Finding Thoreau

The Meaning of Nature in the Making of an Environmental Icon

Richard W. Judd

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781613766378
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In his 1862 eulogy for Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson reflected that his friend "dedicated his genius with such entire love to the fields, hills, and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people over the sea."  Finding Thoreau traces the reception of Thoreau's work from the time of his death to his ascendancy as an environmental icon in the 1970s, revealing insights into American culture's conception of the environment.Moving decade by decade through this period, Richard W. Judd unveils a cache of commentary from intellectuals, critics, and journalists to demonstrate the dynamism in the idea of nature, as Americans defined and redefined the organic world around them amidst shifting intellectual, creative, and political forces. This book tells the captivating story of one writer's rise from obscurity to fame through a cultural reappraisal of the work he left behind.

Chapter 1

A Prophet without Honor, 1817–1862

On July 12, 1917, one hundred years to the day after Henry David Thoreau’s birth in Concord, Massachusetts, a newspaper editor in Fort Worth reported with amazement that “so far as we know, no public celebration of Thoreau’s centennial of any consequence is being held in America.” That same day the Boston Journal noted that the town of Concord, home to “one of the . . . most celebrated writers that New England has ever produced,” seemed to have “forgotten that he ever lived.” Although a few hundred admirers paid homage at the author’s grave site, the town’s leaders, like the rest of America, let the occasion pass without official observance. The Fort Worth editor speculated that recent entry into the European war had “diverted our thought from such things,” and Edward Emerson, son of the Sage of Concord, explained that his committee postponed the Concord commemoration until October, when townspeople had returned from their summer excursions. Unconvinced, the Boston reporter concluded the story with a familiar biblical irony: “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”1

The ambiguity that surrounded the 1917 centennial was typical of Thoreau’s status as an American writer. Contrary to what we might expect, he was not widely received as an author in his lifetime, and he remained virtually unknown throughout most of the nineteenth century. While he lived, his reputation hinged on the spectacularly unsuccessful A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the somewhat more widely read Walden, a series of unevenly reviewed lyceum lectures, and a few articles appearing in obscure journals. “Given this history of publication,” literary critic Townsend Scudder wrote, “and considering the peculiar man himself, there was bound to be a confusion of appraising voices—a babble taking years to blend into anything which approximates a chorus.”2

Some attribute this obscurity to an extraordinarily harsh retrospective written two years after his death by James Russell Lowell, considered at that time America’s most renowned literary critic. Thoreau’s reputation languished after this attack, but in the 1880s his surviving friends burnished his memory by publishing excerpts from his manuscripts and a series of adulatory biographies. Distressed by Lowell’s commentary, they ignored Thoreau’s complex philosophy of life and emphasized his seemingly simple descriptions of nature, precisely at a time when Americans were becoming enthusiastic converts to nature study and outdoor recreation. The nature study movement quickened Thoreau’s entry into the American canon. Wendell Glick, who published an anthology of literary criticism in 1969, noted that by the time his reputation had recovered from Lowell’s attacks, the latter was receding “into the dusty recesses now occupied by his Brahmin contemporaries.” Unimpressed by the poetic justice in Glick’s account, Richard Rutland argued that “if Thoreau’s story needs a villain, let it be the nation itself that lacked the requisite self-knowledge to understand what literature it needed and to acknowledge what literature it got.” But all this reasoning raises an opposite question: What accounts for his near-universal recognition as an American writer in the century that followed? As Edward O. Wilson put it, how did an “amateur naturalist perched in a toy house on the edge of a ravaged woodlot became the founding saint of the conservation movement”?3 The dynamics of Thoreau’s reputation have never been satisfactorily explained.

Thoreau’s literary odyssey is one of the least known but most intriguing stories in the history of American literature. As Lawrence Buell points out, Thoreau was one of the first authors to be added to the American literary pantheon, and for this reason the history of his reputation “makes an unusually interesting window onto American literary history.” He is also one of the few American writers to achieve fame as a folk hero—a “patron saint of American environmental writing,” as Buell puts it. He stands, then, as iconic not only in American literature but in popular culture as well. Surely, the arc of his reputation begs an explanation.4

The matter becomes somewhat clear if we consider his work in its historical context. Walden challenged all Americans to march to the beat of a different drum, but at the time of its publication in 1854 the gigantic mills at Waltham and Lowell were demonstrating the power and productivity of regimented effort, and as Thoreau lay on his deathbed in Concord in spring 1862, the spectacle of troops moving in unison across the battlefields of Virginia testified to the importance of united purpose. But if the Civil War generation rejected individualism, turn-of-the-century Americans embraced it, seeking a firmer sense of self in communion with nature. In like manner, each successive generation redefined Thoreau in order to find something meaningful in his life and works. Summarizing a century-long search for the true Thoreau, biographer Walter Harding mused that he had been, at one time or another, America’s greatest satirist, its greatest conservationist, its greatest prose stylist, its greatest theorist of civil disobedience, and its greatest philosopher. And for each superlative conferred, there was an equally exaggerated condemnation waiting in the wings. Literary critic V. F. Calverton observed that Thoreau’s writing indeed possessed “powerful magic, or there would not be such a need to . . . canonize the shade, or weight it down in the earth under a cairn of rocks.”5

Mark Sullivan, who surveyed graphic representations of Thoreau over the century after his death, found it astonishing “to see the number of ways in which . . . his facial features have been used to convey different messages, or to fit different purposes.” Each image, as Sullivan pointed out, reflected a Thoreau for the times. This malleability stems in part from Thoreau’s enigmatic writing style. When Walden was first published, a reviewer expressed his frustration at finding a meaning in the book: “The author has Carlyle’s hatred of shams and Carlyle’s way of showing it; he has Sir Thomas Browne’s love of pregnant paradox and stupendous joke, and utters his paradoxes and his jokes with a mysterious phlegm quite akin to that of the Medical Knight who ‘existed only at the periphery of his being.’” All this and more he mixed together “without regard to abstract consistency.”6 Thoreau’s illusiveness frustrated critics like this, but it explains, more perhaps than his stylistic brilliance, his popular status today.

This legacy of conflicting interpretation complicated the quest for the true Thoreau. Shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who knew him well, reflected on his friend’s literary persona. We have to look at literary figures like Thoreau, he wrote, “not merely as they now seem, but as they appeared in their day, and we must calculate their parallax.” Vexed by the same enigma, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis introduced a volume of Thoreau criticism in 2012 with a query: “How can we disentangle Henry Thoreau from the myriad causes and ideas now synonymous with his name?” The quest for the true Thoreau is indeed fraught with uncertainty; perhaps, after all, there is no solid bedrock beneath the writer and the written. Perhaps, rather than winnow away the false Thoreaus, we should consider the full range of past interpretations, no matter how broad the spectrum. If we cannot disentangle the true from the transient, perhaps we can learn something from the very nature of this entanglement: How did Americans in successive ages respond to his writing, and what, in turn, do these responses tell us about American culture over this long century of criticism?7

The Idea of Nature in America

“Thoreau has taught countless Americans to see nature,” historian R. D. Richardson wrote in 1986, and indeed his writing tells us a great deal about this core cultural value. As New York Times writer R. L. Duffus pointed out in 1931, nations define themselves mainly through their literature; people write, read, and react to the writing of others, and in the process they forge a national culture. In America that culture is inseparably linked to the idea of nature. To the Puritan, nature was a howling wilderness; to the romantic, a symbol of transcendent truth; and to the modern, a fragile system of ecological interactions. Lewis Mumford saw this complicated bundle of ideas as one of the “chief creations of the civilized man.” In technologically simple societies, the idea of nature is “scarcely visible,” he pointed out, but as society learns to manipulate its environment, it elaborates, and as these manipulations increase in scale, the idea of nature takes on additional layers of meaning.8 Ironically, the more society is separated from nature by its technology, the more completely its members need to define it. As both Duffus and Mumford suggest, the idea of nature is far from static; each age defines it on its own terms.

But if we set aside Richardson’s vision of Thoreau as the voice of nature in America, a broader prospect comes to light: an ongoing critical conversation about his philosophy of nature sustained for more than a century by scholars, literary critics, essayists, journalists, and biographers who took up Thoreau’s ideas and translated them into the idiom of their own times. Defining nature was not an act of individual genius but rather a collective cultural project. Great literary figures do, of course, participate in the construction and reconstruction of nature, but only as part of a larger process. By their very genius they are extraordinary; they rise above historical circumstance and convey a transcendent interpretation of nature. But as Thoreau’s reputation demonstrates, each age reacts on its own terms to these transcendent interpretations, and thus the meaning of nature in each age—its personal, recreational, spiritual, and therapeutic value—is better represented by its own critics and writers than by the seminal authors themselves. Collectively, this commentary was more widely read than was Thoreau himself, and it was composed by men and women who were close observers of their own times—who appreciated how their readers were likely to react to Thoreau’s message. Using Thoreau as inspiration, these midlevel intellectuals interpreted the organic world beyond their doorstep, and, accordingly, they become the focus of our story. In following them as they create this American icon, we get to the very essence of nature as an evolving cultural construct.

Young Thoreau

David Henry Thoreau, known later in life as Henry, was born in Concord on July 12, 1817, third of four children. His grandfather had emigrated from the Isle of Jersey, and when Henry was born his father was maintaining a small farm in Concord that belonged to his wife’s mother. Casting his lot as a merchant, John Thoreau moved the family from Concord to Boston, Chelmsford, and back to Concord. Perhaps too withdrawn for this trade, he remained poor—a “small, deaf, and unobtrusive man.” Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, was by most accounts assertive, outgoing, and talkative; together they were a study in contrasts. Thoreau spent almost all his life living at home, and like everything else about him, this family background has been folded into the ongoing discussion of his literary reputation. Early biographers emphasized his Jersey privateer heritage on one side and his Scots and Puritan lineage on the other. Later critics singled out the contrast between his parents and highlighted the supposed tensions in these family circumstances. Neither father nor mother offered an appropriate model, they surmised, and Thoreau’s writing reflected this psychic conflict. In fact, family life seems to have been happier than these psychobiographers make it out to be, but these circumstances have been a focus of critical commentary from the first posthumous assessments on.9

A methodical tinkerer, John Thoreau eventually went into pencil making with his brother-in-law, and the business prospered modestly. Again, biographical accounts vary. In some, the family’s continuing economic uncertainty explains Thoreau’s withdrawn personality; in others, the parents maintained the cultural standards of their lineage. To make ends meet, the Thoreaus took in boarders and crowded the household with older relatives. Of the latter, most were, by all accounts, prudish and provincial. This stultifying atmosphere helps explain not only the iconoclasm that marked so much of Thoreau’s writing but also the Puritan-like adherence to principle that punctuated his social philosophy.10

In 1833 Thoreau entered Harvard College. Although he later claimed these Harvard years were wasted, the school gave him the solid grounding in classics, modern literature, philosophy, and natural history that made his later writing so distinctive. He put his academic credentials to use briefly in 1838 when he and his older brother, John, opened a private academy in Concord. The endeavor was successful, but when John’s health declined in 1841 they closed the school and Henry returned to the pencil shop and helped the family perfect a formula for using graphite in the electrotyping process.11 Henry was close to his brother, John, and it was in the context of brotherly relations that his first and only well-documented affair of heart unfolded. Seventeen-year-old Ellen Sewall arrived in Concord for a two-week visit in 1839, and since the two families were long acquainted, the five children—Sophia, Helen, Henry, John, and Ellen—spent time together. At age twenty-two, Henry fell in love. He seems to have stepped aside to allow John to court Ellen, and John asked her to marry him. She accepted, but her father opposed the union. Henry then proposed and met a similar fate, and thus the romance ended.12

Again the arbiters of his literary reputation read much into a seemingly simple episode. Townsend Scudder speculated that marriage would have undermined Thoreau’s individualism, a foundational principle in his writing, and thus Ellen “played her unconscious part” in the making of an American literary icon. Others exaggerate or dismiss the episode in order to bolster their own theories on Thoreau’s sexual bearing or to suggest that he subsequently sublimated his romantic inclinations in his worship of nature. Perhaps so, but his biographer Walter Harding cautions against such inferences. “It must not be forgotten that he was raised in an atmosphere of prudish bachelorhood and spinsterhood. Neither his brother nor his sisters ever married—nor Aunt Jane, nor Aunt Maria, nor Aunt Louisa, nor Aunt Sally, nor Aunt Betsey, nor Uncle Charles—and all of these were at one time or another members of the Thoreau household.” For whatever reason, it does seem that after the episode he resigned himself to life as a bachelor.13

Thoreau’s Concord

The setting for Thoreau’s brief romance was a town of some two thousand inhabitants strung out along several roads converging on a tree-shaded central square. Concord’s rivers were too listless to inspire the visions that transformed nearby Waltham and Lowell into industrial cities, and among its neighbors it was known as Sleepy Hollow, an image that helped form Thoreau’s own impression of the good society. Its economy had been built around grain and livestock production, but by Thoreau’s time this traditional way of life was beginning to break down. The village stood at the center of a manufacturing belt stretching from the Connecticut River on the west to the Charles and Merrimack on the east, and as the regional industrial workforce grew, the market for locally produced agricultural products expanded. In 1844 Concord gained a rail connection to Boston, and this opened opportunities for producing perishables like butter, eggs, milk, fruits, and vegetables—a market that impelled Thoreau’s neighbors into the world of abstract prices, impersonal transactions, and distant financial arrangements.14 Like other Concord transcendentalists, Thoreau was unsettled by the new conditions of production. The countryside was becoming “denaturalized,” he thought, suffering from a growing separation between poetry and life. As his confidence in society dissolved, his faith in nature grew.15

Despite these changes, Thoreau was firmly rooted in Co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Prophet without Honor, 1817–1862
• Chapter 2: Thoreau in the Age of Industry, 1862–1890
• Chapter 3: The Cult of Nature and the Age of Progress, 1890–1917
• Chapter 4: Thoreau for the Ages, Thoreau for the Times, 1920–1960
• Chapter 5: Thoreau in a Changing Political World, 1960–1970
• Chapter 6: An Environmental Icon
• Epilogue: Thoreau in the Millennial Age
• Notes
• Index