Homespun to Sophisticated: Place as Transformer :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Homespun to Sophisticated: Place as Transformer Works Cited Missing It is common in the transcendental philosophy to associate the act of transcending with a place. Philosophers, artists, and writers fled to Niagara Falls and the White Mountains in search of sublime scenery that would connect them with God. One of the leading Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, states that "Nature deif[ies] us with a few and cheap elements" (Emerson, 27). The essential communion between man and nature, through something he calls the "Oversoul," enables man to transfer the world into the consciousness, thereby uniting himself with God. Ironically, as the Transcendentalists were streaming into the countryside, young women from farms surrounding New England, especially from the White Mountains, were flooding the cities looking for work in the mills. The "Lowell Girls" went into the city to earn money for themselves or for their families and to undergo a transformation from a "homespun country bumpkin" to sophisticated, respected city woman with a "sense of independ ence." These changes and improvements were part of the Lowell experience. The owners of the mills created a myth of the mills as a transformer which was then perpetuated by the mill girls via word of mouth or through their writings in the Lowell Offering. The fictions in the Lowell Offering express their desire to be seen as transformed into the ideal woman. The act of self-representation through writing, which has as its central essence the transformative power of a place, was utilized by writers such as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. The popularity of their writing and their ideas of the importance of the individual's relationship with God, nature and work surely influenced the Lowell women's writing and their desire to be seen as transformed. According to Transcendental philosophy, "nature is transcendental" (Emerson 197). "There was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and [Kant] denominated them Transcendental forms" (Emerson 197). Man experiences God and his power in the natural world. Beauty which is unavoidable in the natural world has "the presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element ... essential to its perfection. ... Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue" (Emerson 28).