Natural Law and Radical Autonomy in Antebellum American Literature

Abstract

This dissertation examines the tension and conflict between conceptions of the natural law and the ideal of radical autonomy in the work of the antebellum American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. This tension and conflict was brought to the fore by the modernization of American society in the antebellum period. Modernization is here understood as the social process through which increasing recognition is given to individual autonomy, elevating the individual self, as the creator of meaning and value, above the standard provided by nature, including human nature, according to which one ought to live. This standard is here termed “the natural law.” Traditionally, the natural law was held to be objective and accessible to human reason and was mediated to the individual by society’s political, cultural, economic, and religious authorities. Modernization is the process whereby the individual is liberated, not only from these authorities, but also from the natural law itself. This modern understanding of freedom is here called “radical autonomy.”Emerson, Poe, and Melville were of two minds concerning the modernization of American society. On the one hand, they were captivated by the prospect of the liberation of the self from external limitations and constraints, by the possibility that the individual self might be free to give its own meaning to its existence and to determine for itself its own purposes and ends. But on the other hand, they were sensitive to the difficulty that such liberated selves had in finding a sense of belonging in the modern world and in giving their lives real purpose and meaning. These authors were therefore inclined to reaffirm the existence of the natural law and the ideal of the good life as a life lived according to nature, even as such reaffirmations were in tension with their commitments to the emancipation of the self both from society and from nature itself.