“After a High Negative Way”: Emerson's “Self-Reliance” and the Rhetoric of Conversion

The year 1991 marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of the first volume of Emerson's Essays in which appeared, for the first time, “Self-Reliance,” arguably America's most famous essay. Despite the passage of time, this essay has never lost its power to inspire or to enrage. The controversies that continue to swirl around Emerson originate in a few points of contention, but none arouse as much furor as his seemingly innocuous formulation “self-reliance.” From the beginning, Emerson's reception among his readers has been sharply divided. A sampling of studies appearing in the current flood of Emerson criticism suggests that this polarization has never been more characteristic of Emerson's readership than it is currently. On the one hand are those critics of American culture like the late A. Bartlett Giamatti who found Emerson “as sweet as barbed wire” or the sociologist of religion Robert Bellah who located in Emerson the roots of America's most portentous national defects. On the other hand are such notable critics as Harold Bloom, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Poirier who find in Emerson, rightly read and construed, one of the few viable trails left in contemporary culture. The crux of all such articulate responses, whether of detractor or partisan, is the reflexive and seemingly disinterested conception popularized by Emerson as “self-reliance.”