2 - Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Family

Summary

Ralph Waldo Emerson's birth into a lineage of New England clergy - seven generations stretching back to the Puritan migration - has long offered food for thought to biographers and historians. To his earliest interpreters, genealogy itself had explanatory value: James Elliot Cabot could claim that Emerson received from his father “the blood of several lines of 'painful preachers.'” Recent scholars have returned to the family not as a blood influence so much as a cultural, psychological, and textual field around Emerson's written work. Most important, his writing itself includes a scrutiny of family heritage. As Emerson commented in 1841, after eight pages of journalizing on his aunt, brothers, and ancestry, “I doubt if the interior & spiritual history of New England could be truelier told than through the exhibition of family history such as this, the picture of this group of M.[ary] M.[oody] E.[merson] & the boys, mainly Charles” (JMN 7: 446). The memoir that he proposes here never took full shape, but occasional addresses before and after 1841 drew from the well of family memory, as even more deeply did the ongoing, six-decade record of thought in his journal.