The romance of desire

Ralph Waldo Emerson was nearly always concerned with experience, particularly the immediate experience of the ongoing, and therefore incomplete relationship between self and other. This book describes that relationship as a romance filled with passion, risk, and creativity. The author argues that the other, which Emerson took to include nature, other people, and even his own body, figures prominently for Emerson as a partner in relationship.

At times, Emerson experiences the other as an adversary and at other times as a lover.The author suggests ways in which contemporary readers are also Emerson's other, entangled as we are in a complex romance with a writer who conveyed his longing more than message.

Field reads Emerson's Nature in terms of contemporary feminists such as Nancy Chodorow, Jessica Benjamin, Carol Gilligan, Helene Cixous, and Luce Irigary to elucidate Emerson's epistemology as based on relational difference and his ethics as based on caring and responsibility.

In the final chapter, Field suggests that further extensions of Emerson, feminism, and antifoundationalism are our responsibility to make as we take up our play in the romance Emerson initiated. The "new yet unapproachable America" that Emerson longed for is ours in the making, and the making is inevitably and gloriously passionate and incomplete.