Abstract
When Thoreau and the Brook Farmers planted and pounded their beans, they were engineering for all America, but they were confronted with hard limits to the independence of their projects for reform.1 In the end, they could not come out of society, for it came after them. Thoreau’s experiment, his model citizenship in the utopian community of nature, could only have its desired effect with the publication of his report. But this meant devoting himself to the hard labor of taking the manuscript of Walden through seven substantive revisions over as many years, which itself meant returning to the labor of making pencils and surveying town lots. What his report finally produced was not a new dawn, but lukewarm reviews emphasizing the peculiarity of a Yankee woodsman who inexplicably felt he should do everything himself. The Brook Farmers watched their nearly completed, but uninsured, phalanstery burn to the ground. This was a fatal blow to the finances of the phalanx and, after a short flurry of desperate activity, the members dispersed. George Ripley moved to New York, where he worked for decades in various editorial capacities in order to pay off the farm’s debt. Most members, though, were so disheartened as to abandon their dreams of socialism entirely. In later years, they produced a number of sentimental (or cynical) memoirs of what they now regarded as an episode of youthful enthusiasm.
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party. Pounding beans is good to the end of empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Notes
James McIntosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Shifting Stance Toward Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 23, 17, 37.
Robert Sattelmeyer, “Introduction,” in Henry David Thoreau, The Natural History Essays (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980), xxvi.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed., vol. 3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 380. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 19, 22. Paul, Shores of America, 3–16, for a brisk statement of this position.
See Laura Dassow Walls, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 15–52, for the best account of Thoreau’s negotiation in the 1830s with the inheritance of European empiricist and idealist theories of knowledge.
William Howarth, The Book of Concord (New York: Viking, 1982), ix, 10, 20, 64, 80, 118. Perhaps the most unequivocal statement of this position comes in Robert Kuhn McGregor, A Wider View of the Universe, 3–5, a hagio-graphical reading that sees Thoreau changing from “a classically and staidly trained transcendentalist into a radical naturalist” and makes him the inventor of “the principle of biocentrism and the science of ecology.”
Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown, CT Wesleyan University Press, 1966) argues that Thoreau was in fact a Lockean empiricist.
Victor Carl Friesen, The Spirit of the Huckleberry: Sensuousness in Thoreau (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984) maintains that the key to Thoreau’s thought is his lifelong immersion in sensory experience. Oelschlaeger, Idea of Wilderness, 133–171, argues that Thoreau learns a holistic knowledge of nature by intuitively understanding the physical world through immersion in its particulars.
Sharon Cameron, Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) reads the Journal as an extended meditation on how the mind apprehends nature, on the process of generalizing from a bewildering chaos of fragmentary information.
Walls, Seeing New Worlds, 4, 18, 76–93, 147. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 75, 78. Sustained analysis of Thoreau’s attitudes toward science begins with Nina Baym, “Thoreau’s View of Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 26 (1965): 221–234.
William Rossi, “Thoreau’s Transcendental Ecocriticism,” in Richard Schneider, ed., Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 32, argues that Thoreau maintains “twin commitment to the metaphysics of correspondence and to a densely empirical knowledge of nature.” For accounts of Thoreau’s engagement with the Agassiz–Darwin controversy, see Richardson, Henry David Thoreau, 362–384;
and Laura Dassow Walls, “Believing in Nature: Wilderness and Wildness in Thoreauvian Science,” in Richard Schneider, ed., Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 15–27.
Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 78–92. Alfred I. Tauber, Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 140.
Ronald Wesley Hoag, “Thoreau’s Later Natural History Writings,” in Joel Myerson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 152–170, describes the kind of natural history that Thoreau practiced during this decade as a form of humanistic science.
Michael Benjamin Berger, Thoreau’s Late Career and “The Dispersion of Seed”: The Saunterer’s Synoptic Vision (Rochester: Camden House, 2000), 76–119, concludes that Thoreau reconciled empiricism and idealism.
H. Daniel Peck, Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in a Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Journal, and Walden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 39–114, argues that Thoreau thought of observation as “relational seeing.”
Joan Burbick, Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 3. Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading, 15, 50, 78. Stoller, After Walden, 36.
John Hildebidle, Thoreau: A Naturalist’s Liberty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 25, shows that Thoreau “applies the methods of natural history to the reading and writing of history generally.”
Susan M. Lucas, “Counter Frictions: Writing and Activism in the Work of Abbey and Thoreau,” in Richard Schneider, ed., Thoreau’s Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), 266–279, argues from the evidence of the John Brown essays that Thoreau came to see writing as a way to inspire political action from principle.
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© 2005 Lance Newman
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Newman, L. (2005). Nature, Politics, and Thoreau’s Materialism. In: Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973535_14
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