Henry David Thoreau’s Conscientious Performance

McCool, Daniel J.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_4

Henry David Thoreau’s Conscientious Performance

Daniel J. McCool²

Chapter
First Online: 09 September 2018

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Abstract

McCool details two modes of political action. One is authentic: a society of individuals demonstrate their inner consciences to each other in an intimate community, which governs itself directly. One is theatrical: citizens perform roles for each other in political action. Thoreau is presented as a thinker who exhibits the best of both. At Walden, Thoreau speaks with a prophetic voice he finds within his own conscience. In his John Brown speech, Thoreau gives a theatrical performance meant to shock and awaken the consciences of his audience. Ultimately, Thoreau wants his readers to experience their own natural consciences for themselves, as he demonstrates his own rediscovery of his inner nature. This blends the best of both theatrical and authentic models of politics.

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Notes

1.
Jack Turner, “Thoreau as a Political Thinker” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2009), 2.
2.
Turner, “Thoreau as a Political Thinker,” 3.
3.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Or, Life in the Woods (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 1.
4.
Thoreau, Walden, 430.
5.
Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience” in Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1993).
6.
George Shulman, “Thoreau, Prophesy, and Politics” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2009), 125.
7.
Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 9.
8.
George Kateb, The Inner Ocean: Individualism and Democratic Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), 233.
9.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 236.
10.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 89–90.
11.
Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” 2.
12.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 236.
13.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 91.
14.
Joan Richardson, A Natural History of Pragmatism: the Fact of Feeling from Jonathan Edwards to Gertrude Stein (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 77.
15.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 252–53.
16.
Thoreau, Walden, 88.
17.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 85.
18.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 26.
19.
Thoreau, Walden, 88.
20.
Thoreau, Walden, 84.
21.
Thoreau, Walden, 89.
22.
Jane Bennett, “Thoreau’s Techniques of Self” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2009), 295.
23.
Jack Turner, “Thoreau and John Brown” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2009), 153.
24.
Henry David Thoreau, “A Plea For Captain John Brown” in Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 48.
25.
Thoreau, “Brown,” 33.
26.
Thoreau, “Brown,” 48.
27.
It is important to note here that Thoreau is not necessarily endorsing Brown’s actions as political. In fact, John himself was rejecting politics. But by monumentalizing the shocking and controversial example of Brown, Thoreau himself is acting politically, in the Arendtian sense, by persuading his audience through shock value.
28.
Thoreau, Walden, 103.
29.
Thoreau, Walden, 104.
30.
Thoreau, Walden, 104.
31.
Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 23.
32.
Jonathan Mckenzie, “How To Mind Your Own Business: Thoreau on Political Indifference,” The New England Quarterly 84, no. 3 (2011): 422–43.
33.
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 11.
34.
Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 11.
35.
Nancy Rosenblum, “Thoreau’s Democratic Individualism” in A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Jack Turner (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 2009), 2.
36.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 97.
37.
Brian Walker, “Thoreau on Democratic Cultivation,” Political Theory 29, no. 2 (2001): 156.
38.
Philip F. Gura, American Transcendentalism: A History (New York: Hill and Wang: 2007), 44.
39.
Thomas L. Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93.
40.
Thoreau, Walden, 91.
41.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 138.
42.
Kateb, Inner Ocean, 236.
43.
Thoreau, Walden, 213.

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Framingham State University, Framingham, MA, USA
Daniel J. McCool

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McCool, D.J. (2019). Henry David Thoreau’s Conscientious Performance. In: Three Frames of Modern Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_4

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95648-0_4
Published: 09 September 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-95647-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-95648-0
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