"Desert Places"

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less--

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

    

It’s amazing how you can read something multiple times, then come back to it and discover something new.  I’ve often read Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” and admired it for the way it moves from an ordinary winter scene to the vastness of outer space to the familiarity of inner space.  Recently I studied it more closely and found more to appreciate. 

First, let’s note that this “nature” poem is not of the uplifting or sentimental variety.  Instead we get a stark image of human isolation and loneliness in the midst of a desolate scene in which nature is blank and expressionless.  It is striking that this northern winter image is compared to a southern “desert,” but this is but one in a series of striking contrasts.

We have white “snow” and dark “night,” both “falling fast”; “smooth” snow cover with “weeds and stubble” poking through; natural desolation and human “loneliness”; “blanker whiteness” and “benighted snow”; earthly isolation and the emptiness “between stars”; external and internal absence.  The contrasts create a psychic drama as the speaker realizes, not only his own insignificance in the vastness of nature, but also that of the human species on its lonely planet.

This existential image of human isolation is conveyed in Frost’s characteristically familiar style.  The predominately iambic meter, interlocking rhyme scheme, plain diction, sentence fragments, and use of dashes, all make the poem sound conversational, while the occasional irregularity of rhythm, reversal of word order and the use of words like “absent-spirited” and “benighted” offer a slight elevation of style.  The whole is rendered as an ordinary experience that is accompanied by an extra-ordinary shock of recognition.

The winter scene is personified as lonely in stanza two but realistically depicted in stanza three as inanimate, having “nothing to express.”  The emptiness “between planets” is associated with the emptiness of a “desert,” as both of those images, like the winter scene itself, serve as metaphors for psychic absence.  Ironically, this message of disconnection is belied by the speaker’s ability to identify with the external world and the reader’s ability to identify with the speaker. 

A poem about disconnection relies on connecting with disconnection.  The comparative devices of personification and metaphor are used to create a sense of isolation and contrast.  Earthly winter, the human individual, unearthly space, and the earthly desert are all connected by their shared disconnection.  At the heart of human experience is this unavoidable contradiction between alienation (absence) and interconnected relationship (presence).  We are connected in our isolation.

From a socio/political perspective the poem serves to elevate individualism over collectivism, yet it could be read as disrupting this false binary, suggesting that our ability to identify with and relate to what is external to us transcends our isolation and makes social relationships possible, indeed, perhaps redemptive.  As Bertrand Russell wrote, “In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that” (Autobiography Vol 1, pp. 219-221).

Viewed from a mythic perspective, the poem may suggest the Fall, death, loss, even apocalypse, but again, as spring is foreshadowed in the winter solstice, so redemption, rebirth, recovery, and resurrection are foreshadowed in the mythic cycle of eternal return. 

All of this may seem to take us far afield from the original poem, but, as we connect with that poem about loneliness, we transcend our individualism; as we identify with human emptiness, we transcend our isolation.

  

"Bartleby the Scrivener"

Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) is one of those tantalizing stories that invite multiple fascinating interpretations:

Bartleby is an eccentric individualist who refuses to conform to social norms.  Society wins.

Bartleby is a mentally ill homeless man who becomes one of society’s disposables.

Bartleby is H D Thoreau, passively resisting authority and paying the price.

Bartleby represents all the victims of greedy capitalism.

Bartleby is a victim of the mindless, mechanical work of industrial society.

Bartleby represents natural human rights (to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?) in conflict with the property rights of capitalist, industrial society.

Bartleby is a Christ-figure or, at least, “one of the least of these” that Christians are commanded to treat as if they were Christ.  His fate illustrates the incompatibility of capitalist, industrial society and Christian values.

Bartleby is the trial sent by God to test the state of the lawyer’s soul as one of the Elect or one of the damned.

Bartleby represents the dehumanization of those caught in the capitalist machine.

Bartleby is a projection of the lawyer’s own dehumanization and his powerlessness to save himself.

Bartleby represents the extreme exercise of free will, allowing him complete freedom, though it leads to his death.

Bartleby represents the universal human condition of the individual in conflict with society.

 

Well, some are more fascinating than others.

 It’s important to note that the full title of the story is “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street.”  It’s hard not to infer that Melville intends to comment on the financial center of capitalism.  Nor is it unreasonable to expect the reader to interpret it as such.  The first-person narrator, the lawyer, has found himself a safe, comfortable, and lucrative niche protecting the property rights of capitalists on Wall Street.  The lawyer’s office is tucked between two walls, one white, transparent and well lit and the other black, opaque, and dark.  Bartleby spends much of his time staring out the second blank wall.  Is Melville suggesting that the work of Wall Street walls us off from each other? That the capitalists enjoy the view of a bright wall while the workers’ outlook is dark? That the lawyer is comfortably located between the two, earning a good living in service of the capitalists supported by the labor of his office workers.  Do the walls represent the divisions between economic classes in a capitalist society? 

And what of the work that the office workers perform?  A scrivener is a human Xerox machine, literally copying documents by hand and then laboriously checking the copies for accuracy as the lawyer reads the original aloud.  This mechanical, mindless work is paralleled by the predictable behavior of the workers, who themselves seem somehow “programmed.”  The elderly Turkey is mild-mannered and productive in the morning but turns erratic, and error-prone in the afternoon.  The young Nippers, on the other hand, is restless and nervous in the morning but settles down in the afternoon.  Does their robotic behavior reflect the mind-numbing nature of industrial work under capitalism?

Into this Pavlovian world enters Bartleby, who starts out as a reliable copier but refuses to participate in the checking of the documents, simply replying “I prefer not to” when called to work by the lawyer.  He then begins to reply in the same manner when asked to run an errand.  Eventually, he refuses to work at all and simply stares at the window at the dark, blank wall.  Unlike the lawyer, who fits comfortably into the world of Wall Street, Bartleby asserts his free will in the extreme, using “passive resistance” to defy the lawyer and his world. 

The lawyer, to his credit, tries every means of persuasion to win Bartleby’s cooperation before finally firing him.  Bartleby, however, refuses to leave the premises.  It seems he has been living there all along.  Rather than resort to calling the police or forcibly removing Bartleby himself, the lawyer takes the extreme measure of moving his office to another site.  But, this action, similar perhaps to Pilate washing his hands of final judgment on Jesus Christ, merely enables the lawyer to avoid taking any responsibility for the man.  When the new occupant of the lawyer’s old office space shows up to insist “you are responsible for the man you left there,” the lawyer, like Peter denying Christ, responds, “the man you allude to is nothing to me…no relation or apprentice of mine that you should hold me responsible for him.”

If these comparisons to Christ seem to be a bit of a stretch, consider that, at one point when the lawyer is debating what to do about Bartleby, he overhears a conversation, which he believes at first is about his indecision but then realizes is actually about the mayoral election being held that day.  In Melville’s day, “election” would have a religious as well as a political meaning.  In the Calvinist theology in which Melville was steeped (http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Herman_Melville) one was predestined to be one of Elect (preordained by God for salvation) or one of the damned.  Is Bartleby a test of the state of the lawyer’s soul?  Is the lawyer one of the Elect or is he damned?  According to Matthew 25: 31-42 Christ will return on Judgment Day and determine who goes to heaven and who to hell based on whether one has treated those in need as if they were Christ himself. 

In the end the lawyer visits Bartleby in prison, where he is found facing a “high wall” among “murderers and thieves.”  Is it significant that Christ was crucified between two thieves?  Is it significant that when the lawyer returns to find Bartleby dead he makes a reference to him being at rest “With kings and counselors” (Job 3:14)? 

For all the compassion that the lawyer feels toward Bartleby, in the end he does not take responsibility for this “least of these” (Matthew 25: 40).  From a realistic perspective, we might say that the lawyer went far beyond what was reasonable to expect by not calling the police on Bartleby or throwing him out forcibly.  Yet, from a Christian perspective, we might say the lawyer utterly failed to meet the test that Christ set for salvation.  Is Melville questioning whether a capitalist society can also be a Christian society?  Or is he questioning whether Christian ethics is realistic and reasonable in the human realm?

If the lawyer, who seems to allow circumstances to determine his actions,  represents the Calvinist belief in predestination (absence of free will), does Bartleby represent the Transcendentalist belief in free will and individual responsibility?  If so, do the two characters represent the extremes to which the two positions can be taken?  Is it fair to condemn the lawyer for failing to meet Christ’s high standard for salvation?  Is it fair to glorify Bartleby for his (selfish?) insistence on individual “preference”?  Is Melville, like Hawthorne (see previous posts Oct. 2012 & May 2013), using Puritan Calvinism to critique romantic Transcendentalism and vice versa? 

For that matter, is Bartleby truly a victim of capitalism or society in general?  Or is he a victim of his own willfulness? 

I find myself intrigued, though, by the idea of Bartleby as a projection of the narrator’s own psyche.  To what extent has the narrator been dehumanized by his acquiescence to his social and economic circumstances? To what extent is it dehumanizing to deny the power of free will to individuals?  Does Bartleby represent the lawyer’s own dehumanization on one hand and his repressed desire to rebel and assert himself on the other?  If Bartleby is a fantastic version of the lawyer’s own psyche, does he take such an extreme form because the lawyer himself is so extremely passive, non-confrontational, and powerless? 

In any case, the story raises profound questions regarding social organization, material vs. spiritual well-being, religion, individualism, ethics, and our responsibility to each other as fellow human beings.

The Scarlet Letter

Margaret Fuller achieved notoriety, not only for her writing career and political advocacy (see previous post), but also for her private life.  While in Italy, in 1848, she bore a son to Giovanni Ossoli, whom she may or may not have married the following year.  The three of them died in a shipwreck just off the coast of New York on their voyage to the U.S.  This tragedy might well have been seen by her contemporaries, and even her family and friends, as God’s punishment for sexual sin.

For Nathaniel Hawthorne Fuller seemed to evoke powerful feelings.  He called her a “great humbug…defective and evil in nature” in his journal and may have had her in mind when he created the character of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance and Hester in his 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter. 

Near the end of “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” Fuller invokes a kind of prophetess:  “And will she not soon appear?—the woman who shall vindicate their birthright for all women; who shall teach them what to claim, and how to use what they obtain?”  At the end of The Scarlet Letter, we are told that Hester had once imagined herself a “prophetess” of women’s future:  “Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a lifelong sorrow.”

Like Fuller, Hester bears a child out of wedlock.  If Fuller’s punishment came from God, however, Hester’s comes from the God-fearing humans of her Puritan community in Massachusetts Bay Colony.  In Hawthorne’s story Hester evolves from “scarlet woman” in the eyes of her community to well-respected, one might almost say revered, wise counselor of women.  Does Hawthorne hold out hope of redemption for the reputation of Margaret Fuller, or does he see her legacy forever tainted by the "scandal" of her private life?  If Hester does represent Margaret Fuller, then the answer, like a lot of those in Hawthorne’s work, would have to be ambiguous. 

The Scarlet Letter, however, is much more than a reflection on Margaret Fuller or on sexual morality or on women’s rights.  It actually constitutes a contrast, even a debate of sorts, between two world views—the Puritan, Biblical world view of the 17^th century setting of the novel and the Romantic, individualist, expressive world view of the early 19^th century—both of which are still very much with us in the 21^st century.

From the Puritan, Biblical perspective, the world is a drama, a cosmic conflict between God and Satan, good and evil, the saved and the damned, heaven and hell.  At the human level God’s “saints” (the saved) are responsible for representing God’s will, enforcing his laws as laid out in the Bible and punishing the sinners, for their own good of course, to elicit their confession, repentance, and salvation.

 Obedience to the Word of God, as interpreted by church leaders, is one’s ultimate responsibility.  Though lip service was given to the “priesthood of all believers” during the Protestant Reformation, those Puritans who sought to interpret the Bible for themselves (Anne Hutchinson) or who advocated for freedom of religion (Roger Williams) were banished. 

Socially one is expected to put one’s obligations to family, church, and community ahead of one’s own personal desires and wishes.  In this sense the Biblical world view upholds a communitarian, rather than an individualist, ethic, but the Puritan obligations were to the orthodox body of belief.  American Indians, Quakers, and any others who did not subscribe to the approved system of belief were considered outcasts, ripe for persecution.

The free individual is not to be trusted because “original sin” had left human nature essentially evil, able to be redeemed only by God’s grace, not by one’s own effort.  In such a world view social control is necessary to maintain order, and self-control, that is to say repression of one’s natural desires, is necessary for sainthood and salvation.

Conversely, from the Romantic, individualistic perspective the world is an organism.  God is a dynamic energy, power, and life force manifesting in nature, which is healthy, good, and trustworthy.  Nature is not just God’s creation; it is God’s body.  It is itself divine.  Human nature, then, participates in the beauty, goodness, and divinity of the natural world.

Ultimate authority is to be found within oneself.  Authenticity, integrity, and self-trust are the highest virtues.  The drama in this world view is not between God and Satan, but between the god-like individual guided by nature and the society which seeks to train, shape, and control the individual into conforming to a pre-determined standard of behavior and belief.

Social authority and power are to be resisted and natural feelings are to be expressed, not repressed.  Freedom of thought and expression are valued, as is the natural sympathy for others, which provides an organic, affective basis for social relations and community, as opposed to the artificial, legalistic basis of the Biblical world view.

The drama of The Scarlet Letter is played out between these two world views, a conflict which is left unresolved at the end, or, if there is any resolution in these terms, it is an affirmation that the truth lies in a middle ground somewhere between the two.

The Biblical world view is represented by the Puritan town that puts the mark of sin, the letter A, on Hester’s bosom and places her on the scaffold with her newborn child to be reviled by her townspeople.  The Romantic world view is represented by the forest, where Hester and Dimmesdale meet in secret, where Hester literally lets down her hair, and where little Pearl can wander freely, though under the watchful eye of her parents.

The three scaffold scenes mark three different aspects of the Biblical perspective: public punishment, private guilt, and public confession (but is it truly confession or merely another form of self-protection and hypocrisy?)  Some spectators claim to have seen a scarlet A on Dimmesdale’s bosom when he pulls back his shirt, heard him confess his long secret sin, and seen him acknowledge his long unrecognized family.  Others claim that he was merely speaking allegorically and that his bosom was as bare and white as the driven snow.  His words, indeed, are highly ambiguous and open to interpretation, making it possible for his fellow Puritans to hear what they want to hear and, for that matter, see what they want to see.  The whole Bible-based narrative of sin--repentance/confession--salvation is cast into doubt.

The forest scene dramatizes the triumph of the Romantic perspective, when Hester and Dimmesdale are reunited, along with their daughter, renew their vows of love, and plan their escape from Puritan oppression to a place where they can live and love openly as a family.  It is there that Hester unburdens Dimmesdale’s guilt-ridden conscience, assuring him of that their love is blessed and that his good works far outnumber his sins, and it is there that Hester removes the scarlet letter and tosses it away.  However, it is also there that little Pearl returns the scarlet letter to her mother, insisting that she wear it, and that the narrator questions the absolute innocence of nature: “Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Naure of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits.”

And the novel denies the two lovers their happy, Romantic ending, for Dimmesdale, unable to overcome his guilt, chooses to make his dramatic, final statement, however ambiguous, on the scaffold with Hester and Pearl before drawing his last breath.

From the Puritan, Biblical perspective Hester is a fallen woman, though capable of redemption.  Her story is a cautionary tale.  To the Romantic, she is a natural woman, whose free expression is thwarted by an oppressive and repressive society.  Her story is the age-old scapegoat narrative in which she unjustly bears the punishment for others’ secret sins.

Similarly, from the former view Pearl is an “imp,” tainted not only by original sin, but by that of her earthly parents, while from the latter she is an innocent child of nature, unjustly treated as an outcast.  The Puritans see Dimmesdale as either a sinful, but just, saint (assuming he confessed at the end) or as a spotless spiritual leader taking others’ sins on his own head (assuming he spoke allegorically), whereas the Romantics see him as a repressed, tormented soul, unable to break free from the bonds of his misguided religion.  Chillingworth, to the Puritans would be a just punisher, whereas to the Romantics he is a villain.

Neither world view is allowed to triumph in the novel.  The Biblical view is cruel, intolerant, and hypocritical, while the Romantic view is self-indulgent, permissive, and naïve in its unqualified trust in the goodness of human nature.  Both are self-righteous.  Wisdom is to be found in the middle ground of humility, self-discipline, forgiveness, and sympathy.  Communitarianism must respect individual rights and freedoms; individualism must temper itself and value the well-being of others, social cohesion, and the common good.  Tradition must bend to women’s rights, and women’s demands must be mediated by social reality.  Margaret Fuller deserves redemption but cannot escape the judgment of her peers.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Speaking of individualism, Emersonian Transcendentalism, and women’s rights (see previous post), Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) should surely be noted.

When Emerson wrote “Self-Reliance” one senses he was writing for men.  Self-reliance is “manly” and dependence is “effeminate.”  Margaret Fuller, however, taking her inspiration from the Transcendental roots of Emerson’s essay, called on women to develop their independence and on men to treat women as equals.

However gendered the traditional concept of God, the Transcendental “Oversoul,” suggesting as it does the Hindu concept of Brahma, was more abstract and universal.  Emerson’s theory of two selves, the social self and the “aboriginal self,” made it possible to separate gender, a social category, from the Transcendental selfhood or “soul.” 

Thus Margaret Fuller undergirds her call for women’s social and legal equality with an appeal for Woman’s need “as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely and unimpeded, to unfold such powers as were given her when we left our common home,” that “home” being our source in the Universal “One.”

At times, Fuller sounds like an essentialist, capitalizing “Woman” (and “Man”) , referring to “Femality,” and presenting “male and female” as a “radical dualism.” Yet, she argues that the “feminine element…is no more the order of nature that it should be incarnated pure in any form” and asserts that “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” Even the ancients are invoked as recognizing the fluidity of gender identity:  “Man partakes of the feminine in the Apollo, Woman of the masculine as Minerva.” 

As transcendental souls, women are the equal of men and as capable of self-reliance (which Fuller also refers to as “self-dependence,” “self-respect,” and “self-help”) as any man.  As for relationships, she says, “Union is only possible to those who are units,” and she strikes a modern note when she calls for the wife to be an “equal partner” with her husband.

Fuller’s faith in transcendental individualism, however, while it gave her the confidence to pursue her own independence, did not prevent her from speaking out for social justice, not only for women, but also for slaves, Native Americans,  the poor, the sick, convicts, and immigrants.  Her own freedom was not to be enjoyed at the expense of her fellow Americans.  As the first American “foreign correspondent” she openly supported the revolutionary movements in Europe in the 1840’s.  Her life and writings, unlike those of Emerson and Ayn Rand (see previous post), offer strong testimony to the compatibility of individualism and communitarianism.

"Self-Reliance" and Anthem

I was thinking I should do a blog post on Ralph Waldo Emerson since I studied his work so much as both an undergraduate and graduate student in American literature, not to mention my affiliation with Unitarian Universalism since 1979.  “Self-Reliance” seemed like the best known essay to take another look at.  At the same time, Paul Ryan was being nominated as Mitt Romney’s running mate and I was hearing a lot about Ayn Rand, who I have never read.  I started wondering if there was any connection between Emerson and Rand besides being known for promoting individualism.  There seems to be some discussion of whether Ayn Rand misrepresented Emerson in one reference to him (http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/essays/emerson.html) and others have compared the two (noting perhaps more differences than similarities). 

Curious, I read an early example of Rand’s fiction, a dystopian novella called Anthem, which kind of reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984.  Others have also compared those two writers, again seeming to find more contrasts than similarities.  Both Rand and Orwell are critiquing totalitarianism, but Rand from a capitalist and Orwell from a democratic socialist stance. 

In Anthem, the narrator, like all members of his collectivist society, refers to himself as “We, “the first-person “I” having been expunged from the language.  When, upon escaping from this society, the narrator discovers manuscripts from an earlier age, he learns the word “I” and promptly rejects the use of “We”: “I am done with the monster of ‘We,’ the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood, and shame.”  In the end, the narrator chooses “the word that is to be my beacon and my banner…The sacred word: EGO.”

This radical individualism is strangely contradicted by the narrator’s need for a lover and life partner, who is pregnant with his child.  One wonders if the word “we” would apply to his family and what would happen to that unit if every member truly placed “ego” ahead of family relationships.  The narrator’s vision calls for him to invite his “friends” to “follow” and join him in building a new future:  “Here on this mountain, I and my sons and my chosen friends shall build our new land and our fort.”  Again, one wonders how one sustains friendship if ego rules, and how successful this venture will be without some degree of cooperation and communitarianism, not to mention governance. 

Perhaps Rand’s answer would be that so long as relationships, group affiliation, and communal “belonging” is chosen, then, of course, ego naturally adjusts to that choice, but if it is enforced by coercion, law, tradition, or obligation, then ego is bound to assert itself, for true freedom means that “each man will be free to exist for his own sake.”

 One passage in Anthem particularly reminded me of “Self-Reliance.”  The fictional narrator states:

 "I do not surrender my treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit. I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of these is freedom."

 

In “Self-Reliance” Emerson similarly states:

"Then again, do not tell me as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. …your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies; though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have to manhood to withhold."

Self-reliance did not prevent Emerson from suing his first wife’s family for his inheritance and living with relatives after his resignation from the ministry and a tour of Europe, though he did go on to make his own living as a traveling lecturer and writer. Likewise, Ayn Rand, for all her anti-government views, collected Social Security and applied for Medicare.

Perhaps a more thorough study of Rand’s works would reveal more complexity, but Anthem offers a caricature of the choice between individualism and communitarianism.  The latter is reduced to complete tyranny of society over the individual and the former is elevated to the absolute pursuit of individual happiness, regardless of the expense to social cohesion and the common good.  One would think that a devotee of “rational egoism” would have some appreciation for a moderate middle ground, but, no, at least in Anthem, it seems to be either-or.

By comparison, ‘Self-Reliance” is a study in intricacy and nuance.  For one thing, Emerson distinguishes between the social self, formed by conformity to society and consistency to the past self, and the “aboriginal Self,” which, unlike Rand’s materialistic “Ego,” is part and parcel of the Universal Spirit or “Oversoul,” a concept the atheistic Rand would not be able to countenance.  Far from calling for the elevation of the material Ego, Emerson calls for the liberation of that “aboriginal” spiritual Self from the constraints of materialism and socialization.  And it seems that when one is in touch with that spiritual Self, one loses all individualism and participates in a shared universal truth.  Thus, whether you agree with it or not, Emerson at least has a theory that would provide the basis for communitarianism and social cohesion, a basis in human nature and shared understanding, not governmental power and social control.

In an Emersonian world, it seems, individuals would free themselves from coercion, law, tradition, and obligation, not to mention their own false selves, only to find common cause with each other in social relationships based in authenticity, integrity, mutuality, and spiritual bonds.

Neither Rand nor Emerson show evidence of having any understanding of systemic social injustices such as economic disparity, inherited wealth or poverty, racism, sexism, ableism, or, perish the thought, heterosexism.  They seem to assume that all individuals function on a level playing field with equal ability and resources to assert their individuality.  No doubt the message of individual empowerment is important to the economically disadvantaged and socially subordinated, but Rand fails to allow for the role that material and social inequality play in individual opportunity and achievement, and Emerson fails to recognize a relationship between material well-being and spiritual power.

Though Emerson eschewed collective action, for fear it might compromise his independence, he eventually became more active in the abolitionist movement, suggesting perhaps that he did come to realize that (1) the concept of self-reliance is pretty meaningless to a slave, and (2) in the case of such material conditions as slavery, collective social action may be necessary, not only to material but also to spiritual freedom.

Although Emerson used gendered language in describing self-reliance as “manly,” he also supported the women’s rights movement, describing it as “no whim, but an organic impulse…a right and proper inquiry…honoring to the age.”  One wonders if Ayn Rand would acknowledge any debt to the collective women’s action that earned her the right to speak in public, vote, and participate in the political process, as she did when she worked on behalf of Wendell Wilkie’s presidential campaign in 1940.

Where does this leave us?  It seems both Emerson and Rand’s lives and works are rife with contradictions.  Sometimes they seem to be sounding a similar note, though overall their versions of individualism are quite different, Rand openly espousing individual action based on “the virtue of selfishness” and Emerson defining self-reliance as “self-trust,” more an affirmation of self-esteem and self-worth than a rationale for the active pursuit of self-interest without regard for the well-being of others. 

Despite Emerson’s renunciation of the ministry, his philosophy of individualism really has a religious and moral basis, whereas Rand’s philosophy seems to be based on secular materialism and individual self-interest.

 

Emerson seems to be asserting the value of one's individual self-interest as at least equal to that of others, whereas Rand seems to be asserting it as superior to that of others.