Homespun to Sophisticated: Place as Transformer :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Homespun to Sophisticated Place as TransformerWorks Cited loseIt is common in the transcendental philosophy to associate the human activity of transcending with a place. Philosophers, artists, and writers fled to Niagara Falls and the White Mountains in search of sublime scenery that would unify them with God. One of the leading Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, states that Nature deifies us with a few and forte elements (Emerson, 27). The essential communion between worldly concern and nature, through something he calls the Oversoul, enables man to transfer the world into the consciousness, thereby uniting himself with God. Ironically, as the Transcendentalists were streaming into the countryside, teenage women from farms surrounding New England, especially from the White Mountains, were flooding the cities looking for control in the mills. The Lowell Girls went into the urban center to earn money for themselves or for their families and to undergo a transformation fr om a homespun country bumpkin to sophisticated, respected city woman with a sense of independence. These changes and improvements were part of the Lowell experience. The owners of the mills created a novel of the mills as a transformer which was then perpetuated by the mill girls via countersign of mouth or through their writings in the Lowell crack. The fictions in the Lowell Offering express their desire to be seen as transformed into the ideal woman. The act of self-representation through writing, which has as its central essence the transformative power of a place, was utilise by writers such as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau. The popularity of their writing and their ideas of the importance of the individuals kindred with God, nature and work surely influenced the Lowell womens writing and their desire to be seen as transformed. According to Transcendental philosophy, nature is transcendental (Emerson 197). There was nothing in the intellect w hich was not previously in the experience of the senses, by masking that there was a very important class of ideas or desperate forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired that these were intuitions of the perspicacity itself and Kant denominated them Transcendental forms (Emerson 197). Man experiences God and his power in the natural world. ravisher which is unavoidable in the natural world has the presence of a higher, namely, of the uncanny element ... essential to its perfection. ... Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue (Emerson 28).