Labor pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on work, women, and the development of the self (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott)

Emerson has traditionally been seen by critics as concerned primarily with the individual while ignoring societal issues, and as getting more conservative as his career progresses. Certainly, Emerson's most famous doctrine, self-reliance, argues for the vitality and sufficiency of the individual. However, even within the theory most concerned with the importance of the single self, Emerson incorporates a connection to and concern for others, and that connection is revealed most clearly through looking at the role vocation plays within the quest for self-reliance. An investigation into Emerson's philosophy of work shows that he is always concerned with the social implications of the development of the self. It also reveals a surprising consistency in Emerson's writing: throughout several of his essays and lectures, spanning the entirety of his career, Emerson celebrates and insists upon the importance of work both to the individual and, as a result, to society. When Emerson turns, in the last decades of his career, to the “woman question,” his stress on the importance of work in defining and developing the self presses him to advance his views. Emerson's responses to the call for women to have access to the professions and higher education, made most evident in his unpublished manuscript Discours Manqué, do not get more conservative as his career progresses, but rather more liberal and more adamant. Studying Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and The Blithedale Romance alongside Emerson's theory of work uncovers unexpected similarities in their views on the role of work in self development and the effects of the limited access to work on young women and opens the controversial endings of the novels to new interpretations. Alcott's writing, particularly in her neglected novels Work and Hospital Sketches , demonstrates how the increased opportunities available to women through the Civil War confirmed the important role of work in discovering and defining the self. As Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott illustrate, valorizing the importance of work in building a substantive self also validates the need for equality.