Thoreau and Crusoe: The Construction of an American Myth and Style

Abstract

The immense popularity of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in early America suggests that it is paradigmatic in style and mythic content for that culture. Thoreau’s Walden, a later work, is viewed as a counter-genre, representative of a secondary, contrasting mode in American writing.

Kenneth Burke’s dialectical theory of rhetoric, in which transcendent and mundane terms are transformed in value, illustrates certain structural tendencies in the language which predispose the choice of particular metaphoric contexts. Thus applied to the present study, the social and semantic tensions of both works reveal the polarization of the concepts of ‘God’ and ’money’ and the rhetorical inversions that the capitalist and anti-capitalist imagination invoke respectively in language, myth, and literary genre.

If the Crusoe-Franklin myth represents the dominant and prevenient mode of the American consciousness — a downward conversion of transcendental aspiration into materialist pragmatism — then, Thoreau’s Walden parodies, contradicts and disputes this consciousness by inverting the religious-commercial idiom. Both works stand as archetypes of an inherent dialectical tendency that distinguishes American writing to the present.