Writing after the minister: The fruits of Emersonian prophecy

"Writing After the Minister" repositions the "American Renaissance" as a revolt against the vocational and textual authority of the New England ministerial tradition. I borrow the phrase "writing after the minister" from Cotton Mather: for Puritan New England, writing after the minister describes the practice of faithful note-taking during the sermon. An almost inevitable sense of clerical dictation lingers over New England letters into the nineteenth century; Emerson recalls the days of his Youth, when the horizon of possibility showed "nothing but ministers, ministers, ministers." For Emerson, and those who share his sense of inspiration, new prospects appear within the cultural field: leaving the minister behind, these authors claim to write holy scripture anew. This aggressive "writing after the minister" pushes aside the pulpit and offers itself as a substitute spiritual discourse after the minister's departure. The "American Renaissance" works of F. O. Matthiessen's canonizing construct (1850--1855) may be identified by this confident prophetic strain: from Hawthorne's call for a "new revelation" to Melville's attempt to write "the Gospels in this century" to Stowe's claim that "God wrote" her most famous novel. But from the later careers of these Emersonian prophets emerges a contrasting series of retrospective works (1859--1876) which presents the high-cultural death of the minister in a less triumphant, more elegiac tone. I read this series as an "Aftermath of the American Renaissance" reflecting a crisis of ethical authority, a crisis legible in the instability of "Worship" in Emerson's The Conduct of Life, in the nostalgia for pulpit exemplarity in Stowe's The Minister's Wooing, in the anxious reappraisal of ministerial calling in Hawthorne's Elixir of Life manuscripts, and in the restless circulation of spiritual desire in Melville's Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. In this final, retrospective phase, "writing after the minister" comes to mean the pursuit of a lost object.