Previous
Friendship
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Friendship, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
True Friendship
The primary topic of Emerson’s essay is, as the title suggests, the nature of friendship. Emerson takes pains to differentiate true friendship from more superficial kinds of human relationships. In “Friendship,” Emerson emphasizes that meaningful friendship can neither be forced nor shallow. Instead, true friendship emerges by chance, when two compatible individuals form a relationship in which they can be entirely honest and authentic with each other, and through which they can bring meaning…
read analysis of True Friendship
Change and the Laws of Nature
Emerson’s insists throughout “Friendship” that true friendship is part of nature, governed by the same forces that animate the natural world. The chief law of nature, and accordingly of friendship, is change—change that is much slower and more meaningful than the rapid formation and disappearance of superficial human connections. True friendship unfolds at the much slower pace of geologic and biological time. Just like the renewal of plants, or the alternation of electric charge…
read analysis of Change and the Laws of Nature
Solitude vs. Society
In “Friendship,” Emerson argues—somewhat paradoxically—that friendship both requires and promotes the productive solitude of each friend. Friendship is based on spontaneous “affection,” a human feeling of connection that occurs when two appropriately matched individuals encounter one another. Yet each individual must remain essentially separate from the other, an independent person who regards his or her friend as equally independent and autonomous. Emerson suggests that the ideal interaction between two friends is therefore conversation, in…
read analysis of Solitude vs. Society
Get the entire Friendship LitChart as a printable PDF.
