My Life Closed Twice Before Its Close (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Critics and historians frequently draw a connection between Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the New England Transcendentalist movement. Dickinson was growing up and formulating her own ideas when the Transcendentalist movement was reaching its peak between the 1830s and the 1860s. Dickinson lived in Amherst, only seventy-five miles away from the center of Transcendentalism in Boston. Furthermore, Dickinson openly discussed the influence of Transcendentalism, especially the influence of the ideas in the essay called “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson, a key figure in the movement. However, literary critics point out that, although Dickinson’s poetry reflects aspects of Transcendentalism it also reflects many of the Puritan religious beliefs that Transcendentalism supposedly contradicted and replaced. Some interpret this duality as a sign that Dickinson, in her devotion to her family’s religious heritage, allowed herself to be trapped in the contradiction of embracing both modern thinking and a putatively antiquated way of thinking.

The Puritans were a religious sect emerging as a splinter faction of English Protestantism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestantism itself began as a protest against the Catholic Church because of its emphasis on ceremony and on the powers of the church hierarchy, with too little attention being given to God. Puritans felt that mainstream Protestants were themselves distracted by the things of the world. Turning their backs on political activity and social interaction, Puritans focused on theories of heaven and hell and who would end up spending eternity in each when their lives were over. Hard work was valued by Puritans as a way of striving toward one’s salvation, and worshipping God was a constant element of everything they did. The Puritans came to power in England under Oliver Cromwell, but eventually lost power in a resurgence of royalist forces. As a result the Church of England regained control. At that time, North America was being colonized, and hundreds of Puritans made the decision to move to the New World, where they could practice their religious beliefs freely. The Puritans founded Jamestown, the first permanent settlement in North America, and the majority of those who came to America on the Mayflower were Puritans. In 1620, off the shores of Provincetown Harbor in what came to be Massachusetts, the Mayflower Compact was signed, representing the first form of European-style government in America and influencing the country’s political development. Because Puritans valued hard work and disdained comfort or pleasure, they were able to survive the wilderness conditions that other Europeans could not tolerate. American capitalism has been influence by Puritan ethics, particularly in the economic principle that wealth is the reward of hard work and that poverty and suffering are the deserved rewards for failing to work hard. In Massachusetts, among the descendants of the original Puritans, the Puritan influence would have been especially keenly felt.

In some ways, Transcendentalism was a response to Puritan beliefs, although it was also influenced by the literary trend of Romanticism that was sweeping European literature at the same time. Romanticism had grown throughout the late 1700’s, as seen most clearly in the works of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The ideas of Romanticism were crystallized into a distinct statement of beliefs in the introduction to William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Romanticism emphasized freedom and nature, presenting human beings as innate geniuses in their capacity to understand the natural world and dismissing society as a form of corruption. In America, the Romantic ideal made its strongest impact in the way it influenced the New England Transcendentalists. This was a movement begun in 1836 with the Transcendental Club in Boston. Members included such noteworthy intellectuals as Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s book Walden, about the years he spent living in a shack in the woods relying on nature and limiting his involvement with people, is still read in schools today. The most direct and influential spokesperson for Transcendentalist beliefs was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and the author of such essays as “Self-Reliance” and “Nature.” The Transcendentalists were like the Puritans in the way that they emphasized the individual’s relationship to God without the need for a priest or other religious figure to be involved in the middle. However, they did not picture God as a stern, vengeful father figure. Instead of using the word “God,” Emerson coined the word “Over-Soul,” implying that this was an entity present in all of nature and that all people and all components of nature were part of this cosmic force equally.

With its emphasis on Nature as something to be approached and experienced, the Transcendentalist movement faced considerable difficulties in nineteenth century America. As the Industrial Revolution developed, Americans became too busy and too excited with production and economic growth to give much attention to the Transcendentalist worship of nature. As the Civil War approached, citizens chose up political sides, and the Transcendental goal of individuality and self-reliance was seen as naive and self-indulgent. By the time that Emily Dickinson wrote most of her poems and the Civil War was approaching, the influence of the Transcendentalist movement was declining. Both Puritanism and Transcendentalism can be seen as influences on Dickinson’s thought, and her poems show a unique mind that was able to use and blend important ideas from several sources.

Compare & Contrast

• 1896: Entrepreneur Henry Morrison Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil, dredged the south Florida swamp to extended his railway, reaching the newly-incorporated town of Miami. The year before the unincorporated territory consisted of only three houses. Flagler owned a cluster of Florida resorts, with major hotels in Daytona and Palm Beach.
  1990s: Miami is the largest metropolitan area in Florida. Over 40 million tourists visit the state each year, mostly to visit the cluster of theme parks around Orlando.
• 1896: The first public showing of a motion picture occurred in New York, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall.
  1956: The first successful videotape recorder was demonstrated at Ampex Corp. in Redwood City, California.
  1990s: Advanced home theater technology threatens to make public move viewing obsolete.
• 1896: The discovery of gold in the Klondike Territory, near the Alaskan border, led to a gold rush that brought miners from around the world. By the end of the next year, over $22 million had been mined, and many of Alaska’s major cities had been settled.
  1973: When the OPEC oil embargo cut off the United States’ main source of inexpensive oil,
  Congress authorized the nine billion dollar Alaska Pipeline to pump crude oil from Alaska’s Arctic coastal plain to the accessible port of Valdez.
  1990s: Oil is the main economic force in Alaska.
• 1896: The first continuing comic strip, “The Yellow Kid,” began as a one-panel feature in Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper New York World.
  1990s: Readers expect at least a page of comics in any reputable metropolitan newspaper.
• 1896: In the case of Plessy v. Ferguson the U.S. Supreme Court upheld segregation of blacks and whites. The ruling called for “separate but equal” access to accommodations such as transportation and education, but common practice quickly established the practice of offering blacks inferior services.
  1954: In the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the Supreme Court ruled that separate accommodations would never be equal, and overturned the decision of Plessy. The Chief Justice of the Court, Warren Berger, ordered that schools across the country be integrated “with all deliberate speed.”
  1990s: Debates continue about what school systems should do to narrow the discernable gap in test scores between blacks and whites.