SOURCE: “‘Too Pathetic, Too Pitiable’: Emerson's Lessons in Love's Philosophy,” in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance Vol. 40, No. 2, 2^nd Quarter, 1994, pp. 139-82.

In the following essay, Selinger examines Emerson's view on marriage and love, and the friction between earthly love and a more divine love.

I take my title from “Illusions,” the final essay in The Conduct of Life. Emerson has just named women as “the element and kingdom of illusion,” and defied anyone to “pluck away the … effects and ceremonies, by which they live.” In a moment he will announce with chilling calm that “[w]e are not very much to blame for our bad marriages.” The pivot between these statements comes in a punning interjection that discovers or exposes the illusions of matrimony, not in men's or women's actual faults, but encoded in the letters that name the space between them, the married state...