government of the United States. In this way, Emerson
cleverly uses his audience’s democratic ideals to bolster his and his fellow celebrities’

28

own claims to power.
It is hard to say whether the rise of democratic values created the celebrity or vice
versa, but one thing is clear: as the aristocrat lost power under democracy, celebrities like
Emerson stepped in to take over several of his leadership functions. Celebrity theorist
Chris Rojek claims, for example, that modern celebrities represent their society’s
standard of success and exude “a wholeness and glamour that is missing from their
[fans’] own lives” (191), a symbolic role previously confined to royals and noblemen.
Emerson himself explored this function of the celebrity in Representative Men when he
writes of the representative man’s essential relation to the Zeitgeist or the “spirit of the
age.” He calls the representative man “a man in his place,” and even limits his influence
by this place: “Other days will demand other qualities” (Works 4: 7). While Emerson
undoubtedly recognized many forms and degrees of achievement, in this formulation, to
qualify as an actual human symbol of success a famous person must embody the spirit of
his or her age. Thus, the military leader Napoleon shares space with the more peaceable
Plato and Shakespeare on his list of representative men.
Although most scholars, rightly viewing Representative Men as Emerson’s answer
to Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, credit Carlyle for
Emerson’s decision to link his ideal of the representative man to an era’s Zeitgeist,
Emerson’s pivotal introduction to the idea actually came much earlier. In an 1826 letter
to his aunt, Mary Moody, Emerson jokes, “I have not forgiven Everett one speculative
doctrine of ye øBK oration the more disagreeable that I have found some reason to think
it true – to wit that geniuses are the organs mouthpiece of yr age do not speak yr own
words nor think yr own thots [sic]” (Letters 7: 146). Emerson is referring here to an 1824

29

oration his own hero, the celebrated lecturer Edward Everett, gave to an audience of
Harvard students, including Emerson, called “The Circumstances Favorable to the
Progress of Literature in America.” In this speech, Everett lays out many of the ideas that
will become central to Emerson’s vision of the representative man, including the
influence of the spirit of the age and the relationship between the representative man and
those he represents. He even chooses, as Emerson does, to use Shakespeare as one of his
central examples. The speaker (Everett) and the subject matter (literature) ensured that
Emerson would have paid close attention to this speech. And indeed, Emerson’s
inclusion of Everett’s idea in his letter to his conservative aunt, even his faux outrage,
testifies to the impact this lecture had on the aspiring writer. By the time Emerson began
conceiving his reply to Carlyle seventeen years later, Everett’s notions had firmly taken
root in his mind, freed as it now was from his youthful conservatism.
The idea that every age has its own identifiable spirit is, however, a woefully fuzzy
first premise – Does Swedenborgianism, for example, really typify the eighteenth
century? But it does show that Emerson thought hard about the nature of excellence, the
value of those who represented certain types of excellence, and most astutely, the
historical limits of both.
7
Indeed, the very first chapter of Representative Men explores
the uses of great men to their societies. Here, in particular, Emerson sounds a great deal
like Rojek. He calls representative men “intrinsically rich and powerful” (Works 4: 4),
“constructive, fertile, magnetic” (4: 7), and “ripe” (4: 9), and insists that “they make the

7
For more insight into Emerson’s consciousness of the historical relativity of values, see
his essay “History” in which he analyzes the spirit of the Classical age and its relation (or
lack thereof) to his own. Friedrich Nietzsche, an ardent admirer of Emerson, will of
course famously take the premise of the historical relativity of values embedded in the
idea of the Zeitgeist to its logical conclusion in A Genealogy of Morals.

30

earth wholesome” by their example (4: 3). Elsewhere, he claims that they “enrich”
society and give onlookers “a new consciousness of wealth” (4: 13, 18). This language
of plenitude strongly resembles Rojek’s notion of the celebrity’s appearance of
“wholeness and glamor.” Moreover, in another nod to historical relativity, Emerson
contends that the representative man not only symbolizes his society’s idea of success, he
also creates it. In Emerson’s words, “They are such in whom, at the moment of success,
a quality is ripe which is then in request” (4: 32). According to Emerson, such men are
“roadmakers” who reveal to the rest of their society what the age demands of its best (4:
13). In essence – and this is a concept to which Emerson returns again and again – the
representative man’s primary worth lies in his ability to show others how the values of
their particular time and place actually function at the level of the individual.
Because the relationship between the general and the individual is central to
Emerson’s notion of the representative man, an essential assumption underlying this
formulation of the representative man’s function is the inherent value of the individual
and individualism, and indeed, most of Emerson’s critics laud – or conversely vilify –
Emerson as one of the most influential proponents of American liberalism, a philosophy
for which the importance of both is a given. While essays such as “Self-Reliance,” “The
Divinity School Address,” “Compensation,” and “Experience” are chiefly responsible for
this reputation, one should not overlook the impact of his performance as a star on the
promotion of this worldview, because the celebrity – again, like the aristocrat before him
– promotes the value of individualism by his example. As Braudy suggests, hiding the
machinery of fame not only flatters the celebrity’s audience into believing that it has
more influence than it does on his success, it also creates the deception that the star

31

himself has more power than he actually does to raise himself. In other words, just as the
aristocrat put a glamorous face on feudalism, the celebrity hides the industry that supports
him, an industry that differs little in design from that which often imprisons his fans. In
this way, he offers the illusion that, regardless of systemic oppression, powerful
individualism is always possible for a lucky, hard-working few – a proposition that
appealed to many in Emerson’s antebellum audience, raised as it was on the Jacksonian-
era myth of the bootstrapping hero.
While Emerson’s reputation as champion of individualism may seem antithetical
to the role of a community builder, in fact he carefully nuanced his position on the
subject to allow for both. Emerson’s comments on Brook Farm are instructive in this
regard. He rejected the offer to participate in this intentional community, not because he
eschewed all society, but rather because the collective was, as he put it, a “select, but not
by me selected, fraternity” (JMN 7: 408). In other words, while in “Self-Reliance”
Emerson might exaggerate for effect and write aphoristically that “[s]ociety everywhere
is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members” (Works 2: 49), in
practice he qualified this statement. Some societies may be bad for some of their
members, but a carefully chosen society like Literary Concord may be quite good for the
man who creates it. This qualification is borne out by Emerson’s behavior at his Concord
home, Bush. While Emerson disliked his boarding-house years when, after his father’s
death, his mother was forced to take in and cater to a succession of boarders to make ends
meet – an antipathy that lines up well with his stronger pronouncements on the evils of
society – Emerson, as head of his own household, had a very different attitude towards
guests. In his Emerson biography Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter, John

32

McAleer notes that Emerson’s “own home, after he married Lidian, often was run like a
guest house” (308).
8
In Emerson: The Mind on Fire, Robert Richardson declares that
“Emerson had a hunger for friendship and a delight in affection” (432), and Samuel
Schreiner, in The Concord Quartet: Alcott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the
Friendship That Freed the American Mind, describes in detail Emerson’s wedding night
when, much to his bride’s surprise, the groom invited several guests to stay with them
overnight at his new home. This unusual hospitality was not the result of wedding-night
jitters either. Over the years, Emerson frequently hosted both short- and long-term guests
at Bush. His guest lists were also unusually large. Emerson’s daughter joked, for
example, that her mother’s dinner recipes typically began with “beat two dozen eggs”
(qtd. in Richardson, Emerson 208). And even Emerson himself admitted to exaggerating
his chilly reputation for effect. In his journal, he explains, “We love to paint those
qualities which we do not possess. I who suffer from excess of sympathy, proclaim
always the merits of selfreliance [sic]” (JMN 7: 371-72). In truth, Emerson embraced
crowds as long as he occupied a special, lofty place in them either as the host in his own
home or as a speaker on a platform.
Emerson’s 1841 essay, “Friendship,” in fact, can be read as his attempt to give
this ideal social scenario a theoretical justification. In this essay, Emerson repeatedly
assumes his own centrality in his relationship with his friends and even uses the language
of ownership. He writes, “Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine, — a
possession for all time” and “I must feel pride in my friend's accomplishments as if they
were mine, — and a property in his virtues” (Works 2: 195). In the context of the essay,

8
In addition to Richardson and Schreiner, see Field.

33

these remarks merely seem to speak of Emerson’s capacity for fellow feeling, which – to
be fair – is likely how Emerson saw it. But, in practice, Emerson’s fellow feeling was
often predicated on his friends’ willingness to become his satellites. According to
Railton, Emerson aimed at making his audience “of one mind” (JMN 7: 40), but adds
that, for Emerson, necessarily “that one mind would be his” (32). The same rule applied
to an even greater degree to his friends. Emerson explains in his journal: “All loves, all
friendships, are momentary. Do you love me? Means at last Do you see the same truth I
see? If you do, we are happy together: but when presently one us passes into the
perception of new truth, we are divorced and the force of all nature cannot hold us to each
other” (JMN 7: 532). While this idea fits in neatly with Emerson’s monistic belief in the
Oversoul and his theory of the representative man, the hidden premise in this formulation
is – as it is with Carlyle’s hero – that Emerson’s truth is always a priori. “Our own
thought,” Emerson contends, “sounds new and larger from [our friend’s] mouth” (Works
2: 196). Moreover, Emerson is unapologetic about his tendency to use his friends for his
own ends. He writes, “[A]s soon as the stranger begins to intrude his partialities, his
definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is all over. He has heard the first, the last
and best he will ever hear from us. He is no stranger now… Now, when he comes, he
may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, — but the throbbing of the heart, and the
communications of the soul, no more” (2: 193). In comparing the familiar friend thus
unfavorably to the novel stranger, Emerson shows how he regards acquaintances as
resources and bluntly warns that he may quickly exhaust them. Perhaps the greatest irony
inherent in this theory of friendship is the fact that Emerson produced this essay in
conversation with similar essays on the subject by his friends, Thoreau and Fuller. And

34

while they shared Emerson’s idealization of the friend, far from echoing Emerson’s “own
thought,” both writers – perhaps reflecting on their own conflicted relationships with
Emerson – sharply criticized Emerson’s vision of the friend as mere ego expansion tool.
Yet even these struggles with Thoreau and Fuller are consistent with Emerson’s
vision of friendship. In Emerson’s view, such conflicts reflect, and even preserve, the
essential, intersubjective nature of friendship between truly self-reliant individuals. He
thinks of his friend as a “beautiful enemy” and, describing such disagreements between
his friends and himself, he writes, “I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at
least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession” (2: 210). During her stay with
Emerson, Swedish biographer Fredrika Bremer notes exactly this dynamic developing in
her relationship with her host. She calls him a “lion” and admits her growing “desire for
combat with him” (175). In “Friendship,” Emerson expresses a similar wish to treat his
friends with “roughest courage” (2: 201), and if William Henry Furness’s recollections of
his relationship with Emerson are any indication, he did just that. Furness writes,
“Emerson once came to hear me. The next day I got a letter from him that tore my
preaching all to shreds,— not a whole piece left” (Emerson in His Own Time 187).
Moreover, Furness seems to agree with Emerson’s approach to friendship: he calls
Emerson “a right loyal friend” for this treatment. Indeed, most of Emerson’s friends
embraced his combative attitude towards friendship as a sign of his sincere regard.
On the surface Emerson’s delight in such battles might seem to mitigate his
otherwise controlling attitude toward his friends, but, in fact, Emerson only allowed for
one outcome in these contests: his will would prevail. Emerson’s decision to write and
publish “Friendship” itself demonstrates one of the primary tactics he would use to

35

ensure his victory. Emerson’s public treatment of friendship as a topic made sure that he
would get the last word. Because he had the highest profile of the three writers, Emerson
knew that any ideas he published stood a far greater chance of gaining an audience than
anything the other two would write.
9
Emerson’s obsession with controlling public
perception of himself and his relationships is also illustrated by his reaction to Harriet’s
Martineau’s description of him in her Retrospect of Western Travel. Martineau’s portrait
of Emerson was highly complimentary, but she had not asked his permission to publish it,
nor allowed him an advance look at what she had written. More importantly, Martineau
drew a picture of Emerson as she wished him to be seen (specifically, as an avid social
reform advocate), which was at odds with the image he was assiduously developing for
himself. In an 1838 letter to Carlyle on the subject, Emerson shows his terror at the
prospect of losing control of his image even temporarily to Martineau: “Meaning to do
me a signal kindness (& a kindness quite out of all measure of justice) she does me a
great annoyance, -- to take away from me my privacy & thrust me before my time (if ever
there be a time) into the arena of the gladiators, to be stared at. I was ashamed to read, &
am ashamed to remember” (Selected Letters 178). Although portraits of Emerson would
become a mainstay of periodic literature in the latter half of the century, unlike that which
Martineau had composed, they carefully followed the outline that Emerson himself had
created and maintained.

9
While Emerson could count on this disparity in audience size in 1841 when he
published “Friendship” in his first series of essays, in the latter half of the 1840s, Fuller’s
actual readership arguably outnumbered Emerson’s. Although, by the late 1840s,
Emerson had become one of the most famous figures in the United States, many fans
admitted that they had not actually read his work. On the other hand, Fuller enjoyed an
enormous popular audience during her tenure at the widely distributed New York Tribune
throughout the decade.

36

When a friend like Martineau refused to bend to his will, Emerson turned to his
native reserve, and the offender experienced a significant cooling of the relationship. For
example, when Fuller began agitating for more intimacy in her relations with Emerson –
in effect, claiming her own right to possess her friend as Emerson does in “Friendship” –
as their correspondence attests, he responded by pulling further and further away from
her until she all but gave up. And although Emerson’s rift with Thoreau is less well
documented, it appears that Emerson punished him in a similar manner, possibly in
response to understandable criticism from the younger man, during the debacle
surrounding the publication of A Week. Moreover, Emerson did not confine this practice
to his protégés. Francis Espinasse also recounts an evening in which he witnessed
Emerson simply refusing to engage with Carlyle at all when the latter teasingly argued
that Emerson’s job as a lecturer was easier than his own. Evidence from Carlyle and his
wife’s letters during and after Emerson’s visit suggest that the incident Espinasse
describes was only one of many marking a cooling off between the two formerly good
friends, possibly motivated by professional competition, personal differences, or
intellectual disagreements.
10
Although potentially losing a powerful alliance like the one
he had with Carlyle might appear to do Emerson’s career a disservice, Emerson’s vision
of friendship, based as it was on his own self-reliant will, required such sacrifices of
friends who did not follow the rules he had quietly set out. As Emerson says of the self-
reliant boy in “Self-Reliance:” “You must court him; he does not court you” (Works 2:
49), and there would be no exceptions, not even for Carlyle. In other words, although

10
Some Emerson biographers contend that Carlyle and Emerson’s falling out was
instigated by Carlyle’s wife, Jane.

37

Emerson enjoyed the appearance of openness and equality with his friends, ultimately he
expected to dominate. And he knew that, in most cases, he could always beat his
opponent by either using his superior public profile to create an argumentum ad populum
or by displaying his greater willingness to sacrifice the friendship by degree or in its
entirety.
While Emerson’s view of friendship as a contest between self-reliant individuals
seems like a poor basis for any kind of communal endeavor, most antebellum Americans
actually saw Emerson’s obsession with self-reliance as a means of safe-guarding the
traditional benefits of the small-town community and even making them portable.
Indeed, as Karen Halttunen makes clear in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study
of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870, Emerson was far from unique in
extolling self-reliance. It was a common theme in many antebellum conduct manuals.
Halttunen explains that the industrial revolution undermined traditional power structures
by pushing young people away from their hometowns, and the authorities of these towns,
in search of work. According to Halttunen, this migration thrust young people into a
“world of strangers” where, in place of traditional authority figures such as parents or
clergymen, charismatic peers usually held sway (xvi, 34-39, 46-47, 50-51, 56, 58, 96,
188, 192, 197). In order to protect young people from potential corruption under the
influence of their new, untested acquaintances, conduct-manual writers stressed the
necessity for self-culture and the accompanying self-reliance. The idea was that a self-
reliant youth would be less susceptible to the allure of the confidence man, because he or
she approached this world of strangers with a firm sense of self already in place. Self-
reliant young people would not need to look to their new acquaintances for validation and

38

would therefore be less likely to fall under the spell of an unscrupulous stranger, because
they would be confident in their own worth and judgments. In this light, Emerson’s
promotion of self-reliance becomes less about the rejection of society and more about
how to acquit oneself well within it. This attitude is nicely illustrated by one of his more
famous aphorisms on the subject: “It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion;
it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the
crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude” (Works 2: 53).
Emerson is not advocating for a Thoreauvian type of reclusion here: such an attitude is, in
Emerson’s opinion, an evasion of responsibility. This tack is, as he says, too “easy,”
because the ultimate test of character for Emerson is one’s behavior in society.
Arguably, despite Emerson’s own reputation for coolness, he also isn’t advocating
for the adoption of a chilling mystique of impenetrability in social situations. In fact,
Emerson’s journals attest to his negative opinion of his own personal aloofness. For
example, he writes of this trait as “a signal defect of character which neutralizes in great
part the just influences my talents ought to have…an absence of common
sympathies…Its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness in the company of most men & women,
a frigid fear of offending.” He goes on to call this coolness “the poverty of my
constitution” (JMN 16: 275). He certainly did not see this kind of behavior as worthy of
emulation. Instead, he put the emphasis on cultivating a sense of independence in one’s
dealings with others: a position that put him solidly in line with all the conduct-manual
writers of the period.
In fact, far from bolstering the antisocial element of his reputation, Emerson
actually took many opportunities to hint that his reserved veneer concealed a

39

fundamentally warm and welcoming person capable of real intimacy.
11
Lawrence Buell’s
analysis of Emerson’s essay persona in “First Person Superlative: The Speaker in
Emerson’s Essays” supports this reading of his literary performance. Taking on
Emerson’s reputation for aloofness, Buell points out that, “[t]he personal element recurs
throughout Emerson’s prose, on the average of about eight to ten passages per essay, but
sometimes much more often…far more than Emerson’s reputation for impersonality
would lead us to expect” (31). Indeed, Emerson was far from exempt from his
generation’s obsession with personality. For years, he even assembled his own
biographies of his favorite public figures, those he called “My Men” (JMN 16:188). And
when it came to his own writing, he used the personal pronoun so generously that it even
became a point of ridicule for his critics. Moreover, while Buell admits that most readers
prefer what he calls Emerson’s more generalized “exemplary persona” to his more
personal “I,” he argues that the exemplary persona actually “has a personality of its own”
too, and “[w]hen it appears it often gives the sense of great emotional stake and
commitment” (33). He also suggests that the two personae complement each other in a
way that creates an overall impression that is both lofty and concrete. This dual persona
produces an emotional push-pull in which Emerson initially intimidates, but ultimately
welcomes the reader, who is then all the more grateful for the unexpected warmth.
Buell identifies this high/low, cool/warm persona using a close reading of the
essays. Contrasting the persona of the essays with that of his poems, however, yields the
same result. Although Emerson made his name as a lecturer and essayist, he also – and,
one could argue, primarily – thought of himself as a poet, and his poetic persona was

11
Schickel identifies efforts, like Emerson’s, at creating an “illusion of intimacy” as a
crucial element of celebrity culture.

40

almost always more intimate than the cool speaker of the essays. Except for his early,
occasional poem “Concord Hymn,” his elegy for his son, “Threnody,” attracted the most
attention from contemporary readers, and the speaker in “Threnody,” far from sitting at
an emotional remove, begs for the fellow feeling of his readers. Orestes Brownson, in his
1847 review of the poem, swears that he has “never read any thing more heart-rending”
(R.W. Emerson’s Poems, 270). Written in response to his five year-old son Waldo’s
death, Emerson draws a pathetic picture of a bereaved, half-mad father stumbling
hopelessly around his son’s “daily haunts” (Works 9: 151), and he obsessively catalogues
Waldo’s specific interests and talents and his own dashed hopes for the boy in a way that
makes the “I” an unmistakable portrait of himself. This Emerson is quite different from
the emotionally distant speaker of “Self-Reliance” who boasts, “I shun father and mother
and wife and brother, when my genius calls me” (2: 51). This Emerson is vulnerable; he
is also eager for sympathy. To this end, the speaker explicitly characterizes Waldo’s
death as a loss that he shares with his community:
Some went and came about the dead;
And some in books of solace read;
Some to their friends the tidings say;
Some went to write, some went to pray;
One tarried here, there hurried one;
But their heart abode with none.
Covetous death bereaved us all,
To aggrandize one funeral. (9: 153)
And even with personified Nature herself:

41

In birdlike heavings unto death,
Night came, and Nature had not thee;
I said, “We are mates in misery.” (9: 151)
As Halttunen details in her analysis of antebellum mourning rituals, Emerson’s emphasis
on the community’s involvement in mourning his son was uncommon during this period.
“By the mid-nineteenth century,” Halttunen explains, “mourning had become a private
anguish experienced with little community support…” (147). In contrast, Emerson
welcomes fellow mourners from all corners, and the poem extends this invitation to his
readers. Emerson’s willingness to publish his grief for the world to see is unusual, and
there is a whiff of disapproval in Brownson’s review of the poem for that reason. But
here again Emerson is relying on his high/low, cool/warm strategy. The spectacle of this
famously self-reliant man torn apart by heartbreak and in search of sympathy earns an
even stronger feeling of pity in the reader than the same picture of a more emotionally
available man would. Again, the initial intimidating façade appears to give way to reveal
a sweet, loving man under the surface.
12

Emerson reinforced this effect in person. In their collection of contemporary
responses to Emerson, Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson note that most fans report
strikingly similar accounts of their meetings with their idol, especially after Emerson had
become a household name. Routinely, these witnesses document how Emerson

12
Cayton argues that “Threnody” marks a turning point in Emerson’s worldview that will
culminate in the thesis of his essay, “Experience.” According to Cayton, “Experience”
affirms a “social order where alienation is the inevitable fate of individuals” (Emerson's
Emergence 221). While I do not want to gloss over the evolution in Emerson’s actual
thought that Cayton identifies, I want to point out, in contrast, the relative lack of change
in Emerson’s high/low, cool/warm public persona over the same period.

42

overcame their awe of him through various displays of friendliness that they devoured
with eager relief. Swedish biographer Fredrika Bremer, for example, compares him to
both an “eagle” and a “lion” (40, 41), and while she admits that there is something “icy”
in the man’s nature, she assures her readers that “he gladly throws it off, if he can” (40).
In the end, she pronounces him “lovable” and seems to leave his company only with
reluctance (41). An anonymous writer for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
recounting his own visit to Emerson, likewise calls him an “all-wise man,” before whom
the reporter feels like “a presumptuous idiot,” but also swears that “none find warmer
welcome from him than aspiring young men” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 71).
Contemplating this recurring scenario in his biography of Emerson, Oliver Wendell
Holmes exclaims, “What must he not have endured from the persecutions of small-
minded worshipers who fastened upon him for the interminable period between the
incoming and outgoing railroad train! He was a model of patience and good temper”
(367). In an effort to explain Emerson’s motive, Holmes goes on to say, “He might have
been an idol, [but] he broke his own pedestal to attack the idolatry which he saw all about
him” (372). And Alcott’s most famous daughter, Louisa May, comes to the same
conclusion, noting, “I have often seen him turn from distinguished guests, to say a wise
or kindly word to some humble worshipper…” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 91).
Each of these fans recounts the same experience: Emerson belied their expectations of
aloofness and chilly grandeur through gestures of friendliness and often created the
perception of a true bond.
In the case of a public artist-intellectual like Emerson, this imagined friendship
particularly fulfilled what Thomas Baker calls the nineteenth-century audience’s

43

“appetite for communion with genius” (6). Thus, Emerson’s status as a genius also
increasingly became a cornerstone of his public persona. Like the spirit of the age, this
specific definition of genius, as Emerson and his contemporaries primarily understood it,
was an invention and central concept of the Romantic era. Originating in the mid-
eighteenth century both as a quality and as a role, this definition of genius denotes a God-
given ability (or the possessor of such) to imaginatively overleap ordinary perception and
thereby produce results that no one else can. Again, it is difficult to pinpoint Emerson’s
first contact with this idea: it appeared in the works of many Romantic German and
English writers (two particularly influential ones being, respectively, Schelling and
Coleridge) and, like Zeitgeist, was a popular topic of discussion in elite antebellum-
American circles in general. The idea cropped up from the beginning in Emerson’s
journals, but by 1836 Emerson had become virtually obsessed with understanding the
nature of genius
13
– a preoccupation that frequently translated to his lectures and
published works. For example, in “History,” Emerson writes, “Genius studies the causal
thought, and far back in the womb of things sees the rays parting from one orb, that
diverge, ere they fall, by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his
masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. Genius detects through the fly,
through the caterpillar, through the grub, through the egg, the constant individual…”
(Works 2: 13). In “The Poet,” Emerson virtually equates the poet with the genius: “The
young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are more himself than he
is” (3: 5). And Emerson’s most famous essay, “Self-Reliance,” arguably dwells as often

13
In 1836 alone, for example, Emerson includes approximately forty different
meditations on genius in his journal.

44

on the subject of genius as it does on self-culture. For example, Emerson writes, “To
believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true
for all men,--that is genius,” and “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected
thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty” (2: 46). As this evidence
suggests, Emerson had studied the idea carefully, and because of this analysis, he knew
well what qualities he needed to project and highlight if he wanted the public to deem
him as such.
Indeed, his pronouncements on the nature of genius, delivered as they were with
Emerson’s characteristic assurance, created the impression that he possessed special
insight into genius because he was one. And his public performances appeared to verify
this suspicion – at least for those who desired it to be true – by conforming to the popular
model in many particulars. Many of Emerson’s audience members remark, for example,
on what Buell in his biography of Emerson calls his “virtuoso displays of mental energy
and ‘inspired’ thinking” (Emerson 3). The Radical quotes James Russell Lowell’s
recollection of experiencing “flashes of mutual understanding between speaker and
hearer” and gaining “ravishing glimpses of an ideal under the dry husk of our New
England” from Emerson’s performances (“Notes” 476). And Edwin Percy Whipple
recounts how Emerson “poured lavishly out from his intellectual treasury” during these
lectures (120). These descriptions line up well with the general idea of the genius’s
natural gift for special insight, as well as Emerson’s more particular notion of the
genius’s ability to articulate “our own rejected thoughts” (Works 2: 45). In fact,
Emerson’s performance as a genius was so recognizable as such that, from the beginning,

45

many of Emerson’s reviewers took his status as a genius for granted, sometimes even as
they criticized him.
14

And yet, by Emerson’s era, the Romantic idea of genius had accrued connotations
that put it at odds with the community-building ethos of the celebrity. Emerson’s
generation did not simply see the genius as a divinely inspired “master work-man” (13),
as Edward Young had suggested in his foundational 1759 treatment of the subject,
“Conjectures on Original Composition.” Decades of Romantic writers and artists had
already left their mark on the figure, and as epitomized by Byron’s Manfred, he had
become a fierce individualist who shunned the world in favor of his own solitary
communion with the divine. While the celebrity invited feelings of intimacy in his fans,
the genius repelled such fellowship. Emerson’s desire to present himself as a genius thus
added another layer of complication to his ambitions for leading Literary Concord.
Indeed, the difficulty of maintaining his reputation as a Romantic genius, while

14
See, for example, Clarke: “…he has been surrounded by a band of enthusiastic
admirers, whom the genius, life and manliness of his thoughts attracted” (qtd in Emerson
and Thoreau 50); Felton: “He is an extravagant, erratic genius” (254); Heard: “The
American is proud of any man, whose genius tends to give his country an apparent
superiority in any pursuit” (485); Margaret Fuller: “claiming for him the honors of
greatness, and, in some respects, of a Master” (qtd in Margaret Fuller, Critic 4); A writer
for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review: “There is an absence of that
vivid sense of personality – that intense individualism which so often manifests itself in
the morbid and jealous sensitiveness, peculiar to what is called the ‘temperament of
genius’” (592); and Porter: “With all his genius, he is not save from the unmistakable
manner which cleaves to the writer who composes for a private coterie…” (497).

46

simultaneously leveraging his growing fame to build the sphere of influence he desired,
further explains his development of his warm-cool persona. Emerson used his reputation
for Manfred-like reserve to make his actual gestures of friendship seem like rare rewards,
given only to faithful supporters of Literary Concord. Encouragement of such
cliquishness finds plenty of precedent in the behavior of earlier Romantic writers.
William Wordsworth, an early favorite of Emerson’s, for example, went out of his way to
cull out the faithful among his readers. As Emerson would later, Wordsworth created the
impression that he rejected society as a whole (the “tumultuous throng”) (Prelude 1, l:
449), but reserved a small space for “pure hearts” (6, 2: 56): that is, those readers who
truly understood and sympathized with him. Of course, in both cases, the reader himself
would be the judge of whether he qualified for admission into this elite circle. In this
way, both writers turned a difficulty – that is, the conflict between the Romantic notion of
the solitary genius and the celebrity writer’s basic need for an audience – into a powerful
marketing asset.
Moreover, the image of the Romantic genius also helps to explain some of
Emerson’s stubborn eccentricities as a writer and lecturer. For example, while several of
his critics complain about his “bewildering, astounding and incomprehensible” language
and his “flap-doodle mixtures” of ideas (“Roaring Ralph”), as Bonnie Carr O’Neill
astutely points out in “‘The Best of Me Is There’: Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity,”
Emerson’s “growing reputation for difficulty might cause some readers…to regard his
complexity as a sign of his genius” (756). Similarly, while a young Emerson likely
worried about a potential genetic predisposition for mental illness given his two brothers’
bouts with it, Emerson, the writer and lecturer, understanding that contemporary notions

47

of the Romantic genius often included a whiff of insanity, turned the rumors that
circulated about his possible inherited madness into part of his personal mythology. For
example, in “Character” he argues that there is a “right insanity when the soul no longer
knows its own, nor where its allegiance, its religion, are due” (Works 3: 115). And in
“The Poet” he applies this principle more directly to his own controversial persona: “If a
man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the
authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity,
let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism” (3:
32). In other words, by adopting the pose of the Romantic genius, Emerson succeeded in
selling both his talents and his shortcomings to his audience.
Individuals sought out Emerson in order to satisfy their desire to commune with
genius, but – like fandoms today – their shared recognition of his genius also encouraged
them to identify with and seek out each other. In this way, Emerson served his
burgeoning imaginary community by becoming a locus of shared experience. Several of
Emerson’s contemporaries, recalling his lectures, remark on the strength of his fans’
group identity. Emerson’s daughter, Edith, for example, explains her preference for his
Boston audiences in these terms. She writes, “The audience was made up entirely of his
own people…There was an atmosphere of fellowship” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time
163). And one of his earliest biographers, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, describes
Emerson’s audience in terms that evoke a religious community, calling them “so various,
yet so select and so appreciative” and noting both that “they meet like old friends from
one course of lectures to another” and that “there is constantly a band of novices, in
whom the elders of the company see with joy” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 43).

48

Lowell, quoted in the Radical in 1868, describes audience members bonding with each
other by “turn[ing] to exchange glances over some pithier thought” (476). Ednah Dow
Cheney also testifies to the longevity of Emerson’s audience-community, remarking, “It
was astonishing, in all these many years, to see how Emerson always had the same
audience around him… Some of them felt that they must hear him every time they had an
opportunity” (qtd. in Bridgman 74). Richard Schickel explains this phenomenon in
Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America, in which he argues that stars
like Emerson become “common idols, if not common ideals – in a world where the
traditional communitarian forms have lost much of their hold” (275). Emerson,
appearing as a public figure during the industrial era’s adolescence, offered a comforting
substitute for the traditional communal bonds lost in the transition to the new
socioeconomic system.
Emerson’s controversial reputation, in particular, helped to facilitate this bonding
by encouraging a tribal “us” against “them” mentality in his fans. Attempting to describe
this developing divide during its early stages, contemporary critic Samuel Gilman notes
that Emerson “is an object of the severest reproaches from some, and the most profound
admiration from others” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 55), a description that will
quickly become a commonplace in critiques of his work for years to come. While most of
Emerson’s early critics did not seem to know what to make of the situation, James
Freeman Clarke smartly predicts that “the results of this controversy will be excellent”
(39). Indeed, the more conservative critics continued to maintain that Emerson was a
“joke” (Howells qtd. in “Howells’ Visit to Emerson” 319), and that his fans were “silly”
(Parsons qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 36), the more they banded together to defend him

49

and each other. Supporters charged that Emerson’s critics were “[s]uperficial and timid
men” (“A Disciple” 602), and that “it is but few who understand the entire meaning of
the sentences which he writes” (“Ralph Waldo Emerson” 211). In his preface to the
English edition of Essays, First Series, Carlyle, working in the same vein, counters
criticism of Emerson’s fans by romantically characterizing them as highly selective: “a
small circle of living souls” (ix). This strategy created an intense feeling of solidarity
amongst the members of Emerson’s in-group, which was only strengthened by criticism
from outsiders. For example, an Emerson admirer, writing for Yale Literary Magazine in
1850 boasts, “we take pleasure in seeing him contradicted and ‘snubbed’ [original
emphasis]” (204). And Emerson himself explicitly encouraged this us-against-them
feeling in his followers. In his “Introductory Lecture on the Times,” for example, he
writes, “All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what
is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to
stand for it: and the highest compliment man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to
him its disguised and discredited angels” (458). Here, as elsewhere, Emerson draws a
stark line between the insiders who understand and appreciate him and the outsiders who
do not.
Emerson’s controversial reputation was not his only community-building tool
however, and that is why simply characterizing the imaginary community of Literary
Concord as a bastion for Transcendentalists oversimplifies Emerson’s accomplishment.
While Emerson’s early reputation did draw heavily from his association with established
Transcendentalists, his celebrity soon outpaced that of the divisive group and eventually
attracted many unlikely bedfellows into his community of fans. One of the keys to his

50

success was what many of his critics have called his “impersonality.” Several of
Emerson’s contemporaries describe him, for example, as “protean” because of the
difficulty many had in pinning down his personal point of view. While Buell is correct in
arguing that impersonal is too broad a term for his actual performance, as Peter S. Field
suggests in Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Making of a Democratic Intellectual, “a great
deal of his popularity in his day and his continued relevance in our own stems from his
monumental imprecision” (7). This underlying vagueness was an essential element of
Emerson’s widespread appeal because it allowed him to act as a cipher onto which each
individual fan could graft his or her own values and desires. Emerson’s surprising
popularity with the young, social-climbing capitalists of the mid-West provides an
excellent example of the benefits Emerson derived by keeping his own position ill-
defined. As Mary Kupiec Cayton notes in her analysis of this particular segment of
Emerson’s fan-base in Emerson's Emergence: Self and Society in the Transformation of
New England, 1800-1845: “Emerson's audience had come to a sense of group identity
long before his arrival, and hearing him seems to have played a part in heightening its
self-consciousness as a group” (604). In other words, instead of challenging his new
audience members to fit into his existing fandom, Emerson’s persona hazily expanded to
engulf them. As a result, these young fans tended to hear what they wanted to hear in
Emerson’s ideas. Cayton uses Emerson’s lecture/essay “Wealth” to demonstrate this
process. When, for example, Emerson says, "[E]very industrious man can get his living
without dishonest customs” (612), according to Cayton, the mid-Western mercantile
audience merely heard the first part of Emerson’s declaration and dismissed the last part
as unimportant. Because of their selective listening, the bourgeoisie of the mid-West

51

embraced Emerson as their champion of unfettered capitalism and dismissed his earlier
Transcendentalist reputation – and Emerson let them.
Indeed, far from resisting such consumptive readings of his words, Emerson
developed a theory to defend this aspect of his performance. In “The Oversoul,” he
writes, “In youth we are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in them.
But the larger experience of man discovers the identical nature appearing through them
all” (Works 2: 277). In short, Emerson believed at bottom that there was no difference
between the speaker and his audience, that the words he spoke were always quite literally
the hearer’s “own rejected thoughts,” which in turn were simply expressions of the
Oversoul of which they were all a part. By keeping his own ideas imprecise, and by
further cloaking them in bewildering language, Emerson aimed to make it difficult for his
critics to challenge his belief in this underlying connection. Railton emphasizes, in
particular, Emerson’s “temperamental aversion to upsetting an audience” and suggests
that he went to “great lengths to disguise the opposition between himself and his
audience” (30, 23). Although such characterization seems in conflict with Emerson’s
controversial reputation, in fact, by deliberately obscuring his meaning, he often had it
both ways. Audience members with vastly different sympathies could all feel they were
part of his exclusive, misunderstood tribe simply by feeling a vague connection to
Emerson as he performed for them. Indeed, his publisher, Ticknor and Fields, could
invent no better marketing tool for his client than his own public performances on the
lecture circuit.
In addition to his personal disinclination to offend, Emerson’s shape-shifting
effect also arose from the context in which he presented his work: primarily, the lyceum.

52

Cayton argues that lyceums like the ones for which Emerson spoke, “competed with the
theater, concerts, panoramas, and wax museums for public audiences” (615), and that
audience members grouped lyceum speakers with other kinds of performers in their
minds. While Emerson’s audience distinguished him as a speaker who offered a more
educational experience than they would normally get at one of these other venues, Cayton
maintains that they still classified him on a basic level with the other lyceum stars he
shared the podium with on any particular evening. The effect of this kind of grouping,
according to Cayton, was that the audience members would sometimes inadvertently hear
Emerson’s lectures with those of other speakers still in their minds, creating a blend of
subject matter that would sometimes color their perception of Emerson’s ideas. For
example, Cayton explores the effect that listening to Emerson’s ideas on wealth after
hearing one of huckster P.T. Barnum’s get-rich-quick speeches might have had on an
audience. Likewise, where Emerson was grouped with Transcendentalist-leaning
presenters, it is reasonable to assume that the audience would have viewed his ideas
through a Transcendentalist lens. In this way, Emerson could appear strikingly different
to different audiences. Because audience members would presumably select lecture line-
ups featuring speakers and topics that already appealed to them, Emerson stood a good
chance of pleasing them if he did not seem to contradict his stage-mates too sharply.
Although Emerson was enormously adept at taking advantage of any condition –
whether as an outcome of his own performance tricks or of his harmony with the rest of
the night’s line-up – that allowed him to convince his audience of their like-mindedness,
certain engagements strained his method. Emerson’s belief in the underlying connection
between all people, and in his status as a representative man (a status, by his own

53

formulation, proven by his celebrity), led him to the naïve belief that he could speak with
authority on the conduct of people whose own experiences fell well out of his personal
realm of experience. For example, even his usual obfuscating rhetorical techniques could
not entirely hide the fact that the speech he gave at the 1855 Women’s Rights Convention
in Boston was woefully out of step with his audience’s desires. Although he could
depend on a positive hearing when he rehearsed what many of the leading figures in the
women’s movement had said before him to the satisfaction of similar audiences – for
example, when he spoke of the oracular nature of women, their civilizing influence, and
the “mathematical justice” of their claim to equal rights (Works 11: 418) – he wrongly
believed that such expressions of sympathy earned him the right to instruct these same
women on what, in his mind, they should really want: namely, to give up the public
sphere almost entirely to the men. Ordinarily, Emerson could rely on his trademark
vagueness, combined with his powerful charisma, to soften the edges of such a position
and ensure a positive reception. But, as Richardson observes, this audience was
accustomed to plainspoken lecturers like Theodore Parker who argued in no uncertain
terms for the rights they desired. Some, like Paulina Davis, were still pleased with
Emerson’s speech, but many were left deeply unsatisfied by Emerson’s seeming half-
heartedness. Indeed, as Richardson notes, “The newspapers, in reporting the speech,
were not sure which side he was on.” In fact, the ideas in “Woman” haunted Emerson for
decades afterward, and “the subject continued to be a sore one in the Emerson home”
(Emerson 533). As he discovered both in this instance and when he attempted to
pontificate on the slavery issue, his ability to bewitch his audience did not always save
him from accountability for failing to express his audience’s “own rejected thoughts.”

54

In these cases, Emerson failed because he could not keep up with his audience’s
radicalism. And yet Emerson had every reason to believe that he was taking the right
tack. While he had developed a reputation as a controversial figure, in fact, it was this
technique of blending the subversive with the comfortingly familiar that had made him a
star. Celebrity-culture theorist Anna Helen Peterson, in discussing modern celebrities
who produce a similar effect, explains that the key to their success is in their ability to
appear “ahead of the (ideological) curve, but not so ahead that they profoundly disturb
existing ideologies” (np). Indeed, as many of Emerson’s contemporary critics and later
biographers note, none of his ideas were actually revolutionary. His Neo-Platonic
idealism, his belief in the Over-Soul, his notions of self-culture, etc. had been circulating
for years, especially among the great numbers of Germanophile teachers and students at
Harvard. In 1840, English critic Richard Monckton Milnes notes, “much, nay most, of
what his countrymen would probably claim exclusively for his own, has been thought of,
spoken of, and written of, by Fichte, or Goethe, or Novalis, or Coleridge, or Carlyle”
(189), and indeed Emerson almost certainly received his introduction to these ideas early
in his career from his best friend, Frederick Henry Hedge, and his elder brother, William.
Both had been profoundly influenced by the ideas they imbibed while visiting Germany
in the 1820s and had passionately proselytized Emerson.
15
In other words, by the 1840s,
when Monckton Milnes and others were beginning to comment on the growing “Emerson
mania” (English Review 139-152), the ideas for which Emerson had become famous were
already decades old and widespread, at least among educated New Englanders. While

15
For details of Frederick Henry Hedge’s experience in Germany and its effect on
Emerson, see Packer 29-30. For similar details of William’s experience and impact, see
Richardson, Emerson 49-51.

55

still capable of shocking the conservative segment of the population (as evidenced by the
reaction to his “Divinity School Address”), these ideas were well within the realm of
accepted discourse in antebellum America.
Instead, the majority of Emerson’s provocative reputation sprung from his style.
Not only did Emerson dress up his borrowed ideas as pithy aphorisms, he also broke
many unspoken rules in his choice of words in a way that annoyed the establishment –
thus endearing him to legions of outsiders. A writer for the Knickerbocker, for example,
calls his diction “a grotesque garb of motley language” (“Editor’s Table” 559), and
several others complain of Emerson’s verbal “affectation” (“Review of Essays, Second
Series” 539 qtd in Emerson and Thoreau 146): in particular, his penchant for archaic
words such as pleached (“Days”) and behooted (“Divinity School Address”), as well as a
variety of Latinisms. However, by wrapping his thoughts in bold and sometimes strange-
sounding language, he succeeded in grabbing the attention of a much wider audience than
that of his intellectual peers and creating the impression of adding a novel and
challenging voice to public discussions. While lecturing, Emerson also broke the rules.
Before Emerson, lecture performances were bombastic and highly stylized. In contrast,
Emerson chose a simple, starkly unadorned style of delivery. Emerson’s combination of
superficially radical ideas with a genuinely audacious style offered enough members of
his audience exactly the right degree of rebelliousness to ensure his fame.
Moreover, Emerson’s particular blend of the progressive and the traditional was
soothing to his antebellum audience because it often directly targeted their anxieties
about the way the industrial capitalist revolution was transforming their lives. In trying
to explain Henry Ford’s similarly outsized celebrity, David Nye argues that

56

“[s]pecifically, Ford appeared to demonstrate the compatibility of agrarian values with
industrial power, of free enterprise and social welfare, of egalitarianism and vast personal
fortune” (5), and Nye’s analysis of Ford’s appeal applies equally to Emerson (who was,
incidentally, Ford’s favorite writer). Emerson had many ties to the past, and they became
essential nostalgic elements of his public persona. Not only did he come from an old,
well-respected New England family, but he also chose to live in the small town his
ancestors called home despite the draw of more elegant, cosmopolitan communities
nearby. And despite maintaining an often-grueling tour schedule, he found time to
participate in traditional community activities, earning the affection of his neighbors. He
also spoke frequently of his love for the primeval land itself. His first major publication,
Nature, celebrates the mental and emotional invigoration of being in nature, “something
more dear and connate than in streets or villages” (Works 1: 10). In the same essay,
however, Emerson laments that the age is so “retrospective” and that his peers content
themselves with “build[ing] the sepulchres of the fathers” rather than “enjoy[ing] an
original relation to the universe” (1: 3). He repeatedly warns his readers and listeners to
reject the temptation to “grope among the dry bones of the past” (1: 3). Instead, his
experience in nature, he tells them, taught him that “[t]he sun shines to-day also” (1: 3).
In other words, while acknowledging and even tacitly exploiting his audience’s nostalgia
for the past in his not-so-private private life, Emerson earned a reputation for refreshing
optimism primarily for taking on his nineteenth-century peers’ preoccupation with the
age’s supposed declension.
In his follow-up works, Emerson expanded on this general idea and showed its
application to the capitalist industrial-era labor system in particular. At the beginning of

57

“Compensation,” for example, he argues that “in nature, nothing can be given, all things
are sold” and that the same law applies to labor as well (2: 107). He recognizes that
“[t]he farmer imagines power and place are fine things”(2: 99), but assures his audience
that even the “President has paid dear for his White House” (2: 99). Because everything
comes at a price, he advises his audience to “[a]lways pay; for first or last you must pay
your entire debt” and, drawing on his training as a Christian minister, promises them that
“[p]ersons and events may stand for a time between you and justice, but it is only a
postponement” (2: 113). Later, sounding like a strangely passive version of Karl Marx,
he explains that, “[T]he real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and
credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that
which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen”
(2: 114). Because labor represents knowledge and virtue, as Emerson explains in
“Spiritual Laws,” the laborer – far from being powerless – has the ability to make “mean”
labor “liberal” simply through “his thinking and character” (2: 142). As to “the goods of
fortune,” he advises his listener to profligately “scatter them on every wind as the
momentary signs of his infinite productiveness” (2: 143). Because a key component of
Emerson’s labor theory involved “preach[ing] the indifferency to circumstances” (2:
120), Emerson remained relatively aloof during the era’s major fights for social justice.
But Emerson’s stance, combining as it did the familiar notes of an old-fashioned Sunday
sermon with a cheerful nonchalance in the face of the new capitalist business model,
offered comfort and encouragement – if not a real answer – to an audience struggling to
adapt to the new system.
Emerson’s celebrity – transforming him as it did into a symbol of success, a social

58

leveler, and a comforting community locus – was a key ingredient in his ability to govern
Literary Concord. But for all of their symbolic power, not all celebrities become actual
charismatic leaders. Most are neither willing nor capable of developing and maintaining
a community like Literary Concord as Emerson did. Such a feat requires a mastery of
what Emerson’s generation called influence. In her treatment of the rise of the
confidence man, Halttunen defines influence as “the power by which any person’s
character affected the characters of others” (4). She also argues that antebellum
America’s obsession with influence, and those like Emerson who wielded it, sprang from
the social transformations brought on by the industrial capitalist revolution. “Because the
traditional vertical institutions could not contain the new complexity of national social
life,” Halttunen explains, “new social organizations emerged that were formed along the
horizontal lines of economic class and social status” (20). As a result, Halttunen
contends, traditional vertical sources of authority lost their hold and new opportunities
opened up for charismatic leaders who knew how to bend their peers to their will without
the weight of convention aiding them. Although she names Andrew Jackson as the
representative type of this figure, Emerson also continuously lurks behind the portrait she
presents.
First, Emerson understood and masterfully cultivated the horizontal authority that
Halttunen identifies as essential under the new system. Emerson’s participation in the
Transcendentalist Club provides an excellent early case study of his tactics. Created by
Frederick Henry Hedge in 1836, with Emerson’s help, the Transcendentalist Club (as it
would later be called) assembled several like-minded New England intellectuals for
regular discussions. The members of the club, in an attempt to foster fresh ideas,

59

encouraged dissent and forbade censorship during these meetings. Although Emerson
would dub the group the “Hedge’s Club” after its founder, the association was, at least in
principle, an egalitarian fraternity. But, as his determination to convince the group
participants to adopt his chosen name for their club suggests, Emerson did not let his
official status as one member among equals prevent him from carving out a leadership
role for himself. As with his desire to name the club after Hedge, Emerson almost always
hid his power plays under the guise of equality. For example, Emerson frequently
attempted to expand the club’s membership to bring in new recruits of his choosing.
Most notably, Emerson on his own authority introduced several female friends to the
originally all-male organization. While increasing the club’s membership would appear
to add diversity to the meetings and further ward off any development of a hierarchy
within the group, by bringing in his own hand-selected new members, Emerson subtly
increased his influence over the meetings. And Emerson’s experience of antebellum
gender relations, in particular, would have shown him that his female friends, perhaps
with the exception of Margaret Fuller, were far more likely than his male friends to
follow his lead.
16
Fuller’s own attempt to expand her Conversations to include men
ended with a similar result when the female attendees, who had previously been lively
participants, immediately yielded the floor to the new male guests. Moreover, while
witnesses say that Emerson listened far more than he spoke during club discussions, they
also admit to leaving with the vague perception that he had somehow dominated the

16

My argument that Emerson introduced women to the club due to their tactical value
rather than any interest in gender equality is further supported by his behavior while
trying to establish the later, short-lived Town and Country Club in 1849. Once Emerson
no longer needed the support of such women, he vehemently opposed including them.
See Dall.

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proceedings nonetheless.
17
Eschewing the trappings of leadership and seemingly
embracing a democratic relation with his peers, while at the same time manipulating his
supposed equals through well-placed favors, deck-stacking, and sheer charisma, Emerson
showed a tremendous instinct for the new horizontal authority.
Emerson’s mentorship style – a crucial element in creating and maintaining
Literary Concord’s cohesion – also reveals this same pattern of surface egalitarianism.
Buell argues in his article on the subject, “Emersonian Anti-mentoring: From Thoreau to
Dickinson and Beyond,” that Emerson wanted “to seize hold of the swirling currents of
transatlantic thought and articulate a more ‘democratic’ model for imagining the
authority of elders, about his own authority, [and] about intellectual and cultural authority
as such” (4). But Emerson’s intentions as a mentor-figure differed markedly from his
actual performance of mentorship. Buell contends that Emerson’s goal was to foster
“mutuality” between himself and his protégés, but admits that “his entire history as
teacher-mentor was marked by the same duplicity:” specifically, that he seemed bent on
manufacturing “clones” (4). Buell outlines the ways in which Emerson, as a mentor,
attempted to pressure Thoreau into adopting a mold of his choosing, one that reflected
aspects of Emerson’s own character. As McAleer argues, “[H]e not only drew on the
resources of others but, without conscious persuasion or awareness, sent others forth to
live on his behalf those unrealized lives he could not himself pursue. His understanding
of creative assimilation allowed him to regard such delegated lives as a personal resource,

17
See, for example, both Conway’s account of attending a meeting of the
Transcendentalist Club: “Although Emerson did not ascend the tribune nor open his lips,
in a sense he made a majority of the speeches” (155), and Woodbury’s account of
conversations with Emerson: “His conversation was always in the low tone of one
accustomed to being listened to” (126).

61

quite as was the work his hired hands did for him tending his orchard or splitting his
kindling” (335). Not surprisingly, when his protégés began to branch out in different
directions, Emerson reacted with surprise and dismay. For example, he resisted
Thoreau’s efforts to draw him into his abolitionist activism,
18
and he begged Fuller to
leave Europe with him after she had become involved in the budding independence
movement in Italy – despite the fact that both ventures were arguably the most important
of each writer’s career. While John Carlos Rowe rightly blames the naiveté of Emerson’s
Transcendentalist “aesthetic dissent” and his matching belief in American exceptionalism
for his inability to follow his colleagues in these new directions (5), Emerson’s need for
personal control over his protégés is also an essential factor in all of these conflicts.
19

Perhaps Emerson’s most effective tactic for controlling his coterie without
seeming to hold power over them was biographical writing. Although almost all of the
members of Literary Concord referenced other figures in the group at some point in their
writing careers, none did so in the same spirit as Emerson. For example, Fuller reviewed
Emerson’s work a few times, most notably in Papers on Literature and Art where she
dubbed him the “Sage of Concord” (1: 128), and Hawthorne included passages about
Emerson in both Mosses from an Old Manse and the original version of “The Hall of

18
Although Emerson often disagreed with Thoreau’s approach to the subject, his actual
relationship with the various anti-slavery movements of the day is a matter of debate.
Most scholars point to Oliver Wendell Holmes as the originator of the idea that Emerson
kept a distance from the abolitionist cause. In the 1960s, however, several scholars, led
by Len Gougeon (Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Anti-slavery, and Reform), began to challenge
the notion of Emerson as a detached observer of the movement.

19
Emerson’s relationship with his wife is also highly instructive in this regard. Not only
did he convince her to leave Salem, her beloved home, for Concord, he also asked her to
change her name from “Lydia” to “Lidian,” apparently in an effort to make her given
name more euphonious with his surname. Lydia/Lidian’s anorexia, along with her
obsession with Emerson’s first wife Ellen, points to a woman struggling for control.

62

Fantasy,” but neither author was attempting to control public perception of Emerson by
doing so.
20
Rather, they were merely capitalizing on his existing public image. When
Emerson published works about his friends, however, it was always to lead the public’s
perception of them. Emerson’s eulogy of Thoreau, for example, set the latter’s image for
decades to come, and significantly that image was of a poor copy of Emerson himself.
The portrait of Thoreau that emerges in the eulogy is, at best, a caricature of Emerson’s
self-reliant man. Emerson praises his “hardy habits and few wants” (Works 10: 453).
Like Emerson’s self-reliant man, Thoreau appears as a grown-up boy, contemptuous of
the opinion of others; he also reflects Emerson’s Spartan ideal with his “somewhat
military” nature (10: 455). Additionally, Emerson takes this opportunity to show how
Thoreau exemplifies his own ideas in Nature and his essay “Friendship.” In other words,
Emerson makes Thoreau an advertisement for his own work. More troubling, however,
are the ways that Emerson diminishes Thoreau’s own literary contributions in
comparison. He notes that Thoreau “was graduated [sic] at Harvard College in 1837, but
without any literary distinction” and that, despite the fact that Thoreau wrote extensively
about nature, “he was incurious of technical and textual science” (10: 452). Writing about
Thoreau’s style, Emerson argues that he “wanted a lyric facility and technical skill,” then
lamely attempts to mitigate the insult by suggesting that, “he had the source of poetry in
his spiritual perception” (10: 474). The consolation only stands for a few sentences,
however, because after explaining Thoreau’s “spiritual perception,” Emerson returns to
lamenting his “rude and defective” and “drossy and crude” verses (10: 475). Thoreau’s

20

See my earlier discussion of Emerson’s reaction to Martineau’s portrait of him for an
example of what happened when people did try to control his image.

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prose also falls under Emerson’s critical eye. He contends that one of Thoreau’s favorite
rhetorical maneuvers, paradox, “defaced his earlier writings” and calls his interest in
elevating the small and ordinary “comic to those who do not share the philosopher's
perception of identity” (10: 479). As his description of Thoreau as a philosopher in this
context illustrates, the eulogy is also marked by condescension and mockery. For
example, to demonstrate Thoreau’s affection for children, Emerson includes a story in
which Thoreau turns hypocrite, reversing his lofty opinion on the value of aiming at a
select audience to satisfy the desires of a little girl who wants to know if his lecture will
“be a nice, interesting story, such as she wished to hear” (10: 457). Emerson’s
description is affectionate, but it leaves the listener with the impression that Thoreau was,
as their contemporaries would have put it, a humbug. He also depicts Thoreau as an
extreme eccentric. For example, Emerson swears that Thoreau “could not bear to hear
the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel,” and, again in a mocking tone, he ascribes
this aversion to Thoreau’s tendency to “elegancies of his own” (10: 481). In the end,
Emerson claims outright that Thoreau had “no ambition” and that he failed to realize his
own promise (10: 480). Needless to say, Thoreau’s relatives hated the speech. But
outside of Thoreau’s family, the world embraced Emerson’s eulogy as a true picture of
Thoreau. In this way, Emerson succeeded in both using Thoreau’s character to promote
his own ideas while, at the same time, nullifying any threat Thoreau represented as a
literary rival. And, as Bell Gale Chevigny explores in “The Long Arm of Censorship:
Myth-making in Margaret Fuller’s Time and Our Own,” Emerson managed Fuller’s
posthumous reputation in the same way by co-writing the wildly successful 1852
biography The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in which he depicts Fuller, like

64

Thoreau, as yet another of his eccentric and ultimately insignificant literary satellites.
Although Bronson Alcott avoided the same fate by outliving Emerson, Emerson is on
record expressing his desire to play posthumous biographer to him as well. By taking
over the biographies of key members of his coterie when they were in no position to
contradict him, Emerson controlled the narrative of Literary Concord in the minds of his
readers, and kept himself at its center, while appearing to honor his peers.
As subtle as Emerson’s efforts to subordinate his peers were, a number of his
contemporaries recognized what he was doing. For example, according to William James
Stillman, Henry Longfellow once complained that Emerson “used his friends as he did
lemons— when he could squeeze nothing more from them, he threw them away” (qtd. in
The Century 601). Similarly, Emerson visitor Rebecca Harding Davis remarked that
“[h]e took from each man his drop of stored honey, and after that the man counted for no
more to him than any other robbed bee” (566). Even members of Emerson’s coterie
themselves sometimes grumbled about this situation. In 1837, for example, annoyed by
Emerson’s taking credit for some ideas that he believed to be his own, Bronson Alcott
writes the following in his journal: “He holds men and things at a distance; pleases
himself with using them for his own benefit, and as means of gathering material for his
works” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 1). Likewise, Thoreau complained of
Emerson’s disloyal behavior when he appeared to withdraw his support for his protégé
after talking Thoreau into the risky (and, as it turned out, disastrous) move of self-
publishing A Week. In both cases, however, his friends only protested because their
unequal relationship with Emerson no longer seemed to benefit them. Most, in fact,
embraced Emerson’s subtle control. For example, in her 1899 memoir, Reminiscences:

65

1819-1899, Julia Ward Howe happily recounts her conversion from Emerson critic to
Emerson acolyte, and Louisa May Alcott even actively campaigned for a place among
Emerson’s protégés. Indeed, for years, potential disciples came from miles around to visit
Emerson with the hope that the great man would similarly adopt them into his circle,
presumably on the same terms. Many outsiders also recognized this arrangement and,
depending on the degree of their sympathy with Emerson and his friends, they either
praised or condemned it.
21

And yet, to fully master the new art of horizontal influence, Emerson not only had
to mask such efforts to control his circle of friends and admirers, he also had to reject the
idea of traditional authority altogether – which he did. In a way, Emerson’s upbringing
made him unusually suited to such a task. On the one hand, his family’s reputation
weighed heavily on Emerson from a young age. As Gay Wilson Allen explains in
Emerson, because of the long and illustrious history of the Emerson family in New

21
For example, Davis writes, “[H]e is run after, and all but worshipped by many young,
ardent and yet noble minds” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 41); Clarke writes, “[H]e has
been surrounded by a band of enthusiastic admirers” (37 qtd in Emerson and Thoreau
50), Gilman writes, “Many enthusiastic talented young people are represented to be
perfectly fascinated by him.” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 55); Felton writes, “[His
ideas] drew around Mr. Emerson a circle of ardent admirers, not to say disciples” (253),
L.W. B. calls his audience “wondering disciples” (204), “Atticus” writes, “Emerson fills
all his followers with his own conceit and conceits” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 292),
Porter writes, “[H]e is not save from the unmistakable manner which cleaves to the writer
who composes for a private coterie, or for an initiated set” (497), Richard Frederick
Fuller writes, “Elizabeth Hoar used to be there and she acted as chorus” (as qtd. in
Emerson in His Own Time 18), Sanborn writes, “[T]here is constantly a band of novices”
(qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 43); Cheney writes, “Those who sat at his feet once
really sat there all their lives” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 113), Holmes writes,
“Without a church or a pulpit, he soon had a congregation” (373), Harding Davis writes,
“[H]e reigned absolutely as does the unseen Grand Llama over his adoring votaries” (qtd.
in Emerson in His Own Time 211), and French writes, “[I]n Concord he stood for what
amounted to a sort of community conscience, his high ideals of life creating a standard...”
(44).

66

England, his relatives assumed “that the Emerson boys were ‘born to greatness’” (4).
Specifically, for seven generations, the Emersons had been respected ministers during a
time in America when the ministry wielded real power over its parishioners. On the other
hand, however, as Halttunen points out, the nineteenth century had already seen a gradual
decline in the ministry’s influence. And while Emerson’s father, as the leader of
Boston’s First Church, had been one of the most prominent ministers in the area and
ought to have wielded tremendous influence over his sons, in fact, Emerson had a
strained relationship with his father and was not eager to emulate him. As Allen notes,
“Emerson’s memory of his father was colored by fear, resentment, and a desire to be
uncharitably candid” (4).
22
The premature death of the elder Emerson exacerbated his
son’s budding rebelliousness, because the loss of the breadwinner thrust the family into
sudden poverty and, as Field contends, alienated the Emerson boys from their affluent
peers. As a result of these letdowns, Emerson began to question the power structures
around him from a young age. At seventeen years old, for example, Emerson
dramatically announces, “Thy hands are now busy with parricide” (JMN 1:218). And at
twenty, Emerson writes a statement that Schreiner calls Emerson’s “youthful declaration
of independence to himself” (12):
Who is he that shall control me? Why may I not speak and write and think with
entire freedom? What am I to the universe, or, the universe, what is it to me?
Who hath forged the chains of wrong and right, of Opinion and Custom? And
must I wear them? I say to the universe, Mighty One! Thou art not my mother.
Return to chaos if thou wilt. I shall still exist. I live. If I owe my being, it is to a

22
For an in-depth treatment of Emerson’s difficult relationship with his father, see Porte.

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destiny greater than thine. Star by star, world by world, system by system shall be
crushed, -- but I shall live. (JMN 2:190)

Although the journey from disgruntled teenager to public iconoclast was not inevitable,
Emerson’s disappointing personal experience primed him to look at traditional authority
with a critical eye long before his formal rejection of the ministry and his controversial
“Divinity School Address” sealed his reputation as a rebel.
The liminality of Emerson’s professional status as a public intellectual also
contributed to his standing as a path-clearing nonconformist. As Halttunen explains,
rapid socio-economic changes before and during the antebellum era thrust a number of
men and women into unclear and untried careers. When they managed to succeed, as
Emerson did, the remaining establishment feared such figures in part because they lacked
a “fixed social status” (29). Such improvisers confounded expectations. Without a clear
slot in the social system, their behavior could be unpredictable and potentially
unbounded. Emerson’s situation was particularly unsettling to conservatives because,
unlike many displaced workers of the era, he chose it deliberately. By twenty-five,
Emerson had already secured himself a place as junior pastor at Boston’s Second Church.
That position, and his wife’s modest fortune, ensured Emerson and his future family a
comfortable life and the community’s respect. But, after his wife’s death, Emerson chose
to resign his post because of doctrinal differences with the church and his personal dislike
of his pastoral duties. Although Emerson did not abandon the church entirely – indeed,
he spent many years occasionally filling in as an itinerant preacher at the same time that
he was building his career as a lyceum lecturer – this resignation signaled a major shift in
Emerson’s attitude towards his career and social status. He rejected the comfort and

68

security of his family’s legacy in the church in favor of freedom and a wider influence.
Moreover, Emerson embarked on a career that, according to several of Emerson’s
contemporaries, did not exist in antebellum America before Emerson created it. Indeed,
according to Alcott, Emerson “made the lecture” as his contemporaries understood it
(qtd. in Emerson In His Own Time 61). These factors – his deliberate rejection of a
respectable calling and his professional improvisation afterwards – added to his
controversial and often inscrutable public performance to make Emerson appear to many
conservatives, at least during the first phases of his career, as a bizarre and potentially
dangerous radical.
But, of course, the same reputation that alienated some beckoned to others.
Specifically, Emerson appealed to young people. In fact, almost every contemporary
review, reminiscence, or biography of Emerson highlights the relative youth of his
audience. Indeed, even as Emerson himself aged, he continued to attract young readers
and listeners, as well as, according to Holmes, those who were “young by nature, if not in
years” (288). Emerson’s supporters saw the youthfulness of his audience as a reflection
of his forward thinking and of the bravery required to put his words into action. In an
1838 review of Emerson, for example, Convers Francis calls his audience “the brightest
young people” and delights in how Emerson’s popularity with them “had become very
annoying to the dii majores of the pulpits & the Divinity School” (qtd. in Emerson In His
Own Time 4). Conversely, Emerson’s detractors saw the same circumstance instead as an
indication of Emerson’s sophistry: such recycled nonsense could only deceive a young
and uneducated audience. For example, in the same year of Francis’s article, Samuel
Gilman complains that Emerson “deceives the young reader or hearer into the belief that

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[his philosophy] is original and valuable” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 56).
Nonpartisans simply attempted to explain the particular attraction Emerson held for his
youthful audience without commenting on its value. For example, in his review a few
years later, C. C. Felton noncommittally describes the various reactions of different age
groups to Emerson: “Many young people imagined they contained the elements of a new
and sublime philosophy, which was going to regenerate the world; many middle aged
gentlemen and ladies shook their heads at the preaching of the new and dangerous
doctrines, which they fancied they detected under Mr. Emerson’s somewhat mystical and
oracular phraseology; while the old and experienced saw nothing in the weekly rhapsody
but blasphemy and atheism” (80). Regardless of their position on the subject, however,
all of Emerson’s contemporaries recognized the particular hold he had on young people
and rightly judged his popularity with them as the primary key of his success.
But Emerson’s appeal to the youth of his country and abroad was not merely the
result of shared values or a pleasing persona. He deliberately courted young people. For
example, in “Self-Reliance,” Emerson not only states that young people have their share
honor and that everyone ought to “pay homage” to this virtue when they see it in them
(Works 2: 60), but he also conflates the essay’s titular virtue, self-reliance, with the
attributes of youth. He explains, “Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it… [and]
God has armed youth and puberty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and
charm, and made it enviable and gracious and its claims not to be put by, if it will stand
by itself” (2: 48). “The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain
as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one,” he argues, “is the healthy attitude
of human nature” (2: 48). Even his description of the self-reliant man as a modern-day

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Spartan subtly compliments his youthful reader. “Self-Reliance” appears in the same
collection as his less famous essay “History” in which he likens the ancient Greeks to “a
gang of great boys” (2: 25). Emerson also makes the youth the hero of his 1841 lecture,
“The Conservative” (published in the 1849 collection Nature; Addresses and Lectures).
Although, in this lecture, Emerson suggests that conservatism provides an important
balance to innovation, in fact he can barely conceal his contempt for the former
worldview, which, in an extended allegory, he symbolizes as an old person attempting to
thwart the ambitions of the youthful protagonist. In general, Emerson contends, the
conservative “has meanness in [his] argument,” “is always apologizing,” “must deny the
possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet,” and “stands on man’s
confessed limitations” (1: 298). The youth, on the other hand, is, according to Emerson,
“an innovator by the fact of his birth” and, as an innovator, “is always in the right,
triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success” (1: 298). Likewise, in “Power,” he calls
conservatism “timorous and narrow” and suggests that it rightly “disgusts the children,
and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air into radicalism” (6: 64). As these statements
suggest, throughout his career, even when he was no longer young himself, Emerson
idealized youth and defended its claims. To individual young fans, Emerson was
unfailingly supportive and generous with his time. It is no wonder then that he succeeded
in earning the passionate devotion of so many young followers and the suspicion of so
many of their elders.
But Emerson’s power over his audience, young and old, cannot be reduced to
simple, bald-faced strategies of flattery. The most important factor behind his success as
a leader was his personal charisma. Put bluntly, Emerson seduced. In explaining

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Emerson’s effect on the people around him, witnesses are surprisingly consistent in the
language they use. First, they emphasize his charm. But, by calling Emerson
“charming,” it is clear that they do not simply mean that Emerson had a winning
personality: they mean that Emerson, like the popular mesmerists of the era, had the
power to control people’s minds. For example, Lowell describes Emerson’s stage
presence as a kind of magical lure: “the charm of his voice, his manner, and his matter
has never lost its power over his earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its
enchanting meshes” (391). Similarly, an anonymous reviewer writing under the
pseudonym “A Disciple” insists, “The charm of his presence is pervasive, like music. He
commands the attention of his audience, and constrains their sympathy by a power which
they cannot analyze, by a spell that transcends their knowledge” (590). Again, the
keynotes are magic (“charm” and “spell”) and entrapment (Emerson “commands” and
“constrains”). Both Henry James and Margaret Fuller even felt a little unsettled by his
power over them. James, for example, complains that Emerson “bewitches one out of his
serious thought” (qtd. in Taylor 72), and after a stay with the Emersons, Fuller confides
to her journal: “I ought to go away now these last days I have been fairly intoxicated with
his mind [sic]. I am not in full possession of my own. I feel faint in the presence of too
strong a fragrance” (Fuller, Letters 3:70). Nathaniel Hawthorne also resorts to a scent
metaphor to describe Emerson’s pervasive (and perhaps, in Hawthorne’s mind, insidious)
influence over the minds of those around him: “It was impossible to dwell in his vicinity,
without inhaling, more or less, the mountain-atmosphere of his lofty thought, which, in
the brains of some people, wrought a singular giddiness” (CE 2:42). Indeed, in addition
to James and Fuller, McAleer persuasively argues that Christopher Cranch, Caroline

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Sturgis, Ellery Channing, and Henry David Thoreau were all deeply, giddily infatuated
with Emerson. Enchantment, intoxication, infatuation – the prevalence of such ideas in
so many of the accounts of Emerson’s relationship with his audience shows that
Emerson’s power as Literary Concord’s leader, and eventually as America’s premier
celebrity, had an enormous non-rational element to it.
In fact, some witnesses even liken Emerson’s hold over his audience to primal
forces of nature such as electricity, gravity, and magnetism. For example, in his 1847
review of Emerson’s poetry, C. A. Bartol likens Emerson to a “battery” and warns, “To
read his finer pieces is to our poetic feeling like receiving a succession of electric shocks”
(256). A few years later, David Wasson pleads with Emerson: “Speak softly…electricity,
they tell us, is necessary to life, but lightning kills” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 313).
Similarly, Whipple turns to a metaphor of gravitation to explain Emerson’s effect: “[T]he
friend or acquaintance, however he might differ from him in opinion, felt the peculiar
fascination of his character, and revolved around this solar mind in obedience to the law
of spiritual gravitation— the spiritual law operating, like the natural law, directly as the
mass, and inversely as the square of the distance. The friends nearest to him loved and
honored him most; but those who only met him occasionally felt the attraction of his
spiritual power…” (119). Octavius Brooks Frothingham takes Emerson’s “personal
magnetism” as a given in his defense of Emerson against Alcott’s critique of his
supposed impersonality, as does Charles Woodbury in his effort to explain Emerson’s
appeal. As Halttunen explains, nineteenth-century writers frequently resorted to
scientific metaphors of this type to explain influence like Emerson’s, and, as Alan
Ackerman Jr. suggests in Portable Theatre: American Literature and the Nineteenth-

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Century Stage, it was particularly common for people to apply such metaphors to
successful orators and other performers.
Emerson’s critics also did not shy away from the sexual implication of Emerson’s
power over his audience, although, as Bonnie O’Neill shows in “The Best of Me is
There: Emerson as Lecturer and Celebrity,” few could agree about how it manifested.
According to O’Neill, both Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Willis saw Emerson as a
traditionally masculine figure, a position that Eric Cheyfitz defends in The Trans-parent:
Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson. O’Neill points out, in particular, the
prevalence (both explicitly and implicitly) of the idea of penetration in Lowell and
Willis’s descriptions of Emerson’s power, a concept that turns up repeatedly in other
contemporary reviews of Emerson as well.
23
On the other hand, as McAleer notes, many
friends and critics saw an unmistakable androgyny at work in Emerson’s persona. James,
for example, swears that, “no maiden ever appealed more potently to your enamoured
[sic] and admiring sympathy” (The Atlantic Monthly 741); Alcott contends that, “The
best of Emerson’s intellect comes out of its feminine traits” (qtd. in Leverenz n.12, 317);
and John Albee gushes, “His manners – how shall we speak justly of them! They were
those of the finest woman one has ever seen or heard” (21). Moreover, although
Emerson, reflecting his era’s traditional view of the genders, occasionally uses the
feminine in a derogatory sense, he repeatedly defends androgyny as an ideal in his
journal: “The finest people marry the two sexes in their own person. Hermaphrodite is

23
See, for example, Woodbury: “To every comer he was a fact and experience,
undissuadable, penetrating to the region of motive and source of volition…” (121). See
also Whipple: “[H]is voice had the stern, keen, penetrating sweetness which made it a fit
organ for his self-centered, commanding mind” (qtd. in Emerson In His Own Time 106).

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then the symbol of the finished soul…in every act shall appear the married pair: the two
elements should mix in every act” (JMN 8: 380), “the feminine element which we find in
‘men of genius’” (JMN 10: 394), and “when a man writes poetry, he appears to assume
the high feminine part of his nature…a king is dressed in feminine attire” (JMN 8: 356).
Emerson’s reflections on androgyny, like many of Emerson’s philosophical musings in
his journal, were likely an attempt to come to terms with and defend his own self-
presentation.
Although Emerson uses the Greek god Hermaphroditus as the emblem of ideal
androgyny, for many critics Emerson’s own masculine-feminine allure points to another
Olympian. In reference to Emerson’s ability to intoxicate his fans, Richardson calls him
“Dionysian” (Emerson 16, 229, 234, 432), and Richardson’s comparisons offer a useful
way of explaining how both the ultra-masculine and androgynous visions of Emerson’s
sexual allure could coexist. Richardson’s idea of Emerson as a Dionysian figure allows
for a kind of androgyny that, rather than compromising Emerson’s masculine potency,
simply adds a picante element of feminine appeal to the mix, thereby increasing the net
effect. And this ambiguity in turn contributes to the pleasurable disorientation of his
audience. Emerson himself asserts the value of creating Dionysian ecstasy in an
apostrophe to the god in his journal: “O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this
multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols,
perishing for want of electricity to vitalize this too much pastime; and in the long delay,
indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money. Pour
for them, O Bacchus, the wine of wine. Give them, at last, Poetry” (Works 9: 125). One
of his early poems, “Bacchus,” also discusses the virtues of the ecstatic state as the

75

speaker begs the god for such intoxication. In this way, just as his role as a lecturer put
him outside any established professional system, Emerson’s ambiguous sexual charge
again challenged his contemporaries’ settled boundaries, thus imbuing him with an
intriguing and, to some, even dangerous aura.
In fact the very difficulty involved in pinning down Emerson’s allure became, in
effect, an aspect of it. A number of Emerson’s contemporaries, in recounting their own
experiences with him, struggle to quantify his confusing appeal, despite being powerfully
affected by it. For example, Bremer came to Concord to visit Emerson because she had
heard rumors that he was “a man of singular beauty…true and beautiful…very handsome
and tall of stature…” (28-29). Upon meeting him, she was surprised to find him “not so
handsome as I had imagined him,” as well as “peculiar” and “cold” (118). Bremer’s
cognitive dissonance brought out the detective in her, and she became determined to find
the secret of “this sphinx-like individual” (118). And by imperceptive degrees, her
obsession grew. She writes, “I must see more of him, and understand him better” (121-
122). In the end, Bremer suggests that Emerson’s appeal lies in his “strong, noble, eagle-
like nature,” coupled with his “beautiful” voice (153).
24
Moreover, she finds that she
dislikes the thought of leaving him. After convincing Emerson to sit for him, the Scottish
painter David Scott went through a process similar to that which Bremer experienced.
Instead of hearing rumors of Emerson’s attractiveness, Scott had become enamored with
Emerson through his writing. But, like Bremer, upon meeting Emerson he was surprised
that Emerson was not physically beautiful. “My first impression of him was not what I
expected it would have been,” he writes, “His appearance is severe, and dry, and hard”

24
Several of Emerson’s contemporaries similarly see his voice as his primary asset.

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(363). And like Bremer, he also initially describes Emerson as “guarded and cold” (363).
Although Scott does not document his detective work as candidly as Bremer, it is clear
that he experienced a similar process of enlightening. By the time Scott had finished his
portrait of Emerson, he was again smitten with his subject and even insisted on including
a sentimental rainbow in the painting’s background to symbolize the hope Emerson
inspired in him.
25

O’Neill argues, however, that seduction could never have been Emerson’s
intention. If he enchanted his contemporaries, she suggests, it was a “communicative
failure” or at least an “uncontrolled success” (746), because such “erotically charged
sympathy” must be at odds with his intended “intellectual receptivity” (744). While
O’Neill is quite right to recognize that no performer can definitively control his or her
audience’s response, it is difficult, however, to square the idea of Emerson as an
accidental sex symbol with his constant refrain that, “If the orator doesn’t command his
audience they will command him” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 228). In his essay
“The Poet,” for example, Emerson – far from rejecting ecstatic communion – outlines
exactly this effect as that which a poet ought to create for his audience. “Every touch
should thrill,” he insists, and then adds more specifically, “If the imagination intoxicates
the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an
emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration
for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about

25
Scott’s use of the rainbow as Emerson’s personal symbol recalls the hyperbolic praise
of an anonymous fan in the 1849 Boston Post article “Emerson as a Lecturer:” “He
inverts the rainbow and uses it for a swing” (qtd. in Emerson in His Own Time 34). A
writer for the New-York Tribune later uses the same rainbow image satirically.

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happily, like children” (Works 3: 17). Although one may argue that the poet’s effects are
not the same as those of a public intellectual like Emerson, from an early age, Emerson
identified primarily as a poet, and many of his critics see his idea that “it is not metres
[sic], but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem” as a sign that Emerson saw all of
his work as a kind of poetry (3: 6). Alcott and Lowell support this view, writing
respectively of Emerson: “A poet by genius, he always writes poetry, though it be in
prose form” and “though he writes in prose, he is essentially a poet” (Alcott qtd in
Emerson in His Own Time 61; Lowell 393). Thus, one may argue that Emerson gives an
outline of his own hopes as a public figure when writes of the ideal poet’s ability to
intoxicate.
Indeed, his journal entries on the subject of lecturing make it clear that the
conception of the poet’s seductive power that he describes in “The Poet” comes directly
from his experience in the lecture hall. In one passage, for example, he calls the lecture
“a new literature” and “an organ of sublime power” (JMN 7: 224). In another, he writes,
“here everything is admissible” and argues that the lyceum environment makes “other
pulpits tame & ineffectual” because, unlike the lecturer, the minister delivers “no nectar,
no growling, no transpiercing, no loving, no enchantment.” A lecturer like Emerson, on
the other hand, “may lay himself out utterly, large, enormous, prodigal” and “may dare to
hope for ecstasy and eloquence” (JMN 7: 265). A year later, grousing over a failure, he is
even more explicit about his desire to seduce: “I have not done what I hoped…I said I
will agitate others, being agitated myself. I dared to hope for extacy [sic] and eloquence.
A new theatre, a new art, I said, is mine. Let us see if philosophy, if ethics, if
chiromancy, if the discovery of the divine in the house and the barn, in all works & all

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plays, cannot make the cheek blush, the lip quiver, & the tear start” (JMN 7: 338-9). As a
child of the Romantic era, Emerson saw no contradiction between his intellectual and
moral aims and his Dionysian methods. On the contrary, his education taught him that
the only sure way to influence his listener was through a seduction of his or her
sensations and sentiments rather than simply an appeal to his or her logic.
Moreover, while O’Neill argues that Emerson’s emphasis on self-reliance, his
embrace of impersonality, and his personal anxiety about his appearance precluded a
wholehearted acceptance of his own seductive potential, in fact they did nothing of the
kind. Emerson may have advocated self-reliance, and he may have even been sincere
when he congratulated himself on failing to make “a single disciple” despite “preaching
for decades” (qtd. in Buell, “Emersonian Anti-Mentoring” 356). But, as Buell discovered
by examining Emerson’s actual relationships with his protégés, in reality Emerson
wanted influence over his followers. As Halttunen points out, such hypocrisy was
rampant in the antebellum era: the very people promoting self-reliance were also angling
for social power over their audiences. And Emerson’s reputation for impersonality,
rather than tamp down his seductive appeal, actually heightened it. The antebellum era
had become the “age of personality” due to the public’s insatiable interest in the private
lives of public figures and the pressure celebrities like Emerson felt to offer up
themselves in this way for the consumption of their audience. Indeed, reporters routinely
scavenged for intimate details of Emerson’s life. Under these conditions, Emerson’s
natural aloofness should have offended his audience. However, he had a talent for turning
his shortcomings into his strengths. In this case, Emerson developed a theoretical
justification of his impersonality in “The Oversoul” (which he reiterated in many other

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places): because every person is simply a manifestation of God/The Oversoul, individual
differences do not matter. This explanation, in effect, turned Emerson’s impersonal
attitude into an attractive show of piety. At the same time, just as confusion over
Emerson’s appeal itself became an aspect of Emerson’s appeal, Emerson’s very reticence
became an enticement to his fans. Unlike celebrities like Nathaniel Parker Willis who
offered up their private lives to the public eagerly, Emerson held his coolness around him
like a veil under which the public ached to peek. Finally, although Emerson is on record
repeatedly disparaging his appearance, there is no evidence that this anxiety followed him
onto the public stage. “On the platform,” Railton explains, Emerson’s “frigid and
laborious speech could give way to eloquence, estrangement to reunion, frustration to
fulfillment” (31). Even O’Neill admits that Emerson experienced “relative comfort in the
public arena of the lecture hall, as compared with the private arena of intimate
relationships,” but she implies that this comfort was compromised when “attention to his
body rather than his ideas [became] the focus of his success” (741). O’Neill’s claim,
however, overlooks the fact that people – especially professional performers – may
simultaneously feel both insecurity and power in the public reception of their bodies and
that a public intellectual like Emerson may not see a strict division between the reception
of his ideas and the reception of his performance of his ideas.
O’Neill’s belief that Emerson experienced frustration when his audience appeared
to dwell on his person rather than his ideas draws on the common critical view of
Emerson as a naïve or resistant participant in the growing celebrity culture of the
nineteenth century.
26
But, in fact, Emerson was an avid consumer of both celebrity

26
See also Dowling, Capital Letters, and Mattheissen.

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culture (as a fan of Lord Byron, the Lake Poets, and Thomas Carlyle, for example) and of
lectures (as a fan of Edward Everett, Daniel Webster, and William Channing, for
example) from a young age, and by the time he had launched his own career, he would
have been under no illusion about his audience’s response to him. Indeed, in his essay
“Character,” Emerson approvingly lists several representative men whose reputations
“outran all their performance” due to their audience’s attention to their persons. He calls
such personality-based influence “a reserved force which acts directly by presence, and
without means” (Works 3: 89). He adds, again approvingly, that “[w]hat others effect by
talent or by eloquence, this man accomplishes by some magnetism” (3: 90). Emerson
knew that his personal magnetism, not argument, was the right tool for controlling his
audience.
But charisma was not enough on its own. Antebellum American popular culture
was also full of cautionary tales of unscrupulous enchanters who hid evil intentions
behind attractive facades, and Emerson would certainly have been careful to avoid such
charges. According to Halttunen, “American Victorians condemned hypocrisy as a major
social threat” (xiv). Thus, an appearance of sincerity became an invaluable tool to anyone
wishing to gain influence over others. A reputation for such authenticity was especially
critical to a lecturer like Emerson, given that he often shared the stage with showman
scam-artists such as P.T. Barnum. Because Emerson faced a diverse and often skeptical
audience, as Field notes, “[h]is utter lack of hypocrisy, or even the semblance of it,
Emerson well understood, was critical to his success on the lecture platform” (146).
Earlier generations of orators had impressed with theatrical performances of bombastic
utterance and exaggerated display, but they had had the weight of their own pedigrees

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and the dignity of their venues to vouchsafe their credibility. Outside of New England,
Emerson’s family name counted for little and, although the lyceum circuit would
eventually gain a reputation for providing solid education, it was still struggling with its
identity when Emerson began lecturing. Because of the fragility of the trust he initially
shared with his audience, giving his audience even a hint of insincerity meant risking his
authority altogether.
In response to this precarious situation, Emerson created a stage persona of, at
that time, unparalleled sincerity. His projection of authenticity was so effective that it
even influenced antebellum acting styles: his example encouraged actors to give up the
previously standardized dramatic gestures and vocalizations in favor of more natural
behavior on stage. Several of Emerson’s friends and critics detail his unique performance
style. Emerson, they say, appeared in front of his audience as a funny-faced, gangly
individual, dressed in ill-fitting, outdated ministerial clothes. He read his entire speech
directly from his notes, with little variation in his tone, and used minimal gestures.
Occasionally, he would appear to lose his way and would fumble with his pages in an
apparent effort to find his place. Frequently, he would pause, as if searching for the right
word, only to find it a moment later in a sudden illumination. Many audience members
were left with the impression that Emerson was mostly speaking to himself and that,
despite having his notes in front of him, he had improvised most of the speech on the
spot. His pithy aphorisms seemed merely “agreeable accidents of his oratory” (Sanborn
qtd. in Emerson In His Own Time 44); his magnificent voice, simply a lucky genetic gift.
The effect was unprecedented and completely disarming. Indeed, despite Emerson’s
own, possibly disingenuous, evaluation of himself as “the worst known public speaker”

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(qtd. in Higginson, Contemporaries 9), some witnesses went as far as to rank the
experience of listening to Emerson “as the most marvelous and fruitful we have ever had”
(Lowell qtd. in The Radical 476).
Even without the aid of the physical attractions he brought to the stage, Emerson
furthered this impression to a certain extent in his written works. Matthiessen argues, for
example, that “[w]e are often able to hear an actual speaking voice behind Emerson’s
words” (39). This lifelike effect at least partially stems from Emerson’s writing process.
According to Alcott, to make an essay or lecture, Emerson gathered together as many
discrete passages on a subject as he thought he needed, usually from his notebook, and
then arranged them intuitively into the final product, adding transitions where necessary.
As Richardson tactfully puts it, “the secret of his prose is the sentence” (Emerson 202),
and as Howells reports, many of Emerson’s peers considered him “the byword of the
poor paragrapher” (np). Indeed, Emerson’s writing process made rigorous global
structuring virtually impossible. However, what Emerson’s method lost in organization, it
gained in intimacy. Because he eschewed formal outlining, the results resemble the
sometimes haphazard, sometimes inspired logic of conversation.
In addition to his own performance of such, Emerson also writes explicitly about
the importance of sincerity. In “Spiritual Laws,” for example, he declares, “Faces never
lie,” and “A man passes for that he is worth” (Works 2: 157). “No man need be deceived
who will study the changes of expression,” he explains, “When a man speaks the truth in
the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. When he has base ends and speaks
falsely, the eye is muddy and sometimes asquint” (2: 156). Emerson believed, as did
many others during the antebellum years, that faces and bodies faithfully revealed a

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person’s character to anyone who knew what to look for. Thus, in Emerson’s mind, it
was foolish to misrepresent oneself. Moreover, Emerson believed that even successful
deceivers ultimately gained nothing of value from their deception. In the same essay, he
writes, “Pretension never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized the
world, nor abolished slavery” (2: 158). Applying this ideal of sincerity directly to his
own profession, he argues, “It is the vice of our public speaking that it has not
abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator but every man should let out all the
length of all the reins; should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force
and meaning is in him” (2: 142). By taking on the issue of sincerity and showing how he
saw it applying to himself (the “orator” as well as the “man”), Emerson used this essay to
assure his audience of his commitment to sincere expression.
As much as Emerson and his audience wanted to believe in the power of sincerity,
however, Emerson’s desire for commercial success put certain limits on his ability to
express himself authentically. As noted earlier, Emerson went to great lengths to
downplay the differences between his own positions and those of his audience, a
tendency that turned him into a useful cipher for a variety of people. But, perhaps more
importantly, Emerson’s celebrity persona itself restrained his authentic expression.
Despite all of the talk of Emerson as Proteus, in fact, Emerson’s performance became
largely fixed. For example, Lowell writes, “The announcement that such a pleasure as a
new course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as I am, is something like those
forebodings of spring that prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the less
novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. We know perfectly well what we are to
expect from Mr. Emerson, and yet what he says always penetrates and stirs us” (394).

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While Lowell seems to believe that Emerson pleased his audience despite his familiarity,
in fact, it was this familiarity to which his audience primarily responded. Indeed,
Emerson’s rare efforts to break out of his customary role illustrate its constraining power.
The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, for example, angered Emerson enough to depart
from his usual cheerful style to rail against its injustice. According to Whipple, who was
in the audience, an unusual “chorus of hisses” (141) greeted him in response. While
Whipple praises Emerson for his composure in the face of this heckling, he naïvely
believes that Emerson “seemed absolutely to enjoy the new sensation.” On the contrary,
Emerson’s slow and ultimately tepid embrace of the abolitionist cause even after the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Law testifies to his hesitance to replay such a scene.
Lecturing was Emerson’s livelihood, and – as his journal entries on the subject attest – he
took pleasing his audience seriously. Thus, Emerson’s reputation as a truth speaker, by
necessity, was largely an illusion.
27

The improvisational quality of his lectures was also an illusion. Emerson may have
told fans such as A. B. Muzzey that he spent little time preparing his lectures and
invariably only at the last minute, but the Emerson children’s accounts tell a different
story. For example, after she had finished writing an essay, Ellen remembers her father
telling her: “Now we must polish the work and remove all signs of the labour [sic]” (qtd.
in Emerson in His Own Time 162). She also recounts her father practicing his lectures
upwards of twenty times to ensure that he would not laugh at the funny parts and ruin the
effect. Edith remembers her father training her in recitation techniques, particularly the

27
As the negative reaction to his critique of the Fugitive Slave Law suggests, beyond the
ethical limits of Transcendentalism itself, the careerist necessity of maintaining his
familiar persona was another factor impeding Emerson’s ability to react naturally, as
many of his writing peers had, to the injustices he saw around him.

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use of inflection and pausing. Edward also discusses his lessons in oration with his
father, during which Emerson emphasized the necessity for maintaining control of the
audience’s reactions. In fact, Emerson was so interested in oratorical technique, and so
sure of his mastery of it, that he briefly desired a post as professor of rhetoric at Harvard.
After his death, a few members of Emerson’s inner circle also revealed that his reputation
for improvisation had been overstated. For example, Annie Adams Fields, his publisher’s
wife, openly admired Emerson’s preparation: “The labor bestowed upon his own work
before committing himself to print was limitless” (461). In short, the fumbling, pausing,
and all the other marks of Emerson’s supposed improvisation on stage were all part of the
show. As with his organizational technique, Emerson used these ticks to create a sense of
intimacy with his audience. While some critics, such as William Maccall, called out
Emerson for his theatrics and accused him of being “artificial” (778), most of his
audience responded positively to his performance. Audience members recount feeling
warm pity for Emerson when he supposedly lost his place and occasionally even blamed
themselves for his apparent discomfort. They also attest to their pleasure at feeling as
though they were witnessing Emerson discover new ideas in the moment. Indeed, this
sense of immediacy became an important selling point of his lectures and an endearing
aspect of his celebrity persona.
Two months before his eighteenth birthday, an impoverished but still proud
Emerson began to take stock of his prospects. “Shall I embroil my short life with a vain
desire of perpetuating its memory when I am dead & gone in this dirty planet?” he asks.
“Am I then to give my days & nights to a gnawing solicitude to get me a reputation, a
fame forsooth among these worm-eaten, worm-eating creatures of clay, these boys of the

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universe, these infants of immortality as they all must be while they live on earth?” (JMN
2: 231). Emerson’s words, in their emphasis on the vileness of the material world, betray
the conventions of his religious training, but they also show his frustration with the limits
of his vocational choices. Freed from the clergy, Emerson embraced his ambition, these
very same “boys of the universe,” and the fame they gave him. With this new outlook
and its attendant power, Emerson not only created a new vocation for himself, he also
created a new audience to match. In front of this new audience, the normally shy
Emerson transformed into a demi-god capable of enthralling all who heard him – a true
force of nature. Indeed, George William Curtis recalls a speaker who shared the stage
with Emerson one night marveling, “He is easily King of us all!” (qtd. in Emerson In His
Own Time 48). Moreover, those lecture halls saw the beginning of the imaginary
community Emerson would later found in Concord. His fans returned again and again to
recreate the ecstatic experience that the seemingly magical Emerson conjured up for
them, and soon admirers became full-fledged disciples. Boundlessly ambitious, Emerson
used his charismatic powers, his growing celebrity, and the lucre that came with both to
gather his followers around him and to seduce talented individuals like Thoreau and
Fuller to his side to adorn his already glittering reputation. And by 1850, Emerson had
succeeded in remaking Concord in his own image.

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Chapter Two
Walking in Fairyland: Thoreau as Adventure Guide

“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying
adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to
our desolate kingdoms.”

Part invitation, part challenge – these words echoed through the Concord Lyceum
hall many times throughout the 1850s. “Walking” was by far Henry David Thoreau’s
favorite lecture. Indeed, he considered this speech, with its ardent defense of the wild,
his personal manifesto. “I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write
hereafter,” he scrawled at the top of the manuscript. Written during the same explosively
creative period that saw the completion of Walden, “Walking” shows Thoreau working
out the characteristic shape of his desired authorial persona: Literary Concord’s official
guide. As Robert D. Richardson notes in Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind,
Thoreau’s favored themes of wildness and myth-making had begun to take shape in the
early 1840s in the articles “Natural History of Massachusetts” (1842), “A Walk to
Wachusett” (1843), and “A Winter Walk” (1843); and by the late 1840s, they had
coalesced to form a recognizable and marketable guide persona. Responding, often
explicitly, to industrial-era feelings of anger against the capitalist system and nostalgia
for an idealized past, Thoreau, as guide, offered to lead his readers out of their dirty and
corrupt cities into a hidden fairyland, located both literally on the outskirts of Concord
and the neighboring regions and, perhaps more importantly, in the intersubjective space
between those who – as sympathetic readers and, thus, as virtual friends – claimed
residence in the imaginary community of Literary Concord. In this place, they could
reclaim their lost purity in the company of a select community of likeminded adventurers.

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Thoreau capitalized on his skills as a hiker, naturalist, and surveyor, his unusual
knowledge of his hometown’s history, Native American culture, Transcendentalism and
Romanticism, as well as his top-notch Classical education, to cast himself convincingly
in this role.
To understand Thoreau’s choice of persona, one must first understand his vision
of his audience. More than any of his Literary Concord peers (or their English
counterparts), Thoreau aimed his writing most sincerely, and almost exclusively, at a
select group of like-minded readers. To say that he had a limited audience in mind,
however, does not mean that he saw himself as standing apart from more commercially
successful writers, as many Thoreauvian scholars have suggested. It is actually difficult
to pinpoint the origin of Thoreau’s desire for an exclusive readership, but it is likely that
his disappointment in the commercial failure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers was a factor. Although he had long believed that “the best books, if noticed at all,
meet with coldness and suspicion” from the majority of readers (Writings 4: 321), his
willingness to prepay for 1000 copies of A Week in order to see the work published
suggests that, at bottom, he was more optimistic about the mass market than this
statement suggests – at least until he tried to sell A Week. In Walden, ruminating on the
earlier book’s failure, he likens himself to a naïve Indian who does not understand the
relationship between supply and demand: “Thinking that when he had made the baskets
he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man's to buy them. He had
not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other's while to buy
them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would
be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I

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had not made it worth any one's while to buy them” (2: 21). In the end, Thoreau –
defensively licking his wounds – concludes that the book’s value should not rest on its
value to a mass audience and that he will no longer chase one. His original hope of
benefiting a large audience with his ideas gives way, first, to the sullen decision to no
longer attempt to please anybody (“I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling
[my books]”) (2: 21), and later, to the more tempered belief that he should limit his reach
to a select group of individuals (“I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man
in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments”) (2: 357). Thus, in aiming for a
select reader, Thoreau managed to craft a delicate ideal out of a brute necessity.
As it was with Emerson, Thoreau’s reading of William Wordsworth is also likely
a factor in his development of this audience-limiting strategy. Although Thoreau
preferred to highlight his education in older literary works, he did read a selective
bibliography of nineteenth-century writers,
28
and, according to many scholars,
29
he had a
particular affinity for the Lake Poet, Wordsworth. To praise Thomas Carlyle, for
example, Thoreau likens him to Wordsworth (albeit as an inferior version). In the same
review of Carlyle, he describes Wordsworth as possessed of “simple Homeric health” – a

28
In addition to Wordsworth, Stendahl and Byron may have served as models for
Thoreau in this regard. Stendahl dedicated Red and Black to “The Happy Few,” a
reference that some critics believe comes from Byron’s Don Juan (“the thousand happy
few”). Of course, both Stendahl and Byron’s use of the phrase, along with Oliver
Goldsmith’s ironic reference to “the happy few” in The Vicar of Wakefield, likely derives
from Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the titular hero hails his fellow warriors as "we
few, we happy few, we band of brothers." Given his education, it is very likely that
Thoreau would be familiar with this whole tradition.

29
See, for example, Fergenson, J. Gilroy, Moellering, T. Ware, Perry Miller, “Thoreau in
the Context of International Romanticism,” Canby 27, 107, 206, and Lebeaux 9.

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tremendous compliment from a man who worshipped both Homer and health (4: 343).
Thoreau kept both a copy of Wordsworth’s Complete Poetical Works and The Prelude in
his personal library. Moreover, as Joseph Moldenhauer notes in “‘Walden’ and
Wordsworth’s Guide to the English Lake District,” Thoreau references many of
Wordsworth’s favorite Lake District haunts in both A Week and in his earlier essay, “A
Walk to Wachusett.” In the latter work, he also quotes Wordsworth’s “Peter Bell.” In his
Dial essay, “Aulus Persius Flaccus” (reprinted in A Week), Thoreau includes Wordsworth
in a list, with Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Marvell, of the greatest authors of all
time. Later, in A Week, he likens him to Chaucer. Moldenhauer also points out that
Thoreau continued to read Wordsworth avidly into the 1850s. As I mentioned while
discussing Emerson’s efforts to create a tribal energy in his audience, Wordsworth
exclusively hailed what he called the “pure hearts” from within the general body of
readers, a rhetorical move that many later Romantics would copy. Thus, given Thoreau’s
personal affection for Wordsworth’s work and Wordsworth’s influence on Romantics as
a group, it is reasonable to look to Wordsworth as one of Thoreau’s few contemporary
models and, more particularly, as a source for his Romantic strategy of exclusivity. By
showing him how to circumscribe his audience, Wordsworth provided Thoreau with a
useful tool for navigating the literary mass market.
The exact character of this select audience and its relationship to Thoreau’s choice
of the guide persona, however, emerged, not from Thoreau’s reading of European
Romantics, but rather from Thoreau’s engagement with his mentor Emerson’s ideas on
the nature of friendship. Both Emerson and Thoreau, in their respective treatments of the
subject, emphasize the importance of self-reliance in friendship. For both writers, friends

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meet each other as subjects, sovereign in their independence. In “Friendship,” Emerson
envisions ideal friendship as a meeting of “gods” or even “beautiful enem[ies]” and
cautions you to give your friends “room” and ultimately to “[t]reat your friend as a
spectacle.” Contemplating the usual intimacies of friendship, he asks, “Why insist on
rash personal relations with your friend?” (Works 2: 209-210). Similarly Thoreau
imagines ideal friendship as a meeting of flinty-eyed warriors, sitting “not on carpets and
cushions, but on the ground and on rocks” (Writings 1: 291). Both writers emphasize the
dignity, independence, and even combativeness of ideal friendship.
But, at this point, Thoreau and Emerson part ways, and it is this difference that
informs Thoreau’s authorial guide persona. For Emerson, the inter-subjective distance
between self-reliant friends is sacred and must be diligently maintained. Indeed, his
attitude toward friends is identical to his attitude toward books: he appreciates them for
their “lustres” only (Works 3: 233). Accordingly, Emerson warns that friends who
attempt to become too familiar risk losing his attention and respect. “Almost all people
descend to meet,” complains Emerson. “All association must be a compromise, and, what
is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other” (2: 199). Thoreau, on the other hand, despite his
reputation for churlishness, envisions the inter-subjective space between friends as one
desperately in need of exploration: “I know that the mountains which separate us are
high, and covered with perpetual snow, but despair not. Improve the serene winter
weather to scale them. If need be, soften the rocks with vinegar. For here lie the verdant
plains of Italy ready to receive you. Nor shall I be slow on my side to penetrate to your

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Provence” (Writings 1: 303). Thoreau, unlike Emerson, urges willing friends (his ideal
readers) to bridge the distance that lies between them.
In picturing this inter-subjective space as actual geography, Thoreau also gives us
an insight into how his guide persona works. Like Emerson, Thoreau believed in
spiritual correspondences between things: for example, a correspondence between the
orb of the eye and the orb of the earth.
30
Thus, the real geography of Concord, for
Thoreau, corresponds to the imagined geography of this inter-subjective space between
friends (the “fairyland” to which he frequently refers), and guiding his reader through the
one necessarily means guiding him through the other. For example, in his 1859 lecture
“Autumnal Tints” (published in 1862), his ode to the regional changing of the leaves, he
demonstrates his ability to reveal this correspondence between worlds. First, he beacons
his reader to savor the “beauty” of the “golden harvest,” which is “too fair to be believed”
(5: 259): a survey of the natural wonders of the actual scenery. But then he asks, “[D]id
it not suggest a thousand gypsies beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the
fabled fawns, satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth?” (5: 275), encouraging his
friends to join him in the scene’s corresponding fairyland. Moreover, he warns that
“Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much beauty visible to us in
the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, – not a grain more” (5: 285-286).
Thoreau’s fairyland – existing as his representation of the inter-subjective space between
true friends – belonged to his friends, the select readers, alone. The characteristic
combination of travelogue and intellectual musing in A Week is, therefore, not merely an

30
For further information about Emerson’s theory of correspondence, see his essay
“Circles.”

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example of Thoreau following the tradition of the excursion narrative, but rather a
demonstration of his certainty that the contours of the countryside and those of the
imaginary space of Literary Concord align on a spiritual level.
Thoreau’s journal attests to his growing identification with the guide role. In a
1841 entry, Thoreau muses, “I would have men make a greater use of me” and later
writes, “I think I could write a poem to be called ‘Concord.’ For argument I should have
the River, the Woods, the Ponds, the Hills, the Fields, the Swamps and the Meadows, the
Streets and Buildings, and the Villagers” (1: 205, 282). Soon after, however, he realizes
that his material greatly exceeds even the most epic poem. Slowly, as the idea of
Concord as an idealized, imaginary community begins to form in the 1840s, Thoreau
realizes that he might serve well as a guide. In “Walking,” he poetizes suggestively,
“Great guide-boards of stone,/ But travellers none./ It is worth going there to see/ Where
you might be” (5: 215). In an 1850 journal entry (which he reuses in “Excursions”),
Thoreau begins to point at a second, invisible world and his value as a guide: “Man and
his affairs, -- Church and State and school, trade and commerce and agriculture, --
Politics, -- for that is the word for them all here to-day, -- I am pleased to see how little
space it occupies in the landscape. It is but a narrow filed. That still narrower highway
yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller” (2: 43). After the commercial failure
of A Week, however, he bitterly questions his ability to attract followers: “Men will pay
something to look into a travelling showman’s box, but not to look upon the fairest
prospects on the earth” (2: 235). Yet by July 2, 1851, he has recommitted to his vocation:
“A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is
the best symbol of our life” (2: 281). And two months later, he has a clear idea of how to

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express his vocation: “How to live. How to get the most life… That is my every-day
business. I am as busy as a bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that
errand…searching the livelong day for the sweets of nature” (2: 470). Later, he writes, “I
have sometimes imagined a library, i.e. a collection of the works of true poets,
philosophers, naturalists, etc., deposited not in a brick or marble edifice in a crowded and
dusty city…but rather far away in a the depths of a primitive forest…which the heroic
student could reach only after adventures in the wilderness amid wild beast and wild
men” (3: 271). Here, one finds an expression of exactly the kind of privileged imaginary
space he attempts to construct in his works. But contrary to the challenge implicit in this
fantasy, Thoreau did not expect his readers to make the journey alone.
31
He knew that he
could help them.
As a Concord local, avid hiker, amateur naturalist, historian, and philosopher, and
a recognized member of literary Concord’s circle of writers, Thoreau knew he was an
ideal candidate for the guide job and included many advertisements for his relevant skills
in his works.
32
In a typical example from A Week, he not only boasts of his ability to
catch fish with his bare hands, he follows up such an account with an in-depth taxonomy
of the fish in the area, demonstrating both his practical and theoretical knowledge of his
subject. Indeed, he states clearly from the outset that, with “the acquaintance we had
with river and wood, we trusted to fare well under any circumstances” – a promise he

31
Howarth notes that Thoreau offers the names and distances of landmarks he encounters
“for the benefit of future tourists” (qtd 6, 111).

32
Both Buell and Petrulionis explore Thoreau as a guide as well, but neither scholar
focuses directly on the idea of professional intention in the author’s creation of this
persona. Petrulionis calls him a “[f]irst-person travel guide, trail mate, and self-help
guru” (Thoreau in His Own Time xi), and Buell simply assumes his role as a companion
to the reader.

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tacitly extends to readers willing to follow him as well (1: 20). In fact, Thoreau routinely
includes detailed accounts of his resourcefulness in response to various guide-related
challenges. For example, later in A Week he describes his ingenuity in procuring water
where there did not seem to be any:
First, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby
wood, till I came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had
carried travellers up, I lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a
pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet I could not fill my dipper, though I contrived
little siphons of grass-stems, and ingenious aqueducts on a small scale; it was too
slow a process. Then remembering that I had passed a moist place near the top, on
my way up, I returned to find it again, and here, with sharp stones and my hands,
in the twilight, I made a well about two feet deep, which was soon filled with pure
cold water, and the birds too came and drank at it. So I filled my dipper, and,
making my way back to the observatory, collected some dry sticks, and made a
fire on some flat stones which had been placed on the floor for that purpose, and
so I soon cooked my supper of rice, having already whittled a wooden spoon to
eat it with. (1: 194)
Thoreau painstakingly records the steps he takes to solve the problem to highlight his
skill in the face of a difficulty that most men would find insuperable. In doing so, he
impresses his readers with his qualifications as a guide. They can imagine such a skilled
survivalist leading them safely through the wild fairyland he offers.
Part of his value as a guide derives from his particular skills, but part of it – he
frequently suggests – is innate. As he states in A Week, Thoreau believed that ideally,

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“The poet is no tender slip of fairy stock, who requires peculiar institutions and edicts for
his defence [sic], but the toughest son of earth and of Heaven, and by his greater strength
and endurance his fainting companions will recognize the God in him” (1: 362). To
prove that he was a true poet worth following, Thoreau went to great lengths to
specifically demonstrate his own toughness to his readers. For example, in another
passage from A Week, he tells an illustrative story of staying at an inn off the beaten path.
The surly proprietor scoffs at Thoreau’s worries about finding someone awake to pay
when he rises in the morning, telling him that he “should not fail to find some of his
household stirring, however early, for they were no sluggards” (1: 218). Despite this
assurance, Thoreau tells his reader that he rose “by starlight the next morning, before my
host, or his men, or even his dogs, were awake” (1: 219). Thoreau offers this story of his
early rising, as he does many others, to show how much stronger he is than other men,
even sturdy woodsmen like the ones in the inn. Indeed, Thoreau frequently describes
himself in almost superhuman terms. In a remark ostensibly about how to travel cheaply,
for example, he offers even more evidence of his hardy constitution: “I have travelled
thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground
when convenient…” (1: 325). While such boasts gave strength to his detractors’
accusations of egotism, they were essential to Thoreau’s advertisement of his wares. His
readers had to feel that they were in good hands.
But good hands didn’t just mean strong hands. Thoreau also believed that a
proper guide to adventure in Literary Concord would have to be in tune with the beauties
that stirred under the prosaic surface of the world. In his journal, Thoreau shows his faith
in his own possession of such poetic sensitivity. Describing his feelings at the close of an

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especially hot and difficult day, for example, he declares boldly, “I…am at the top of my
condition for perceiving beauty” (8: 436). Again, A Week provides excellent examples of
Thoreau in this mode. Upon hearing the faint hum of some nearby telegraph wires, the
poet Thoreau likens the sound to “an Aeolian harp…singing its message through the
country” (1: 185). And in case his reader has missed the point, he explains how special
his understanding of the moment is: “So have all things their higher and their lower uses.
I heard a fairer news than the journals ever print. It told of things worthy to hear, and
worthy of the electric fluid to carry the news of, not of the price of cotton and flour, but it
hinted at the price of the world itself and of things which are priceless, of absolute truth
and beauty” (1: 185). In this example, Thoreau advertises his Romantic ability to see the
sublime in the ordinary. Moreover, as he suggests in his journal, Thoreau believed that
his talents were god given: “Sometimes, when I compare myself with other men,
methinks I am favored by the gods. They seem to whisper joy to me beyond my deserts,
and that I do have a solid warrant and surety at their hands, which my fellows do not. I
do not flatter myself, but if it were possible they flatter me. I am especially guided and
guarded” (7: 365). In other words, Thoreau’s value as a guide derived from the fact that
he himself was divinely guided. Thoreau wished to show that, unlike any other writer on
the market, unlike even his fellow scribes in Literary Concord, he combined the
toughness and sensitivity necessary to properly guide interested readers around his
hidden fairyland.
Drawing on Emerson’s idea that this fairyland was fundamentally a “mid-world”
(my emphasis) that bridged the real and the ideal (“Experience”), Thoreau presents

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himself as a hybrid creature: half wild and half civilized.
33
In his journal, for example, he
writes, “I walk as one possessing the advantages of human culture, fresh from society of
men, but turned loose into the woods” (8: 437). In an 1886 letter to Francis H.
Underwood, John Shepard Keyes explains, “His philosophy of life was that of an
educated Indian: to read Plato in his wigwam, visit the college library when not hunting
and fishing, and have all the learning and civilization of the past ages, ready at hand when
he cared to seek them…” (qtd. in Thoreau As Seen 208). In other words, with his unusual
combination of rusticity and refinement, Thoreau fancied himself the perfect mediator
between nature and civilization. In his poem “The Fisher’s Boy,” he hints at this
advantage:
My life is like a stroll upon the beach,
As near the ocean’s edge as I can go…
They scorn the strand who sail upon the sea,
Yet oft I think the ocean they’ve sailed o’er
Is deeper known upon the strand to me. (Writings 1: 255)
While the sailors experience the ocean more intimately, their view is limited to their
immediate surroundings because they are too busy navigating. The lowly beachcomber,
on the other hand, can see the ocean from a greater and more stable perspective because
he judges it from a safe distance. Likewise, Thoreau immerses himself in nature as
deeply as he can do so safely, and unlike a real woodsman like Alex Therien, the French

33

In my discussion of Thoreau’s hybrid persona, I will use the term civilized in the way
Thoreau’s contemporaries would have understood it: that is, as a descriptor of someone
who is trained in the conventions of modern (largely Anglo-American) society; not as an
implicit indictment of indigenous culture. In the interests of space, I will also present
Thoreau’s naïve understanding of the connection between Native Americans and nature
without critique.

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Canadian he encounters in Walden, or (to a lesser extent) a Native American like his
Maine Woods guide, Joe Polis, returns regularly to civilization to tell the tale. In
“Walking,” he sums up the unusual situation in which he finds himself: “For my part, I
feel, that with regard to Nature, I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into
which I make occasional and transient forays only” (5: 242). Moreover, unlike Therien
or Polis, Thoreau carries the advantages with civilization with him into the woods. For
example, Thoreau routinely reminds his reader of his formal education, the possession of
which allows him to contextualize and poeticize his experience in nature in a way that the
real wild men cannot. As his critics point out, in addition to the fruits of his education, he
also enjoyed the patronage of friends and family even during his stay at Walden. While
one may argue that these privileges made him a hypocrite in his quest for wildness, they
also made him an ideal translator of the experience for antebellum reader, and thus a
useful guide.
This hybridity also served to make Thoreau, as a guide-figure, warmly familiar to
his readers. Although he claimed to eschew all popular literature, novels in particular, he
had read at least some of James Fenimore Cooper’s wildly successful Leatherstocking
Tales in college and had – whether he liked it or not – absorbed the literary lessons
within.
34
He knew that audiences loved Natty Bumppo, the white man who lived like an
Indian, and – as a great deal of evidence suggests – he likely suspected that they might be
interested in a real-life Natty Bumppo too. Like Thoreau, Bumppo was a tolerated
squatter and jack-of-all-trades who served as a trusted guide to several other characters
who needed to navigate his native woods in the Leatherstocking Tales. And like

34
See, for example, Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau and Thoreau’s Library.

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Thoreau, he bridged two worlds: the Indian and the white man’s. Bumppo is a white man
raised by Native Americans (the Mohicans).
35
In “Kindred Spirits: Cooper and Thoreau,”
George F. Bagby enumerates the “numerous descriptive touches” the two authors shared
(np): for example, the descriptions of the two lakes, Glimmerglass (The Deerslayer) and
Walden Pond and the breaking up of the ice on Otsego (The Pioneers) and on Walden, as
well as their sympathetic treatment of Native Americans. Moreover, Bagby notes that
both Bumppo and Thoreau spent a night in jail. And in his biography of Cooper, Wayne
Franklin goes as far as to suggest that Thoreau’s hut on Walden Pond “literalized Natty’s
fictional home by the shores of Lake Otsego” (xxix). Although Bagby recognizes that
Cooper and Thoreau shared a few common intellectual inheritances – for example, their
tendency to see nature in moral terms, the occasional elegiac tone of their nature writing,
their shared distrust of majority rule, and their belief in visual possession – he and
Franklin make a strong argument for Bumppo as a direct model for Thoreau’s hybrid
White-Indian guide persona.
Neither Bagby nor Franklin, however, address that possibility that Thoreau, in
creating his persona, was influenced more by Daniel Boone – the real-life prototype for
Bumppo – than by Cooper’s character. While Boone could not have been far out of
Thoreau’s sight, however, he was less useful to the denizen of Literary Concord than
Cooper’s invention. As Henry Mills Alden writes in an article for the 1868 edition of
Harper’s Magazine, Thoreau admired Boone’s “Indian nature and sympathy,” but
disliked the other side of Boone’s hybrid persona. As Alden explains, Boone’s pioneer
sensibility, especially as he applied it to the Indian, was unattractive to the Romantic

35
Bumppo is renown for his skill with a rifle, a skill that Thoreau boasts of as well.

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Thoreau. In contrast, Alden believes that Cooper shared Thoreau’s “civilized theory of
the savage life,” which he describes (somewhat unfairly) as “the frontier as fancied in the
comfortable library” (415). Moreover, Cooper’s romanticized version of Boone was a
proven winner on the literary market. As a new writer on the literary scene, Thoreau
would have been looking for exactly such workable models. He had received criticism
for his work’s resemblance to Emerson’s from the outset of his career, and yet the various
domestic, middle-class roles that his peers were adopting did not fit his character. Thus,
looking backward – as Cooper had done – to the days of the pioneers, while using a
nostalgic Romantic filter (through a “tumbler,” as he describes this approach in his
journal), offered Thoreau the best option for building a fitting persona of his own.
36

Some of Thoreau’s friends quickly picked up on this authorial persona and
attempted to reinforce it, with some shrewd adjustments, in their own reviews of his
work. For example, Bronson Alcott’s article on Thoreau, “The Forester,” written shortly
before Thoreau’s death in 1862 and reprinted several times under other titles, attempts to
cement Thoreau’s guide credentials. “I had never thought of knowing a man so
thoroughly of the country as this friend of mine, and so purely a son of Nature,” Alcott
declares, “he has the key to every animal’s brain, every plant, every shrub” (443-445). He
calls him “[a] peripatetic philosopher” and “of all men…the native New Englander.”
Following Thoreau’s own lead, Alcott characterizes the author’s relevant skills in almost
superhuman terms, writing, “His senses seem double, giving him access to secrets not
easily read by other men,” and, several times, even implying a semi-divinity to Thoreau.

36
Of course, this technique of nostalgically looking back to a slightly earlier era was
Walter Scott’s invention. Thus, despite Thoreau’s distaste for novel writing, both Cooper
and Thoreau are creatively indebted to the Scottish writer.

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Alcott tells his readers to follow Thoreau’s call to come walking with him, “where health
and wholesomeness are finely insinuated into our souls.” In another article on Thoreau,
Alcott refers to him as Concord’s resident naturalist, a position, he argues, that is so
valuable that it ought to be standard in any American town. While Alcott picks up
Thoreau’s themes of wildness and Homeric-era heroism here, he diplomatically
downplays the aspects of Thoreau’s writing that initially turned off readers – his raillery
and perceived philosophy of selfishness. Similarly, Ellery Channing depicts a smoothed
out version of Thoreau’s guide persona in his biography Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist.
Picking up the hybridity aspect of the guide persona, he writes of Thoreau’s “unusual
degree of mechanic skill” and assures his reader that “the hand that wrote ‘Walden’ and
‘A Week’ could build a boat or a house,” and that Thoreau “knew the woods as a poet
and engineer” (5). He also makes it clear that, while Thoreau was “familiar” with “the
Indian vocabularies” (55), he was a civilized man at bottom. Surpassing Alcott in his
praise of Thoreau’s skills, Channing adds, “His eye and ear and hand fitted in with the
special task he undertook” (32). And, like Alcott, Channing goes to great pains to deal
with Thoreau’s critics, handling, point by point, what he calls their “void estimate of his
life, his manners, sentiments, and all that in him was” (31).
37

Many contemporary reviewers of Thoreau’s work also intuitively understood that
he was presenting himself as a kind of guide figure hailing a select group of fellow
adventure-seekers from their place among the larger reading population. Moreover, as

37
Like Channing, Thoreau’s other earliest biographers – Franklin Sanborn, Alexander H.
Japp (aka H.A. Page) and Henry Stevens Salt – also go to great lengths to counter popular
assumptions about Thoreau’s coldness and inhumanity, instead emphasizing instances of
his humor and warmth.

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their preoccupation with teasing out the relationship between the corporeal and spiritual
plains in his work suggests, a few even recognized that he was offering a tour, not just of
various spots in New England, but also of the imaginary community that his friend,
Emerson, had been cultivating for over a decade. In his review of A Week, for example,
the Liberator’s critic writes, “We shall accept this invitation of Mr. Thoreau to pass a
‘week’ with him on the same river, and, making that the starting point from which to
ascend to ‘cloud-land,’ we shall accompany him on the wings of imagination as far as we
can sustain such a flight” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 344). This writer recognizes that
Thoreau, in writing A Week, does not merely wish to recount his voyage with his brother,
but also aims at recreating the experience for the reader as both a concrete journey up two
rivers and an exploration of “cloud-land:” the imaginary space he shares with the rest of
Literary Concord’s residents. Another reviewer similarly imagines himself as Thoreau’s
traveling companion: “From the author’s door in Concord, up to the head of Canoe
Navigation on the Merrimack, we float along with the voyagers – the whole scene almost
as distinct to us as to them” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 351). Moreover, he
specifically praises Thoreau’s ability to serve as a guide: “You will have for a guide here,
one to whom the manifold mysteries of nature are open as the signs of the sky and the
ocean to the pilot” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 354). Indeed, most of the reviewers of
A Week understood that Thoreau had written no ordinary excursion narrative, as this sub-
category of the travel narrative genre was understood. While some expressed mild
annoyance that so much of the book was devoted to “Mr. Thoreau’s reveries” and scoffed
that the whole thing “might have been written anywhere” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau
349), most delighted in the opportunity Thoreau afforded them for a true glimpse of

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Emerson’s Literary Concord.
Yet Thoreau complicates this reading by persistently locating his fairyland
explicitly in and around Concord. In “A Walk to Wachusett,” for example, he tells his
audience that the Concord cliffs to which he is headed “served equally to interpret all the
allusions of poets and travelers” and compares them to Homer’s mythologized Mount
Olympus and Virgil’s Etrurian and Thessalian hills (Writings 5: 133). Contemplating the
journey, moreover, he worries that the mountains mark the boundary of his special world
and that “thereafter no visible fairyland would exist for us” (5: 135). In A Week, he
makes a similar connection between the regions of Classical myth and the area’s
riverlands. He begins, “I trust that I may be allowed to associate our muddy but much
abused Concord River with the most famous in history” (1: 10). And coming upon a
village along the way, he writes, “I have not read of any Arcadian life which surpasses
the actual luxury and serenity of these New England dwellings. For the outward gilding,
at least, the age is golden enough…” (1: 256). Writing proudly of the Concord Lyceum,
Thoreau declares the lecture series the mark “from which a new era will be dated to New
England, as from the games of Greece” (1: 102). And of the region’s annual turning-of-
the-leaves, he writes, “If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed
down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last” (5: 259). Although
Emerson saw his mythologizing of Concord as a “whim” and a “weapon” against any
who would disparage Thoreau as provincial, Thoreau sees mythology instead as
“enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being
omitted” (1: 60). Like Arcadia, Concord is both a real and an imagined place. While he
encourages his readers to develop an idealized imaginary community in their minds, he

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insists on a real-life starting point: Concord and the surrounding region.
Perhaps Emerson was right to suspect Thoreau’s glorification of the region as a
defense against personal criticism, but it is more likely that Thoreau knew the potential
value, during this period, of presenting himself as a guide to both Emerson’s imaginary
community and his real home. By 1849, the year of A Week’s publication, Literary
Concord, and Emerson in particular, already had a high enough profile to be quite
marketable. While literary historians traditionally have pointed to the lackluster sales of
Emerson’s essays during the 1840s and the outright commercial failure of A Week as
evidence of the coterie’s cultural marginalization, Richard F. Teichgraeber III
convincingly argues that assessments based entirely on book sales overlook many other
ways that Literary Concord’s reputation spread during this period. Teichgraeber points
out that several prominent newspapers and literary journals reviewed Literary Concord’s
authors throughout the 1840s and that these reviews almost always included lengthy
excerpts from the books themselves. While the cost of the expensively bound Emerson’s
Essays, First Series and Walden was too high for many people, thousands of readers
encountered these works through these lengthy reviews. Moreover, Teighgraeber shows
that accurate assessments of Literary Concord’s reach during the 1840s must include a
transatlantic dimension. Thanks to cheap European reprints of Emerson’s works and the
championing of a few well-placed friends, Emerson’s reputation soared in England well
before he had become a celebrity at home. And as references to Thoreau’s work in the
Dial – the host for much of Literary Concord’s early writings – in the reviews of A Week
show, despite Emerson and Fuller’s inability to make a profit on the journal and their
eventual decision to shut it down, most of America’s literati was at least familiar with the

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publication. Moreover, throughout the 1840s, Literary Concord’s reputation was spread
through the articles of several members of the central coterie, including Thoreau himself,
that appeared in numerous other newspapers and journals. Perhaps most importantly,
Literary Concord’s denizens dominated the highly influential lecture circuit throughout
the decade. Indeed, by the 1850s, far from occupying a small, strange corner of the
public’s imagination, Emerson’s coterie had become world-famous. In reviewing A
Week, for example, the Knickerbocker’s critic assumes his readers’ familiarity with his
subject: “[W]e will give [our readers] a slight account of the book and its author; but we
presume the information will be necessary to only very few” (236). In light of this
evidence, the notion that Literary Concord held an obscure place in the cultural
imagination of mid-century Americans needs to be reevaluated. Thus, Thoreau’s
demonstration of his intimate knowledge of both the real and imaginary Concords would
have served him well with an audience starved for glimpses of Emerson and his friends’
lives.
As this shrewdly practical rationale suggests, not only have many critics
mischaracterized Literary Concord’s reputation in this era, they have also exaggerated
Thoreau’s anti-market sensibility – at least in terms of his own vocation. Because of
Thoreau’s well-known focus on the evils of the marketplace, critics such as Joseph
Krutch have concluded that Thoreau had little interest in participating in such a system as
a professional writer.
38
While Thoreau did chafe against many of the requirements of the
profession, as Steven Fink and Michael Gilmore persuasively argue, the assumption that

38
In describing his view of Thoreau’s relationship to his profession, Krutch famously
quips, “[Thoreau] had no intention of becoming so committed to authorship as to
discover too late that it also was a profession” (46).

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overzealous admirers pressured him, against his natural inclination, to publish is false.
Although Fink argues that “the Transcendentalists tended to regard any active
consideration of audience as adulterating or debasing the work” (“Thoreau and His
Audience” 73), he details several ways in which Thoreau participated enthusiastically in
the machinations of the writing industry from the beginning of his career. While in New
York, for example, Thoreau – at Emerson’s own suggestion – made the rounds to offer
his services to various publishers and editors. Although Thoreau failed to secure a
writing job during this search, he made a good impression on Horace Greeley, the editor
of the New York Tribune, and the two men began a professional epistolary relationship.
Gilmore notes that Thoreau’s correspondence with Greeley was “filled with monetary
details and accounts of negotiation with publishers” (10), and Fink shows that, while
Thoreau was considering his publishing options for his first book, he similarly consulted
with Emerson about potential financial outlays. Moreover, Thoreau was actually
remarkably open to advertising and, when necessary, revising his works for greater
marketability. Again pointing to Thoreau’s relationship with the Tribune’s editor,
Gilmore writes, “Thoreau was willing to follow Greeley’s advice about how to promote
himself with the reading public…He urged Thoreau to advertise his works by publishing
chapters in advance, and Thoreau obliged” (10). In “The Contemporary Reception of
‘Walden,’” Bradley P. Dean and Gary Scharnhorst also outline Thoreau’s cooperation
with his publishers, Ticknor and Fields, calling their promotion of Walden a “well
orchestrated…two-month campaign” (294). Indeed, Thoreau approached the business
side of his writing career with the same practicality he applied to his family’s pencil
company. Yet, Thoreau’s critics are right in their identification of a strain of cultural

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critique and resistance in his work. Like many of his contemporaries, Thoreau was
disgusted by what he saw as the disintegration of traditional communities, the consolation
of wealth in the hands of a few, and the deterioration in most people’s standard of living.
But unlike many of his contemporaries, Thoreau believed a solution existed for himself
and his readers: the imaginary community of Literary Concord.
To Thoreau, both the real Concord and the imagined community of Literary
Concord were healthier environments than those in which most of his contemporaries
currently lived. Indeed, Thoreau – a sufferer of tuberculosis from a family of
tuberculosis sufferers – saw the world primarily in terms of health and disease. In
Walden, for example, he writes, “All health and success does me good, however far off
and withdrawn it may appear; all disease and failure helps to make me sad and does me
evil, however much sympathy it may have with me or I with it” (Writings 2: 87). As this
passage suggests, Thoreau used these opposing terms – health and disease – to judge
everything around him: individuals, groups, institutions, the natural world, goods and
services, actions, and even ideas.
39
Much of his introduction in his early essay “Natural
History,” for example, focuses on this subject. “In society you will not find health,” he
warns, “but in nature” only, as “Society is always diseased” (5: 105). He characterizes
the invisible fairyland he offers, on the other hand, as healthy and wholesome, and he
advises his reader specifically to seek out its “wholesome” scent of pines and the
“restorative” odor of its pastures (5: 105). Thoreau also argues against organized religion
on the grounds that it is only attractive to the sick. In “Natural History,” for example, he

39
In fact, health was a popular term with all of the Romantics on both sides of the
Atlantic, but Thoreau, arguably, goes to greater lengths than any of his contemporaries to
develop this idea.

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swears that a man need only “sleep soundly” to “forget it all between sunset and dawn”
(5: 106). And in A Week, in a similar vein, he adds, “A healthy man, with steady
employment, as wood-chopping at fifty cents a cord, and a camp in the woods, will not
be a good subject for Christianity” (1: 74-75). Later, in A Week, he also cites the poet as
a different example of a person who has benefited from spending time in this healthful
place, noting that here “he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the
gods,” and “[b]y the healthful and invigorating thrills of [such] inspiration his life is
preserved to a serene old age” (1: 365). To Thoreau, the primary benefit of joining the
imaginary community of Literary Concord was health, and he believed that he was
uniquely suited to guide his readers to this goal.
Despite his tuberculosis, Thoreau believed that part of what made him an ideal
guide was that he personally embodied this holistic ideal of health, and he stuffed his
works with pieces of advice for readers who wished to emulate him. From the beginning
of his publishing career, Thoreau included analysis of the elements of health and tips for
his readers on how to maintain it. For example, in “Natural History,” he (self-servingly)
recommends that one “keep some book of natural history always by” as “a sort of elixir”
(5: 105). In “A Winter Walk,” taking up the topic again a year later, he discusses diet in
the same manner: “If our bodies were fed with pure and simple elements, and not with a
stimulating and heating diet, they would afford no more pasture for cold than a leafless
twig, but thrive like the trees, which find even winter genial to their expansion” (5: 167).
Without a doubt, diet becomes a favorite subject of Thoreau’s. In A Week, he declares,
“A man may esteem himself happy when that which is his food is also his medicine” (1:
272). In Walden, for reasons of both health and economy, he recommends “as simple a

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diet as the animals” (2: 68), which he proceeds to break down into minute particulars. In
“Walking” and “Wild Apples,” he also champions exercise as one of the primary keys to
one’s overall fitness. In contrast to his holistic approach to health, he dismisses medicine
as “quackery” (1: 77). Indeed, Thoreau considered such information as essential
preparation for his readers’ initiation into his fairyland.
In addition to discussing health explicitly, Thoreau also included coded references
to this ideal state in the form of two symbols – the seed and the color green – which,
predictably, mystified his critics and inspired those who saw themselves as Thoreau’s
select readers. As a naturalist, Thoreau was intrigued by seeds and marveled at their
hardiness. In his final manuscript “Faith In A Seed,” for example, he writes, “I have
great faith in a seed./ Convince me that you have a seed there,/ and I am prepared to
expect wonders” (xvii). Such power made them perfect symbols for the healthy state
available in Thoreau’s fairyland. In discussing the ways in which his readers could
restore their society to such a state of health in A Week, he writes, “Seeds! there are seeds
enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice
or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor. O thou spendthrift! Defray thy debt to the world;
eat not the seed of institutions, as the luxurious do, but plant it rather, while thou
devourest the pulp and tuber for thy subsistence; that so, perchance, one variety may at
last be found worthy of preservation” (Writings 1: 129-130). Similarly, in praise of the
infamous militant abolitionist John Brown, he writes, “[W]hen you plant, or bury, a hero
in his field, a crop of heroes is sure to spring up. This is a seed of such force and vitality,
that it does not ask our leave to germinate” (4: 418). In both passages, the seed becomes
the symbol for Thoreau and his friends’ individual commitments to improving the world.

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He urges his readers to patiently lay down the foundations for a healthier future by
transforming the present, ailing system, knowing that they may not see the full results
themselves. Likewise, the presence of the color green in his works also signals this
dedication to a healthy state. In an early review of Sir Walter Raleigh’s work, for
example, Thoreau describes his reaction to Raleigh’s writing in green terms: “It is as if a
green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass
in midwinter or early spring” (1: 107). Later, in A Week, Thoreau allows himself
inclusion in this exclusive, green party, writing, “Methinks my own soul must be a bright
invisible green” (1: 250). This announcement confuses at least one of his reviewers who
writes, “‘Give me a sentence,’ prays Mr. Thoreau bravely, ‘which no intelligence can
understand!’ – and we think that the kind gods have nodded” (Lowell qtd. in Jones 26).
At the same time, friend and fellow poet Walt Whitman latches onto the symbol with
enthusiasm and famously applies it to himself in “Song of Myself,” calling grass “the flag
of my disposition, out of hopeful/ Green stuff woven” (16). For both authors, the color
green – reminiscent of grass and leaves and the other elements of Nature in full bloom –
aptly symbolized the state of spiritual health to which they and their readers aspired.
His commitment to health also led him, in a move undoubtedly inspired by
Emerson’s own pronouncements on the subject, to champion a different kind of
“greenness” as an ideal: youth.
40
Like Emerson, Thoreau used this rhetoric to hail his
select readers: both the young and the “young at heart.” While most Romantics,

40
In A Week, Thoreau – trying to bring all of the elements of his personal mythology
together neatly – explicitly draws attention to the metaphoric relationship between youth
and the color green when he writes, “The opinions were of that kind that are doomed to
wear a different aspect to-morrow, like last year's fashions; as if mankind were very
green indeed, and would be ashamed of themselves in a few years, when they had
outgrown this verdant period” (Writings 1: 195).

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following Rousseau, celebrated the child as a pure, unsullied creature of nature, Thoreau
had a particular investment in youthfulness as a symbol of wellbeing. In “Life Without
Principle,” for example, he refers to youth as the developmental stage in which most
instinctively obey “our finest instincts” (Writings 4: 468). The same opinion turns up in
Walden wherein Thoreau suggests that youth is a better “instructor” than age and that the
young person should never be “hindered” from “doing that which he tells me he would
like to do” regardless of what it is (2: 79). Because he identifies youth with wisdom, he
also repeatedly uses the idea of youthfulness to praise others. In A Week, for example, he
declares, “[I]n Homer and Chaucer there is more of the innocence and serenity of youth
than in the more modern and moral poets” (1: 394). In life, Thoreau also frequently
demonstrated his admiration for the young. Emerson, in his eulogy for Thoreau, notes
how he held children in the highest regard and “threw himself heartily and childlike into
the company of young people whom he loved” (Works 10: 456). For Thoreau, young
people represented the ideal of healthy humanity and thus deserved such deference on the
page and in life.
In fact, Thoreau’s worldview seemed to be premised on the idea of eternal youth.
Many readers of Walden criticized Thoreau for the unsustainability of his plan, pointing
out that while such a subsistence-level existence might work in the short term if one were
young and strong like Thoreau himself, it would not serve him into old age or even to the
age when most men would have dependents to protect. Although Thoreau did not
literally believe that one could stay young forever, he did trust that many of the problems
he associated with old age could be forestalled indefinitely with the right attitude. In
Walden’s conclusion, for example, Thoreau tells the story of an artist who was granted

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“perennial youth” because of his “singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated
piety” (Writings 2: 359), suggesting that Thoreau, on some level, believed that old age
was merely a state of mind. It is unclear why Thoreau largely refused to acknowledge the
necessity of aging in his outlook. Perhaps, he always understood that his tuberculosis
would kill him before he reached old age. Perhaps, the specter of his brother’s untimely
death from lockjaw (also very likely helped by tuberculosis) served as an example to him
that one must live for the moment.
41
Perhaps, as a misunderstood young man, he simply
resented his elders’ criticisms and wished to discredit them. What is clear is that Thoreau
considered growing old as something of a moral failing. Famously, in Walden, Thoreau
complains, “I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first
syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors” (2: 20). His immediate
point is that one can only truly learn from personal experience, but the means by which
he makes this point reflect his ongoing prejudice against old age. Earlier, in A Week, he
breaks down his argument against his elders when he takes on Chateaubriand’s implicit
argument that religiosity and patriotism are the products of wisdom because these
feelings tend to grow as one ages. He writes pointedly, “[T]his infirmity of noble minds
marks the gradual decay of youthful hope and faith. It is the allowed infidelity of age… It
is because the old are weak, feel their mortality, and think that they have measured the
strength of man” (1: 137). While Thoreau’s subjects here are religion and nationalism,

41
Walden’s entire argument rests on this idea of living for the moment, which he makes
explicit in the penultimate chapter: “We should be blessed if we lived in the present
always…and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities”
(Writings 2: 346). Of course, while Thoreau pits the present against the past in this
passage, he does not address the value of planning for the future, the primary sticking
point for his critics.

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the terms of his argument all rest on the assumption that old age represents a state of both
physical and moral decline rather than enlightenment.
42

As his rebuttal to Chateaubriand suggests, Thoreau’s primary problem with
disease – and, arguably, he saw aging as merely a form of disease – is that it makes
people cowards. His condemnation of reformers in Walden, for example, partially rests
on this connection. Echoing his earlier criticism of religion as attractive only to the sick,
he writes, “I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his
fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be
righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake
his generous companions without apology” (2: 86). While the average reader might not
see the forsaking of generous companions as a courageous move, as Thoreau’s argument
against philanthropy makes clear, he believes that this decision is the only option for a
man clear-eyed enough to see the larger problem and brave enough to trade the bandage
for the cure: that is, his select reader. Thoreau’s opinion on this matter – the connection
between courage and the “healthy nature” – comes from his reading of Emerson. In
“Self-Reliance,” one of the most important sources for Walden, Emerson describes the
“healthy attitude of human nature” as the “nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner,
and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one” (Works 2: 48).
For both authors, healthy individuals are those who would be willing to defy authority
because of the strength of their own position; and for both authors, this kind of defiance
is the essence of real courage. Thus, in Thoreau’s view, bodily disease, hunger,

42
Again, Thoreau employs a greenness metaphor to naturalize his prejudice. In Walden,
after he has presumably left the topic behind, he slyly writes, “Those plants of whose
greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most
employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man…” (Writings 2: 85).

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backbreaking labor, and even the natural effects of aging compromise one’s integrity
because they compromise one’s strength.
In contrast, Thoreau’s community of the initiated would be full of heroes. As an
example, interestingly, the possibility for this kind of community forms an important part
of his defense of John Brown. He writes of Brown and his followers:
I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good
and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have had him wait till that time
came? — till you and I came over to him? The very fact that he had no rabble or
troop of hirelings about him would alone distinguish him from ordinary heroes.
His company was small indeed, because few could be found worthy to pass
muster. Each one who there laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a
picked man, culled out of many thousands, if not millions; apparently a man of
principle, of rare courage, and devoted humanity; ready to sacrifice his life at any
moment for the benefit of his fellow-man. (Writings 4: 432)
In this passage, Thoreau turns a common criticism of Brown – that his uncompromising
position on slavery was so extreme that he alienated all but the most fanatic individuals
among the country’s slavery opponents – into a sure sign of the probity of his character
and the righteousness of his actions. In Thoreau’s view, Brown was not unpopular: only
selective. And Thoreau does not limit the value of culling out the brave to militants like
Brown. In “Resistance to Civil Government” (originally presented as a lecture in 1848
and published in 1849), for example, he advises his abolitionist readers not to worry
about democratic support, telling them that he “think[s] that it is enough if they have God
on their side, without waiting for that other one,” and adding that, “any man more right

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than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already” (4: 369). In the same work, he
challenges his reader to rise about the cowardly mass with the lament: “Oh for a man who
is a man, and, as my neighbor says, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your
hand through! Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How
many men are there to a square thousand miles in this country? Hardly one” (. In the final
version of Walden, Thoreau also limits his audience to a brave minority.
43
He suggests
that his book addresses “poor students” primarily (4: 364), presumably because in their
present condition they have more potential to join him in heroically resisting the
seduction of wealth and social respectability. In “Life Without Principle,” he makes his
requirements for his readers even more explicit. He tells them bluntly, “You cannot serve
two masters. It requires more than a day's devotion to know and to possess the wealth of
a day,” and warns them that cowardly succumbing to the pleasures of commercial society
for even an instance risks “intellectual and moral suicide” (4: 474). While these kind of
stern admonitions, along with his unflattering descriptions of his neighbors, tended to
repel the average reader with their cruel idealism, they also had the effect of hailing those
among his audience who felt up to the challenge he posed (and, again, the decision lay
with the reader) – exactly his intention.
Thoreau likely at least partially derived his selecting device, heroism, (as he
understood it) from Thomas Carlyle. Although he did not place him on the same level as
Wordsworth, Carlyle was long a favorite of Thoreau’s, as the latter’s admiring 1847
essay “Thomas Carlyle and his Works” attests. He was also an enormous influence on

43
See my discussion of the timeline of Thoreau’s culling strategies. Originally, Thoreau
wished to dedicate Walden to his Concord neighbors, but by 1854, after A Week’s
commercial failure, he removes the dedication. This alteration signals a change in
Thoreau’s view of his audience.

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their mutual friend, Emerson, so that Thoreau received Carlyle’s ideas both through
direct reading and through the filter of Emerson. And when it came to the subject of
heroism in particular, Thoreau considered Carlyle “the Chief Professor in the World’s
University, and [one who] even leaves Plutarch behind” (4: 350). Although, in his
treatment of the subject, On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, Carlyle
makes distinctions between several different categories of heroes, he does subject them
all to the same basic standard which Thoreau, in turn, adopts. For Carlyle, the hero – like
Emerson’s Representative Man – is one who possesses the “wisdom to discern truly what
the Time wanted” and the “valor to lead it on the right road thither” (10). This definition
of the hero derives, in turn, from Hegel’s notion of der Geist seiner Zeit (more commonly
known as Zeitgeist): the spirit of the times. Instead of believing that men are limited by
the age they live in as Hegel did (Lectures on the History of Philosophy), however,
Carlyle suggests that the hero naturally embodies the spirit of his time and that his
actions, therefore, are not limited by this spirit but rather automatically express it, even
create it. Thoreau’s descriptions of John Brown, in his multi-lecture defense of the man,
echo this notion. In addition to explicitly calling him “heroic and noble,” he also
specifically calls him “the greatest and best man” of the nation (Writings 4: 442), and
offers him as a representative of the North. He suggests that Brown, “if consulted as to
his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside”
because, in Thoreau’s view, he had already shown that he alone could see what was right
for the country (4: 441). In contrast, Brown’s contemporaries “were not leading, but
being dragged” (4: 442). Not only does Thoreau pick up the idea that the hero has an
intuitive sense of what the world needs from him and courage to follow through on this

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recognition, he also picks up Carlyle’s notion of the hero as godlike. In describing
Brown, for example, he asserts, “[A] hero in the midst of us cowards is always so
dreaded. He is just that thing. He shows himself superior to nature. He has a spark of
divinity in him” and even likens him to Christ (4: 436). In “Last Days,” he calls Brown
“miraculous” and marvels “that the ‘little dipper’ should be still diving quietly in the
river, as of yore” after his death (4: 441). Although Thoreau himself does not pretend to
quite this much heroism and does not expect it of his readers, by offering up Brown as his
ideal, he hails the audience he desires: those readers who, like Thoreau, recognize and
value this kind of courage above all else.
Carlyle gives Thoreau his selecting device. He also clarifies Thoreau’s definition
of the writer’s role in the latter’s wrestling with Carlyle’s heroic categories. Carlyle
divides heroic writers into two classes: the poet and the man of letters. The poet is a hero
because he serves his nation as “an articulate voice” and “speak[s] forth melodiously
what the heart of it means” (94). The man of letters is a hero because he “speaks forth
the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books” (127). These definitions encompass
both Thoreau’s mission to deliver up his idealized fairyland to his readers and his desire,
like Emerson, to create a truly American literature. But as important as Carlyle’s embrace
of the hero-writer is to Thoreau, his qualifications and criticisms of the type are even
more important. Carlyle calls the poet-as-hero “less ambitious” than his fellow heroes
and asserts, “The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would
never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself
were at least a Heroic warrior too” (93-94). He calls the man-of-letters-hero a “rather
curious spectacle” of the modern age and laments that “the Hero from of old has had to

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cramp himself into strange shapes” to become the man-of-letters, because “the world
knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world”
(184). In his review of Carlyle, Thoreau defends the poet against these accusations, but –
as F. O. Matthiessen suggests in his analysis of Thoreau’s vigorous reputation in
American Renaissance – in his development of his own writing persona Thoreau clearly
takes them to heart. Although he continues to dwell on this problem throughout his
career, he grapples with the subject most fully in A Week. In writing of his profession, he
admits, “[The poet] has no longer the bardic rage, and only conceives the deed, which he
formerly stood ready to perform… now the hero and the bard are of different
professions” (Writings 1: 392). And later, warming to his topic, he writes in disgust: “A
modern author would have died in infancy in a ruder age” (1: 402). In contrast, he asks
for books that give no “cowering enjoyment,” but – like the works of men of action – are
instead “dangerous to existing institutions” (1: 99). And he sees the ideal author as a
“captive knight, after all” and a “Cincinnatus of literature” (1: 402): that is, a part-time
scribe who only writes to record the wisdom gleaned from his own active and heroic life
as a kind of public service. In the same work, he offers himself up as an example, calling
himself a “brave man,” “well-seasoned and tough,” and dares his readers to “use” him
roughly (1: 304). In later works, he also makes it clear that writing represents an
intermission in his real life, which he believes is primarily characterized by heroic
activity rather than mere contemplation. Thus, by both defending the writer from
Carlyle’s criticisms and attempting to personally avoid such traps, Thoreau finds the
terms he must satisfy in his creation of his authorial persona.
As such references to knights and Roman dictators indicate, Thoreau frequently

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uses the soldier, and especially the Spartan soldier, as a symbol of the kind of courage he
wishes to foster in his readers: an image that puts militant action and physical sacrifice
above the mere good intentions of Wordsworth’s pure-hearted.
44
This soldier figure first
appears in Thoreau’s unfinished 1840 essay “The Service,” but he only begins to take on
his characteristic appearance in A Week. Responding to Emerson’s laudatory poem, “The
Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” Thoreau laments that in his day, “Lexington and
Concord stand/ By no Laconian rill.” Later, he writes, “When we are in health all sounds
fife and drum for us” (1: 183). And in his discussion of ideal friendship, he declares that
the “relation implies such qualities as the warrior prizes; for it takes a valor to open the
hearts of men as well as the gates of castles” (1: 291). Later, in Walden, Thoreau
repeatedly likens himself and his friends to soldiers. In discussing his unfashionable
clothing, for example, he writes, “When the soldier is hit by a cannonball, rags are as
becoming as purple” (2: 28-29), and in explaining the intention of his experiment, he
announces, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily
and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life” (2: 101). When he loses his copy
of the Iliad, he tells his readers that he imagines that it has been found by “a soldier of
our camp” (2: 191). Ruminating on the evidence of another man’s sojourn in the same
area, he notes that the man, Col. Quoil, “had been a soldier at Waterloo” and avows, “If
he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again” (2: 288).
45
In
discussing his impatience with world news, he declares that he is “ready to leap from

44
Again, Thoreau’s militarizing of Wordsworth’s select audience suggests a desire to
evoke Shakespeare’s original “band of brothers.”

45
In his journal, Thoreau recollects his one and only meeting with Quoil a few years
earlier. He implies that Quoil was an alcoholic and out of shape.

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their court-yard like the Mameluke bey” (2: 363). And, of course, his famous aphorism,
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a
different drummer,” also hits a distinctly martial note (2: 358). He even likens Walden
itself twice to Valhalla, the warrior’s heaven of Norse mythology (2: 223, 326).
Although Thoreau is not always admiring of real-life soldiers in his works, the soldier as
symbol becomes one of his most consistent means of hailing his ideal reader.
46

Thoreau’s abolitionist essays, in particular, being very specific calls-to-action,
abound with images of the soldier. In his defense of John Brown, for example, he dwells
heavily on his martial qualities. In “A Plea,” he tells his reader that Brown is “like the
best of those who stood at Concord Bridge once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker
Hill” and also compares him to Oliver Cromwell (4: 411). Moreover, he notes that Brown
“was a man of Spartan habits… as became a soldier” (4: 413). Thoreau also fills his
defense of Brown with subtle military language that reinforces this image. He calls
Brown’s individual followers “recruits” and their body a “company” and he talks of their
ability to “pass muster” with Brown (4: 432). In “Last Days,” Thoreau returns to his
soldier symbol in the following jab at his opponents: “[Pardoning Brown] would have
been to disarm him, to restore to him a material weapon, a Sharps' rifle, when he had
taken up the sword of the spirit--the sword with which he has really won his greatest and
most memorable victories” (4: 449). Thoreau’s use of Brown as a model for the soldierly
ideal privileges the active, sacrificial quality of this image. Although, when Thoreau

46
In “Resistance to Civil Government,” for example, he criticizes the soldier’s
unquestioning obedience to authority: “Now, what are they? Men at all? or small
movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit
the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make,
or such as it can make a man with its black arts – a mere shadow and reminiscence of
humanity” (Writings 4: 359).

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wrote his original lecture on Brown he was not yet aware of the violent extent of the
latter’s actions, he did know that – unlike many abolitionists who merely begged their
opponents to end of slavery – Brown had actually raised arms against the slaveholders.
Likewise, Thoreau wanted soldier-like readers who were ready to actually take action for
what they believe, to honor Brown through “emulation” – whether by undermining the
capitalist system that sustained slavery or by resisting the government that condoned it –
rather than through mere “short-lived praises” (4: 453).
Thoreau’s use of the soldier motif was a sincere expression of his own militancy
and asceticism. When he characterized this figure as specifically Spartan-like, however,
the soldier also served his career by placing him firmly in Literary Concord.
47
While it
would not surprise his readers to see Thoreau referencing Ancient Greece – after all, his
works were full of self-conscious allusions to his fine Classical education
48
– this
particular figure, the Spartan soldier, quietly hailed all of the virtual residents of Literary
Concord by putting Thoreau’s work in conversation with Emerson’s. In 1836, Emerson
introduces the image in his lecture “Self-Reliance” (published in 1841). In outlining the
path to self-reliance, he calls on his readers to “hear a whistle from the Spartan fife” and
“enter into the state of war” (Works 2:60, 72). He expands on these suggestions in his
1841 essay “Heroism” in which he specifically defines the quality, as Thoreau will later,

47
Thoreau’s lengthy treatment of friendship in A Week performs a similar function by
likewise putting him in conversation with Emerson, Fuller, and other Transcendentalists.

48
Perhaps the most famous example is his reference to the copy of the Iliad, which he
tells his readers he kept on his desk during his stay at Walden Pond like some modern-
day Alexander the Great (Writings 2: 111).

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as a “warlike [or] military attitude of the soul” (2: 250).
49
Margaret Fuller keeps the
conversation going in her 1840 essay “The Great Lawsuit” (later expanded and
republished as Woman in the Nineteenth Century) by attempting to enlarge on Emerson’s
image of the Spartan soldier to include women like herself.
50
She tells the readers that
“the women of Sparta were as much Spartans as the men,” likens one of her own heroes,
Madame Roland, to a “Spartan matron,” and cites the Spartan mother’s famous command
to her husband or son upon his departure to battle to “Return with [his shield] or upon it”
(Woman 61). While references to Spartans serve to remind readers of the three writers’
connection to one another and to Literary Concord, Thoreau and Fuller also use these
images to distinguish themselves from their more famous mentor. Both Fuller and
Thoreau criticized Emerson in private for his inaction in the face of slavery.
51

Throughout the 1840s, the two younger writers had become increasingly radicalized
while Emerson remained relatively silent on the subject, as well as on other troubling
social issues. In light of this difference of opinion, Fuller and Thoreau’s use of the
active, self-sacrificing Spartan soldier figure in their work can be seen as a challenge to
Emerson, the initiator of the image, to turn his words into action.

49
Emerson’s essay “Heroism” may also be the source of Thoreau’s much-quoted
suggestion in Walden: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is
because he hears a different drummer.” Emerson specifically tells his readers that the
hero “advances to his own music” (Works 2: 250).

50
Although, to be fair, Emerson’s original essay “Heroism” includes women in the type.

51
Although Thoreau rarely criticized Emerson openly, Thoreau’s journal contains a
number of veiled criticisms of Emerson’s complacency. For example, on January 10,
1851, he writes, “It is an important difference between two characters that the one is
satisfied with a happy but level success but the other as constantly elevates his aim”
(Writings 8: 142).

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Thoreau questioned Emerson’s personal commitment to his heroic ideal. Yet,
Emerson’s argument that enlightenment was to be found in nature formed the crucial
building block for Thoreau’s understanding of how to cultivate his definition of
heroism.
52
To Thoreau – raised by his mother to love the forests and ponds around
Concord – Emerson was telling him that the path to heroism lay in the nearby wilderness
and in cultivating one’s own wildness therein. In Nature, Emerson writes, “The moral
law lies at the centre [sic] of nature and radiates to the circumference” (Works 1: 42). He
affirms man’s underlying “occult sympathy” with nature and sees it as the foundation of
man’s “noble emotions” (1: 67). Similarly, in A Week, Thoreau connects “the heroic
spirit” with the wild, the “dream of remoter retirements and more rugged paths”
(Writings 1: 55). Moreover, in his manifesto “Walking” (sometimes combined with
another piece, notably entitled “The Wild”), Thoreau echoes Emerson passionately,
declaring, “I WISH TO SPEAK a word for nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness,
as contrasted with a freedom and Culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant,
or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society” (5: 205). He writes
bluntly, “Wildness is the preservation of the world,” and tells his readers, “Go to grass.
You have eaten hay long enough” (5: 239). Although Thoreau does not break down his
argument as formally as Emerson, the main claim here is fundamentally the same as one
finds in Nature: He encourages his readers to develop their affinity with nature as a
means of educating their minds and refreshing their souls. While Emerson sees nature as
a teacher of many morals, however, Thoreau is far more specific about what one has to
gain from cultivating wildness. He implies that such refreshment is the means to reviving

52
A full treatment of the influence of even a single one of Emerson’s essays on Thoreau
is, of course, beyond the scope of this project.

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an old kind of courage, such as one finds in the Homeric and Medieval epics. “I felt that
this was the Heroic Age itself,” he confesses, “though we know it not” (5: 224).
Discussing the effect of his own nature walks, he insists, “The chivalric and heroic spirit
which once belonged to the rider seems now to reside in — or perchance to have
subsided into the Walker,” and reminds his reader that, “The founders of every state
which has risen to eminence, have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild
source” (5: 224-225). Thoreau took Emerson’s hints about the value of nature and
synthesized them with his personal experience in the wild to create a clear blueprint for
heroism for his readers: wildness.
To cultivate wildness, Thoreau, again playing a virtual guide, tells his readers that
they must start by placing themselves in the right spot. No one, in his view, could gain
the necessary wisdom by remaining indoors. He hits this note early and often in his
work. Even his 1843 essay “The Landlord,” ostensibly a tribute to the ideal innkeeper
(an indoors-y trade if there ever was one), strangely dwells on the value of the outdoors.
Thoreau pictures the central figure outside as often as he sees him in the actual inn: “The
Landlord stands clear back in nature, to my imagination, with his axe and spade felling
trees and raising potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer” (5: 156). And he requires that such
a man possess “a certain out-of-door obviousness and transparency not to be disputed”
(5: 157). In Walden, likewise, Thoreau spends the majority of his time out-of-doors as an
essential part of his plan for self-improvement. And when trapped into making social
visits in town, he tells his readers that he always looks for “a gap in a fence” in order to
“escape[] to the woods again” (2: 187). Thoreau attempts to explain the problem with the
indoors by creating an extended analogy between humanity and the wild apple in “Wild

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Apples.” He begins the speech by noting, “IT is remarkable how closely the history of
the apple-tree is connected with that of man [original capitalization]” (5: 290). When wild
apples are removed from nature, Thoreau argues, “their evanescent and celestial
qualities” disappear so that, by the time they reach the market, they are nothing but
“pomace” (5: 296). “[T]he wild apple,” he tells his audience, “so spirited and racy when
eaten in the fields or woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and
crabbed taste” (5: 311). The problem, he suggests, is that “there you miss the November
air, which is the sauce it is to be eaten with” (5: 311). The example of the wild apple, he
explains, represents “a lesson to man” because it shows that “there is one thought for the
field, another for the house [original emphasis]” (5: 307, 314). In other words, man, like
the wild apple, loses his integrity if he spends too much time indoors because his mind
begins to dwell on the wrong ideas – for example, moneymaking and social status. He
needs to be out in the elements to maintain the right, wild perspective.
Thoreau applied the same binary to society at large, pitting the city – a sort of
great indoors – against the country, a site of relative wildness. He states his own
preference for the country in “Walking,” suggesting that he, like Carlyle’s hero, is
expressing the spirit of the times in doing so: “…on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and withdrawing into the
wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something
like this is the prevailing tendency of my countrymen” (5: 218). Historically, Thoreau’s
claim that his countrymen were fleeing the city couldn’t be further from the truth despite
the increasing numbers of pilgrims heading West in search of their fortunes. Rather than
stating a measurable fact, however, this passage describes a widespread flight desire that

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Thoreau recognized in his peers and that he hoped to address in his own writing. He uses
the progressive tense – “leaving” and “withdrawing” – to signal this difference. The
answer does not lie in a single move to the country, but in an ongoing resistance to the
values of the city. Indeed, in his 1854 abolitionist essay “Slavery in Massachusetts,” he
emphasizes the moral aspect of the city-country divide specifically: It is evident that there
are, in this Commonwealth at least, two parties, becoming more and more distinct — the
party of the city, and the party of the country. I know that the country is mean enough,
but I am glad to believe that there is a slight difference in her favor…Let us, the
inhabitants of the country, cultivate self-respect. Let us not send to the city for aught
more essential than our broadcloths and groceries; or, if we read the opinions of the city,
let us entertain opinions of our own (4: 397). The problem with the city, as with the
indoors, is not that city dwellers are fundamentally bad, but rather that the environment
itself is not conducive to moral development. In “Autumnal Tints,” he gives his readers
an example of the city’s privations: “A great many, who have spent their lives in cities,
and have never chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this, the
flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding with one such citizen, who,
though a fortnight too, late for the most brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would
not believe that there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon
before” (5: 249). As this story illustrates, the problem with the city-dweller is that he is
ignorant. He has been robbed of a proper moral education because he has not had his
share of the healthful influence of Nature. By laying the blame, not on such men
themselves, but rather on the city in which they live and work, Thoreau avoids alienating
his audience. Instead, he welcomes urban readers to join him in his search for the

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fairyland hidden on the fringes on Literary Concord.
But Thoreau warns that country-living itself is only the first step of the journey.
Even in the country, one could fail to cultivate wildness by attempting to domesticate
nature rather than living in harmony with it. Although Thoreau occasionally praised
farmers and was himself an excellent gardener, more often, Thoreau criticized farming
and gardening as ill-considered attempts to civilize nature. In A Week, for example, he
complains that gardening “wants the vigor and freedom of the forest and the outlaw” (1:
55). “[T]he gardener,” he explains, “is too much of a familiar. There is something vulgar
and foul in [his] closeness to his mistress” (1: 56). Moreover, he argues that farming,
involving as it often does “the grazing of cattle and the rooting of swine, is the source of
many diseases which now prevail” (1: 379). And his farming neighbors’ participation in
the capitalist system created yet another reason for Thoreau’s disapproval of the practice.
The gardener/farmer, by taming the wilderness, was doing unspeakable harm to both the
environment and himself. Because of his focus on profit, he saw little more of Thoreau’s
hidden world than the city dweller. For example, in discussing witch hazel, Thoreau
writes, “Certainly it blooms in no garden of man's” (1: 379). Likewise, in “Wild
Apples,” he notes of the wild apple, that, “the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather… that he has better in his barrels… but he is mistaken” (5: 308). The wild apple,
he explains, is “a prince in disguise” (5: 307), and the farmer has thus missed out on
something of much greater value than his crops in ignoring it. In “Autumnal Tints,”
Thoreau complains that, “The gardener sees only the gardener's garden” (5: 285). On
these grounds, Thoreau personally rejects agriculture, identifying instead with America’s
earlier hunter-gatherers: “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older era than the

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agricultural” (1: 54). Although rejecting the farmer and the gardener’s work risked
alienating some of the very readers Thoreau sought to attract, he needed to distinguish his
fairyland from the trendy country landscapes popular magazines of the era were touting
as the latest get-away.
53

Because Thoreau saw the answer to his society’s problems in terms of a
geography (both actual and imagined) waiting to be discovered, travel turns up in both
literal terms and, more importantly, as a dominant conceit in his writing. Many of his
works – “A Walk to Wachusett,” “A Winter Walk,” and “Night and Moonlight,” in
particular – recount actual hikes Thoreau had taken, and A Week centers around a long
boat trip he took with his brother. Other works, such as The Maine Woods, Cape Cod,
and A Yankee in Canada, outline more complicated trips that included hikes, voyages by
boat, and train rides; and Thoreau fills these works with specifics about the actual
physical journey. Even in relatively domestic works such as Walden the reader gets a
sense that the narrator is endlessly peripatetic – crisscrossing the woods constantly,
sailing on the pond, marching back and forth from town, visiting the Irish laborers in
their shantytowns, and following the woodsman Therien about his labors. Although
actual travel is central to Thoreau’s worldview, walking and boating become even more
important to Thoreau as extended metaphors for enlightenment. In “Walking,” for
example, Thoreau does not describe the kind of physical sights he does in his other
works, because in this essay “walking” is simply representative of an ideal frame of
mind. Here, more than in any other work, Thoreau attempts to clearly define his idea of
this mental state. He warns his reader that to be a walker, you must “have paid your

53
See Sullivan for a larger discussion of the relationship between Thoreau’s work and the
lifestyle magazines of the day.

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debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs” (5: 206). Yet he makes it clear that
wealth cannot make one a walker; that the ability comes only from God. Moreover, he
explains that becoming a walker requires courage – “the spirit of undying adventure” –
and sacrifice: The walker must be “ready to leave father and mother, and brother and
sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again” (5: 206). It also requires
ongoing commitment. He writes, “Some of my townsmen, it is true, can remember, and
have described to me some walks which they took ten years ago, in which they were so
blessed as to lose themselves for half an hour in the woods, but I know very well that
they have confined themselves to the highway ever since” (5: 207). But, despite these
demands, becoming a walker in the style of Thoreau has its rewards, because such an
endeavor means “travel[ing] in the interior and ideal world” (5: 217). Thoreau boasts, “I
walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer,
walked in…a new fountain of the Muses” (5: 246). For Thoreau, the idea of travel
perfectly symbolized his belief in self-culture because it encompassed both the notion of
progress and the notion of adventure – components he considered essential to such
enlightenment.
Thoreau’s focus on travel provided him with a useful conceit for elucidating the
kind of initiation he demanded of his readers, but – as Steven Fink persuasively argues in
Prophet in the Marketplace – Thoreau knew that it was also a potentially profitable
vehicle. Travel narratives had long been immensely popular, and according to several
sources,
54
Thoreau was an avid reader of the genre himself. Many of his works appear to
borrow heavily from the genre’s conventions. Although by the mid-nineteenth century

54
See, for example, Richardson, Thoreau 13 and Christie.

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travel writing had broken down into many subgenres, most still shared a few, basic rules:
they followed a chronological narrative of a journey undertaken by the author, told in the
first person. A Week, “An Excursion to Canada,” Cape Cod and The Maine Woods all
follow this pattern. Despite their chronological structure, travel narratives were marked
by hybridity: historical anecdotes, personal reflections, social commentary, advice to the
reader, literary allusions, and other side-notes frequently took the main narrative off
course for pages at a time. Thoreau’s works are no exception. For example, A Week
famously veers off into lengthy discourses on religion and friendship. In their study of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travel writing conventions, Elizabeth A. Bohls and Ian
Duncan explain that many nineteenth-century travel narrative writers, inspired by
Linnaeus, also combined “personal narrative with ‘precise’ observation” and dwelt
heavily on natural history as well as the usual “manners and customs” of those they met
(xxv). In this respect, travel writing lined up exceptionally well with Thoreau’s own
interests. In The Maine Woods, for example, Thoreau combines detailed descriptions of
local flora with those of the Indian tribes he meets in the region.
In addition to following these conventions, Thoreau also exploited the growing
trend towards Romantic travel writing. Romantic travel writers such as Mary
Wollstonecraft distinguished their works by touting their exploration of relatively
untouched regions. Thoreau’s journey up the mountain Ktaadu (also during his Maine
trip), while not a unique voyage, ranks as an account of a relatively untouched area.
Thoreau tells his readers that he knows of only four other white men to have ever made
the same trip and concludes smugly that “it will be a long time before the tide of
fashionable travel sets that way” (Writings 3: 4). Other Romantics like Wordsworth set

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themselves apart from the majority of travel writers by their rejection of simple, lyrical
descriptions of the picturesque in favor of social critiques inspired by the trip, and
Thoreau committed to this technique so fully, in fact, that he continually exposed himself
to criticism on the grounds that he was spoiling the pretty effect of his nature writing. In
Cape Cod, for example, he devotes his first chapter to a shipwreck that arrests his
attention upon his arrival in town. Noticing that the clutch of floating bodies left over
from the wreck had done nothing to slow down the beachcombers he remarks drily,
“Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure” (4: 8). He
also cruelly suggests that the Irish emigrés, in drowning, had found a better shore than the
one that originally awaited them in America. The sight also offers him an occasion for
defending his commitment to individualism. Pondering his apathetic reaction to the
bodies, he decides, “If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it
would have affected me more” (4: 11). This observation leads him into a larger
discussion of individualism wherein he concludes, “It is the individual and private that
demands our sympathy” (4: 11). By thus locating his own work in the tradition of
Romantic travel writing, Thoreau attempted to hail the extensive existing readership of
this popular genre.
Not only do many of Thoreau’s writings demonstrate his general education in
travel-writing conventions, they also reflect his interest in particular books within the
category. Several of his works borrow substantially from earlier publications. Although
on the surface, Walden does not appear to fit neatly into the travel writing genre, a
comparison between this book and other regional guides (a subcategory of the travel
writing genre) of the era provides an excellent example of Thoreau’s synthesis of other

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works of this type. Wordsworth’s Guide to the Lakes is one model,
55
but Thoreau also
looked to examples closer to home, in particular Susan Fenimore Cooper’s 1850 guide to
Cooperstown, New York, Rural Hours, as Michael P. Branch argues in his essay on
Cooper.
56
Branch notes that Thoreau refers to Cooper’s earlier publication in his journal
and that Walden mimics Cooper’s descriptions of loons, wild berries, the lake bottom,
and the spring thaw. Sullivan also observes a similarity between Walden and Joel Tyler
Headley’s 1849 The Adirondacks, or Life in the Woods, his guide to the mountain region
of the same name. Sullivan believes that Thoreau looked to travel writing in popular
magazines as well when composing Walden, particularly articles on the country “house
craze” (150). Although Thoreau had the Romantic’s investment in originality and put a
unique stamp on his own works, as a professional writer he knew better than to ignore the
lessons such books had to offer.
While, arguably, Thoreau and his friends were ultimately successful in promoting
his adventure-guide role,
57
Thoreau’s brand suffered in the short run due to influential
competing readings of his persona – a testament to the increasing impact of literary
criticism in the antebellum era. A flurry of reviews accompanied the publication of

55
See Moldenhauer’s precise breakdown of Thoreau’s use of Wordsworth’s guidebook in
Walden.

56
Susan Fenimore Cooper is the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, the author of the
Leatherstocking Tales.

57
Buell outlines the rise of Thoreau’s posthumous fame as an adventurer and nature
guide in The Environmental Imagination and “The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The
Structure of an American Cult.”

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Walden in the summer of 1854.
58
In one July review (no longer preserved), a critic
likened Thoreau to Diogenes, and the others pounced on it. In their sampling of
contemporary reviews of Walden, Dean and Scharnhorst record no fewer than nine critics
between August and November who characterized Thoreau as a modern version of the
Ancient Greek Cynic philosopher. In some cases, the critics even included the
comparison in their review title. In The Fame Machine, Frank Donoghue argues that,
after the demise of the patronage system, “literary careers were chiefly described, and
indeed made possible, by reviewers,” that these powerful critics, in fact, “supplied the
plots for a variety of literary careers” (3). Moreover, Donoghue cites many examples,
like this one, “of the struggle between writer and reviewer for the authority to describe
the shape of the writer’s efforts” (4). To Donoghue, the reviewers were marked by their
heterogeneity, and he maintains that “[e]ach magazine represent[ed] a different voice”
(3). Yet the rapid spread of the Diogenes label instead illustrates the closed structure of
nineteenth-century criticism and the individual critics’ surprisingly lack of uniqueness.
Indeed, far from representing a different voice, one critic for the British publication
Chambers’s Journal simply reproduced an earlier American review of Walden word-for-
word.
59
Not only did these reviewers have the ear of a far larger audience than Thoreau
could ever hope to reach, in the face of such transnational agreement, Thoreau and his
friends had difficulty wresting control of his authorial persona. And there were real
stakes involved in winning this battle. The Diogenes label privileged Thoreau’s tart social

58
As Gilmore notes, Thoreau’s publishers wisely advised him to give out advance copies
of the book to reviewers. Thus, several of these reviews actually predate the official
August release of the book and many others came out simultaneously.

59
For comparison, see “Town and Rural Humbugs” 235-241, and “An American
Diogenes” 330-338.

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criticism over his joyous celebrations of the natural world and undoubtedly alienated
many potential readers.
Likewise, the reviewers’ favorite label for Thoreau – the hermit – though less
obnoxious than the Diogenes-identity, also skewed the narrative away from his value as a
guide to the imaginary community of Literary Concord by negatively emphasizing his
reputation for reclusiveness. Critics began making references to Thoreau’s hermit-like
qualities soon after his publication of his first full-length work, A Week. For example,
George Ripley, writing anonymously for the New York Tribune, describes him twice in
eremitic terms. But only with the arrival of Walden does the hermit become a full-
fledged label. The fault lies with his friend and supporter, Horace Greeley. In a review
entitled “A Massachusetts Hermit” the powerful editor of the New York Tribune hammers
on this image repeatedly. Among other tactics, Greeley breaks down Walden’s chapters
into his own subchapters, which he whimsically titles “The Hermit Builds His Hut,” “The
Hermit Plants Beans,” “The Hermit Commences Housekeeping,” etc. Again, as with the
Diogenes image, a flock of reviewers rushed to take up the hermit label. Dean and
Scharnhorst record eleven different explicit references to Thoreau as a hermit in just three
months, as well as the attribution of numerous hermit-like qualities to the author.
Undoubtedly, Greeley meant well. To the nineteenth-century Romantics, the
hermit – by communing with nature and God on his own instead of sullying himself in
the affairs of society – represented a quiet ideal of self-culture. The Lake Poets, in
particular, championed the figure.
60
The hermit as a narrator had the potential of

60
See, for example, Coleridge’s use of the hermit in The Lyrical Ballads and The Ancient
Mariner and Wordsworth’s use of him in The Prelude and in Thoreau’s favorite, “Peter
Bell.”

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appealing to non-Romantics as well. Readers of all stripes still fondly remembered Felix
MacDonogh’s humorous Hermit In… series from the 1820s,
61
and as Sullivan puts it,
“antebellum newspapers were often claiming to have found a soul in a cave, a man in the
mountains” (222). But while Greeley originally intended the hermit title as a compliment,
in the hands of less sympathetic reviewers, this persona also became potentially
alienating to Thoreau’s readers. The anonymous critic from the Boston Daily Bee, for
example, calls Thoreau’s hermit life a “selfish existence” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau
373). The critic for the Richmond Enquirer warns his readers not to be lured into
thinking the hermit figure “quaint” and determines instead to see such behavior in “the
most unfavorable light possible” (qtd. in Scharnhorst 33). And the reviewer for the
Churchman writes gleefully, Thoreau the hermit “cuts the pleasing connection after
awhile, and hastens back to civilization, to secure the admiration of the very vicious
public whose unprofitable heart-aches and barren pursuits he had, for the moment,
abandoned” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 384). As the Churchman review suggests, not
only did many critics view the hermit Thoreau as antisocial, several also saw such
pretensions to eremitism as phony. Variations on the word affectation appear in many
works in which Thoreau is characterized as a hermit and many critics even suggest that
he is deliberately putting the reader on. Other reviewers simply think him stupid. The
critic for the Oneida Circular, for example, cannot understand why “our hermit” chooses
his solitude over communism if he means to fight the market system (qtd. in Emerson
and Thoreau 371). All of these interpretations undermined Thoreau’s ability to sell

61
Although generally unfavorable, the review from the Churchman includes a direct
reference to the MacDonogh series.

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himself as a worthwhile guide to his readers.
But as Robert Sattlemeyer, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, John T. Lysaker, and
William Rossi have convincingly argued, one interpretation, in particular, did more
damage to his reputation than all the others: Emerson’s. While Emerson championed the
younger man as a rough-hewn genius when he echoed his own ideas, he became
increasingly frustrated with Thoreau as his work matured and their intellectual
approaches began to diverge and began to support the view of Thoreau as a Diogenes
figure.
62
What might have remained a private misunderstanding, however, became the
basis for one of the dominant assessments of Thoreau’s reputation for many years after
Emerson articulated his concerns in his extremely public eulogy for his friend. Although
Emerson does give some space to Thoreau’s role as a guide and, as I mentioned earlier,
he even shows Thoreau’s similarities to his own ideal of the self-reliant man, he spends
just as much time reinforcing the critics’ Diogenes and hermit labels. Right from the
beginning, Emerson writes disapprovingly of Thoreau’s cynical attitude towards, for
example, the liberal arts (“He was graduated at Harvard College in 1837, but without any
literary distinction. An iconoclast in literature, he seldom thanked colleges for their
service to him”) and sciences (“he was incurious of technical and textual science”).
While he mildly remarks on the rare instances when he witnessed Thoreau being kind and
friendly, he devotes more energy to describing Thoreau’s more caustic attributes – in
effect cancelling out the former impression. Emerson notes, for example, that Thoreau
“slighted and defied the opinions of others,” that he was “rarely tender,” and that, with

62

In a May 21, 1858 letter to Thoreau, for example, Emerson writes exasperatedly of the
younger man’s rejection of society: “My dear Henry, a frog was made to live in a swamp,
but a man was not made to live in a swamp” (Selected Letters 8: 562).

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admirers, he was “never affectionate, but superior, didactic.” In Emerson’s description,
Thoreau becomes a hopeless curmudgeon whose unpleasant tendency to disagree is
“chilling to the social affections” (Works 10: 456). Memorably, Emerson quotes a
mutual friend who admits, “I love Henry but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm,
I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree” (10: 456). The negative terms of
Emerson’s description – ingratitude, coldness, inhumanity – bolstered the already-
dominant critical tradition of viewing Thoreau as a cynical recluse and haunted Thoreau’s
posthumous reputation for years.
Emerson and Thoreau’s critics played large roles in the disruption of his plans,
but part of the problem stemmed from Thoreau’s own inability to communicate
effectively. When he could, Thoreau always tried out his essays as lectures on the local
lyceum circuit before publishing them. This method created two recurrent problems in
Thoreau’s writing. First, contrary to Matthiessen’s assertion that Thoreau’s “own
sensitive organization” allowed him to finely discriminate “between the spoken and the
written word” (156),
63
Thoreau frequently misjudged how little of his on-stage
performance translated to the page – particularly his humor. Although Emerson once
criticized Thoreau for having no sense of humor, in one journal entry he records an
evening watching Thoreau lecturing in which the younger man repeatedly reduced his
audience to hysterical laughter. A reviewer for the Salem Observer agrees, noting that
Thoreau “[kept] the audience in almost constant mirth” during his lecture at the Salem

63
Matthiessen points to Thoreau’s analysis of the difference in his journal as evidence for
this claim. In Walden, Thoreau rightly recognizes that “what is called eloquence in the
forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study” (Writings 2: 113). However, in
light of Thoreau’s obvious difficulty in making the transition himself, this statement
ought to be read as frustrated self-criticism rather than proof of his ability to overcome
the issue.

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Lyceum (qtd. in Thoreau as Seen by His Contemporaries 237). Indeed, read with an eye
for humor, Walden, for example, is potentially full of jokes. Lines like “Others have
been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and
some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained” (Writings 2: 3),
and “James Collins’ shanty was considered an uncommonly fine one” (2: 47), for
example, are hard to read with any degree of seriousness. And Thoreau’s parodic streak
is more obvious still. For example, he writes, “a woman’s dress, at least, is never done”
(2: 25), and “Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive
day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?” (2: 141). Some
contemporary reviewers recognized Thoreau’s humor immediately, calling the book
“playful” and its author “a good writer, possessed of great comic powers” (qtd. in
Emerson and Thoreau 379, 389). One went as far as to suggest that the entire book was a
put on. But just as many missed the punch lines, for example, calling Walden “radical
and austere” in tone and characterizing it as a record of the world’s “miseries”
(Springfield Republican 2). Others saw Thoreau’s wit, but also suspected that many
would not and thus attempted to explain the tone in their own reviews (a sure sign that a
joke has failed). Thoreau, on the other hand, assumes that his reader, like his lyceum
audiences, is getting every joke. In fact, Thoreau is so sure of his comedic powers that he
feels the need to explicitly prepare his reader for his occasional shifts to a more serious
tone, prefacing such shifts with, for example, “I am far from jesting” and “I do not mean
to be satirical” (Writings 2: 32, 137).
Not only did Thoreau seriously misjudge his lack of affect on the page in terms of
humor, he also miscalculated the mass readership’s reception of his criticism. Lecturing

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at the local lyceum meant talking to like-minded friends and acquaintances. While
Thoreau’s tendency to contrarianism occasionally annoyed his neighbors, their irritation
was offset by their personal familiarity with the writer, which created a far more complex
impression. Channing, for example, despite frequently losing patience with Thoreau,
concluded that, overall, “[h]e served his friends sincerely and practically” (17). And even
Emerson, sour and heartbroken as he was at Thoreau’s funeral, praised his friend’s
tendency to throw “himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people
whom he loved” (Works 10: 456). The mass of readers, on the other hand, had never seen
the Thoreau the locals knew – indeed, would not get a glimpse of him until well after his
death – and many understandably refused to give him the benefit of the doubt when he
began to rail at them on the page.
Thoreau, never one to resist an opportunity to be witty, also muddied his guide
image by deliberately playing with the Diogenes and hermit readings of his persona. In
introducing his lecture on “The Succession of Forest Trees,” for example, Thoreau refers
to himself self-consciously as one “who is distinguished for his oddity” (oddity being one
of the critics’ favorite descriptors for Thoreau and his work) and – alluding to his
reputation for cynicism – suggests that his audience “will think that they have committed
this mistake who invited me to speak to you to-day” (Writings 5: 184-185). Likewise, in
A Plea, while ostensibly referring to Brown, he clearly also touches on his own reputation
when he writes, “The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the
market-place” (4: 421). While – contrary to Scharnhorst’s belief that Thoreau
“apparently gave little thought to how he would be regarded by posterity” (qtd. in
Petrulionis, Thoreau in His Own Time xxxiv) – such sardonic nods to his popular image

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show Thoreau’s professional self-awareness; they also demonstrate the writer’s
overconfidence in his own ability to control his public impression. Again, the fault lies
with his insensitivity to the differences between performance and print. While even a
reader cannot miss the irony in Thoreau’s suggestion that his audience will regret inviting
him to speak, without access to his physical cues, it is more difficult to determine how
much he has embraced the eccentric label. And when he defends hermits in A Plea, the
tone is even more ambiguous.
One might argue, as Leon Edel does in his biography of Thoreau or as Robert A.
Gross does in “That Terrible Thoreau: Concord and Its Hermit,” that the critics’ view of
Thoreau as either a Diogenes or hermit figure more accurately represented Thoreau’s
authorial persona than the adventure guide, but such readings ignore the real efforts he
made to avoid such labels. The changes he made to later drafts of Walden, for example,
almost all had the effect of toning down his cynical social criticism in favor of personal
lyricism.
64
Gilmore, for one, criticizes these alterations as “a series of withdrawals from
history,” each of which “disables the political” (35). In Gilmore’s view, Thoreau’s
changes lead to a final position that is “radically at odds with the tone of Walden's
beginning” (44). Gilmore blames Walden’s inconsistency on the commercial failure of A
Week, suggesting that the experience – coming as it did while Thoreau was in the process
of drafting Walden – weakened the author’s resolve to expose the shortcomings of his
society because of his fear of alienating his readers. While fear of failure was very likely
at the bottom of his accommodations, arguably, so was Thoreau’s positive desire to
maintain control of his authorial image. By toning down his criticism and emphasizing

64
For a detailed account of all the changes Thoreau made while drafting Walden, see
Shanley.

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the personal-journey element of his narrative, Thoreau focused attention on his ability to
serve his readers as an imagined guide rather than on his growing reputation as a
firebrand. And while an examination of the critical responses to Walden suggests that
Thoreau’s efforts in this regard were largely unsuccessful, at least one reviewer
appreciated the effect. The critic for the Christian Register writes, “Its opening pages
may seem a little caustic and cynical; but it mellows apace, and playful humor and
sparkling thought appear on almost every page” (qtd. in Emerson and Thoreau 379).
Although, in general, Thoreau had less impetus to combat his reputation as a
hermit, he could not allow the unsociability of the image to undermine his status as a
qualified guide. He handled this problem by emphasizing that, rather than being an out-
and-out misanthrope, he was merely selective in his associations – a tactic that welcomed
the likeminded reader. At the outset of Walden, for example, he describes the book as an
“account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land” (Writings 2: 4). The phrase
“a distant land” acknowledges the reader’s perception of Thoreau’s experience at Walden
Pond as removed from the ordinary lot from the beginning, but it does not erect a barrier
between the author and his audience. On the contrary, by calling his readers “kindred”
the passage suggests that Thoreau feels a warm connection to his audience and that he
writes, like someone separated from his family, in order to imaginatively bridge the
distance. And while in his chapter “Solitude,” he admits that “[t]o be in company, even
with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating” (2: 150), he immediately follows this
chapter with one entitled “Visitors,” which begins with an explicit repudiation of the
hermit label: “I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten
myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I

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am naturally no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-
room, if my business called me thither” (2: 155). Not only does he dispute his reputation
in general terms, he gives specifics. For example, he points out that, ironically, because
of the novelty of his Walden Pond experiment, he had “more visitors while [he] lived in
the woods than at any other period in [his] life” (2: 159). While Thoreau includes
animals in that number, he makes it clear that he primarily means other people. In this
chapter, he discusses the variety of guests he entertained, the chairs he put out to
welcome guests, and the unusual ways in which he engaged them in conversation. But
most importantly, he introduces the reader to Therien, whom Thoreau befriends in the
forest. He admiringly calls Therien “a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man” and devotes
several paragraphs to recounting his conversations with the woodsman in detail (2: 159).
While Thoreau does not present Therien as a stand-in for the reader, he uses him as a test
to cull out potential friends from the mass readership. Likeminded readers, potential
travelers in Literary Concord, would see Therien’s qualities in the same heroic light that
Thoreau did. Again, if Walden’s reviews give any indication of contemporary reader
response, Thoreau’s success in combating the more negative implications of the hermit
label was mixed. While most critics still saw Thoreau as uncompromisingly antisocial, a
few recognized his friendly overtures. Even more telling is the case of a fan, who upon
hearing of Thoreau’s ill health, wrote that the news had hit him as hard as it would have
if Thoreau had been a personal friend. As these examples suggest, Thoreau’s efforts to
qualify his image as an eccentric loner found some traction among his readers.
In his final months, Thoreau worked tirelessly to polish several earlier lectures for
publication and to complete as much as he could of his newer projects. Such industry,

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especially under such trying circumstances, indicates that the author was acutely
concerned with his legacy. Before his death, Thoreau had only published two books – A
Week and Walden – and a handful of essays. And for this effort, he had earned a
reputation for misanthropy, eccentricity, and selfishness. In light of his publishing
record, indeed, Emerson’s suggestion that he had not fulfilled his promise as a writer
would have struck many as a fair assessment of Thoreau’s literary career. With this
unflattering starting point, the years after Thoreau’s death saw a struggle for control of
his authorial image between Thoreau’s critics and his friends. For a long time, it
appeared that Emerson’s version of Thoreau as a cold, strange underachiever would
prevail, and in fact many still come away from his work with this impression. But
Thoreau’s supporters – marshaling the author’s lesser-known works, his personal journal,
and the remembrances of more sympathetic acquaintances – worked hard to fight this
caricature. Ironically, Emerson’s own son, Edward Waldo, struck one of the most
successful blows against his father’s depiction of their family friend in his Henry
Thoreau: As Remembered by a Young Friend. To the younger Emerson, Thoreau came
across as a “youthful, cheery figure,” a “magician” who “appeared often in house or
garden and always to charm” (4). Armed with delightful anecdotes of a rarely seen side
of Thoreau, the author convinced many readers to reevaluate the Thoreau they thought
they knew. Moreover, Lawrence Buell argues that, shortly after Thoreau’s death,
“admiring coteries” on both sides of the Atlantic appropriated his work to suit their own
causes (The Environmental Imagination 311). While the diversity of Thoreau’s
posthumous fan base produced a bewildering number of interpretations of Thoreau’s
authorial persona, it also saved Thoreau from obscurity. As a result, Thoreau ultimately

145

succeeded in promoting himself as an adventure guide to many generations of readers
who would never know him as a “Yankee Diogenes” or a “Massachusetts Hermit.”

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Chapter Three
Margaret Fuller as Elder Sister: The Role of a Lifetime

“Could a circle be assembled in earnest desirous to answer the great questions. What
were we born to do? How shall we do it? Which so few ever propose to themselves ‘till
their best years are gone by. I should think the undertaking a noble one, and if my
resources should prove sufficient to make me its moving spring, I should be willing to
give it a large portion of those coming years which will as I hope be my best.” (Letters 2:
87)

Margaret Fuller never lived in Concord, Massachusetts, although she visited
often. But, in the imaginary town of Literary Concord, she was a prominent resident.
She arrived at the outset of her career and quickly established herself as the community’s
official Elder Sister, a public persona that fit well with established conventions of public
intellectualism, especially in Romantic circles, and that came quite naturally to the oldest
of nine children. This persona, so familiar to Fuller’s readers steeped as they were in
both conduct literature and Romantic conventions, drew a comforting arm around her
family of readers and writers, now her spiritual younger siblings. From this intimate
position, she showed them how to live their lives and what to value. While her critics
charged her with arrogance and a tendency to domineer, her supporters defended her on
the grounds that she was just doing what a good older sister should. Moreover, Fuller
adopted the Elder Sister role to challenge the way others, including her own friend
Emerson, used the idea of the sister to maintain the status quo in gender relations. In
Fuller’s hands, the clichéd figure of the Elder Sister, now with its sexist implications
subverted, became a powerful means of assuming authority in the public sphere.
As the above passage from a 1839 letter to Sophia Ripley suggests, Fuller had
long been eager to find – or, if need be, herself establish – a community of like minds. In
the same letter, she asserts the urgent need for such a society, writing, “I have heard

147

many of mature age wish for some such means of stimulus and cheer, and these people
for a place where they could state their doubts and difficulties with hope of gaining aid
from the experience and aspirations of others” (2: 86). She specifies that such a society
must aim “to lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the cant of coterie criticism and
the delicate disdains of good society and fearless meet the light although it flow from the
sun of truth” (2: 87-88). Reports of her famous Conversations, those high-minded,
mostly women-only discussions Fuller began in the autumn of 1839, suggest that she was
on the right track. The men and women who attended these meetings raved about the
uplifting experience and praised Fuller’s leadership. To most of the participants, Fuller
had indeed succeeded in creating an ideal community of thinkers – at least in the short
term. Fuller had accurately diagnosed the needs of her audience: Many educated New
Englanders, stifled by the growing commercialism and urbanization they saw around
them, had been longing for a select society of likeminded individuals with whom they
could shut out the blaring noises of modern life and engage instead in discussions of
perennial importance.
Fuller believed that educated women had a particular need for such a community
because, unlike their male counterparts, they seldom had practical opportunities to
exercise their formal education outside of the classroom. Critics of Fuller rightly point
out that this premise is flawed on two counts: first, the assumption that men had far
greater opportunity to use their formal education in their everyday lives than women and
that this practice was the key to their retention; and, second, the assumption that the
Conversations actually constituted a practical application of such education.

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Nevertheless, Fuller’s Conversations satisfied the participants’ emotional longing for
intellectual community.
Although Fuller herself – classically educated by her father from a young age –
had always craved the company of artists and intellectuals, her particular insight into the
social needs of her contemporaries sprang in large part from her growing connection to
Concord’s intellectual elite, specifically Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amos Bronson
Alcott. In 1833, Emerson travelled to Europe and met Thomas Carlyle, William
Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These Romantic writers revolutionized his
thinking, and he began spreading their ideas of the god within,
65
a crucial pillar of
Transcendentalist thought, when he returned home to New England. At about the same
time, Alcott – always reform-minded and freethinking – began developing his theories on
education. By the end of 1836, their own Romantic Zeitgeist was in full swing: Emerson,
Alcott, and Fuller were seeing each other regularly at the Transcendentalist Club (aka
Hedge’s Club), a major organ of Transcendentalism in the United States that boasted
numerous illustrious members, and Fuller had begun work at Alcott’s Temple School,
and Emerson had settled in Concord and published his paradigm-shifting essay “Nature.”
The following years would see Alcott joining Emerson in Concord (along with the
introduction of Salem-born Nathaniel Hawthorne and the return of Concord native son
Henry David Thoreau), Emerson delivering his “American Scholar” speech and “Divinity
School Address,” and perhaps most importantly, Emerson and Fuller beginning their all-
consuming work on the short-lived Transcendentalist journal, The Dial. While Fuller’s

65

Transcendentalists understood the human mind as the source of all divinity. Thus, they
believed that all humans were manifestations of God (that which Emerson would call the
“Oversoul”).

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own ideas quickly outgrew the tenets of Transcendentalism, she did take away an
important lesson from her participation in this circle. During the most vibrant years of
the Transcendentalist movement, Fuller remained deeply involved with the efforts of its
Concord leaders, and these relationships sharpened her understanding of ideas such as
self-culture and friendship – the cornerstones of her ideal community.
To say that Fuller’s relationships with these men influenced her ideas about self-
culture does not mean, however, that she was merely an unquestioning Emersonian or
Alcott acolyte. Rather her ideas on the subject developed as much out of her resistance to
both men’s philosophies as it did from her embrace of them. Emerson, her usual host
during her frequent visits to Concord, had electrified her with his ideas about self-culture,
but Fuller had harbored doubts about his unqualified commitment to self-reliance. As
John Bard McNulty convincingly argues in his foundational 1946 article “Emerson’s
Friends and the Essay on Friendship,” Emerson’s essay likely represents his efforts to
grapple with Fuller’s objections to his apparent rejection of society. Viewed in light of
Fuller and Emerson’s ongoing debate regarding the value of companionship, the
Conversations likewise can be seen to represent an exercise of Fuller’s side of the
argument. According to the glowing reports of the participants, Fuller proved that the
occasional company of carefully selected associates, all bent on improving themselves,
could in fact aid in one’s own self-culture rather than diminish it. If her debate with
Emerson supplied the inspiration for the Conversations, her training in Bronson Alcott’s
modern pedagogy supplied their form. During an era of lectures and rote learning, Alcott
advocated the use of student-centered discussions and practical experiences as the
primary learning tools of his classroom. Although Fuller’s journal entries during her

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tenure at Alcott’s school suggest that she initially had doubts about the efficacy of his
method,
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by the time she had left the infamous Temple School, she had begun to see its
value and largely patterned her Conversations on this interactive model. Thus, while the
Conversations, like the Temple classes, met in Boston, they were clearly the products of
another burgeoning community: Literary Concord.
Like many aspiring intellectuals of the antebellum era, Fuller was drawn to
Concord. She called the town a “Paradise of thought” (qtd. in Higginson 69).
67
Visits to
Emerson sometimes lasted for weeks at a time, and when she was not in Concord, she
pined to return. While working in Providence, for example, she writes to Emerson: “I
look to Concord as my Lethe and Eunoe after this purgatory of distracting petty tasks.”
68

Elsewhere, she explains, “Every day I have mentally addressed Concord, dear Concord,
haven of repose where headach [sic] – vertigo – other sins that flesh is heir to cannot long
pursue’” (qtd. in Capper 1: 206). Emerson was happy to have her, calling her “a very
easy guest to entertain” (Memoirs 1: 217), but he was even more eager to find Fuller and
her mother a home of her own in Concord – unfortunately without success. Nevertheless,

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In one journal entry, for example, Fuller writes, “I wish I could define my distrust of
Mr Alcott’s [sic] mind. I think constantly he is one-sided without being able to see where
the fault lies. There is something in his view of every subject, something in his
philosophy which revolts either my common-sense or – my prejudices – I cannot be sure
which” (qtd. in Capper 1: 198). Although Fuller privately expressed gentle criticisms of
Alcott, she invariably defended the beset reformer in public.

67
Interestingly, Fuller’s description of Concord as “Paradise” exactly matches Nathanial
Hawthorne’s comparisons of the town with Paradise/ Eden in Mosses from an Old
Manse.

68
Fuller’s opinion of Concord remains strikingly consistent throughout her life. While in
Italy a decade after this letter to Emerson, for example, she writes to her friend, Elizabeth
Hoar, and tells her “to prize the thoughtful peace of Concord” (Letters 5: 241).

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Fuller did feel at home in Concord.
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According to Emerson, she had many friends in
town, including the Hawthornes, Alcotts, and Channings. Moreover, Emerson was
surprised to discover that Fuller was also on intimate terms with Concord’s working
class. “The Concord stage-coachman distinguished her by his respect,” he gushes, “and
the chambermaid was pretty sure to confide to her on the second day, her homely
romance” (Memoirs 1: 217). With evident admiration, Emerson spells out Fuller’s
attitude towards the townsfolk: “She adopted all the people and the interests she found
here. Your people shall be my people” (1: 217). Although Fuller had a knack for making
friends wherever she found herself – as Emerson’s observations and her own comments
suggest – she quickly recognized her own kind in Concord. She may have been born in
Cambridge, but by the time she came of age, she had outgrown the intellectual
conservatism of her hometown. Concord was a town of rebels and eccentrics – just as
she was. She had found a place where she could be herself.
As a result, Literary Concord – its residents and the ideas it represented – created
and became home to Fuller’s professional authorial voice. Although she had already
published a few short articles by the time she arrived on Emerson’s doorstep, these first
essays (an editorial and a couple of reviews) largely copied her father. For years, Fuller
had struggled to find a way to use her father’s training without simply copying him – an
authorial stance she found unsatisfying. Concord helped her find it. In the second
volume of his magnificent two-part biography, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic
Life, Charles Capper rightly locates 1840 as the pivotal year in Fuller’s career as a public

69
Fuller’s public persona is so bound up with Concord that many of her critics ignore the
fact that she did not live there. Today, the trend continues. The town of Concord, itself,
held a celebration in its adopted daughter’s honor in 2010.

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intellectual. In this year, Fuller’s reputation grew enormously, transforming her from a
woman of local interest into a national celebrity “virtually overnight” (2: x). In
particular, he credits Fuller’s conflict with Emerson over the nature of their friendship
during the late 1830s as the catalyst behind her new, independent authorial voice. By
1840, between the long nights in Emerson’s drawing room piecing together The Dial and
the long mornings teaching Bostonian women how to think in new ways through her
Conversations series, Fuller’s career as a public intellectual was in full swing.
Indeed, both the successes and failures of the Conversations reflect the role Fuller
had already adopted in Literary Concord, the one that she would continue to play in
various forms for the rest of her literary career: Elder Sister. Nagging, shaming,
instructing, modeling, and supporting – Fuller’s writings are replete with sisterly rhetoric,
as her audience would have understood it. As documented by many of her friends and
acquaintances, Fuller also supported this authorial persona with her public performances.
Anna Parsons, for example, remembers Fuller as a “born leader” who, at home,
instinctively and expertly took over Parsons’s mother and older sister’s roles immediately
after introductions, governing and entertaining the children in her household (qtd. in
Capper 1: 94). Parsons’s description of Fuller’s behavior is typical of the majority
opinion: in social settings she tended to draw others around her, at which point she would
either entertain or instruct them. She was particularly drawn to children whose trust and
friendship she easily earned. Adults tended to be warier of her at first, troubled by her
reputation for aggression, but in most cases, they too fell under her Elder Sister spell.
Fuller’s friends, colleagues, admirers, and critics all recognized this distinctive pattern of
behavior in both her written and live performances. Her brother, Richard, even explicitly

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call her “everybody’s sister” (qtd. in Fuller in Her Own Time 193). While the idea of
playing the sister in the public sphere was not unique to Fuller, Fuller’s version of the
Elder Sister proved a natural fit for Fuller’s aims.
Many of Fuller’s biographers have hesitated to put such a definitive label on her
public persona, arguing either that Fuller’s writing persona changed too much over the
course of her career or that her personality was too fragmented to sustain a coherent
persona over her whole body of work.
70
While it is true that Fuller matured as a writer
over the years through her varied writing experiences at home and abroad and that her
theatrical nature also encouraged her to experiment with slightly different literary guises
during that time, she was never free of the need to justify her particular presence on the
writing scene. Although many women in this era wrote professionally, they tended to
limit themselves to certain genres and styles of writing, most of which did not appeal to
Fuller. Indeed, Fuller’s journals are full of her critiques of such female writers. In
contemplating a book by George Sand (whom she admired overall) that she had recently
read and disliked, for example, Fuller writes, “I have always thought…that I would not
write, like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man, of the world of
intellect and action” (qtd. in Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth 57). This statement of
intention demonstrates not only Fuller’s recognition of the stereotypes the reading public
of her era attached respectively to women’s and men’s writing, but also her own

70
For example, Myerson sees Fuller’s writing persona as an “evolving identity”
developed through “reading and writing” as “recursive processes” (Margaret Fuller,
Critic xxxvi), Chevigny sees Fuller’s persona in terms of “various identities” or
“chronological experiments” designed to help her work through the socio-intellectual
problems her writing addressed (Woman and Myth 9), and Matteson views Fuller as
“protean” (xiii, 205, 251). Like Chevigny, he believes Fuller experimented with a series
of successive personae.

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complicity in this kind of gender essentialism. In order to act out her plan to write “like a
man” – that is, in a style and a genre that had at that point been reserved for men and in
which the vast majority of her competitors would be male – Fuller needed a persona that
both she and her reading public would accept as a legitimate female authority. By
treating all of her readers as little brothers and sisters – in essence, using a paradigm of
the private sphere in a public setting – Fuller succeeded in carving out a unique position
of power for herself.
And, in a fundamental way, she did see her peers as brothers and sisters. One of
the reasons that the Elder Sister was a natural choice for her authorial persona was
because she saw society primarily in familial terms. In Woman, for example, she
addresses her female readers as “sisters” and, in criticizing the institution of slavery, she
refers to the black man as the white man’s “sorrowful brother” (15). While the use of the
terms brother and sister as a means of appealing to a reader’s emotions is certainly not
particular to Fuller, her sustained commitment to the family metaphor is. In the Memoirs,
Emerson notes, with some initial surprise, that Fuller addresses all of her associates by
their first names. Moreover, Fuller often invents nicknames for her friends: Sam Ward
becomes “Raffaelo,” Clarke becomes “Germanico,” and even Emerson himself becomes
simply “The Sage.” These practices, clearly unusual in the antebellum era (as Emerson’s
reaction attests), reflect Fuller’s tendency to regard everyone she meets on intimate terms,
and – in the case of her invented nicknames – to take a big sisterly lead in the
relationship.
71
As a writer, she extends this philosophy to her relationship with her

71
Emerson was actually quite amused by Fuller’s tendency to invent nicknames and even
attempted to coin some of his own.

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readers. In Papers on Arts and Literature, a mature compilation of her best criticism, for
example, she explicitly defines writers and readers as imaginary siblings, calling
literature “an epistolary correspondence between brethren of one family, subject to many
and wide separations, and anxious to remain in spiritual presence one of another” (1: 172).
Elsewhere, in Papers, she describes the critic as the artist’s younger brother (1: 11-14).
While Fuller, herself a critic, appears to be complicating her role as Elder Sister by
calling the critic a younger sibling, in fact, this description replicates the doubling move
she makes elsewhere. Fuller’s definition of the critic as a younger brother allows her to
indulge her fantasy of being the younger sibling while in fact continuing to play the same
Elder Sister role. She appears to be looking up to the artist as an older and wiser sibling,
but in fact she is the one judging and correcting – the Elder Sister’s prerogative. At the
same time, this definition allows Fuller, as artist, to regard her own critics as younger
siblings and treat them accordingly. And her ventriloquizing of the younger brother-
critic in the passage that follows creates a model for her own “younger brothers” to
emulate.
72
As this imagined dialogue between artist and critic suggests, Fuller already
had a strong inclination to view people she liked as her spiritual family, the idea of filling
a place in an imaginary community came easily to her.
Not only did she see brothers and sisters all around her, she also saw these as
ideal roles for both genders. In Woman, for example, in defense of the unmarried woman
she writes, “A sister is the fairest ideal, and how nobly Wordsworth, and even Byron,
have written of a sister!” (107). This statement shows Fuller’s regard for the sister role in

72
For example, the Critic sees his elder sibling, the Poet, as his “benefactor,”
acknowledges his inferiority in the eyes of their “common mother,” and rests his value on
the assertion that he “understands” his brother better than anyone else – all positions
Fuller would have her own critics assume (1: 11).

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general, but in referencing Wordsworth and Byron in particular, it also reinforces the idea
that the sibling role is especially fitting to literary endeavors. Fuller’s opinion of the
suitability of the sibling role to the world of letters becomes even clearer when she argues
for the brother as the ideal for men. While she uses the idea of acting in a “brotherly”
fashion in a generally positive sense – for example, when in Summer, she urges white
men to treat Native Americans with “brotherly good will” (235) – she reserves a special
regard for men who behave as good brothers to female writers. In another passage from
Woman, for example, Fuller celebrates William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband,
as “one who would plead [his wife’s] cause like a brother.” Fuller adds that “[h]e acted,
as he wrote, like a brother” (63), suggesting that writing – as she does – as a concerned
sibling is an ideal for all authors to consider. Fuller’s belief that the sibling role is the
highest one can play helps to explain her embrace of the Elder Sister persona in her
literary career.
Moreover, as the example of Godwin and Wollstonecraft suggests, she sets up the
brother-sister relationship as a model for relations between the sexes, regardless of their
true connection. In Woman, concerned as it is with the status of women, she hits this note
repeatedly. "Are you acting toward other women in the way you would have men act
towards your sister?" she asks her male readers and chides them for not behaving as a
“good brother” ought to (63). She also includes many potential models for her readers in
this regard – not surprisingly, all with a literary pedigree. Like Godwin and
Wollstonecraft, for example, the married Count and Countess Zinzendorf earn Fuller’s
endorsement for emulating siblings. Of the Count’s attitude towards his wife, she writes
approvingly, “[H]e could and did look on her as a sister and friend also” (71). And she

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applies the same standard to non-married male-female associates as well. For example,
she lauds Emily Plater’s biographer for gathering up her works “with a brotherly
devotion” (35). Repeatedly, Fuller holds up the brother-sister bond as an ideal for all
gender relations. Fuller’s argument reflects her own experience. At the time of writing
Woman, Fuller was still an unmarried woman, and her brief romances had not impressed
her with the potential of such unions.
73
On the other hand, time had increasingly
improved her relations with her brothers. Over the years, Eugene, the second-oldest
Fuller child, had proven an excellent companion. In a 1844 journal entry, for example,
Fuller writes of their days spent exploring the woods and streams around their house
together, full of long conversations and comfortable silences. When her son was born,
she named him Angelo Eugene in honor of her brother. And she loved younger brother
Richard at least as well – perhaps more. Her letters to him are full of endearments, and
she frequently shares her innermost hopes – as well as substantial sums of her own
money – with Richard. Richard himself proudly called his famous sister his “confidante”
(qtd. in Fuller in Her Own Time 188). More importantly, he worshipped her. In
reflecting on his relationship with his sister, he writes, “Margaret’s society was very
valuable – or rather, it was invaluable to me” (188). Unlike her half-hearted paramours,
Fuller’s brothers were affectionate, respectful, and unswervingly loyal. And Fuller
clearly believed that they brought out the best in her as well.

73
Fuller’s good opinion of the brother-sister relationship was also reinforced by the
Romantic literature and conduct books she read. For example, in her conduct book, The
Women of England, Sarah Stickney Ellis describes the brother-sister relationship as
“perhaps one of the most faithful and disinterested of any which the aspect of human life
presents” (294).

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Moreover, by playing the Elder Sister, Fuller exploited an increasingly popular
domestic code to her advantage. Highly influential conduct manuals laid out clear rules
for all members of the family that, by mid-century, had settled into a standard of behavior
for most of America’s middle-class. Although Fuller was already an adult when the
conduct manual’s heyday began in the 1830s, several books of this type already existed
on the market when she was a youth. It is true that, as Ann Douglas notes in The
Feminization of American Culture, Fuller’s father did not include them in her educational
reading list, as other parents would have. But, at some point – whether out of personal
curiosity or as a result of Timothy Fuller’s eleventh-hour panic over his daughter’s
feminine development – Fuller discovered this genre.
74
Moreover, during the conduct
manual genre’s height, Fuller was an aspiring writer on the lookout for usable trends. She
could not have failed to notice the popularity of these books and the roles they
championed, including that of the sister. Indeed, a generation later, Bronson Alcott’s
Concord-raised daughter, Louisa May, would say of her own decision to write girls’
books, a novelistic sub-genre of the conduct manual: “Though I do not enjoy writing
‘moral tales’ for the young, I do it because it pays well" (qtd. in Showalter 56-7). Fuller
herself was eager to be paid well for her work and fastened upon the Elder Sister persona

74
For example, in an 1826 letter to her former teacher, Susan Prescott, Fuller
demonstrates her familiarity with at least one popular conduct writer when she debates
the relative value of Madame de Stael and Maria Edgeworth’s writing. Edgeworth’s
works belong to a subgenre of the conduct book: didactic fictional stories meant to
demonstrate the same teachings with titles such as The Parent’s Assistant. Fuller deemed
her work “useful” and “practical” (Letters 1: 154).

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as a means of appealing to her readers’ conduct manual-engrained respect and affection
for the type.
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Although these manuals rarely espoused the kind of gender equality Fuller would
champion in her proto-feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century (originally a
shorter work entitled “The Great Lawsuit: Man Versus Men, Woman Versus Women”),
they all assume a special and important place for women in the household – one that a
clever woman like Fuller could transform into real power in the public sphere. As Leila
Silvana May notes in her treatment of the nineteenth-century middle class’s view of the
sister, ideal sisters were potential repositories of great affective influence in this time of
rapid changes and perceived moral threats.
76
Conduct manuals were largely responsible
for this attitude towards sisters, as well as for establishing the terms by which one may
deem a sister “ideal.” For example, Eliza Farrar devotes a whole chapter in her popular
1836 conduct book, The Young Lady’s Friend, to “The Influence of Sisters on Brothers”
(in which she also includes information on the influence of sisters on sisters). In this
section, she tells her young female readers that their “companionship and influence may

75
Because of her characterization in the Memoirs as a Romantic idealist, Fuller’s
financial interest in her writing rarely receives any critical attention. But Fuller saw book
sales as both a symbol of professional success and also as a welcome relief from her
ongoing financial troubles. For example, after the publication of Woman, Fuller writes to
her brother, Eugene, of the former motive: “The book is out and the theme of all the
newspapers and many of the journals. Abuse, public and private, is lavished upon its
views, but respect is expressed for me personally. But the most speaking fact, and the
one which satisfied me, is, that the whole edition was sold off in a week to the
booksellers, and eighty-five dollars handed to me as my share. Not that my object was in
any wise money, but I consider this the signet of success” (qtd. in Howe 148). In
explaining her desire to temporarily put aside her other projects and to instead publish
translations of French bestsellers to James Freeman Clarke, she cites the latter motive:
“My aim is money” (qtd. in Risjord 107).

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May calls the sister “the primary pole of the sibling relationship” and “the locus of
tenderness and spirituality in the family” (13, 18).

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be powerful agents in preserving your brothers from dissipation, in saving them from
dangerous intimacies, and maintaining their minds a high standard of female excellence”
(218). Moreover, she reserves special powers for the eldest sister, calling her the “ablest
advisor” of her younger siblings, and she urges her to be “patient and kind” and to “read
some of the excellent works which have been written on education” because “[e]lder
sisters exert a very great influence over the young children of a family, either for good or
for evil” (219, 230, 226). Farrar’s estimate of the sister’s power, especially over male
siblings, was well within the mainstream during this era. Catharine Beecher (sister of
Harriet Beecher Stowe) suggests the same in her influential 1841 conduct book, A
Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School,
when she writes, “The mother forms the character of the future man; the sister bends the
fibres [sic] that are hereafter to be the forest tree…” (37). Although Fuller would
challenge some of the sexist limitations these manuals put on the attitude, behavior, and
aims of elder sisters, she seized upon their first premise: The elder sister had legitimate
power over both her “sisters” and “brothers.”
Fuller not only read these manuals – as did almost all men and women of her class
in antebellum Massachusetts – she also received personal training in these principles
from Farrar herself. After meeting Fuller at Harvard, Farrar – impressed by Fuller’s
intellect but discouraged by “the defects of her training” – took the young woman under
her elegant wing and “undertook to mould [sic] her externally, to make her less abrupt,
less self-asserting, more comme il faut in ideas, manners, and even costume” (Higginson

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36).
77
Fuller took careful note. Her social apprenticeship with Farrar marked the
beginning of her reign as “queen” of the “parliament of love,” as Emerson would
describe Fuller’s relationship with her fans early in her career (Memoirs 1: 213). But she
also came back to these ideas when it came time to craft a professional writing persona.
Skillfully conflating the public and private spheres, Fuller wielded these domestic
prerogatives in her public performances to establish herself as a critic and historian worth
heeding.
Fuller’s adoption, and adaptation, of the Elder Sister role also has its roots in her
Romantic education: specifically, Hegel’s articulation of ideal gender relations in
Phenomenology of Spirit. The primary advantage of the brother-sister relationship for
Hegel is its “equilibrium” (205). Unlike the relation between husband and wife,
according to Hegel, brothers and sisters “do not desire one another; nor have they given
to one another, nor received from one another” and thus are “free individualities with
respect to each other” (205). Apart from Hegel’s troubling association of sexual relations
with ideas of impurity and imbalance, this basic formulation of the brother-sister
relationship as one primarily characterized by equality offers a promising rhetorical
premise on which Fuller and other women could base their entrance into the public
sphere and fight for women’s rights. Unfortunately, Hegel draws some decidedly
unbalanced conclusions from this first premise: the most important being that, due to the
centrality of the brother-sister relationship to the ethical development of both the
individual and ultimately the community, “[t]he loss of a brother is thus irreparable to the

77
Fuller and Farrar were so close during this formative period of Fuller’s life that the
older woman proposed to take her protégé to Europe with her. Fuller was elated at the
prospect. Only her father’s death and the immediate necessity of finding a job kept her
from going.

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sister, and her duty towards him is the highest” (206). Hegel does not suggest that the
loss of the sister would wreak equal damage on her brother. This inequality exists
because, unlike the sister – in whom, according to Hegel, the ethical spirit remains
unconscious – “the brother is the member of the family in whom its spirit becomes
individualized, and enabled thereby to turn towards another sphere” (206). The latter half
of this equation reproduces standard patriarchal assumptions about the spiritual nature of
woman and her unfitness for public life.
Not surprisingly, many of Fuller’s male peers, including Emerson, fastened upon
the more conservative aspects of Hegel’s message: his association of sex with impurity
and imbalance, his association of women with the unconscious and mystical realms (i.e.,
“women’s intuition”), and his relegation of women to the private sphere as mere supports
to their “brothers.” For example, Emerson’s speech “Woman,” given at the 1855
Women’s Rights Convention in Boston, rehearses all of these ideas. He immediately
cites women’s supposedly “oracular nature” and divides men and women, respectively,
into “Will” and “Sentiment.” Like Hegel (and most of the conduct manuals of the day),
Emerson characterizes women as a civilizing force, albeit one that operates through
private channels alone. “Every woman being the wife or the daughter of a man,-- wife,
daughter, sister, mother, of a man, she can never be very far from his ear, never not of his
counsel,” he assures his female audience, while adding the provision: “if she has really
something to urge that is good in itself and agreeable to nature” (my emphasis, Works 11:
425). Emerson uses this argument to persuade the women in his audience to abandon
their push for greater representation in the public sphere. Indeed, he suggests that
women’s entrance into the public sphere would result in what he calls a “contamination”

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of women’s virtue with men’s vice. Instead, he recommends that she find a male
guardian and vaguely assures her that, “when he is her guardian, fulfilled with all
nobleness, knows and accepts his duties as her brother, all goes well for both” (11: 426).
Here, Emerson directly cites Hegel’s notion of the brother-sister bond as the ideal of
gender relations, preserving the paradoxical inequities Hegel associates with this
supposedly “balanced” union.
Although Emerson’s lecture postdates Fuller’s death, she certainly would have
been familiar with Emerson’s Hegelian-inflected ideas about the nature of women and
their role in the world. Indeed, she agreed with some of his premises. For example, in
Woman, Fuller agrees with the idea that women have greater access to the unconscious,
mystical realms of the world. She explains that women have more of the “electrical, the
magnetic element” than men and even repeats the clichés of women’s intuition and the
essential masculine nature of intellect (91). Likewise, one can see that Fuller takes
Hegel’s original idea of the “balance” inherent in the brother-sister relationship to heart
when she remarks that she had originally believed William and Mary Howitt to be
siblings due to “the equality of [their] labors and reputation” (67). Hegel’s vision of the
brother-sister bond as a model of ideal gender relations, in fact, is as central to Fuller’s
development of her Elder Sister persona as the conduct manuals she devoured.
In adopting Hegel’s general concept, however, she rejects and subverts many of
the most sexist conclusions he and others append to the basic model. Indeed, she devotes
quite a bit of space in Woman to working out the specifics of her position on this subject.
For example, while she is comfortable with the idea that a spirit realm exists and that
women have greater access than men to it, she does not allow that men naturally have a

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greater intellectual facility in balance. Instead, she abruptly puts the metaphysical aside
and blames any imbalance in this area on gender oppression, specifically citing a lack of
education opportunities for women. Discussing the state of female education, for
example, she insists, “[I]t should be acknowledged that they have intellect which needs
developing,” and not merely so “that they may become better companions and mothers
for men” (84). Despite what Fuller argues is a pressing need to organize “school
instruction for girls [in such a way as] to give them as fair a field as boys,” she contends
that such “arrangements are made with little judgment or reflection” (83). She follows up
this claim by breaking down exactly how the mid-century education system fails girls: for
example, she believes that the widespread use of young male students as teachers and the
preponderance of similarly imperfectly educated women in the administrations of such
schools perpetuates existing flaws in the system by offering no opportunities for critical
perspective. Improving girls’ education along these lines, in Fuller’s opinion, would
protect young women from becoming “blinded by narrowness or partial views of a home
circle” and better prepare them for public life (83). By placing an emphasis on concrete
social factors in this way, rather than on some essentializing notion of how spirit is
individualized in men, and by explicitly assuming women’s rightful place in public life,
Fuller challenges Hegel’s central premise for arguing that the public sphere naturally
belongs to men.
Fuller’s version of the fraternal-sororal model also troubles an unstated premise in
Hegel’s formulation: i.e., that, like (and sometimes in conjunction with) the nineteenth-
century convention of passionate language between friends, the fraternal-sororal model
necessarily contains and sublimates any messy sexual feelings between associates. In

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Woman, Fuller initially seems to be reinforcing this idea in disavowing her avatar
Miranda’s potential for either inspiring or feeling sexual attraction: “She was fortunate in
a total absence of those charms which might have drawn to her bewildering flatteries, and
in a strong electric nature, which repelled those who did not belong to her, and attracted
those who did. With men and women her relations were noble,— affectionate without
passion, intellectual without coldness” (28). But, as her romance with young fan
Giovanni di Ossoli demonstrates, in practice, Fuller was emphatically not void of sexual
feeling toward her peer-“siblings,” nor incapable of producing it in others. Indeed, her
stance on this issue became a point of confusion and conflict with Emerson. As Christina
Zwarg puts it in her treatment of Fuller and Emerson’s correspondence, “Emerson was
enormously troubled by the seductive energy released through his intellectual
conversation with Fuller” (37). While Zwarg allows that both Emerson and Fuller were
influenced by Fourier’s “law of passionate attraction” in the management of their
relationship, she argues that, due to the fact that “she was self-conscious about her unique
position in culture, Fuller discovered the lineaments of that management much sooner
and with greater force than did Emerson” (40). As a result, Zwarg contends that “Fuller
took charge of the correspondence” (47), and the resulting flirtation was, in Zwarg’s
words, both a “contaminating and motivating force for both of them” (48). At some
point, however, it all became too much for Emerson. In the fall of 1840, Fuller
apparently sent him a letter that was so sexually provocative that he destroyed it and sent
her a chastising response.
78
By flouting the assumptions built into Hegel’s fraternal-

78

Nathaniel Hawthorne was similarly troubled by the sexual energy Fuller directed at
him. See my chapter, “Nathaniel Hawthorne: Family Man and Peeping Tom.”

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sororal model through subversion of the accepted sister role, Fuller showed her disdain
for the limitations women faced in the public sphere.
Fuller not only refused to neuter her Elder Sister in her relations with her peer-
siblings, she also refused to make her Elder Sister heteronormative. Numerous scholars
have identified lesbian traces throughout Fuller’s body of work, as well as in the
anecdotal evidence of her friends. Although homosexuality had not yet been codified as a
distinct sexual orientation and passionate same-sex relationships were an accepted
convention of the nineteenth-century, Fuller’s treatment of such relationships again
defied the unspoken rules of both the fraternal-sororal model and the same-sex romance.
For example, while the passionate embrace of girlfriends was supposed to spring from a
shared sense of womanhood, Fuller frequently, and sometimes explicitly, imagined
herself as a boy or man in these scenarios. Mary E. Wood points to a passage in her
Memoirs in which Fuller rhapsodizes about an older girl. In contemplating her absent
friend, Fuller imagines herself as Harry Bertram from Guy Mannering searching for his
lost lady-love. In Summer on the Lake’s story of Mariana, the female narrator (whom
Fuller suggests – along with Mariana, herself – as a stand-in for herself) sets out to court
the exotic older Mariana with wild flowers. Later, the same girl goes down on her knee
to kiss Mariana’s hand, “resembling,” as David Greven puts it, “the suitor on bended
knee proposing to his would-be fiancée” (47). Fuller also plays with gender in her basic
description of Miranda’s relationships in Woman. In describing Miranda’s dealings with
men, Fuller asserts that they “showed to her confidence as to a brother, gentleness as to a
sister” (28). Such gender bending complicates the notion that chastity undergirded such

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same-sex romances by replicating the structures of (the more visible) heterosexual
courtship.
Wood also points to biographical evidence of Fuller’s lesbianism and gender
bending. She notes Emerson’s complaints about Fuller’s supposedly “burly masculine
existence,” as well as her female friends’ “enthusiastic attachment” to her (Memoirs 1:
280). Francis B. Dedman also points to Fuller’s tempestuous relationship with Caroline
Sturgis. Wood notes that Sturgis explicitly describes her relationship with Fuller as one
that “is redeemed from ‘the search after Eros’” (qtd. in Wood 4); however, the inclusion
of this compliment itself can be taken as proof of such tensions in their friendship. It is,
after all, unusual for non-romantic, same-sex friends to praise each other for the mastery
of their sexual feelings for each other. While one must be careful not to read modern
scripts of sexuality backward onto the nineteenth-century, such examples at least suggest
that Fuller was willing to present herself in a way that engendered confusion about where
the homosocial intersected with the homosexual in her female relationships. In this way,
Fuller challenged yet another gendered boundary the Elder Sister role was originally
designed to patrol.
Not only must we separate Fuller’s use of the Elder Sister persona from its more
conventional iterations, we must also distinguish the idea of Fuller as Elder Sister from
the most influential theory of Fuller’s literary role: that is, as Friend. This idea comes
from Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing – the editors of the
widely read Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). Of Fuller’s friendships and their
impact on her public persona, for example, Emerson writes, “A life of Margaret is
impossible without them, she mixed herself so inextricably with their company; and

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when this little book [the Memoirs] was first projected, it was proposed to entitle it
‘Margaret and her Friends’” (1: 205). And Clarke makes their connection to her career
even more explicit: “She was, indeed, The Friend. This was her vocation” (2: 40). For
the editors of the Memoirs – each a committed Transcendentalist – the idea of the “friend”
had special significance. As Emerson explains in his essay “Friendship,” true friends
inspire self-culture and therefore hold the highest place in the social realm, essentially as
servants of the Over-Soul (his concept of the divine). Her editors had a point: Fuller was
devoted to her friends, as they were to her, and she did inspire them to improvement. By
the time Fuller became a public figure, she was already tremendously popular with her
own set. Indeed, Horace Greeley, the high-minded publisher of the New York Tribune,
marveled at the “strangely Oriental adoration” of her friends (qtd. in Ingersoll 172).
79

Her published works also contain evidence to support this view. In Summer, for example,
Fuller stops the narrative of her voyage for many pages simply to celebrate a friend’s
birthday.
80
In the same work, she also frequently references her friends in her story, such
as Sarah and James Clarke (“S” and “J,” respectively), her companions on her journey.
Although, without direct evidence, it is difficult to reconstruct reader response at the
distance of over a century, given the popularity of the Memoirs and the editors’
reputations as Fuller’s intimates, one can assume that – at least posthumously – much of
Fuller’s audience did indeed regard her as the epitome of the Transcendentalist Friend.

79
Fuller worked for Greeley at the New York Tribune between 1844 and 1850 (until her
death). In 1846, Greeley made her the paper’s first female editor and, shortly after, its
first female foreign reporter.

80
According to Emerson, in fact, Fuller often dated letters and journal entries by her
friends’ birthdays rather than by their calendar date.

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But by presenting Fuller primarily as a Friend in the Transcendentalist mode, the
editors forced her into a mold that suited their purposes: that is, they blunted the
threatening aspects of Fuller’s persona while reaffirming their own intellectual
commitments. Specifically, they had unwittingly undermined Fuller’s seriousness in the
public’s mind. Transcendentalism, with its rejection of social, intellectual, and religious
conventions as well as its reputation for head-in-the-clouds idealism, had engendered
criticism from social conservatives from the beginning. These same readers had also
harbored suspicions about Fuller with her frequent forays into the masculine bastions of
literary criticism and history, her interest in exotic German writers and thinkers, and her
feminism, as well as her personal reputation for arrogance and flamboyance. Thus, by
depicting Fuller as the Transcendentalist Friend – to the increasingly conservative readers
of the second half of the nineteenth century, the very image of the annoying, busybody,
eccentric reformer of one’s parents’ era – the editors of the Memoirs reinforced these
aspects of Fuller’s persona at the expense of her more down-to-earth, practical qualities.
Two of Fuller’s earliest biographers, Julia Ward Howe (Margaret Fuller,
Marchesa Ossoli, 1883) and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Margaret Fuller Ossoli,
1884), specifically highlight Fuller’s Elder Sister persona to correct misperceptions of the
writer that had sprung up out of the narrow depiction of her in the Memoirs. By
reinstating Fuller as Elder Sister, Howe and Higginson counter Emerson et al’s vision of
Fuller with evidence of her private side (although, of course, as I am suggesting here,
Fuller had routinely exploited her Elder Sister persona in her public writings as well).
Both biographers acknowledge the veracity of the Memoirs editors’ depiction of Fuller as
a great friend and an important member of the Transcendentalist circle, but they both

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focus squarely on her role as sister. Of Fuller’s decision to forego a trip abroad with her
friends to help support her mother and siblings after her father’s death, for example,
Howe writes, “Of all the crownings of Margaret’s life, shall we not most envy her that of
this act of sacrifice? So near to the feast of the gods, she prefers the fast of duty, and
recognizes the claims of family affection as more imperative than the gratification of any
personal taste or ambition” (Margaret Fuller Ossoli 59). In defense of Fuller’s later
decision to move to New York, Howe reiterates, “The children of the household had
grown up under her fostering care, nor had she, in any flight of her vivid imagination,
forgotten the claims and needs of brothers, sister, or mother” (128). In both instances,
Howe insists that Fuller’s public career – while extremely important to her identity –
always came after her obligations to her family. By depicting Fuller’s priorities in this
way, Howe seeks to mitigate the dominant posthumous image of her as a “pretentious”
and “eccentric” bluestocking, out of touch with ordinary women’s lives (28). In a similar
move, Higginson writes, “[I]t does not seem to have been their impression that she
neglected her home duties for the sake of knowledge; such was her conceded ability that
she was supposed equal to doing everything at once” (25). Like Howe, Higginson points
to Fuller’s sacrifices after the death of her father as proof: “Every New England farm-
house has been the scene of some touching tale of sisterly devotion, but nowhere more
genuine than in that old homestead at Groton” (55). The sisterly image of Fuller that
emerges from these anecdotes sharply contradicts the more eccentric picture of Fuller in
the Memoirs.
In fact, Higginson goes further than Howe in positioning Fuller as Elder Sister by
describing Fuller’s actual literary role as sisterly. In explaining her unremunerated tenure

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as editor of The Dial, for example, Higginson subtly links her generous efforts on behalf
of the fledgling journal with those on behalf of her younger brothers: “[A]t a time of
such discouragement as this, she proposes to her brother that they should unite in
advancing $300 to an older brother in Louisiana; she pledging herself, however, to
become responsible for the whole amount, if necessary, though then possessed of but
about $500 in the world. Such acts of sisterly devotion were common things with her;
and this is mentioned only to show out of what patient self-denial the ‘Dial’ was born”
(167-68). Just as Fuller put her brother’s needs before her own by giving him much of
the little money she had, she put her literary “brothers’” needs for a public platform
before her own by giving them much of the little time she had to devote to her own
literary career. For Howe and Higginson, Fuller’s thoughtful, sisterly behavior better
represented her than the Memoirs biographers’ image of her as a strange, Romantic friend
with few practical impulses.
More recently, biographer Bell Gale Chevigny has also grappled with the
Memoirs editors’ image of Fuller as Friend for the same reasons as Howe and Higginson
and with a similar strategy, but with a different message about her sisterly role. Like
Howe and Higginson, Chevigny acknowledges the Memoirs editors’ claims that Fuller
played the Friend, but unlike Fuller’s early biographers who still felt the need to respect
the authority of the Memoirs, Chevigny sees this persona as an early experimentation on
the road to a new identity that was yet “without local example” (The Woman and the
Myth, 8). She writes, “Though it fused her disparate energies, sharpened her identity,
served her differing needs as they emerged, and brought something new to the culture of
New England, the art of friendship alone could not be her vocation. The sheer exercise of

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her formidable personality could not long conceal the absence of real function” (68). For
Chevigny, Fuller’s social activism instead becomes the keynote of her public career. As
the phrase “the absence of real function” reveals, Chevigny’s ultimate rejection of Fuller
as Friend, like Howe and Higginson’s, rests on the airy, out-of-touch impracticality of the
image as it was understood by Transcendentalism’s detractors. In its place, she
highlights Fuller’s efforts to use her position to bring attention to worthy causes such as
the rights of women, convicts, immigrant laborers, slaves, Native Americans, and perhaps
most famously the Italian republicans. She too downplays Fuller’s uniqueness, showing
her instead as a paradigmatic, middle-class American woman.
But unlike Howe and Higginson, Chevigny – a second-wave feminist writing
almost a century later – does not see the self-sacrificing Elder Sister role as particularly
positive: “American women who did not capitulate to the marital yoke often compensated
by bending their necks to other family yokes, offering their services to the brothers or
sisters who would support them…In various seasons of her life, Fuller took each of these
routes, which became the life-stories of many women” (8). Although Chevigny notes
that “Fuller characteristically stretched traditional roles” (150), she does not seem to
recognize the traces of the Elder Sister in Fuller’s eventual public performances. Without
an understanding of how Fuller transformed the Elder Sister role, however, it is difficult
to account for the authority Fuller wields in the public sphere – an essential prerequisite
to her social activism.
Indeed, Fuller’s confident assumption of power in the public sphere, on and off
the page, confounds the image of her as Transcendentalist Friend and reinforces that of
her as Elder Sister more than Howe and Higginson’s examples of her sisterly self-

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sacrifice. Fuller may have been a friend to many but, like Emerson, she never offered her
friendship on equal ground. Rather she always assumed a position of authority and
dominance over her acquaintances: the eldest sister’s pride of place. Clarke himself, in
discussing Fuller’s friendship, attests to this tendency when he writes, “Henry the Fourth
without Sully, Gustavus Adolphus without Oxenstiern, Napoleon without his marshals,
Socrates without his scholars, would be more complete than Margaret without her friends”
(Memoirs 1: 75). In each analogy, Clarke unconsciously posits a dominant friend with
one or more satellite associates. Later in the same passage, he refers to Fuller’s friends as
her “property,” again reproducing the inequality inherent in the relationships. Similarly,
Emerson calls Fuller’s friends “the chorus” and Fuller herself “the queen of the scene” (1:
205). He also repeats Clarke’s property analogy, famously referring to her friends as “a
necklace of diamonds about her neck” (1: 213). Fuller herself unapologetically embraces
this inequality in her relations in her depiction of the Fulleresque “Mariana” when she
writes about the titular character’s attitude towards her schoolmates: “She could never be
depended on to join in their plans, yet she expected them to follow out hers with their
whole strength” (Summer 81). Fuller’s description of Mariana’s double standard shows
her self-awareness: She knew that she was incapable of regarding her friends as her
equals, that she expected their obedience. Because of this lopsided balance of power,
Elder Sister fits Fuller’s persona far better than a more generalized notion of her as
Friend.
Indeed, Fuller’s frequent emphasis on her role as a teacher highlights her view of
the elder sister as a leader rather than, as her intellectual “brothers” would have it, simply
a selfless supporter. In Minerva and the Muse, Joan von Mehren writes, “Teaching was

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natural to her, and she would, in fact, never cease being a teacher in one guise or another”
(103). Fuller had a great deal of experience teaching, tutoring her younger siblings and
other local children and making her living as one in Alcott’s Temple School and later in
Hiram Fuller’s Greene Street School. And Fuller draws on this experience in her writing,
frequently lapsing into lecturing tone throughout her body of work. For example, while
discussing the craft of writing in Papers, she includes a lesson for aspiring authors:
“Writers have nothing to do but to love truth fervently, seek justice according to their
ability, and then express what is in the mind; they have nothing to do with consequences,
God will take care of those” (2: 138). In Summer, she interrupts her travel narrative to
instruct her readers on child rearing: “American men and women are inexcusable if they
do not bring up children so as to be fit for vicissitudes” (124). And polemical writings
such as Woman seem to be motivated entirely by Fuller’s desire to educate her readers.
In this work, she frequently breaks into aphorisms such as Samuel Johnson’s “Clear your
mind of cant” and the unattributed angel-in-the-house mantra: “lf you have a power, it is
a moral power” (n. 17, 153). She also explicitly notes that her purpose for writing
Woman is to advise women on their roles. Moreover Fuller’s writing is full of imperative
constructions. In one passage from Woman, for example, Fuller erupts into a veritable
orgy of imperatives as she role-plays various sages: “Knock and it shall be opened; seek
and ye shall find…Be ye perfect… Gather from every growth of life its seed of thought;
look behind every symbol for its law…Do the best thou knowest…Shrink not from
frequent error…Follow thy light…be faithful as far as thou canst…Help others…Love
much and be forgiven…Do not disturb thy apprenticeship by premature effort; neither
check the tide of instruction by methods of they own. Be still, seek not, but wait in

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obedience” (10). Here, Fuller uses fourteen imperative constructions in the space of
seventeen sentences, and while this passage marks the extremity of her tendency to order
her reader around, it is far from unusual in her writing.
81
Fuller’s list of orders reads like
an instruction manual or a written lecture. Fuller’s focus on teaching, in itself, was not
unique. As both T. Gregory Garvey and Bruce Dorsey note in their respective treatments
of gender and the culture of reform in antebellum America, for female writers, weighed
down by the unspoken burden of justifying their very existence in the marketplace,
playing the reform-minded teacher in some fashion seemed almost a necessity. By
frequently invoking the elder sister’s prerogative to instruct her younger siblings, Fuller
emphasizes the elder’s sister’s role as a leader over her other functions.
Fuller’s desire for a persona that allowed her to regularly display her leadership
skills is also reflected in Capper’s counter-intuitive theory of Fuller as Patriarch. He
recounts Fuller’s glee early on when, at the urging of her father, she submitted an article
to the Boston Daily Advertiser and Patriot entitled “In Defense of Brutus” and
discovered that at least one reader (the one who chose to debate her position) mistook her
for an elderly man (Letters 1: 226). Fuller’s delighted response to this misidentification
shows the high status she personally attached to such father figures as well as their
generally revered position in her society – a fact that Fuller would not overlook later
while fishing for an authoritative persona as a writer. By the time she wrote a letter to

81
In one of her dispatches from Rome, for example, Fuller uses twelve imperative
constructions in six sentences: “Be a believer; abhor to be King, Politician, Statesman.
Make no compromise with error; do not contaminate yourself with diplomacy, make no
compact with fear, with expediency…Take no counsel except from God, from the
inspirations of your own heart, and from the imperious necessity of rebuilding a temple to
Truth, to Justice, to Faith. Ask of God, self-collected in enthusiasm of love for
Humanity…then enter upon it…look neither to the right hand or the left…ask of
yourself…Proclaim aloud the result…Do not say to yourself…” (Sad But Glorious 196).

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Reverend Hedge asking for him to contribute to The Dial, for example, Fuller writes of
her relationship with the struggling journal: “I also am a father” (Letters 2: 124-125).
Capper draws attention to the difficulty Fuller had in reconciling her society’s belief that
women had no place in the public sphere with her own ardent “ambition for fame and
public recognition” (1: 53). Drawing from her letters in which she struggles to find an
authorial voice that suits her, he explains that “as a woman she felt, on some level, alien
to all public roles” and that she experienced “ambivalence…over whether or not, as a
woman, she could ‘play’ the role of a public artist of any sort” (1: 338).
82
Capper points
out what many of Fuller’s biographers had marveled at before him: that Timothy Fuller
assumed almost exclusive control over his daughter’s upbringing from the beginning and
that, in many ways, he was intent on molding her into his own image. As a result, Capper
asserts that Fuller saw the symbol of the father as “exalted” and spent her later life
“looking for him” (1: 37). He also claims that Fuller found him most “successfully,
within herself” and that, after Timothy died, she became “the new ‘paterfamilias’” (1: 37,
167). To support this claim, he cites Fuller’s frequent references to her own “masculine”
attributes. He also notes that Fuller’s mother herself recognized the resemblance between
the two early on and that Margaret in many ways shared Timothy’s place as her mother’s

82
Capper cites an 1839 letter to a friend in which Fuller writes, “For all the tides of life
that flow within me, I am dumb and ineffectual, when it comes to casting my thought into
a form. No old one suits me…At hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle;
as, on the other hand, I should palsy, when I would play the artist” (qtd. in Capper 1:
338). Although Fuller never directly links her writing difficulties with her status as a
woman in this passage, the juxtaposition of the two ideas – living as a woman and
playing the artist – strongly suggests that she sees them as mutually exclusive.
Elsewhere, Fuller does in fact make the conflict between the two identities more explicit:
“A woman of tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with
men. They are astonished at our instincts…It is quite another thing when we come to
write…” (Memoirs 1: 295-296).

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primary companion when he was gone (both after his death and during his many absences
as a congressman). Capper points to this identification to explain Fuller’s romantic
attraction to women: “Despite – or because of – her intense entanglements with her
parents’ psyches, Margaret Fuller for much of her life would seek out alternative,
especially maternal, attachments” (1: 41).
83
Capper also draws on her younger brother
Richard’s testimony of Fuller’s assumption of paternal leadership wherein she became “a
tower of strength” to her struggling mother and siblings (qtd. in Capper 1: 166). Not only
did Fuller become the family’s primary breadwinner during this period, she also made
many decisions about household management and the care of her siblings as her father
had done before her. Capper suggests that her private experience in the paternal role
helped her through her difficulties in finding her authorial voice.
Capper’s vision of Fuller as Patriarch comprehends far more of Fuller’s authorial
strategies, and is more sensitive to Fuller’s self-image, than the Memoirs’ more restrictive
view of the author as Friend. Capper’s efforts at gender-blindness, however, ironically
reproduce some of the assumptions of Fuller’s original, sexist critics. Capper does allow
that Fuller eventually embraced (what she saw as) her femininity in her efforts to
distinguish herself from Emerson in a psychosexual replay of her struggle to emerge out
from under her father’s overwhelming image. But his understanding of Fuller’s
negotiation of the masculine and feminine – rooted as it is in a personal psychological
difficulty rather than in the concrete social problem of her existence as a female writer in

83
In treating Fuller’s relationship with her father as an unresolved psychosexual drama,
Capper’s analysis strongly resembles Anthony’s argument in her Freudian biography of
Fuller. McGavran Murray also centralizes this relationship in her treatment of Fuller’s
life and career, going as far as to suggest actual sexual abuse.

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antebellum America – overlooks how she struggled to find a source for her authority out
of the existing roles for women in her time. Capper is right to look at Fuller as a gender
rebel in some ways: she demanded respect from both her male and female readers, she
refused to stick to the genres of writing already dominated by women, and she explicitly
wrote in protest against the traditional roles her society allotted to women. But while
Fuller admits to Channing, for example, that she sometimes wishes she were a man
because, as she puts it, “womanhood at present is too straitly bound to give me scope,”
she actually begins the same passage with “I love best to be a woman” (Memoirs 1: 297).
Not only did Fuller claim to love being a woman (a claim that she substantiated in many
surprisingly traditional ways throughout her life), she also recognized that, unless she
wanted to continue to write anonymously – a condition of writing undoubtedly anathema
to her ambition – she could not ignore the public’s attitudes towards her gender. She
might write of a better future when women could be sea captains if they wished, but as a
mid-century, American, female writer, she knew that she first had to contend with the
world as it was if she wanted the opportunity to change it. Thus, her strategy was not to
force her audience to see her as a feminized father-figure – an authorial image that would
have struck the average reader as excessively jarring – but rather to “stretch traditional
roles” (150), as Chevigny puts it. As Howe and Higginson’s descriptions of Fuller’s
sororal self-sacrifice attest, nineteenth-century, middle-class Americans – steeped in the
ideology of domesticity – already had a strong, positive image of the sister who gives her
life to her family, and they accepted that she could claim a share of power in return. By
playing the Elder Sister to her readers, Fuller could demand the respect she needed from
her imaginary little sisters and brothers without, in most cases, challenging their settled

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ideas of womanhood from the outset. Capper is right that Fuller shared both her father’s
desire for power and many of his ways of exercising it, but he overlooks the challenges
she navigated to claim and hold it – “straits,” as she put it, that her father never faced.
Such a journey required a very different kind of vessel.
84

Given her need to find a persona that was both authoritative and female, one
might ask why Fuller didn’t simply play Mother to her readers and peers. Undoubtedly,
many of her biographers would argue that Fuller neither identified with, nor truly
respected, her mother and thus did not think of playing such a role. Many of Fuller’s
biographies rehearse the same story: Timothy Fuller dominated Margaret’s childhood,
leaving her mother with little to do.
85
As a result, according to these accounts, mother
and daughter remained courteously estranged until Timothy’s death brought them
together. Some exceptions to this narrative can be found. Her earliest biographers,
Howe, Higginson, and the editors of the Memoirs, for example, treat Fuller’s mother
gallantly, highlighting Fuller’s own words about her, rather than attempting to quantify
her influence over her daughter. However, while none of these writers explicitly discount
her mother’s role in her life, the relative paucity of information about their relationship
available in these biographies (especially in comparison to their treatments of Fuller’s
relationship with her father) hints at the same idea. Capper and von Mehren argue more

84
From an early age, Fuller looked for alternative models to her father to guide her
expression: for example, while she identified her father with the Ancient Romans he had
her read, she identified her mother with the Ancient Greeks and claimed to be a balance
of the two cultures herself; she also explicitly identified Shakespeare as an alternative to
her father.

85
See, for example, Anthony, McGavran Murray, Matteson, and Chevigny, Woman and
Myth.

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explicitly against the dominant narrative of mother-daughter estrangement. However,
even these writers reaffirm the premise that Fuller’s father was her primary influence.
Yet Fuller’s writing is replete with powerful images of mothers, and at least one of her
friends did see her as a mother figure.
86

There is a simpler explanation for Fuller’s unwillingness to adopt a motherly
persona: honesty. The young woman who, after assessing her own appearance, resolved
to “be bright and ugly” was not one to claim powers that were not hers by right (Memoirs
1: 229). By the time Fuller had entered the literary world as a full-fledged professional,
she was – in her society’s parlance – a spinster. Thus, instead of falsely embracing the
mother’s role, she chose to identify with “the class contemptuously designated as ‘old
maids’” (Woman 84), arguing for their social necessity and moral potential. In this
defense, one can also detect the terms by which she claims power as one of their ranks.
The woman without husband or children works “for the use of all men, instead of a
chosen few” (86). Because such women are “undistracted by other relationships” (85),
they have – in Fuller’s opinion – greater access to the wisdom of the universe. She lists
several exalted roles for such a person, but tellingly finishes with the one she inhabits:
“the intellectual interpreter of the varied life she sees” (86). In other words, not only does

86
Fuller’s positive references to mothers can be grouped into roughly four strikingly
unoriginal and vague categories: Mother Nature (e.g., “water, mother of beauty”),
Mother Country (e.g., “The ‘Mother of Nations’ is now at bay against them all”), Mother
Concepts (e.g., “Truth is the nursing mother of Genius”) and the mother as the ultimate
source of comfort and support (e.g., “they sang…with as gentle and resigned an
expression as if they were sure of going to sleep in the arms of a pure mother.”) Fuller
rarely spoke of mothers in the negative unless she was comparing them unfavorably to
maiden aunts. Sam Ward referred to Fuller as “Mother,” and Fuller herself may have
attempted to revive this metaphor in discussing her romantic relationship with James
Nathan, when she called herself “mother of thy spirit life” (Love Letters 89).

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Fuller have a better claim to the Elder Sister role, but, in her view, the Elder Sister also
has a better claim to power than would a literary mother figure.
More recently, in “Tropes of Suffering and Postures of Authority in Margaret
Fuller’s European Travel Letters” (2005), Heidi Kolk has challenged the dominant
opinion that Fuller presented herself as a socially-oriented figure at all, whether as Friend,
Father, or Elder Sister. Instead, Kolk sees Fuller posing as outcast, “the long-suffering
prodigal child” (381): the ultimate outsider-insider.
87
Kolk makes her case by arraigning
copious extracts from Fuller’s published works and private correspondence in which she
“obsessively” plays the prodigal role (382). She rightly dates the beginning of Fuller’s
experimentation with the role to her journals of the early 1830s and pinpoints its apex,
not surprisingly, during her most difficult period abroad when she was forced by
circumstances to bear her child, Angelo, alone and in secret in Rieti, a small Italian town
approximately forty miles outside of Rome.
88
Kolk shows how Fuller uses the Old
Testament role to create a novel, uniquely American and female literary persona with
special authority. In her newly minted mythology Fuller permanently trades the
daughter’s sense of belonging for the expanded vision of the orphan wanderer. Unlike
those that position Fuller in more pedestrian roles, Kolk’s interpretation of Fuller’s

87
Many of Fuller’s most recent biographers are adherents of Kolk’s outcast theory.
McGavran Murray argues that Fuller adopted the outcast persona as a way of dealing
with her troubled relationship with her father. Matteson sees Fuller necessarily adopting
a “misfit” persona for a large part of her writing career because of her unusual position as
a woman intellectual. He also suggests that Fuller’s domineering and imperious
personality alienated others and contributed to her outsider status.

88
For example, Kolk includes Fuller’s letter to her friend, Charles King Newcomb, in
which she describes the Romans’ recognition of her exiled status: “The country people
say [of me] "Povera, sola, soletta," poor one, alone, all alone! the saints keep her, as I
pass. They think me some stricken deer to stay so apart from the herd” (Letters 5: 76-78).

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rhetoric recognizes the latter’s pleasure in enacting Romantic narratives, such as the
outcast’s journey. As Kolk notes, Fuller’s prodigal persona is animated by heart-
wrenching loss, because in Fuller’s version of the story - unlike the Old Testament son –
she can never come home again.
89

Although Kolk’s child-in-exile thesis appears to contradict the idea of Fuller as
Elder Sister, in fact Fuller’s adoption of the prodigal role forms an important, even
arguably an essential, part of her larger Elder Sister persona: that is, as an escape. The
eldest sister in the antebellum household shouldered tremendous responsibility towards
her parents and her younger siblings. Catharine Beecher, for example, recommends “[a]ll
the sweeping, dusting, care of furniture and beds, the clear starching, and the nice
cooking, should be done by the daughters of a family, and not by hired servants” (50).
She also suggests that, when one’s oldest daughter reaches the age of eight or nine years
old, she should be given a younger sibling to tend entirely as a mother might. As her
journal entries attest, Fuller appears to personally accept these duties without question (if
not without complaint). Five years older than the second oldest Fuller child (brother
Eugene), Fuller found herself tending not one younger sibling, but six.
90
Her father’s
frequent absences and early death placed an unusual burden on her mother and herself as
Fuller frequently found herself supplying his place as teacher and disciplinarian to her
siblings, companion and assistant to her mother, and later breadwinner to them all. A
journal entry from 1835 shows her sense of responsibility: “May I have light and strength

89
In this case, of course, Fuller’s prophecy did come true: she never did return home
again.

90
Although Fuller is actually the oldest of nine children, she had little opportunity to care
for two of her siblings because they died in toddlerhood.

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to do what is right, in the highest sense, for my mother, brothers, and sister…I alone was
ready” (Memoirs 1: 155, 170). Indeed, when Fuller realized what a precarious position
her father’s untimely death had put her mother and siblings, she gave up her plans to
journey to Europe – the trip of her dreams – to find a job that would support them. In
light of these burdens and her disappointment at losing her chance to travel abroad, Fuller
flight fantasy makes perfect sense. Not only does the prodigal escape the pressures of
family life, but as a tragic exile she also succeeds in making both her real family and her
literary “family” – that is, her little-brother and -sister readers and cohorts – regret not
valuing her more while they had her.
These needs also motivate Fuller to occasionally imagine an elder sister or brother
of her own. Again, she shows both her weariness with the elder sister’s responsibility
and her desire for recognition of her worth as an elder sister in this dream of role-
reversal. In her memoirs, she writes, “I sigh for an intellectual guide” (2: 153). Goethe,
Beethoven, Emerson, Harriet Martineau, and Eliza Farrar – each of them seem like a
possible choice at different times of her life. She writes of this longing privately, but she
also explores it in her public works. Again, “Mariana” stages this conflict most clearly.
In “Mariana,” for example, Fuller creates a curious dynamic by presenting herself as both
the narrator, a younger student at Mariana’s school, and as Mariana herself. As the
younger student, Fuller notices the charismatic Mariana immediately and resolves to “be
the wise and delicate being who could understand her” (Summer 88). The narrator Fuller,
ignored by her idol, is overcome by her feelings: “I fell upon my knees, and kissing her
hand, cried, ‘O Mariana, do let me love you, and try to love me a little’” (89). In terms of
the affection Fuller expresses, this relationship replicates the one she shared with the

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older English girl she would immortalize in an unpublished autobiographical romance
she writes twenty-three years later, whom she calls her “guardian spirit” and “the first
angel” of her life (Memoirs 2: 35). But Mariana’s haughty reaction to the younger girl’s
attentions reflects Fuller’s sense of self as well. In her performance of Elder Sister,
Fuller understands that she is difficult and exacting. Thus, by doubling herself as both
the younger and older girl, Fuller plays out a fantasy of younger sisterhood and, at the
same time, the dream of having the perfect younger sibling who can ignore her
shortcomings while appreciating her strengths. In short, as with her fantasy of exile, her
dream of having an older sister of her own satisfies both her need for escape from her
over-determined role and her desire for greater appreciation in it.
Critics frequently view Fuller’s tenacious wooing of the cerebral and withholding
Emerson as a straightforward replay of her relationship with her father, but evidence also
supports the idea that Fuller was rehearsing her younger-sister fantasy yet again.
McGavren Murray does not question the Emerson-as-father thesis. At the same time,
however, she gives a lengthy list of the ways in which Fuller may have viewed Emerson
as an excellent stand-in for herself: “[T]heir situations and ambitions were similar. Both
had been raised by harsh Unitarian fathers, now dead. Both were caring for reserved,
dignified, deeply religious mothers they loved – mothers who were not demonstrative in
returning their love. Both had younger brothers who were mentally slow (for Emerson it
was Rober Bulkeley, and for Margaret it was Lloyd). Both, moreover, were seeking
replacements for beloved others who had recently died…And both, in their fashion, were
seeking to affirm – despite personal doubts, anxieties, and uncertainties – a stable sense
of self by attending to the still voice of God within)” (99). Thus, by affectionately

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attaching herself to a man with whom she – rightly or wrongly – identified so strongly,
Fuller again indulged her fantasy of younger sisterhood.
Fuller’s occasional morbid tendencies also spring from the same source: her
frequent death wishes represent the extremity of her twin desires for escape and
appreciation. References to her imminent death remind her younger-sibling readers to
appreciate her while they can. Again, she demonstrates these longings most clearly in
“Mariana.” Fuller indulges a fantasy of dying unappreciated through her heroine:
“Mariana, so full of life, was dead. That form, the most rich in energy and coloring of any
I had ever seen, had faded from the earth” (Summer 81). And Fuller also frequently
expresses the notion that she will die young in her private writings. In the Memoirs, she
blames the strict educational regimen of her youth: “[T]here was finally produced a state
of being both too active and too intense, which wasted my constitution, and will bring
me, -- even although I have learned to understand and regulate my now morbid
temperament, -- to a premature grave” (1: 15).
91
Part of Fuller’s morbidity of course
sprung from her identification with Romantic conventions – the Romantic heroine rarely
survived to the end of the story. But Fuller’s readers would also have seen a real threat in
her prognostications. Poorly understood illnesses such as tuberculosis took young
Americans with regularity. Their deaths often appeared random and mysterious –
seemingly the result of a delicate constitution or even, as Fuller suggests, a morbid
temperament or emotional upset. Pregnancy also substantially increased a woman’s risk
of death, so it is not a surprise that Fuller’s private letters from Rome, written while

91
As with her belief that she could never return home again, Fuller’s prophecy of an
early demise does come true as she dies at the age of forty.

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pregnant, contain so many presentiments of coming doom. In such an atmosphere, Fuller
could convincingly worry her readers with subtle references to telltale signs of decline.
While Fuller, as Elder Sister, often attempts to stimulate such feelings of guilt and
remorse in her readers to gain more respect for herself, she also wields these weapons in
service of her causes. In Woman, for example, she repeatedly shames her imagined
opponents for disrespecting women. In one passage, she adroitly blends women’s plight
with that of the laborer and the slave: “Those who think the physical circumstances of
woman would make a part in the affairs of national government unsuitable, are by no
means those who think it impossible for the negresses to endure field work, even during
pregnancy, or the seamstress to go through their killing labours [sic]” (24). In another,
she chides the reader for not appreciating the value of childless, unmarried women whom
she calls “the spiritual parents, who have supplied defects in the treatment of the busy or
careless actual parents” (85).
92
This rhetorical choice finds its exact corollary in her
letters to her own brothers. For example, after the death of their father, Fuller attempts
(unsuccessfully) to shame her younger brother into returning home to help restore the
family, writing, “God grant that you, Eugene, may return to us with the spirit of a man
[original emphasis], able and disposed to do for your mother what a daughter cannot”
(Letters 1: 246). As she does with her readers in her public pleas, Fuller subtly chides her
brother for his apparent apathy, his slowness to act.
93
Moreover, she makes her argument

92
Of course, as mentioned earlier, Fuller’s defense of the “old maid” was also self-
serving as she was considered one herself.

93
Slowness to act in the face of injustice was, in fact, a particular outrage to Fuller. For
example, she criticized Emerson repeatedly for his lack of concrete action in the face of
social problems; and in her coverage of the Italian Risorgimento for the New York
Tribune, she aims the same lance at her fellow countrymen. On July 8, 1848, she writes,

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with the same terms with which she criticizes misogynists by calling into question a
crucial premise of his masculinity: that is, the responsibility that supposedly justifies the
power men claim. The imaginary sexist she envisions in Woman deserves our scorn
because he complacently watches female slaves and female seamstresses doing the actual
work. Likewise, Fuller implicitly warns Eugene that his own masculine honor will be
compromised if he chooses to sit back and watch her do the actual work their own
situation demands.
Sometimes, rather than straightforwardly criticizing her younger-sibling
opponents, she uses paralipsis as a tool of passive-aggression. Again, in Woman, where
her controversial subject brings these skills to the fore most often, Fuller slips into this
mode repeatedly. For example, she writes, “But I need not speak of what has been done
towards the red man, the black man. Those deeds are the scoff of the world” (my
emphasis, 14-15). Later, she insists that, “she will not speak” of a long list of complaints
she has against “profligate and idle men,” then follows with the list itself. Afterwards,
she admits to her trick: “I said, we will not speak of this now, yet I have spoken,” but
gives as her excuse that “the subject makes me feel too much” (22). These rhetorical
moves, as Fuller uses them, mimic the indirect, soft power techniques of the nineteenth-
century older sister and mother. In these instances, her complaints appear to be the result
of excess emotion, of being pushed too far in the moment by her opponent’s lack of
consideration, rather than the elements of a studied, strategic attack. This approach
disarms the reader, primed as he or she is by the era’s standards of etiquette to respond
gently to a sister’s distress.

“Will America look as coldly on the insult to herself as she has on the struggle of this
injured people?” (Sad But Glorious 307).

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Fuller gets away with such nagging because her touching sense of personal
responsibility as Elder Sister, especially to the most vulnerable members of her
community, is so obviously the driving force behind most of the subjects she takes up. In
Summer, for example, she chides herself for forgetting her perceived duty: “I have fixed
my attention almost exclusively on the picturesque beauty of this region; it was so new,
so inspiring. But I ought to have been more interested in the housekeeping of this
magnificent state, in the education she is giving her children, in their prospects” (104).
Contrary to the impression Fuller gives in this outburst, however, a great portion of her
travelogue centers on exactly such social concerns. In his reissue of the work, retitled At
Home and Abroad, Fuller’s brother points out this tendency, writing especially of “her
sympathy with all the oppressed” (v). Indeed, Summer is remarkable in its genre for the
amount of space Fuller devotes to lamenting the plight of the Native Americans she
meets. While she tries not to infantilize her subjects in this regard, a tone of big-sister
superiority frequently creeps in unbidden. As John Carlos Rowe explains in his preface to
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Selected Works, “Fuller was a product of
her times” in regard to the Native Americans (14). But this combination of
protectiveness and condescension was also the hallmark of her Elder Sister persona. One
finds her adopting exactly the same protective position in regard to other oppressed
groups in later works as well. In Woman, for example, not only does she argue for the
rights of women like herself, but she also springs to the defense of less fortunate women
– slaves, the very poor, and imprisoned women in particular. Sounding every bit the
kindly, but patronizing older sister, she asks middle-class women to “[s]eek out these
degraded women, give them tender sympathy, counsel, employment. Take the place of

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mothers, such as might have saved them originally” (133). She also used her position at
the New York Tribune to defend immigrant minorities, such as the Irish. In “The Irish
Character,” she calls these reviled immigrants “one of the best nations of the world”
(Margaret Fuller, Critic 1: 148), chides her fellow Americans for both their exploitation
of and their lack of respect for the Irish, and welcomes a future in which future
generations of Irish-Americans will overcome both. When she received letters protesting
the sentiments in the article, she responded in pure Elder Sister fashion, shaming her little
sisters and brothers for their pride. For example, to charges of Irish “ingratitude” she
reminds their readers that their Irish servants have little to be grateful for in comparison
to their own blessings (1: 155). Unlike fellow writers such as Emerson or Thoreau,
Fuller rejected the notion that individuals, regardless of how disadvantaged, must succeed
on their own. Instead, she offered herself as a symbolic Elder Sister to anyone in need: a
strategy that offset criticisms of her supposedly unfeminine stridency.
Fuller’s spirited defense of the weak – a keynote of her writing oeuvre – exactly
mimics her sense of her role as oldest sister in her own family. In his will, her father had
unwisely chosen Fuller’s uncle Abraham as his executor. Abraham Fuller proved
untrustworthy, routinely withholding funds from the family’s inheritance when they were
most needed and eventually stealing the remainder by secretly willing it to his own
family. As breadwinner, a frustrated Fuller found herself competing with her uncle for
control of her family, and the fight brought out this older-sister protective streak
powerfully. In 1837, for example, Fuller writes her mother the following letter:
My very dear Mother,

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Do not suffer the remarks of that sordid man to give you any uneasiness –
Proceed to act as we agreed when I was with you. It is perfectly clear to my mind
that the arrangements we then made are the right ones, and I do not fear to hold
myself responsible for the consequences. If Abraham Fuller continues to annoy
you in this manner I am decidedly of opinion that the management of our affairs
had better be transferred to some other lawyer…. We pay Abraham and we could
as well pay another man who would confine himself to his proper part of
managing the money. You must, my dear Mother, steadily consider yourself as
the guardian of the children. You must not let his vulgar insults make you waver
as to giving the children advantages to which they would be well entitled if the
property were only a third of what it now is…. Fit out the children for school, and
let not Lloyd be forgotten. You incur an awful responsibility by letting him go so
neglected any longer. I shall get Ellen a place at Mrs. Urquhart’s if possible; if
not, I may take her to Providence, for I hear of no better place. She shall not be
treated in this shameful way, bereft of proper advantages and plagued and
cramped in the May of life. If I stay at Providence and Abraham manages to
trouble you about money before we can get other arrangements made I will pay
her bills, if I do not stay there, I will put the affair into the hands of a lawyer: we
will see if she is not have a year’s schooling from twelve to eighteen. I am not
angry but I am determined. I am sure that my Father, if he could see me, would
approve the view I take…If I do not stay I will let her have my portion of our
income with her own…. (Letters 1: 300-301)

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Fuller’s later signature style is evident throughout this missive. She frequently addresses
her mother with imperative sentences, urging her to rise to the standard Fuller has
dictated for her. Fuller herself is decidedly fierce in her role as her younger siblings’
advocate, criticizing her mother for being moved by her uncle’s prodding and insisting
unequivocally that she should follow Fuller’s own orders instead. She is also generous
and self-sacrificing, agreeing to shoulder her sister’s expenses if her uncle objects to her
plan. Her uncle – like the misogynists of Woman and the white oppressors of the Indians
in Summer – becomes a vile enemy without sense or honor. Unlike her later work,
however, Fuller’s letter dispenses with any pretense of dialectic. For example, in
Woman, Fuller dramatizes a conversation between a mother and father about \educating
their young daughter. While Fuller’s disgust at the father’s unwillingness to properly
educate his daughter is evident throughout this exchange, she does give the father an
opportunity to defend his position. Here, Uncle Abraham gets no voice, even in stilted
form, with which to make his side of the argument. Part of this difference springs from
the relatively personal nature of the offense, but part of it reflects the source of Fuller’s
authority. In this case, Fuller brings in the ghost of her father to support her position,
arguing that she has special insight into his desires on the subject. In works like Woman,
the only authority to which she may claim access is merely a vague notion of revealed
history and her only means to this authority is her own claims of second sight. Thus,
Fuller tempers her fervor somewhat in her later persuasive writings.
If Fuller’s Elder Sister persona did nothing but prickle at injustice and lecture and
admonish her readers, however, she would not have served Fuller as well as she did. As
useful as these negative strategies were in moving her reform-obsessed readers to action,

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her true power, like Emerson, was as a mentor. As Clarke attests in the Memoirs, Fuller
excelled at the mentor’s tasks: “[W]e never met without my feeling that she was ready to
be interested in all my thoughts, to love those whom I loved, to watch my progress, to
rebuke my faults and follies, to encourage within me every generous and pure aspiration,
to demand of me, always, the best that I could be or do, and to be satisfied with no
mediocrity, no conformity to any low standard” (1: 64). Although Fuller could be
demanding and was frequently disappointed in her protégés, Fuller’s praise, when it did
come, could be lavish. For example, in an 1848 letter from Rome to her brother, Richard,
she assesses him and sees “talent, nobleness, a good person, good health, good position,
[and] good education” (Fuller in Her Own Time 187). According to Richard, Fuller used
her talent for conversation to encourage others towards their goals. He writes, “The
thought in leaving her company was much less ‘How remarkable she is!’ than ‘How
remarkable I am!’ I had no idea my mind had such powers, my tongue such eloquence,
and my heart such ardor!” (189). Although Richard admits that it was difficult to sustain
this momentum in his sister’s absence, he avows that her presence allowed one “to throw
off the shackles of habit and the long prejudice of years and to rise for the time to the true
godlike stature of man.” In these moments, he sees her “reach[ing] out a hand to lead us
in discourse to that elevation where her thought habitually dwelt” (190). Not only did
Fuller mentor her friends and family members in private, she also used her public
platforms to steer her writing peers towards success. In her essay “American Literature,”
for example, she champions the then-up-and-coming Nathaniel Hawthorne and writes of
her hope “that this slight notice of ours may awaken the attention of those distant or busy
who might not otherwise search in the volume” (Papers 1: 143). Indeed, Fuller herself

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sees this mentorship as her highest calling: “It has been one great object of my life to
introduce here the works of those great geniuses” (1: vii). The image of Fuller selflessly
devoting herself to cheering on other writers would have appealed to many readers raised
on such expectations of their own elder sisters. By folding her status as a critic into this
beloved conventional role, Fuller assured her opinions a receptive audience. And her
readers, as pseudo-siblings and therefore legitimate mentees, could also take pleasure in
doing their best to follow Fuller’s advice on self-culture and social justice, knowing that
Elder Sister would approve.
Fuller’s numerous prophecies, while appealing to a readership steeped (as she
was) in Romantic literature, were also effective in terms of solidifying her advisor role –
likely the main reason she continued to embrace this feminine stereotype so fervently
when she had rejected so many other essentializing notions of woman’s nature.
Specifically, as a prophetess, she made a mythology of her opinions, pronouncing on the
fate of all and turning her favorites into a new elect. In Summer, she already begins to hit
this note: “I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to
foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked from this” (28). In
the same work, she confidently pronounces on the “fate” of the Native Americans (to
disappear) and on the “star” of America (to be “free and equal”) and of Europe (to be
influential). When she turns to the subject of women’s roles in Woman, she again
predicts the future with tremendous self-assurance. She writes of the “destiny” of women
to expand their roles, how “the time is come,” and how the “symptoms of the times” are
reliable clues to this outcome (22, 13, 20). Likewise, in Papers, she announces that
“signs too numerous to be counted” indicate a coming class “revolution” (1: 8). And

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later, in Papers, she also brings her prophetic powers to bear on her criticism, announcing
for example, that “[u]nder the auspices of Wiley and Putnam, Hawthorne will have a
chance to collect all his own public about him, and that be felt as a presence which before
was only a rumor” (1: 144). In her most mature works, her dispatches from Europe,
Fuller has polished her prophetic tone to such a degree that she seems to be willing her
prophesy into being. In writing of the fledgling Italian Risorgimento, for example, she
confidently declares, “The New Era is no longer an embryo; it is born… Men shall now
be represented as souls, not hands and feet, and governed accordingly. A congress of
great, pure, loving minds, and not a congress of selfish ambitions, shall preside…Do you
laugh? ...Soon you, all of you, shall ‘believe and tremble’” (Sad But Glorious 322).
While declarations of what the future holds or that such-and-such is a “sign of the times”
are well-worn conventions of Romantic writing, Fuller’s use of them also bolsters her
status as a woman writer. By presenting herself assuredly as a seer, Fuller adds weight to
her opinions and strengthens her position as Elder Sister, because part of the older
sibling’s power springs from his or her relatively greater life experience. Just as the older
sibling shares wisdom gleaned from realms currently (or even forever) inaccessible to the
younger sibling, Fuller purports to base her advice on her special ability to see into the
future.
Thanks to an antebellum baby boom that introduced an unprecedented number of
siblings to middle-class American households and a growing literature dedicated to these
relationships, Fuller knew that imagining a literary community as a family, with her
playing the warmly familiar Elder Sister, would help her to connect with her readers and
grant her the power she needed to be taken seriously in the literary market. On the other

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hand, it also created a challenge: Fuller was not the only female writer to adopt a sisterly
pose and thus it became imperative that she distinguish her Elder Sister persona from the
mass of sisterly scribes on the market.
94
To do so, Fuller made sure that she would not be
seen as just any elder sister; instead, she would be – as Emerson and others had
nicknamed her – a “Yankee Corinne” – the American equivalent of de Stael’s brilliant,
unconventional elder-sister character of the same name. She would not allow her peers to
regard her as a safely neutered woman or force her into a supporting role. With these
moves, Fuller added a needed force to the elder sister role, making herself distinct from
the host of well-meaning but relatively staid “sisters” and “aunts” that had already
flooded the literary market without sacrificing the social authority inherent in the role.

94
Famous examples include Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Lydia Sigourney, and later,
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott.

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Chapter Four
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Family Man and Peeping Tom

While readers today primarily associate Nathaniel Hawthorne with his home town
of Salem thanks to the success of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables,
both set in the Massachusetts port town, the author actually owed a great deal of his
success to his Concord connections. Although moving to Concord had originally been
Sophia’s idea, and although Hawthorne’s relationship with his Transcendentalist
neighbors and their lofty ideas never completely lost its frosty patina, he quickly
discovered the potential market value of participating in the imaginary community of
Literary Concord. As David Dowling explains in his study of antebellum literary
coteries, The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America, by the 1840s,
the Transcendentalists were already a widely recognized coterie, a potent brand name on
the literary market, and Emerson, the inspirational and financial center of the group, was
friendly to newcomers. Always alert to literary trends and opportunities, Hawthorne
made himself at home, both literally and figuratively, amongst the Concord set,
positioning himself diplomatically as an insider, but not a partisan. From this vantage
point, he offered his readers a privileged view into the lives of his eccentric peers that
was at once intimate and objective; and eventually, when he learned to couch the practice
in the ideology of the increasingly popular cult of domesticity, he even used it to develop
his own successful role in Literary Concord: the family man.
Viewing Hawthorne in this way – as a professional writer working within a
literary coterie to satisfy certain demands of his readership, rather than as a tortured soul
cloistered in his study far from the influence of others – helps to bring to light the ways in

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which Hawthorne’s work actually engages the world around him. Finding the social
Hawthorne underneath the antisocial image is an important part of a larger push on the
part of New Historicist critics to resituate such authors in their proper writing milieu.
Stephen Railton, Richard Brodhead, and Michael Gilmore, for example, have begun the
process of analyzing the relationship between antebellum authors like Hawthorne and
their audiences, noting their strategies of engagement as well as their insecurities
surrounding the endeavor. In examining the ways in which Hawthorne participates in
constructing Literary Concord, Railton’s focus on the act of writing as performance
serves as a particularly useful tool as it allows for the conceptualization of both an
imaginary stage and imaginary players, essential components of the imaginary
community that Hawthorne and his colleagues together were creating. While Railton et
al focus on writer-reader relationships, critics such as Dowling and Michael Davitt Bell
add another layer to the whole by reconstructing the relationship between writing peers.
Dowling, in particular, shares this study’s interest in the influence of the coterie on the
individual writer but focuses instead on the material exchanges between authors such as
Hawthorne and Emerson rather than on their creative cooperation. In looking at
Hawthorne, supposedly the epitome of the loner artist, as instead a participant in a group
project – the construction of the imaginary village of Literary Concord – this study brings
the established analysis of the antebellum author/reader relationship in conversation with
that of the author/author relationship.
Although association with Literary Concord offered Hawthorne many potential
professional perks, the most direct benefit of joining the Concord coterie was access to
their established periodical network. Hawthorne had already cultivated the good opinion

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of several magazine editors and critics and understood the value of these relationships to
his career. Not only could their friendly reviews raise his stock in the literary market,
these men and women also held the keys to publication for many authors of the day.
Known as the “golden age of periodicals” (Illinois Monthly Magazine 302 qtd. in Mott
341), the antebellum era saw an explosion of new magazines, and they quickly became
the primary means by which authors shared their work. By even partially identifying
himself with Concord’s literary residents, Hawthorne knew that he stood to gain the
attention of a large nexus of influential editors and critics. For example, as early as
October 1842, Hawthorne had earned the respect of Transcendentalist writer and
magazine reviewer Orestes Brownson who described his style as "a pure and living
stream of manly thought and feeling” (Literary Notices 561). Noted Transcendentalist
journalist William Henry Channing also included a positive review of Mosses in The
Harbinger, and Margaret Fuller contributed several laudatory reviews of Hawthorne’s
work in both The Dial and The New York Tribune. Additionally, Hawthorne’s
relationship with the Concord set added several Transcendentalist-friendly journals to his
list of potential publishing venues. For example, James Freeman Clarke welcomed
Hawthorne’s submissions to The Western Messenger, and his sister-in-law Elizabeth
Peabody included his work in the first issue of Aesthetic Papers.
95

Hawthorne also succeeded in using his relationship with the Concord set to
generate publicity for his work among Transcendentalism’s detractors. These critics
believed that Hawthorne was on the verge of losing his literary soul to what they saw as
an absurd cult. Some set to rescuing him in print. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, in an

95
Dowling puts Elizabeth Peabody at the very center of Hawthorne’s career, likening her
to a literary agent and publicist (Business 117-146).

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otherwise positive review of Hawthorne’s work in the November 1847 edition of Godey’s
Lady’s Book, exhorts the author “to mend his pen, get a bottle of visible ink, come out
from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, [and] hang (if possible) the editor of ‘The Dial’”
(Works 7: 38), and notes with a tone of relief: “We had supposed, with good reason for
supposing, that he had been thrust into his present position by one of the impudent
cliques which beset our literature; but we have been most agreeably mistaken” (7: 33).
An unnamed reviewer for the British journal Blackwood’s Magazine, referring to
Hawthorne’s participation in the Transcendentalist experiment Brook Farm, writes
angrily, “Mr. Hawthorne himself, we should suppose, could scarcely be in great condition
for dissecting his neighbors and their ‘inner nature’ after a day’s ploughing or reaping”
(qtd. in Crowley 312). Hawthorne knew the value of giving his readers a stake of this
kind in his work; and by carefully maintaining a mysterious “is he or isn’t he?” position
vis-à-vis Transcendentalism, Hawthorne succeeded in provoking heated speculation as to
his actual sympathies – a deeply satisfying pastime for his readers.
Not only did Hawthorne’s reputation benefit from his connection to Concord’s
writers, it also gained from his association with the beloved town itself. Brook Farm and
Fruitlands may have failed as utopian ventures, but Concord was drawing more and more
interest every day. Indeed, because of its unusual power to symbolize America’s
idealized past, Concord enjoyed robust and growing tourism throughout the nineteenth
century. By the late nineteenth century, of course, literary tourism had become a craze,
and fans flocked to Concord to gander at the homes of their favorite authors and, perhaps,
to pick up a token or two at shops such as “Emerson & Thoreau Souvenirs” (Concord

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Museum).
96
But Concord’s romance with tourism had begun much earlier. Early
nineteenth-century travelers made pilgrimages to the town to examine the site of “the
shot heard round the world” (“Concord Hymn”),
97
locally marketed as the beginning of
the Revolution. By mid-century, in an effort to capitalize on interest in the town’s past,
residents such as Cummings E. Davis had developed Concord museums that specialized
in town memorabilia. Thoreau, an admirer of Davis’s efforts, himself endeavored to
preserve Concord’s history in relic form, specifically by amassing a collection of local
Indian artifacts – the first of its kind in America (Concord Museum). Always the
opportunist, Hawthorne was likewise determined to exploit popular interest in the town to
sell his works.
Indeed, Hawthorne’s participation in the promotional tactics of his Concord peers
is merely one example of a lifetime of literary opportunism. Early in his career, for
example, Hawthorne tried his hand at writing gift books: collections of essays and/or
short stories printed with fancy bindings and engravings and released each year just in
time for the Christmas shopping season, a profitable trade at the time. The decision of
Hawthorne and his publishers to re-release his most popular short stories in collected
form (Twice-told Tales) was, of course, also a common promotional tactic – one that
continues to this day. His decision to pad out Mosses from an Old Manse into two

96
Today, cultural tourism in Concord still sees booming business, and Concord’s famous
residents (those who succeeded in catching the public imagination and developing village
roles for themselves) are fetishized. The Concord Museum, for example, considers its
prize holdings to be, in this order, Paul Revere’s lantern, a collection of Thoreau relics,
and Emerson’s study obsessively preserved in its entirety as it was at the time of his
death.

97
Emerson’s participation in the eulogizing of the North Bridge battle is an excellent
example of his own efforts to turn Concord into an imaginary community with powerful
nostalgic value.

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volumes also sprang from the contemporary popularity of two-volume book sets. The
Marble Faun owes its occasional resemblance to a travelogue to the fad for lengthy
treatments of foreign travel during the period (a motive that was not lost on Hawthorne’s
critics). His interest in writing children’s literature, beginning in the late 1830s and
culminating in the 1850s, unsurprisingly coincided with a significant spike in the
children’s literature market.
98
His biography of Franklin Pierce took advantage of his
college friend’s sudden political ascendance and his party’s need to advertise their
candidate. And finally, his frequent inclusion of sensationalist and gothic elements in his
stories also reflects his tendency to exploit popular gimmicks. In each case Hawthorne
looked to the potential market appeal of a project before putting pen to paper.
Moreover, Hawthorne took a prominent role in the promotion of his works after
he had written them, frequently giving his publishers notes on the subject – a habit that
demonstrated his interest in the financial viability of his writing and his understanding of
the industry in which he was trying to position himself. For example, in a letter to his
publisher (also Ticknor and Fields) Hawthorne writes, “If ‘The Scarlet Letter’ is to be the
title, would it not be well to print it on the title-page in red ink? I am not quite sure about
the good taste of so doing; but it would certainly be piquant and appropriate…” and,
later, he similarly instructs Fields on the promotion of his biography of Pierce, writing, “I

98
Hathaway writes of Hawthorne’s decision to try his hand at juvenile literature: “The
times were indeed propitious for such a book, as Hawthorne had judged. The romantic
movement with its idealization of the child, the revolution in religious and secular
education which was making school and church more child-centered and was softening
the rigors of copybook memorizing, paved the way for one who would soften the cold
outlines which had hitherto clothed the classic myths. Furthermore, the Greek revival of
this period extended beyond architecture to other arts as well” (163). It also didn’t hurt
that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the hottest new poet in America, was briefly
interested in collaborating with Hawthorne on a children’s book.

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think you must blaze away a little harder in your advertisement…Emphasize largely with
capital letters” (CE 16: 308). In the same letter, Hawthorne also offers an ad copy sample
for the biography, and in his own choices for capitalization, points out the major selling
points of the work: for example, the inclusion of excerpts from Pierce’s private journal,
the addition of a high-quality engraving of Pierce, the fact that it was the official
biography of the candidate, and of course the fact that the famous Hawthorne was the
author. In terms of marketability, Hawthorne’s choices here are unerring; the list
demonstrates its author’s education and skill in the art of literary promotion. In Capital
Letters, Dowling describes the professional writers of this period as “individualistic
entrepreneurs” and notes that most necessarily became skilled promoters of their own
work (2). Hawthorne was no exception. Indeed, in both conception and execution his
writing consistently bears the mark of this kind of professional ambition.
One of the most challenging aspects of establishing this view of Hawthorne as a
writer deeply invested in the literary industry is to prove that Hawthorne’s reputation as a
dreamy romancer has been exaggerated and that he actually took enough of an interest in
the world around him to engage with it regularly on, if not off, the page. Although it is
hard to ignore that Hawthorne favors a psychological landscape over a realistic picture of
quotidian life in most of his works (as generations of Hawthorne critics have pointed
out), such an approach itself actually shows Hawthorne’s engagement with the
professional literary modes of the period. As Nina Baym points out in her preface to the
2003 Penguin edition of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne “read contemporary magazines to
learn the popular taste” (ix), and Hawthorne biographer Brenda Wineapple also notes that
he “carefully assessed the work of his competitors” by “studying a great many novels –

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and, in particular, works by women writers,” some of the most successful authors of the
day (78). Psychological landscapes, both fictional and non-fictional, were tremendously
popular in Hawthorne’s day – they were the hallmark, for example, of the gothic genre as
well as a signature of the Lake Poets’ work – and thus Hawthorne’s use of the
psychological, rather than confirming his loner image, demonstrates his attention to the
trends his peers and models were developing.
The strategy of turning his famous friends into characters in his work earned
Hawthorne a place in the imaginary community of Literary Concord, but it also solved
one of the central problems of his writing career: the Romantic-era obsession with
autobiography. Coleridge had called it “the age of personality” (n. 20, Biographia
Literaria,), himself decrying the need to appeal to a new reading public more interested
in the writer’s person than in his literary productions. Current Romantic-era scholarship
supports Coleridge’s view. As Gilmore asserts, “Unbosoming in the marketplace,
speaking openly there of one’s private circumstances, was a widely acknowledged
requirement for popular success” (82). Yet, as his friends, his biographers, and even
Hawthorne himself have pointed out, the man was unusually shy. In life he fiercely
guarded his privacy, and in print he frequently bristled at the necessity of exposing his
private life to garner a readership, once even likening the practice to prostitution (CE 17:
456). Hawthorne could not escape this literary trend, but when he does experiment with
autobiography in works such as Mosses from an Old Manse, the preface for The Snow-
Image, “The Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter, and Our Old Home, his
discomfort is obvious. For example, in Mosses, after taking his reader on a virtual tour of
his home and its environs, he defensively warns, “How little have I told! – and, of that

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little, how almost nothing is even tinctured with any quality that makes it exclusively my
own!” (CE 10: 32). Despite his reservations, however, Hawthorne knew that personality
sold books. Moreover, he didn’t question that personality was essential to a book’s
quality. As Brenda Wineapple writes, “Hawthorne believed in privacy – no doubt about
it – and self-control and discretion, but writing, really good writing, depends on the
inmost me stealing forth like a bosom-serpent that crawls out of its hole. Hawthorne
knew that” (283). Wineapple recognizes the pressure Hawthorne felt to “unbosom.” Yet
his primary response to this pressure was not to expose more of himself, but rather to
expose more of his friends to the reading public. With the possible exception of The
Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne encourages his readers to identify him exclusively with his
narrators who either take the omniscient view or sideline themselves as mere onlookers.
99

After his introduction to the Concord circle and their habit of talking with and about each
other in print, Hawthorne realized that it didn’t exactly matter whose personality he
shared in his writing, as long as the result was exciting.
Such a strategy also appealed to Hawthorne because it required a taste and talent
for voyeurism, something he had been cultivating for years. His notebooks are riddled
with lurid accounts of his adventures in spying. On July 26, 1837, for example,
Hawthorne eagerly relates an embarrassing incident he witnesses at a local bar when a
man “of a depressed, neglected air” arrives, looking for his wife. The patrons meet the
man’s entreaties with jeering laughter because – as Hawthorne gleefully shares – the
police had just picked up the man’s wife during a prostitute raid three nights before.

99
One might argue that Hawthorne does not sideline his narrator in “The Old Manse,”
but as host he necessarily points the reader away from himself and towards the attractions
of the Manse, its environs, and his neighbors instead.

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Hawthorne ends the description by admitting his nosy desire “to have witnessed his
meeting with his wife” (CE 8: 59). Biographer Edwin Haviland Miller argues that a trip
to Boston to visit his in-laws also quickly became an excuse for voyeurism. Hawthorne –
despite being perpetually low on funds – insisted on lodging at a nearby boarding house.
While the desire to avoid his in-laws likely played a role in this decision, it was also
obviously motivated by the voyeuristic possibilities the public house offered, as his
notebooks attest. Hawthorne writes, “I should not doubt to find occupation of deep
interest for my whole day, in watching only one of these houses” (qtd. in Miller 303).
While visiting the theater during the same trip, Hawthorne was drawn to the audience
itself. His attention dwelt, for example, on an inebriated, older man and his suspiciously
attractive, young, female companions as well as a number of out-of-control, drunken
sailors, whose antics he observed with pleasure. Such observations show Hawthorne’s
obsession with glimpsing other people’s private lives, especially if those glimpses
suggest possible impropriety.
But perhaps the most famous example of Hawthorne’s obsession with peeking
into other people’s business is his report of Concord local Martha Hunt’s death by
drowning. Despite apparently not knowing her personally, he begins and ends this
passage in his journal with gossip about her personality: “[She was] a girl of education
and refinement, but depressed and miserable for want of sympathy…She was of a
melancholic temperament…The idea of suicide was not new to her; she had before
attempted...” (CE 8: 261, 266-67). Hawthorne’s obsession with voyeurism becomes most
obvious in his intense description of the girl’s dead body:

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I never saw nor imagined a spectacle of such perfect horror. The rigidity, above
spoken of, was dreadful to behold. Her arms had stiffened in the act of struggling;
and were bent before her, with the hands clenched. She was the very image of a
death-agony; and when men tried to compose her figure, her arms would still
return to that same position; indeed it was almost impossible to force them out of
it for an instant. One of the men put his foot upon her arm, for the purpose of
reducing it by her side; but, in a moment, it rose again…As soon as she was taken
out of the water, the blood began to stream from her nose. Something seemed to
have injured the eye, too; perhaps it was the pole, when it first struck the body.
The complexion was a dark red, almost purple; the hands were white, with the
same rigidity in their clench as in all the rest of her body. Two of the men got
water, and began to wash away the blood from her face; but it flowed and flowed,
and continued to flow…” (CE 8: 263-64)
In addition to this macabre account, Hawthorne, reveling in the girl’s degradation, muses
on how her rigid posture represents the position she would assume on Judgment Day and
how, if she could have seen how ugly her corpse was, she would never have killed herself
in this manner. Hunt’s suicide, in its exhibition of physical and mental debasement,
offered Hawthorne an irresistible opportunity for indulging his obsession with voyeurism
and gossip.
One may argue that, while Hawthorne certainly had a private tendency towards
voyeurism, this proclivity did not extend to his published works. Yet, when he writes in
The Blithedale Romance of the drowned Zenobia, not only does Hawthorne reproduce all
of the gory details of Hunt’s death, often word for word, he also embellishes on his

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original reflections on the state of the woman’s soul at Judgment Day and her imagined
vanity about her corpse:
One hope I had; and that, too, was mingled half with fear. She knelt, as if in
prayer. With the last, choking consciousness, her soul, bubbling out through her
lips, it may be, had given itself up to the Father, reconciled and penitent. But her
arms! They were bent before her, as if she struggled against Providence in never-
ending hostility. Her hands! They were clenched in immitigable defiance. Away
with the hideous thought!
Being the woman that she was, could Zenobia have foreseen all these ugly
circumstances of death – how ill it would become her, the altogether unseemly
aspect which she must put on, and especially old Silas Foster’s efforts to improve
the matter – she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have
exhibited herself to a public assembly in a badly-fitting garment! (CE 3: 236)
Miller argues that, “in his published works Hawthorne himself avoided the vigorous,
sometimes racy prose and occasional sexual innuendoes of the notebooks for the sake of
a respectable public image” but – as this passage suggests – apart from describing
nakedly sexual situations, he could not resist indulging his voyeuristic side from time to
time. In fact, when one looks beyond the passages that Hawthorne lifted almost directly
from his notebooks to include his many veiled references to the personal lives of real
people, voyeurism becomes one of the hallmarks of his work.
Hawthorne could have followed popular writer Nathaniel Parker Willis’s lead and
simply gossiped about his peers in a straightforward fashion, but instead he opted for a

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roman a clef strategy.
100
For one reason, Hawthorne’s relationships with his subjects
were more delicate than those of Willis and the celebrities on whom he spied. Hawthorne
was not prepared to sacrifice his friends’ good will for a short con – their support was too
valuable to him in the long term. Margaret Fuller, for example, was a widely read and
sympathetic reviewer, and, as Dowling points out, Emerson not only lent Hawthorne the
prestige of his professional association, he also loaned the Hawthornes “liberal sums” on
a number of occasions (Business 96). On the other hand, Hawthorne likely also worried
about being seen as a writer in the Transcendentalists’ thrall, and Hawthorne himself
expresses his ambivalence towards Transcendentalism in the autobiographical opening
tale of Mosses. He mocks the unnamed Transcendentalists who populate Literary
Concord (“bores of a very intense water”) while treating Emerson both more explicitly
and more respectfully. Hawthorne calls him “a great original thinker” and compares him
to a “glittering gem” and a “beacon,” but also maintains a personal reserve, writing, “[I]
sought nothing from him as a philosopher” (CE 10: 30-31). As this description of
Emerson suggests, when he did choose to name-drop transparently, Hawthorne handled
his literary peers’ reputations with care. In the first version of “The Hall of Fantasy,” for
example, he includes direct references to several of his writing colleagues, including his
neighbors, Emerson and Alcott. In the second version, they are gone. In his 1940
analysis of these changes, Harold P. Miller writes that Hawthorne questioned the
“wisdom of his selections” and the tone of the comments he makes about them (235).
The original references to his writing peers were risky not only for his inclusion of

100
While Nathaniel Parker Willis tended to gossip openly in his works, his sister Sara
Willis (aka Fanny Fern), would of course famously employ the roman a clef strategy
herself in writing Ruth Hall (1854).

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occasional criticisms – the suggestion, for example, that, with Emerson, “sometimes the
truth assumes a mystic unreality and shadowyness [sic] in his grasp” (231) – but also for
appearing too much like an unwarranted puff, a compromise of Hawthorne’s supposedly
objective position. Miller notes that one of the editors of the Pioneer, the journal in
which “The Hall of Fantasy” first appeared, warned Hawthorne of dating the tale by
including, as Miller puts it, “allusions of only temporary interest,” specifically references
to “friends and acquaintances” (Carter qtd. in Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, rptd. in
Miller n.35, 234). Without the veil of the roman a clef, Hawthorne could not write “as if
the devil were in [him]” (CE 16: 344-46), his standard for literary greatness.
But the veil was not merely a defensive measure; it was also an enticement. As a
student of Sir Walter Scott,
101
Hawthorne knew the value of playing literary hide-and-
seek. By continuing to refuse to attach his name to his Waverly novels even after their
wild success, Scott made the discovery of the author’s identity a game. Each reader had
the pleasure of ferreting out incriminating stylistic details to build his or her case.
Likewise, Hawthorne generated interest in his works by including characters and
scenarios that stimulated speculation amongst his readers as to their real-life sources. As
Wineapple observes, Hawthorne “was ransacking the present, or near present” to create
his characters and their environments (246). The effect seems tantalizingly biographical,
but the details are maddeningly difficult to pin down – which was exactly Hawthorne’s
intention. Indeed, in the preface to The Snow-Image Hawthorne even taunts his critics for
failing to decipher his code, warning them not to overestimate the accuracy of the
seemingly explicit autobiographical elements of his stories, while at the same time urging

101
For evidence of Scott’s literary influence on Hawthorne, see Koskenlinna, Doubleday,
Giczkowski, and Turner.

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them instead to “look through the whole range of his fictitious characters” for the truth
(CE 11: 4). But such an approach, rather than settle the issue, instead creates a maze of
multiple, often contradictory readings. For example, just in the last few decades,
scholarly readers have interpreted the character Hester Prynne variously as Ann
Hutchinson, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne’s mother, and Hawthorne himself, to name only
some of the guesses as to her model.
102
By practicing his own brand of roman a clef
writing Hawthorne knew that he was adding another layer of fun to the experience of
reading his works. As with his “is he or isn’t he?” status as a Transcendentalist, this
technique created a personal stake for his readers as they constructed and defended their
own guesses.
Perhaps the most accurate approach to Hawthorne’s method is to view his
characters, not as one-to-one copies of single originals, but rather as “tapestries” as
Edwin Haviland Miller insightfully calls them.
103
The tapestry technique added an extra
level of challenge to his readers’ guessing game and shielded Hawthorne from criticism
when his portraits become unflattering or otherwise outré. In his creation of his
tapestries, Hawthorne begins with a romantic type: the misunderstood artist or the mad
scientist, for example. Then, to flesh out the type, he chooses certain, often thematically
related, exciting details from a real person’s life as well as a few recognizable quirks or

102
The primary sources of these readings are, respectively, Colacurcio, Kearns, Baym,
“Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Mother,” and Gilmore 71-80.

103
Although Miller, like Gilmore, tends to be more interested in finding the traces of
Hawthorne himself veiled in his characters, his term aptly describes both the writer’s own
literary guises and the writer’s inclusion of other real world personages as well.
Wineapple also sees Hawthorne’s characterization technique in similar terms, calling it
“biographical palimpsest” (181).

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physical characteristics. To this base, he adds enough red-herring details to plausibly
suggest that the character is either based on a different individual altogether or is simply a
product of Hawthorne’s imagination. Some critics, such as biographer Philip McFarland,
assume that Hawthorne’s process ends with the general type. They cite a supposed lack
of realistic, specific details in the author’s characters, as well as Hawthorne’s own
explanation of what being a “romancer” meant to him, as evidence.
104
But, by taking
Hawthorne at his word, such critics blind themselves to the many ways Hawthorne does
individuate his characters.
Indeed, other modern critics, in their readings of Hawthorne’s characters,
demonstrate an intuition about this multi-threading technique when they interpret
individuals as corporate entities. For example, returning to Hester Prynne, critics have
seen her as the American type, an analogue for the vanishing nobility, a representative of
the Transcendentalists, and a representative of American radicals, again to name only
some of the most prominent takes.
105
By approaching his characterization in this way,
Hawthorne – learning from his mistake in writing the nakedly autobiographical
Fanshawe – created deeply symbolic, yet recognizable men and women whom he could
control entirely, without concern for the reputation of their models and without having to
deal with the originals’ theme-ruining complexity.

104
For Hawthorne’s own definition of the romance writer, see The House of the Seven
Gables’s preface and The Blithedale Romance’s preface.

105
The primary sources of these readings are, respectively, Davitt Bell, Hawthorne and
the Historical Romance of New England, Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and
the American Literary Renaissance, 90-91; Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An
Anthology, 476; and Bercovitch.

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An apt example of Hawthorne’s tapestry technique is The Blithedale Romance’s
Zenobia, the utopian community’s doomed feminist. As always the author begins with a
romantic type – in this case, the dark lady/fallen woman. He used his notes on Martha
Hunt’s death to flesh out Zenobia’s suicide, leading some readers to conclude that the
schoolteacher forms the model for his character. But the answer is not that
straightforward. He seems to have drawn Zenobia’s appearance from the exotically
beautiful Amelia Barlow, one of his friends at Brook Farm (the obvious model for the
Blithedale community), leading other readers to suspect her for the model. As
contemporaries such as George Eliot and later critics such as Oscar Cargill guess,
however, such valences operate primarily as distractions from the bulk of the portrait,
which strongly suggests fellow Literary-Concordian Margaret Fuller. Zenobia, like
Fuller, is an intelligent and charismatic feminist with a taste for fine clothes and hothouse
flowers in her hair and a shadow of failed romances in her past, and like Fuller, her life is
cut short by drowning.
106
Indeed, Hawthorne knew that he was skating close to the edge
of open gossip in his crafting of Zenobia. To avoid accusations to that effect, he includes
an otherwise unnecessary reference to the real Fuller at the beginning of Blithedale, thus
establishing her as a separate character in the world of the novel. In this reference,
moreover, Coverdale compares Fuller to Priscilla, Zenobia’s antithesis. He also prefaces

106
Cargill points out that Margaret Fuller spent a great deal of time at Brook Farm
despite not being a participant herself. Additionally, both are feminists and charismatic
favorites among other women. They both made a habit of wearing beautiful clothes, in
particular exotic flowers in their hair. They both drown. Cargill also sees a similarity in
their physical appearance and reads a subtle reference to Italy, forever associated with
Fuller, in a description of Zenobia’s expression. Furthermore, he notes that “Westervelt,”
the name of Zenobia’s mysterious male associate, matches a name on the passenger list
of the ship on which Fuller perished. Finally, he sees Hawthorne’s allusions to Zenobia’s
love life as strikingly similar to Fuller’s.

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the novel with a disclaimer, promising that all of the characters are “entirely fictitious”
and rightly recognizing that “[i]t would, indeed, (considering how few amiable qualities
he distributes among his imaginary progeny,) be a most grievous wrong to his former
excellent associates, were the Author to allow it to be supposed that he has been
sketching any of their likenesses” (CE 3: 2). Later, Hawthorne would reiterate this
message to his wife, allowing only that “‘Zenobia’ in one particular reminded him of
Margaret Fuller” (qtd. in Gilbert 103). Although the evidence strongly suggests that
Hawthorne was lying to his wife, with the perfection of his tapestry method, Hawthorne
could shrug off the critics’ accusations that, in Zenobia, he was sharing private
information about Fuller by pointing to the superficial ways in which the two differed.
As the example of Zenobia suggests, his biggest pay-off came after 1850 when he
turned to gossipy, barely veiled portraits of Margaret Fuller in his fiction for the first
time. But suggesting that Hawthorne had financial reward in mind when he wrote his
Fuller characters does not mean that he was not also motivated by his complicated
personal relationship with Fuller. The critical arguments that have arisen around this
question of motive tend to present the subject as if there could only be one answer. To
Katherine Anthony writing in the Freud-obsessed 1920s, Hawthorne used Fuller as a
basis for several of his characters because of his perverse attraction to her. To Oscar
Cargill responding in 1937, this notion is nonsense. Hawthorne was clearly motivated by
a number of grudges he held against Fuller. To Bell Gale Chevigny, reopening the case
in The Woman and the Myth, her reputation-reviving treatment of Fuller’s life and work,
Hawthorne was driven by his need to control and defeat the intimidating proto-feminist.
More recent studies follow Nina Baym’s lead and take issue with the idea that Hawthorne

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even meant these characters to be negatively viewed, arguing instead that Hawthorne
used them to draw attention to the weaknesses and failures of his male characters.
107

These theories do tend to contradict each other, sometimes quite sharply; but none of
them necessarily contradicts the careerist argument. Any of them could co-exist quite
comfortably alongside his pecuniary motive. In fact, adding any one of these theories to
the mix helps to account for Hawthorne’s willingness to exploit Fuller for financial gain:
every one of these accounts suggests that she was worth more to him as a subject than as
a friend.
Indeed, personal insight into Fuller’s life was a proven commodity during
Hawthorne’s time. For a while, she was arguably the most famous woman in America.
As Thomas Carlyle once put it, the public clambered “to know what time she got up in
the morning, and what sort of shoes and stockings she wore” (Greenwood 264). And in
the years after 1850 – the year of her shocking death at sea – publications on or by Fuller
saw brisk business. Her Memoirs, for example, became one of the best sellers of the
decade as the reading public lined up for an unprecedented peek into the unusual
woman’s life.
108
The sheer volume of material written about Fuller, of course, makes it
difficult to distinguish the true from the false in trying to reconstruct her character and

107
Baym, “Thwarted Nature: Nathaniel Hawthorne as Feminist.” See also, for example,
Berlant, Orsagh, and Millington.

108
Mitchell notes some of the numbers involved: “When Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli appeared in February 1852, the first 1,000 copies sold within 24 hours. Before the
year ended, the two-volume edition had been reprinted 4 times, by 1884 11 times”
(“Julian Hawthorne” 212). See also Mitchell’s statistics on the sales of Fuller’s other
works (“Julian Hawthorne” 210-233).

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life and, in particular, what made her such a good subject for gossip.
109
But perhaps that
is the point: By the time Hawthorne chose to put his own insider information about Fuller
to work, she had already been transformed into a public product. Fuller herself had
begun the process by inserting herself explicitly and implicitly into her own writings and
by cultivating a complementary, outsized persona in her personal appearances. For a
readership that valued the ability of a writer to suggest her actual presence in her work, or
as William Wordsworth put it, appear as “a man speaking to men” (Lyrical Ballads 13),
Fuller’s strategy made sense. Likewise, Hawthorne’s decision to build on this existing
architecture to attract an established audience to his own works had a canny logic to it.
Hawthorne was also well suited to the job. After all, he could legitimately claim a
personal relationship with Fuller. Fuller was a frequent visitor at the Manse while the
Hawthornes lived there, and evidence suggests that they were quickly on close terms.
Indeed, Fuller occasionally watched the couple’s daughter and, if Sophia’s story of
Fuller’s arrival at the Manse while she was in her “husband’s embrace” is true (qtd. in
Mitchell 71), Fuller sometimes even dropped by unannounced, both signs of the
Hawthornes’ trust in and affection for her. One should not be surprised to find many
references to Fuller in Sophia’s journal, since Hawthorne’s wife had long been a fan of
the charismatic woman. But even taciturn Nathaniel, who once wrote, “I hate to ink my
fingers more than is necessary” (CE 15: 664), penned many lines in his journal about her.
Moreover his journal entries, especially when matched with Fuller’s own, occasionally
show Hawthorne and Fuller in extremely friendly, even romantic, relation to one another.

109
A comprehensive list of the many books, articles, plays, and poems written about
Fuller is impossible here. For example, in the decade following her death alone, at least
24 critical articles, 6 eulogies, 10 reissues, and 2 major new publications were published
on the author.

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As Thomas R. Mitchell notes in Hawthorne’s Fuller Mystery, one passage from
Hawthorne’s journal stands out in particular in this regard. The author describes a few
stolen hours he spent with Fuller one August afternoon:
…I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady
reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She
had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading; for she had a book in
her hand, with some strange title, which I did not understand, and have forgotten.
She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a
theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a
group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path
which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see
Margaret reclining on the ground, and me sitting by her side. He made some
remark about the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow
of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost
in the woods, and about the crows, whose voices Margaret had heard; and about
the experiences of early childhood, whose influence remains upon the character
after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains
from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matters of high
and low philosophy. (CE 8: 342-343)
Here Hawthorne’s characteristic, wry ambivalence is gone. In its place one finds the
author in his most lyrical mode. Interestingly, merely a few paragraphs before this scene
Hawthorne complains about the “petty impediments” the forest throws up in his way and
how “annoying” this kind of walk is. But in Fuller’s presence Hawthorne has forgotten

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his pique and has fallen under the romantic spell of the moment. His language shows his
desire to create a magic circle around them. She is “Margaret,” a mark of familiarity that
he does not bestow on Emerson when he later briefly joins them.
110
And he talks of
Fuller’s solitude first being broken by a group of strollers, despite the fact that he had just
broken it himself. In other words, to Hawthorne the only privacy that matters is the one
that he shares with Fuller. An old man smiles at them, and Hawthorne imagines that he
enjoys looking at the tableau they present, because Hawthorne himself is enjoying his
self-consciousness of it. Indeed, the scene strongly resembles the meeting of The Scarlet
Letter’s lovers in the forest, the only romantic moment he gives the adulterous couple.
Could Hawthorne have daydreamed of an affair with Fuller? Mitchell believes that it
went further than that. What is certain is that the meeting was unusually pleasing to
Hawthorne. Fuller and Hawthorne’s talk passes from pleasing observations on their
present situation to sweet reminiscences of being children to imaginative flights of fancy
to the greatest questions of the universe, possibly the longest and deepest conversation
Hawthorne had ever had. When he writes at the end of the passage “we separated –
Margaret and Mr. Emerson towards his home, and I towards mine…” he seems awash
with melancholy. The ellipsis is like a hand stretched out with longing. And, as Mitchell
points out, the spell lingers into the night. Hawthorne writes, “Last evening there was the
most beautiful moonlight that ever hallowed this earthly world; and when I went to bathe
in the river, which was as calm as death, it seemed like plunging down into the sky. But I
had rather be on earth then even in the seventh heaven, just now” (CE 8: 344). Of the
meeting, Fuller, herself overcome, writes, “What a happy, happy day, all clear light. I

110
In fact, Fuller encouraged all of her friends to call her by her first name, and she
would also use their first names. For example, she referred to Emerson as “Waldo.”

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cannot write about it” (as qtd. in Mitchell 77). Although Fuller would later regret that
their relationship lacked real depth, she would diplomatically dub Hawthorne her spiritual
brother after that. As for Hawthorne, his early infatuation with Fuller would
mysteriously spoil so that his references to her would become increasingly bitter. But in
the meantime he would gather enough unique, personal observations of the woman to fill
several books.
One might argue that, despite the numerous character sketches, celebrity news,
and rumors being peddled in the most prominent journals of the time, as well as the
wildly popular autobiographies and romans a clef circulating in the market, selling what
amounts to gossip – even in disguised form – would prove a losing tactic for a writer
concerned about his literary legacy, because the practice would inevitably lend a tawdry
air to his image. Indeed, in several of his essays, Emerson himself repeatedly expresses
his displeasure at the prevalence of gossip he sees around him in his community and tells
his readers to avoid the practice and even the company of those who gossip (“Social
Aims”). But Emerson’s frequent references to gossip in his work also illuminate the
complexity of contemporary attitudes toward gossiping. Today, those who gossip –
either privately or for pay – tend to be regarded exclusively in unflattering terms. This
attitude, when applied to gossip magazines in particular, largely reflects an increasing
commitment to journalistic ethics at the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the
twentieth century.
111
It also reflects a trend, already in development during Emerson and
Hawthorne’s day, towards greater personal privacy. But during the mid-nineteenth
century, gossip was not always a negative term. The gossip was still seen as an agent of

111
For a treatment of the rise of journalism ethics in America and its relation to print
gossip, see, for example, Garcia.

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community cohesion, binding together speaker, listener, and subject in a cozy
relationship of special knowledge. The role itself still included shadows of its earlier
incarnation: that is, the god-sib or spiritual relative, most commonly known as the
godparent. Even shorn of its explicit religious significance, a gossip could still simply be
a bosom friend, an intimate (“Gossip” OED). Emerson shows his understanding of this
shade of meaning in his description of an encounter between village schoolgirls and a
young shop-keep: “[W]ithout any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman
flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they
establish between them and the good boy the agreeable, confiding relations, what with
their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was invited to
the party, and who danced at the dancing school, and when the singing-school would
begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed” (Works 2:173). The
gossiping girls in this scenario appear wholesome and picturesque, part of a nostalgic
fantasy of bygone days. By the same logic, literary gossip, in the right hands, could
evoke a similar longing for an idealized past where everybody knew everyone else well
enough to care about their personal business.
In Hawthorne’s hands, gossip creates exactly this kind of intimacy, but with a
moralizing touch, a technique that helped him to promote his own developing literary
brand: the American family man. Implicit in the gossip monger’s role is the sense of his
or her own probity, and Hawthorne’s exposure of Fuller’s supposed sins contributed to
this project by creating a contrast between the two authors in which readers could view
Hawthorne as a moral paragon railing against depravity in the name of the community
(while, of course, providing the necessary titillating evidence). Each time, Hawthorne

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uses the same model: Hawthorne’s narrators – like Hawthorne himself in his dealings
with Fuller – approach these women from a position of dramatic ambivalence. In every
case, the narrator acknowledges the woman’s powerful charisma and his own attraction
to her. But he (and the narrators are always, tellingly, “hes”) also spares nothing in his
analysis of her flaws, almost always of the moral variety. Hawthorne encouraged his
readers to view his position as sympathetic, but justly critical in regard to the fallen
woman: the kind of down-to-earth paternalism of the American family man. He soaks
his narration with noncommittal ambiguity to avoid appearing sanctimonious and, in a
classic “show, don’t tell” maneuver, instead allows his Fuller women to make his case for
him by letting their supposed fatal flaws dictate their pathetic fates. It was a winning
move. While friends and family were busy whitewashing Fuller in her Memoirs,
Hawthorne was supposedly hinting at hard truths about his extraordinary associate.
So what exactly were these hard truths? Hawthorne’s infamous 1858 Roman journal
entry sums up many of the charges:
[S]he had not the charm of womanhood…she had a strong and coarse nature, too,
which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains, but which of course
could only be superficially changed…Margaret had not left, in the hearts and
minds of those who knew her, any deep witness of her integrity and purity…[And
in reference to Fuller’s death at sea] there appears to have been a total collapse in
poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was,
Providence was, after all, kind in putting her, and her clownish husband, and their
child, on board that fated ship. (CE 14: 155-156)

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In the same passage, Hawthorne hints broadly that Fuller’s relationship with her husband
was motivated entirely by a kind of old maidish lust, that Ossoli himself was a star-struck
gigolo, and that in general Fuller was a pretentious phony. Although Hawthorne had
always made teasing comments about Fuller to his wife, this journal entry represents a
dramatic shift in Hawthorne’s representations of his late friend, a change of tack that
reflects his effort to assert of his own new moral authority.
Again, one may argue that it is unfair to use Hawthorne’s private journal as
evidence of his willingness to use friends like Fuller in his fiction. The passage
described, after all, was not made public until Hawthorne’s son, Julian, published it in
1884 in Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, his biography of his parents. But, again,
Hawthorne’s private notes ceased to be private when he drew from them to write for
publication, and Hawthorne clearly drew from this passage in the Italian Notebooks in the
creation of Miriam and her Italian lover, Donatello: two of the central characters in The
Marble Faun, published two years later. Donatello, whose companions liken him to a
modern-day satyr, is, according to Hawthorne’s narrator, replete with sensual charms:
“So full of animal life as he was, so joyous in his deportment, so handsome, so physically
well-developed” (CE 4: 14). Hawthorne was undoubtedly well aware of Ossoli’s
reputation for beauty and may have even seen a photo of Fuller’s young lover before
writing this description. Eager to reproduce the guilty pleasure his personal circle must
have experienced in gossiping about the unlikely pair, Hawthorne spares no detail in
fleshing out Ossoli’s sex appeal – apparently, the key to the “riddle” of Fuller’s
relationship with him (CE 14: 155-156). And, in case his reader should miss the point, he
reproduces Fuller in her haughtiest form in Miriam: a woman unlikely to form an

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attachment to an intellectual inferior for any other reason than sex. Indeed, Miriam is
cruel in her assessment of Donatello, calling him “underwitted,” “commonplace,” and “a
simpleton” (CE 4: 15, 13, 7). And in binding Miriam and Donatello together through the
murder of the Model, Hawthorne reproduces yet another specific of the gossip
surrounding Fuller and Ossoli: their supposed shared guilt. After all, the most scandalous
aspect of Fuller’s relationship with the Italian was not their age gap, nor their intellectual
differences, but rather the mysterious birth of their child. While Fuller’s friends hastened
to affirm that the two had married and produced a legitimate son, doubts swirled about
the veracity of such claims. No one had actually witnessed the wedding, and evidence
suggested that Ossoli’s family would have stood in the way of such a union. Such a juicy
story, of course, presented Hawthorne with an ideal opportunity to craft yet another
romance around Fuller.
But Hawthorne’s strategy in using Fuller here as he had elsewhere, while
intrusive and exploitative, was not the same as his son’s. While Julian wished to
diminish her reputation, Hawthorne only used her to bolster his own. Indeed, in
Hawthorne’s published works, he tones down the venom that characterizes his private
opinion of Fuller. For example, contrary to his description of the original, Hawthorne’s
Fuller characters are marked particularly by their “charm of womanhood” and, in general,
display more virtue. But while these descriptions are kinder than his original assessments
of Fuller, one should not assume that the differences spring from Hawthorne’s tact.
Hawthorne included these improvements because the father was a smarter businessman
than the son, not more discreet. If Hawthorne harbored a negative opinion of Fuller – and
this passage suggests forcefully that he did – he knew that such unqualified animus was

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no longer the basis for good gossip. Scathing satires, á là the Scribbler’s Club, were out
of fashion and sentimentality was the style of the day. His readers wanted insider
information on people they cared about, not people they despised. Yes, they wanted to
feel morally superior to celebrities like Fuller. But they also wanted to feel warmth and
pity for them.
112
Indeed, Hawthorne himself enjoyed exactly this combination of
sensations in regard to Fuller. At the end of the journal entry previously quoted,
Hawthorne writes, “On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better for it; -- the
better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of her
sisters might” (CE 14: 157). Hawthorne knew how to effectively gossip about Fuller in
his fiction, because he knew what kind of story he would like to hear about her.
And unlike his son, Hawthorne did not see Fuller as his rival. In his article
“Julian Hawthorne and the ‘Scandal’ of Margaret Fuller,” Mitchell – developing the
argument Bell Gale Chevigny originates in “The Long Arm of Censorship: Mythmaking
in Margaret Fuller’s Time and Our Own” -- contends that Julian, in instigating the
inevitable war of words over the publication of his father’s comments about her,
contributed to the destruction of Fuller’s literary reputation in order to bolster his father’s
and his own. Hawthorne, on the other hand, working from the imaginary community
model, likely had no intention of harming Fuller’s literary renown by using her in his
short stories and novels. On the contrary, the act of writing about Fuller should have
helped to solidify her citizenship in Literary Concord (and thus her legacy), even more so
from the fact that he included her portraits in veiled form, effectively unmooring them

112
For more information on the culture of sentiment in antebellum America, see, for
example, Thomas N. Baker, Douglas, as well as the essay collection The Culture of
Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19
th
Century America.

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from any real time or place. The problem, perhaps, is that Hawthorne’s version of Fuller
– and he really only had one version of her, which he recycled a number of times –
subverted the literary persona she had built for herself. In the place of the Elder Sister
role Fuller had fashioned for herself, Hawthorne had transformed her into the town’s
official fallen woman, a role that effectively poisoned the well for her readership in the
increasingly prudish atmosphere of mid- and late- nineteenth-century America.
Hawthorne chose this role for Fuller, first, because he was interested in the
general type. Unexpurgated versions of his journals show an unwavering fixation on
female bodies and female sexuality, especially in its bolder forms. While such an interest
would not be out of the ordinary in a confessional journal, the writers of Literary Concord
(including Hawthorne) largely used journal writing as a means of brainstorming their
lectures and literary publications and often even expected to share them with writing
peers. In this milieu, Hawthorne’s frequent meditations on sex were well outside the
norm in his writing community. On one trip, for example, Hawthorne ogles some
women walking by: “[T]o see the wind reveal their shapes; their petticoats being few and
thin, and short withal, showing a good deal of the leg in a stocking, and the entire shape
of both legs, with the mist of a flimsy gown floating about it” (Lost Notebook 30). At
Brook Farm, he remarks on a “frolicksome little maiden” who sports a “petite figure” and
imagines her unwitting sexual effect on her pubescent male playmates (CE 8: 209). In
England, Hawthorne’s eye is drawn to Liverpool’s prostitutes. Fuller’s feminism and
unconventionality may have led Hawthorne, already inclined to dwell on the sexual, to
hope for a hidden lasciviousness in his friend. Fuller’s passionate friendships with
several men and women in Hawthorne’s circle, as well as what Hawthorne may have

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interpreted as her flirtatious behavior towards himself, offered a great deal of material for
his suspicions. And when rumors of her unorthodox relationship with the handsome and
much younger Ossoli hit America, Hawthorne might have suspected, as many did, that
they had not bothered to marry before or after producing a son. The combination made
Fuller an appealing template for Hawthorne’s dark ladies.
Hawthorne needed such a template because, from his education in popular
literature, he knew the value of the dark lady to a work’s success. Although, as a stock
character, she can be traced back to the beginning of literature, she became virtually
ubiquitous in Romantic-era writing. For example, she is featured in John Keats’s
influential poems “Lamia” and “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” She also appears routinely
in gothic novels. Matilda from Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk is typical – she is
seductive, mysterious, dangerous, and downright evil. But while Hawthorne was
undoubtedly influenced by the Romantic poets and the gothic novelists, his primary
literary influence in his creation of his dark ladies, as always, was Sir Walter Scott. In
Scott, the dark lady – while still potentially dangerous – is not evil. A perfect example is
Ivanhoe’s Rebecca, the Jewish healer who endures the unwanted attentions of the
Byronic De Bois-Guilbert as well as a trial for witchcraft. Like other dark ladies, she is
exotic and literally dark in complexion compared to the other characters. She also seems
to have access to a magical realm unavailable to the rest – although, in Rebecca’s case,
this is mere superstition. Finally, she is the means by which a man dies - although, again
in Rebecca’s case, Scott softens the effect: She is the occasion for his death, not his killer.
Hawthorne also clearly looked to fellow-American and celebrity-writer James Fenimore
Cooper for inspiration in creating his dark ladies. Cooper’s tragic mulatta, Cora Munroe,

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works in much the same way as Rebecca. She endures the unwanted attentions of the
Byronic Magua, and both Magua and her love interest, Uncas, are killed during her
friends’ efforts to rescue her from Magua’s clutches. Hawthorne’s inclusion of dark
ladies in several of his works shows his attention to the tricks of the trade and his desire
to replicate the success of earlier writers by adapting such tricks to his own use.
Not only did the dark lady/fallen woman have an excellent literary track record,
she also helped Hawthorne to articulate his image of the ideal woman, his personal
version of the stock-character “fair lady,” by way of contrast. Again, this strategy is
common in Romantic writing, and both Scott and Cooper include such foils in their
novels in the form of Rowena and Alice Munroe, respectively. But for Hawthorne,
writing as he does decades after Scott and Cooper, at a time when the women’s rights
movement begins to gain form and power in the United States, the fair lady has gained
extra significance as a symbol of patriarchal resistance, an alternative to the kind of
woman championed and embodied by women like Margaret Fuller. Unlike their
complicated and forceful dark sisters, fair ladies are characterized by their piety, purity,
innocence, and relative passivity. According to Barbara Welter, who explains the gender
roles associated with the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity in “The Cult of True
Womanhood: 1820-1860,” proponents of this backlash, such as the Hawthornes,
considered these fair ladies to be essential to the moral well-being of men. Welter
explains that the dizzying economic changes of the nineteenth century set off an
explosion of anxiety about the supposed erosion of traditional values. In response,
middle-class men and women invented the idea of the “true woman” who protects these
values and offers her man a spiritual oasis when he comes home from work. According

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to this ideology, women are naturally more moral and religious than men, their proper
sphere is the home, and their role is to privately and gently tend to the souls of their male
kin. Thus, unlike Scott or Cooper, Hawthorne invests the fair lady-dark lady dichotomy
with political significance. It becomes his answer to Fuller’s own influential feminist
tract, Woman in the Nineteenth Century. In The Marble Faun, for example, Hawthorne
compares the fair-haired Hilda with the dark, vaguely Semitic-looking Miriam. While
Miriam is mischievous and unrestrained in her behavior, Hilda is tightly bound by her
sense of decorum and frequently chides Miriam for her forwardness. After Miriam teases
Donatello cruelly, for example, “gentle” Hilda admonishes her with “Hush, naughty
one!...You are very ungrateful, for you well know he has wit enough to worship you, at
all events” (CE 4: 8). Miriam, like Hawthorne’s vision of Fuller and her emancipated
women, is proud and thoughtless, while Hilda, the “true woman,” is more sensitive to the
man’s feelings. Hawthorne does draw Miriam in attractive colors, but by idealizing
Hilda throughout the novel, he shows his ultimate preference for the fair lady.
The fair lady-dark lady dichotomy helps Hawthorne articulate his position on
women’s rights and build interest in his work by putting it in conversation with that of
Fuller. It also helps the author to further flesh out his own family-man literary persona
by dramatizing the narrative of his supposed domestication. If the early Romantic era
had celebrated the irrepressible rogue-male in celebrities like Lord Byron, by mid-century
this figure had lost some appeal. With capitalism came the rise of the middle class with
its values of privacy, domesticity, cleanliness, and good manners.
113
Thus, it was time for

113
For a historical analysis of nineteenth-century American middle-class values, see, for
example, Young, Brodhead, and Halttunen.

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the rogue-male to mend his ways and settle down. The new American Byron was still
sexy, still brooding, but through the love of a good woman, he had found his moral
center, and he no longer felt the spell of the dark lady. Hawthorne, as family man,
embodied this transformation. To reinforce this identification, Hawthorne repeatedly
draws specific parallels between his fair lady characters and his own wife. Hilda, for
example, is “a slender, brown-haired, New England girl” and an artist-copyist like Sophia
(CE 4: 7). Additionally, Hawthorne repeatedly likens Hilda to a dove, recalling
Hawthorne’s nickname for his wife. The resemblance was true enough that many of the
Hawthornes’ friends instantly recognized Sophia in the character. Hilda, as a “fair, pure
creature” (CE 4: 52-53), is the moral center of the novel, and thus Hawthorne, by
connecting her to his wife, suggests that Sophia represents his real-life moral center.
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He also explicitly idealizes his relationship with his wife in his writing. In Mosses, for
example, they become the new Adam and Eve – a trope he also uses repeatedly in his
journal to describe his experience with Sophia in Concord. By dropping such clues
throughout his work, Hawthorne successfully sells this story to his audience as his
personal mythology.

114
Some critics have suggested that sculptor Maria Louisa Lander is the primary model
for Hilda, but others see Lander as a model for Miriam. Lander did hail from New
England, and Hawthorne was struck by Lander’s ability to travel around Rome
unchaperoned as Hilda does, but by the time Hawthorne had begun to write The Marble
Faun, Lander had suffered a public disgrace for cohabiting with a man, assumed to be her
lover, and for allegedly posing nude for several male artists. Hawthorne, by this time,
had rejected Lander’s friendship on these grounds, and – according to John Idol Jr. and
Sterling Eisminger in their study “Hawthorne Sits for a Bust by Maria Louisa Lander” –
had also rejected a bust she had made of him because its sensuality embarrassed him. As
Lander fits neither Hawthorne’s portrait of Hilda nor that of Miriam exactly, I argue that
Hawthorne, again using his tapestry technique, layers elements of Lander onto the basic
molds of Sophia and Margaret Fuller, respectively.

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Hawthorne’s family also supported this image of the author through their own
literary performances. Sophia, as the real-life model for Hawthorne’s fair lady, was
critical to the success of Hawthorne’s own image in the second half of the nineteenth
century. As T. Walter Herbert notes in his treatment of the Hawthorne nuclear family,
Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middleclass, she co-wrote a
personal journal with him, contributed as “the Mrs.” to many of the same literary journals
for which he wrote, gave him notes on his manuscripts, and severely edited his notebooks
after his death. All of these choices added to the idea that she was both Hawthorne’s
selfless, devoted helpmate and the primary civilizing force in his life. Sophia, aware that
the heavy gaze of her husband’s audience was always on her, reinforced this notion even
in her private correspondence. For example, in a letter to her mother discussing Fuller’s
feminist essay, Sophia writes:
What do you think of the speech which Queen Margaret Fuller has made from the
throne? It seems to me that if she were married truly, she would no longer be
puzzled about the rights of women. This is the revelation of woman’s true destiny
and place, which never can be imagined by those who do not experience the
relation. In perfect, high union there is no question of supremacy. Souls are
equal in love and intelligent communion, and all things take their proper places as
inevitably as the stars their orbits. Had there never been false and profane
marriages, there would not only be no commotion about woman’s rights, but it
would be Heaven here at once…Home, I think, is the great arena for women, and
there, I am sure, she can wield a power which no king or conqueror can cope
with. (rpt. in Julian Hawthorne 1:257)

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Sophia’s argument reproduces the exact terms Welter describes – the role of woman as
her husband’s helpmate and moral guide, the essentializing of “true” womanhood, and
the relegation of the woman to the private sphere. She also reinforces the fair lady-dark
lady dichotomy by contrasting Fuller’s supposedly discontented spinsterhood with her
own supposedly perfect marriage.
115
After Hawthorne’s death, both his son-in-law and
his own son wrote biographies, and both also continued to promote Hawthorne’s
established perfect-marriage mythos. Son-in-law Lathrop calls the Hawthornes’s
marriage “the dawn of a life-long happiness for Hawthorne” (180), and Julian Hawthorne
dubs it their “unfailing History of Happiness” (1: 246). Julian adds of his parents’
relationship: “There never was a love which was at the same time more intense and
complete and personally unselfish. She protected him by her womanly tact and
sympathy; he protected her by his manly tenderness, ever on the watch to ward off from
her the hurts to which she was liable from those moral shocks given by the selfishness
and cruelty she could never learn to expect from human beings” (1: 248). In this passage,
the son neatly summarizes the terms of his father’s established script of the family man
and his fair lady.
Hawthorne’s fallen women created opportunities for the author to exercise his
kindly paternalistic persona, and they lent drama to his narrative of monogamous bliss,
but they also served a simpler purpose: sexual arousal. Writing of the fallen woman’s
scandalous history and her sad comeuppance necessarily required the inclusion of a great
deal of salacious detail. Often, as with Hawthorne’s description of Zenobia’s drowning,

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Herbert points out that the Hawthorne marriage was, in fact, far from the “perfect,
high union” that Sophia describes and that Nathaniel promoted as part of his literary
persona. Instead, he sees their relationship as an increasingly bitter power struggle.

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such documentation includes incredibly voyeuristic, sadomasochistic descriptions.
Indeed, one of Hawthorne’s most famous passages – the introduction of Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter – gains much of its power from its thinly disguised sexual content.
Here, he places a beautiful, seemingly sexually available young woman on a scaffold to
be boldly ogled by her neighbors (and Hawthorne’s readers), and, in an especially
piquant touch, he also surrounds her with several crude torture devices that could be used
on her at any moment. As in many of Hawthorne’s earlier short stories,
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Hester’s ordeal
follows a classically sadomasochistic script with Hester as the submissive: in this case,
the freewheeling, whorish woman who learns her place through brutality.
Not only is Hester an adulteress, but Hawthorne’s description of Hester’s
character throughout the novel also suggests that she is, at bottom, a bit of an
exhibitionist. Examining Hester’s state of mind upon leaving prison, for example,
Hawthorne writes, “Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps
from the threshold of the prison, than even in the procession and spectacle that have been
described, where she was made the common infamy” (CE 1: 78). He explains that,
during the earlier ordeal, Hester felt “supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and
by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into
a kind of lurid triumph” (CE 1: 78). In other words, the excitement of being before an
audience had tempered Hester’s punishment in the moment. Hawthorne also makes clear
that Hester’s attitude towards the scarlet letter itself reflects a subtle exhibitionism. He

116
For other examples of sadomasochism in Hawthorne’s works, see the torture exhibits
in “Endicott and the Red Cross” and “Main Street,” the parade in “My Kinsman, Major
Molineux,” the list of Puritan fantasies in “The Maypole of Merrymount,” and the devil’s
recounting of the Quaker woman’s whipping and the Satanic ritual in “Young Goodman
Brown.”

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notes that Hester’s choice to heavily embroider the letter puts her dress “greatly beyond
what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony” (CE 1: 53). Hester’s
violation of these rules serves as evidence of her rebellious will. But, to both the Puritans
and Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century readers, it also would have brought to mind an
actress. In seventeenth-century England, from which most of Salem’s inhabitants
originally hailed, players who wore the nobility’s hand-me-downs on stage had
traditionally been the only commoners allowed to defy sumptuary laws. Hawthorne also
reinforces this image of Hester as actress as she steps up to the scaffold, her stage, when
he writes that she “know[s] well her part” (CE 1: 56), and by giving his readers a window
into Hester’s mind, he demonstrates Hester’s performativity. Hester the actress taunts her
audience with both a “burning blush” and an equally sexually charged “haughty smile”
(CE 1: 52), but inwardly feels “agony” as if “her heart had been flung into the street for
them all to spurn and trample upon” (CE 1: 55). With such details, Hawthorne subtly
encourages his readers to view Hester as a willing player in the show, thus mitigating
their guilt in indulging their sexual gaze at her expense.
Throughout Hester’s stage-show, Hawthorne creates the voyeuristic,
sadomasochistic fantasy by continually emphasizing her vulnerability, her inability to
hide her body and the evidence of her sexuality from the eyes of her audience. As he
puts it, she “stood fully revealed before the crowd” and “was thus displayed to the
surrounding multitude…under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all
fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom” (CE 1: 52, 56-57). The eponymous
letter itself emphasizes her breasts, as does her awkward clutching of her illegitimate
child to her chest – an action that Hawthorne specifically notes is not motivated by any

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desire to protect the baby, itself the physical proof of her carnality. And like the
woman’s body itself, the embroidery on the letter overflows with “fertility” and
“luxuriance” (CE 1: 53). Hawthorne’s blazon du corps, when it finally comes, acts as a
climax to Hester’s forced strip tease, delivering on the promise the author makes with his
earlier details. Members of her Puritan audience, warming to their own dominator roles,
respond by conjuring up further sadomasochistic scenarios for their slave-girl. For
example, one matron fantasizes about “stripp[ing] Madam Hester’s rich gown off her
dainty shoulders” to expose her breasts (CE 1: 54). Each additional concrete detail
increases the literary violation of Hester’s body, while the Puritan matrons’ sadistic
fantasies model ways of extending the information Hawthorne does include to encompass
any desire the scene inspires in the reader, printable or otherwise.
As Hawthorne’s constant attention to Hester’s breasts in this scene suggests, the
sight of breasts is one of his favorite forms of titillation. In his journals, he never fails to
note breast-feeding, often with approval, when he chances to witness it. While knocking
on a random door as a kind of prank in Ipswich, for example, Hawthorne delightedly
writes of being rewarded with the site of a bewildered woman with “a disorder about the
bosom of her dress, as if she had been disturbed while nursing her child” (CE 8: 9).
During another outing, Hawthorne tells of peeping at an upstairs window at a woman
“drawing her handkerchief over her bosom, which had been uncovered to give the baby
its breakfast” (CE 8: 54). And at a theater in Boston, he describes his view of a breast-
feeding woman in breathless detail: “Hereupon, the smaller of the two girls, after a little
efficacious dandling, at once settled the question of maternity, by uncovering her bosom,
and presenting it to the child, with so little care of concealment that I saw, and anyone

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else might have seen, the whole breast, and the apex which the infant’s little lips
compressed” (CE 8: 504). But while voluntary breast exposure pleases him, the idea of
forced breast exposure – adding the element of sadism as it does – rivets Hawthorne.
Hawthorne first introduces the image in the short story “Main Street” (1849) wherein the
author describes a constable dragging a topless Quaker woman through the streets behind
a cart as he whips her. Hawthorne emphasizes the constable’s pleasure in this role,
noting the “smile upon his lips” and how “he puts his soul into every stroke” (CE 11: 70).
Studied within the context of Hawthorne’s many similar breast references, his focus on
Hester’s bosom in this instance cannot escape a sexual reading.
While, in “Main Street,” Hawthorne fixes the reader’s position as passive viewer
and his own – as both author of the scene and descendent of the judge who demanded
such a punishment
117
– as guilty conspirator in the woman’s abuse, in The Scarlet Letter
he suggests a choice of positions for both his authorial persona and the reader to occupy:
sadistic voyeur or masochistic exhibitionist. On the one hand, he invites his readers to
join him (as torture pornographer) in the dominant position and enjoy Hester’s ordeal as a
spectacle; on the other, by sharing Hester’s thoughts during her experience, he gives them
an opportunity to identify with her in her agony – as the narrator (presented explicitly as
Hawthorne, himself, in The Scarlet Letter’s preface, “The Custom House”) and
Dimmesdale do when they both mimic the effect of the scarlet letter on their own breasts,
the former imagining the letter burning his chest, the latter secretly whipping himself

117
In “Main Street” Hawthorne notes that the constable who punishes the Quaker
Woman acts on the authority of “Major Hawthorne's warrant” (CE 11: 70), and in “The
Custom House” he alludes to the incident again and strongly suggests that Major
Hawthorne was indeed his “first ancestor” (CE 1: 9).

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with a scourge until the letter appears. His description of the torture devices that share the
scaffold with Hester reinforces this flexibility of position. In “Main Street” Hawthorne
invites the reader to watch both the Quaker woman and another individual being
whipped. Likewise, in his earlier short story “Endicott and the Red Cross” (1837), the
author remarks on the “singular good fortune” of happening by the scene in time to show
the reader several people being tortured (CE 9: 434),
118
a comment that cements his (and
our) place in the dominant, gazing position. But in The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne merely
describes the pillory itself in all its menacing glory without putting Hester into it. This
change allows his readers to imagine either encasing Hester in the pillory, or enduring it
themselves. By offering a choice of perspectives, Hawthorne – perhaps in recognition of
his growing audience – gives greater play to a variety of sexual preferences.
One might argue that reading Hester’s ordeal as pornographic exaggerates what
may have been incidental erotic undertones and that such a reading does not fit into the
moral climate of the antebellum era, steeped as it was in moral reform movements. But,
in fact, Hawthorne’s readers were primed to recognize such undertones, however subtle.
Although The Scarlet Letter predates the great age of the sensation novel, many of the
genre’s themes were already widespread by 1850. Hawthorne had grown up reading the
wildly popular gothic novels and had also seen the rise of the Newgate Novel craze.
119

Both genres favored scandalous subject matter designed to titillate the reader. Indeed,

118
Incidentally, “Endicott and the Red Cross” also marks the first time Hawthorne writes
of an adulteress forced to appear before a crowd while wearing a scarlet letter on her
breast.

119
The Newgate Novels, also known as Old Bailey Novels, were melodramatic stories
centered on the lives of famous criminals. They grew out of the fashion for criminal
biographies in the eighteenth century.

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according to Michael Gamer in his study of the influence of the gothic novel,
Romanticism and the Gothic, the genre consistently had “strong associations with
obscenity” that “affected the gothic’s cultural status and trajectory for most of the
nineteenth century (87, 89). And Gamer adds that critics attacked gothic novels like The
Monk and Zofloya for their “close alignment of sexual pleasure with sadism” in particular
(87). Marcus Wood supports the idea that sadomasochism was central to nineteenth-
century eroticism when he writes that, “pornography focused on slave imagery
flourished” (89). The sensation caused by Hiram Powers’s nude statue The Greek Slave
in the 1840s testifies to Wood’s assessment. Powers describes his subject as a beautiful,
young captive being sold as a sexual slave who “stands exposed to the gaze of the people
she abhors” (qtd. in Kasson 51). While reformers increasingly embraced the statue –
some seeing it as a critique of American slavery; others as a critique of patriarchy – many
others simply came for a glimpse of a nude woman in an implicitly sadomasochistic
situation. In addition to the image of the slave, flagellation was an extremely popular
element of nineteenth-century pornographic literature. Although many of the most
famous works on the subject appear in the 1870s and 80s, many others predate The
Scarlet Letter, demonstrating the absolute centrality of sadomasochism to eroticism
throughout the century. Thus, the image of Hester forcibly displayed as an adulteress in
front of her neighbors, while many fantasize about torturing her, would have certainly
registered as erotic for Hawthorne’s readers as it fits in neatly with the most popular
pornographic narratives of the period. That so few contemporary reviewers exhibited any
shock at Hester’s ordeal only shows how commonplace sadomasochistic imagery was in
the period.

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The novel, however risky its content, also had a role to play in advancing
Hawthorne’s career as a Literary Concord insider (albeit, as I will explain, a different one
from that of the autobiographical preface, “The Custom House”.) Again, Hawthorne had
returned to Fuller for inspiration in his creation of Hester Prynne. As the dozens of
theories on Hester’s origin suggest, Hawthorne had mastered his tapestry technique by
this time. Thus, any argument that seeks to identify Hester entirely with one real-life
model must be reductive in nature. But, while it is impossible to ignore, for example, the
shades of Ann Hutchinson, Hawthorne’s own mother (whose recent death undoubtedly
weighed heavily on Hawthorne’s writing process), and even Hawthorne himself in the
creation of Hester or, likewise, the obvious Christian typology in calling Hester a symbol
of “Divine Maternity,” no theory of Hester is complete without an acknowledgement of
the influence of Hawthorne’s favorite model, Margaret Fuller, on the character.
Since Francis E. Kearns introduced the comparison in his 1965 article on the
subject, few Hawthorne critics have dared to discuss Hester without at least touching on
Fuller’s influence on the character. But nobody makes the case better than Thomas R.
Mitchell in his splendid treatment of Hawthorne’s relationship with Fuller, Hawthorne’s
Fuller Mystery. Mitchell neatly summarizes the parallels Kearns draws between the two
“as mothers of illegitimate children who are or become linked with the non-English
aristocracy, as social reformers and feminists, as counselors to women, and as nurses to
the dying” (132), and Larry J. Reynolds’s suggestion in European Revolutions and the
American Literary Renaissance (echoed by Sacvan Bercovitch in The Office of the
Scarlet Letter) that both embody the "ideas of revolution and temptation” (qtd. in
Mitchell 132), as well as Reynolds’s observation that “Hawthorne began his historical

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romance less than two weeks after learning in early September through Caroline Sturgis
Tappan that Fuller had become the mother of an apparently illegitimate baby” (qtd. in
Mitchell 135). Mitchell deepens these theories with support from close readings of both
Hawthorne’s published and private writing and adds to this existing scholarship with his
own bold interpretation of the Hawthorne/Fuller relationship: specifically, in examining
the passage in which Hawthorne describes meeting Fuller in Sleepy Hollow, he is certain
that Hawthorne and Fuller themselves had become adulterous lovers and that The Scarlet
Letter thus explores the author’s feelings about his own trespass. He notes that much of
the novel’s action takes place seven years after Hester and Dimmesdale’s union and,
likewise, that Hawthorne began writing the novel seven years after Fuller’s lengthy stay
in Concord during which their romantic meeting had taken place. Mitchell also analyzes
Hester’s daughter, Pearl. He notes Hawthorne’s earlier mention of the name in his
journal: "Pearl—the English of Margaret—a pretty name for a girl in a story'' to show
that Hawthorne knew of the connection between the two names and had deliberately
drawn a coded parallel between Fuller and his heroine through the child (CE 8: 242). For
Mitchell then, Pearl becomes a symbol of Hawthorne’s fantasy of having a child with
Fuller, an idea that Mitchell argues arose in Hawthorne while he watched Fuller’s
unusual connection with Hawthorne’s daughter, Una. Mitchell, like many other critics,
also sees Dimmesdale as a stand-in for Hawthorne, thus reinforcing the idea of The
Scarlet Letter as a confession of his adultery with Fuller – a confession that Mitchell
believes was motivated by Hawthorne’s expectation of Fuller’s imminent return to New
England. Mitchell’s theory, while bold, has a growing following amongst Hawthorne
and Fuller critics because it expertly mobilizes the public and private writings of both

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authors and reflects a sensitivity to the remaining traces of the antebellum era’s sexual
atmosphere.
And Mitchell’s evidence, overwhelming as it is, doesn’t even exhaust the parallels
between Fuller and Hester: For example, Hawthorne creates many similarities in their
physical impact on the viewer. At first glance, Hester does not seem to physically
resemble Fuller at all. Like Zenobia, Hawthorne’s heroine is tall and beautiful, with dark
hair and eyes; and multiple accounts of Fuller’s appearance suggest that she was slightly
below middle height and plain, with light hair and eyes. But a list of such differences
belies the similarity in the psychological effect of Hester and Fuller’s bodies on others.
For example, on meeting Fuller for the first time, journalist Elizabeth Oakes-Smith
remarks, “I was surprised to find her height no greater” (qtd. in Capper 1: 216). She
explains that Fuller’s literary persona had given her “an impression of magnitude” that
she found difficult to shake. Her eyes too, while in fact blue-gray, were so intense that at
least one writer refers to them as “dark” (Chodzko qtd. in Capper 2: 318) – an adjective,
incidentally, that several of Hawthorne’s acquaintances applied to his own blue-gray eyes.
Fuller’s share of beauty is also a matter of debate. Although most of her acquaintances
describe her as “plain” or otherwise “without beauty” (Memoirs 1: 298), at least one
argues that “she was not plain” and itemizes her many physical attractions, including
“excellent teeth,” “sparkling” eyes, and a “graceful” neck (1: 92). And again, if Fuller
did not possess much in the way of objective beauty, this reality was overwhelmed by her
ability to charm most of her friends into seeing the beauty in her. Fuller’s peers, including
Hawthorne, were well aware of this gap between perception and reality in regard to the

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glamorous Fuller.
120
Thus, Hawthorne crafts Hester, not as an objective reflection of
Fuller, but rather to represent his most romantic (and therefore most marketable)
impression of his friend.
And while Hester and Fuller’s physiques may differ in terms of actual height,
beauty, and coloring, they match up quite well in other, perhaps more significant ways.
For example, Hawthorne notes that Hester’s hair is “abundant” (CE 1: 53, 202), the exact
same adjective Reverend R. Hedge uses to characterize Fuller’s hair (Memoirs 1: 92).
Others agree with Hedge’s assessment: Poe, for example, refers to Fuller’s “profusion of
lustrous light hair” (Works 122), Emerson calls her hair “strong” (1:202), and Poe’s wife
Sarah Helen Whitman notes its “heavy folds” (qtd. in Margaret Fuller Ossoli 299).
Hawthorne’s choice to draw so much attention to Hester’s hair throughout the novel
further reinforces the similarity. Likewise, Hawthorne repeatedly highlights Hester’s
“richness of complexion” (CE 1: 53), again, word-for-word, the exact same description
Thomas Higginson gives of Fuller’s mother’s skin, which she, “a blooming girl of a
florid complexion,” apparently inherited (Hedge qtd. in von Mehren 26). In addition to
her hair and skin, Hawthorne also subtly suggests that Hester shares Fuller’s full figure,
common in the colonial era, but unusual in Hawthorne’s day. He writes, “there was a
coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their
fair descendants” for “every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter
bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame” (CE 1: 50).
Although Hawthorne uses this description to characterize the women in Hester’s
audience, he does not suggest that Hester is an exception. On the contrary, he specifies

120
See, for example, Emerson’s description of Fuller’s ability to seduce people into
admiring her in the Memoirs.

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that Hester’s own figure is “on a large scale” (CE 1: 53), possesses “a certain state and
dignity,” and is not “delicate” (CE 1: 53). These three particular characteristics –
abundant hair, high skin color, and a full figure – all add up to a picture of uncontrollable,
feminine voluptuousness: one of the hallmarks of the fallen woman.
Her other hallmark is pride, and in creating Hester, Hawthorne also sought to
capture this element of Fuller’s persona. At the time that Hawthorne was writing The
Scarlet Letter, Fuller had not yet suffered her posthumous comeuppance in the public
sphere, but Hawthorne’s fantasy of it is already clear in his creation of Hester’s ordeal.
Moreover, Hester shares Fuller’s natural nobility: the primary cause of her pride and
eventual fall. Hawthorne writes of Hester’s “natural dignity” and how “lady-like” she is
(CE 1: 52), and he notes that, between her appearance and that of the scarlet letter, many
observers unfamiliar with her history assume that she is “a great lady of the land” (CE 1:
104). Again, “lady-like” is the exact term Emerson applies to Fuller in his description of
his first impression of her (1: 202), and “Queen Margaret” was Nathaniel and Sophia’s
private nickname for Fuller. Fuller’s friend, Thomas Higginson, in his own discussion of
Hawthorne’s possible use of Fuller in his writing, notes the similar “queenliness”
between Hawthorne’s characters – Zenobia in particular – and Fuller herself (179).
Hawthorne also borrows from Fuller’s grandiose self-mythology in creating Hester,
subtly drawing attention to evidence of Fuller’s pride. During her tenure as literary editor
and, later, foreign correspondent of the New York Tribune, Fuller signed all of her articles
with a star, and from thereafter other writers routinely referred to her simply as the “Star.”
“Hester,” derived from the Greek, means “star.” Again, as with “Pearl,” Hawthorne uses
names as coded references to his friend. Although Hawthorne’s attitude towards Fuller’s

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pride would later harden and thus become more obvious, as evidenced by his depictions
of Fuller-characters Zenobia and Miriam, Hester represents his first real attempt to
express this aspect of Fuller’s personality in his own writing.
In addition to provoking fun, gossipy speculation as to the identity of
Hawthorne’s model for Hester, The Scarlet Letter also explores the practice of gossip
itself. While Hawthorne presents some negative, as well as some laughable, effects
arising from gossip, the novel is unusual in its nuanced, sympathetic approach to the
practice, showing Hawthorne’s growing identification with the role of the gossip.
121
His
first trick is to distinguish between those who publish gossip-worthy news and those who
consume gossip. According to Hawthorne, the former group merely provides the story.
The latter group is responsible for whether the gossip becomes ugly or not. Hawthorne
slyly signals the parallel he is creating between the Salem scene and his own situation as
a market-driven writer by the chapter title, “The Market-Place.” After establishing the
parallel, he also uses this scene to specify that female readers, often the target audience of
antebellum publishers, are primarily to blame for the market-driven writer’s need to
include gossip in his writing. Before introducing his heroine, Hawthorne depicts a group
of Salem “goodwives” (a term he makes synonymous with “gossips”) discussing Hester
in her absence. The first to speak is, in Hawthorne’s words, a “hard-featured dame of
fifty” (CE 1: 51). Another is an “autumnal matron” (CE 1: 51). The final woman to
speak is “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges” (CE 1:
51). All of these women discuss Hester and her adultery with great animation and
personal outrage until silenced by a nearby man. In contrast to his lengthy description of

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Hawthorne’s earlier short stories, most notably “P’s Correspondence” and “The
Minister’s Black Veil,” also explore the effects of gossip, though with less sympathy.

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these cruel women, Hawthorne leaves the actual source of the gossip about Hester vague
throughout the novel. The original scandal presumably arises due to Hester’s
increasingly obvious pregnancy, and later rumors appear to spring up of their own
accord. Until the news reaches the ears of the goodwives, in fact, Hawthorne does not
identify a single gossiping agent. Rather, until this point, gossip seems to exist as a
natural phenomenon with a will of its own. With this sleight of hand, Hawthorne allows
the gossip to avoid responsibility for the results of his activity. If his publication of
another’s actions causes harm, the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of his audience.
The Scarlet Letter also questions, however, whether gossip is, in fact, damaging in
the end. The reader is introduced to Hester Prynne on perhaps the worst day of her
ordeal, when, after languishing in prison for her own commitment to privacy, she is
forced to display a bold symbol of her crime on her chest and endure the prying eyes of
her censorious neighbors. But Hester’s lot consistently improves throughout the novel.
She finds a new place for herself in her society where she may live honestly and
independently, having earned both her freedom from her husband and the grudging
respect of her community. Indeed, the exposure – negative as it initially is – actually
ends up helping Hester prosper. The narrator tells us that everyone in town knows Hester
Prynne’s skill with the needle, and that the scarlet letter itself becomes, among other
positive symbols, “a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames
of a court might gladly have availed themselves” (CE 1: 81) – in other words, an
effective advertisement for her wares. The business-savvy Hawthorne cannot resist
explaining to his audience how his references to friends like Fuller, even when
uncomplimentary, help to promote their careers by keeping them in the public eye.

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Hester may be embarrassed, but she emerges better for it. Meanwhile, her adulterous
lover, Arthur Dimmesdale, escapes identification by the mob, and thus the community’s
punishment, but also becomes increasingly despondent as his sense of his own hypocrisy
continues to eat away at his soul. In not trusting in “the great and warm heart” of the
public as Hester must (CE 1: 127), Dimmesdale makes himself vulnerable to the
psychological manipulations of Hester’s husband, Chillingworth, who becomes bent on
forcing the pastor’s confession – a situation that drives Dimmesdale half-mad and
eventually kills him. Hawthorne’s message seems to be that, while having one’s secrets
aired before the public may be painful, it is also psychologically and socially liberating.
In this formulation, the gossip becomes an agent of social cohesion, on the one hand, and
personal fulfillment on the other.
Not only does The Scarlet Letter suggest that such openness has its psychological
and social rewards, it also makes a case for its spiritual value. When Hester’s judge tells
her that “Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out
an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without” (CE 1: 67), the reader
is initially skeptical. But as the story unfolds this is exactly the moral that Hester and
Dimmesdale learn. Hawthorne presents the case explicitly in a debate between
Chillingworth and Dimmesdale. The doctor rhetorically asks Dimmesdale why anyone
would choose not to unburden themselves with confession, and the pastor admits that,
“after such an outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren!” (CE
1: 132). Dimmesdale attempts to counter by arguing that a man may choose not to
confess in order to maintain his appearance of morality if doing so would help to bring
others to God, but quickly gives up the argument when Chillingworth forcefully replies,

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“if they seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they
would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of
conscience, in constraining them to penitential self-abasement!” (CE 1: 133).
Chillingworth’s description of a true man of God who teaches through the example of his
own sin, of course, perfectly matches the role that Hester comes to play in her community.
She asks nothing from her neighbors, yet gives plentifully of her time and money until
some rechristen her letter A as “Angel.” As these contrasting portraits suggest,
Hawthorne conflates the airing of secrets with the Christian notion of confession, thus
painting his own role as instigator in a more positive light.
While one could argue that the Christian idea of confession does not acquit an
interfering second-party, Hawthorne doesn’t just suggest that exposure of one’s own sins
is morally healthful, he also infers that telling on others – in other words, playing the
gossip – is necessary for keeping one’s own moral compass. Years of living as one
“whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth” gives Hester enough of a moral
education that – seven years on – she realizes that she was wrong to initially agree to
keep the secret of Chillingworth’s identity as he used his disguise to harm Dimmesdale
(CE 1: 173). But – despite this epiphany – Hester’s continuing refusal to name
Dimmesdale as her partner in adultery continues to compromise her moral progress.
During Hester and Dimmesdale’s forest meeting, the ironically-titled chapter “The Pastor
and his Parishioner,” Hawthorne demonstrates how such secrets break down the moral
authority of both the one who hides his sins and the one who helps him. Initially
Dimmesdale and Hester cannot seem to decide who should play the pastor and who
should play the parishioner and fumble in their attempts to hear each other’s confessions.

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Dimmesdale begins the interview in full pastor-mode, asking for his parishioner’s
confession: “Hester…hast thou found peace?” (CE 1: 190). But Hester does not reply,
instead merely giving him a sad smile and a gesture at the scarlet letter. Both recognize
his inability to do his job under the circumstances. Hester follows this exchange with the
same question and initially has more luck. The pastor pours out his confession. But
while Hester has the moral authority to listen, as the one who shields his sin from the
world, she does not yet have enough to absolve him. Dimmesdale refuses to accept her
suggestion that his “sin is left behind” (CE 1: 191). After these failed exchanges,
Hawthorne shows the couple becoming increasingly mired in their mutual weakness. The
vehemence of Dimmesdale’s principled reaction to her attempt to excuse his sin fools
Hester into believing that he does in fact have the moral authority to absolve her of what
she sees as her remaining sin: her role in hiding Chillingworth’s true identity. Instead,
however, he reacts as the injured party and refuses to forgive her until she harries him
into it. Finally, buoyed by her success, she forces her earlier absolution on him. She uses
the priest’s language, telling Dimmesdale to “Exchange this false life of thine for a true
one” (CE 1: 198), but her meaning is not holy. Her idea of reforming is to move to
another place together under an assumed name. Hawthorne shows that Hester’s integrity
is still compromised by her desire to hide Dimmesdale’s sin and that she can therefore
not serve as an appropriate moral guide.
Worse, as a result of this travesty of a confession, the remainder of Hester and
Dimmesdale’s dearly-earned moral authority begins to erode uncontrollably. At first
Dimmesdale merely feels a “strange disquietude” (CE 1: 214), but soon he can barely
contain his rising moral confusion and fantasizes about swearing at an old deacon, telling

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an impoverished old lady that there is no Heaven waiting for her, ogling and perhaps
seducing a young woman, teaching a gang of children a few obscene words, and loafing
around with some disreputable types he sees by the shore. Moreover, the town witch,
Mistress Hibbins, immediately recognizes the change in his moral outlook and welcomes
him as a fellow reprobate. Likewise, at the Election Day Sermon after the forest meeting,
Hester suddenly loses the protection of her somber reputation for the first time in years
and again stands in a “magic circle of ignominy” in front of the entire town, including the
original knot of unkindly matrons (CE 1: 246). Before this new torture, Mistress Hibbins
approaches Hester to express her pleased recognition of the younger woman’s supposed
bond with the devil as she had done with Dimmesdale. The couple is only saved from
this moral disorder by Dimmesdale’s decision to publicly identify himself as Hester’s
adulterous lover and Pearl’s father. With this move, Dimmesdale exposes his own guilt,
but also Hester’s complicity in hiding his crime. Although Dimmesdale does not
explicitly include Chillingworth in this revelation, the knowledge of Dimmesdale’s role
in Hester’s adultery, as well as Chillingworth’s reaction in the moment, presumably also
leads his audience to Chillingworth’s own identity as the cuckolded husband. Thus
having unmasked all of the main actors in his drama, Dimmesdale dies beatified. Again,
Hawthorne conflates gossip with confession and, in this final act, attempts to show the
ethical value of telling all.
While the adults learn this lesson slowly (or not at all), the child Pearl,
representing Hawthorne’s own position, understands it from the beginning. Because
Hawthorne variously describes Pearl as an elf, a witch, “an imp of evil” (CE 1: 93), and
“demon offspring” (CE 1: 99, 244, 261), he encourages the reader – like Governor

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Bellingham and Mr. Wilson – to misread her as wicked, just as one might accuse a gossip
of being immoral. But Hawthorne repeatedly undercuts this view of Pearl, suggesting
instead that people see their own sin reflected in her and not the girl herself. For
example, Hester, the adulteress, watches her daughter, “ever dreading to detect some dark
and wild peculiarity, that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her
being” (CE 1: 90), the Satan-worshipping Mistress Hibbins sees Pearl as Lucifer’s child,
and the cruel townspeople assume she is of a “hellish breed” (CE 1: 99), which
Hawthorne notes was also the Catholic opinion of Martin Luther. Beyond comparing her
to the founder of Protestantism, Hawthorne even suggests that, unlike everyone else,
Pearl may be an unfallen creature. The child as an emblem of prelapsarian humanity was
a mainstay of Romantic literature, so that Hawthorne’s audience would have been primed
to suspect accusations of Pearl’s wickedness from the outset.
122
But Hawthorne also tells
his readers of Pearl’s value explicitly: “[T]he infant was worthy to have been brought
forth in Eden; worthy to have been left there, to be the plaything of the angels, after the
world’s first parents were driven out” (CE 1: 90). He also compares her to the pearl in
Jesus’s parable: the Pearl of Great Price. As the most common reading of the parable
makes the pearl a symbol of the Kingdom of God, this comparison suggests that, beyond
merely good, Pearl should be read as a holy figure. Thus, when Pearl incessantly
demands that Hester tell her the truth about the scarlet letter and that Dimmesdale show
her the same paternal affection in public as he does in private, Hawthorne expects his
readers to recognize that this impulse to expose is on the side of right regardless of the

122
See, for example, the view of children in the works of Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth,
and Coleridge.

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consequences. In her interview with the governor, Hester calls the scarlet letter a moral
teacher, and by extension, Pearl, the living scarlet letter, is also a teacher, and her lesson
is that secrets should always be aired.
In Romantic literature, nature – like the child – is also an unerring moral teacher,
and in The Scarlet Letter, nature itself always does what it can to tell what it knows.
123

During the forest scene, for example, Pearl encounters a brook that eternally attempts to
“whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest” because it “had gone through so solemn
an experience that it could not help talking about it” (CE 1: 186). Moreover, after
witnessing the secret meeting between Hester and Dimmesdale, Hawthorne tells the
reader that the brook “would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart
was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble” (CE 1: 213).
He adds that the trees, “with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had
passed there” as well (CE 1: 213). If the brook and the trees are talkers, however, the sun
is the greatest tattler of all. As he does in “Endicott,” Hawthorne specifies that Hester
must undergo her public exposure for an hour under the sun at its height at noon. He
adds that the sun is so strong that Hester experiences it “burning down upon her face, and
lighting up its shame” (CE 1: 63). In other words, the sun literally illuminates the
evidence of her crime. Likewise, as Richard Kopley observes in The Threads of the
Scarlet Letter, the comet that trails through the sky on the night of Dimmesdale’s first
ascension to Hester’s guilty place on the scaffold operates like a nighttime sun,
threatening to actually expose his complicity in Hester’s sin. Later, while Hester
hesitates to unmask Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, Pearl says, “the sunshine does not

123
See, for example, the view of Nature in the works of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and
Coleridge.

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love you” (CE 1: 183). Similarly, while contemplating the duplicitous Chillingworth,
Hester wonders, “Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon
him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with
his deformity, whichever way he turned himself?” (CE 1: 175). And, indeed, when
Dimmesdale does finally tell the world the truth, Hawthorne writes that Chillingworth
“shriveled away… like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun” (CE 1: 260). In full
Emersonian mode, Hawthorne adds that the sun finds sympathy with Pearl in particular,
suggesting an analogy between Pearl’s exhortations to tell the truth and the sun’s role as
natural light source.
124
By interpreting the sun as an accomplice in the spreading of
secrets and the brook and trees as eager gossipers, Hawthorne thus naturalizes the
practice, and in the Romantic era, to suggest that something is in tune with nature, itself,
is to successfully defend it.
While the Fuller-like Hester in all her masochistic glory represents Hawthorne’s
primary bid for the reading public’s attention, The Scarlet Letter is actually replete with
literary tricks designed to engage those readers desirous of returning again to the
imaginary community of Literary Concord. In “The Custom House,” for example,
Hawthorne returns his readers to this idealized Concord by means of repeated, subtle
contrasts with his dreary current reality in Salem. Hawthorne begins with a frank
admission that what will follow is, in fact, autobiographical and, by doing so, cleverly
turns the reader’s attention back to his use of autobiography in the Concord-based
Mosses. After specifying that in Salem his workspace is “cobwebbed” and “dingy,” he

124
For Emerson’s doctrine of sympathy in Nature, see, for example, “Nature,” “Circles,”
and “Representative Men.”

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writes, “You might have recognized, honored reader, the same individual who welcomed
you into his cheery little study, where the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the
willow branches, on the western side of the Old Manse” (CE 1: 8). This reference to his
old home begins a series of comparisons between the two towns. He notes, for example,
that “Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to
Paradise” (CE 1: 13), harkening back to his frequent comparison of the Old Manse to
Eden. He also alludes to Concord in his (false) explanation for returning to Salem: “On
emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange, indolent, unjoyous attachment
for my native town that brought me to fill a place in Uncle Sam’s brick edifice…” (CE 1:
12). He also refers to many of his Concord friends: “living for three years within the
subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson’s [sic]…those wild, free days on the
Assabeth…with Ellery Channing…talking with Thoreau about pine-trees and Indian
relics, in his hermitage at Walden…[and having] known Alcott” (CE 1: 25). Again, he
contrasts these scenes of “freshness and activity of thought” with his experience in the
custom house where he was forced to “exercise other faculties of [his] nature” (CE 1: 25,
35). He also sets the Old Manse and the Custom House in a balance, noting that he spent
exactly three years in each. Finally, he calls the writing of The Scarlet Letter – the first
thing he did after leaving the Custom House – his happiest time “since he had quitted the
Old Manse” (CE 1: 43). While “The Custom House” is ostensibly a portrait of his time
in Salem, he in fact uses these pages to return his readers imaginatively to their shared
space in Literary Concord.
By bringing his readers back to Concord, Hawthorne doesn’t just indulge their
nostalgia. He also uses the borders of Literary Concord to establish an “us against them”

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stance that creates a virtual clique of insiders within the larger group of readers. He first
hails this select group of readers when he introduces the second person pronoun “you” in
the above passage. With this unusual breaking of the forth wall, Hawthorne reestablishes
his earlier intimacy with the reader, who in Mosses, he has already imaginatively
welcomed into his home. This ideal reader, he clarifies, is “a friend, a kind and
apprehensive, though not the closest friend” (CE 1: 4) – in other words, a member of
Literary Concord. He contrasts this relationship with the unseemly one favored by his
literary rivals who “indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect
sympathy” (CE 1: 3). Hawthorne’s technique resembles that of Emerson, Thoreau, and
the Lake Poets before them: He suggests that the average, market-driven writer may
attempt to create an imagined intimacy with a wide group of readers, but that this writer
only wishes to appeal to the chosen few.
The Scarlet Letter began a string of professional successes for Hawthorne that
propelled him to literary stardom, but Hawthorne – always conservative in temperament
– would not trust the fickle literary market, alone, to support him and his family. Thus, at
the first opportunity, he used his growing renown to secure one of the few possible
sources of patronage left: namely, future president Franklin Pierce. Specifically, he
offered to write his friend’s campaign biography. The spoils system was still an
established part of politics, and Pierce had proven generous to Hawthorne in the past.
When, for example, after three years in Concord, Hawthorne found himself a few dollars
short of indigence, Pierce stepped in and arranged a regular position for him in the Salem
custom-house. And this protective act was only the latest and most dramatic of Pierce’s:

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From the beginning of their friendship, Hawthorne’s former classmate had frequently
exerted himself on the writer’s behalf, introducing him to influential friends and gaining
him entrance to exclusive clubs. As Richard Williamson notes in his treatment of
Hawthorne’s relationship with Pierce, The Impact of Franklin Pierce on Nathaniel
Hawthorne, the latter man “seemed to play the role of a type of savior-friend, a rescuer of
sorts whose influence and actions often provided Hawthorne with passage over difficult,
financially strained, or emotionally devastating circumstances” (17). As Hawthorne
coyly wrote in a letter to John L. O’Sullivan less than a year later: “biographers of great
men ought to be rewarded – and sometimes are” (CE 16: 663). If Pierce, the senator, had
been helpful, what couldn’t Pierce, the president, do? Hawthorne, who, despite his
acclaim, had always harbored a measure of resentment at the necessity of competing in a
market-driven literary environment, eagerly grasped at the possibility of securing a
patron, one of the few such opportunities left in antebellum America.
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Moreover, although Franklin Pierce’s biography appears to be a departure from
the Concordian tactics Hawthorne employs in The Scarlet Letter as it deals exclusively
with a New Hampshire politician rather than any member of the Concord coterie and
broadcasts itself as a straightforward story of Pierce’s life rather than a roman a clef-

125
The extent to which Hawthorne could have predicted Pierce’s success is difficult to
judge. Historians of the era often refer to Pierce as a “dark horse” candidate because of
his lack of experience. But a politically aware citizen, such as Hawthorne, may have seen
the destruction of the Whig party coming before the election. Without the Democratic
nomination, Pierce indeed could have been considered a long shot. But once he had
become the Democrat’s official candidate, the argument becomes harder to sustain. It is
possible that the continued dark-horse rhetoric was more a political ploy than a perceived
reality. If so, Hawthorne’s offer to write Pierce’s biography can be seen as a particularly
astute exploitation of contemporary presidential politics: he appears to be offering his
friend his help from a relatively disinterested position (a pose he employs explicitly as
narrator of the biography) but in fact he enters the fray already ensured of rich success.

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romance, in fact, the biography represents an experiment in stretching the established
techniques of Literary Concord into a new, potentially more profitable form by applying
them to the campaign biography genre – a trick that was not lost on Hawthorne’s
critics.
126
An election-year biography of Pierce, the mysterious dark-horse Democratic
candidate in the 1852 election, had a built-in audience, and the official campaign
biography even more so. Thus, when Pierce unexpectedly won the Democratic
nomination in the summer of 1852, Hawthorne saw an unparalleled opportunity for
personal gain. In the past, his allusions to Literary Concord had served to bolster both the
celebrity of his writing peers and his own. If he could put the same technique to work in
service of Pierce’s campaign, they both stood to benefit a great deal.
Although many Hawthorne scholars, taking Hawthorne’s pose of reticence
seriously, interpret Hawthorne’s interest in the project as slight and motivated entirely by
duty to his friend rather than personal benefit, in fact Hawthorne’s congratulatory letter to
Pierce shows how eager he was to write the biography. Close-reading the letter,
Williamson rightly recognizes the disingenuousness in Hawthorne’s protestations that he
is unfit for the job. Williamson argues that “the primary purpose of the letter” is to secure
the biographer position using “a coy strategy” (73). After warming up with
congratulations to his friend on his nomination and joking about his future as a president,
Hawthorne gently raises the subject: “It has occurred to me that you might have some
thoughts of getting me to write the necessary biography.” As Williamson notes, the

126
Reviewers of the period enjoyed the effect, but rightly recognized that Hawthorne was
using the same methods he had perfected in his fiction. See, for example, Hale, who calls
the book “entertaining,” but admits that “Considered as a piece of biography, this book
has, of course, scarcely any value” (182).

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phrasing is suspicious in its forced casualness, as well as manipulative: Hawthorne
already knew that Pierce had publicly expressed an interest in securing him as a
biographer. While the letter is filled with mock-humble statements such as “I don’t
believe that I should succeed in this matter so well as many other men” (CE 16: 545),
they are always balanced by reiterations of Hawthorne’s willingness to try. He writes of
his “availability” and his desire to be of “service” (CE 16: 545). Williamson points out
that Hawthorne frequently adopted such poses of mock-humility in both his public and
private writing to head off criticism and rejection and that they therefore cannot be
trusted as indications of true reluctance. On the other hand, Hawthorne’s invitation to
host Pierce in Concord and his inclusion of his publisher information suggest that
Hawthorne is already ready to take the next step in producing a manuscript.
Perhaps the most telling evidence of Hawthorne’s eagerness, however, is his
willingness to employ a Concordian tactic to get the job. Specifically, Hawthorne sells
himself as an insider, the value of which he knew from his earlier attempts at writing
veiled gossip about his famous Concord friends. Despite his phony protestation that he
writes too slowly for Pierce’s purposes, as a friend of Pierce’s, Hawthorne knew that he
was one of the few writers who would be able to generate a credible manuscript before
the election. Although Williamson outlines the unforeseen difficulties Hawthorne
encountered in securing interviews with Pierce’s associates and even Pierce himself,
these challenges would have been no different for another writer. And another writer
would not already have had possession of a partial manuscript on Pierce’s early years:
Hawthorne’s autobiographical first novel, Fanshawe. Hawthorne could save time by
borrowing liberally from this first draft. But even if he had not known Pierce,

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Hawthorne’s growing celebrity would have helped him win Pierce’s endorsement and the
trust of the readers. As Richard Schickel explains in his study of celebrity, Intimate
Strangers, “Among the most visible perquisites of celebrity is access to one’s fellow
celebrities” (259). In other words, because Hawthorne was a celebrity himself, readers
would assume that he was a true Pierce insider. And Pierce himself, despite being
famous in his own milieu, would not be immune to Hawthorne’s glamor as a literary
celebrity. Williamson shrewdly notes Hawthorne’s exploitation of his own renown in his
backhanded compliment of a potential rival. Hawthorne writes, “[I] have no doubt that
[Hazewell] would acquit himself ten times better than I should. I am not personally
acquainted with Mr Hazewell, (or Haswell; for I don’t know how he spells his name) but
could easily become so, as he is a resident in this town” (CE 16: 546). While Hawthorne
pretends to recommend another man for the job, he appears to have trouble remembering
the writer’s name – not a problem that most literate people would have had in regard to
Hawthorne himself by 1852. The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables had
ensured his name-recognition. His strategy was sound. Pierce, either prudently
calculating the voters’ love for inside information or falling under its spell himself, could
not resist the combination of fame and friendship that Hawthorne offered to bring to the
task.
In addition to painting himself as an insider to the readers, Hawthorne also
revived their interest in their shared imaginary community. The author begins his preface
by reinforcing his now-established Literary Concord role: the family man. The cult of
domesticity underlies many of Hawthorne’s avowals that he is “so little of a politician
that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party” and that “[t]his

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species of writing is too remote from his customary occupations --and, he may, add, from
his tastes--to be very satisfactorily done” (CE 23: 273). In other words, the author is
merely a private citizen who would prefer to mind his own affairs than to dabble in the
public sphere. Not only does Hawthorne don this well-worn and cozy domestic persona,
he also applies it to Pierce despite much direct evidence to the contrary. In Hawthorne’s
hands, Pierce becomes a family man who enters the world of politics unwillingly and
only out of a sense of duty. This image of the reluctant leader, of course, is not exclusive
to Pierce. Several historians have noted the prevalence of the Cincinnatus-figure in
American political rhetoric, beginning with George Washington. For example, as W.
Burlie Brown points out in “The Cincinnatus Image in Presidential Politics,” almost all of
the presidential candidates of the nineteenth century could be relied on to have led a rural,
“barefoot boyhood” (23), and thus could be cast in the role fairly easily. But Hawthorne
must contort the Cincinnatus figure to fit Pierce’s life. In the biography, Pierce’s
hometown, Concord, New Hampshire – despite being the state capital, a railroad hub, and
a center of industry – transforms into a rural village in comparison to the unnamed cities
Pierce could have chosen as home, and his family and private law practice become the
symbolic farm that Pierce must leave. The resulting image, like so many in the
biography, appeals to the reader’s sense of nostalgia for the era of the Founding Fathers
by tapping into the existing mythology of the Revolution.
Having established his own right to the reader’s trust in the preface through his
private-man rhetoric, Hawthorne begins the book proper with the same tactic he employs
in “The Custom House”: He conjures up his own imaginary Concord and hails its virtual
inhabitants. As Williamson notes, Hawthorne devotes an unusual amount of space to

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Pierce’s father, Benjamin (86-88). This strategy serves many purposes in the biography,
but the first is bring the reader’s attention to Franklin Pierce’s connection to their beloved
Massachusetts town and to set the scene for yet another of Hawthorne’s gossip circles.
One of the most frequently cited passages of the biography describes the elder Pierce at
the outset of the Revolution: “On the 19th of April, 1775, being then less than eighteen
years of age, the stripling was at the plough, when tidings reached him of the bloodshed
at Lexington and Concord. He immediately loosened the ox chain, left the plough in the
furrow, took his uncle's gun and equipments, and set forth towards the scene of action”
(CE 23: 275). With this snapshot of the young man, Hawthorne subtly draws the Pierce
family toward his imaginary village. The immediacy of the image distracts the reader
from the fact that Pierce’s father was not in Concord when the war began, but rather
nearby Chelmsford. Hawthorne then turns Benjamin Pierce into an American knight-
errant, traveling the country with the Revolutionary army, and merely remarks that, “he
was appointed brigade major of the militia of Hillsborough county” (CE 23: 276), not
that the elder Pierce had resettled permanently with his family in New Hampshire.
Through these subtle manipulations of the facts, Hawthorne leaves the reader with the
impression that the Pierces had greater ties to Concord, and its romantic past, than they
actually had.
In addition to connecting Franklin Pierce, through heredity and a muddled sense
of time and space, to the glorious revolution, the elder Pierce also becomes Hawthorne’s
means of developing the son’s own Concordian role. As Williamson notes, the primary
paradigm governing the biography is Pierce-as-soldier. Although Pierce had indeed seen
action during the Mexican-American war as a volunteer brigadier general, he was not a

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soldier by vocation; nor did distinguish himself during the war itself, having been injured
early on. Hawthorne, however, successfully glosses over these facts by asserting that
Pierce had the “air” of a military hero, and that – at least early on – he had an ambition to
become a soldier. But his favorite maneuver is to suggest that the father had passed
down the role to the son through education and natural talent. For example, Hawthorne
writes:
From infancy upward, the boy had before his eyes, as the model on which he
might instinctively form himself, one of the best specimens of sterling New
England character, developed in a life of simple habits, yet of elevated action.
Patriotism, such as it had been in revolutionary days, was taught to him by his
father, as early as his mother taught him religion. He became early imbued, too,
with the military spirit which the old soldier had retained from his long service,
and which was kept active by the constant alarms and warlike preparations of the
first twelve years of the present century. If any man is bound, by birth and
youthful training, to show himself a brave, faithful, and able citizen of his native
country, it is the son of such a father. (CE 23: 277)
While most Hawthorne critics see his efforts to establish Pierce’s credentials as a soldier
as an attempt to portray him as a new Andrew Jackson, this reading is incomplete. An
examination of the many connections Hawthorne draws between the father and the son
shows that the author primarily wished to connect Pierce to the heroes of the Revolution
and thus to satisfy the nostalgic desires he already knew his readership harbored.
127

127
Although Andrew Jackson can technically be considered one of the heroes of the
Revolution after he joined as a militia courier, he was only eight years old when the war

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Finally, along with connecting Pierce to the site of the Revolution and establishing
his Concordian role, Hawthorne uses Pierce’s father to defend the son against attacks on
his political record, in particular his stance on slavery. Evoking his insider status,
Hawthorne’s argument rests on a “if only you knew him as well as I do” appeal. The key
scene begins the second chapter “His Services in the State and National Legislatures.”
Hawthorne describes Benjamin Pierce’s sixty-seventh birthday party, inviting the reader
to peek into a private and, according to Hawthorne, defining moment in Franklin’s life.
The father enjoys the company of his Revolutionary comrades-in-arms during which they
reminisce about “the era of seventy-six” (CE 23: 284). Hawthorne dwells particularly on
the veterans’ “manly and pathetic farewell” at the close of the evening (CE 23: 284).
Hawthorne’s depiction of the party simulates the sensation of good gossip: The readers
feel as if they are seeing something normally off-limits and that they are now privy to
secret information about some of their more interesting neighbors. At first, the scene
seems incongruous with the stated subject of the chapter: Pierce’s early political career.
But no sooner has Hawthorne dismissed the venerable crowd of partygoers then he shifts
to his real purpose: using the scene to defend Pierce’s anti-abolitionist views. He writes,
“A scene like this must have been profitable for a young man to witness, as being likely
to give him a stronger sense, than most of us can attain, of the value of the Union which
these old heroes had risked so much to consolidate” (CE 23: 285). Juxtaposed against the
gathering of the elderly heroes, Pierce’s anti-abolitionist position becomes a defense of

began and did not distinguish himself on the battlefield, as he would later in the War of
1812.

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their legacy and thus supremely patriotic. Hawthorne’s appeal to nostalgia and filio-piety
is as powerful as it is phony.
128

Hawthorne succeeds with such fly-on-the-wall tactics because the reader is never
quite sure when the author is writing from personal experience and when he is reporting
news second-hand. In the preface to the biography, Hawthorne asserts explicitly that the
value of the work lies in its status as “the narrative of one who knew the individual of
whom he treats, at a period of life when character could be read with undoubting
accuracy, and who, consequently, in judging of the motives of his subsequent conduct has
an advantage over much more competent observers, whose knowledge of the man may
have commenced at a later date” (CE 23: 273). One the most powerful ways Hawthorne
reinforces this insider position is by randomly inserting himself into the action. In his
treatment of Pierce’s Bowdoin years, Hawthorne, the narrator, includes many of his
personal interactions with his subject. He writes, for example, “We were soon
acquainted…I can bear testimony to his having discharged not only his own share of the
duties, but, that of his colleagues… His slender and youthful figure rises before my
mind's eye” (CE 23: 282). In this section, Hawthorne shifts subtly between his
eyewitness accounts of his subject and those of other students and Pierce’s teachers. As a
result, the reader tends to blend Hawthorne’s own testimony with that of Pierce’s other
acquaintances and leaves the chapter with the impression that Hawthorne had a great deal

128
The imposture of this characterization becomes particularly clear in Hawthorne’s
treatment of one of Pierce’s more questionable legal arguments: the moral propriety of
denying financial support to the families of Revolutionary veterans. Hawthorne suggests,
with a tortured logic, that Pierce’s position rests, not on his lack of respect for
Revolutionary veterans, but rather on his special understanding of the Revolution taught
to him by his father. Specifically, Pierce argues that all Americans, both soldiers and
civilians, contributed to the Revolution in their own way and, thus, that it was unfair to
favor only the families of the actual combatants.

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more contact with the presidential candidate than he actually had. This blurring of the
omniscient and limited narrative perspectives, a tactic that Hawthorne continues
throughout the biography, combined with his judicious use of Pierce’s own war journals,
peppers the text with many first-person pronouns. The reader is left with the vague
feeling that Hawthorne is sharing first-hand gossip throughout the text.
Hawthorne successfully used his family-man persona, his insider status, and his
readership’s nostalgia, all mainstay techniques of Literary Concord, to sell Pierce’s
biography, and – against his publisher’s advice – he chose to stand by these tactics again
in Our Old Home’s controversial dedication to Pierce a decade later. Hawthorne’s
dedication reinforces his now-familiar Literary Concord persona and his insider status as
the former president’s friend when he emphasizes the private, personal nature of his
address to Pierce. He writes, for example, “[E]xcuse (if you think it needs any excuse)
the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal friendship between a private
individual and a statesman who has filled what was then the most august position in the
world. But I dedicate my book to the Friend, and shall defer a colloquy with the
Statesman till some calmer and sunnier hour” (CE 5: 5). As this quotation suggests,
Hawthorne reinforces the private nature of his relation with Pierce in this passage by
repeatedly juxtaposing his appeal to Pierce in the role as “Friend” with Pierce’s public
performances as the “statesman.” Hawthorne’s dedication creates the image of a private
conversation between two men possessed of, as Hawthorne asserts, “an early friendship
that has grown old” (CE 23: 302). By defending Pierce on the basis of friendship alone
and refusing to acknowledge evidence from Pierce’s public actions, Hawthorne subtly
returns to his “if only you knew him as well as I do” tactic. Moreover, in this way,

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Hawthorne appeals to his readers by painting himself as the shy, hearth-loving family
man who avoids the increasingly ugly public sphere.
Equally importantly, in this preface, Hawthorne treats Pierce like a patron, and by
1862, the image of the client paying tribute to the patron was charmingly old-fashioned
and certain to appeal to the reader’s nostalgia. Both Hawthorne’s title “To A Friend” and
his use of his pet name for Pierce, “General,” suggest that the author’s decision rested on
the strength of their personal relationship and Hawthorne’s genuine gratitude towards his
friend. But Hawthorne’s assertion of friendship with Pierce also reproduces a convention
of classic dedications. As Isaac Disraeli writes in his contemporary essay on the subject:
“Some…have observed that no writer should dedicate his works but to his FRIENDS; as
was practised [sic] by the ancients” (29). Hawthorne’s description of Pierce also hits
many of the traditional notes of a patronage-era dedication: He makes several oblique
references to Pierce’s former high office (the American equivalent of praising his
nobility), he honors Pierce’s father (again, an American equivalent, this time of ancestor
praise), he apologizes for the unworthiness of his literary offering, and most importantly
given Pierce’s current fall from grace, he emphasizes the man’s integrity and
patriotism.
129
Hawthorne’s dedication, whether a gentle request for Pierce’s continued
favor or an expression of thanks for the man’s former largess, demonstrates the author’s
understanding of patronage system practices and at least a symbolic recreation of them.
As Henry Benjamin Wheatley notes in his history of literary dedications, The Dedication

129
Several of these dedication conventions are explicitly enumerated in Thomas
Gordon’s 1719 satire on the subject, A Dedication to a Great Man, Concerning
Dedications. Apart from the personal tone Hawthorne adopts, the dedication conforms to
most of the patronage-era standards already being mocked a century before.

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of Books to a Patron and Friend: A Chapter in Literary History (1887), by 1863,
dedications themselves were no longer common practice. Hawthorne’s choice to include
one would have stood out as a deliberate anachronism, a nod to a time when authors
wrote for a private circle of privileged readers. As concerns about the quality of market-
driven literature continued to escalate among America’s literati, Hawthorne designed his
dedication to hit a nostalgic nerve.
130

Although one may make a superb case for Hawthorne’s success as an example of
simply knowing all the right people, as Jane Tompkins does in Sensational Designs: The
Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860, Hawthorne’s own agency in navigating
his career through the turbulent waters of the antebellum literary marketplace needs to be
acknowledged as well. Through careful observation of his competitors, Hawthorne
gained a keen understanding of the public’s taste in literature. When his arrival in
Concord opened up an opportunity for Hawthorne to join Emerson’s circle, and thus
benefit from their established contacts in the publishing industry and critical journals, as
well as the narrative that they had already created around themselves and their beloved
town, Hawthorne did not hesitate. Already a crafty exploiter of literary trends,
Hawthorne quickly immersed himself in the imaginary community and adopted its most
useful practices. In particular, he found peddling town gossip to be the most successful
tactic he could borrow and became the Concord set’s most adept practitioner of the old-
fashioned art. At first, he aimed at other members of the Concord set exclusively,
especially the charismatic Margaret Fuller, but later he successfully expanded his

130
For more information about the growing concern about quality in the arts and its
connection to the increased class stratification in nineteenth-century American society,
see Levine.

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character sketching to include other public figures, most notably Franklin Pierce. In the
process, Hawthorne developed his own enduring Literary Concord role, the family man, a
persona that would help him and his readers bridge the difficult passage between
antebellum life and post-war life by offering a retreat to the imagined protection of the
private sphere, a realm that would only increase in emotional value as America moved
toward the twentieth century. He gave his audience the satisfying narrative of Lord Byron
tamed by the love of a good woman; the excesses of the Romantic era tidied up by a
newly enlightened generation. By not only recognizing and serving the desires of the
antebellum audience in this way, but also by anticipating those of future generations, and
by using the existing architecture of the imaginary community of Concord to achieve
these effects, Hawthorne actively and successfully contributed to his own legacy.

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Chapter Five
Writing Back to Emerson: Frederick Douglass and Literary Concord

Literary Concord was Emerson’s creation. Indeed, until dementia forced him into
semi-retirement, Emerson went to great lengths to control the image of his imaginary
community and make it a reflection of himself. And — if the contemporary reviews and
early scholarship about the Concord set are any indication — he largely succeeded. But
Emerson’s public success in this regard masks the numerous tensions that actually existed
under the supposedly placid surface of Literary Concord’s image. Both Thoreau and
Fuller pushed for a more radical activist role for their literary community, and — at the
other end of the spectrum — Hawthorne consistently distanced himself from literary
Concord’s dreamy, impractical reputation in favor of a more conservative, man-of-the-
house persona. Moreover, these differences reflected the changing interests of Literary
Concord’s silent citizens: its readership. As Larry Reynolds argues in Righteous
Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance, for example, many of
Emerson’s readers increasingly began to see his passive, idealistic, non-violent stance
towards the many injustices and resulting revolutions of the period as irresponsible and
worked hard to change their leader’s mind. Reynolds’s argument builds on Sandra
Petrulionis’s groundbreaking study, To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Moment in
Thoreau’s Concord, in which Petrulionis outlines the development of abolitionist fervor
in Concord, starting with the agitation of a few local women and ending with the
endorsement of Emerson himself. This push-back from Emerson’s protégés and, perhaps
more importantly, from a large part of Literary Concord’s core interpretative community
created an opportunity for celebrities like Frederick Douglass, who – as both an

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abolitionist and a feminist – appealed to Literary Concord’s activist new guard, to expand
their influence into this important circle of writers and readers.
Although, in The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth Century America,
Dowling convincingly argues that the literary coteries of the antebellum era, including
the so-called Transcendentalists, tended to build their reputations in opposition to other
coteries rather than in concert with them and rightly identifies Douglass with William
Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionists rather than the Concord set, his analysis primarily applies
to the early, foundation-building stages of these groups. As these coteries became more
established, their members became less protective of their carefully constructed images
and more open to cultural exchange. For example, although writers for the New-York
Monthly Magazine, the Knickbockers’ main publishing organ, did occasionally mock
Emerson and his Transcendentalist followers, Fuller was a long-time fan of Knickbocker
Nathaniel Parker Willis, and influential writers and publishers such as James Russell
Lowell and Horace Greeley, respectively, gladly supported both coteries. A similar
pattern of increased cooperation and overlapping also characterized the relationship
between Literary Concord and the abolitionists after an initial distrust and disassociation.
Petrulionis notes that early 1840s Concord, epitomized by Emerson’s own “silent years”
(Gougeon qtd. in Petrulionis 24), still lagged far behind Boston in terms of its embrace of
the emancipation cause, especially its immediatist version. But between the relentless
agitations of local abolitionists such as Mary Brooks, the female Thoreaus, and the
female Emersons, the anger engendered by Charles Sumner’s caning and the passage of
the Compromise of 1850, and the inspiring examples of Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John
Brown, and Douglass himself, the fifties saw a dramatic change in Literary Concord’s

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participation in the movement. Increasingly, Concordians saw that slavery was not
simply a far-away evil, and they began to understand the urgency of ending slavery.
Emerson and his followers had, by and large, joined the fight.
Moreover, Douglass had personal reasons for reaching out to Literary Concord.
As Douglass’s fame and ambition outgrew the strict confines of Garrison’s leadership
style and moral program, his initial loyalty to the famed abolitionist eventually gave way.
By the late 1840s, having split with Garrison, Douglass was looking for new alliances to
bolster both his newfound personal independence and his struggling Rochester-based
newspaper. While Emerson himself kept a respectful distance from his rival on the
lecture circuit and certainly didn’t court Douglass in the way he did Thoreau or Fuller,
Douglass could not have helped but notice that Emerson’s followers, especially many of
the young and/or female ones, were well-suited to follow him as well, if he could only
reach them. To this end, Douglass made frequent stops in Concord and the surrounding
region while on tour. But, more importantly, in the development of his public persona,
he opportunistically positioned himself as a new and improved version of the coterie’s
founder: one who demonstrated a charm similar to Emerson’s but who surpassed the
original’s sensitivity to the needs of this part of his audience.
And, in the late 1840s, there was still a great deal of room for improvement in this
area. Emerson had a talent for endearing people to him, and from the beginning, he
particularly attracted young readers and female readers of all ages, but he had difficulty
maintaining an unblemished reputation with either group. Emerson successfully
appealed to both types of readers by routinely defending them against conventional
criticisms and, in the case of young people, characterizing them as the saviors of their

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community.
131
But many of these readers, like his young protégés Thoreau and Fuller,
became increasingly frustrated with his reticence in the face of injustice, both at home
and abroad. As Reynolds points out, Emerson’s interpretative community was swiftly
radicalizing, led by exactly the groups Emerson had originally championed, and many
complained of Emerson’s slow and tepid support. Petrulionis unearths a private letter
abolitionist leader Mary Brooks sent while organizing a rally in Concord in which she
expresses exactly such reservations: “I hope Emerson will say a word think he will. But
we want some good speakers whose souls are fired with genuine anti Slavery, whose
souls are bowed to the earth with the position of our country, and whose words shall burn
into the very joints and marrow of pro Slavery” (qtd. in Petrulionis 42). Brooks’s
assumption that Emerson could be counted on only for a lackluster performance
demonstrates how far he had fallen in the estimation of readers like herself, once his
target demographic. After all, Emerson’s popularity with a certain kind of audience
partially rested on his early reputation as a rebel, and his reluctance to play the part when
they felt they most needed him left many acutely disappointed.
As a youthful female admirer of Emerson and one who would herself come to
define Literary Concord in her own time, Louisa May Alcott makes an excellent
representative of the segment of Emerson’s interpretative community leading the political
vanguard in the late forties and early fifties. Alcott revered Emerson and actively sought

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As Wendell Phillips’s response to being called a “stripling” by Samuel Hoar and to
John Shepard Keyes’s characterization of local female abolitionists as “silly women”
suggests, women and young people were in the vanguard on the issue of slavery. Phillips
tartly replies, “Who ever heard this subject presented, before the movement of the silly
women and striplings?” (qtd. in Petrulionis, To Set This World Right 37). This alliance
demonstrates what both Emerson and Douglass instinctively exploited while promoting
themselves: the potential for sympathy between different groups of relative outsiders.

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out his mentorship. But, by nineteen, as Petrulionis notes, she also “expressed a desire to
‘do anything, — fight or work, hoot or cry’ after listening to Wendell Phillips decry the
re-enslavement of Thomas Sims.” Moreover, Alcott and Emerson’s own daughter, Ellen,
“both grew excited by the prospect of violence, even war, in the antislavery campaign”
(111). Reynolds reads Alcott’s 1864 novel Moods as a meditation on those years of
attempting to reconcile her Emerson-philia with her increasing social activism.
Documenting John Brown’s rise to fame in the late 1850s in John Brown, Abolitionist,
David J. Reynolds asserts that much of Brown’s success stemmed from “his savvy self-
promotion before a select group of Northerners hungry for heroes.” Reynolds
specifically credits Brown’s ability to exploit the public’s perception of contemporary
society’s “pervasive moral flabbiness” by presenting himself, on the contrary, “as a man
of sterling principles” (206). And, in fact, this was how Alcott saw him.
While Brown is easily the most stunning example of the appeal of this kind of
counterculture stance to Concord’s new radicals, he is not, however, the only example.
Douglass had already made use of the same social tensions to promote himself within
Literary Concord, particularly among white, middle class, educated women like Alcott.
Indeed, while Emerson was still telling abolitionists to “never varnish your hard,
uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off”
(Works 2:51), Douglass was repeatedly risking his life in service to the anti-slavery
cause. Likewise, while Emerson was declining an invitation to the Seneca Falls
Convention, Douglass was convincing fellow attendees to expand their women’s rights
platform. Indeed, as Phillip S. Foner makes clear in his collection of Douglass’s feminist
writings, Frederick Douglass on Women’s Rights, Douglass’s support on that day proved

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pivotal in turning his fellow reformers’ attention to the need for women’s suffrage.
Moreover, after the convention, Douglass published a glowing report of the proceedings
in The North Star, effectively expanding the feminists’ reach: a tactic he would use
repeatedly throughout his career in support of the women’s movement. Although
Douglass would later alienate many in the women’s rights movement by supporting the
Fourteenth Amendment without any provision for gender, he continued to actively
champion their cause throughout his life, admiring it as potentially “the most stupendous
revolution the world has ever witnessed” (qtd. in Foner 40). Douglass’s passionate,
active commitment to his principles, as well as his willingness to include the rights of
women prominently among them, strongly appealed to many of Literary Concord’s
citizens who, like Alcott, still believed in self-reliance, but also craved a champion who
regarded the big social equality issues of the day in the same light that they did. Indeed,
at the funeral of abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, Alcott famously chose a seat
between Douglass and his wife: a symbolic gesture that broadcast Alcott’s loyalties
clearly. The relationship between Douglass and Alcott’s Literary Concord was, by all
accounts, a good fit.
Douglass made himself appealing to the female reformers of Literary Concord,
but they also appear to have had a particular appeal for him that set them apart from their
Rochester sisters. Garrison had long courted sympathetic Concordians, especially
Concord’s women, to his cause and Douglass often assisted him in this courtship. By the
late forties, the town was unusual in terms of its national influence, and the savvy leaders
of the abolition movement knew it. As Petrulionis explains in “‘Swelling That Great
Tide of Humanity’: The Concord, Massachusetts, Female Anti-Slavery Society,” “The

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Concord, Massachusetts, Female Anti-Slavery Society boasted the wives, sisters,
mothers, friends, aunts, and neighbors of men who public support eventually directed
worldwide political and philosophical attention to the antislavery cause” (386). Winning
over the women of Concord meant potentially winning over some of the most influential
voices in the country. Moreover, by the time Douglass had split from Garrison, he had
already – under the tutelage of Garrison – laid the necessary groundwork for a successful
solo alliance with Concord’s reform-minded women, most particularly Helen and Sophia
Thoreau. He would not have wanted to waste the work he had already done to establish
those connections. But Douglass’s interest in Concord’s female reformers likely
extended beyond these practical considerations. As Tiffany K. Wayne explains in
Woman Thinking: Feminism and Transcendentalism in Nineteenth-Century America, the
key difference between the Concord feminists and their counterparts elsewhere, including
Douglass’s home base of Rochester, was the philosophical legacy the former group
inherited. “Concord reformers such as Ednah Dow Cheney, Caroline Dall, Paulina
Wrights Davis, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith brought Transcendentalism into the national
women’s movement that emerged in the early 1850s,” Wayne notes. “These thinkers
linked the Transcendentalist philosophical project of self-culture to an activist-reform
agenda that promoted woman’s education and ‘right to think,’ and understood change in
the realm of ideas and language as a necessary precursor to any of the practical rights
women hoped to gain, including and especially the vote” (8). Douglass had often sparred
with other reformers over exactly these issues and frequently had to defend his
Emersonian-inflected liberalism. With the Concord female reformers, however, he found
nothing but resounding agreement in this area.

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And such neat affinities were rare in the abolitionist movement, which, on the
contrary, was more often characterized by internecine conflicts. In fact, by 1840, the
movement had effectively split down the middle: Those like Garrison who believed in
moral suasion over political or violent action, who considered the Constitution a pro-
slavery document, and who advocated for disunion formed a faction dubbed the “old org”
and those like Gerrit Smith who came down on the opposite side of all of these issues
became known as the “new org.” As a prominent leader within the movement, Douglass
sparred continually with other abolitionists over the details of his position, especially
after he shifted his loyalties from Garrison to Smith. For example, as Robert S. Levine
outlines in Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative
Identity, Douglass routinely fought with Delany over the proper relationship between
blacks and whites and whether black emigration was the answer. Terry Baxter suggests
in Frederick Douglass’s Curious Audiences: Ethos in the Age of the Consumable Subject
that many of these conflicts were likely staged to satisfy the expectations of the audience
for a lively contest. But, as Douglass’s eventual rift with Garrison attests, the stakes were
often real in these debates, and despite the humanitarian nature of the abolitionists’ work,
the group was not free of political maneuvering. Levine points out, for example, that
Douglass frequently found himself competing against not only Delany but also Samuel
Ward and Henry Garnet for the top spot in the black abolitionist community. Delany and
the others criticized him for what they saw as his “politics of accommodation” and
debated him on the subject continuously in both person and print (60). While the
growing number of abolitionist sympathizers in Literary Concord were not free from
these doctrinal disputes – most of them, in fact, identified with the old org – the group’s

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provincialism benefited Douglass. Just as they gently overlooked the shakiness of
Emerson’s support in an effort to claim him as one of their own, they tended to put such
internal differences aside for the chance to woo a prominent abolitionist representative to
their local meetings. Such philosophical liberality made them ideal targets for Douglass,
whose reputation had been badly harmed by the efforts of Garrison and his supporters
following their split.
Not only did the growing nest of abolitionists in Literary Concord offer Douglass
a potentially soft landing after his fall-out with Garrison, in their demonstrated affection
for Emerson as a public figure, they showed themselves to be partial to an appeal that
strongly resembled that of Douglass’s own celebrity persona. On stage, Emerson thrilled
audiences with his naturally beautiful voice and his mesmerizing, understated appearance
and mannerisms, all of which appeared utterly unaffected. With few obvious stage tricks,
he enthralled hundreds of onlookers by the sheer force of his personal charisma, arousing
many into a pitch of excitement that left logic far behind. Likewise, although some of
Douglass’s celebrity arose from his novel status as a fugitive (and then ex-) slave
lecturer, much derived from his similarly exciting stage presence. Transcripts from
Douglass’s speeches show him eliciting a lively call-and-response from his audience, a
skill he would have honed from his experience as a pastor in several black churches. In
addition to general cheering, audience interjections such as “Hear, hear” and “Shame,
shame” punctuate his declarations. Douglass’s razor wit and talent for mimicry also
served to whip up his audience into hysterics.
132
When he combined such theatrics with
heart-rending descriptions of the torture he and his fellow slaves endured – even

132
For an in-depth treatment of Douglass’s humor, see Ganter.

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threatening to expose the ridged scars on his own back to the stricken onlookers – he
created waves of competing emotions in his audience. As Baxter suggests, Douglass,
like Emerson, used these effects to “stymie the faculty of judgment” in his audience and
leave it instead in an enchanted, impressionable state (90). Although Douglass’s
individual tactics differed from Emerson’s, the effect remained largely the same.
Audiences came away from Emerson’s lectures bewitched, convinced that they had just
seen the greatest living American in action – an impression that, for some, lasted a
lifetime. Similarly, despite widespread racism, Douglass packed lecture halls with
mesmerized onlookers who also came away with a distinct impression of Douglass’s
excellence.
Douglass’s willingness to court a conflicted scopophilia in the prospect of baring
his ruined back to his audience also points to the role the celebrity body plays in both his
and Emerson’s appeal. Emerson’s followers dwelt frequently and obsessively on his
appearance. They routinely praised his brilliant blue eyes, his sweet smile, and his rich
baritone voice. Even where his physique did not match conventional notions of
masculine beauty, they gloried in his body’s very eccentricity, delighting in his beaked
nose and stooped, too-slight frame, so that he eventually gained an international
reputation as a great American beauty. And, arguably, Douglass used his personal
appearance to even greater effect in his career. As Robert Fanuzzi explains in “The
Trouble with Douglass’s Body,” many audience members considered Douglass’s
appearance a “visual delight” (1). Fanuzzi, drawing from John Blassingame’s own
analysis of Douglass’s body, cites Ebenezer Bassett’s memory of Douglass as a man
whose “physical equipment. . . left little to be desired” (qtd. in Blassingame xxxix).

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Baxter is even blunter about the effect of Douglass’s physical appearance on his
audience: “We have to consider…the matter of Douglass’s sexual attractiveness, most
certainly a part of his personal appeal. Male and female commentators noticed his fine
looks, but female admirers also sometimes sexualized the relationship” (96). Baxter cites
Douglass fan Celia Logan as a typical example. Logan writes, “…the play of his fine
features made a little thrill run through me. The dignity of his attitude, the majesty of his
stature made Frederick Douglass look every inch a man” (qtd. in Baxter 96). Logan is
candid about her focus on his body, as well as her arousal in his presence. Baxter also
cites Douglass contemporary Gerald Fulkerson’s assertion that his “meetings often
attracted a disproportionate number of women” because such women were “under the
spell of Douglass’ [sic] virile appearance, rich voice, and refined manners…” (qtd. in
Baxter 96). While Douglass could not have helped but notice that such reactions
uncomfortably reproduced the slave owners’ sexual objectification of their black slaves’
bodies, for the sake of his cause he endured this kind of attention for the power it now
gave him as a public figure. Through sheer charisma, Emerson had convinced his fans of
his beauty, which in turn drew them more forcibly to him. But Douglass impressed at
first glance, and his good looks remained a powerful asset throughout his career.
Much of Emerson and Douglass’s appeal sprang from this native ability to
bewitch audiences; however, they could not appear to actually be tricking any one. The
appearance of authenticity was essential to the success of any public figure in this era,
and Emerson and Douglass were both particularly adept at projecting this image.
Emerson revolutionized lecturing by rejecting the public speaking conventions of the
period in favor of a personal, naturalistic style complete with (well-rehearsed) flubs. And

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Douglass also included staged gaffes in his performances, both on stage and in print, to
demonstrate his own authenticity. As Baxter asserts, “[G]iven Douglass’ [sic] extreme
self consciousness, there is every reason to suspect that he exhibited character ‘flaws’ on
cue, to make a point or excite a response” (9). For example, in the Narrative, Douglass
calls attention to his problematic belief that Providence guided his journey out of slavery
and offers that a reader might find such an attitude “superstitious, and even egotistical.”
To this charge, he responds, “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring
the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence” (Papers 1:
30). This set-up trains his readers to interpret all of his shortcomings as evidence of his
willingness to be honest. Similarly, on stage, he calculated that an occasional display of
the slave’s supposed lack of emotional control (again, manipulating his white audience’s
latent racism) would give his performance an air of authenticity in the eyes of his white
audience, as well as an electric charge. As Baxter explains, intense emotional displays
had been a commonplace and effective means of connecting with a lecture audience for
years before Douglass arrived on the stage and always signaled the all-important element
of sincerity. Moreover, Douglass’s expressions of emotion most often came in the form
of unchecked fury, part of a larger “exhibit of a dangerous and exotic kind of manhood
that thrilled antebellum audiences” (88). Thus, by indulging in such calculated outbursts,
Douglass succeeded in increasing both his reputation for sincerity and his entertainment
value.
While Douglass was sometimes willing to play into his white audience’s racist
expectations when it benefited his persona, the need to demonstrate authenticity also
sometimes led him to adamantly refuse to play into racist stereotypes – most particularly

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the stereotype of the uneducated, witless slave – even against the advice of his fellow
abolitionist lecturers. Ironically, his unwillingness to be false to himself in this regard
initially exposed him to charges that he was not presenting himself authentically. Many
questioned his status as a fugitive, claiming that he did not speak as someone who had
been raised as a slave. The 1845 publication of the Narrative, with its multitude of
identifying names and places, however, effectively silenced such criticism. Emerson’s
performance of authenticity had an irresistible wholesome freshness that had helped
make him a star, but for Douglass, no career was possible without convincing his
audience of his sincerity. Both his personal livelihood and his public mission depended
on it.
His claims of authenticity faced far more scrutiny than those of Emerson and his
protégés because, as I have suggested, as a fugitive slave Douglass could not rely on the
same basic level of audience identification that Emerson, a man from an established New
England family, could take for granted. Many white audience members (like Emerson
himself), despite despising slavery on principle, believed racist doctrines about the
supposed natural inferiority of black people and sincerely doubted their ability to
maintain moral convictions to the same degree as white people. And tales of desperate
slaves lying, stealing, and even killing disturbed morally upright Northerners of all
ethnicities. While the Narrative proved the truth of Douglass’s claims about his origins,
it did not in itself solve this larger problem. If Douglass were indeed a runaway slave,
how could he be trusted? To handle these unspoken accusations and win over audiences
like Emerson’s, Douglass most often resorted to straightforward pathetic appeals. Such
tactics, he knew, were ideal for an audience primed on sentimental fiction. For example,

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early in the Narrative, to handle the problem of slave deceit, Douglass relates a story of a
young slave boy who encounters his master on the road without recognizing him. Hiding
his own identity, the master asks him two questions about his treatment, both of which
the guileless boy answers frankly. One of his answers displeases the master, who
responds by ripping the child from his family and friends and selling him “down the
river” to the dreaded Deep South. Douglass concludes, “This is the penalty of telling the
truth, of telling the simple truth, in answer to a series of plain questions” (Papers, Series
Two 1: 23). This exceedingly pathetic anecdote resonates throughout the rest of
Douglass’s work, not only explaining his own deceit, but also encouraging Douglass’s
readers to react with sympathetic fear when Douglass himself faces interlocutors of
uncertain loyalty. Moreover, as this anecdote also suggests, he characterizes the
slaveholders as far worse liars, motivated by lust for power and control rather than simple
fear. The trope of the untrustworthy slaveholder peaks with Douglass’s characterization
of the slave-breaker Mr. Covey, whose “forte consisted in his power to deceive” (1: 48).
By emphasizing the greater dishonesty of the slaveholders, Douglass encourages his
audience to excuse the slaves’ own more-understandable duplicity by showing how such
behavior was built into the system and propagated by its leaders. But, more importantly,
these descriptions are so disgusting that they encourage readers to celebrate the duping of
such hypocrites as justice well served.
The requirement for scrupulous authenticity also inevitably led both Emerson and
Douglass to controversy, a selling point in its own right, as neither man minced words
about sensitive topics. Their criticisms of religion, in particular, earned both iconoclastic
reputations. In the early 1830s, Emerson shocked his community when he resigned from

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his post as Boston’s Second Church minister over the practice of communion, which he
could no longer endorse. And he cemented his heretical reputation in the eyes of
conservatives near and far when he began publishing his views on the Oversoul. But
Emerson’s religious rebellion looked quaint beside that of Douglass, who, a decade later,
freely excoriated the many American churchmen still preaching the curse of Ham in
support of contemporary slavery. One could argue that such a position was not as
provocative as it might seem to a modern reader. After all, Harriet Beecher Stowe had
repeatedly raised the same issue in her own works, beginning with Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
and received little censure for it (beyond that which already came with writing
abolitionist books). But as a white woman and the wife of a famous minister and
religious scholar, she did not risk the same critical backlash as Douglass. As an ex-slave
writing in the early forties, Douglass knew his white audience would give him little
latitude to criticize them on any subject, much less religion. He did it anyway. Acutely
aware of the controversy surrounding his statements on the subject, Douglass chose to
include an appendix at the end of his Narrative ostensibly to “remove the liability of such
misapprehension” as could arise from incendiary statements such as “Another advantage
I gained in my new master was, he made no pretensions to, or profession of, religion; and
this, in my opinion, was truly a great advantage” and “…of all slaveholders with whom I
have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst” (1: 81, 57). Douglass’s idea of
removing misapprehension, however, did not equate to quelling controversy. Instead,
this passage reinforces the image of Douglass as an irrepressible firebrand drawing the
proverbial line in the sand. He begins by creating two poles: one that he calls
“Christianity proper” and another he calls “the slaveholding religion of this land.”

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Building on this premise of the true and the false churches, he writes, “I love the pure,
peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding,
women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land” (1:
81). He follows this with a full-blown jeremiad against the latter, including an
unexpurgated version of Whittier’s “Clerical Oppressors,” and a transcript of his own
famous parody of a slave-apologist minister. The Narrative’s appendix shows
Douglass’s mastery of the same dynamics that made Emerson a celebrity. While
appearing to wish to avoid controversy, he does everything he can to stimulate it further,
and the contradiction itself, like Emerson’s gesture of writing “Whim” above his door,
solidifies his devil-may-care reputation. Equally importantly, as his careful division of
Christianity into two houses demonstrates, such controversies exploited the tribal, us-
versus-them tendencies of his readers. As with Emerson, every enemy Douglass gained
earned him more loyalty from his supporters, as well as more fame.
But Douglass made sure that his audience knew he was a rebel with a cause. For
example, his treatment of hypocritical Christianity in the Narrative was, while
provocative, ultimately only part of the writer’s overall desire to use his story to create an
in-depth, moral reading of the Bible.
133
Likewise, he frequently aimed directly at his
audience’s patriotism by contextualizing the slaves’ morally complicated actions within
an honorable, or at least pleasing, existing American tradition. For example, in his first
attempt at writing fiction, The Heroic Slave, Douglass likens the illegal actions of slave
militants like his protagonist, whom Douglass aptly names Madison Washington, to those
of America’s revolutionaries. Invoking the principle of natural rights, Douglass has

133

For a standard study of Christian allusions in The Narrative, see for example, Zeitz
56-64.

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Washington anticipate his audience’s misgivings about his morality: “The fact is, sir,
during my flight, I felt myself robbed by society of all my just rights; that I was in an
enemy’s land, who sought both my life and my liberty. They had transformed me into a
brute; made merchandise of my body, and, for all the purposes of my flight, turned day
into night,--and guided by my own necessities, and in contempt of their conventionalities,
I did not scruple to take bread where I could get it” (18). Douglass reinforces his
argument by having Listwell, his surrogate for his white readers, agree heartily and even
reference Douglass’s real-life friend, Gerrit Smith, as a (white) source for further
explication of the subject. And after Washington has taken violent control over the slave
ship, Douglass sharpens the comparison even further by having Washington proclaim,
“You call me a black murderer. I am not a murderer. God is my witness that LIBERTY,
not malice, is the motive for this night’s work… We have done that which you applaud
your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they” (48). Similarly, in his
autobiographies, Douglass harkens back to America’s beloved founders when he asks the
reader to understand his own moments of deceitfulness through the lens of the Benjamin
Franklin-trickster tradition. Most famously, he evokes Franklin’s crafty ingenuity when
he writes of his efforts to trick his white peers into teaching him to write, a crime in the
South:
The idea as to how I might learn to write was suggested to me by being in Durgin
and Bailey’s ship-yard, and frequently seeing the ship carpenters, after hewing,
and getting a piece of timber ready for use, write on the timber the name of that
part of the ship for which it was intended. When a piece of timber was intended
for the larboard side, it would be marked thus—“L.” When a piece was for the

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starboard side, it would be marked thus—“S.”…I soon learned the names of these
letters, and for what they were intended when placed upon a piece of timber in the
ship-yard. I immediately commenced copying them, and in a short time was able
to make the four letters named. After that, when I met with any boy who I knew
could write, I would tell him I could write as well as he. The next word would be,
“I don’t believe you. Let me see you try it.” I would then make the letters which I
had been so fortunate as to learn, and ask him to beat that. In this way I got a good
many lessons in writing, which it is quite possible I should never have gotten in
any other way. (Papers, Series Two 1: 37)
Douglass’s ability to convince the wharf boys that his writing lessons were, in fact,
contests that they were winning bears a striking similarity to several of Franklin’s own
tricks, most notably his success in convincing a political enemy that he was, instead, a
friend by asking the favor of borrowing a rare volume from the man’s library. While
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is right to locate Douglass’s trickster persona primarily in the
longer history of African culture and literature to which he would have undoubtedly had
access in the slave community, the familiar self-made-man-rags-to-riches story arc of
Douglass’s autobiographies bears too many similarities to Franklin’s autobiography to be
a coincidence.
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Just as his allusions to the founders in The Heroic Slave served to
ennoble the idea of the rebel slave, Franklin’s ghost helped Douglass’s readers put his
own otherwise sneaky-looking machinations into a positive perspective.
By likening himself to Franklin, and the Douglass-like protagonist of “The Heroic
Slave” to James Madison and George Washington, Douglass also reinforced his

134

For analysis of the similarities between Douglass and Franklin’s autobiographies, see,
for example, Zafar.

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reputation for “American-ness,” a quality that he desperately needed to counteract his
Northern audience’s feelings of alienation from him. Emerson’s success partially rested
on his reputation as a representative of the American type, and he further encouraged this
characterization with his own typology, Representative Men. Thus, for Douglass to
become the new Emerson, he knew he would have to convince his audience that he too
was a representative American man. Indeed, he made his representative status the
unstated premise justifying his abolitionist work, a premise that actually gained power
after Douglass’s followers purchased his manumission when it ceased to be an issue of
personal gain. In My Bondage, for example, he insists, “I have never placed my
opposition to slavery on a basis so narrow as my own enslavement” (2: 5). Instead, he
makes it clear that he writes as a representative of both the slave community and its
abolitionist defenders. In the Narrative, he dons both of these roles when he chastises the
promoters of the Underground Railroad for giving away their methods, a move that
Douglass believed lessened the system’s efficacy. In thus defending the interests of his
fellow slaves and fugitives, Douglass occupies a representative position for these groups.
Moreover, in comparing the Underground Railroad’s self-exposure unfavorably with his
own decision to mystify the means by which he escaped – in essence, teaching his fellow
abolitionists how to do their job – Douglass assumes a representative position in the
abolitionist movement as well. Douglass also reinforced his performance of
representativeness early on by marshaling white abolitionists to support him. In his
preface to the Narrative, Garrison pointedly presents Douglass as a representative of
America’s slaves, writing, “I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment;
certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the godlike

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nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever. There stood one, in physical
proportion and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural
eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly ‘created but a little lower than the angels’—yet
a slave, ay, a fugitive slave” (1: 3). In My Bondage, James McCune Smith is even more
explicit, calling Douglass one of a few “living exemplars” of African American potential
and “a Representative American man—a type of his countrymen” (2: 14), and backing up
these statements at length with pseudo-scientific analysis. Later, to solidify his
representative status, Douglass followed Emerson’s lead and wrote a speech arguing for a
definition of American representativeness that reflected his own persona: “Self-Made
Men.” Not only does Douglass sound a great deal like Emerson in this speech – for
example, in his discussions of individualism and in his sign-of-the-times rhetoric – he
actually begins by referencing Emerson’s Representative Men directly twice before
making the case for his own American representativeness. Many of Douglass’s
contemporaries couched their praise of him in terms of his representativeness, but the
idea did not come to them spontaneously. For Douglass, establishing himself as the
American representative man of his time was perhaps even more essential to him than it
was to Emerson in his prime, and he went to great lengths to convince his audience to
elect him as such.
It was also much harder for him to gain such a title, because – as Gates and Levine
both argue – by the racist logic of nineteenth-century America, there was only room for
one representative African American on the antebellum stage, and Douglass’s success
was far from a given. In “Wheatley to Douglass: The Politics of Displacement,” for
example, Gates outlines the road that led to Douglass’s achieving the top spot. Gates

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shows that Douglass’s representative-man status did not arise organically: He did not
simply create a mold that others would follow. On the contrary, the black community had
long been trying to create a representative in a certain prefixed mold. As Gates explains,
Phyllis Wheatley had been the African American community’s primary cultural
representative for decades, but the combination of her gender and her genre (lyric poetry)
made her less useful to the antebellum black community, steeped as it was in hyper-
masculine Jacksonian values. Wheatley’s initial supplanter James Williams also failed to
satisfy when his celebrated “autobiography” turned out to be a fiction, an unacceptable
fact to the authenticity-obsessed mid-century audience. Douglass replaced both because
he satisfied his audience’s desire for a public representative who was both masculine and
authentic, and he reinforced these qualities at every opportunity. But, as Levine
demonstrates, Douglass wasn’t the only black man vying for representative status at the
time. Martin Delany, for one, had a similar ambition and fought Douglass for the title.
Delany distinguished himself from Douglass by emphasizing his militancy, his desire for
separatism, and his racial purity in opposition to Douglass’s non-violence, desire for
integration, and bi-racial status. As both Gates and Levine argue, Douglass’s eventual
success in securing the crown came, not only from his own strengths, but also from
denigrating those of his rivals. For example, Gates points to Douglass’s assertion, when
asked, that he could think of “no book of importance written by a Negro woman” (qtd. in
Gates 51), a statement that effectively erased Wheatley’s contributions; and Levine cites
his similarly calculated silence on the contributions of rival black intellectuals, including
Delany. Again, Douglass’s tactic of silence bears a strong similarity to Emerson’s own
manipulations. Emerson’s list of representative men, not surprisingly, concentrates on

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previous generations, leaving the field open for a new contender: himself. Moreover,
while he promoted his literary friends, he made sure to keep them subordinate to himself
in the public’s eye. And despite the fact that Douglass and Emerson often shared the
stage on the lyceum circuit – even in Concord itself – neither man has much to say about
the other, a reticence they applied to all rivals and calculated to limit potential free
publicity.
The idea of being a representative man was not the only tool he borrowed from the
Sage of Concord. Douglass’s choice to elect the self-made man as America’s particular
representative builds directly on the idea of self-reliance; and while Emerson was not
alone in championing self-reliance as the American’s cardinal virtue, by the time
Douglass had begun to build a name for himself as a public intellectual, his audience had
already firmly linked Emerson with the idea. In “Self-Made Men,” for example,
Douglass makes it clear that “self-made” is simply another way of saying “self-reliant.”
He explains, “Personal independence is a virtue and it is the soul out of which comes the
sturdiest manhood” (np). And on the question of what should be done to help his fellow
African Americans thrive in post-war America, he echoes Emerson’s own pre-war ideas
on the subject: “Give the negro fair play and let him alone… If he fails then, let him fail!”
Moreover, as Waldo Martin, Jr. argues in The Mind of Frederick Douglass, from the
beginning of his career, Douglass drew heavily on Emersonian self-reliance in the
creation of his persona. For example, in the Narrative, a good indication of his early self-
fashioning, he recounts a radically solitary hero’s journey. As Eric Sundquist argues in
“Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” in the absence of a real mother or father,
Douglass appears to spring out of nowhere fully formed: in essence, fathering himself

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through the act of life-writing. From there, this guideless hero apparently hatches
multiple plans entirely on his own – many, like his efforts to teach himself to read and
write, aimed at self-culture – that culminate in his eventual escape from slavery. Helpers,
where they do appear, are either of momentary value (for example, Bill, the slave who
would not help Covey beat Douglass) or almost as harmful as they are helpful (for
example, Sophia Auld, who taught him to read, but later joined her husband in forbidding
him to do so). An embrace of Emersonian self-reliance not only helped Douglass locate
his persona within a popular, well-understood, existing tradition, it also helped him
counter contemporary racist notions of African Americans, especially slaves, as a child-
like, helpless race.
While one could argue that Douglass’s commitment to self-reliance owed more to
an overall zeitgeist than to an individual influence like Emerson’s, Douglass’s
presentation of himself as a young slave boy bears an uncanny resemblance to a more
specific trope in Emerson’s work: the idealized Spartan youth, his favorite incarnation of
self-reliance. In My Bondage, for example, Douglass expands the Narrative’s basic
description of his “harrowing boyhood” with details that Emerson’s audience would find
surprisingly familiar:
…[F]reed from all restraint, the slave-boy can be, in his life and conduct, a
genuine boy, doing whatever his boyish nature suggests; enacting, by turns, all the
strange antics and freaks of horses, dogs, pigs, and barn-door fowls, without in
any manner compromising his dignity, or incurring reproach of any sort. He
literally runs wild…His days, when the weather is warm, are spent in the pure,
open air, and in the bright sunshine. He always sleeps in airy apartments; he seldom

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has to take powders, or to be paid to swallow pretty little sugar-coated pills, to
cleanse his blood, or to quicken his appetite. He eats no candies; gets no lumps of
loaf sugar; always relishes his food; cries but little, for nobody cares for his crying;
learns to esteem his bruises but slight, because others so esteem them. In a word, he
is, for the most part of the first eight years of his life, a spirited, joyous, uproarious,
and happy boy, upon whom troubles fall only like water on a duck’s back. And
such a boy, so far as I can now remember, was the boy whose life in slavery I am
now narrating. (Papers, Series Two 2: 25-26)
While encomiums to both the child and the so-called natural man appear frequently in
Romantic writing, adding the idea of hardship improving the child – that is, the Spartan
model – puts Douglass more directly in line with Emerson’s vision. In “History,” for
example, Emerson praises the ancient Greeks for their healthy attitude and declares that
they “have surpassed all” (Works 2: 26); and in his elaboration of what makes them so
excellent, he likens them to children, specifically boys. Moreover, he insists that
“[l]uxury and elegance are not known” to these great boys of old, and, as a result, that
“the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to wonderful performances”
(24). In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson also makes the boy his ideal, and while this perfect
boy, unlike Douglass, is “sure of a dinner” (2: 48), Emerson urges him to forego it as a
voluntary discipline: “Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the
Spartan fife” (2: 60). By fashioning himself as a new version of Emerson’s Spartan boy,
Douglass taps into a familiar and attractive image. At the same time, he improves on the
basic model by increasing the stakes. Emerson admired the idea of a boy whose needs
are so few that no one can buy his opinion. He has an almost impenetrable self-respect.

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But Douglass presents his readers with a boy whose self-respect is completely inviolable
despite the most trying hardships.
Douglass didn’t simply craft his persona as a copy of Emerson’s, however, or as a
realization of Emersonian principles; like many of the Concord Sage’s own protégés, he
challenged the master’s position on many core Transcendentalist topics. For example,
like Fuller and Thoreau, Douglass made it clear that Emerson’s detached notion of
friendship did not satisfy him. While Douglass’s autobiographies do largely depict a
solitary hero’s journey from slavery to freedom, his accounts of his relationships with
various groups of friends reveal a markedly non-Emersonian view of friendship. Even in
the Narrative, the most Emersonian of his autobiographies, he confesses that he will
always be “indebted to the society of [his] fellow-slaves” (Papers, Series Two 1: 60).
Describing their bond, he writes, “We were linked and interlinked with each other. I
loved them with a love stronger than any thing I have experienced since… I believe we
would have died for each other. We never undertook to do any thing, of any importance,
without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were one...” (1: 60).
Indeed, after a failed escape attempt, Douglass insists that his subsequent separation from
his co-conspirators “caused me more pain than any thing else in the whole transaction”
(1: 66). Later, while plotting another escape attempt, he characterizes the prospect of
leaving his friends behind as “painful beyond expression” and asserts that such “strong
cords of affection,” in fact, cause many slaves to forgo possible escape opportunities (1:
74). And, in the most un-Emersonian passage of all, Douglass recounts his
overwhelming loneliness after reaching New York. Where Emerson praises the person
“who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of

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solitude” (Works 2: 54), Douglass punctures Emerson’s fantasy with his own stern
reality: “There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger; without home
and without friends, in the midst of thousands of my own brethren—children of a
common Father, and yet I dared not to unfold to any one of them my sad condition”
(Papers, Series Two 1: 75). The passionate, unqualified language he uses in these
passages, his proud lack of self-reliance under these circumstances, contrasts markedly
with Emerson’s notion of the friend as merely a “beautiful enemy” who “from time to
time…pass[es his] gate” to fill him with occasional “jets of affection” (Works 2: 193), a
shift in tone that exploits a weak spot in Emerson’s persona. While Emerson’s protégés
fought him on his theory of friendship using their own understandings of the Romantic
worldview they shared, Douglass’s highly personal description of both the moral and
practical value of friendship under extreme duress shows the limits of Emerson’s
comfortably abstract argument in a way that would have confirmed the instincts of
Emerson’s frustrated community-oriented followers.
He also infused his image with popular Romantic characteristics that, for
temperamental reasons, Emerson mostly rejected despite their popularity with his
audience. For example, although both men admired Byron (as did their audience),
Douglass embraced the quintessential Romantic poet’s heroic persona in a way that cool,
intellectual Emerson never could. In particular, Douglass appreciated Byron’s active
defense of his principles. Byron hated oppression wherever he saw it and frequently
wrote on the subject. But unlike most of his writing peers, Byron didn’t confine his
assistance to words. During the Greek War of Independence, in particular, Byron raised
large sums of money to improve the Greek navy and army and died while training Greek

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troops for battle. In his effort to emulate Byron, Douglass takes every opportunity he can
in his autobiographies to show how he supports his words with actions. In the Narrative,
for example, to describe his famous standoff with Covey, he writes, “I resolved to fight;
and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat…” (Papers,
Series Two 1: 53). Here, Douglass’s previous intellectual meditations on slavery come to
fruition in a decisive action. In My Bondage, Douglass makes his point even clearer.
Discussing his escape plans, for example, Douglass writes, “Like most other men, we had
done the talking part of our work, long and well; and the time had come to act as if we
were in earnest, and meant to be as true in action as in words” (2: 164). Douglass
additionally underlines the Byronic quality of his behavior by quoting Byron’s most
famous words on the subject: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not/ Who would be free
themselves must strike the blow?” (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto II, LXXVI).
McCune Smith reinforces Douglass’s active persona by repeating the same Byron
passage and also by placing Douglass in the intellectual company of Hungarian
revolutionary Lajos Kossuth: “His were not the mere words of eloquence which Kossuth
speaks of, that delight the ear and then pass away. No! They were work-able, do-able
words, that brought forth fruits in the revolution in Illinois, and in the passage of the
franchise resolutions by the Assembly of New York” (Papers, Series Two 2: 14).
Douglass’s active persona struck right at the heart of Literary Concord’s misgivings
about Emerson. While Mary Brooks was struggling to get Emerson to even speak about
slavery, Douglass was repeatedly risking his life in service to the cause.
Many in Emerson’s audience felt a mounting frustration with his unwillingness to
take a more active role in the fight against slavery and other instances of injustice

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because, as Reynolds demonstrates, they were themselves rapidly radicalizing. But
Emerson’s passivity also reflected a larger tendency that had troubled his fans from the
beginning: Emerson’s trademark serenity seemed to stem from a lack of feeling. The
“man of feeling” had been a tremendously attractive type for decades by the time
Emerson emerged, and one that the Byronic hero also embodied. But Emerson had
difficulty with the role and preferred to maintain a philosophical tone, even on troubling
subjects like slavery. Audience members frequently remarked on his quiet evenness on
stage, and his writings largely reflected this image as well (a notable exception being
“Threnody”). Douglass, on the other hand, as I have mentioned, often made a show of
his uncontainable emotion on stage, and sprinkled his writings likewise with outbursts of
feeling. In his (published) letter to his former master and suspected father Thomas Auld,
for example, he describes the day of his escape in highly emotional terms: “The hopes
which I had treasured up for weeks of a safe and successful escape from your grasp, were
powerfully confronted at this last hour by dark clouds of doubt and fear, making my
person shake and my bosom to heave with the heavy contest between hope and fear. I
have no words to describe to you the deep agony of soul which I experienced on that
never to be forgotten morning” (2: 248). Douglass includes physical evidence of his
intense feeling – his shaking and rapid breathing – and suggests that, in reflecting on his
past life, his emotion is so great that words actually fail him. Moreover, his use of these
emotion-conveying devices is not limited to this one instance; they are standbys of his
writing. As a result, Douglass – like Byron – created the overall impression that he was a
man of deep feeling, correcting Emerson’s shortcoming in this regard.
But attitudes had changed in the fifty years that separated Byron’s man of feeling

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from Douglass’s. Audiences still appreciated sturm und drang, but by mid-century, the
conventions of sentimental fiction dictated the terms by which most judged the man of
feeling. Thus Douglass – always a savvy self-fashioner – tempered his wrathful and
sardonic sides with frequent displays of tenderheartedness. One of the best examples of
Douglass’s attention to his audience’s taste for sentimentality is his famous apostrophe
(repeated intact in all three of his autobiographies) to the ships coming in and out of
Chesapeake Bay in which he mournfully contrasts their freedom with his own
enslavement. As William M. Ramsey points out in “Frederick Douglass, Southerner,”
the passage appears affected and melodramatic to the modern eye. But to Douglass’s
contemporaries, this passage represented the peak of his literary achievement. For
example, both of the Narrative’s prefacers single out the Chesapeake Bay passage in their
discussion of Douglass’s merits as a writer. Wendell Phillips briefly cites the “‘white
sails’ of the Chesapeake” in suggesting Douglass’s ability “to gauge the wretchedness of
the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and
blighting death which gathers over his soul” (12). And Garrison is even more affected by
the passage, writing, “This Narrative contains many affecting incidents, many passages of
great eloquence and power; but I think the most thrilling one of them all is the description
Douglass gives of his feelings, as he stood soliloquizing respecting his fate, and the
chances of his one day being a freeman, on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay—viewing
the receding vessels as they flew with their white wings before the breeze, and
apostrophizing them as animated by the living spirit of freedom. Who can read that
passage, and be insensible to its pathos and sublimity? Compressed into it is a whole
Alexandrian library of thought, feeling, and sentiment—all that can, all that need be

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urged, in the form of expostulation, entreaty, rebuke, against that crime of crimes,—
making man the property of his fellow-man!” (Papers, Series Two 1: 7). Not
surprisingly, given his own reaction, Garrison chose to reprint this passage in The
Liberator, along with a handful of others, in an effort to advertise Douglass’s book. By
1845, sentimentality was a proven asset in the literary marketplace.
Douglass’s forays into sentimentality also led him to increasingly embrace his
middle-class readership’s obsession with the family, a theme that – again, with a few
notable exceptions – remained largely absent from Emerson’s individual-focused
writings. Indeed, subverting his opponents’ favorite bromide about the plantation family,
one of Douglass’s key arguments against the institution of slavery was that it undermined
real familial relations. In My Bondage, Douglass puts it bluntly: “There is not, beneath
the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers
and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded
my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world” (2: 36).
As a result, he explains in terms designed to disturb his family-obsessed readers: “It is a
successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of
the sacredness of the family, as an institution” (2: 23). And the early chapters of all three
of Douglass’s autobiographies are animated by repeated, wrenching separations from
family members, as well as evidence of the estrangement such separations engendered.
Upon learning of his mother’s death, for example, Douglass flatly admits, “I received the
tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death
of a stranger” (1: 14). Likewise, upon being briefly reunited with his siblings, he greets
them as strangers. And lest the reader should doubt the loss Douglass felt at these

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estrangements, he makes sure to contrast such separations with poignant descriptions of
his limited experiences of familial wholeness. For example, he makes it clear that he
considers the cabin he shared with his grandparents and cousins “MY HOME—the only
home I ever had,” and he assures his readers that, despite its rudeness, “I loved it, and all
connected with it” (2: 27). While Emerson blithely writes of disregarding his family’s
claims over him, a tactic that could never have sat well with many in his audience,
Douglass makes his longing for his scattered family, as well as his touching efforts to
create a new family, the cornerstones of his personal story.
Such passages immediately bring to mind the orphaned, friendless protagonist of
many sentimental novels of the period, but Douglass was also willing to borrow from far
darker genres popular with his audience. Douglass understood that his mid-century
readers’ obsession with family and the conventions of sentimental novels also dovetailed
with a predictable interest in sexual situations that perverted their ideals of family and the
related cult of domesticity: the kind of scenarios found in gothic, sensationalist, and
erotic novels, as well as in most slave narratives of the period, which themselves
borrowed from these genres. In My Bondage, in fact, he goes as far as to explicitly
encourage this interest, calling it a “commendable curiosity” (2: 6). And Douglass
repeatedly offers to satisfy it. To explain his belief that his master was in fact his father,
for example, he does not shy away from the underlying facts: “[T]he children of slave
women shall in all cases follow the condition of their mothers; and this is done too
obviously to administer to [the masters’] own lusts, and make a gratification of their
wicked desires profitable as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the
slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of master and

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father” (1: 14). Douglass follows this assertion with a lengthy eyewitness account of his
aunt’s whipping, a passage that Rowe rightly likens to a “biblical scene of perverse
instruction” (116). Douglass begins the passage with innuendo: “Why master was so
careful of her, may be safely left to conjecture. She was a woman of noble form, and of
graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer superiors, in personal
appearance, among the colored or white women of our neighborhood” (Papers, Series
Two 1: 16). Aunt Hester’s crime, Douglass tells the reader, was in visiting her slave
paramour against her master’s orders, a restriction that Douglass strongly suggests arose
from the master’s own forced sexual relationship with his aunt. From this point,
Douglass drops the veil and turns instead to an extremely graphic description of the
master stripping his aunt to the waist and whipping her mercilessly. While Rowe views
the latent sexual content of this scene primarily in terms of its service to Douglass’s
political aims – that is, in overturning both specifically pro-slavery and more generally
racist clichés – it also shows Douglass’s familiarity with, and willingness to exploit,
existing literary trends popular with his middle-class, white audience. As I have
suggested in my study of Hawthorne’s obsession with whipping and restraints,
sadomasochistic imagery and master/slave scenarios flourished in mid-nineteenth-century
erotica, as well as in the gothic and sensationalist genres, and it is very difficult to escape
the voyeuristic overtones of this passage. A youthful Douglass witnesses this scene while
peeking through a crack in a closet door. He calls the incident “the blood-stained gate”
of slavery through which he knew he too would pass (1: 16). However, the sexual basis
of the conflict, along with his emphasis on his aunt’s beautiful, defiled body throughout,
show that the moment is also a sexual awakening for the boy. And although the Hester

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whipping scene is unusual in Douglass’s oeuvre for its length and detail, Douglass adopts
this outraged, yet titillated tone regularly. In a passage describing Covey’s attempts to
increase his slave stock, for example, he invites the same “commendable curiosity.”
Throughout the description, he carefully manipulates his readers’ reactions to draw out
their outrage and titillation: for example, he begins, “[H]e was only able to buy one slave;
and, shocking as is the fact, he bought her, as he said, for a breeder [original emphasis]”
(2: 124). The use of the term “shocking” and the italicization of “breeder” prime the
reader for an aroused reaction to the description of Covey’s breeding attempts that
follows. By including shocking passages like these in his works, Douglass was following
the conventions of the slave narrative, which built on similar devices in other mass-
market literary genres. These kind of devices, he knew, sold books; and sell they did.
By blending elements of the popular literary genres of the period with Emerson’s
themes, Douglass showed an astute understanding of Literary Concord’s changing tastes,
particularly the growing influence of women as cultural consumers. By the time Douglass
began building his career in the late thirties and early forties, women dominated the
literary field both as readers and writers; and while men still led the lecture circuit,
women almost always formed the majority of their audience. From his apprenticeship
with Garrison, Douglass also learned the worth of women to the abolitionist movement,
and the importance of giving them the credit they deserved. Douglass’s public gratitude
towards Julia Griffiths provides an excellent example of his behavior in this regard.
During the rocky start-up period of Douglass’s first paper, The North Star, the British
Griffiths made the unusual move of relocating to Rochester to help him. Her business
skills, organizational talent, and ability to raise large sums of money proved essential to

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his success. Indeed, Frank E. Fee, Jr. goes as far as to call Griffiths Douglass’s
“salvation” (8), and David Blight calls her Douglass’s “most cherished friend” (19).
Douglass rewarded Griffiths’s kindness with endless gratitude and steadfast loyalty. He
risked public censure by walking arm and arm with her in New York, and when a still
angry Garrison suggested that Douglass’s relations with Griffiths were inappropriate, he
even convinced his publicity-shy wife to issue a retort in her defense. Moreover,
Douglass’s third autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, features a
lengthy, heartfelt tribute to Griffiths:
But to no one person was I more indebted for substantial assistance than to Mrs.
Julia Griffiths Crofts. She came to my relief when my paper had nearly absorbed
all my means, and I was heavily in debt, and when I had mortgaged my house to
raise money to meet current expenses; and in a single year by her energetic and
effective management enabled me to extend the circulation of my paper from
2,000 to 4,000 copies, pay off the debts and lift the mortgage from my house. Her
industry was equal to her devotion. She seemed to rise with every emergency, and
her resources appeared inexhaustible. I shall never cease to remember with
sincere gratitude the assistance rendered me by this noble lady, and I mention her
here in the desire in some humble measure to “give honor to whom honor is due.”
(228)

Douglass did not thank everyone who helped him, and almost no one in such terms. But
he understood the value of his relationship with Griffiths as a symbol of the bond he felt
with his white, female audience.

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In order to win and maintain their support, Douglass also took every opportunity
to draw out the similarities between himself and his female audience. For example, he
had a tendency to draw attention to himself as an unusual lecturer, whose very right to
speak in front of an audience had faced harsh scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the same
women who flocked to Douglass’s performances were also those fighting for their own
right to preach. Douglass crafts his description of his introduction to public speaking in
My Bondage, for example, to highlight his objectified, outsider status in a way that would
have resonated with his female readers: “Many came, no doubt, from curiosity to hear
what a Negro could say in his own cause. I was generally introduced as a “chattel”—a
‘thing’—a piece of southern ‘property’—the chairman assuring the audience that it could
speak… ‘Give us the facts,’ said Collins [to me], ‘we will take care of the philosophy’”
(Papers, Series Two 2: 207). He also lets his female readers know that he understands
how it feels to have to fight other members of one’s own oppressed group on the subject:
“Some of my colored friends in New Bedford thought very badly of my wisdom for thus
exposing and degrading myself” (Life and Times 185). Most importantly, he shows he
understands the courage it takes for people who have traditionally been excluded from
public speaking to take the stage. Standing in front of a New York audience at the
Tabernacle in 1845, for example, he admits, “My habits and early life have done much to
unfit me for public speaking… when I came in this morning, and looked at those massive
pillars, and saw the vast throng which had assembled, I got a little frightened, and was
afraid that I could not speak” (Papers, Series One 1: 28). While disavowing one’s
competence had long been a popular convention for all writers and speakers, regardless
of their status, Douglass’s specific tone – his willingness to momentarily abandon his

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trademark ultra-competent masculinity in favor of a feminine-inflected timidity, his
palpable resentment at the condescension and ridicule his presence aroused, as well as his
attention to his own objectification and the controversy surrounding it – aimed at
connecting with his female audience’s own experience.
Although many of his abolitionist arguments rested on particulars of slave life that
were not easily generalized to another group, Douglass also frequently wrote and spoke
in terms that he knew reflected injustices his female readers and auditors felt as well. In
an 1841 speech decrying segregation in churches, for example, he writes:
Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in
their proper place! They assign us that place; they don’t let us do it for ourselves,
nor will they allow us a voice in the decision. They will not allow that we have a
head to think, and a heart to feel, and a soul to aspire. They treat us not as men,
but as dogs—they cry “Stu-boy!” and expect us to run and do their bidding.
That’s the way we are liked. You degrade us, and then ask why we are
degraded—you shut our mouths, and then ask why we don’t speak—you close
your colleges and seminaries against us, and then ask why we don’t know more.
(Papers, Series One 1: 12)
Here, Douglass makes the barest mention of his subject – “colored men” – in favor of a
more generalized “us,” inviting the women in his audience to see the parallels with their
own experiences of subjugation, and even in the same terms they would have
encountered: that is, proscriptions against assertiveness and equal education coupled with
resulting unfair assumptions about one’s nature.

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Most importantly, Douglass – maintaining his reputation for being a man of
action, and not just words – openly and consistently supported women’s rights
throughout his career on the explicit basis of their shared commitment to righting their
people’s wrongs. His newspaper’s motto, “Right is of no Sex - Truth is of no Color -
God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren,” made clear that the connection he felt
with his activist sisters was a priority to him, equal to his own fight for emancipation.
And these were no empty words: as Foner carefully documents, Douglass frequently used
both The North Star and Frederick Douglass’s Newspaper to personally argue for
women’s rights and to promote the work of other feminists on the issue. He also
contributed feminist articles to other papers, such as The New York Tribune. As I
mentioned in contrasting Douglass’s political activity with Emerson’s passivity, Douglass
also famously attended the Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, the first of its
kind. He was one of only forty men in attendance, and the only black man. Indeed, when
many at the meeting were inclined to drop women’s suffrage from the agenda as an idea
too radical to consider, Douglass took the stage to change their minds. And, despite the
criticism he faced from his fellow feminists for his position on the Fourteenth
Amendment, Douglass remained loyal to the suffragettes, whom he still considered
important allies. As late as 1888, during a convention on women’s rights, Douglass
introduced himself as someone who had “long been identified with the Woman’s
Suffrage movement” and again drew an explicit parallel between women and African
Americans: “I say of her, as I say of the colored people, “Give her fair play, and hands
off” (Foner, On Woman Suffrage 109, Lift Every Voice 449). Although, in reviewing his
actions in support of women’s rights, Douglass congratulated himself on doing something

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truly selfless, his assistance was also an acknowledgement of the many women who had
helped him and his cause.
However, Douglass did not confine his campaign to merely fostering empathy
with this crucial demographic and thanking individual white women; to inspire and flatter
his female audience, he also increasingly paid homage to black heroines from his slave
years. Several scholars have noted the short shrift Douglass gives the women in his early
life in his first work, the Narrative. For example, Rowe observes, “Douglass’ women in
the 1845 Narrative do not speak; Douglass speaks for them” (120). Although both
Sundquist and Douglass biographer William S. McFeely contend that the absence of
black women is a problem that Douglass never overcomes, I argue that Douglass aims
many of the additions in the much longer My Bondage at correcting this impression. As
Rowe points out, while the Narrative primarily tells the story of single, self-reliant
protagonist, My Bondage re-peoples his journey with mentors and helpers, including
heroic black women. In particular, Douglass vastly expands his descriptions of his
relationships with his mother and grandmother in an effort to demonstrate, as his prefacer
McCune Smith calls it, his susceptibility “to the kindly influences of mother culture”
(Papers, Series Two 2: 9). In the Narrative, for comparison, Douglass refers to his
grandmother only eight times and only briefly, and in half of these references she is “his
poor old grandmother” (1: 39-40), an object of pity. In My Bondage, however,
Grandmother Betty emerges as a strong, resourceful community elder. Indeed, Douglass
literalizes Betty’s strength when he recounts her carrying him, already a tall, strapping
boy, during a long walk. And Douglass makes his devotion to her clear: “Grandmammy
was, indeed, at that time, all the world to me… My grandmother! my grandmother! and

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the little hut, and the joyous circle under her care, but especially she, who made us sorry
when she left us but for an hour, and glad on her return…” (2: 25). Likewise, Douglass’s
mother evolves between his first and second autobiographies. In the Narrative, the
reader admires her fortitude when she walks many miles without sleep, risking the lash in
the morning, so that she may lie by her sleeping son; but this mysterious heroine is dead
by the end of the paragraph and Douglass makes no further mention of her. In My
Bondage, on the other hand, Harriet makes several important appearances. In addition to
the original account (now expanded to give full credit to Harriet’s motherly feelings),
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Douglass includes a moving story of his mother’s intervention during a conflict with the
cruel plantation cook, “Aunt” Katy. Although Harriet must lean on the borrowed power
of the master to subdue Aunt Katy, she succeeds in cowing the bully. Douglass’s
description of his mother in this scenario repeatedly highlights her strength: “The
friendless and hungry boy, in his extremest need—and when he did not dare to look for
succor—found himself in the strong, protecting arms of a mother; a mother who was, at
the moment (being endowed with high powers of manner as well as matter) more than a
match for all his enemies… That night I learned the fact, that I was, not only a child, but
somebody’s child” (2: 33-34). He concludes the passage by declaring that he felt
“prouder, on my mother’s knee, than a king upon his throne” (2: 34). This exalted
mother-son image also lurks behind Douglass’s insistence in My Bondage – contrary to
racist and sexist assumptions – that his literary powers came from his mother. Both his

135
McFeely is not so sure about the depth of Harriet’s motherly feelings. In his
biography of Douglass, he writes, “…nothing prevented slaves, living close by, from
visiting. To be sure, even frequent visits would have been a poor substitute for the
constancy of daily life together, but Harriet did not make them at all. Perhaps Frederick
knew she could have done so…that, whatever the reason, his mother
had not appreciated
him as she should have” (7).

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mother and his grandmother transform into essential mentors and protectors in his second
autobiography – a tribute to a readership obsessed with the idea of sacred motherhood.
But Douglass did not limit his expanded treatment of women to expressing his
appreciation of “mother culture.” In My Bondage, Douglass actually revises the
description of his fight with Covey, the crucial turning point of his entire story, to make
clear that he owed his success, in part, to the actions of a sympathetic slave woman, as
well as a sympathetic slave man. In the Narrative, Douglass demonstrates the solidarity
of the slaves during the climactic fight between Covey and the youthful protagonist by
noting that Bill, a nearby slave, refuses to heed Covey’s command to help him subdue
Douglass. In My Bondage, Bill again refuses Covey’s entreaties, but so does Caroline.
Moreover, Douglass makes it clear that Caroline’s refusal is even braver than Bill’s. Bill
is merely a rented slave whose own master forbid beatings for anything but actual crimes;
Caroline is Covey’s own slave, and her refusal means a severe punishment at Covey’s
hands. Douglass also heads off any suggestion that Caroline’s refusal actually arises
from a different kind of cowardice: a fear of Douglass himself. At the risk of
compromising his own hyper-masculine image, Douglass explains, “[S]he was a
powerful woman, and could have mastered me very easily, exhausted as I now was” (2:
140). Douglass’s inclusion of Caroline in the pivotal fight scene re-inscribes the active
role of black women in the slaves’ fight for freedom, and by extension gives credit to all
of the women in his audience who had been supporting the abolition movement.
His silence about the essential part his wife, Anna, played in his escape, however,
has led many scholars to doubt the sincerity of Douglass’s respect for his female
supporters. Although Douglass makes a good case for hiding the part Anna and others

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played in his escape in his first two autobiographies, citing the need to protect his
assistants from prosecution as well as the importance of mystifying the means by which
slaves were escaping, when he does finally give the details in his post-war The Life and
Times, he still fails to credit Anna for her substantial help. In Manhood and the American
Renaissance, David Leverenz blames this omission on “Douglass’s preoccupation with
manhood and power,” which he asserts “all but erases any self-representation linking him
to women, family, and intimacy, as well as to lower-class black people” (109). This
blanket condemnation, however, does not account for the many exceptions to this rule in
his second autobiography (and retained in his third), a book that Leverenz himself
believes Douglass altered from the original to better please himself. My Bondage proves,
on the contrary, that Douglass wished to counteract the damaging charges of elitism his
rivals were leveling against him. But the many, often lengthy tributes in My Bondage to
those whom he overlooked in the Narrative actually highlight his continued silence on
Anna’s role, which becomes a unique omission that cannot simply be dismissed as part of
Douglass’s self-fashioning as a self-reliant, representative man. McFeely generously
suggests that Douglass’s unwillingness to discuss Anna’s involvement in his escape
stemmed from a desire to protect her from suggestions that she was sexually involved
with Douglass before their marriage. While McFeely’s explanation makes sense given
the gender conventions of antebellum culture, it does not, however, entirely explain
Douglass’s motivation, because Douglass frequently flouted similar conventions in his
relationships with other women such as Julia Griffiths. Nor does James Oliver Horton’s
analysis in “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions Among Antebellum Free Blacks”
entirely explain Douglass’s decision. Horton argues that these communities pressured

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black women to put the welfare of their race above their interests as women and restrict
themselves to largely invisible, helpmeet roles. While Anna’s own behavior seems to
conform to these standards, Douglass himself argued that sexism and racism were linked
problems, and he strongly supported the right of women to participate in the public
sphere. It may simply be a matter, as with her aborted reading lessons, of respecting
Anna’s own will on the subject. Regardless of his motivation, Douglass’s elision of
Anna’s role in his escape story, while perhaps in line with his early attempts at self-
fashioning, is entirely out of step with his later efforts to present himself as a new and
improved Emerson.
By the time Douglass had freed himself from both his Southern master and his
Northern mentor in the late 1840s, Emerson had become the biggest celebrity in America.
Thus, it is not surprising that Douglass turned to Emerson’s example for ideas in
promoting himself beyond Garrison as America’s preeminent abolitionist spokesman and
beyond Delany as America’s most important black public intellectual. Whether
Douglass’s public persona naturally resembled Emerson’s or whether he learned
Emerson’s tricks from sharing a stage with him or from analyzing his performance as The
Columbian Orator had taught him, by the time Douglass had established his own
international reputation, the similarities had become abundantly clear. Both were
controversial, electrifying speakers with tough attitudes about self-reliance. Yet Douglass
could only get so far by copying Emerson, because Emerson’s model was far from a
perfect fit. Most significantly, he could never appeal to his audience, as Emerson had, by
promoting his well-known, local patrician family. Douglass knew that, when dealing with
a Northern, middle-class, often white, audience, he could not wave the flag of familiarity.

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He could, however, offer audiences – even Emerson’s own interpretative community –
much of what they felt Emerson lacked. Thus, Douglass becomes a symbol for the way
Literary Concord “wrote back” to Emerson. His promotion by Emerson’s own followers
brings attention to the ways in which Emerson failed, as any individual must, to represent
his community’s heterogeneous, evolving positions on issues like friendship, women’s
rights, and slavery. Emerson may have been the leader of Literary Concord, but he
wasn’t its only citizen. Douglass’s success as an Emersonian figure who occasionally
tempered his self-reliance with warmth and gratitude towards his friends, and who looked
at social injustice as an evil that required immediate, unqualified resistance in both words
and actions, demonstrates the way Literary Concord’s silent members contributed their
own say, whether Emerson liked it or not, to the shape of their community.

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Coda

The academic tradition of labeling Emerson’s coterie the Transcendentalists is
deeply problematic. Even when scholars attempt to nuance this characterization by
merely drawing attention to the group’s association with Transcendentalism, they fall into
the same trap. Matthiessen’s idea of the “American Renaissance” fell out of fashion for
good reason, but scholars of American literature cannot simply substitute
Transcendentalist without creating a whole new set of problems. The truth is that, while
Transcendentalism was an important popular philosophy during this period and while the
writings of Emerson and his friends occasionally show the influence of these ideas, not
one of them qualifies as a true Transcendentalist in any useful sense. Thus, it does not
avail modern critics of this period to continue to use this term. Indeed, by holding on to
this inaccurate descriptor, we risk making fundamental errors in our assessments of both
the writers’ individual work and legacies and those of the group. So the question
becomes: If a shared commitment to Transcendentalism fails to accurately account for the
existence of this literary coterie, what was its actual bonding mechanism?” I have
proposed that the key was Concord itself. At once a real town and an imaginary
community with tremendous affective value, Literary Concord helped this writing group
establish their public image and communicate effectively with their audience around the
globe.
In fact, evidence of the group’s creation is still on display in Concord. The small
town boasts a thriving tourist industry, which appears on the surface to be divided into
two distinct areas of interest: Concord as the site of the famous Revolutionary War battle

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and Literary Concord. Many companies offer tours of the area catering to both interests,
and visitors will find a plethora of knickknacks with both themes available for purchase
at every major attraction in town. The Concord Museum boasts numerous artifacts from
both eras, artfully juxtaposed in adjoining rooms to create a meaningful visual time line.
Considering the rich history of the town, these efforts at preserving and, often,
commodifying the past are unsurprising. What does come as a surprise, however, is the
role that Emerson and his peers played in this process. As this dissertation makes clear,
the members of Literary Concord did not simply serve as the commodified subjects of
Concord’s tourist industry, but also as active participants in their own popularity. Indeed,
a crucial part of Literary Concord’s appeal at the time sprang from the town’s existing
status as a Revolutionary War battleground, and Emerson and his Literary Concord peers
frequently mythologized the area’s historic role in their own works and performances.
Many of the local artifacts in the Concord Museum’s collection, in fact, came from
Thoreau’s own antiquarian endeavors (although Thoreau, himself, tended to privilege the
Native American history of the town in his choice of relics). Thus, to a certain extent,
both arms of Concord’s tourism can actually be understood as part of Literary Concord’s
branding strategy. By playing an actual role in the inscription of the town’s cultural
significance, these writers claimed intellectual and creative ownership of Concord and
everything it meant culturally, which they then, in effect, sold to others through their
works. In other words, these writers borrowed Concord’s existing patriotic luster to
position themselves as representative American writers.
While I am far from alone in recognizing the ways in which the writers in this
coterie mythologized Concord and, by extension, themselves, the tendency of most

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scholars to focus on Transcendentalism obscures the underlying, coordinated strategy at
work in this process. Indeed, as I have shown, putting aside Transcendentalism in favor
of Literary Concord gains us several advantages in terms of understanding this coterie.
First, this approach creates more space for recognizing conflict and difference between
individual writers in the group. For many decades now, scholars have sought to rescue
Thoreau and Fuller from the unflattering assessment of early critics who largely
dismissed them as poor copies of Emerson. Continuing to view them – together – as
Transcendentalists, however, puts an unnecessary limit on how far we can take this
reclamation: one logically ceases to be a Transcendentalist if one falls too far into
heterodoxy, and yet heterodoxy was the defining intellectual trait of this group. The
concept of Literary Concord instead privileges their shared goal of creating an elective
community, the foundation that lay under the varied intellectual architecture of the group.
It also reveals previously obscured associations between writers like Hawthorne and
Douglass and Emerson’s core group by showing how Hawthorne and Douglass
sometimes defined themselves, when it suited them, vis-à-vis Literary Concord: strategies
that necessarily presupposed a well-defined imaginary community to start with. This
recognition pushes back against Hawthorne’s image as a lone wolf writer and, even more
importantly, against the notion that Douglass was merely copying Emerson in his self-
presentation.
Fundamentally, in many ways, the concept of Literary Concord helps reveal the
actual practical development of this coterie. Emerson’s role, in particular, becomes much
clearer. In the place of a spiritual guru, Emerson becomes something closer to a small
town politician. And as is often the case with a politician, his ideas were less important

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to his success in the end than was his personal charisma or – and this insight is
particularly important – his desire for power. Indeed, documenting the creation of
Literary Concord shows that, while Emerson is famous for preaching self-reliance,
ultimately he undermines this stance with his own actions as Literary Concord’s leader.
The key is Karen Halttunen’s idea of “horizontal influence.” In order to create Literary
Concord in the image he desired, Emerson faced the paradoxical task of controlling,
without seeming to control, the actors involved. While many scholars have certainly
looked at these kind of tensions between Emerson and individual members of his coterie
before, understanding them through the rubric of Literary Concord shows how these
tensions are built into the structure of the project, itself. Everyone in Emerson’s coterie
was struggling for control of Literary Concord’s image, as opportunistic individuals like
Hawthorne and Douglass waited on the edges and watched for weaknesses that they
could exploit to their own advantage. In essence, the history of this coterie is an account
of a power struggle as much as it is of a collaboration.
Indeed, as many scholars have intuited in their studies of the careers and influence
of individual authors in this group, this power struggle is a fundamental part of Literary
Concord’s legacy. The posthumous reputations of several of Literary Concord’s key
players show the signs of this conflict – a fight that arguably continues to this day.
Emerson propped up his own reputation by downplaying Thoreau and Fuller’s
contributions to Literary Concord. Likewise, Hawthorne’s son burnished his father’s role
in Literary Concord by effectively rewriting Fuller’s life. Indeed, a cursory look at
periodical references to the group in the late nineteenth century (of which there are many)
shows that Emerson had successfully subordinated the images of his peers to his own.

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E.M. Forster’s 1908 novel, A Room With a View, offers a typical popular view of the
group in the decades following the main writers’ deaths. The hero and his father, both of
whom Forster clearly characterizes as latter-day members of Literary Concord, are named
Emerson – a move that conflates the entire coterie and its audience with Emerson,
himself. Moreover, it is Emerson’s version of Literary Concord that Forster’s
protagonists admire: they are free thinking, fiercely individualistic, and ultimately lacking
in any kind of intellectual rigor or larger social purpose.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Stephens Salt and others were already
at work rescuing Thoreau’s reputation from Emerson’s faint praise and reinstituting him
as the one, true representative of Literary Concord. And while Fuller – perhaps due to
the relatively itinerant nature of her career – would never truly find her way back to her
proper place in Literary Concord, she has also had her defenders who have convincingly
shown her central importance to the group’s literary project. The twentieth century
would mark a gradual reclamation of both. The Beat poets, for example, would
champion Thoreau and even Whitman, alongside of Emerson, as their inspiration, and by
the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress would go as far as to ignore Emerson
altogether while compiling its Books That Shaped America list – a list that, incidentally,
includes Thoreau, Hawthorne, Douglass, Alcott, Melville and Whitman, if not Fuller.
Indeed, if one looks at Concord’s tourist industry today, Emerson’s leadership
role seems to have been wholly usurped by a second-generation member of Literary
Concord: Louisa May Alcott. Tours of Alcott’s Concord home sell out quickly every
day they are offered, and Alcott merchandise outsells that of any of Literary Concord’s
other famous residents. Moreover, tours of Alcott’s home have a markedly different

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energy than similar ones to the Old Manse or Bush. Generations of fans listen with rapt,
adoring attention as tour guides and re-enactors lead them through Louisa May’s world.
The longevity and potency of Alcott’s reputation has, of course, benefited from her
willingness to write children’s literature (or what would now probably be classified as
Young Adult literature), an exceedingly popular and flexible genre. But part of her long-
lasting appeal comes from Alcott’s ability to position herself as Emerson’s true successor
in Literary Concord. Alcott’s commercial success added to Literary Concord’s luster, but
at the same time it can also be understood as a product of the imaginary community’s
existing reputation. Moreover, as the original coterie members had done before her,
Alcott played an active role in keeping interest in the imaginary community alive in her
contemporaries. Although Alcott barely outlived Emerson, she became the central figure
of the group during Emerson’s waning years, due in part to her status as a daughter in one
of Literary Concord’s first families and in part to her canny knack of translating the
appeal of Literary Concord to a new, and in many ways very different, generation of
readers.
Alcott replaced Emerson as the new figurehead of Literary Concord in the last
decades of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Literary Concord’s borders began to
expand. Because the original writing coterie fundamentally conceived Literary Concord
as an imaginary community – albeit rooted in a real place – it was, in essence, portable;
and new generations of writers began to see how they could use this fact to their
advantage. New Yorkers Herman Melville and Walt Whitman, for example, exploited
tenuous connections to the members of Literary Concord to establish themselves as
honorary members of the group. By the twentieth century, one could even argue, that

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Literary Concord simply came to be understood as an attitude or outlook on life to which
anyone in the world could claim a share. Moreover, the idea of an imaginary community
is, on a basic level, performative. Emerson and his peers, thus, helped bridge the gap
between the values of their own era – obsessed as it was with authenticity – and the era
that followed, which rediscovered the pleasures of theatricality. Again, Alcott, Melville,
and especially Whitman become key examples of this transition. All three borrowed
inspiration from the signature style of Literary Concord’s first generation and combined it
with the more playfully overt performativity of their own generation.
Ultimately, the originators of Literary Concord – and Emerson in particular –
showed an incisive understanding of their audience’s emotional needs and responded to
them in a way that proved adaptive across countries and over time. Emerson’s coterie
marketed Literary Concord as a rapidly disappearing ideal: an intentional community of
likeminded artists and intellectuals drawn on an intimate scale. The public images of
Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller and the others that emerge during this time reflect the ways in
which their contemporaries wished to see themselves and the values they wished to
project in protest against the troubling political and economic changes of the period.
Whether locals by residency or by affinity, the people of Literary Concord cared about
history and tradition, but without the bigoted conservatism of the Know Nothing
movement. They cared about human rights, but could not agree about how to address
abuses in a way that honored the individual to their satisfaction. They saw themselves as
intellectuals, but left a space for ecstatic, non-rational insight. Above all, they wanted to
be understood as utterly authentic non-conformists. The performances of Literary
Concord’s members not only reflected their readers’ ideal vision of themselves, they also

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authorized certain ways of living that still resonate today. Generations of artists,
intellectuals, and others attracted to Literary Concord’s unique image have claimed a
space, by right of affinity, alongside the community’s original members on the imaginary
walking paths of this particular fairyland.

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract Almost immediately, unsympathetic critics labeled Ralph Waldo Emerson and his circle of writer‐friends Transcendentalists, a jibe aimed at the philosophical eccentricities they supposedly shared. Most literary scholars are aware of the name’s origin story

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Creator Wenstrom, Erika (author)

Core Title Our town: the invention of Literary Concord

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 07/15/2017

Defense Date 05/04/2015

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag antebellum,authorial performance,celebrity,coterie,Frederick Douglass,friendship,Henry David Thoreau,imaginary community,Literary Concord,literary market,Margaret Fuller,Nathaniel Hawthorne,OAI-PMH Harvest,Ralph Waldo Emerson,select reader,transcendentalism

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Advisor Rowe, John Carlos (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Halttunen, Karen (committee member), Kemp, Anthony (committee member)

Creator Email braydair@yahoo.com,erikawenstrom@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-597236

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Legacy Identifier etd-WenstromEr-3615.pdf

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Document Type Dissertation

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Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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