Self-Reliant women in Frances Harper's writings.

Publication: ATQ (The American Transcendental Quarterly)

Publication Date: 01-SEP-05

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"I do not think," said Mrs. Stillman, "that we can begin too early to teach our boys to be manly and self-respecting, and our girls to be useful and self-reliant." (Iola Leroy 253)

In "Self-Reliance" Emerson undoubtedly envisions a self-reliant man, not a self-reliant woman. "Man is his own star," the essay opens, and it never wavers in its assumption that the self-reliant person Emerson invokes is male. While at one moment Emerson writes that "we want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state" (32), his essay does little to imagine or name such women. His models for self-reliance--such as Moses, Plato, Milton, Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Copernicus, Newton, Hermit Anthony, Luther, Wesley, Clarkson, Scipio and others--are all men. Throughout the essay, Emerson uses the terms "every man" and "a man," and the "I" of the essay announces that he "will shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me" (22). Indeed, Emerson underscores the maleness of his self-reliant man when he labels the "decorous and prudent rage" of the "cultivated classes" who might oppose the self-reliant man with "their feminine rage" (24). As Carolyn Sorisio argues, "the radical implications of [Emerson's] philosophy are undercut when considered in relation to women by his consistent use of gendered language that highlights difference" (116). To Sorisio, "'Self-Reliance' ... exhibits Emerson's suspicion of the feminine/domestic realm's potential tyranny" and its ability to "[entrap] the young male in stifling societal roles" (122). Emerson imagines that the self-reliant man, while staying "the chaste husband to one wife" (31), may need to assert himself against his family in order to be on the side of truth rather than appearances. "Self-Reliance" is without a doubt written from man to man, underscoring that self-reliance is an ideal of manhood.

This manly ideal is, to a large degree, seen in opposition to family as well as sympathy and charity. Emerson emphasizes the individualism of the self-reliant man and questions his social ties and obligations. When the speaker of the essay declares that he will "shun father and mother and wife and brother when my genius calls me," he begins a longer, somewhat vexed and ironic inquiry into his relation to others:

Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, 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. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but 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 thousandfold 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 the manhood to withhold. (22)

Emerson does not imagine his self-reliant man to be entirely on his own--indeed even when the "I" of the essay declares to his family that he will live according to his truth and not their rules, he always envisions taking care of them (31). But, responding to the foolish philanthropist, he does define self-reliance and manhood in opposition to charity and sympathy. The essay wonders: to whom does the self-reliant man belong and whom should he support? There is no easy answer since spiritual affinity is hard to define and to find--as Emerson also makes abundantly clear in his beautiful and meandering essay on "Friendship." While he will go to prison for those with whom he shares such spiritual affinity, Emerson's self-reliant man confesses that he needs to resist the temptation of the central nineteenth-century (feminine) concepts of sympathy and charity; indeed, it is part of his manhood to be able to do so. In that sense, too, Emerson constructs self-reliance as a male ideal, even a sign of manhood.

But Emerson is not writing to or for all men; his essay does not seem to envision self-reliant African-American men or working-class men, and, surprisingly, Emerson offers few American models of self-reliance. When he invokes "our Saxon breasts" (31), Emerson's call for a new manhood "was a racialized call for a Saxon brotherhood" (Sorisio 105). Indeed, Sorisio argues, "his desire to reclaim the American males' manhood, to emancipate them from the captivity of the feminized parlor, coincides with some of the most pronounced language of racial difference" (123-24). In the same vein, while consciously encouraging every man to value his own thoughts, Emerson unconsciously situates his self-reliant man above the lower class when he imagines him in opposition not just to the "feminine rage" of the "cultivated classes" but more forcibly to "the ignorant and the poor," "the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society" (24). Finally, while Emerson mentions with admiration "Washington's dignity" and "Adam's eye" (25), his essay looks for most of its examples of self-reliant men into the past and outside of America. Thus, Emerson's essay, while outlining self-reliance as a crucial American principle, does not flesh out visions of self-reliant Americans that would include the poor, African Americans, and women. (1)

To flesh out these visions is a central project of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's work. Self-reliance is a consistent key term in Harper's writings, from her early short story "The Two Offers" (1859) to her late novel Iola Leroy (1892). As if directly answering Emerson's essay, Harper's work addresses precisely those questions that Emerson's essay rhetorically excludes: What does self-reliance mean for women and others who are dependent and oppressed? How exactly can we envision the lives of self-reliant African Americans, working-class people, and, most importantly, women? Harper's work offers a critical extension and revision of Emerson's original concept of self-reliance in terms of race, class, and gender. Consequently, tracing Harper's use and re-definition of the term self-reliance in her fiction and nonfiction allows us to explore her contribution to American Renaissance writing and to open up connections between these two eminent nineteenth-century writers.

Despite the fact that Emerson and Harper both were foremost public intellectuals and writers in nineteenth-century America and both were involved in the abolitionist and the women's movements, they are seldom mentioned in the same breath. The MLA bibliography yields not a single entry in a recent combined search of...

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