SOURCE: Steele, Jeffrey. “Materializing the Psyche: The Counterexample of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.” In The Representation of the Self in the American Renaissance, pp. 134-71. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Steele argues that the fiction of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville provide a counterexample to the Transcendentalist writings of Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman.

Transparency or Masquerade

It makes a great deal of difference whether or not the self is seen as incarnating transcendent spiritual power. If God—as Emerson believed—is found at the root of the psyche, one's attitude toward psychic phenomena such as intuitive promptings can be one of faith, of subordination to a “higher” power. In Emerson's view the language of the self needs to be made “transparent” in order to reveal the presence of the transcendental signified that he locates in the unconscious. But even though Emerson dreamed of...