In Nature To better understand Transcendentalism, I referred back to a Unitarian Minister named William Ellery Channing. The text mentions the opposition Transcendentalists had with Unitarianism, such as “cold rationality and materialism”, but they both shared the belief that the “power of human intuition” was at the core of being close to God (Belasco and Johnson 730). Transcendentalists needed to relate to God, or be at one with Him, in a private, personal setting. They believed in “the spiritual
Romantic Literature Romantic notions regarding the virtue found in youth and solitude, and God’s transcending existence in nature are prevalent in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Through similar, romantic perspectives, Emerson and Thoreau describe the spiritual growth they experience within nature. The idea that God exists in every aspect of nature is constantly voiced in both chapters, and both men explain how they achieve enlightenment. The ways in which both Emerson
American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, quite simply, had a complicated relationship with women. When his father died from Yellow Fever in 1808, Hawthorne, then only four-years-old, was left to be raised by his mother and two sisters (Conway 16). Hawthorne’s childhood, which was shaped almost entirely by women, proved to have a profound impact on his life and perception of femininity. Consequently, Hawthorne more fully understood women and created female characters who were multifaceted, nuanced, and
To a certain extent, Into the Wild is a modern-day Transcendentalist classic, and mostly not the story of a mentally disturbed young man. To understand this, one must first realize what exactly a Transcendentalist is, and what it means to be mentally disturbed. Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement that stemmed from social factors in 1836, as a reaction to rationalism; it is essentially the protest over spirituality and the intellectualism that results from gaining such experiences