Study Guide to Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645421870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, a leading figure in transcendentalism.

As a transcendentalist of the nineteenth-century, Thoreau's work reflected his belief in the correspondence between Man and Nature. Moreover, his anti-materialistic ideology was influential in Western philosophy. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Thoreau's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains:

- Introductions to the Author and the Work

- Character Summaries

- Plot Guides

- Section and Chapter Overviews

- Test Essay and Study Q&As

The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he taught school, first at Concord, then in a private school opened with his brother John. He also began keeping his Journal upon graduation, and in 1837 made Emerson’s acquaintance. During the period after college he began giving lectures and publishing essays, chiefly in the Week and the Dial (a Transcendental journal). He lived with the Emersons in 1841, and again after the Walden experience (1845-47), supervising the household in Emerson’s frequent absence. From 1844 onward, making a living also included for him brief periods in his father’s pencil-making factory and surveying. Also, from 1839 he was periodically making excursions on the Concord and Merrimack rivers and into the Maine woods and Cape Cod, the basis of later published writings. He went to Minnesota for his health in 1861, and died at Concord of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862.

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THOREAU’S LIFE

From the brief biographical summary above emerge certain areas of some significance to the reader to Thoreau’s work: the period right after college, including what appear to have been the two loves in his life, and his unending conflict about choosing a profession; his friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his interest in Transcendentalism; and of course the excursions into “Nature” which produced his major works. It is generally assumed that he loved (but did not marry) two women in his life: one was Ellen Sewall, sister of his friend Edmund Sewall, to whom he proposed in the years after college and was rejected; the other was Lidian Emerson, wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a woman beautiful and severe, 15 years his senior, to whom he seems to have been devoted platonically for a number of years. Just out of college Thoreau was plagued with both choosing a profession suitable for a Harvard graduate, and with simply earning a living. Although he never found himself able to fit into any of the categories assumed suitable for his education-divinity, law, academic teaching, lecturing and research - and throughout his life elevated (as had Emerson in “The American Scholar”) the “poet-philosopher” as his own ideal, he was annoyingly confronted from time to time with the problem of making a living: hence his periodic teaching and lecturing, his stays with the Emersons during which time he was supposed to “make it” in the New York literary world (but did not), his frustrated periods of work in his father’s pencil-making factory, surveying, and the day-labor he did while at Walden and on other excursions. Thoreau’s strong resistance to the drudgery necessary to make a go of it in the material world was of course linked to his belief that man should pursue his higher nature, discover his inner self, probably through isolated meditation in a time of leisure; when forced into the hustling economic world he felt his life to be “prosaic, hard and coarse.” In an essay “Life Without Principle,” for example, he expressed his bitterness by asserting, “a man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.”

The influence of his Transcendentalist mentor Emerson upon Thoreau was of course great, both through Emerson’s writings such as “The American Scholar” (in which he idealizes the scholar’s life of meditation and study) and “Nature” (in which we find the seed of many of Thoreau’s ideas about Nature and man), and through his friendship with the Emersons. Yet their friendship proved a difficult one in which Thoreau seems to have invoked an impossible ideal of communication on a “higher plane” between two philosophers. If Thoreau was idealistic, Emerson himself may have been slightly patronizing to the younger man: the inevitable result at any rate was antagonism, expressed for example in an excerpt from Thoreau’s Journal - “Talked, or tried to talk, with R.W.E. Lost my time - nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind - told me what I knew - and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.” His first stay with the Emersons, however (and tutoring Emerson’s nephew on Staten Island), solidified his desires to withdraw from the civilized world for awhile; he wrote in the Journal, “I don’t want to feel as if my life were a sojourn any longer. The philosophy cannot be true which so paints it. It is time now that I begin to live.” Hence the Walden experiment.

Friendship to Thoreau, though, was the highest Transcendental relation, without which Nature was not morally significant. Thus he went to Emerson (whose essay “Nature” had become the bible of the Transcendentalists) hoping that their relationship would be so ideal as to show the world “what men can build each other up to be, when both master and pupil work in love.” [Basically, Transcendentalism explores the nature of reality, and there are several “philosophies” which fall into the general category of Transcendentalism; here we are concerned with an American Transcendentalism propounded chiefly in the ideas of Emerson, based on the search for reality through spiritual intuition.] Thoreau was able to respond intellectually to Emerson, however, in the sense that his own Transcendentalist ideas developed from those set forth in Emerson’s famous essay “Nature.” Briefly, those ideas, basic to the American Transcendentalist movement, are 1) conviction of knowledge beyond that given to us through the five senses; 2) spirit is supreme over matter; 3) Nature is to be enjoyed, even reverenced; 4) the individual must set a high standard of personal conduct, which often includes an anti-materialistic view of the business world.

THOREAU’S WORKS

Thoreau’s chief works are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Walden (1854), The Maine Woods (1863), certain essays such as “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), and “A Plea for John Brown” (1859). In addition there are now published his Journal accounts of various excursions, and letters and poems, all of which can be found in the standard edition of his works, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, 1906, 20 volumes). (Many of his essays, in other words, were first presented as lectures or published in journals such as Dial and The Atlantic Monthly, and were in fact only collected posthumously.) A comment can be added here about A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849, two years after Thoreau emerged from Walden Woods; for he wrote this series of essays while at Walden, and it can be said to encompass his spiritual history from 1839 to 1849 (just as Walden spans the spiritual struggles of 1845 to 1854). These two may be regarded as companion volumes, chronicling his search for an organic life in Nature, from the easy, youthful communions to the intellectually harder-won communions of his adulthood. He himself financed the publication of the book, and was disappointed in its lack of popular success. Just like Walden, A Week [it is often referred to as Week by biographers and critics] reveals as much of the poet-philosopher as it does of the traveler-sojourner.

THOREAU’S MAJOR THEMES AND IDEAS: SELF-AWARENESS

Thoreau’s essential theme is life-but life lived when one is fully awake. As a Transcendentalist he was bound to explore the meaning of reality and seek his own inner self. This is why such a volume as Walden is both an experience lived and an experience reflected upon: while at Walden from 1845-57 he of course kept his daily journal, but the book he published was the outgrowth of reflections upon that past experiment and experience. Walden chronicles the spiritual self-searching of 1845 to 1854, which very importantly includes Thoreau’s struggle to recapture afterwards the purity and union with Nature that he felt in his simplified physical existence at Walden Pond. He did not look upon his withdrawal to Walden in the search for self-realization, incidentally, as a permanently desirable isolation from society; but, as one of his critics, Sherman Paul, puts it, “self-realization in Nature suffused him with love. Neither life nor love could be shared, he learned, until he had found his own center, the pride that rested on the security of his own self-reliance.”

To find that center of the self, however, Thoreau believed that a “doctrine of simplicity” was desirable; the physically simplified life was the best means to self-emancipation. Through a kind of voluntary poverty, a materially simple existence, a direct line of communication between the inner self and Nature might be established. Thus he chose the pastoral life as the ideal milieu. In his Journal he wrote, “There are two kinds of simplicity, one that is akin to foolishness, the other to wisdom. The philosopher’s style of living is only outwardly simple, but inwardly complex. The savage’s style is both outwardly and inwardly simple.” Thoreau is not, then, merely glorifying the life of the savage in his doctrine of simplicity (some of the American Transcendentalists, along with their counterparts among the English Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, had elevated the primitive life as such, a tendency usually referred to as primitivism); a pastoral life is not necessarily a primitive life, as Thoreau was aware from his days at the pond and in Concord pastures when contrasted to life in the wilder Maine woods. Nor did he view the withdrawal to pastoral life at Walden Pond as escape but rather as discovery and strengthening of his higher nature which he might then bring back into communion with society.

NATURE VS. “BARBARIC” CIVILIZATION

It is true, however, that the idealization of Nature was typical both of Transcendental thought in general and of Thoreau’s personal philosophy. Nature administered to both physical and spiritual needs; there was a “correspondence” between man and Nature - that is, every fact of Nature corresponded ideally with a fact of consciousness in man’s mind. Or, to put it another way, everything in Nature could be taken possession of by the human mind. Furthermore, experience in Nature became later idealized, “folded many times thick,” as Thoreau described his experience at Walden as it had matured through his Journal into the final version. Thoreau also described this correspondence between man and Nature in a poem titled “The Inward Morning”:

Packed in my mind lie all the clothes Which outward nature wears, And in its fashion’s hourly change It all things else repairs.

In vain I look for change abroad, And can no difference find, Till some new ray of peace uncalled Illumes my inmost mind.

This inward morning is the kind of wakeful awareness he stresses throughout Walden, for example; it assesses the constant inspiration to be derived from Nature. What he was ultimately aiming at of course, as philosopher and Transcendentalist, was union or a sense of complete oneness with Nature: in order to achieve this he attempted a disciplined, ascetic life - the idea of purity, purification of the channels of perception, often recurs in his writing - and he observes Nature closely, practically gives himself up to the life in Nature.

It is only natural that such a philosophy should emerge as anti-materialistic; added to this was Thoreau’s personal distaste for materialistic striving, his refusal to subscribe to the prevailing Puritan work ethic, his dislike of organized authority (of church or state, for instance), and his disgust with the way civilized society seemingly obscured-even brutified-man’s inner, higher nature. This is why he said in Walden that “most men live lives of quiet desperation,” trying to make a living and/or attempting to reach materialistic goals conformed to by the surrounding society. This is why he personally subscribed to the poet-philosopher’s life of leisurely soul-study, in the face of strong opposition from those who believed in the ethic “work, for the night is coming.” Thus he shows the “positive hindrances” of civilization by exposing in Walden such everyday matters as food, clothing, shelter, furniture, as well as education, law, reform to the test of fitness to man’s “inner necessities.” The paradox of civilization, then, was that it actually “barbarized” men, since it drove them or caused them to drift farther away from awareness of their inner selves. By the same token, Thoreau contended that he had “civilized” himself by the experience of Walden, since he approached self-realization and oneness with Nature.

WALDEN (1854)

The germ of this volume is of course to be found in Thoreau’s daily entries in his Journal during the two-year stay at Walden Pond, entries which attempt to capture the spontaneity of his life and experiences in Nature there. But, as pointed out, Walden is more than a mere record of the years 1854-47; it is that experience metaphorized by thought and revisions over the years until its appearance in 1854 (several editions of Walden, for example, distinguish ideas and passages altered or even added between the early and the later periods of its growth as a book). These later revisions emphasize too, of course, that Walden is a more structurally unified work than a simple diary of events would be.

One large area of revisions and additions, for example, which made Walden a sophisticated, mature work was that of symbolism and imagery. Thoreau had seen, for instance, that the narrative acti...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction To Henry David Thoreau
• 2) Detailed Summary: Walden
• 3) Walden: Textual Analysis
• 4) On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
• 5) Selected Poems
• 6) Critical Commentary
• 7) Essay Questions And Answers
• 8) Bibliography And Guide To Research Papers