Edwin Fussell’s book on the image of the West in the American Renaissance, Edwin Fussell’s Frontier, denies any real conjunction of philosophical and geographic polarities in mid-nineteenth-century New England. According to Fussell, the frontier, for Emerson and other New-Englanders, represented nothing but a “figure of speech, gradually but never entirely sloughing European implications as it assumed new functions in a new context.” Thus what Fussell calls “the figurative frontier” never quite coincided with the actual process of westward expansion. It was already drained of expressive value when Emerson did write about the West in “The Young American,” in 1844; and after the accession of California and Oregon to statehood in 1850 and 1859, “no longer was the West a boundless opportunity, but a mopping-up operation” (Fussell 18-25).

Fussell’s suggestion is both seminal and frustrating. It points to a major characteristic of Emerson’s thought, which concerns not only his view of the American West, but his response to the various problems of the age—his ability to turn political, sectional, or social facts into oracular assertions, or at least into materials for what Sacvan Bercovitch has called “auto-American biography.” The modern reader sometimes has an odd feeling that Jackson’s election, the emergence of cotton mills on the Merrimack River, or the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act were perceived by Ralph Waldo Emerson not as historical events, but as illustrations of a transcendental Weltanschauung.

Fussell’s second assertion is challenging, but more problematic. He distinguishes between the early writings, in which Emerson borrows his paradigms from Coleridge and Carlyle, and the later works—the dividing line being 1844 and the publication of “The Young American”—in which he “sloughs” his European models to find a new inspiration in the West. The 1844 lecture would, as it were, mark Emerson’s metamorphosis from heir of European Romanticism to Poet Laureate of America, and the “discovery” of the West that opens the lecture would be a conversion of sorts: “We in the Atlantic states, by position, have … imbibed easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius” (Emerson 216).

The very title of the 1844 lecture undoubtedly illustrates this metamorphosis; but how can we reconcile this obvious fact with Fussell’s first point: that Emerson’s discovery came when the “real” West was disappearing? Fussell’s purely metaphysical polarities (dualism vs. monism, reason vs. understanding, organicism vs. mechanism) are not of much use to come to terms with this paradox. A sentence of his introduction, however, can help us to approach Transcendentalism without soaring to stratospheric heights: he speaks of the “teleological nationalism cartographically advancing from right to left, old world to new” (19, 14). This statement is useful because it may help us to connect an historical fact—westward expansion—and a central feature of Emerson’s thought—his belief in the expansiveness of the Self.

As early as 1822, Emerson invokes the West to reject the dependence of his native culture on European traditions. In his journal, when he fumbles for models which can crystallize the specificity of the American experience, he focuses on the energy of the pioneer breaking the primeval silence of forests with his axe—an archetypal gesture which Thoreau too will turn into an inaugural ritual in Walden. [2] There is something incongruous in this Western cliché, coming as it does from two extremely cultivated Easterners: like Crèvecœur, like Cooper, Emerson and Thoreau find in the West a catalyst for their growing dissatisfaction with the weight of the past, and dream of empty spaces which seem to invite newness, boldness and enterprise. In Emerson’s case, this is all the more striking since his pioneer-as-new-man appears in the journal more than ten years before the creation of the self-reliant hero who will embody the Transcendentalist gospel (Journals, I, 146 ff.). But—typically—, the Harvard gruaduate is very wary of the real West. Thus, in April 1823, he laments the excessive tempo of American growth, and describes the pioneers as an unruly crowd, impatient of law and order, eager to satisfy their craving for unlimited freedom. After being a fountain of youth, the West becomes a focus of anarchy and licence—a semi-barbarous way of life in which individual needs become destructive forces; and, significantly, this lurid picture is contrasted with a very conventional evocation of Boston as a flowering of propriety, culture and distinction. [3] The contiguity of these conflicting images shows the ambivalence of Emerson’s political stance during his formative years: he is torn between a young graduate’s impatience with tradition and a fear of disorder that he has imbibed from a Federalist, Unitarian culture. Even more striking is the fact that the polarity of Europe vs. the American West is, as it were, the topographical foundation of both attitudes.

Before turning to the West and writing his pioneering study of the frontier myth, Henry Nash Smith devoted a remarkable essay to “Emerson’s Problem of Vocation,” i.e. to the personal crisis which led Emerson to withdraw from the ministry in 1832 and to become the spokesman of the “Party of the Future” against the “Party of the Past.” Smith proposes to read “The American Scholar” not as a statement of literary nationalism, but as a romantic manifesto: that of a man who had just “seceded” from the Church and from the State, and who “had to perform the intellectual and imaginative labor of conceiving a new vocation for himself, and almost a new society in which this vocation might have meaning” (Smith 71). Hence the bellicose tone of the address, which almost reads as a declaration of war on political and religious institutions. The pattern that emerges from Smith’s essay is of course remarkably “western”: after all, who better than Westerners built a “new society” in which “new vocations” could arise? Yet neither Nature nor “The American Scholar” contains any direct allusion to the West; and the same remark holds for the first series of Essays.

This observation brings us back to Fussell’s remark about Emerson’s “figurative” frontier, during his early period, which is marked by reliance on Romantic models. If we follow Fussell, we must search his pages for a clandestine, or emergent, or unrealized West which is born of a misreading, or at least a very American reading of Coleridge and Carlyle. Take for instance the conclusion of the essay “Circles.” “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why” (Porte 181). Or take the opening pages of “Self-Reliance,” which celebrate the total freedom of youth, its avoiding of all pledges, and the resulting “unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence” (122). Both passages express the cardinal opposition of Transcendentalism: that of “newness” vs. age, hope vs. memory, extravagance vs. prudence, irresponsibility vs. decorum. This is neo-Kantianism run wild—an exalted vision of the absolute self against the world, deriving its inviolable strength from Nature and the Oversoul, radiating infinite power and threatening all traditions. But it is also a vision of the American self which requires endless space as its sphere of activity. The word that can best express the tenor of such passages is expansiveness.

The essay “Circles” offers the most eloquent formulation of this centrifugal view of the self. It is built on the opposition of energy and freedom vs. constriction and stasis: “The life of a man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring, imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outward to new and larger circles, and that without end … There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference to us” (Porte 175). Five pages later, the expansive image has been taken over by a prescriptive, aggressive, anarchistic, proselytic I: “The only sin is limitation … I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back” (180). The tenor of this sweeping statement is pure Transcendentalism—note the rejection of traditions, the vociferous proclamation of individual self-reliance—; but the vehicle, which gives the essay its title, shows how deeply, if unconsciously, Emerson has internalized, appropriated the dominant fact of his age—the conquest of the American continent. The charm of Emerson’s essays lies in this odd meeting of East and West. The reader is sometimes tempted to forget that he is a perfect product of Eastern culture, and see in his metaphors, lexicon, and syntax a chastened, spiritualized form of Western self-assertion. Take “Self-Reliance”: the hyperbolic self-assertion sounds very much like a philosophical translation of Western bragging—a metaphysical tall tale, if you like.

Nature, the first manifesto of Transcendentalism, begins with an exasperated assessment: America has no “original relation to the universe.” It “gropes among the dry bones of the past” instead of harking to the voice of nature. But at this point the rhetorical and metaphorical patterns begin to change. Nature, Emerson writes, is “thoroughly mediate. It is made to serve.” Her “floods of life invite us to action proportional to her strength” (Nature, in Porte 27, 40). “The American Scholar” takes up the theme and gives it a distinct Western coloration. Not only does Emerson proclaim that “our days of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” but he resorts to a metaphor that clearly points to the West as the source of regeneration: “So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished or planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion” (Porte 61). This, I take it, is far closer to Daniel Boone than to Wordsworth in its insistence on expansion through conquest; or rather, it pulls Wordsworth in the direction of Daniel Boone, in suggesting that Nature acquiesces in her own demise, since it “invites us to action.” Finally, this spiritualized frontier finds its embodiment when Emerson declares: “Not out of those on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature” (63). This indistinct, yet titanic figure crystallizes the merging of romantic topoi and Western metaphors: the Westerner becomes a Transcendental hero who promises to lead the crusade against the “Party of the Past.”

It is of course tempting to link such hero-worship with the powerful myths of Jacksonian America. As John William Ward has noted, the oppositions of Emerson’s early essays are remarkably akin to those of Jackson’s followers in the 1828 campaign. In a way, “Old Hickory” to his zealots was the “helpful giant” sung by the American bard. Emerson even seemed to invite this reading of his trumpet call in Nature, when he alluded to the orator, bred in the woods, who heard the murmur of the pines and the rolling of the rivers in the broil of politics (Porte 37). This was written eight years after the triumph of the “modern Cincinnatus,” of him who, according to Bancroft, “grew as the forest trees grow,” of him who conquered the state after conquering nature, and whose sturdy simplicity contrasted with the effete, quasi-European cultivation of his opponent, John Quincy Adams. The West vs. the East, the future vs. the past, nature and innocence vs. society and corruption: Jackson seemed to embody Emerson’s most cherished dreams, Adams his most dreaded nightmares. What Ward seems to forget, however, is that the author of “Self-Reliance” had greeted Jackson’s election with the same shudder as the whole Boston patriciate: he saw it as the invasion of the White House by the unprincipled hordes of the West, the reign of vice and immorality, the collapse of civilization. In fact, the 1828 campaign had a lot to do with what Henry Nash Smith calls his “secession from the State”: throughout the 1830’s, i.e. during the period of Jackson’s rule, his references to American politics in his journal are either bilious or cynical (Ward 46-78; Gonnaud 125-27, 160-62). The ambivalence of his early years had not disappeared: the poet celebrated helpful giants in savage nature, but the citizen saw Westerners as barbarians threatening law and order. For Emerson, the West remained a catalyst of his conflicting response to an inherited culture.

The real change took place between 1841 and 1844, partly because of the gradual erosion of Romantic certainties, partly because of growing doubts as to the endurance and strength of New England culture. The text that best illustrates the first process is the 1844 essay “Experience,” which lists all the obstacles to man’s fulfilment to reach the astonishing conclusion: “The individual is always mistaken.” The metaphors that convey this retreat of “the aboriginal Self” (to quote “Self-Reliance”) are even more striking: imprisonment, stasis replace conquest and movement. We are slaves to illusion, Emerson writes, “shut in a prison of glass which we cannot see.” From this prison, we look wistfully toward an inaccessible horizon: “Men seem to have learned of the horizon the art of perpetual retreating and reference.” Man’s eyesight has become a measure of his weakness, not—as in the early essays—of his promise: “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.” The limitless spaces of the 1830s and early 1840s have given way to a world in which man is hemmed in on all sides: “God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky, and another behind us of purest sky.” One sentence sums ups the extent of this metamorphosis: “There is no power of expansion in men.” The former disciple of Carlyle now reads Montaigne and declares: “The mid-world is best” (Porte 201, 202, 205, 206, 207).

This metaphysical skepticism corresponds chronologically to an increasing feeling of impotence and disgust before the softness and resignation of the Whigs, the thin-bloodedness of respectable Boston and more generally of the East, which contrasts with the coarse vigor of the Democrats, with the rising tide of new energies. One senses in Emerson’s journal an awareness that New England’s day is passed. Significantly, he dwells lovingly and nostalgically on the sturdy simplicity of the yeoman’s life, in a series of lectures given in 1842, which conversely lament the restlessness and cynicism of contemporary Americans (Gonnaud 360-66). I am tempted to see a link between this new helplessness and the closing in of his metaphysical space alluded to above. After all, the East is shut in by the barriers history and custom have erected, and lacks the energy which would help it to see the horizon not as a focus of hopeless longing but as an endlessly desirable goal.

It is therefore not entirely surprising that the uncharacteristic wistfulness of the essay “Experience” should be counterbalanced by an extravagant hymn to the West as a fountain of youth, or even as a promise of rebirth: “I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement [before] the sunbright Mecca of the desert … I am ready to die out of nature and be born again in this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West” (Porte 208). To the uninformed reader, this may seem to mark a mere return to earlier themes—note the celebration of youth and the adamic metaphor; but the sense of separation and distance has not disappeared: the virgin lands are still “unapproachable.” The West is not Paradise Regained, but Paradise To Be Regained; and the “joy and amazement” of the discovery is inseparable from a keen awareness of irretrievable loss: dying out of nature means renouncing the Romantic gospel of 1836; being born again means being naturalized as a Westerner—an unlikely regeneration for a son of Concord.

There is little doubt, however, that the West has helped Emerson to overcome his temporary crisis, by offering a new “prospect,” to quote the title of Nature’s conclusion, to his visionary eye: “Suffice it for the joy of the universe that we have not arrived at a wall, but at interminable oceans. Our life seems not present so much as prospective; not for the affairs on which it is wasted, but as a hint of this vast-flowing vigor.” The “sunbright Mecca of the desert has reawakened the expansive urge which had been temporarily checked by doubts and discouragement, and inspires an almost martial call for action: “Onward and onward!” (Porte 208-09).

What such prophecies seem to suggest is something like a transfer of loyalties, as if the Westerner had become the new embodiment of Emerson’s self-reliant individualism. Thus, in the New England lectures alluded to above, he extols the “frank Kentuckian” who seems to say: “Here I am, if you don’t appreciate me, the worse for you.” In the 1844 lecture on “The Young American,” the Western pioneer is an avatar of the yeoman, ousted from New England by urbanization and industrialism. Just as significant is the long rhapsody on the “tranquillizing and sanative influences” of land, which is described as “the appointed remedy to whatever is false and fantastic in our culture,” and which invites Americans to plough the wilderness, to load the prairies with wheat, the swamps with rice, the hill-tops with innumerable sheep and cattle, and to transform “the interminable forests” into “graceful parks, for use and for delight” (Emerson 214-15).

The words “tranquillizing and sanative” (two pages later, Emerson even speaks of a “sanative and Americanizing influence”—my emphasis), applied to the virgin lands of the West, have an ironical ring: 1844 was the year of Polk’s election, on a nationalistic and expansionist platform. Texas was annexed the next year. Soon the Mexican war broke out, to Emerson’s disgust and indignation—indignation at the appetites of the South, disgust at what he called New England’s “subservience.” The journal laments the “cotton thread” which “holds the nation together, unites John C. Calhoun abnd Abbot Lawrence.” Governor Briggs, he adds, in acquiescing in the annexation of Texas, has “immolated the honor of Massachusetts.” Such outbursts only show that far from being a reservoir of peace and prosperity for all, the West was becoming more and more clearly the catalyst of sectional rivalries (Journals IX: 412, 425, 445).

In all logic, Emerson’s militant opposition to the Mexican War should have put an end to his idyll with the West. In fact, the opposite took place: from 1850 onward, he repeatedly visited Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois on a series of lecture tours, and oddly enough approached even the most sinister aspects of Western life with surprising tolerance. Although he was quite ready to acknowledge that “the geography is sublime, but the men are not,” that the junction of the two oceans had been effected by “selfishness, fraud and conspiracy,” he began to accept the growing power of Western States, reflecting that this was the price to pay for the rising glory of America: these “dog-men, that [had] not shed their canine teeth,” these “rough grisly Esaus, full of dirty strength”—in other words, embodiments of what was denounced in “The Transcendentalist” as materialism and expediency—might be the unlikely agents of the new dispensation: God’s ways were impenetrable, especially when the manifest destiny of America was concerned. As Maurice Gonnaud has convincingly argued, compensation in Emerson’s second phase was seen more and more often as a providential channelling of raw power (See Journals XI: 81; Letters V: 199 ff.).

On the face of it, this new acceptance of Western barbarity blatantly contradicts Emerson’s adamant stand on the Mexican question. But, as we all know, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Emerson himself was not unaware of the contradiction, as appears clearly from a journal entry in 1844: New England’s duty, he writes, is to “resist the annexation with tooth and nail,” for ethical reasons; but he adds:

(Journals IX: 74)

Nine years later, he was to extol the “wonderful powers of absorption and appropriating” of the “pushing, versatile, victorious Anglo-Saxon race,” and announce the annexation of Cuba, South America, and the implantation of the United States in Japan and Asia (Gonnaud 461). By thus drawing a distinction between short-term and long-term commitments, Emerson only shows how difficult it was for him to reconcile his new nationalism with his former individualism: his ethical, high-principled rejection of the war looks like a quixotic gesture, since he admits as inevitable what he condemns as immoral.

In fact, from 1844 onward, Emerson built up a philosophical system which enabled him to transfer his expansionist vision from the triumphant self to triumphant America: hence the key role allotted to the West which, in spite of its uncouthness and its violence, has the power of purging the country of its dross, because it is the newest part of the New World. At the same time, the purely spatial approach of the early essays gives way to an emergent awareness of historical time: note how, in the above quotations, the emphasis is put on the specific traits of the “strong British race,” and not on the specificity of American culture. The two notions may seem contradictory to the modern reader; actually they are inseparable: instead of positing, as he did in his youth, a kind of radical polarity between East and West, Emerson now subscribes to the myth of the westward course of empire, which enables him to describe American expansionism as the heir and successor of British imperialism. This is the hidden theme of a remarkable and perverse book, English Traits, which is an obituary disguised as a tribute: Emerson begins by celebrating “the spawning force of the British race” subduing India and building a world-wide rule—and significantly compares this force to the strength of the buffalo, just as he likens British pluck to the self-reliance of the pioneer in Wisconsin—: “The American is only the continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less propitious.” But in the next breath he insists on Britain’s imminent decay: the last chapter of the book, his “Manchester speech,” concludes that it is time for a passation of powers: “ … The British power has culminated, is in solstice, or already declining.” “The old races are gone, and the elasticity and hope of mankind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges, or nowhere” (Lebreton 28, 22-3, 196).

This last sentence sounds like an echo of the 1844 lecture on “The Young American,” which already stated: “These rough Alleghanies should know their master.” It also reminds me of a letter to Carlyle of March 11, 1854, in which Emerson writes that in America, and in America only, “is the right home and seat of the English race; and this great England will dwindle again to an island which has done well, but has reached its utmost expansion” (Norton II, 267). The “Manchester speech” welds these two themes into a single assertion of national pride: the taming of the West becomes incontrovertible evidence of America’s world-wide mission.

The final statement of this nationalism is the essay on “Power,” which was first delivered as a lecture, then included in The Conduct of Life in 1860. It is certainly one of the most irksome of Emerson’s essays to a twentieth-century reader who has found under less innocuous pens that “power is the essential measure of right.” In fact, it reads a little like a caricature of the above-quoted texts, to which it adds an incongruous attack on Eastern refinement. The power of the Westerners, Emerson writes, “is not clothed in satin. ’Tis the power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates; and it bullies the peaceable and loyal.” Arkansas, Oregon, Utah send to Washington men who are “rough riders, half orators, half assassins”; but “the instinct of the people is right,” and this power bears with it its own antidote, for it will “keep at bay the snarling minorities of German, Irish, and native millions.” [4] To this unusual celebration of the frontiersman—not as the tamer of the buffalo, but as that of the immigrant …—Emerson adds a footnote which shows to what lengths he could carry his newly-found westophilia: the wrath of these men, according to him, “has a bold and manly cast,” which makes them “really better than the snivelling opposition” of “their Excellencies the New England governors” and “their honors the New England legislators.” The Westerner has thus become a kind of universal shield—against the hordes of lower-class scum, who in an interesting reversal now come from the East, from Europe, and against the effete patriciate of New England—which is described in terms oddly reminiscent of the Jacksonian rhetoric in 1828. The Harvard graduate, the Cambridge minister seems to have cast his lot with the big he-men of the West, men with “a surcharge of arterial blood” who

(Porte 283-84)

There is something pathetically telling in this extravagant tribute: it throws some light on a little-known aspect of this endlessly contradictory figure—an aspect of which he himself was probably unaware. What emerges here is a growing dissatisfaction with the restraints of patrician Boston, of an emasculated and emasculating culture, and a corresponding urge to escape, to be “reborn,” to quote “The Young American” once more, into a rough rider, a miner, a hunter. As unlikely as it may appear, Emerson sometimes dreamt of becoming what Theodore Roosevelt did become to the public eye: a westernized Easterner. I have suggested above that the very writing of the essays had a Western extravagance about it—a trait which by the way was not specific to Emerson, since it was also a characteristic of Thoreau’s prose, and led him to launch into an odd profession of faith in the conclusion of Walden. [5] I have even spoken about “Self-Reliance” of a metaphysical tall tale. The passage of the “figurative frontier” to the actual West, or rather to Emerson’s myth of the actual West, divests the tall tale of its metaphysical trappings: when our New-Englander tours the Great Lakes area, he is fascinated by the expansiveness of Western speech, and notes in his journal the phrases which he has heard. No wonder, then, that his tribute to the adventurer invites the reader to walk up the Himalaya, hunt lion and rhinoceros in Africa, or ride alligators in South America (Porte 285). [6]

Thus after all, in spite of his contradictions, inconsistencies, recantations, Emerson remains faithful to a private vision of the West which has a lot to do with his frustrations, disappointments, hopes and dreams in the East. The clue to this vision may well be the largely unconscious link which connects “politics” and “manners,” to use two titles of the essays: just as he is increasingly ready to accept westward expansion—and to look beyond the West, he is increasingly fascinated by the Westerner’s expansiveness. Expansionism takes him away from the provincialism of New-England politics; expansiveness frees him from the constricted world of New-England life and culture. Thus does a proper Bostonian become an unlikely booster of the West. [7]