Race and the Cultures of Transcendental Reform

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Race and the Cultures of Transcendental Reform David Faflik (bio) Peter Wirzbicki, Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. 325 pp. Figures, acknowledgements, and index. $39.95. From the time of its emergence in New England in the early 1830s, Transcendentalism often proved unintelligible to the uninitiated, who were unsure what to make of its heady mixture of liberal spiritual renewal, German philosophic idealism, and progressive social reform. Area divines like the Cambridge-based Unitarian theologian Andrews Norton responded to the challenge posed to his religion by the Transcendentalist worldview by naming it "the latest form of infidelity." Those who were inclined to caricaturize meanwhile set about establishing the stereotype (which retains its appeal in the popular imagination today) of the Transcendentalists as an insular cohort of young, white, mostly middle-class regional intellectuals whose deep reading in period Continental thought and English and European Romanticism rendered them a feckless band of starry-eyed dreamers, ill-equipped for active involvement in the world. Indeed, despite the subsequent canonization in the United States of such celebrated Transcendentalist stalwarts as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker, a largely fictional portrayal of the Transcendentalists as abstracted and detached has had surprising staying power. Author Nathaniel Hawthorne epitomized a contemporary trend in Transcendentalist satire with his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852); the roman à clef narrative contained therein reads less as an objective depiction of the famous Brook Farm experiment in communal living in which Hawthorne himself participated than it does a seriocomic sendup of a Transcendentalistled enterprise that figures as ridiculous on the page. Even recent critics of a cultural phenomenon that qualifies more as a historical moment than a full-fledged movement have found it hard to resist the too-easy dismissal of Transcendentalism as an esoteric afterthought to the rough and tumble realities of antebellum America. Writing of what he calls the "politics" of classic American literature, for example, John Carlos [End Page 25] Rowe reserves the opening chapter from his study At Emerson's Tomb (1997) to describe an entire Transcendentalist tradition of "aesthetic dissent" as being undermined by "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 naïve realism that confuses truth with social convention" (p. 1). Neither the ends nor the means of the Transcendentalists matter from Rowe's perspective. For in his account of the different facets of American life in which their beliefs found expression—most notably these include abolitionism, women's rights, and an emergent antimaterialist critique of capitalism—the New Views, as Transcendentalism's main tenets were known to their adherents and detractors alike, register at best as an adjunct to nineteenth-century reforms that derived their energies and direction from elsewhere in the culture. Worse, the utopian, perfectionist premises of the Transcendentalists' otherwise diverse points of view are in Rowe's analysis an insuperable obstacle to the stated aims of anyone who might have regarded Transcendentalism as a fitting vehicle for undertaking sweeping social change during the decades leading up to the Civil War. Now it has fallen to Peter Wirzbicki to correct the revisionist correctives that have since restored Transcendentalism's place in the written history of antebellum reform. In their edited collection Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (1999), Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Right afforded a forum for scholars at the start of this century to reestablish the multi-faceted nature of a "movement" that has taught us as much about the history of ideas as it has the history of hands-on social reform in the nineteenth-century West. With his comprehensive studies American Transcendentalism: A History (2007) and Man's Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (2017), Philip F. Gura likewise attends to the "centrifugal" forces that made Transcendentalism something other than a narrowly Protestant religious complaint among disillusioned New Englanders in the aftermath of the disestablishment of the Congregational Church. But with Wirzbicki's Fighting for the Higher Law, we meet with a book that...