“All Things Go to Decay”: Decadence in the Early Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Abstract This article examines the functions of decadence, understood as both a rhetoric of personal, cultural, or civilizational decay and a logic of historical change, as it appears in the early journal writings and first published essay of the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. This article seeks to show, through a close survey of these early writings, that Emerson’s fascination with decadence is not an incidental folly of youth that was quickly outgrown, as is often supposed, but instead provides a crucial infrastructure for the development of the hallmark Emersonian ideas of compensation and self-reliance. By pursuing this line of inquiry, the article makes the case for a more nuanced consideration of Emerson’s status in nineteenth-century American studies and a greater engagement with his work in the field of decadence studies.