Mr. Emerson

Mr. Emerson appears in Mary Antin's memoir as the guest speaker at a Friday evening meeting of the Natural History Club, held in the reception room of Hale House. He is introduced by Mr. Winthrop, who has just finished reading the minutes of the last meeting, as "an authority on spiders." The introduction fills Mary with dread, as she has a deep, visceral fear of the creatures. Yet the lecture that follows becomes one of the most transformative episodes in her American education, converting her repugnance into wonder and opening her mind to the natural world in a way that no book had ever done.

The Spider Lecture at Hale House

The meeting takes place on a Friday evening, and Mary arrives with a sense of leisure, knowing there will be no school the next day. She sits in a kindergarten chair beside the piano, prepared to have an agreeable evening even if she is a little bored. When Mr. Winthrop announces the speaker, pronouncing the word "spiders" with unmistakable relish, Mary's nerves contract into a tight knot. She grips the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on. She watches Mr. Emerson, waiting for him to open a box of spiders, recalling a hideous experience of long ago when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm and shook a spider out of her sleeve.

The Demonstration That Dispels Fear

Mr. Emerson, however, has no menagerie in his pockets. Instead of producing live specimens, he talks in a familiar way about different kinds of spiders and their ways, and as he talks, he weaves across the doorway where he stands a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he has ready in the door frame. Mary is fascinated by the progress of the web. She forgets her terrors and begins to follow his discourse. She is surprised to hear how much there is to know about a dusty little spider, besides that he can spin his webs as fast as her broom could sweep them away. The drama of the spider's daily life becomes very real to her as the lecturer goes on: his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors, the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of his body for his surroundings, of his instincts for his vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of life under the direction of definite laws fills her with a great wonder and leaves no room in her mind for repugnance or fear.

A Turning Point in Natural History

Mary reflects that it is the first time the natural history of a living creature has been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she is surprised at her dullness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history. She does not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once; she does not at once begin to collect worms and bugs. But on the next sweeping-day she stands on a chair, craning her neck, to study the spider webs she discovers in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two webs of more than ordinary perfection she suffers to remain undisturbed for weeks, although it is her duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling clean. She begins to watch for the mice that are wont to scurry across the floor when the house sleeps and she alone waked. She even places a crust for them on the threshold of her room and cultivates a breathless intimacy with them, when the little gray beasts acknowledge her hospitality by nibbling her crust in full sight. And so by degrees she comes to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she begins to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club.

Significance in Mary's Development

The spider lecture marks a quiet but decisive step in Mary's Americanization. It is not a dramatic event like her first day at public school or her Washington's Birthday poem, but it represents the kind of intellectual opening that the new world offers her. The lecture demonstrates how a skilled teacher can make even the most repellent subject come alive, and it shows Mary that knowledge is not confined to books but can be found in the everyday world around her. The transformation from terror to fascination, from sweeping away spider webs to preserving them for study, is a small-scale version of the larger metamorphosis she undergoes throughout the memoir: the greenhorn who learns to see her new country, and the natural world, with fresh eyes. Mr. Emerson himself remains a minor figure, appearing only in this single episode, but his method of teaching by demonstration rather than by precept leaves a lasting impression on the young immigrant, and his lecture becomes one of the threads in the fabric of her new American identity.