Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Emerson, Whitman & Douglass on "Freedom"

In Emerson's 1837 speech The American Scholar, he alludes to freedom of thought in the sense of a thinker being independent from simply internalizing another thinker's words.  For example, a parrot who repeats words does not understand them or their concepts, they merely make the sounds which they have heard previously.  Likewise, a true intellectual thinker according to Emerson should not simply repeat thoughts they've come across exactly as they've heard them, but rather interject their own knowledge into the mixture.  Freedom, in the intellectual sense, means freedom to debate theories and add to them rather than accepting them as infallible and merely repeating them.  Enslavement, in the intellectual sense, would then be to accept other's words without question and to fall victim to logic that may be unjust or simply wrong.

To Walt Whitman, freedom is in a poet's ability to overcome their title as a poet and transcend the barrier between writer and reader.  He wants very much to be intimate with his readers and have them not consider him a distant, elite voice but rather their own voice embodied in poetry they can relate to.  In his 1855 poem Leaves of Grass he writes that "You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself," - a concept Emerson would certainly agree with from a scholarly point of view.  Whitman believes freedom lies in the ability to read poetry and separate the meaning of the words from the connotations readers associate with lofty writers - the ability to relate to poetry rather than relate to a poet.  Whitman wants his readers to be free from the mindset which keeps them from interpreting his words as their own thoughts - from using his prose to describe themselves rather than him.

Frederick Douglass has a very literal definition of freedom: the ability for someone to be free of the de-humanizing qualities imposed by another person.  He calls this out two-fold though, saying that as much as slaves are made so by their master's cruelty, their masters are also de-humanized through the cruelty they impose upon their slaves.  In chapter 7 of Douglass' Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, he writes of a benevolent mistress whom he becomes the first slave of in Baltimore and how through becoming her slave, she becomes a slave of her own evils as well.  Through acquiring him as property, this moral woman becomes a cruel master and abuses her power over her new servants - through Douglass losing his freedom, she loses her human civility.  Freedom, to Douglass, is two-fold, and through enslavement, neither the master nor the slave retain their humanity.  Such is the nature of slavery.

1 comment:

  1. God! I especially like your comments on Emerson - - e.g. that imitation is "enslavement" while creation is freedom. I wonder how this might also work in re Douglass?

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