The romance of desire

by Susan L. Field

Ralph Waldo Emerson was nearly always concerned with experience, particularly the immediate experience of the ongoing, and therefore incomplete relationship between self and other. This book describes that relationship as a romance filled with passion, risk, and creativity. The author argues that the other, which Emerson took to include nature, other people, and even his own body, figures prominently for Emerson as a partner in relationship. At times, Emerson experiences the other as an adversary and at other times as a lover.The author suggests ways in which contemporary readers are also Emerson's other, entangled as we are in a complex romance with a writer who conveyed his longing more than message. Field reads Emerson's Nature in terms of contemporary feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Carol Gilligan, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigary to elucidate Emerson's epistemology as based on relational difference and his ethics as based on caring and responsibility. In the fin