Why Mary Moody Emerson Intrigues me

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt intrigues me. Her name is Mary Moody Emerson.

Emerson biographer Robert Richardson, Jr. says that Mary provided the single most important part of his education, even in comparison to his curriculum at Harvard, then as now where the elite was educated. Waldo called her the “best writer in Massachusetts” in her prime, and he preserved and copied her writing into his own notebooks for inspiration. She was well-read and articulate, occasionally brutally candid.

Her energy and charisma attracted the young, and she attracted them and cultivated their friendships. They must have been drawn to her penchant for controversy and her limitless energy and interest in the growth of the mind. She frequently visited her Emerson and his brothers, her nephews, and maintained throughout her life a steady stream of letters with each that probe and inform, tear apart ideas and texts, and recommend reading. On nothing was she without an opinion, and she freely shared them. Her obituary in the Boston Commonwealth said that “she was thought to have the power of saying more disagreeable things in half an hour than any person living.”

And this is just the beginning of a sketch of her personality and character, which must have been eccentric. Richardson in his Emerson biography says she was only four foot three, slept on a bed shaped like a coffin, and wore a burial shroud when she traveled. Her size belied her energy. “She could keep step with no human being,” Emerson wrote. “She would tear into the chaise or out of it, into the house or out of it.”

Always poor and never married (though asked), Emerson said that destitution was her muse, and her days were filled with books and housework, and I can’t help but wonder what impact the dual needs of sustenance and daily labor had when contrasted with our modern conveniences and technology. In spite or maybe because of this situation, she was self-educated and read Plato, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Stewart, Coleridge, Locke, Byron, and others. No fields were beyond her interest, and she would “zigzag” between authors, topics, and books.

Mary Emerson was deeply religious, too, though she could “neither believe completely nor be comfortable in her unbelief.” Christ was her mediator, but she “looked forward to a time when she do could without him.” Her views seemed to want to stretch the bounds of religion to include imagination, to connect it to the natural world, and she seems to struggle with her own sense of mortality.

As I read about Mary, I contemplate if we can find such thinkers today. We might call them free thinkers, but are there any?

Is it possible, with the continuous and nearly omnipresent influence of social media and the internet, of thirty-second video clips and 240-character messages, to develop the independence and freedom to digest great thought, great writers, great books, and produce great thinking, new thinking, new worlds?

Are we stunted by our own prosperity and the golden handcuffs that our wealth provides us?

Netflix, Amazon Prime, and ESPN are ready to fill our every waking hour, and our employment is geared to provide economic benefit, not intellectual power or expansion, at least usually.

What would happen to such a woman as Mary Moody Emerson if she were born today?