Freedom and Fate, Revisited

Long have I felt that part of what I wanted to do in my engagement with Emerson is to move us past the debilitating focus on reading him as a writer who oscillates between poles: Freedom, Fate. Spontaneity, Fate. Society, solitude. Action, passivity. Individual, Social. Of course, Emerson’s work does bounce between these differing poles; he is a dialectical thinker and writer, but our job as readers is to notice not just the poles, but the movement between. We shouldn’t stop or freeze in place, writing that is constantly putting itself in motion and depending on its movement for its argument and sense.

Thus, I don’t think you can read Emerson like Stephen Whicher does, as a writer who moved from a youthful embrace of Freedom to an older acquiescence to the demands of fate. Nor do I think you can read him, like Bloom does, as a writer moving between the tree poles of freedom, fate, and power. What is missing from all of these readings is the key fact that for Emerson, such movements are always motivated by something. That something is often personal, frequently social, and often political.

For example, readers that follow Whicher’s thesis of freedom leading to fate (and, frankly, these readers are almost all of Emerson’s readers since Whicher’s book came out in the 50s) have had a hard time explaining how Emerson’s movement towards a quiet acquiescence to fate pairs with his more frequent social activism on issues of race, abolition, and such. And, frankly, they can’t explain it without acting as if his activism was muted or part of a larger trend or somehow just not that important and not that active, which is ludicrous as the scholarship of the last 25 years has shown. What I would like to think through is how external and internal motives propelled him from pole to pole, so that even in a period in which he was mostly thinking “Fate”, he would move towards reform, towards “freedom,” because he was responding to social situations and pressures. Thus the Civil War and the debates of the 1850s must be read in his work, and vice versa.

What I am proposing is that we view Emerson not as a thinker or writer in stasis, but as a fluid force of expression. Certainly, large shifts will make themselves known, but we should not attribute stasis to what is not static.

What I am coming to see, however, is that Fuller is a powerfully motive force behind what I have long seen as Emerson’s method of writing and living. Fuller is the one who teaches him this “style”--this ability to “skate well on the surfaces”. For Fuller, this style is intimately connected to her identity as an independent woman writer, and to her view of her vocation as not simply writing, but acting in the world.

What I want to do in the chapter is to find some sort of origin or struggle with this new style in her letters to Emerson, then to explain how that style shows itself in her mature work in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and then to view it in practice in her work during the Italian Revolution.