Fabulous shadows: rethinking the Emersonian tradition

Abstract

Fabulous Shadows: Rethinking the Emersonian Tradition Priscilla Wald (bio) At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature. By John Carlos Rowe. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 292 pages. $49.50 (cloth). >$16.50 (paper). “This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.” Thus, Hart Crane pays tribute to a master, Herman Melville, in “At Melville’s Tomb,” one of his most widely anthologized poems. Crane is certainly not the first poet/pilgrim to make the inspirational journey to the final resting place of a predecessor. Such memorializations appear frequently enough among artists to constitute a tradition. Typically, Crane meditates on what his predecessor could not do—in this case, make death comprehensible: he “watched” as “[t]he dice of drowned men’s bones . . . /Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.” And he equally celebrates Melville’s achievement: “The calyx of death’s bounty giving back/A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph.” 1 At Melville’s tomb, Crane muses on the project of art. More than a generation earlier, Walt Whitman had similarly contemplated his debt to a deceased master in “By Emerson’s Grave,” remarking, “as Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, It is not we who come to consecrate the dead—we reverently come to receive, if so it may be, some consecration to ourselves and daily work from him.” 2 With his title, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature, John Carlos Rowe invokes these works and the tradition of [End Page 831] such visits. Musing on the critical project, he rethinks the legacy of, as he memorializes, a dead critical predecessor. Emerson has dominated a literary (and literary critical) tradition for too long, Rowe argues, and an Emersonian tradition has strongly influenced what and how we read in most educational institutions in the United States. In At Emerson’s Tomb, Rowe challenges what he calls “aesthetic dissent . . . the romantic idealist assumption that rigorous reflection on the processes of thought and representation constitutes in itself a critique of social reality and effects a transformation of the naive realism that confuses truth with social convention” (1). While he is troubled by Emerson’s retreat from a more actively engaged social criticism, he is even more disturbed by literary and critical traditions that privilege “rigorous reflection” over political engagement in their aesthetic evaluations. Those traditions, for him, constitute the Emersonian legacy. In At Emerson’s Tomb, Rowe wants to redefine the task of literary criticism and theory. To do so, he contends, we must revisit previously and newly canonized works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. fiction and poetry with particular attention to changing attitudes toward social and political struggles concerning race, class and gender. American letters, for Rowe, is fundamentally political, but the mainstream Americanist literary tradition has resulted in the obscurity of that fact. As a result, certain important literary works have been devalued and other, more canonical, works have been misread. Rowe explains the project of At Emerson’s Tomb as his attempt to assess . . . the political aims of mainstream American writers in terms of the political achievements of writers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Kate Chopin. How should we read literary texts to comprehend not only their overt political messages but their exclusions and blindnesses? (228–29) And what literary innovations, he asks, emerge from these writers’ (previously unexamined) engagements with social movements—specifically, abolition, woman suffrage, and their legacies? “Mainstream” is a complicated term here, since the other writers he discusses—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Henry James, and William Faulkner—have had a variety of critical receptions both in their own times and subsequently. But Rowe’s point is that an Emersonian tradition that privileges “aesthetic dissent” has, until recently, dominated Americanist literary history and [End Page 832] criticism and influenced both what and how we read for several (academic) generations. He turns his own critical attention to works that he believes have been neglected as a result, and he argues for renewed attention to the formal and stylistic innovations that have been overlooked in works deemed “political” because of their authors’ evident social commitments. By placing works he considers marginalized at the center...