Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History

Voorkant
Oxford University Press, 26 feb 1998 - 400 pagina's
Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God. Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker. Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.

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Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

Introduction
3
THE FAMILY
13
A WOMANS LIFE
81
Photo gallery
161
THE MOVEMENT
161
LAST THINGS
247
Notes
311
Index
360
Copyright

Overige edities - Alles bekijken

Veelvoorkomende woorden en zinsdelen

Populaire passages

Pagina 61 - Trust ye not in a friend, put ye not confidence in a guide: keep the doors of thy mouth from her that lieth in thy bosom.
Pagina 18 - If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent his bow, and made it ready.
Pagina 46 - But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed then Eve. And Adam was not deceived ; but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression ; notwithstanding she shall be saved in child-bearing, if they continue in faith, and charity, and holiness with sobriety.
Pagina 66 - And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the Lord because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.
Pagina 3 - England, and marks the precise time when the power of the old creed yielded to the influence of modern science and humanity. I have found that I could only bring you this portrait by selections from the diary of my heroine, premising a sketch of her time and place.
Pagina 163 - The key to the period appeared to be that the mind had become aware of itself. Men grew reflective and intellectual. There was a new consciousness.
Pagina 30 - I did not know it, Sir,' he replied, with the utmost humility. This is one of the household anecdotes in which I have found a relationship.
Pagina 122 - ... who twice or thrice put me in mortal terror by forcing me into the salt water off some wharf or bathing house, and I still recall the fright with which, after some of this salt experience, I heard his voice one day, (as Adam that of the Lord God in the garden,) summoning us to a new bath, and I vainly endeavouring to hide myself.
Pagina 231 - I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.
Pagina 58 - God wills us free, man wills us slaves, I will as God wills ; God's will be done. Here lies the body of JOHN JACK A native of Africa, who died March 1773 aged about sixty years.

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