Reading race in(to) the American Renaissance: A study of race in Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Ellison

Emerson, Whitman, and Melville loom large in Ellison's Invisible Man. The American Renaissance writers also appear conspicuously in the African American writer's critical essays. However, the canonical writers' ideas, philosophies, and symbols are deliberately subverted in the novel and their moral visions are implicitly questioned in the essays. Ellison's ambivalent representations of the nineteenth-century writers imply that his stance towards them is far from simple: he at once critiques and claims their heritage. His subversive appropriation of the canonical writers derives from his recognition that their universal or transcendental ideas are steeped in contemporary racist ideologies. Since the question of race is at the heart of his critique of them, his allusions to them in his novel converge on their racial ideas. Ellison's critique of their racial limitations in effect urges his readers to read race in(to) the American Renaissance writers in order to reexamine and reinterpret their social visions.;Ellison reroutes the canonical writers' social visions after criticizing the racial ideas inherent in their moral compromises and insincerities. Reading race in(to) the American Renaissance writers reveals that their apparently democratic and egalitarian doctrines are in fact severely circumscribed and even nullified by their racial ideas echoing contemporary racist propaganda: Emersonianism includes and demands a racist interpretation of society; Whitman's ideas on democracy and comradeship envision an all white America; Melville's portrayals of black characters run the whole gamut of racist stereotypes from "jolly negroes" to savage cannibals. Indeed, none of the allegedly democratic writers were abolitionists despite their occasional antislavery pronouncements.;Since an African American is not an implied audience of the canonical writers' discourse, Ellison' s allusions to them are his symbolic action to "de-racialize" and universalize their racially-circumscribed social visions. While pointing out their racial limitations, he revises their major symbols, ideas, philosophies, and works: he modifies Emersonian senses of self-reliance, representativeness, and social organicism; he reinterprets Whitman's idea of America's Unionism as a matter of regional integration into an issue of racial rapport; he reads Melville's "Benito Cereno" in juxtaposition with the Amistad case, thereby suggesting an abiding image of interracial fraternity in American literature.