Democracy, Language, and Nineteenth-Century

American Individualism

_______________________________''We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language,

which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a courseof many hundred years has contributed a stone.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson1

Following the Industrial Revolution and the resulting indefatigable

rationalism of the late eighteenth-century, many early nineteenth-century

Americans sought to define themselves in a way that would reflect not only

the “authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast

potentialities,”2 but also the infinite and promising nature of America

itself. Conscious of Europe’s protracted influence on America’s social,

political, and artistic affairs, these nineteenth-century literary pioneers

—namely, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman--through the use of language and

poetry, aimed to create an ideal, self-reliant, democratic American

individual; free of any “Old World” European influence.

With the emergence of this democratic American self during the 1850s

came a change in perspective. A variety of events including the Compromise

of 1850, the decline of the Whig Party and the formation of the Democratic

Party, along with whispers of Civil War, appropriated a dramatic response

from the American people. This vital time of nationalism, more than ever,

encouraged the emergence of a self-made American who could exist free of

social, political, racial, and geographical boundaries, emboldening the 1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nominalist and Realist”, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library Paperbacks, 2000), pp 390-401 (p.393).2 Richard W.B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth

Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 1-14 (p.1).

formation of a national consciousness. While the individual played a

vital role in the creation of this unified American consciousness, it was

the writer, the poet—the divinely inspired artist, who could momentarily

capture the intangible pervasiveness of the American mentality.

Through their imaginative writing styles, Emerson, Thoreau, and

Whitman incessantly endeavored to resolve the lingering question, what is an

American? As individuals from around the world journeyed to the promising

shores of America’s East Coast, seeking social and religious freedom,

America’s cultural variety swelled and rehabilitated existing conceptions

of a truly “American” man. Although he or his ancestors may have once taken

pride in a European heritage, this new American left behind the traditions

and customs of the past and awakened to new ideas, new principles, and

could entertain new thoughts, form his own opinions, and experience the

world through his own nature.

As this new way of thinking spread throughout the nation, writers

reflected upon conceptions of freedom, individualism, democracy, boundless

frontiers, and golden opportunities—experimenting with how America’s multi-

cultural nation should define and understand itself in collective terms.

Henry Nash Smith’s theories of America’s abstracted self-reflexivity

suggest a “subconscious level of meaning and myth, where concept and

emotion… are fused into broad collective representations that sometimes

serve to define an entire society’s understanding of itself.”3 In other

words, America both developed as a result of past experiences and the

simultaneous reshaping and redefinition of those experiences into an

American mindset. But as nineteenth-century American society strived for a

universal understanding of itself, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman used myth

and symbol to celebrate the self-reliant individual who stood as a

3 Giles Gunn, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 126-144 (p.133).

2

representation of the culture as a whole; just as literature, which

reflects personal, individual experiences, can inspire an entire nation.

The Language of Democracy/The Democracy of Language

During the American Renaissance authors Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry

David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and others including Louisa May Alcott, Herman

Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickenson, all proliferated the

idea of a collective American “frame of mind, form of sensibility, [and]

mode of experience.”4 Through the use of symbols, analogy, metaphor, and

other literary techniques, several nineteenth-century writers mythologized

a model of American consciousness both conceptually and syntactically.5

Although these writers fought to wriggle free of their transatlantic

predecessors, the creation of the American literary tradition began with

and existed solely because of Old World influences, which, in turn, fueled

the American author’s desire to repudiate them.

Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson explored more democratic language forms,

absconding the rigidity present throughout Puritanical and Unitarian

literature of the eighteenth century.6 Through the transformation of

existing themes and literary devices, and the application of newly formed

American conventions and vernacular, nineteenth-century American authors

contested the conformism of “Old World” literature, antiquating many

longstanding European literature traditions in the process.

While these European writers ruminated over formerly established

traditions, American authors, existing at a unique historical transition,

used “socio-literary factors[,] literary sources, national history, and

4 Gunn, p. 127.5 Gunn p. 128.6 Gunn p. 132.

3

personal experience…” in order to create a “symbolic, timeless

literature,” representative of a newfound sense of national pride and

identity.”7 In “The American Scholar,” Emerson calls for an intellectual

declaration of independence through a cerebral engagement in what he calls

Man Thinking, which, unlike knowledge gained from reading books, is an innate

form of thought in which man connects to a universal consciousness.8 This

democratic mode of experiencing and interpreting the world not only

encourages self-trust, but also, much like in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas,

examines the intrinsic wisdom of the soul and the importance of democracy

in the construal of one’s individuality.

This quest for individuality, which paralleled a growing desire for

popular sovereignty, subjugated a number of America’s national concerns

including, “struggles over freedom, slavery, labor, women’s rights,

territorial expansion, Indian ‘removal,’ popular sovereignty, and the right

of revolution.”9 In “Revolution in the Renaissance,” Betsy Erkkila notes

the importance of this time of transition, suggesting, “while these

struggles manifested themselves in… a collective ‘fullness and overflowing’

of culture, what was being reborn was not only culture but a mode of

revolutionary thinking that transgresses the legal limits and nation-

centered forms set in place by the Constitution of the United States in

1787.”10 During this time in American history, roughly the late 1830s until

1850, the tension stimulated “radical experimentation in the forms of

American writing,” as well as, “violent social struggle[s] in which writers

gave voice to conflicting and at times radically alternative ideas of 7 David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp.1-567 (p.6).

8Emerson,p.44.9 Betsy Erkkila, ‘Revolution in the Renaissance’, A Journal of the American Renaissance 49.1-3 (2003), pp.17-32 (p. 21).10 Erkkila, p.21.

4

America.”11 It is this multiplicity of perspectives that gave rise to the

idea of a national narrative, a uniquely American literature that

simultaneously chronicled and participated in mythologizing America’s

history.

The seeds for what Jonathan Arac refers to as, “national narrative,”12

were planted during the colonial beginnings of the United States and

watered by several American authors in the subsequent years. Thoreau,

Emerson, and Whitman all participated in this form of American

mythmaking.13 These authors were chronicling the nation’s history, while

also participating in the very formation of that history by mythologizing

their own literary sphere—transcending both temporal and spatial

particularities, and, as a result, revolutionizing and immortalizing

America’s perception of itself.

By providing a meeting ground upon which diverse literary modes could

coexist, democracy allowed Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and various other

nineteenth century writers to experiment with different forms of

expression. Through the promise of democracy, “political and social

freedom [were] reflected in a sudden linguistic freedom,”14 through which,

American authors sought to establish a new national vernacular, molding and

shaping the nation within a mythologized vision of itself.

Within this unallocated space, authors and poets alike produced a

critical enterprise that took place entirely within the realm of

language.15 This allowed their writing to be independent from any social or

11 Erkkila, p. 25.12 Jonathan Arac,’Establishing National Narrative’, The Cambridge History of American Literature Volume 2 (1995), pp. 1-172 (p.1).13 Gunn, p. 132. 14 Reynolds, p.444. 15 Sacvan,Bercovitch, and Myra Jehlen eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) pp. 1-451 (p. 3).

5

political repercussions and, instead, enabled them to fuse their writing

with cultural representations in the form of symbols, myths, and images.

Emerson believed that language is used to “express a moral or intellectual

fact,”16 portraying language as a series of metaphors originating from a

universal understanding which he calls “Reason.” Proposing that the whole

of nature is a metaphor for the human mind, Emerson suggests that the

imagery associated with language is “the blending of experience with the

present action of the mind,” showing the duality of nature as both

intrinsic to the whole of Reason, as well as the human mind’s

interpretation of the image.17 Only Reason, Emerson felt, could perceive the

analogy that “marries Matter and Mind;” enabling him to connect thought

with its proper symbol—acknowledging “language [as] the archives of

history.”18

Determined to illumine the objectives and apprehensions about an

American mindset, Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson utilized democratic

language forms as well as native literary materials to shape literary

conventions such as: the anecdotal sermon, visionary mode, dark temperance,

grotesque humor, and sensational novels—which, when combined, “possess

stylistic plurality as well as broad cultural representativeness.”19

Infusing classical archetypes from antiquated literature with these

uniquely American idiosyncrasies, these American Renaissance authors

contributed to the development of a free-floating, democratic vernacular,

allowing them to construct a place free of the confines of time and space.

A place in which they could offer cultural critiques using metaphor and

symbol; bridging the gap between the material world and nature, the mind

16 Emerson, p.13. 17 Emerson, p.16. 18 Emerson, p. 296.19 Reynolds p. 5.

6

and its object, and the soul and over soul.20 This desire of combining the

innate universal knowledge of being with a self-reliant, democratic,

American individual reimagined the microcosmic relationship between both

man and nature and the self and society.

Emerson desired poetry that stuck to a simple, natural, and local

subject, while simultaneously representing life, democracy, society—or

anything larger than itself. Through this method of creative writing,

Emerson expressed an awareness of the infinite in a single momentary

experience using symbols-- hoping to revolutionize language and attain

multiplicity of perspective towards a single Truth.

In 1837, Emerson delivered his address, “The American Scholar,” to the

Phi Beta Kappa society in Cambridge Massachusetts. In this address he asks,

“If there is any period one would desire to be born in, --is it not the age

of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side and admit of

being compared; … when the historic glories of the old can be compensated

by the rich possibilities of the new era?”21 Emerson felt that Revolution

defined much of the conflict that arose during the eighteenth-century. He

explores this revolutionary impulse, as it exists in mid nineteenth-century

America. In Betsy Erkkila’s “Revolution in the Renaissance,” she takes note

of the revolutionary impulse as it continued on into the nineteenth

century. She points out that, “increasing democratization,

industrialization, and political crisis when the contradictions,

exclusions, repressions, and silences of the founding moment broke forth

with renewed revolutionary force in the writing, culture, and politics of

American society.”22 The incorporation of culturally charged symbols into

20 Reynolds, p. 5.21 Emerson, p. 57.22 Erkkila p. 20.

7

this revolutionary mindset fueled Emerson’s union of language and

imagination.

Emerson concludes the Language chapter of Nature by recalling, “that

which was unconscious truth, becomes, when interpreted and defined in an

object, part of the domain of knowledge.”23 Emerson believed that true

genius lie in the poet’s ability to reconcile opposites by seizing both the

image and the thought at once, allowing words to “become one with

things.”24 This explanation of his use of language as vehicles for the

emancipation of truth in the physical world manifests in his frequent use

of edifying symbolism.

The “transparent eyeball,” which represents Emerson’s deepest moment

of self-transparency, has become an important symbol in American

transcendentalist thought. In this passage from Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson

describes the experience of the soul’s transcendence and merging with, “The

Oversoul,” uniting as a divine being. “Standing on the bare ground, -- my

head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all

mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing, I see

all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me, I am part or

particle of God.”25 This abstraction of mind’s own contemplation of itself

and its processes lead to a revolution in thought—empowering a double

awareness in which the “each” resembled “all.” Combining his abstract

transcendentalism with popular imagery, his use of nature as the symbolic

vehicle for his metaphysical ideas enabled Emerson’s writing to transcended

specificities, allowing for, and even encouraging, multiple levels of

meaning. In Meese’s article on

23 Emerson p. 19.24 Francis O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941) pp. 1-661 (p.30).25 Emerson, p.6.

8

transcendentalism and theme, she notes:

When writers regard the physical world as a symbol for the spiritual

world, and when they cultivate a special vision in order to achieve a

particular mode of perception, they naturally regard language in terms

of its potential for capturing that vision. Transcendental literature

characteristically expresses the knowledge of and sometime

simultaneously the process of accumulating awareness of object, self,

and spirit.”26

Meese affirms that, “to have and retain a sense of self-definition and

simultaneously to transcend that self constitute the dilemma of

transcendence for the American.”27

Emerson frequently utilizes this moment of transcendence when the mind

recognizes and destroys the separation between “internal and external,”

and, as a result, “the particular and the universal.”28 Transcendence,

which acted as the “bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in

terms of a realm ‘beyond it,’”29 imbued nineteenth-century political thought,

representing the metaphysical notion that everything in the natural world

can be seen in terms of its “corresponding essence in the spiritual

world.“30 If this is true, then the words of the divinely inspired poet

represent a higher realm of meaning, a human reproduction of a universal

truth, uniting the binaries of the mind and nature.

When interpreting Emerson’s language theories, it is important to

remember that, unlike Thoreau’s paragraphs of organic wholeness, Emerson’s

microcosmic writing should be read as individual sentences—each containing

26 Elizabeth A. Meese, ‘Transendentalism: The Metaphysics of the Theme’, American Literature 47.1 (Duke University Press 1975) pp. 1-12 (p.13).27 Meese, p.13.28 Meese, p.7.29 Meese, p.2.30 Meese, p.3.

9

a perfectly whole thought on its own—in much the same way that the

individual could represent an entire society. While this theory of language

attempted to reunite fact and abstraction, Reason and Understanding, art

and language, and democracy and individualism, Henry David Thoreau

entertained a slightly different conception of language.31 Seen as more of

a naturalist than an artist, Thoreau focused more on the process of

language, and its ability to capture the nature of the space in which the

transcendence occurs, rather than solely the act itself. Thoreau described

this “organic harmony between body and spirit,”32 proposing that the

artist’s work should speak to the whole being, rather than just the mind.

More of a pragmatist than Whitman or Emerson, Thoreau’s interest in

the organic nature of language and its ability to describe the world in

natural and simplistic terms held the low language of farmers and peasants

in a higher regard than the “scholar’s labored sentences.”33 Thoreau’s

conception of language underscored the primitive essence of words—and he

maintained that “[a] word which may be translated into every dialect, and

suggests a truth to every mind, is the most perfect work of human art… it

is the nearest to life itself.”34 Thoreau effectively “demonstrated what

Emerson had merely observed, that the function of the artist in society is

always to renew the primitive experience of the race,” returning to his

aboriginal self only a mile outside of Concord.35 Unlike Emerson, who

focused primarily upon ocular visualizations, Thoreau expressed interest in

the basic nature of language and how a variety of sensual experiences—sound

in particular, represented the fundamental language of all nature.

31 Matthiessen, p.85.32 Matthiessen, p.84. 33 Matthiessen, p.86.34 Matthiessen, p.87. 35 Matthiessen, p.166.

10

Fascinated with the tantalizing purports of nature’s music, Thoreau

dedicated an entire chapter of Walden to the exploration of the

intersection of sound and the soul. “Whatever things I perceive with my

entire man,” he rejoices, “those let me record, and it will be poetry. The

sounds which I hear with the consent and coincidence of all my senses,

these are significant and musical.”36 His interest in the rhythm of nature

as well as his egalitarian writing style reflected the “wilder, more

liberated language of the common Americans.”37 His strategic balance

between the ineffable world of transcendental thought and his pragmatic

organicism gave Thoreau a unique perspective and the ability to base his

theories on the “harmonious interaction between man and nature, without

which he did not believe that man could be accurately described.”38

Thoreau’s mission to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts

of life,”39 resembles a desire to return to the simplicity of the natural

world, maintaining a structure that is natural and organic; modeling itself

on the perfectly integrated formal patterns of natures fixed fluidity,

“provid[ing] paradigms for the perfect (divine) arrangement.”40 Thoreau’s

desire for structural wholeness in his writing corresponded with a higher

cosmic wholeness and exhibited his incessant desire for natural order,

suggesting that one could only understand something completely through the

larger network of circumstances in which it participated.

The ability to think in images, and thereby communicate in symbols,

empowered Thoreau’s frequent use of cyclical imagery as a theme throughout

his works. As Walden’s narrator states as spring begins to blossom, “…the day

36 Matthiessen, p.91. 37 Reynolds, p.658.38 Matthiessen, p.94. 39 Henry David Thoreau, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived for’, Walden (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854) pp.1-361 (p.103).40 Meese, p.14.

11

is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and

evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is the summer.”41Reflecting

nature’s recurring path of birth, life, and death, Walden, which

symbolically begins on the Fourth of July 1845, unfolds through the

progression of seasons. Through this progression, Thoreau symbolically

communicates the stages of his own personal spiritual awakening. As winter

moves over Walden Pond, Thoreau becomes acutely aware of winter’s chilling

grip on his spirit, slowing his perception and understanding of himself. He

recites:

A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our

prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be

blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every

accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence

of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in

atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our

duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant

spring morning all men's sins are forgiven.42

Once spring breaks through the dismal cold of winter, Thoreau describes a

rebirth into consciousness in which he awakens to the duality of his nature

and explores his place within nature’s infinite cycle.

Two passages taken from Walden demonstrate a dual mode of perception

within nature’s cyclical pattern: In “Solitude,” Thoreau states,“[I] am

sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself

as from another.43 After he observed this double nature in himself, Thoreau

was able to recognize the union between physical and spiritual reality. In

41 Thoreau, p.340. 42 Thoreau, p.352.43 Thoreau, p.154.

12

a later chapter called “The Ponds,” he captures the moment in which the

two realities intersect, while fishing in his boat one night.

It was very queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had

wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel his

faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you up to

Nature again. IT seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into

the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more

dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook. 44

In this passage, as with many others throughout Walden, Thoreau presents

Walden Pond itself as both a natural and symbolic—transcending levels of

physical and metaphysical existence. In “The Pond in Winter,” Thoreau uses

the pond to reflect both a natural entity and a glance into the “focal

point through which passes that vertical axis which joins the self to the

Brahman or God, the terrestrial to the celestial, and the creation of the

world, through various phases of history, to the eternal present.”45 The

pond becomes for Thoreau a metaphor for the mind and the mind’s object,

reflected in both the mirror-like surface, as well as the more obscured

depths of Walden Pond.

Engaging in an artistic process resembling Emerson and Thoreau,

Whitman, too, incorporated popular cultural images into his writing—

redefining and reconstructing their meaning to reflect, as an extension,

America’s pursuit of democracy. Taking advantage of democratic language,

Whitman strategically evaded poetic conventionalities, referring to his own

Leaves of Grass as a “language experiment.”46 Understanding that words existed

as the product of human culture, Whitman understood that language bonded

44 Thoreau, p.199. 45 Meese, p.17. 46 Matthiessen, p.517.

13

the real with the ideal and acted as a “universal absorber and

combiner,” providing an index to America’s cultural linguistic development.47

Resembling Emerson’s notion that words are a sign of a natural fact,

Whitman chimes, “All words are spiritual—nothing is more spiritual than

words.”48 Perhaps Whitman’s democratic interpretations of poetic language

represent his desire to transcend language altogether. His eloquent

synthesis of opposing elements, body and soul as well as material and

ideal, “adhere to concrete experience and yet are bathed in imagination,

his statements become broadly representative of humanity.”49 Much of

Whitman’s poetry attempts to transcend socioeconomic, local, racial,

sexual, and religious boundaries. In Patrick Reddings’ “Whitman Unbound,”

he asserts:

American poetry becomes democratic only when it reproduces the

vernacular idiom used in different regions of the nation. A poet who

seeks out local dialects and conversational phrases proves his

commitment to democracy by transgressing traditional class boundaries.

By insisting on rugged, local speech, the democratic poet tears down

the barrier between “the coteries, the art-writers, the talkers and

critics” and working-class laborers like the “mechanic” or “miner.”50

Whitman’s incorporation of local dialect and slang into his poetry, along

with his desire to write plainly as to embody equality and eradicate

hierarchical poetic structure, represented an emphatically democratic

approach to language—capturing the crude realism of colloquial speech,

reorganizing America’s cultural images from his unique vantage point. In 47 Matthiessen, p.519.48 Matthiessen, p.521.49 Matthiessen, p.526.50 Patrick Redding, ‘Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1912–1931’, New Literary History 41.3 (2010) pp. 669-690 (p. 672).

14

his hope to establish a first person, democratic voice, Whitman aimed to

“fuse the contradictory phenomena in American culture…be individualistic

and yet democratic, unconventional yet acceptable to all, radically

egalitarian yet cultured,”51 presenting an American language that was

innovative and new.

In Leaves of Grass,

Whitman’s first person narrator organizes and transforms existing social

structure in terms of the world of “me,” and posits a return to the active

self, or the “I” which “contributes to selfhood through the novelty of its

responses to the environment.”52 Whitman’s conceptions of this doubleness

combined with his unconventional use of language attempt to relieve the

tension between the obligations and the freedoms of a democratic society—

claiming that the self can only be free if it participates in such a

paradoxical society.

Whitman’s revolutionary language, as seen in both “Democratic Vistas”

and Leaves of Grass, expresses his desire to create a democratic nationality

that would unite American people through a national literary tradition. The

American poet’s ability to perceive a dual level of meaning allowed a

correspondence with the universal American mind, in addition to his

connection with the reader as an individual. Whitman’s open and loving

democratic sensibility and patriotic reverence were met with a “profound

disappointment with the failure of [national ideals] in nineteenth-century

America.”53 Whitman utilized this juncture in his emphasis on the common

life of the working American, contributing to the rise of nineteenth-

51 Reynolds, p.514. 52 Stephen John Mack, ‘The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy’, The Walt Whitman Archive, <http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00159.html#ack> [accessed 22 December 2012]53 Reynolds, p.311.

15

century nationalism. Often celebrating the average,

mundane, and commonplace nature of America’s working class, Whitman draws a

parallel in his construal that a blade of grass, although seemingly common,

possesses as much splendor and mystery as the entire cosmos. He sings, “I

believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.”54

Once again importing the use of democratic language to endow a multiplicity

of meaning, Whitman’s blade of grass, in addition to representing the

importance of the both individual and the whole, also symbolizes the

cyclical pattern of life and death. In this spirit, Whitman used the

binding power of birth and death over each individual’s existence to render

all of humankind as equals in his poetic universe. By envisioning

a world that both exists as a material entity while also constantly

fluctuating and expanding, Whitman emphasizes the universality of a

democratic desire for freedom. His poetic language, like that of Emerson

and Thoreau, constructed a reality in which he could mythologize his own

ideas of American democracy. For this reason, the “I” who acts as the

narrator in Song of Myself, does not represent Whitman as an individual, but

rather acts as a symbol for a democratic America-- insisting in one of his

journals from 1847, that “the American poet [is] one whose universal soul

embraced not just heroes but murderers, thieves, and deformed people as

well.”55 Boldly examining the interchangeability and connectivity between

the self and society, Leaves of Grass demonstrates Whitman’s desire to “record

the dazzling diversity of American life,” while also identifying an

“underlying unity” produced by American democracy.56 Whitman’s visionary

language of American democracy both paralleled and predicted the nation’s

political evolution in the years following the Civil War, and presented an 54 Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself,’ Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, David McKay, 1891) pp. 75-205 (p.139). 55 Reynolds, p.312.56 Reynolds, p.318.

16

idealistic model for future revolutionary American writers and poets.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville addresses the “linguistic

innovation” that is necessary in a democratic culture. He notes, “Americans

often mix their styles in an odd way as the continual restlessness of

democracy leads to an endless change of language.”57 He notes the double

meanings often associated with individual words, allowing them to be

interpreted from multiple perspectives. This freedom allowed Emerson to

“exaggerate democratic individualism in both theme and language;”58 it

allowed Whitman to anthropomorphize the individual’s relation to the entire

cosmos; and it allowed Thoreau to explore contentious material and, through

self-transcendence, arrive at an organic truth. “Nothing,” -Reynolds

claims- “is impossible in this imaginary realm of hyperbolic democracy, for

all aspects of perceived reality are dissolved and recombined at will by

the imagination that reduces all things to the same level.”59 Finally, the

introduction of democratic language provided the opportunity for individual

voices to rise up and express societal concerns and critiques shared by the

majority of the nation.

The American Self/American Individualism

While Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau used language in different ways to

promote democratic thinking and individuality, each man formed his own

version of the ideal American individual and, subsequently, how that

individual could relate to society as a whole. Their democratic mindset

along with the recognition of reform literature’s growing popularity

allowed for the “rejection or transcendence of social concerns,” 60 calling

57 Reynolds, p.444.58 Reynolds, p.451. 59 Reynolds, p.444. 60 Reynolds, p.6.

17

for an existential self-renewal. This new individual was both

“emancipated from history,” and the naïve, childlike “American Adam,”61

occupying a new territory that presented the opportunity for a fresh start,

and the hope of a promising future that celebrated a new kind of American.

Hoping to create an identity that both reflected ideal

American qualities of self-reliance, non-conformity, and love for nature,

as well as envisaged a world in which social mobility resulted in a no-

class aristocracy, Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau represent a change in the

individual’s attitude toward the relationship between the self and society.

Saturating nineteenth-century, democratic-minded Americans with the notion

that “subjectivity [constitutes] an inextricable part of…understanding

reality,” rendering it malleable,”62 and allowing Americans to choose how

they would shape their culture, this moment of transition between old and

new, colonial and post-colonial, past and present, and European and

American represents an important shift in the way Americans viewed

themselves both as a nation and as individuals.

During this time of transition, Emerson called for an intellectual

engagement with history, rather than submerging oneself mindlessly into the

dusty, antiquated, musings of the past. He lamented, “meek young men grow

up in libraries believing it is their duty to accept the views which

Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke,

and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.”63

This call to action inspired Emerson’s self-reliant, democratic, American

individual who, through his own devices, could awaken to the dual nature of

the self as body and spirit. The intersection of these binaries form what

Emerson called “Reason.” In Nature, he explains, “[m]an is conscious of a

61 Lewis, p.1.62 Bercovitch, p.6.63 Emerson, p.14.

18

universal soul within or behind his individual life, wherein, as a

firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, Freedom, arise and shine.

This universal soul he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, but

we are its.”64 Promoting the significance of both individualism and a

collective unconscious, Emerson asserts:

The mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and

intellectual. There was a new consciousness. The former generations

acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the

beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the state.

The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual,

for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly

written in revolution and national movement, in the mind of the

philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world.65

As he reiterates the importance of democratic individualism, this passage

also demonstrates the symbiotic importance of the individual to the nation.

This notion of dualism becomes the key to understanding much of

Emerson’s writing. “In yourself slumbers the whole of Reason,” Emerson

rejoices; “a nation of men will for the first time exist, because each

believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all

men.”66 Emerson’s individualism rests between two binaries: that of Kant,

which accepts freedom as free compliance with a higher, universal law—and

that of Nietzsche, which dictates an individual as a sovereign self, free

from the law. This situates on one side, a receptive individuality in which

the individual gains a sense of freedom through obligation--- and on the

opposing side, the notion that an individual can only be free if he

64 Emerson, P.14.65 Mattheissen, p.6. 66 Emerson, p.59.

19

declares himself free from the laws that govern man.67 Emerson

beautifully stiches together these conflicting theories into a tapestry of

the ideal American, reminding every man of the “free, sovereign, [and]

active” soul to which he is entitled. He proclaims in “Self-Reliance,” that

“to believe your own thought, to believe what is true for our in your

private heard is true for all men—that is genius.”68 In his quest to

liberate the individual, Emerson simultaneously unleashes what he calls the

“aboriginal self,” upon which, he suggests, “universal reliance may be

grounded,”69 creating a duality of consciousness between the self and the

“Over-soul,” as well as the liberated, democratic individual and society:

“…the deeper [man] dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment,

to his wonder he finds this is the most acceptable, most public and

universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every

man feels—this is my music; this is myself…He learns that in going

down into the secrets of his own mind he has descended into the

secrets of all minds.”70

Emerson’s individual trusts in his own mind, and firmly stands his ground

against societies conforming tendencies, and, in turn, generates an entire

mode of thinking subsequently adopted and reformed by both Thoreau and

Whitman.

Although Emerson’s conception of American individualism constitutes a

rejection of society and its “conspiracy against manhood,”71 Thoreau

prescribes “homoeopathic doses” of society, suggesting that it is “not

until we are lost…and realize where we are,” that we can ponder the

67 Christopher Newfield,“Emerson’s Corporate Individualism.” America’s Literary History. 3.4 (1991), pp.657-684 (p.660). 68 Emerson, p.132.69 Emerson, p. 132. 70 Emerson, p.53. 71 Emerson, p. 134.

20

“infinite extent of our relations.”72 Thoreau’s individualism inspired

notions of passive resistance and, rather than a complete dismissal of

society, offered a model of government which followed laws of conscience

rather than conforming to public opinions. Providing both practical and

theoretical structures for a democratic society, “Resistance to Civil

Government” bestows a great deal of responsibility on the individual, who

can either agree, disagree, or passively accept the government’s

shortcomings. In the conclusion of Walden, Thoreau states:

It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but

to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through

obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of

opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with

such.73

Reiterating the importance of the individual to both society and a

functional democratic government, Thoreau proposed that both civil

disobedience and ecological consciousness constituted American

individualist thought.

Believing that an individual’s decision to assert himself against the

unjust nature of government; and, while not greatly affecting any immediate

changes—that individual could change and shape history. “Civil

Disobedience” taps into the “revolutionary principles of individual rights,

sovereignty, and consent in support of resistance to slavery, the Mexican

War, and U.S. imperialism.”74 Operating on a theoretical level, Thoreau’s

passive resistance promotes a level of political individualism based on the

constitutes of one’s own conscience—while Walden represents a physical

retreat into solitude, a literal removal of oneself from society. Both

72 Thoreau, p.190, 195. 73 Thoreau, p. 364.74 Erkkila, p.23.

21

assertions of individuality represent Thoreau’s dichotomist notion of

freedom and equality within a functioning democratic society, and his

ability to mythologize a heroic vision of the American man.

This heroic American figure blossomed in Whitman’s American myth,

importing that in order for a work to be truly American, it must “be a song

of ‘the great pride of man in himself.’”75 Believing that an individual can

only be free in a democratic society, Whitman’s ability to celebrate both

the actual and the ideal self as a proponent of that society created an

individual that could, “contain multitudes.”76 Through this democratic

American individual, Whitman hoped to embrace every American, exulting, “I

hear America singing/the varied carols I hear…singing with open mouths

their strong melodious songs.”77 Whitman’s democratic individual took on

the task of reconciling his own individualized personal development with

“one’s obligations to the State and Nation,”78 desiring to fashion a

culture that would coexist with American democracy. Just as he commends

every individual within the broader scope of society, so too does Whitman

account for and celebrate every part of himself, uniting body and soul.

This American individual did not isolate himself from society like Emerson

or offer a critique of it like Thoreau—but rather was individually

representative of a perfect democratic state in equal portions of body and

spirit.

Expressing both excitement and anxiety over America’s developing self-

image, nineteenth-century artists forged a new category of literature;

enabling the individual to orient himself within a more subjective view of

American democracy. As the nation’s culture reshaped and redefined itself,

a larger sphere of interpretation allowed for an imaginative mythologizing 75 Matthiessen, p.650. 76 Whitman, p.202.77 Whitman, p.37.78 Matthiessen, p.591.

22

of American history. The artist who could transcend his personal

limitations represented the voice of a larger, cultural transcendence—

uniting binaries such as: body and spirit, soul and over-soul, individual

and nation, had the ability to affect the nation’s self-awareness. This

allowed nineteenth-century authors Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau to

envision an America where equality and freedom harmonized with democratic

individualism. In defining the mind as something other than a self-

contained entity, Emerson’s embodiment of a self-reliant, democratic

individual emphasizes its important function in society as a whole.

Combining the democratic language of a shifting America with notions of

microcosmic connectivity between the self and society, Emerson envisioned

an ideal symbiosis between the material and ideal prospects of democracy.

Similar in his approach, Thoreau’s self-reliant, passively resistant

democratic vision of the self in both Walden and “Civil Disobedience,”

inspired a naturalistic American hero; whose ability to live simply and

deliberately awarded a thoughtful, intellectual individualism. Just as

Emerson’s individual transcends himself to join a higher consciousness, and

Thoreau’s individual unites man and nature, Whitman’s individual paved the

way for America’s democratic future by celebrating the diversity of every

citizen, unifying them through his use of democratic language forms and

American symbolism. These nineteenth-century answers to the question what is

an American, transcended time and still remain relevant today.

It was

through this method of transcendence that this democratic individual who

once scribbled his ideas about America’s vanishing past, unbounded future,

and golden opportunity to pursue health, wealth, and happiness, could

transcend time and space—alive today in the spirit of every American

individual.

23

24

Works Cited

Arac, Jonathan,’Establishing National Narrative’, The Cambridge History of American

Literature Volume 2 (1995), pp. 1-172.

Bercovitch, Sacvan, and Myra Jehlen eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 1-451.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, ‘The American Scholar’, in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library Paperbacks, 2000), pp 43-59.

Erkkila,Betsy, ‘Revolution in the Renaissance’, A Journal of the American Renaissance

49.1-3 (2003), pp.17-32.

Gunn, Giles. The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 126-144.

Lewis, Richard W.B, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 1-

14.

Mack, Stephan John, ‘The Pragmatic Whitman: Reimagining American Democracy’,

The Walt Whitman Archive, <http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00159.html#ack> [accessed 22 December 2012].

Matthiessen,F.O., American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 1-661.

Meese, Elizabeth A., ‘Transendentalism: The Metaphysics of the Theme’, American

Literature 47.1 (Duke University Press 1975), pp. 1-12.

25

Newfied, Christopher. “Emerson’s Corporate Individualism.” America’s Literary History. 3.4 (1991), pp.657-684.

Redding, Patrick, ‘Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1912–1931’, New Literary History 41.3 (2010) pp. 669-690.

Reynolds, David, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp 1-567.

Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived for’, Walden (Boston:

Ticknor and Fields, 1854) pp.1-361.

Whitman, Walter, Song of Myself,’ Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, David McKay, 1891), pp. 75-205.

26