Emerson's Aunt Played Crucial Role in His Writing

2-20-98
Philadelphia -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the fathers of American literature, freely borrowed words and ideas from the aunt who raised him, and used them as his own, a Penn State professor reveals in a new book.

In "Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism," author Phyllis Cole brings Emerson's oft-described "eccentric aunt" to the center of American literature and demonstrates through painstaking research the crucial role she played in her nephew's intellectual thinking and published writings. The book, which consumed Cole's energies for 17 years, has been heralded by scholars nationwide.

"Mary has largely been dismissed by generations of Emerson scholars as little more than the beloved but quirky aunt of Ralph Waldo," says Cole, an associate professor of English at Penn State Delaware County in suburban Philadelphia. "But my research shows she is far more than that.

"And though Ralph Waldo Emerson struggled throughout his life to say what his aunt meant to him -- she was always on his mind -- he only told half the story. The truth is that he copied her letters and diary into his own journal, and used them later as a source for his published writing."

Cole researched the book at Harvard University, where Mary Moody Emerson's letters to her nephew are kept, and discovered her long-lost diary in an uncatalogued box. In that diary, she soon found evidence of Mary's role as a primary source of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Transcendentalism." Previous scholarship largely credits Boston Unitarianism and English Romanticism as his likely inspiration, but Cole found that Mary actually introduced her nephew to both of those traditions.

The Penn State scholar describes Ralph Waldo's "borrowing" of his aunt's writings in detail, a habit he continued through most of his life. At the age of 18, she writes, he began copying her whole letters into his journals; he begged and transcribed her personal journal as much as she would allow. Years later, he filled a thick notebook, titled "MME," with passages from her letters and three more with excerpts from her diary. In 1837, at the early height of his career, Ralph Waldo recorded Mary's name in his journal as first among his seven most vital "benefactors," but wrote that he would rather take gifts of thought from others "as we take apples off a tree without any thanks."

Published by Oxford University Press, "Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism" is foremost a book about Mary's own historical standing as a writer, thinker, spiritual seeker and self-reliant, self-creating woman. In the book's more than 300 pages, Cole introduces a self-taught, strikingly independent woman who read poetry and philosophy a full generation before her nephew -- for her own sake, rather than his.

"She was an isolated person by choice," says Cole, "but her independence and her capacity for joy are absolutely wonderful. I most admire the sheer fervor of her spirit and her genius with words, even though she lacked a formal education."

In recent years, a number of scholars have revealed the unspoken contributions that women have made to some of the world's most famous writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald (Zelda), William Wordsworth (Dorothy) and James Joyce (Nora). In the book's introduction, Cole writes of this trend: "Through correspondence with her nephew Waldo, however, Mary became a direct source of Transcendentalism. Just as William Wordsworth wrote some of the founding texts of British Romanticism through silent partnership with his diary writing sister Dorothy, so Ralph Waldo Emerson appropriated and assimilated his aunt's language from youth through old age."

The Penn State scholar believes Mary's contributions surpass those of Dorothy, Zelda and Nora. "Mary seems to me to be the most amazing of all of them, because of the reading and writing she did," Cole says. "She told Ralph Waldo what books to read, and he did. She was a whole generation ahead of him, and that put her in a different framework than a wife or sister, because she really mentored him."

Cole's research on Mary Moody Emerson was supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Women's Studies in Religion Program of Harvard Divinity School.

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CONTACT:
Nancy Crabb (610) 648-3276 nmh1@psu.edu