Trance and dental
Not mystical orthodontia, but a survey of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and others in or near American transcendentalism.
Rob James
May 25, 2026
Sorry-but-not-sorry for the pun. Peter Schickele, the scholar and performer of the works of P.D.Q. Bach (1807-1742?), paid tribute to Franz Liszt by showcasing works dedicated to a mesmerizing tooth-puller, the Trance and Dental Etudes.
Seriously, this post is about a passel of intellectual Bostonians of 1830-1860 who were enraptured by nature as the pathway to the divine in each individual, stifled by Calvinist and rigid Unitarian dogma, vehemently opposed to slavery, and disappointed by emergent American urbanity and materialism.
Setting the stage
The Massachusetts wild in the 1800s was becoming a place of sublime inspiration, not the danger it posed to earlier settlers. Boston Common was in fact a cattle-grazing “commons” until 1830 (now more known for the children’s book Make Way for Ducklings). Increases in technology and education led to widespread publishing of newspapers and to 90% adult white literacy. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. called the Boston State House “the hub of the Solar System,” hence the Hub nickname. Cities increased in population, to the distaste of many; one visitor said the best citizens he met in New York were the pigs being driven to market.
One early source was William Ellery Channing, a Unitarian minister. His 1828 sermon “Likeness to God” doubled down on the admonition in Ephesians 5:1 to “follow God” by proclaiming that we should be like God, “partaking more and more of the divine, feeling the divine presence in ourselves.” “God is in every thing, from frail flower to lasting stars.” “God is another name for human intelligence raised above all errors and imperfections and extended to all possible truths.” God is best apprehended in nature rather than in classics or theology; your scripture is a leaf and a tree, and from them you may approach the divine.
(I hadn’t heard of this almost pantheistic work until today. I also didn’t realize that the genre of the extended sermon, with complex divisions and hour-long memorized delivery, was a revolutionary tool of the Puritans. Sermons in the Anglican tradition were in contrast rare, short, and confined to doctrinaire doctrine. The Library of America volume on American Sermons was an eye-opener for me.)
Transcendentalism was not so much a creed as a way of perceiving the world, centered on nature and consciousness rather than on external fact. In harmony were the English romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. The thinkers borrowed heavily from German scripture-discounting theologians such as Eichhorn, Griesbach, Herder, Schleiermacher, Fichte, and Lessing; decades before Darwin, Jussieu’s taxonomy suggested the connectedness of all living things (I know none of these guys yet).
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Emerson himself disliked the term “transcendental,” and after all it is cribbed from Immanuel Kant, who applied the adjective to ideas that surpass all experience. He said his method merely carried forward old thoughts into new times, which also seems disingenuous to me.
Rather, Emerson advocated man's original relation to the universe—“original” meaning unmediated by dogma or institutional authority (whether Calvinist, Anglican or even rigid Unitarian). He faltered as a Unitarian minister, becoming uncomfortable with Holy Communion as a sacred ceremony and disliking public prayer. He called rigid Unitarianism “corpse-cold.”
In the book Nature (1836), Emerson asked almost enviously: why should only the past generations get all the revelations and miracles? Should we not also enjoy a direct relation with the divine? Why should we not have insight rather than tradition, why should we not have revelations of our own, not just a history of theirs? “The sun shines to-day also.” Truth is not revealed in scripture, but apprehended by men in communication with nature. (He employs an awkward and ridiculed metaphor of an “transparent eye-ball.”)
In his 1837 Harvard Phi Beta Kappa address “The American Scholar,” Emerson said nature is in himself and he is in nature. Nature resembles man’s own spirit in being unlimited. Man and nature stem from one root. “Know thyself” and “study nature” are the same maxim; study nature to know yourself. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. called it “our American intellectual Declaration of Independence.” James Russell Lowell said, “We were still socially and intellectually moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of blue water.”
More notorious were his 1838 remarks for six of the seven students graduating from Harvard Divinity School. He basically equated man and nature with God and said Jesus serves us by his divine thoughts and not by his sacraments or miracles. Salvation is found not in laws and books but in nature. Words are the symbols of facts, particular natural facts are symbols of general spiritual facts, and nature is a symbol of spirit itself. To know the world is to know the divine. God unites Me and Not-Me. Our intuition, not religious doctrine, guides or should guide our moral sentiments. “The soul knows no persons. It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the universe, and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love.” “To attempt to convert a man by miracles, is a profanation of the soul.” “Man is an infinite soul, the earth and heavens are passing into his mind, he is drinking forever the soul of God.”
This hot-tubby “Harvard Divinity School Address” was vociferously countered by the traditional Unitarian Andrew Norton and others (“the part which was not folly is downright atheism”). It was just as vociferously defended by Channing, George Ripley, Theodore Parker and others. HDS was staunchly Calvinist until 1802 when it became staunchly Unitarian. No wonder the speech was controversial for practically everyone; compare poor Ann Hutchinson, who had been persecuted in Boston merely for saying that the Holy Spirit can inhabit a “justified” person.
(Some of the other reformers went even further. Parker was a fiery sermonizer with formidable foreign-language skills. He disbelieved in or rejected the relevance of miracles altogether, and asked whether belief in a divine Jesus was necessary. Emerson called him “our Savonarola.”)
Emerson was ostracized at Harvard until the 1860s, but then became “our famous son,” and now there is an Emerson Hall with an Emerson statue. (This “prophet without honor in his own country” tale reminds me of John Steinbeck being hated, then revered and enstatued, in my home town of Salinas, California.)
In the essay “Self-Reliance,” Emerson claimed that what is true for you is true for all fellow men—is not a man better than a town? This seems over the top and rather disturbing dogma that could easily be misread and misapplied. This piece is the source of the familiar line, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” Americans should stop taking all their cultural cues from Europe, and those seeking spiritual truth should free themselves from “a historical Christianity.”
In “Over-Soul,” Emerson said the soul of a man is the soul of the whole. Many other essays were delivered on the Lyceum lecture circuits of the day. (He spoke with a clenched fist, kind of a trademark like Bill Clinton’s protruding thumb.) He wrote the fine “Concord Hymn” on the occasion of raising of an obelisk (a “shaft”) commemorating the “rude bridge that arched the floor” and that heard “the [1775] shot heard round the world.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Thoreau was dismissive of his Harvard education, saying an undergraduate could study without profit the economics of Adam Smith, Ricardo and Say, yet plunge his father into irretrievable debt. When Emerson said Harvard covers all branches of knowledge, Thoreau riposted, “Yes, and none of the roots.”
In 1847 Thoreau built a cabin on Emerson’s newly acquired property on Walden Pond just south of Concord. The shack was completed July 4 (out-of-pocket cost, $28.12 ½) and he stayed there until 1849. The 1854 book was read during the century of its writing as a nature guide. In our time it has been called “a satire on contemporary civilization,” “a spiritual autobiography,” “as much a religious document as any scripture.” Contrary to later impressions, the pond was rather built up at the time; a noisy railroad track was nearby and Thoreau hosted many visitors and endured industrial ice harvesting. Don Henley of the Eagles has helped to preserve much of the surroundings from modern encroachments.
Thoreau pities his conventional neighbors who toil their lives away—“why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?” “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all is when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” At age 30 “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.” “When the farmer has got his house [from the bank], it be the house that has got him.”
“Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.” In Hell there is no light but rather “darkness visible” (a line from Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the title of William Styron’s later memoir of his clinical depression). “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, … and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” Why hurry? “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.” “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.”
“If we knew all the laws of Nature, we should need only one fact, or the description of one actual phenomenon, to infer all the particular results at that point. Now we know only a few laws, and our result is vitiated, not, of course, by any confusion or irregularity in Nature, but by our ignorance of essential elements in the calculation.”
Shades of Gaia: “The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.” “A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts.” “We need the tonic of wilderness.” “In wildness is the salvation of the world.”
Thoreau’s theodicy: “We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion… I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed and suffered to prey on one another. … The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal. Compassion is a very untenable ground.”
You don’t need to go far afield for adventure. “Be rather the [Lewis and Clark] of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes. … Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. … [H]e will live with the license of a higher order of beings … If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” By going to nature and learning about himself, he could catch two fishes as it were with one hook. A fact one day may be a truth tomorrow.
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” Enlightenment can strike any of us, any “John or Jonathan,” any day now. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
Thoreau wasn’t a hermit—he himself went to Concord every day or two. On one such visit in 1847 he was briefly jailed, for failure to pay taxes to a government that countenanced slavery, resulting in the 1849 essay Resistance to Civil Government, republished posthumously in 1866 as Civil Disobedience. We should be men first and subjects afterward, obeying our conscience first and the law second. Soldiers marched against their wills are “small movable forts,” converting their bodies into machines. Some serving the state are as likely to serve the Devil as God; others serve the state with their consciences, and so necessarily on occasion resist it. The state imprisoned me but not my meditations, and they were really all that was dangerous. Thus the state contains a man’s body not his moral sense. (When Emerson visited the jail and asked, “What are you doing in there?” Thoreau riposted, “What are you doing out there?” Thoreau seems to have gotten off the better one-liners.)
Thoreau also wrote travelogues including The Maine Woods, where he described the thrill of climbing Mount Katahdin. (Later research apparently suggests that he only reached a false peak. I can relate, as a teenager having triumphantly taken younger scouts to the top of Pico Blanco, only to be informed later that I had declared victory way too early and way too low.)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
A disciple of Emerson, and a Bowdoin classmate of Franklin Pierce and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He said ministers looked like grim, bad angels, as if they had wrestled with devils so long that some of the diabolical had worn off on them.
Founded in 1624, Salem was extremely Puritanical. In January 1692 two girls were accused of witchcraft and by June 150 townspeople were so charged. A special court was formed and heard “spectral evidence” (testimony by those who supposedly were bewitched, often between longstanding adversaries); fourteen women and five men were hanged and one man was crushed to death. By October the Supreme Court of Judicature stepped in, banning spectral evidence and acquitting the rest. See Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) both for a pretty accurate portrayal of this story and for its allegory to McCarthy-era Red Scare tactics.
Set in 1642-49 well before the witch trials, The Scarlet Letter (1850) unfolds the sad tale of Hester Prynne, having given birth to a baby Pearl; she won’t tell dad’s name. Her long-absent husband (not known to this community, so comes up with the name Roger Chillingworth) demands the man be punished, and Minister Arthur Dimmesdale duly questions her. Pearl grows up wild on the outskirts of the settlement, but before the community can snatch her, Dimmesdale convinces them to let Pearl remain with Hester. You can remember from high school or guess the rest of the love triangle story, which ends tragically for the men but okay for the women.
What is the transcendental connection? Well, for one thing, Hester goes to the edge of nature, rather than to another settlement. The interminably long “Custom House” preface, which I impatiently hated in high school, accounts for how Hawthorne supposedly came across the story and also introduces us to Salem of the time.
His other works include The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852) loosely based on Brook Farm. I haven’t read those yet.
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Sorry for wedging old Herman in here, as he wasn’t really a transcendentalist. But he was a friend of Hawthorne and inspired by him. I will stop short of discussing other American writers of the antebellum era, like Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, Whittier, Stowe, and Lowell, as they collectively more than deserve a second post.
Melville was a sailor for a time and married the daughter of jurist Lemuel Shaw (of later fugitive-slave-law enforcement dilemmas—see Robert Cover’s brilliant Justice Accused). He had success with South Sea sailing yarns Typee and Omoo, but Moby-Dick was a bust; his psychological study Pierre did even worse. The short novels Benito Cereno and Bartleby followed. He got a “day job,” wrote poetry, and died with the unfinished manuscript of Billy Budd.
I will go somewhat backwards. I like the poem “The Portent,” which has a “weird” meter and subject all its own:
Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on your green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
(Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.
The meteor of the war indeed—John Brown was the spectre that Southerners long feared, the man who in David Blight’s words “knew how to die,” living only to be martyred in order to overcome the evil and the sin of slavery.
Bartleby? I prefer not to summarize that one. As a transactional lawyer, the willful lack of activity in the short story that is its entire point hits too close to home. (“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”)
Benito Cereno is a great role-reversal of narration. Would we have spotted the switch between masters and slaves?
Billy Budd is a superb meditation on the laws of man and the laws of God, akin to Sophocles’ Antigone. Again, see Robert Cover’s chapter on “starry Vere.” (It is remarkable that Budd and Lemuel Shaw are connected through the author.)
Now I make my way to Leviathan.
I clump together the main episodes of Moby-Dick just as a way to collect my favorite quotations. I sped through the Modern Library edition in college, sped through it again just now with the help of a graphic novel (illustrated by Chabouté—I’m not proud), and look forward to surveying it at leisure, now that I have the landmarks firmly in mind. The prose is Biblical, Shakespearean, Miltonic—and Melvillian. The construction of the plot is absolute perfection, not disturbed in the least by the dozens of detours in the 135+ chapters and 835 pages (“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!”). (Note that the title of the book is Moby-Dick (“or the Whale,” perhaps the most superfluous subtitle in all of literature) but the whale is Moby Dick. That hyphen is the first thing I look for in any essay about the work.)
A. Ishmael, “in a damp, drizzly November in my soul,” is driven to go to sea. (“[A] whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”) He heads to Nantucket and the Spouter-Inn, where he is terrified by Queequeg (from the island of Kokovoko—“it is not down in any map, true places never are”) but befriends him (“better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian”). They pick the Pequod, are granted 1/300 and 1/90 shares, and listen to the preacher hold forth in his prow of a pulpit, overlooking the entire world.
B. We meet the mates and their harpooners Starbuck (Queequeg), Stubb (Tashtego) and Flash (Daggoo)—and Ahab. We hear the story of how Moby Dick made off with the captain’s leg, said to justify this vengeance voyage. The gold doubloon speech is the greatest example of fervent demagoguery—you can feel the sailors getting caught up in and carried away by the emotion. The crew pledges on the axis of spears and the passing of the grog. The rational Starbuck uselessly objects to Ahab’s obsession—“to be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.” Here is the crux of the novel—what is the white whale? “All visible objects … are but as pasteboard masks.” (Kant and Schopenhauer could not put it better.) “How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” “I am madness maddened!”
C. From Nantucket the Pequod sails down the South American and African Atlantic coasts. They kill whales and the ship becomes a factory. Zillions of chapters about whales and whaling. “All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.” The wonderful entire chapter on Fast-fish and Loose-fish is similar.
D. Many “gams” (conversations between passing vessels in which both captains are on one ship while both first mates are on the other) demonstrate the captains’ respective characters and let Ahab know the white whale is nigh. They cross to the Indian Ocean, the long way back to Nantucket, to Starbuck’s discomfort. (Ahab’s personal harpooner Fedallah, revealed after the ship has sailed, prophesies that Ahab will see a natural hearse and an American-wood hearse before he and Moby Dick meet.)
E. Queequeg takes deathly ill, has a “canoe” coffin built, then miraculously recovers. The coffin becomes a sealed and caulked life-buoy. Ahab has a harpoon forged (like Siegfried) and quenched in the three harpooners’ blood (what a scene!).
F. Ahab curses and tosses the sextant and compass for only telling him where he is, not where the white whale is. (As a collector and scholar of slide rules I must object.)
G. The Pequod crosses the Indian Ocean towards the Pacific Ocean and into Formosan and Japanese seas. Ahab spurns the request of the captain of the Rachel to look for her boat and his young son. Viewing the sharks tearing at the whale-flesh, Fleece says, “Your voraciousness, fellow-critters, I don't blame ye so much for; dat is natur, and can't be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint. You is sharks, sartin; but if you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more than de shark well goberned.”
H. The final chase. (1) Ahab spots the whale and claims the doubloon; (2) Ahab loses his leg and Fedallah is missing; (3) Fedallah is spotted tethered to the whale (hence a natural hearse) and the whale crashes into the Pequod with fatal force (hence an American-wood hearse). “From hell’s heart” Ahab stabs the whale, which drags him under. Only Ishmael survives, atop the coffin, to be rescued by the Rachel. (What an amazingly perfect tying up of loose ends! No television series ever handled its conclusion better.)
Some other fellow travelers
William Lloyd Garrison led the rejuvenated anti-slavery movement, joined by Theodore Parker, Emerson and Thoreau among others. They sometimes split the vote with other parties, causing defeats for which Abraham Lincoln never forgave them.
Louisa May Alcott was not a member of the gang, though her father Bronson was. She incorporated some of the thoughts in Little Women and Little Men, which made more money than the transcendentalists stacked on top on each other.
Emily Dickinson wrote 1800 poems looking into her soul or out the window of her Amherst house, but only eleven were published in her lifetime. Bizarrely, despite her lack of any field trips into the wild, she is considered the ultimate example of transcendentalism. “Home is the definition of God.”
Utopias like George Ripley's Brook Farm in West Roxbury didn't last long. One woman said the residents were “a race who dove into the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.”
Evoking a similar spirit, the Hudson River School artists (1835-70) sometimes depicted tiny humans in huge nature oil landscapes.
Margaret Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She did not write that she “accept[ed] the universe,” and Thomas Carlyle did not respond, “Gad! She’d better,” but they and others did write something pretty darn close.
Reflections
Transcendentalism is pretty murky as a movement, and even the prose in any individual piece is often vague and overblown. H. L. Mencken wrote, “a good deal of [Emerson's] obscurity is due to contradictions inherent in the man's character. He was dualism ambulant.” Charles Dickens said, “Whatever was unintelligible is transcendental,” though he also admitted “yet if I lived in Boston, I would be a transcendentalist.” I’ve written elsewhere that the Henry James Sr. book The Secret of Swedenborg was so obscure that one reviewer sarcastically congratulated James on “keeping the secret.” Another reviewer said one of the bloated, prolix, wandering essays was like fifteen railroad cars with but a single passenger.
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American Sermons: The Pilgrims to Martin Luther King, Jr. (Library of America, 1999).
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Annotated Emerson (David Mikics, ed. 2012).
R. Todd Felton, A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England (2006).
Phillip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (2004).
Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (1950).
Nathaniel Philbrick, Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011).