Emerson and Self-Reliance

I wrote the following section on its own a few months back, and I want to slide it in to the chapter here. I’d like to go, then, from the biography, to the connections between RWE and CLB, then into this bit about the essay “Self-Reliance”. Still, I’ll need to add a bit and work on some transitions and linkages. Saving that for later, though.

In other news, I won’t have anything new tomorrow, but I should have a couple of more posts later in the week or over the weekend. Then, I might take a week off from posting to prepare the next few and spend my days at the seminar for the first-time teachers of composition. I’ll resume broadcasting every few days until it’s done when the semester starts on the 30th. Probably just another week after that, with the end goal of having the entire chapter posted up here and in a draft format in my hands by the week of September 6th.

THIS little break is because Amber went back to college today (loaded up the cars this morning and dropped her off around lunch time. She managed to remember everything except blankets!), India starts middle-school tomorrow, and Holden starts high-school tomorrow, too. I’m a little overwhelmed by all of these changes, all of this movement, and all of this growth by my kids.

I am also feeling pretty damn proud of what my kids have been able to do and what I’ve accomplished with these three kids. Just to be where we are at the moment, as a family, after everything that we’ve been through the last few years--well, the very proud papa that I am is also feeling pretty darn self-satisfied, too.

oh, yeah, Darwin stuff still to come....

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1. The Trope of Boys in “Self-Reliance” and Emerson

        Bantling: “A young or small child, a brat. (Often used depreciatively, and formerly as a synonym of bastard.)” OED

        Cast the bantling on the rocks,

        Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,

        Wintered with the hawk and fox,

        Power and speed be hands and feet.

                --Ralph Waldo Emerson, prologue to “Self-Reliance”

        In 1849 the New York City Almshouse cared for 514 orphaned or abandoned children. Of these children, 50 were adopted and 97 were “discharged to parents or ‘friends’” (Miller 57). 109 were “at nurse” at the end of the year, and 258 died in the almshouse. Those 258 deaths were mostly of children under 12 months of age; Infants admitted to the almshouse, who were mostly foundlings, did not often live through the year. During the 1840s and 1850s, New York City was facing a crisis of abandoned children and infants. From 1849 to 1859, the almshouse received approximately 3,232 infants, a rate of almost one infant per day. 2,045 of these infants died within one year of being received. The mortality rate for infants left at the New York City Almshouse over the decade of the 1850s was 63%. This eclipsed the national and regional rates, which hovered at around 21%, arguing for something more simply “neglect” in the high mortality rate of the foundlings (##). According to Julie Miller, this something more is the “taint of illegitimacy” (21). That is, foundling mortality outstripped infant mortality as such because their family, their caregivers and society as a whole saw them as tainted by their mothers’ sins. As products of what were regarded as immoral relations, these infants were themselves held in contempt, believed to be as tainted by that original sin as their parents. As Miller notes, at the time “the London Foundling Hospital considered changing its name to Orphan Hospital because of “the general notions of the common people that the name Foundling carries with it the Idea of contempt, and that of Orphan of compassion”” (21). Foundlings were, she writes, “associated with the stigma created by illegitimacy” and many believed that it were best that they die rather than live with their mother’s shame (21). A common attitude at the time was that the foundling hospitals were not meant to be places where these abandoned infants were reared or raised, but where they came to die in more comfort than could be provided by their mothers (Miller ##).

        These grave statistics reveal the power of a cultural discourse about family, legitimacy, and illegitimacy in the middle decades of the nineteenth century--a discourse whose power was written on the bodies of those 2,045 dead infants. Given the murderous power of this discourse, it is remarkable to hear Emerson begin his essay “Self-Reliance” by making the “bantling”--the abandoned bastard, the foundling--the key image of the self-reliant individual. This is remarkable not simply because Emerson’s use of the discourse of foundlings is shocking--certainly it would bring to his contemporary reader’s mind the rising crisis of infant abandonment, but it is also remarkable because Emerson attacks the “taint of illegitimacy” in a effort to turn the bantling’s bastard status from a weakness to a rhetorical strength.

        Calling forth histories and mythologies of feral children, Emerson’s trope works to construct self-reliance as a concept independent of family, society, and even civilization. The foundling’s “taint of illegitimacy” becomes, in fact, a virtue. It is the source of the bantling’s power. The “bantling on the rocks” is, like Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf, and, like Enkidu, the bantling becomes strong and swift through his contact with the “hawk and fox.” These associations of the bantling with the mythological feral child echo in “Self-Reliance’s” closing sections when Emerson compares the “civilized man,” who has “build a coach but...lost the use of his feet,” with the “naked New Zealander, whose property is a club a spear and a mat” (151). But, says Emerson, “compare the health of the two men and you shall see that the white man has lost his aboriginal strength” (151). Emerson’s easy racialism might disturb the modern reader, but that should not prevent us from seeing how deeply indebted self-reliance is to the working metaphor of the bantling, the foundling, and the young boy as well as to that of the savage or the primitive. The boy and the bantling are closer to nature, closer to the “Aboriginal self,” and become in the essay a vessel through which self-reliance expresses its content. Furthermore, this trope of the boy-savage appears time and again in the discourse of juvenile delinquency and boyology, as we shall see later. Emerson’s careful deployment of this trope is meant to challenge a cultural preference for legitimacy and meant to motivate the virtue of self-reliance--of reliance on the self (and on nature) irregardless of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and the whole social system of family.

        The trope of the boy is not only used in “Self-Reliance,” but it is a constant presence in Emerson’s writing, particularly in the early works that would have been influential on Brace at the time of the CAS’s founding and development. Emerson had early on allied himself with sons over fathers. Nature opens by saying that “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers” (3), and his first few public lectures outside of the church-house, such as the “Divinity School Address” and “The American Scholar,” were directed at and presented before young scholars. While it is Thoreau who claims that his work is “more particularly addressed to poor students,” it is Emerson who, in “The American Scholar,” calls the scholar a “schoolboy under the bending dome of day” (Walden ##; 45). The “Divinity School Address” similarly opens with the image of a man standing under the “transparent darkness” of the evening absorbing the “spiritual rays” of the stars. “Under them,” Emerson writes, man “seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy” (63). Or later, when giving advice on what to do with this new creed, Emerson advises his audience to view themselves as “a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost” (76). Nature, as we have seen, opens by positioning the reader and the writer as children who “build the sepulchres of the fathers” (3), but Nature then goes on to use the child (and, yes, the “savage”) to express a privileged position (outside of family, outside of civilization) from which to see and understand Nature, if only negatively: “To speak truly,” Emerson says, “few adult persons can see nature” (5). Children (and savages) can “see” what their older selves might have learned to overlook because they are less inured in the habits of mind destructive of really “seeing.”

        Throughout Emerson’s early work, then, we see a constant trope of the boy as the self-reliant individual because the boy is able to think confidently without being adversely affected by habit and tradition--to trust fully in his own experience alone. Recall how Brace admires the self-reliance of the street-boys. Brace believes that the “best quality of this class” is their “sturdy independence” (100). And now in “Self-Reliance” Emerson starts to use the bantling and not just the boy as a trope of the self-reliant individual, heightening the discourse of self-reliance not simply as a matter of overcoming the past, of overcoming one’s father, but of being able to stand outside of family structures entirely. The bantling, because of its “taint of illegitimacy,” must be outside of the family, the traditional method of making democratic subjects, and here becomes not just a trope for the ideal self-made man but for the citizen as such. The first few sentences of “Self-Reliance” praise Plato and Milton but also the most famous foundling in western literature, Moses, as men who “spoke not what men, but what they thought” (132). Emerson works to convince the reader that “geniuses” like Moses are just like the reader only more so because of their self-trust or self-reliance, a feature of their characters earned from their positions outside of families. Instead of rejecting his best self, Moses embraced those thoughts that we “recognize” in “every work of genius” as “our own rejected thoughts” (132).

        “Great men [like Moses] have always...confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age,” Emerson writes, further aligning self-reliance with childhood and beginning in “Self-Reliance” a sustained consideration of childhood’s relationship with self-reliance. In the next few paragraphs, “Self-Reliance” works through numerous metaphors of childhood (“What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text [this text of self-reliance] in the face and behavior of children, babes, and even brutes!”, “Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it,” “the nonchalance of boys...is the healthy attitude of human nature,” etc.) which culminate in Emerson’s declaration that “no law can be sacred to me but that of my own nature” (132-5). Presumably the argument is that one’s own nature is possible to apprehend and comprehend without other influences, so that it depends less on education, culture, and indoctrination than on self-trust and self-possession, qualities available, perhaps only so, outside of rigid family and social structures and strictures. When Emerson declares, “if I am the Devil’s child, I will live with the Devil,” then the trope of the self-reliant individual standing outside of family is taken to the furthest extreme: the “bantling” is not just without family, but is also cast out from family as such, from religion, and even from social relations altogether and thus becomes “devilish” (135). Who is left for this “Devil’s child” to depend on but his (or her) own self?

        Emerson uses this trope of the abandoned infant and the “young boy” to reveal just what it is that he means when he calls forth the “Aboriginal self,” which is a self that, because it is metaphorically so young, can know the “highest truth” since it is able to “remember[] the intuition” that the “man” has, through experience, forgotten (141, 143). This requires that Emerson establish the contrast of intuition and knowing. Intuition is a form of knowledge that Emerson compares with a more mature sort of knowing, of knowledge from experience. Experience, he argues, too often devolves into habit, making individuals “bad” children who “repeat by rote the sentences” of their elders. Instead, Emerson wants to produce “good” children who write their own verse; the production of which he tries to do through another metaphor of youth, by reminding his readers of the child within: “Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past?” (142). The metaphor of the acorn, and later the roses that “make no reference to former roses or to better ones,” but which “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day” (143), is a metaphor that establishes the true power of the trope of the bantling--his possibility, his existence not as familial legacy but as pure potentiality in the process of becoming. Without a family to burden him, without parents to limit him, but with his senses and his unfettered self-trust the bantling is able to become whatsoever he wishes. Thus he is the Devil’s child because he is the most hated of things for he is no thing. Or, as Emerson puts it, “this one fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside” (144). This one thing the world hates: the bastard child, the self-reliant boy, the acorn that is always only becoming an oak.