Emerson

University of California Press

On March 29, 1832, the twenty-eight-year-old Emerson visited the tomb of his young wife, Ellen, who had been buried a year and two months earlier. He was in the habit of walking from Boston out to her grave in Roxbury every day, but on this particular day he did more than commune with the spirit of the departed Ellen: he opened the coffin. Ellen had been young and pretty. She was seventeen when they were engaged, eighteen when married, and barely twenty when she died of advanced tuberculosis. They had made frantic efforts at a cure, including long open-air carriage rides and massive doses of country air. Their life together had been stained almost from the start by the bright blood of Ellen's coughing.

Opening the coffin was not a grisly gothic gesture, not just the wild aberration of an unhinged lover. What Emerson was doing was not unheard of. At least two of Emerson's contemporaries did the same thing. A Unitarian minister and good friend of Margaret Fuller's, James Freeman Clarke, once opened the coffin of the woman he had been in love with when he was an undergraduate. Edgar Allan Poe's literary executor, the anthologist Rufus Griswold, opened the coffin of his dead wife forty days after the funeral.1

Emerson opened not only the tomb or family vault but the coffin itself. The act was essential Emerson. He had to see for himself. Some part of him was not able to believe she was dead. He was still writing to her in his journals as though she was alive. Perhaps the very deadness of the body would help a belief in the life of the spirit. A modern writer has said that "beside the corpse of the beloved were generated not only the idea of the soul, the belief in immortality, and a great part of man's deep-rooted sense of guilt, but also the earliest inkling of ethical law." We do not know exactly what moved Emerson on this occasion, but we do know that he had a powerful craving for direct, personal, unmediated experience. That is what he meant when he insisted that one should strive for an original relation to the universe. Not a novel relation, just one's own. Emerson is the great American champion of self-reliance, of the adequacy of the individual, and of the importance of

the active soul or spirit. Never content with mere assertion, he looked always for the sources of strength. Emerson's lifelong search, what he called his heart's inquiry, was "Whence is your power?" His reply was always the same: "From my nonconformity. I never listened to your people's law, or to what they call their gospel, and wasted my time. I was content with the simple rural poverty of my own. Hence this sweetness."2

Emerson's direct facing of death owed something to his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, the brilliant and original sister of Emerson's father, who deliberately lived with death every day of her life and drew much of her own power from that grim helpmeet. Her jagged, combative prose uses death and pain as probes for faith. "Did I not assure good Lincoln Ripley, long since," she wrote, "that I should be willing to have limbs rot, and senses dug out, if I could perceive more of God?"3

Emerson had also by now learned to think of ideas not as abstractions but as perceptions, laws, templates, patterns, and plans. Ideas were not less real than the phenomenal world. If anything, ideas were more important than phenomena because they lay behind them, creating and explaining the visible world. Ideas for Emerson were tangible and had force. "Believe in magnetism, not in needles," he wrote. Ideas, even the idea of death, could not be separated from sense experience.

Emerson's own journal entry for this March day was terse: "I visited Ellen's tomb and opened the coffin." They had been utterly in love, and for a moment, on September 30, 1829, their wedding day, the future had seemed clear. Notes and letters flew back and forth. They traveled and wrote verses together and laughed at the Shakers who tried to woo them to celibacy. She intended to be a poet, he a preacher. He had accepted a pulpit in Boston, and they had set up a home that became at once the center of the Emerson family, as both Waldo's mother and his younger brother Charles came to live with them. Now, a little more than a year after Ellen's death, Emerson's life was unraveling fast. He was so desolate and lonely that his mother tried to persuade his invalid brother Edward to come back from the West Indies to look after him. His professional life was also going badly. Though he was a much-loved minister in an important Boston church, he was having trouble believing in personal immortality, trouble believing in the sacrament of Communion, and trouble accepting the authority and historical accuracy of the Bible. The truth was that Emerson was in a fast-deepening crisis of vocation. He could not accept his ministerial role, he was unsure of his faith, and he felt bereft and empty. He was directionless.

His brother Charles wrote to Aunt Mary that "Waldo is sick . . . I never saw him so disheartened . . . things seem flying to pieces."4

At Ellen's grave that day in Roxbury in 1832 Emerson was standing amidst the ruins of his own life. More than ten years had passed since he had left college. Love had died and his career was falling apart. He was not sure what he really believed, who he really was, or what he should be doing. He felt the "vanishing volatile froth of the present" turning into the fixed adamantine past. "We walk on molten lava," he wrote.

In the months immediately ahead he continued to walk to Ellen's grave every day, but now his concentration on death was broken and he wrote a sermon called "The God of the Living" and another on astronomy. He reached a major watershed in his long struggle with religion. "Astronomy irresistibly modifies all religion," he wrote. "The irresistible effect of Copernican astronomy has been to make the great scheme of the salvation of man absolutely incredible." He would live no longer with the dead. "Let us express our astonishment," he wrote in his journal in May, "before we are swallowed up in the yeast of the abyss. I will lift up my hands and say Kosmos."5

Before the year was out, Emerson had resigned his pulpit, moved his mother, sold his household furniture, and taken ship for Europe. He set out on Christmas Day, 1832. A northeast storm was on its way as the ship sailed from Boston, plunging into the grey expanse of the North Atlantic.