| Self-reliance is a significant component of contemporary Emerson scholarship, but few scholars have examined the way in which reading---almost unarguably Emerson's favorite pastime---can contribute to this canonical Emersonian idea. By delineating a passage in Emerson's journal which purports to entail the "secret" to self-reliance, I suggest that a key aspect of generating self-reliance is making your "supposed deficiencies redundancy" (Emerson, Journals VII: 521), which is the gradual abdication of self-doubt, and that this secret is manifest in passages that describe the act of reading throughout Emerson's Essays. However, that secret---like many of Emerson's concepts---evolves over his career and takes on new shades of meaning, and my project attempts to trace that evolution to arrive at a sketch of how reading can inform self-reliance. I use the essays "History", "The Poet", and "Experience" to demonstrate this evolution and also self-reliant reading's limitations. Ultimately, I hope to suggest that it's these very limitations that create the possibility for ethical conduct in an indeterminate world, thereby demonstrating the necessity of reading for living "the good life". |
