Untitled Document

Mary Moody Emerson II

Bill Long 11/13/04

Rediscovering More than an Influence

Though Mary Moody Emerson's influence on her nephew Waldo has certainly not been ignored in Emersonian scholarship, it has often been downplayed or even degraded. Characterized as an "intellectual, eccentric, death-obsessed Puritan aunt" whose influence was "on the whole injurious," this aunt's formative influence was first rescued by Emerson's biographer Robert D. Richardson and then, in 1998, by Phyllis Cole in her Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. This mini-essay will introduce a few biographical facts about her and then provide some quotations or reflections from RW Emerson's eulogy to his aunt's memory delivered before the Women's Club in Boston in 1869.

Mary's Biography

I need not trace the history of the Emerson family in America to Thomas' arrival in 1635, the several generations of Emerson clergy in Massachusetts in the 17th and 18th century and then the ministry of Mary's father William at the Concord Church in the 1770s in order to make the point that she was suffused with Puritan learning and divinity ab ovo. But her life was also creased with tragedy, which no doubt informed her strange mix of Puritan theology, death-obsession, intellectual aggressiveness, love of nature and solitariness.

Her father, the builder of the Concord Old Manse, took up the call to serve as Chaplain for the Revolutionary troops, and Mary, then an infant, ended up living with her maternal grandparents in Malden. Rapid deaths in the family, including that of her father during the War, led to her living (still in Malden) with her father's sister's family, a family wracked by poverty and mental instability. After inheriting the family farm, she traded for property in Maine, where she lived for several years, coming back to Boston about 1810, at the death of her brother William, to live with the Emerson family (Ralph Waldo was the 7 year-old son in the family) at the manse of the "Old Brick Church" (First Church) in Boston. She remained in the house for several years during Waldo's formative times, casting a large shadow over him, which Phyllis Cole has carefully documented in her book.

Emerson's Eulogy

Possibly the best window into her manner and personality, however, can be gleaned from the very long eulogy mentioned above. If there is any spirit that pervades the whole is that Mary was a dominating intellectual figure, equally conversant in the Bible, Milton, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, among others. She was obsessed with genius and with young people, desiring to learn all she could from them, probably to see how their minds worked and how the seeds of her own formidable intellect might take root in their lives and thought.

As for her own preoccupations or obsessions, one first notices the power of death over her. Known as the "puny pilgrim" (because she stood all of 4'3"), Waldo observed, "For years she made her bed in the form of a coffin and delighted herself with the discovery of the figure of a coffin made every evening on the sidewalk, by the shadow of a church tower which adjoined the house." In an odd but revealing piece of arcana, Waldo says that her friends used to greet her, "I wish you the joy of the worm (presumably referring to the "company" that worms would keep with her body in the grave)."

But this rather morbid death-fascination, which is not so unusual in Puritan thinking, must be complemented with her outgoing and agressive intellectual style. As Waldo says,

"She delighted in success, in youth, in beauty, in genius, in manners. When she met a young person who interested her, she made herself acquainted and intimate with him or her at once, by sympathy, by flattery, by railery, by anecdotes, by wit, by rebuke, and stormed the castle. None but was attracted or piqued by her interest and wit and wide acquaintance with books and with eminent names. She said she gave herself full swing in these sudden intimacies, for she knew she should disgust them soon, and resolved to have their best hours."

In one sentence that seems to sum up this most notable characteristic, he says, "She had the misfortune of spinning with a greater velocity than any of the other tops." He goes on, "she would tear into the chaise or out of it, into the house or out of it, into the conversation, into the thought, into the character of the stranger, --disdaining all the graduation by which her fellows time their steps: and though she might do very happily in a planet where others moved with the like velocity, she was offended here by the phlegm of all her fellow-creatures, and disgusted them by her impatience."

She could, however, "always be tamed by large and sincere conversation. Was there thought and eloquence she would listen like a child. Her aspiration and prayer would begin, and the whim and petulance in which by diseased habit she had grown to indulge without suspecting it, was burned up in the glow of her pure and poetic spirit--which dearly loved the Infinite."

Conclusion

Thus one gets the impression of a woman of enormous energy and intellectual tenacity, who blew into people's lives with an untamed ferocity but who quickly wore out her welcome; who then retreated to her own islands of solitariness; who felt that God was her only real companion and who poured out herself to Him in rich prayer and sensitive poetry about nature (Waldo has a sensual description of the Maine farm property, in view of the White Mountains, where she lived for several years). Her diary entries reflect a writer of quirkiness and immense energy also.

Thoughts of death alternate with those of gratitude for being alive. Impatient utterances and stories alternate with reflective comments on the glories of the Infinite. The dark Puritan inheritance seems to vie for attention with a spirit of broader learning gleaned from ancient philosophers and modern poets.

There is a large and insistent spirit in Mary Moody Emerson, a spirit that no doubt washed over Waldo in his formative years in Boston. Her urging him to "scorn trifles, lift your aims; do what you are afraid to do" might well have become his motto in life. Indeed, Phyllis Cole argues that Waldo actually took over quotations from her and put them into his own work. I think it is probably true that once the dye of Mary Moody Emerson worked its way into Waldo's soul, its stain was well-nigh ineradicable. If he is the flower, she is either the roots or one of the springs that nourished the roots. Despite our inability to calibrate influence precisely, he no doubt "heard" her insistent, vigorous, demanding voice until his dying day.