The Art of the Threshold: A Poetics of Liminality in Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman

Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were all drawn to visions of transition in the natural world as a way to define the passage between world and self, but their focus on the endlessly unfolding potential of the aesthetic ideal in the "space between" gave rise to a poetics of liminality that makes them distinct. Emerson's foundational conceptions of passage and transition emerge most fully in the writings of Thoreau and Whitman in three interrelated contexts or modes of liminality which parallel---in ascending stages---Arnold van Gennep's rites de passage, the tripartite process of initiation, transformation, and reintegration so important in Victor Turner's later theory of liminality. For these three American Romantic authors, liminality can operate in moments of clear vision that stress marked outlines of boundaries or horizons; in transformative moments of interpenetrative exchange that fuse or confuse opposites across the threshold; or in transfiguring moments of sublimity. Here liminality involves a stress both on the physical place that serves as a borderline or threshold and on the process of passage across that threshold---the "limen" in which transformations are seen to be generated.;The thesis first addresses the ways in which Emerson's key concepts and understandings of spiritual and aesthetic process initiated a widely influential vision of nineteenth-century liminal poetics. Thoreau's very different responses to the Emersonian model of transformation, as it unfolds within the definitive topos of the natural landscape, are then considered---first in the liminal spaces of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, and then in the darker allegorical contexts of The Maine Woods and Cape Cod. The final full chapter examines Whitman's later response to Emerson's liminal poetics, especially in the way that the persona of Leaves of Grass becomes a transitioning hero of consciousness and mediating interpreter of human experience---leading a community of readers out of stasis and through threshold moments of conversion. The study concludes with a brief epilogue outlining a subsequent trajectory for writing that emerges from Emerson's liminal poetics---an aesthetic perspective generated by the power (but also the indeterminacy) of continual regeneration and renewal.