The Women at the Concord Tombs

Ralph Waldo Emerson is buried on Authors Ridge, a hilly section of the large cemetery on the edge of Concord, Massachusetts. There are 20 graves in the Emerson family plot. Nearby are buried the Alcotts, the Hawthornes, and the Thoreaus. Emerson’s grave is marked by an imposing rock bearing a plaque. Two smaller stones stand just six inches to the right and left of Emerson’s rock: they identify the graves of his wife, Lidian, and their daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson.

Ellen’s stone is inscribed with words that commend her for her strong Christian convictions:

Her life was happy in that
“Among the scenes of real life, she wrought Upon [the] plan that pleased her childish thought.”
She cherished the old Religion. It was her Guide through each day and the Temple to which in solitude she withdrew. The joy of her Father and Mother and the comfort of their last years, her love embraced the widest circle of kindred and friends …

Of a fine mind, she cared more for persons than books, and her faith drew out the best in those around her.

One book that Ellen Tucker Emerson did care deeply about was the Bible. For most of her adult life she was a Sunday-school teacher at Concord’s First Parish Church. She also belonged to a Bible class—two of them for a while—and she eagerly promoted the study of the Scriptures in the Emerson family: “All four of us took hold and studied Galatians Saturday evening,” she reported in a letter written in 1882, “and with Uncle George we read Romans xi on Sunday evening. That was glorious!”

Ellen Tucker Emerson was a Christian Unitarian, an all but vanished breed these days, but in her time an identifiable variety of Unitarianism. In theological terms this means that her Christology was Arian, a view of Jesus more akin to that of the Jehovah’s Witnesses than to present-day liberal Methodism. She believed that Jesus was the Savior sent from heaven—not quite a member of the Godhead but of a status higher than the angels—and that a person needed to trust in him in order to be saved. One of her favorite spiritual books was The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales. She also held Dwight L. Moody in high esteem: “How do you feel about Moody & Sankey?” she asked one of her correspondants. “They interest Concord very much, and the tone of the Christian Register about them is so friendly we are delighted.”

She was not a scholar, but neither was she an intellectual lightweight. While the 1,300 pages of her published letters1 provide much uninteresting detail about people and things, there is also clear evidence of a lively and observant mind capable of acute observations and critical insights. Even though her religious convictions were very orthodox, she was not content with an unexamined faith. When she accompanied her father to Paris in 1873, she wrote home to her mother about the Protestant church service she and Mr. Emerson attended: “Oh! if I could only talk French, with what eagerness should I go to the Bible-class, if it is conducted on the same principle as ours, so as to ask him where he got certain views and why he should understand this and that as he does, for he gives a turn entirely new to me to various things.”

Ellen was deeply devoted to her parents. In her published biography2 of her mother, Lidian Jackson Emerson, she refers regularly to her mother’s solid Christian commitments.3 Although A. W. Jackson, who penned her eulogy in the Christian Register, claimed to have heard her quarrel with her father’s published views “as frankly as she would Addison or Montaigne,”4 Ellen leaves those differences mostly unstated in her correspondance. They are clearly implied, though.

Emerson’s official reason for leaving the ministry in 1832 was his refusal to administer the Lord’s Supper, a rite whose theological basis he had come to reject. After joining the church in 1867, Ellen reports: “Father is surprised, and says he should feel as if he abridged his boundless freedom if it were himself.” But she sees the move as adding something important to her life: “It gives me access indeed to the Communion table.”

In 1881, a year before her father’s death, she writes in some detail about her disappointment with trends in Unitarian thought. Her chief concern is with departures from a Christology that views Jesus in exalted terms: “How can I like to receive a minister of a modern kind who is distinctly persuaded that Christ was a man, only a man, and that, as two ministers have said to me, he was valuable to the human race, ‘exactly as Washington was, as a moral example.’ ” She is “only pained,” she adds, by the preaching of ministers who do not realize that “the laity are hungry and find that the food the ministers offer does not satisfy.”

Ellen Tucker Emerson was not the only daughter of a Concord literary family to draw spiritual strength from the “old Religion.” In 1898 Hawthorne’s daughter Rose, within months of the death of her husband (from whom she had been separated), became a Dominican nun, and dedicated the rest of her life, as Sister (and later Mother) Mary Alphonsa, to caring for cancer patients. In her earlier years she had embraced Catholicism, having decided that Unitarianism was a “chilling void.”5 Soon after her conversion to the Roman church, she had a vision of the crucified Christ, who told her of his love for her, leaving her with such confidence that she had begun “to love Him only, as I have prayed to do for three years . …Jesus loves me, and everything is simplified and exalted.”6

I have visited Authors Ridge a half-dozen times. Some of my favorite heretics are buried there. I think it is a good thing for a Christian to have some favorite heretics. Not that I am convinced that the world is a better place, all things considered, because heretics have existed. That is a question of theodicy that I have not settled in my mind. But heresy is a fact of life, and given that there are plenty of heretics to choose from, one might as well have a few favorites.

One can disagree strongly with someone and yet find it helpful to wrestle on a regular basis with the particular challenges that this person poses to one’s own way of seeing things. That is how I feel about the writers buried on Authors Ridge. I disagree with the thoughts they set forth, but I find it profitable to keep thinking about why I so strongly oppose what they have written. When I walk among their graves, I find myself experiencing both awe and sadness.

Emerson especially has fascinated me ever since first I read him in my late teens. I resonate with Matthew Arnold’s assessment of how Emerson influenced his life. Early on in his intellectual pilgimage, Arnold testified, he found Emerson to be “the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,” and he admired his “hopeful, serene, beautiful temper.” Eventually he grew weary of Emerson’s writings, even dismissing him at one point as one of the “moral desperadoes” of the world of letters. Nonetheless, he later sent a copy of one of his books to Emerson, accompanied by a note in which he told the American, “I can never forget the refreshing and quickening effect your writings had upon me at a critical time of my life.”7

“Refreshing and quickening” captures my own early experience with Emerson. I read his essays as a student at an evangelical college where strong “holiness” themes abounded. One professor there, who taught a small seminar restricted to senior English majors, was my all-time favorite teacher. She was a legend on the campus, combining a deep spirituality—it was said that she prayed for hours each morning for missionaries around the world—with a passion for American literature. I could never quite figure out how it all fit together in her mind; nor did one dare ask her direct questions of this sort. But she obviously found ways of putting together her deep love for Jesus with a profound admiration for Emerson. She always began each class with a fervent prayer, typically singling out each member of the Trinity with expressions of adoration. Then she would open her eyes, take a deep breath and begin discussing “Self-Reliance” or “The Over-soul.”

The college was in a rural setting, and I regularly went for long walks. I am not normally given to nature-loving.I seldom find myself longing for a lost Eden; my spiritual reveries are more likely to be anticipations of a Holy City.In my college days, my long walks were typically occasions for thinking about ideas or relationships or for conversations with a good friend. But for a brief time, it was different; reading Emerson made it possible for me to focus directly on nature in memorable—albeit not lasting—ways.

In his Between Man and Man, Martin Buber tells about a time when, as an 11-year-old, he experienced a “deeply stirring happening” while taking care of a horse on his grandparents’ estate. Stroking the horse’s mane and feeling its “life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me.” But in another, equally mysterious moment, Buber suddenly became aware of his own hand—and “something had changed; it was no longer the same thing.” He never recovered the earlier moment.8

My own experience, when I took long walks during the time that I was reading Emerson, was much like Buber’s. I can’t recapture what happened during those few weeks in my late teens. I do have moments in my life—quite regularly, actually—that I would describe as “mystical.” But these typically come to me in worship settings, or during times of private devotion; they happen when my focus is on God or matters relating to how God relates to human beings.

My “Emersonian” experience was different. It came from an intense attention to nature itself—more specifically, to grassy hillsides, flowers, trees, leaves lying on a wooden path. Not only have I not had that kind of experience since; I do not even know how to prepare the way for its retrieval. The fact that it occurred at one time in my life I see as a gift. And while Emerson was not himself the Giver, reading him was the occasion for seeking the gift.

Again, I have difficulty holding together my feelings of gratitude toward Emerson and my strong intellectual disagreements with him. It helps, though, to have examples of others who seem to have achieved an integration of sorts. My college teacher is one example, but she is easily outclassed in the project by Ellen Tucker Emerson. I am grateful for the testimony to “the old Religion” inscribed on the gravestone that stands alongside Emerson’s.

A picture of Emerson’s gravestone dominates the cover of John Carlos Rowe’s 1997 book, At Emerson’s Tomb. The black-and-white photograph does not show the women’s grave markers on either side. It is bordered in black, giving the dust jacket a rather gloomy cast, which is not altogether misleading. Authors Ridge stands on the rim of Sleepy Hollow, a wooded area where the nineteenth-century Concord literati were fond of taking their strolls. While there is some color, especially from the autumn leaves, the grays of natural rocks and grave markers almost always dominate the scene.

Rowe is not interested in Authors Ridge as such. “At Emerson’s Tomb” is also the title of his lead chapter, which is headed by a quotation from Emerson’s “Immortality,” telling us that death is a natural event, and that it is “a progress in opinion” to focus on the present experience of being alive. Rowe’s aim is to cast doubt on a reading of the American literary tradition that focuses primarily on how subsequent writers interacted with the Emersonian agenda of “aesthetic dissent”; that is, the insistence that an intense but “distanced” reflection on our lived experiences can generate important programs of social reform. Rowe is convinced that the works of “canonical” American writers—a company that includes Emerson, Poe, Melville, Whitman, Henry James, Twain, and Faulkner—had the effect of marginalizing other profound literary voices, such as those of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, who were articulating alternative perspectives on issues of race and gender.

Nor is it enough, Rowe argues, to enlarge the canon to include these other voices, or to destroy the canon as such by promoting a plurality of literary traditions. Scholars who propose those kinds of strategies are content to let Emerson be, to allow his writings to stand untouched alongside of others. Rowe has larger designs.

“[O]ur enduring literature,” he insists, “must meet the demands of political reform.” And not just “any sort of political reform.” The kind of “literary work that aspires to undo democratic principles and yearns nostalgically for the strict, albeit arbitrary, hierarchies of a vanished aristocracy, certainly does not belong to the traditions of American literature that ought to provide a cultural foundation for utopian ideals of equal justice and opportunity.”9

Emerson does not pass Rowe’s reformist test. He wants us to interpret Emerson’s work “in terms of the reactionary unconscious his idealism produced in Poe, in the transcendentalist impasses ironized by Melville, and in the entrepreneurial ‘good will’ (and historical ignorance) of [Henry] James’ Christopher Newman”—all of these being manifestations, in Rowe’s scheme, of nostalgic yearnings for lost hierarchies. This does not mean, however, that we should banish Emerson from the list of writers whose efforts have enduring literary worth. We can treat him, not as an inhabitant of “a museum of distinguished and discrete worthies,” but as a contributor to an ongoing tradition whose members share “a mutual dependence on each other for a nuanced account of literature’s contribution to political reform.”

What we need to do to accomplish this, Rowe argues, is to engage in a new kind of critical and creative reading of the classic American writers, forcing them into “a productive conversation” with other writers who, while ignored by them, were challenging the hierarchies of race and gender that they themselves opposed, when they did so at all, with much timidity. We do this by inventing “connections, complementaries, and supplementaries that may in fact have not been imaginable across the borders of the racial and gender divisions of nineteenth-century America.”10

While Rowe accuses Emerson of both racial and gender insensitivity, he concentrates primarily on Emerson’s views of race. He finds in Frederick Douglass a helpful conversation partner for Emerson on this topic. There is no corresponding writer mentioned in Emerson’s case for the dialogue on gender, although Rowe obviously believes that the gender discussion should also take place.

I have some candidates for the dialogue on gender: the women of the families buried on Authors Ridge. Some of them thought much about gender topics. Here, for example, is Mother Alphonsa/Rose Hawthorne on the subject:

There is a tenacity about a woman’s convictions, when she consents to have them, that holds better than her masculine rival’s. I believe that a society established by American women can never become feeble, if it is simple, religiously painstaking, dauntless for the relief of the poor, and as strong in extent and support as an army.11

It would be interesting to imagine what Emerson and Hawthorne would say, if forced, by the sort of “productive conversation” Rowe encourages us to invent, to engage their daughters’ convictions. My own interests in constructing such a dialogue would not correspond exactly to Rowe’s. While I do not find myself yearning for lost hierarchies in general, there is at least one hierarchical scheme that I hang onto for dear life: the “higher-lower” relationship between Creator and the creaturely.

And the fact is, if Rowe is really serious about the dialogue he proposes, he will not be able to avoid talking about that particular relationship either. Frederick Douglass, his chosen interlocutor for Emerson, challenged the slavery system, not on the basis of a cosmic egalitarianism, but specifically by appealing to the authority of a transcendent God. He made this clear in his letter to his former master: “What you are, I am,” he wrote. “You are a man and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings.”12

In attempting to create the dialogue with the Concord women, I have no illusions about effecting a postmortem conversion of Emerson and his colleagues to orthodoxy—any more than Rowe hopes for a change of heart in staging his reformist dialogue. The intention in each case is to reach for new understandings of the topics that these writers explored. There is a precedent, though, in beginning the conversation within their own families.

Alfred Kazin, in his recent discussion of Emerson’s religious views, twice mentions the fact that Emerson came from a long line of preachers13 — a piece of biographical detail that Kazin obviously takes to be relevant for understanding the forces that shaped Emerson’s mind and heart. There is nothing new in this insistence that the men buried on Authors Ridge were in a conversation of sorts with their literal ancestors. Perhaps the time has come to imagine what it would have been like for them to participate in a serious conversation with their own offspring.

Richard J. Mouw is president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

1.The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, edited by Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent State Univ. Press, 1982), 2 vols.

2. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, edited by Delores Bird Carpenter (Michigan State Univ. Press, 1992).

3. Just after I submitted this essay for publication, I read Wilfred M. McClay’s interesting article in the May 1998 First Things, “Mr. Emerson’s Tombstone.” McClay offers some insightful observations about Authors Ridge, and also mentions the two graves that flank Emerson’s. However, McClay sees the women’s gravestones as symbolizing the ways in which Emerson relied, in spite of his professed “self-reliance,” on Concord’s social support systems. My own purpose here is to show how the women were not merely silent helpers; they had minds of their own, and they strongly disagreed with Emerson on key points.

4. Quoted by Delores Bird Carpenter, Introduction to The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, p. xxi.

5. Quoted in Patricia Dunlavy Valenti, To Myself a Stranger: A Biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1991), p. 104.

6. Dunlavy Valenti, To Myself, pp. 104, 144.

7. Quoted in Nicholas Murray, A Life of Matthew Arnold (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 44, 205.

8. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 22-23

9. John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), p. 247.

10. Rowe, Emerson’s Tomb, pp. 250-51.

11. Quoted by Dunlavy Valenti, p. 167.

12. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), p. 423.

13. Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), pp. 13, 41. Kazin can’t seem to get the number of preacher-forebears straight, though; the first reference mentions nine generations, the second eight.