Emersonian Friendship: A Splendid Failure

"Emersonian Friendship: A Splendid Failure" tracks the splendid failures and tentative successes of a collectively developed theory of friendship that arose in the circle of friends and writers that surrounded Ralph Waldo Emerson. As a work engaged with sensibility studies, this dissertation argues that Emersonian friendship attempted to develop a new form of friendship without the exclusionary biases that have inhered in Western theories of friendship since Aristotle's famous declaration that the friend is a second self. Emerson attempted to theorize the possibility of friendships that could reach across the interpersonal divisions that Aristotle believed made true friendship impossible. This dissertation not only pursues that theoretical argument, but also attempts to document the personal effort made by Emerson and his female friend Margaret Fuller to establish a friendship that transgressed the division of gender--a divide that Aristotle believed prevented friendship. "Emersonian Friendship" argues that Margaret Fuller challenged Emerson's theory to better account for the difficulty of establishing such transgressive friendships by insisting that he give more attention to the work or labor that such friendships require. What Emerson theorized as possible, Fuller revealed to be challenging. Finally, "Emersonian Friendship" investigates the legacy of this new way of understanding friendship as a relationship of choice by considering one of the first adoption agencies in the United States. Emerson's theories on friendship influenced Charles Loring Brace and the Children's Aid Society of New York City (CAS) in their effort to "out-place" orphaned children from New York City to rural farms through a project that has come to be called "The Orphan Trains". The CAS operated in an era before legal systems for adoption, and "Emersonian Friendship" argues that Brace and the CAS relied on a rhetoric of Emersonian friendship to construct these new sorts of families of choice.