Throughout Walden, Thoreau goes back and forth between portraying himself as a "real farmer," vitally connected to the land and the physical world that surrounds him, and as nothing like an ordinary farmer, abstracted from the physical to the spiritual world that lay somewhere in the pond and hills. What seems most important to Thoreau is his own spiritual existence, and his ability to transcend the particular by becoming intimately connected with the immediate world around him.
Clearly, there is something special to Thoreau about rural life, which seems more attuned to the natural world. Thus, he gives us depictions of farmers and Irish ice-cutters and mysterious visitors from the hills. In this, Thoreau strikes a very Wordsworthian note. Thoreau delights, for example, in the idiosyncratic speech of his Canadian wood-chopper friend, who reveals to him (like Wordsworth had suggested in the Lyrical Ballads) "that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate" (101). And just as Wordsworth often does, in poems such as "Simon Lee," Thoreau portrays himself as superior to the farmer and other rural dwellers. Thoreau even echoes Wordsworth when he talks about reformism: "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root," he says (and of course, it is Thoreau who is constantly striking at roots and pulling up dead stumps in Walden), just as Wordsworth had taken the axe from Simon Lee and "struck, and with a single blow/ The tangled root I severed,/ At which the poor old man so long/ And vainly had endeavoured" ("Simon Lee" ll. 93-96).
A clear difference between Thoreau and Wordsworth, however, is that Thoreau seems very intent on portraying himself as an actual farmer, able not only to write about rural life, but to live it (and to live it better than the actual farmers themselves). Wordsworth seems perfectly content to live his own, privileged life, and maybe swing an axe once or twice, as occasion has it. Thoreau, on the other hand, gives us records of his accounts, twice, to prove he could turn a profit and live satisfied on his six-week method of subsistence farming. Nevermind that he often ate out, and that he only farmed for one season, and that he didn't have a family to support, and so on. No, Thoreau was a real farmer, and he lived out the romantic ideal in the real world.
Were these ideals under such fire in the 1840s and '50s to require such extra, empirical support? It seems they were, at least, for Thoreau, in a much more pressing way than for Wordsworth. Wordsworth made quite a lot of the natural world, and of life in the country, more closely connected with nature. Thoreau, too, makes much of nature and being away from the city, but he also is also fain (and feigns?) to test it. His experiment, however, doesn't seem to have done much for the actual world around Walden Pond, and Thoreau certainly doesn't seem to care much about helping, in any substantial way, the actual farmers and Irish immigrants living around him.
This reminds me of the anxiety some ecocritics seem to have about the need to prove themselves ecologically-saavy, in touch with nature because they can range-find with a compass and topographical map through campus, or they can cite all kinds of troubling statistics about the environment in their essays on literary works. This isn't intended as an indictment against scholars who want to incorporate ecological concerns in their work, but maybe Walden should serve as a cautionary tale against privileging idealized notions of nature and "the rural" over other, more urban(e) environments, as well as a certain tendency to overdetermine, perhaps, the "ecological" component in literary criticism, as if citing statistics must make one's work more authentic and effective. It may be well worth asking whether this is "striking at the root" of the problems we have in recognizing our connection with our various environments, or if it is merely "hacking" away.
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However meandering (and eventually unrelated) this may be, I just wanted to respond to the idea that "maybe Walden should serve as a cautionary tale against privileging idealized notions of nature and "the rural" over other, more urban(e) environments, as well as a certain tendency to overdetermine, perhaps, the "ecological" component in literary criticism." This was especially intriguing to me with regard to the cited contrast between Wordsworth's approach and Thoreau's, and the way in which the two mediate natural and "civilized" environments. I agree that Thoreau seems, more than Wordsworth, bent on distinguishing between the two in order to identify more closely with the former and that part of civilization (rural/farmers/icecutters) which lives most simply, closest to the land. For whatever reasons, it was more pressing for Thoreau to root himself in nature, if only for two years, in order to conduct his experiment. If anything, it seems to me that Walden works to reinforce the "ecological component in literary criticism." In order to "brag as lutily as chanticleer in the morning," to "stand on his roost" and "wake his neighbors up," Thoreau had to retreat from "civilized life" into the woods and "earn his living by the labor of his hands only." His going into the woods and returning into society seems key to his project, and to validating his work, as though his experience gives him a roost to stand on. For instance, "The Village" follows "The Bean Field" and it can be seen that Thoreau's perceptions of his environment in the village are colored by, even formed by his experience in the woods: "instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle" (115). Continuously, he distinguishes one from the other, if not only to separate the two, to demonstrate how his retreat affects his return. It's as though he had to leave in order to come back. In the "economy" section, Thoreau goes to great lengths to assert how he must strip his existence down to the essentials in order to turn inward and gain full access to his intellect--all in order to turn out the results of his project, to write a book, to "wake his neighbors up." Deep ecology, for Thoreau, is not opposed to social environmentalism. In fact the former is, perhaps, prerequisite to the latter.
ReplyDeleteWordsworth, on the other hand, the distinction between rural/natural and society seems much less urgent. I wonder if this might be a product, not only of his time, and the lack of "fire" or pressure concerning the distinction, but also of the actual place he wrote from--The Lake District. Having spent time there, I can say that "natural" and "civilized" environments are more overlayed, and to distinguish between the two in such as conscius way as Thoreau does, would not only be difficult, but perhaps irrelevant. Just as Wordsworth is referred to as a "Lake Poet," the people who live in the Lake District are "Lake People." Wordsworth was certainly distinguished by class, his time for leisure and writing--things which afforded him the ability to "romanticize" what was all around him. However, just like his neighbors, he would have had to go a little ways to buy his groceries and en route he would have greeted people he knew in "the country" while also marveling at the scale of mountains and the span of lakes as far as he could see. There would not have been that line--real or imagined--between forest and street, which both Thoreau and Cooper see, where even the little animals hesitate and turn back. One did not have to think of oneself apart from society in order to be a part of nature or to embrace the natural world in writing. Retreat was not prerequisite as it was for Thoreau. Perhaps this lack of real and/or imagined distinction between "natural" and "civilized" and the ethical/moral response to it we see in Thoreau, is part of what we see as romanticism, anthropomorphism, etc...in Wordsworth's writing, where there was not the same urgency to "strip down" or form binaries. It seems to me that the poet/writer in the Lake District was unnlikely to identify himself as a mediator between two distinct entities of nature and civilization. Wordsworth didn't need a roost to stand on, and if he felt the need to wake the neighbors up, it wasn't to demonstrate reality or practicality. Perhaps, Wordsworth was a deep ecologist insofar as he was unconcerned with these binaries. With nature already close at hand, and without a need to reconcile it with the "outside," one is inclined to make it more immediate (even self-referential) through imagery and other artistic means....