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

Homespun to innovative Place as TransformerWorks Cited MissingIt is common in the preter born(p) philosophy to associate the act of transcending with a place. Philosophers, artists, and writers fled to Niagara Falls and the White Mountains in search of sublime scenery that would connect them with deity. One of the leading Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, states that spirit deifies us with a few and cheap elements (Emerson, 27). The essential communion amidst man and character, by means of 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, young women from farms surrounding New England, especially from the White Mountains, were flooding the cities looking for work in the mills. The Lowell Girls went into the city to crystallise money for themselves or for their families and to undergo a transformation from a rough country b umpkin to sophisticated, respected city woman with a whizz of independence. These changes and improvements were part of the Lowell experience. The owners of the mills created a myth of the mills as a transformer which was then perpetuated by the mill girls via word of mouth or through their writings in the Lowell Offering. 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 of import essence the transformative power of a place, was utilized 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 relationship with God, nature and work sure 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 which was not antecedentl y in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired that these were intuitions of the mind 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 spiritual element ... essential to its perfection. ... Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue (Emerson 28).