'Fleeing to fables': Reading Emerson in Literature for Children

Emerson regularly employs the figure of the child in his essays, poems, and personal writings as he works to define what man is and should be, with childhood frequently in opposition as both the status that man has (or should have) left behind and an ideal state to which man might aspire (or return). While such oppositions have rarely been explored in any sustained depth in Emersonian criticism, writers of children’s literature have returned to Emerson over the last 150 years in ways that call for deeper investigation. This chapter considers portrayals of Emerson in the works of Louisa May Alcott, L. M. Montgomery, and Ransom Riggs, analyzing Emerson’s construction for an assumed child audience; how such constructions reflect, relate to and trouble his works; and how Emersonian philosophies of childhood are both ratified and destabilized to prompt new readings of Emerson’s own question in Nature: “What is a child?”