Melville and the Idea of Blackness by Christopher Freeburg

Author:Christopher Freeburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

Coda: Slavery and Ralph Emerson’s Pending Resurrection

When reading Emerson’s words in his essays “Fate” and “Experience,” one knows his work is not only composed of dreamy rainbows. While he certainly did not ignore the tumultuous struggles of life and nature’s chaos, he steadfastly promoted the idea that the right kind of thinking can transform one’s relationship to life’s horrible and unexpected disruptions. Emerson, moreover, refused to include Melville’s social plebian or Parker’s “dangerous classes” as integral parts of his early revolt from historical Christianity to spiritual ascendency. This does not mean that Emerson did not care about social reform and political equality. Emerson emphasizes, in Len Gougeon’s words, “moral suasion and comprehensive reform of individuals” instead of focusing on one moral issue, which puts him at odds with most abolitionists.63 Despite his principled unwillingness to tie himself to a single moral cause, Emerson found himself deeply troubled by the Fugitive Slave Law and the United States’ regional stalemate that shaped the minds, movement, and consciousness of the 1850s.64 The much-debated law created a cultural spectacle across black and white communities in Boston.65 Thus, in addition to national and international challenges over the future of U.S. slavery, as matter of local politics, the impending crisis over the fugitive law distressed Emerson. Not “since 1844 had he been moved to such emotional heights by a social cause.”66

Emerson’s certainty and optimism, which underscore much of his early writings, disavow “the malign evil in man” (35). His final prognostication in the “American Scholar” reflects this. “A nation of men,” Emerson proclaims, “will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”67 In a broad sense, his prophecy comes true; each subject interprets the divine soul, but one person’s truth is another’s nightmare, and slavery seemed to demonstrate the defeat of Emerson’s optimism of nature in this regard. Thus blackness, “struggles, convulsions, and despairs, the wringing of hands, and the gnashing of teeth,” which Pierre tragically embodies and which Emerson claims people had to go out of their way to find, literally sat on Emerson’s doorstep in his nightmares.68

The “deplorable question of Slavery” haunts Emerson as he writes in his journal, “I waked at night, and bemoaned myself,” of the issue and then recovered in the coming “hours of sanity.”69 The immorality and irrationality over the question of slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law force upon him questions like “what makes the essence of rational beings?” He thought that when men retreat into the recesses of thought only “angels receive” them, but approaching the Civil War, he questions whether men actually listen to them or if any angels await at all in the recesses of thought. The specter of political history inhabits Emerson’s rhetoric and pervades his frustration over the moral crisis, which to him also raises questions about human epistemological capacity and humans’ capacity to exercise it socially and politically. He agonizes over humankind’s failure to transmute the divine laws of nature into juridical practice.

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