The Intellectual and Social Life of New England

One of the most important reasons for the rise of American literature in the midnineteenth century was the intellectual and social ferment in New England. This region had been traditionally noted for its interests in self-improvement and in intellectual pursuits; the prosperity of the century's early decades created an especially fertile soil for their growth.

These interests found expression in the Lyceum movement, which was founded in 1826 to improve American education. The Lyceum organizations were named for the school of the Greek philosopher Aristotle. They had a number of goals, ranging from training teachers to establishing museums. One part of the Lyceum program was a course of winter lectures, which became immensely popular in New England and throughout the Midwest. The topics ranged from the practical ("The Honey Bee") to the educational ("The Life and Times of Oliver Cromwell") to the inspirational ("The Capacity of the Human Mind for Culture and Improvement").

This was a time of social improvement in other ways as well. (New England was a center of numerous reform movements. Horace Mann and others were dedicated to improving public education; Dorothea Dix devoted herself to alleviating the horrible conditions in insane asylums; others addressed themselves to the problems of the blind and the deaf. Abolitionist groups led by the radical William Lloyd Garrison sought the immediate abolition of slavery. Feminists such as Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and Emma Willard campaigned for women's rights. (Women were still not allowed to vote, and their other legal rights were greatly limited.)

Southerners called New England the home of "isms," and they were right—social causes, both reasonable and crackpot, abounded. Numerous Utopian projects aimed at reforming society completely.

Transcendentalism. It is a branch of romanticism. In 1836 an informal society, called a “Transcendental club” was formed. Its members were prominent American writers with Ralf Waldo Emerson at a head. It is a specifically American philosophical and literary moment. It is a term borrowed from Immanuel Kant philosophy. Accepted to Transcendentalists, a man can get knowledge that goes beyond experience, - transcends it. The Transcendentalists rejected a theory of John Locke (1632-1704) who considered that a mind of a person born into a world is nothing but “tabula rasa”. The Transcendentalists held that human understanding of evil and good as well as human knowledge are attributed to a person since his birth. The Transcendentalists started from assumption that bourgeois America had favorable conditions for the development of a personality, but each person accepted to Transcendentalists, must do his best to reveal inborn abilities installed in him by God or nature. This statement was contradictionary: on the one hand Transcendentalists proclaimed respect for each person, on the other - individualism, rapaciousness.

The Transcendentalists optimistically believed in human perfectibility, and they were often engaged in projects intended to make this ideal a reality.

When we think of Transcendentalism today, we think almost automatically of Emerson. But in fact, transcendental ideas were as wide-ranging as these minds; they were educational, practical, mystical, poetical, and political. The Transcendentalists shared idealism and a commitment to the spiritual and the hopeful, but that commitment took many forms.

Transcendental thought was most clearly and forcefully expressed in Emerson's writings and in those of his disciple, Henry David Thoreau. As developed by Emerson, Transcendentalism grafted ideas from Europe and the Far East onto a native American philosophical stem.

One product of Emerson's conviction that we can find God directly in nature was a profound optimism. God is good, and God works through nature. Therefore, even the natural events that seem most tragic—pestilence, death, disaster—can be explained on a spiritual level. Death is simply a part of the cycle of life. To the extent that we are separated from a direct, intuitive knowledge of God, we are capable of evil. But if we simply trust ourselves—that is, trust in the power each of us has to know God directly—then we will realize that each of us is also part of the Divine Soul, the source of all good.

But not all the writers and thinkers of the time were in agreement with Transcendentalist thought.

Where Melville disagreed with Emerson was not in the notion that spiritual facts lie behind the appearances of nature; he disagreed with the premise, that those facts are necessarily benign or good.

Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, in their own ways, would have agreed with Melville. These three writers are sometimes considered "anti-Transcendentalists." However, this does not mean there was no element of Transcendentalism in their work. Moreover, their work had common roots in America's past.

Emerson had taken the ecstatic, mystical elements of Puritan thought and ignored its dark side. The ideas of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe developed from both the mystical and the melancholy aspects of Puritan thought. Melville emphasized the conflict between good and evil in his work; Hawthorne was concerned with the psychological effects of sin; Poe sought the mystical realm in the derangement of the senses. Although their subjects differed greatly, symbolism was important to each of them.

Symbolism was also a technical strategy in their writing. This is especially evident in the work of Melville and Hawthorne, whose characters live simultaneously on two levels, as real people and as representatives of something larger.

Despite their differences, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe share with Emerson and Thoreau a vision of the world that ultimately came from their Puritan ancestors and that was shaped by the American experience. Theirs was an imaginative vision that was essentially Romantic, in that it stressed intuition, the powers of nature, and individual emotion. And despite this vision's borrowings from other cultures, it was uniquely American.

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