Embree 1

Camille Embree

Whipple

US History

4 Nov 2018

Force Project

During the 19th century, an abundance of transcendentalist ideas spread among antebellum

communities, causing several social reforms. Transcendentalist philosophers believed in the ideas of

individualism, idealism, and the “oversoul” (divinity in nature). This perspective was spurred due to

reactions towards rationalism and similar movements, gaining many followers through it’s early years.

One recurring motif found in transcendentalist works is the interconnectedness of all things, an idea in

which the world around us reflects our own lives. These ideas were presented in Antebellum pieces like

“Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson and “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman. In terms of the social

movements, Sylvester Graham’s diet reform provides a good example of how the interconnectedness of

the world ties into antebellum historic events.

In 1837, Sylvester Graham published a book called A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making. This

book focuses primarily on describing the process and instruction of how to make the best nutritious bread,

but in one excerpt, a chapter labeled “Laws of Diet”, Graham discusses how certain foods (specifically

bread) can allow man to be in our most healthy state. The scholar gives examples using different

mammals and introducing religious and scientific ideas regarding a clean diet. He believed that “Every

substance in nature which God has prepared for the food of man, consists of both nutritious and

innutritious matter” (Graham 13). This belief that certain foods in various environments were made by

God within divine predetermination for the benefit of human health helps create a connection between the

two different systems. By putting natural and unprocessed foods into a human's system, there will be

benefits such as being “preserved from improper concentrations... also from pernicious combinations of

alimentary substances” (Graham 14). This idea of every input to our bodies having a dependent output
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shows how something as seemingly irrelevant as nature truly interconnects and effects humans, thought to

improve their health and their thoughts.

Hungry for Reassurance, a book by Erin R. Mulligan, contains an excerpt labeled Historical

Foundation that discusses Graham’s thoughts and motives behind his diet reform. Mulligan mentions that

“Graham believed that certain foods—most notably meat of any kind and foreign spices—stimulated

sexual desires in both men and women” (4). This quote displays the motif of interconnected with the

world, describing how the intake of certain foods can affect an output as basic as human thought. The

excerpt previously mentioned that objects such as bread “signified domestic order, civic health, and moral

well-being, [and] ingesting more bread...would produce healthy bodies and homes,” which similarly

relates back to the idea that the natural and artificial world interconnect in many ways (Mulligan qtd. in

Tompkins). The fact that something utilized in daily human life, such as bread or other foods being

cultivated from the natural world and grown in the environment around us, can signify human social

standards shows that the world is interconnected in many ways.

One of the 19th century’s most significant transcendentalist leaders is known as the father of

American Literature: Ralph Waldo Emerson. His piece, “Nature”, displays the interconnectedness of all

things when he writes, “The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflect the wisdom of his best hour, as

much as they had delighted in the simplicity of his childhood.” With this quote he connects natural

elements of scenery to human life; nature reflects man’s life from the delights of childhood to the peak of

his wisdom. This displays interconnectedness of the world by uniting the idea of the stages of the life to

the complexity found in nature. To connect man with the world once more, Emerson taps into the

“oversoul” idea in saying: “The currents of the universal being circulate through me; I am part or particle

of God.” This quote conveys that man and all things are one connected soul. This concept is one of the

most important aspects to the interconnectedness motif, because of the way it incorporates all of the

universe into one united life.

Another poet who liked to express the “oversoul” idea was Walt Whitman. In his piece “Song of

Myself” he presents the line, “In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the
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glass,” (48.) Similar to what Emerson touched on, Whitman describes how every man and women has

God within themself. Quotes like this from all transcendental writers strengthen the motif of

interconnectedness because they use God (or some sort of divine energy in general) to connect the

humans and or nature of the world.

When curating the idea for our artifact we wanted to find a way to incorporate all aspects of our

motif, history, and literature into one parody infomercial. When deciding what to make we wanted to

come up with a way that would easily convey our information while still remaining upbeat and comical.

We chose a topic we believed has not been talking about too much in our classes and figured it would be

an original topic that could educate our peers. While creating the actual video we chose to emulate

previous infomercials from the past that we grew up seeing on television, with obnoxious rhetorical

questions, street interviews, and shown demonstrations of what the product looks like.

All together, our motif, interconnectedness to the world, is accurately represented in the

antebellum historical and literary pieces. The motif is shown in the history through Graham’s desire to

have people understand that the input of food can affect human’s connection with each other and the

world. The motif in the literary works is shown through the various rhetorical devices used as well at the

speaker’s tone. We chose to create an infomercial as our artifact as we believed it would be a creative way

to engage our classmates on a topic they may have never learned about in their classrooms. Many of our

ideas shifted while we progressed further into this project but as we continued we curated a project that

showed all the aspects that were necessary.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Emerson Central, https://emersoncentral.com/texts/nature-

addresses-lectures/nature2/chapter1-nature/. Accessed: 4 November 2018.

Graham, Sylvester. A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making. Boston: Light and Stearns, 1 cornhill, 1837.

13-16. HooplaDigital. Web. 28 Oct. 2018.

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Mulligan, Erin N. Hungry for Reassurance Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Cultural Anxieties and the

Diet Debate, 1890-1914. MA Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University, 2016.

OhioLINK, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1467743345&

disposition=inline. Accessed: 4 Nov. 2018.

Walt, Whitman. Song of Myself. 1892 version, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version. Accessed: 4

November 2018.