Race and the Cultures of Transcendental Reform

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