Emerson’s Memory Loss
This chapter examines Emerson’s 1870–71 lecture series Natural History of Intellect, which formed as Emerson’s experience of memory loss became profound, and registers its author’s shifting protocols for producing texts as he contended with changing patterns of cognition. Natural History of Intellect reflects upon Emerson’s increasing reliance upon his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson, who assisted Emerson as he lectured and who eventually reshaped Emerson’s manuscript materials. Entering into conversation with other literary historians who challenge an account of Emerson’s thought that enshrines Emersonian individualism to the exclusion of more communal dimensions of transcendentalism, this chapter contends that the lecture series theorizes the terms of his collaboration with Ellen in ways that break with Emerson’s earlier tendency to lionize insular consciousness and to isolate the body from the mind, offering instead an account of first-person thought as if always interpenetrated with the thinking of other people.