Abstract
Thoreau is extravagant, even self-consciously defiant, when he claims in Walden to feel more at home at the Pond than in Concord:
Yet I experienced sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Aeolian music to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. (W 131)
A peripatetic philosopher, and out-of-doors for the best part of his days and nights, [Thoreau] had manifold weather and seasons in him; the manners of an animal of probity and virtue unstained. Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest, and the best republican citizen in the world; always at home minding his own affairs. A little overconfident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories … there was in him an integrity and love of justice that made possible and actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics—all the more welcome in this time of shuffling and pusillanimity.
—Bronson Alcott
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Notes
Bronson Alcott, Concord Days (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 13. There are clear echoes in Thoreau’s description of the community of nature of Scottish anti-Lockean theories of the socially stabilizing effects of the common sense of humankind. For an account of the social function of these ideas in the early-nineteenth-century United States,
see Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 337–362. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 115, notes that James Munroe’s 1833 edition of Dugald Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of Mind (1792) was a required text at Harvard during Thoreau’s years there.
Emerson, Journal and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. 9, 9–10. Compare the more collegial comments on “A Winter’s Walk” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letter to Henry David Thoreau, September 18, 1843, in Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 137.
Pamela Regis, Describing Early America: Bartram, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, and the Rhetoric of Natural History (DeKalb, IL: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), argues from texts by Bartram, Jefferson, and Crevecoeur that the terms sublime, beautiful, and picturesque were initially understood as scientifically precise markers of aesthetic response that implied a narrative of transformation.
Cecilia Tichi, New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) explores the period’s urgent ideological commitment to changing the New World landscape. Additional valuable discussions of the cultural politics of transformative landscape aesthetics include
Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 47–79;
Edward Halsey Foster, The Civilized Wilderness: Backgrounds to American Romantic Literature, 1817–1860 (New York: Free Press, 1975);
Jehlen, American Incarnation; Angela L. Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993);
and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). The two best accounts of the cultural politics of the pastoral
remain Marx, Machine in the Garden and Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
Bernard Rosenthal, City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of American Romanticism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980), 17–27, argues that the story of nature in early-nineteenth-century America, whether told in novels, travel narratives, or political orations, recounted the transformation of nature into its purest form, civilization. What distinguishes the American Romantics from their contemporaries is that they modify that story into the tale of an interior journey to a city of the self.
Ado Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 224–225.
James Russell Lowell, Review of Letters to Various Persons by Henry David Thoreau, North American Review, 101 (October 1865): 607.
Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 35, 49.
Sterling Delano, “Thoreau’s Visit to Brook Farm,” Thoreau Society Bulletin, 220/221 (Fall 1997–Spring 1998): 1–2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, letter to
Margaret Fuller, February 28, 1847, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds., Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor M. Tilton, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 3: 377–378.
Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958), 301 shows that Walden follows the argumentative structure of Nature quite closely.
Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 100–105, gives a brief account of Thoreau’s relation to the Association movement. Aso
see John H. Matle, “Emerson and Brook Farm,” ESQ, 58 (Spring 1970): 84–88. A section on Walden, emphasizing parallels with communitarian metaphysics and episte-mology occurs in Francis, Transcendental Utopias, 218–240.
Leonard Neufeldt, The Economist: Henry Thoreau and Enterprise (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) shows that Walden parodies the conventions structuring contemporary guidebooks for young men that propose to show them the path to material and social success.
Bob Pepperman Taylor, America’s Bachelor Uncle: Thoreau and the American Polity (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 75–97 provides a concise summary of Thoreau’s economic argument in Walden.
Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 7–8, notes that Thoreau emphasizes the date of his departure for the pond, July 4, as a broad hint that Walden, a heroic, scriptural book, recounts an attempt to individualize the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence.
Sherman Paul, Emerson’s Angle of Vision (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), 3–4. For an account of how this central idea structured the whole of Transcendentalist millennialism,
see Catherine L. Albanese, Corresponding Motion: Transcendental Religion and the New America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).
For a narrative of Thoreau’s initial admiration and final rejection of William Gilpin’s theories of landscape appreciation, see Gordon V. Boudreau, “H.D. Thoreau, William Gilpin, and the Metaphysical Ground of the Picturesque,” American Literature, 45, no. 3 (November 1973): 357–369. An additional source for the vocabulary of the picturesque was Wordsworth, for which
see Neill Joy, “Two Possible Analogues for ‘The Ponds’ in Walden: Jonathon Carver and Wordsworth,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 24 (1978): 197–205, which suggests that Wordsworth’s Guide to the District of the Lakes, published as part of the 1837 Complete Works, shaped Thoreau’s general ideas about landscape. Joseph Moldenhauer “ Walden and Wordsworth’s Guide to the English Lake District,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 261–292 documents the text’s influence on Walden.
Walter Benn Michaels, “Waldens False Bottoms,” Glyph, 1 (1977): 132–149, performs a deconstructive analysis of Walden, focusing on the instability of oppositions between nature and culture, the finite and the infinite, and literal and figurative language.
For complementary reading of Thoreau’s way of opposing history and nature, see Larry Reynolds’s chapter “Kossuth Fever and the Serenity of Walden,” in European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 153–170.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). Capitalism and the Moral Geography of Walden. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_12
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