“Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done some thing strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’ A simple manly character need never make an apology…”  –Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was perhaps these words by renowned thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson that gave Charley Parkhurst that push towards the West, disguising herself as a man and leaving her past behind. Letting go of all fear, the townspeople’s gossip in Rhode Island, the pain of losing her family; it only fueled her desire to do something – anything – with her life, for herself, without having to apologize for it.

Emerson’s independent thinking was thought revolutionary and risqué during that time, as was no doubt Charley’s preferred lifestyle. Published from 1841 through 1844 in two volumes, Emerson’s Essays brings together a collection of the philosopher’s most popular and sensational idealistic concepts, including the Over-Soul, where he details the individual Self as part of a universal All. Accused of atheism for these notions, Emerson wasn’t taking away power from the “One True God” Catholicism believed, but was rather giving humankind a transcendental power in return; perhaps giving society more credit than it was due in his time.