著者

冨塚 亮平

出版者

アメリカ学会

雑誌

アメリカ研究 (ISSN:03872815)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.54, pp.187-207, 2020-04-25 (Released:2021-09-11)

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Almost all of the major works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), except his diaries, were written after his move to Concord in 1834. This paper examines the themes of intimacy and solitude in his essays and lectures, mainly focusing on representations of space. In “Love” and other essays included in Essays: First Series (1841), Emerson stresses the importance of home as the central site for developing intimate relationships with others. Based on the argument of Henri Lefebvre, this essay reconsiders experiences in space as being “lived,” mainly paying attention to the perspective of gender.In antebellum America, individualism expanded rapidly, along with “domestic ideology” with a particular emphasis on the aspect of ownership. Just as Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the phases of isolation and withdrawal, so the ideas of American individualism and ownership were both generated retrospectively by the border line that divides the inner and the outer. According to Milette Shamir and Amy Kaplan, female writers of advice books in the mid-nineteenth century discussed issues of home economy based on the proposition that this division of the inner and the outer, or study and parlor, is stable.On one hand, Emerson similarly criticizes the elements of space, like “Egyptian wilderness” and “tents of a night,” which have no distinct borders with the outer. On the other hand, it is notable that he uses metaphors of doors that link “home” and “street,” and one of his servants likened his house to a hotel. These images of “door” and “hotel” deconstruct the boundary between two spaces—inner and outer.As Barbara Ryan and Christopher Newfield severely criticized, it is certain that Emerson’s relationships with servants and his own family members—his “domestic and social experiments”—were not necessarily successful. He held patriarchal authority in his home to a certain extent, although the relationships were partly reciprocal and equal. Nevertheless, in his family, only Emerson could freely choose to open and shut the door to his private room.For Emerson, however, an ambivalence between these binary oppositions of space and gender was at stake. Unlike the contemporary authors of advice books, his lecture “Home” (1838) grappled with issues of domestic economy and household as a practical experiment that fluidizes and renews every boundary related to the household. Furthermore, just as he stated that conversation is the “first office of friendship” in the lecture “The Heart” (1838), so he also compared the sense of friendship to a spacial rhetoric.Emerson could transcend the gender conflict—namely the binary of parlor and study—by conversation not with his own family members or servants, but with friends like Margaret Fuller, whom he repeatedly praised for her outstanding capacity for dialogue. As D.W. Winnicott insisted, Emerson could cultivate “the capacity to be alone” or find solitude, not in withdrawal to his study, but in the parlor with friends like Fuller or in the lecture hall with the audiences of “Home”.

著者

冨塚 亮平

出版者

青土社

雑誌

ユリイカ (ISSN:13425641)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.51, no.16, pp.170-184, 2019-09