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The Thoreau You Don't Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant

2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isp124

1759-1090

M. Jimmie Killingsworth,

Thoreau and American Literature

The journalist and nature writer Robert Sullivan's homage to Thoreau is structured like a biography but devoted to an apologia. Those of us who first read Thoreau in the late 1960s—when his anarchistic social criticism resonated with the anti-war and early environmentalist movements—might wonder why a defense of Thoreau is needed. But recent ecocriticism has raised strong objections to Thoreau's seemingly masculinist, individualistic, sometimes racist, and often mystifying transcendentalism. Coupled with the distaste of more conventional undergraduates for Thoreau's seeming grumpiness about ordinary people just trying to make a living, this critical trend represents a serious threat to Thoreau's security as a canonical American author. Sullivan argues that Thoreau has been misunderstood, mainly by readers who know him through anthology excerpts from Walden and the essay on civil disobedience, which reinforce the view of Thoreau as a self-righteous crank with a nastily misanthropic streak. Sullivan's position is that, far from being a dreamy romantic, Thoreau was practical and, in the crisis economy of mid-nineteenth-century America, hard-put to make a living through the family pencil business, free-lance writing, and surveying. Far from being a sulky loner and forerunner of the macho tradition of anti-social nature writing, he was a good son and devoted brother, a fun-loving townsman who played the flute and loved to dance. The experiment at Walden Pond, far from having the pretence of a wilderness experience, was Thoreau's version of alternative Utopianism that was all the rage in his day; the house itself not a cabin in the wild but a logical, if exaggerated, nod toward the simplicity favored by the best-known architects of the times. Much of the Walden experiment—even the bean patch that Thoreau managed to cultivate at a slight profit—was an elaborate joke, issuing from Thoreau's favorite tropes: hyperbole and ironic inversion. In his lectures at the Concord Lyceum, he was seen as a humorist, as he often softened his social criticism with verbal wit and gentle irony. Sullivan rightly points out that humor has a short shelf life, and without some historical contextualization, we may miss much of what was funniest in Thoreau.