Emerson, Mary Moody (1774–1863)

American essayist, diarist, and thinker, who played a crucial role in the intellectual development of her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson as a Transcendentalist thinker. Born on August 25, 1774, in Concord, Massachusetts; died in Brooklyn, New York, on May 1, 1863; daughter of William Emerson and Phebe (Bliss) Emerson; had four brothers and sisters.

Mary Moody Emerson's birth coincided with the birth of the United States as a free nation. When she was one year old, the battle of Concord took place literally outside the windows of her home, the Old Manse, which still stands as a spacious two-story clapboard house near the North Bridge on Monument Street in Concord, Massachusetts. The death of her cleric father in 1776 and her mother's remarriage in 1780 left Mary to be reared by her aunt and uncle on a farm in Malden, Massachusetts. The elderly couple was desperately poor, and young Mary, expected to get by on a legacy of ten dollars a year "for clothes and charity," grew up in an atmosphere of solitude and material scarcity. But her restless young mind had been stimulated by reading the Bible, several volumes of sermons, and a battered book lacking covers and title page that she would only years later discover to have been John Milton's classic Paradise Lost.

Mary Emerson's youth was austere and even bleak, since the prevailing theology of New England in her day was one of unrelenting, unforgiving Calvinism. Except for a few years' attendance at the local school, she was completely self-taught. She remained a fiercely devout Calvinist, while she was intellectually stimulated by the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, Locke, Coleridge and Byron. Her eccentric behavior—her self-described "oddities"—can likely be traced to these years, when she "was driven to find Nature her companion and solace," writes Ralph Waldo Emerson.

After the deaths of her aunt and uncle, she inherited their farm and sold it in order to live off the proceeds the rest of her life in a state of penurious independence. Although she had an offer of marriage, Mary turned it down. From this point on, she was a traveler, living in many places in New England. For years, she lived with her sister Rebecca Emerson at her farm, "Elm Vale," in South Waterford, Maine, enjoying the stunning countryside of that region. Mary Emerson would spend much of her life boarding with friends and relatives, seeking places to live where she would have minimal responsibilities, thus being free to carry on her "vocation" of reading, writing and engaging in lively conversations and debates.

Mary Moody Emerson supervised with inexorable zeal the education and intellectual development of her four nephews, the sons of her deceased brother William Emerson (1769–1811). Convinced that "they were born to be educated," she saw to it that major obstacles in the way of their education were removed. She believed that, through vigorous debate and challenges to the intellect, their minds and personalities would grow up to become strong and independent. Particularly attached to young Ralph Waldo Emerson, she made every effort to influence his intellectual growth. An indefatigable conversationalist and letter writer, Mary Emerson had gifts of eloquence, sharp wit and original metaphors which played a significant role in helping her nephew form his own unique literary style.

Throughout his long life (1803–1882), Ralph Waldo Emerson revealed his deep respect for his aunt, seeing her as a living bond between himself and his ancestors. From his earliest years, he recognized and appreciated her religious impulses. Although she chose to break with Ralph Waldo over his increasingly radical theological views (even refusing to live in the same town with him), in time she did reconcile with him, and was in fact secretly proud of her nephew for the fame he had achieved through his lectures and writings. As late as the early 1870s, years after her death, he continued to read and draw intellectual enrichment from her papers, and many of his celebrated essays were indebted to her, both stylistically and thematically.

Although loved and appreciated by her family and a few close friends who included Henry David Thoreau, Mary Emerson defended and prized her independence. In 1817, she wrote of her commitment to a life of freedom: "give me that oh God—it is holy independence—it is honor & immortality—dearer than friends, wealth & influence … I bless thee for giving me to see the advantage of loneliness." Both a passion for introspection and an appetite for intellectual stimulation and lively debate characterized her personality.

A large selection of Emerson's letters to her family was recently published, and Nancy Craig Simmons makes a persuasive argument that Mary Moody Emerson's letters served to "transform the minor genre of letter writing into a major vehicle for free discussion." Unlike traditional family letters which might include trivial news and gossip, Emerson's letters dealt with moral debates, metaphysical controversy, and issues of world importance. She could at times combine Transcendental concerns with practical philosophizing, as when she informed the recently married Ann Sargent Gage , "Beware, my young friend, how you go to keeping house on this ball of dust so as to lay up treasure in Heaven. However we theorise contemptuously of earth, it gets dominion & the grandure of the soul lies beneath rubbish, Pardon the caution."

While she was flinty and intellectually irrepressible within the circles of her friends and family, Emerson's eccentric appearance and comments in public appalled most strangers and conservative New England townsfolk. Her "macabre humors" as well as her "brutal, sardonic candor" in most matters did not endear her to the conventionally minded of her contemporaries. In his classic pen portrait of Mary Moody Emerson, "The Cassandra of New England," Van Wyck Brooks provided many examples of her outrageous verbal assaults on both friends and strangers. She stood out among others due to her height (4′3″), her predilection for dressing in a shroud of her own making, and her customary brooding on death ("O dear worms! Most valuable companions!"). Although Emerson rhetorically invited death, confiding to her diary how she yearned for a "tedious indisposition" to take a fatal turn that "would open the cool sweet grave," in reality she remained a woman tenaciously attached to life.

Underneath the bizarre exterior she had created, Emerson was a woman of great intellectual and personal integrity. Having once defined herself as a "puny pilgrim whose sole talent was sympathy," she remained on course throughout her long life, searching for God and the myriad truths that help explain both the divine and human aspects of the universe. Those who knew her well chose to ignore her eccentricities, as did Henry David Thoreau, who recognized that she was "really and perseveringly interested to know what thinkers think." Toward the end of her life, Mary Moody Emerson mellowed, becoming kinder and happier. But she never lost her mystic sense of wonder, writing that to be "Alive with God is enough—'tis rapture."

The last four years of Emerson's life were spent in Williamsburg, now part of the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City, where she was cared for by her devoted niece Hannah Haskins Parsons . After her death on May 1, 1863, her remains were taken to her hometown of Concord, where she was buried in the Emerson family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

sources:

Allen, Gay Wilson. Waldo Emerson: A Biography. NY: Penguin, 1982.

Brooks, Van Wyck. "The Cassandra of New England," in Scribner's Magazine. Vol. 81. No. 10. February 1927, pp. 125–129.

Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

Christopherson, Johan Arthur. "The Post-Christian Turn: A Study of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Sermons" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1998).

Cole, Phyllis. "The Advantage of Loneliness: Mary Moody Emerson's Almanacks, 1802–1855," in Harvard English Studies. Vol. 10, 1982, pp. 1–32.

——. "The Divinity School Address of Mary Moody Emerson: Women's Silence and Women's Speech in the American Puritan Tradition," in Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Vol. 16. No. 2. December 1985–January, 1986, pp. 4–6.

——. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History. NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Feltenstein, Rosalie. "Mary Moody Emerson: The Gadfly of Concord," in American Quarterly. Vol. 5. No. 3. Fall 1953, pp. 231–246.

Mott, Wesley T., ed. Biographical Dictionary of Transcendentalism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

——, ed. Encyclopedia of Transcendentalism. West-port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Myerson, Joel, ed. Studies in the American Renaissance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986.

Simmons, Nancy Craig, ed. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Williams, David Ross. "Wilderness Lost: New England in the Jaws of an Angry God" (Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1982).

John Haag , Assistant Professor of History, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia