overdue for another marriage, and he found a relatively wealthy 31-year-old woman named Lydia Jackson. Emersons decidedly bloodless, businesslike marriage proposal, coming in January of 1835, defined the terms of their union: he would treat herwithdeep and tender respect,sinceher earnest and noble mindinspired so much goodness in his soul. Nevertheless, he dampened any romantic expectations by assuring her that his love could only manifest itself in a new and higher way. He declared that she was so in love with what I lovethat no remoteness of condition could separate usperhaps a veiled reference to his nontraditional sexual orientation. His essaySpiritual Laws declared that the soul harbors a photometer, a metaphorical irritable goldleaf and tinfoil device for measuring light. According to Louisa May Alcott, he defended his lack of affectionate gestures to [Lydia] by saying he was a photometer not a stove: he could measure light but not radiate heat. Emersons own brush with a same-sex love affair was first proposed in 1976 when Jonathan Ned Katz published his groundbreaking Gay American History. Emersons baffling, paralyzing crush on Harvard classmate Martin Gay is fairly well documented by Katz and his successors. However, the field of Transcendentalist studies has largely chosen to trivialize its implicationswhen it hasnt avoided them entirely. This tendency is nowhere more apparent than in Emersons relationship with Henry David Thoreau. FOREVERASORTOFBEAUTIFULENEMY AFTER A LONG HISTORYof denial by academic historians and critics, Thoreaus sexual nonconformity is a matter of widespread agreement, if not consensus. However, no one has gone so far as to suggest that he was Emersons lover. Emersons account of how they first met has a starry-eyed quality: He was not quite out of college ... when I first saw him. Emerson helped examine Thoreau for a Harvard rhetoric class on February 25, 1835, which was one month after his marriage proposal to Lydia Jackson. Thoreau, who was fourteen years younger than Emerson, graduated in 1837 a few months after the publication of Emersons first book, Nature. Thoreaus Harvard classmate David Greene Haskins found it remarkabletosee how Thoreau had so quickly undergone a chemical transformation into Emersons doppelgänger, due to his frequent contacts and intimate intercourse with Mr. Emerson, beginning from the very time of his leaving college.InThoreaus mannerisms, said Haskins, and in the tones and inflexions of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson.Haskins swore that he could have recognized Thoreaus original voice in the dark, but in Emersons study, he decided to deliberately close his eyes while they conversed and found himself unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. The Self Reliance has rarely been recognized as one of historys first manifestos for people to be honest about their sexual nonconformity. SeptemberOctober 2023 11
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