Nature

Nature is personified as a feminine presence in Emerson’s essay. This portrayal fits in with the classical tradition of applying the pronoun “she” to nature, in addition to the fact that nature is gendered feminine in the romance languages of classical texts. Fecund nature, which was full of material forms, was regarded as the feminine opposite to God and the intellect. Emerson employs maternal allusions to his discussion of this source of bounty, as he describes a “child’s love” for his “beautiful mother.” The love of a child for his mother is instinctive, complete, and irrational. He views her through a rose-tinted, potentially distorted lens. Just as 19th-century education separated boys from their mothers to encourage them to disidentify with the feminine sphere and become more manly, Emerson wants to gain enough distance from the surface sensorial characteristics of nature to enter the more masculine realm of its intellectual and spiritual significance.

Emerson’s text abounds in similes and metaphors, which use comparisons to distance the reader enough from everyday phenomena to see them anew. For example, Emerson uses metaphor to support his argument that the present age deserves its own philosophy when he questions why “we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe” when “the sun shines to-day also” (15).