Mary Moody Emerson: The Godmother of Transcendentalism BY VICTOR CURRAN
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The Marquis de Lafayette visited Portland, Maine during a grand tour of the United States in 1825. When Mary Moody Emerson—fifty years old at the time— was introduced to the aging hero of the American Revolution, she told him she was “‘in arms’ at the Concord Fight.”1 It was a joke, but as always, her wit had an edge of truth. She was indeed present for the “shot heard ’round the world,” but the “arms” she was in were her those of her mother, clutching eight-month-old Mary as the battle raged 150 yards from her window at the Old Manse. That battle set both America and Mary Emerson on steep paths to independence. The next year, Mary’s father, Rev. William Emerson, died while serving as an Army
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chaplain and her mother, Phebe Bliss Emerson, suddenly found herself a widow with five children. Overwhelmed, she sent two-year-old Mary to live with relatives in Malden, Massachusetts, a time the little girl would recall as her “infant exile” and “invariably gloomy.”2 The family lived in the shadow of poverty, and Mary was put to work as what historian Robert Gross calls a “domestic drudge.”3 One of her chores “was to watch for the approach of the deputy-sheriff, who might come to confiscate the spoons or arrest the uncle for debt.”4 This hard-luck childhood formed her selfreliant character. Her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson would later write, “Destitution is the muse of her genius,”5 but she learned to
N.C. Wyeth painting of Mary sitting with an admiring young Henry Thoreau. Created to illustrate the book Men of Concord, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1936. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library
read, and in books she escaped to a world of inspiration and imagination. As a teenager, Mary was called back to Concord, but her mother—now remarried and raising a new family—set Mary to work at what she called “duties which tried me.” She found respite in Concord’s new Charitable Library, co-founded by her stepfather, Reverend Ezra Ripley. There she began to discover “a religion of rational proof and . . . understanding the physical universe as a revelation of God.” She believed God was both “good and knowable.”6 A decade before her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson was born, she was envisioning transcendentalism. Mary wrote down her thoughts, at first in a journal she called her Almanack, and later in a literary magazine, the Monthly Anthology, that her brother William published while he served as minister of Boston’s First Parish. Inspired by books like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Germaine de Staël’s The Influence of Literature on Society, she stressed the importance of nature and imagination in ways that anticipated both transcendentalism and Romantic literature. In the religious debates of the early 1800s, Mary allied herself with neither side. She blended the intuitive, enthusiastic religious experience of her Calvinist ancestors with the benevolent, forgiving God and appeal to reason of the cool-headed Unitarians. In her own words, “I danced to the music of my own imajanation.”7 When her brother William died in 1811, Mary stepped in to help care for his children, including seven-year-old Ralph Waldo. Over the years that followed, “Emerson derived much of his character from his aunt,”8 according to Elizabeth Peabody (who also helped guide Waldo on the road to transcendentalism). Her next protégé was Sarah Alden Bradford, who would later marry Mary’s half-brother Samuel Ripley and become a respected scholar herself. Sarah recalled that
