Emerson and the Gothic

Abstract

Although typically recognized for his Transcendental idealism, Ralph Waldo Emerson was also deeply engaged with the Gothic, a literary mode that prior to the Civil War ran parallel to Transcendentalism but is rarely used in the same breath with Emerson, or any other Transcendentalist for that matter. Exploring his relationship with the Gothic, this essay shows how Emerson, who began writing under a long Calvinist shadow, reproduces the gloom-and-doom rhetoric of the Puritans while simultaneously drawing inspiration from European Gothics like Goethe, Coleridge, and Lord Byron. Yet after becoming a leading Transcendentalist, Emerson condemns Calvinism while evincing a postcolonial determination to cast off European influence. Nevertheless, he continues to draw lavishly from the Gothic lexicon, this time to assail religion and anything that imperils originality. The essay concludes by looking at Emerson's full return to the Gothic in his fatalistic work The Conduct of Life, a bleak and brutal text that anticipates the pessimistic naturalism of the fin-de-siècle.