Mary Moody Emerson (August 23, 1774May 1, 1863) was an American letter writer and diarist. She was known not only as her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson's "earliest and best teacher", but also as a "spirited and original genius in her own right".Richardson on back cover of Origins Ralph Waldo Emerson considered her presence in his life a “blessing which nothing else in education could supply”;Emerson Lectures 432 and her vast body of writing—her thousands of letters and journal entries spanning more than fifty years—"became one of Emerson's most important books".Richardson 25 Her surviving documents reveal the voice of a "woman who […] had something to say to her contemporaries and who can continue to speak to ours" about "the great truths that were the object of her life's pilgrimage".Cole Origins xl, xxvii
Biography Early life
Born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1774, Mary Moody Emerson was the fourth child of Phebe Bliss and the Reverend William Emerson. Both the Emerson and the Bliss family forebears came to Massachusetts with the first generation of Puritan settlers in the 1630s, and both families' histories deeply involved religious ministry. Ever since Mary's great-great-grandfather Joseph Emerson settled in Concord, at least one son in each succeeding generation was ordained a minister of the church. Included in this “ministerial dynasty” was Mary's great uncle Joseph Moody, who appeared before his congregation with a handkerchief covering his face—the inspiration for the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Minister's Black Veil".Cole Origins 18, 22 Many of the Emerson men attended Harvard, and the family was generally respected and genteel though not wealthy, integrally involved in the New England Calvinist milieu.Cole Origins chpt 1
In 1776, after suffering the loss of her father to "army-fever", two-year-old Mary was sent out of Concord to live in Malden, Massachusetts, with her grandmother, who was in poor health, and her aunt Ruth, who suffered from insanity.Emerson Lectures 400 This marked the beginning of what Mary Emerson later called a time of "chaos and deprivation".Cole Origins 56 Separated from her mother and siblings, reared with little social interaction and meager formal education, she wrote that her life in Malden was a "slavery of poverty & ignorance & long orphanship […and] lonesome solitude".Cole "Advantage" 7 The family was so impoverished that they very often subsisted on a "bread-and-water diet" and would send the young Mary to keep watch for the debt-collecting sheriff.Emerson Lectures 419, 400 Mary's journal entries suggest that living in "calamitous poverty" and isolation as a youth profoundly affected her entire life.Richardson 24 She wrote many years later, "Oh I could give facts of the long drawn years of imprisoned minds & hearts w'h uneducated orphans endure[d]".Letters xxxix
Education
As Emerson revealed in an 1869 lecture dedicated to his aunt, starting in her youth, Mary Emerson developed an ethic of individualism and found meaning in labor and self-education. She explained in a journal entry, "I am so small in my expectations, that a week of industry delights. Rose before light every morn; visited from necessity once, and again for books; read Butler's Analogy; commented on the Scriptures; read in a little book,—Cicero's letters,—a few: touched Shakespeare,—washed, carded, cleaned house, and baked. To-day cannot recall an error, nor scarcely a sacrifice, but more fulness of content in the labors of a day never was felt".Emerson Lectures 411-412 The kind of person who never seemed to rest, she "sp[un] with a greater velocity than any of the other tops [,…] 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".Emerson Lectures 407
Though burdened with innumerable daily chores including the care of an infirm grandmother and an insane aunt, Mary Emerson found time to read voraciously. Her early reading included the Bible, the English poets Milton, Young, and a few others, and the religious writers Samuel Clarke and Jonathan Edwards. As a young woman, she would read Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Cousin, Locke, Mme. De Stael, Channing, Byron, Spinoza, Rousseau, Eichhorn, Goethe, among numerous others.Richardson 24 Her education (through books, lectures, correspondence, sermons, and conversation) was completely self-directed—an "insatiate roaming after metaphysics and illuminati", according to her nephew Charles.M.M.E. Letters 278 Denied the Harvard education available to her brother and other male relatives both past and present, Mary Emerson made the seeking of personal truth and knowledge a central concern in her life. Ralph Waldo Emerson later stated that she, like he, was of the "Sect of the Seekers".Barish “Angel” 219 Unlike the formally educated male Emersons, Mary sought knowledge, as she wrote in her journal, “without any of the bridges”.Cole "Men and Women" 138
Adult life
Mary Moody Emerson lived in Malden until 1791, when she moved to her sister Hannah's home in Newburyport to help care for that family's ten children. She felt optimistic at this point in her life and declared that leaving her situation in Malden was an "awful moment wh divide[d] the polluted past from the spotless, the tremendous future".Cole "Advantage" 18 After Newburyport, the seventeen-year-old Mary began a sort of occupation as an on-call nanny and nurse for various relatives which was to provide her room and board and keep her busy and moving around New England for many years. In his 1869 lecture, Emerson praised his aunt's "good will to serve in time of sickness or of pressure",Emerson Lectures 402 but one of his aunt's journal entries conveyed a sense of weariness with her role as constant care-giver: "Oh how quietly […] did I use in early years to pass from Mother to Aunt from Sister to Sister for all was without mentality & to keep souls & bodies together".Cole Origins 92
Although Mary Moody Emerson had thus "given her youth to old people and her meridian to children",Cole Origins 150 her lifestyle seemed a conscious and deliberate choice. She was offered one proposal of marriage, but rebuffed it, writing, "Henceforth the picture I'll image shall be girded loins, a bright lamp, fervent devotion".Cole "Advantage" 15 She wrote that she "never expected connections and matrimony", claiming, "I scarcely feel the sympathies of this life enough to agitate the pool".Emerson Lectures 404 "Doubt[ing] the advantage of marriage in a woman's life",Cole Origins 225 Mary eschewed her expected role as wife and mother, instead choosing "[r]eading, writing, and conversing [as] her vocations".M.M.E. Letters xxviii
In 1809, Mary Emerson invested her modest inheritance from her Aunt Ruth (who died in 1808) in a 150-acre farm close to the White Mountains near Waterford, Maine, which she called Elm Vale. A rustic, secluded farmhouse surrounded by lakes, streams, and "noble forests", Elm Vale would become Mary Emerson's sanctuary.Emerson Lectures 401 Here, as her friend Elizabeth Hoar remarked, Mary "wrote and read, and enjoyed poetic and spiritual raptures, in comparative seclusion".Cole Origins 143 Though she owned the farm (along with her sister Rebecca and brother-in-law Robert Haskins) for almost forty years, financial issues demanded that she live there only sporadically. Mortgage obligations, disputes over the property, and her own intermittent desire for new stimulation prompted Mary to spend long periods—from months to years—visiting, boarding, and working as care-giver elsewhere. Although she seemed to enjoy the intellectual and physical stimulation of traveling, proclaiming, "I had rather live a wandering life & die a beggar,…than drag down to active littleness",Cole Origins 165 Mary Emerson missed her farm when away and wrote often of "pitifully […] saying good-bye" when departing.M.M.E. Letters xxxii
Mary Emerson and young Ralph Waldo Emerson
In 1811, when Waldo was eight years old, Mary Moody Emerson's older brother—the Reverend William Emerson—died, and again she assisted her family in a time of need. She left Elm Vale and moved to Concord to live with William's widow Ruth, helping care for Ruth's six young children and working to support the boarding house that became an important source of family income.Cole Origins 136-137 Here, Mary and her nephews developed close bonds (her one niece, Mary Caroline, lived only three years). William, Ralph Waldo, Edward, Robert (who was intellectually disabled), and especially the youngest boy Charles came to consider their Aunt Mary a surrogate father, since she helped generate income, took charge of their spiritual as well as intellectual education, and pushed them to excel.Cole Origins chpt 6 Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed that his aunt "gave high counsels" and that it "was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard indicated to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply".Emerson Lectures 432 And Ruth Emerson wrote, "I do not think her place could be supplied to these fatherless children by anyone on earth".Notable American Women 581
Mary Emerson lived with her brother's family periodically for seven years and would play a significant role in the lives of her nephews her entire life.Richardson She instilled in them her habit of daily journal writing and continual reading for self-education. She encouraged them to read poetry, delight in nature, and take risks, commanding, "[S]corn trifles, lift your aims: do what you are afraid to do".Emerson Lectures 406 Ultimately, however, she seemed to grow weary of the domestic sphere, feeling that the endless, tiresome work "defeated [her] pursuit of knowledge." She wrote, "Another day is done' of activity so intense that every nerve throbs, yet the gloom of these little painful labors could not be shook off.Cole Origins 141 Though the boys "pulled at Mary's genuine affection",Cole Origins 144 by 1817 the forty-three-year-old Mary felt that it was time for her to leave and return to Elm Vale.
Religion
Mary Moody Emerson considered herself a lifelong orphan and adopted faith as surrogate parent, writing, "Decrees—predestination—place—purpose by whatever name I love thee […]—the faith has been my father mother prized house".Cole "Advantage" 24 She was reared by family members who believed in the New Light (or neo-Calvinist) tenets propagated by Jonathan Edwards during the eighteenth-century Great Awakening. Familiar with the sermons of her New Light forebears Reverend Samuel Moody and Reverend Joseph Emerson, young Mary accepted, as her grandfather Joseph preached, "that there is a Heaven of unconceivable Glory above, and a Hell of unutterable Torment below".Cole Origins 16-18 Instead of terrifying her, however, Mary Emerson's ancestral religion provided her comfort and hope. Growing up destitute, separated from her immediate family, isolated from society, she embraced her misery as the will of God. She "valued her own despair because it assured her of the existence of God [….] Hers was the paradoxical spirit of Calvinism that found in the darkest despair the […] presumption of holiness, that embraced rejection and turned it into an identification with Eternity".Williams “Rapture” 5 She wrote, "I rose,—I felt I had given to God more perhaps than an angel could,—had promised Him in youth that to be a blot on this fair world, at His command, would be acceptable. Constantly offer myself to continue to obscurest and loneliest thing ever heard of, with one proviso,—His agency. Yes, love Thee, and all Thou dost, while Thou sheddest frost and darkness on every path of mine".Emerson Lectures 428