ALL AMERICA BEHIND HIM: TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETICS,

NATURAL RELIGION, AND AMERICAN PHENOMENOLOGY

IN HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN & CAPE COD

______

A Thesis

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

in

English

______

by

© Nathan Joshua Collins 2017

Summer 2017 ALL AMERICA BEHIND HIM: TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETICS,

NATURAL RELIGION, AND AMERICAN PHENOMENOLOGY

IN HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN & CAPE COD

A Thesis

by

Nathan Joshua Collins

Summer 2017

APPROVED BY THE INTERIM DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES:

______Sharon Barrios, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Jeanne Clark, Ph.D. Matt Brown, Ph.D., Chair Graduate Coordinator

______Rob Davidson, Ph.D. PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this thesis may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to the scholars of Henry David Thoreau who cut their critical paths through the undergrowth of his often demanding style to discover the varied landscape of American philosophy in his naturist approach to writing. I have followed in their steps, living out some of these philosophical perspectives in my own life and studies, and found them to be a good guide for an expansion of the mind and spirit. Paraphrasing Thoreau in Walden, that in nature, we see our limits transgressed. On this year of Thoreau’s 200th birthday, I have in my own way, following in this tradition of insight and scholarship, called back through the trail of time to this classic American literary figure. These days, Thoreau feels like an old friend. And through these studies, I have transgressed my own limits as a writer and a student of literature. The very idea of writing and of focused scholarship is the only form of time travel, of transcendence, that we have available to us in our time here. May you, reading this, know something of who I was, during this strange time in our history as a nation. And may you, reading this, know something of who Thoreau was, because we need him to walk with us again.

iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In my years as a graduate student at California State University, Chico, the faculty and staff of the English department became like family to me. After a hiatus from my studies, they welcomed me back with a warmth and kindness that I will never forget. Each of these people have lifted me up in more ways than they can know.

Sharon Demeyer, for organizing the operations of the entire department while patiently helping me with the minutiae of graduate school. Sarah Pape, for her friendship, glowing encouragement, gentle guidance, and editorial comradery in resurrecting the English department’s literary magazine, Watershed Review. Kim Jaxon, for her unyielding positivity and fierce support of me as a teacher and a scholar; she showed me how to teach, always leading by example, with passionate curiosity. Chris Fosen, for his intuitive brilliance in coaching me through my first teaching experiences and for doing his best to explain distributed cognition. Roger Kaye, for first showing me what it meant to close read. Rob Davidson, for challenging me to read broadly and showing me how to balance creative and academic writing. And Matt Brown, well, for everything; in all our conversations, between talking about Fender Telecaster guitars and Ford flathead V8 engines, he gave me what I needed to craft this thesis. And the many others whose kind words along the way led me to pursue this work. Among them, my lifelong friend, Marcus Alaimo, as we workshopped our first essays on Thoreau together. My good friend, Mindy McPherson, for re-reading Thoreau with me. And my high school honors English teacher, Linda Draper, who first introduced me to Thoreau’s work. I will always remember my mentors, and the knowledge, support, and guidance they gave me as I pursue a career in teaching. In the spirit of these great people, I will give every one of my students the same time and thoughtful attention that they gave so freely to me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract ...... vii

CHAPTER

I. Introduction: A View From Thoreau’s Vantage ...... 1

II. An American Scholar: A Perspective on Thoreau’s Divergent Interpretation of Emerson ...... 9

III. Aesthetic Variations in Transcendentalist Thought: A Reading of Walden ..... 21

IV. Nautical Images, Sea Similes, Oceanic Metaphors: Fathoming Cape Cod as American Phenomenology ...... 44

V. Conclusion: A Commentary on the Development of Thoreau’s Transcendental Aesthetic ...... 71

Works Cited ...... 76

vi ABSTRACT

ALL AMERICA BEHIND HIM: TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETICS,

NATURAL RELIGION, AND AMERICAN PHENOMENOLOGY

IN HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN & CAPE COD

by

© Nathan Joshua Collins 2017

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Summer 2017

This thesis is built on the assumption that in order to be a serious Thoreau scholar, one must move away from Walden (1854) and read his other works. Walden is, to be sure, Thoreau’s most studied book and remains an iconic example of 19th-century American transcendentalism. As I come to terms with this foundational text, I argue that Walden is a product of Emerson’s influence and mentorship, and as such, is an amalgam of Emersonian and Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetics. Emerson gave Thoreau the raw materials for his philosophical development, but ultimately Walden is an outlier in Thoreau’s progression as a writer. Fundamentally, young Thoreau and his mentor Emerson are divided by an epistemological disagreement the likes of young Aristotle and his mentor Plato. Is knowledge, thereby transcendence, to be found in the experience of nature itself? Or is nature merely a reflection of innate truths, that the physical world must be transcended to glimpse? In order to get at a more true sense of Thoreau’s project, I turn to his final and least studied work,Cape Cod

vii (1865). My position is that Cape Cod is an important transcendental work that deserves further study. As it stands, it is a singularly unique example of American phenomenology. For Thoreau, knowledge is found in the experiential journey toward nature, to see our limits transgressed through consideration of the sublime, but not, in fact, to transgress those limits ourselves. For to transcend the boundaries of the natural world necessitates death, physical and spiritual.

viii CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: A VIEW FROM

THOREAU’S VANTAGE

When Henry David Thoreau first set out on his journey to walk along the strands of

Massachusetts’ Cape Cod with his friend, transcendental poet Ellery Channing, in October of 1849, he had in the last year come out of the woods, moved into and out of the cramped guest room of the Emersons’ home, and returned to live with his family in Concord. He was engaged in renovating his parents’ new house on Main Street. He worked at improving and expanding the family graphite business (a self-described “Pencil-Maker” in his journal), and took on independent work as a surveyor to supplement his income, which he used mostly to buy volumes on natural history, an area of rapidly developing personal interest and dedicated study, according to Robert Sattelmeyer’s compendium in Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (59-60). He had finished a 117 page first draft ofWalden , and he had just essentially self-published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers to disparaging reviews, accompanied by a sudden acquisition of substantial amounts of personal debt—about $300—which would’ve been a year’s wages for a man at the time. Out of a thousand copies printed of the first edition, less than three-hundred circulated in the contemporary literary community. His longtime mentor, friend, and chief of the transcendentalist tribe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had done little to bolster its reception, instead refusing to review it after its publication, despite his urging that Thoreau publish it out-of-pocket. Their relationship which at one time involved hours of discussing the life of the mind, was eroded by Emerson’s growing interest in his ever increasing cultural notoriety and the goings-on of his burgeoning community of casually

1 transcendental, affluent literati of his various salon clubs. Moreover, Emerson had set his sights on Europe for his forthcoming lecture tours. It’s doubtful that Thoreau did much to bury the hatchet, as his manner and presence are confirmed by no less than Nathaniel Hawthorne, quoted in Robert .F Sayre’s “Chronology” in the Library of America edition of Thoreau’s work, as “a young man with much of wild original nature still within him … He is ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior” (1044). In a strange irony, Hawthorne bought the Musketaquid in 1842 for seven dollars, Thoreau’s boat that he and his brother built for the journey depicted in A Week, and Thoreau showed him how to paddle it. If only he had showed as much interest in piloting the book built from that journey into some public sphere. In any case, despite either of their shortcomings in social matters, Emerson and Thoreau were irreconcilable on a much deeper issue. From the outset of Thoreau’s transcendental development, he did not wholly align himself with the Emersonian unit of analysis for the development of transcendental philosophical theory. A kind of Platonic-Aristotelian disagreement began to brew between them as soon as Thoreau gave up his lukewarm aspirations as a poet, and began to develop his naturalistic style in his essay, “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” his first major work (other than poetry) to be published in The Dial in 1842. To quote Harmon Smith’s brief summary of the essay and the issue in his My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau’s Relationship with Emerson, Thoreau’s “attitude had changed toward one of the principal views expressed in Nature. He had become convinced that the physical universe was intrinsically more important than Emerson had been willing to admit. His belief that there is ‘nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses’ was ‘anathema to Emerson and his followers’” (66). This is further corroborated by Edward Waldo Emerson, Emerson’s son, who in his Henry Thoreau: As Remembered by A Young Friend writes, “Be it distinctly understood that Thoreau was not created by the Transcendental Epoch … Thoreau was Thoreau and not the copy of another,” though he adds, “His close association, under the same roof, for months, with the maturer Emerson may,

2 not unnaturally, have tinged his early writings, and some superficial trick or manner of speech been unconsciously acquired, as often happens. But this is all that can be granted” (12). Despite their similarities in their early approaches, the dynamic duo of transcendentalism were split by the age-old epistemological debate over innate knowledge measured against experiential knowledge. In the body of this thesis, I will work with more contemporary literary critics, but here I would like to begin where most American literature scholars do, with F.O. Matthiessen. Matthiessen describes this aesthetic difference between Emerson and Thoreau in his foundational Americanist text, American Renaissance: Art of Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, when he is engaged in a close reading of the beginning of Walden as being particularly indicative of Thoreau’s rhetorical stance and phenomenological project. Balancing the size of Matthiessen’s style with the valuable clarity and support of his statement, accompanied by a quote from Thoreau, I will quote and work with him here at some length. Matthiessen posits that, “By this method of presenting an experience instead of stating an abstraction,” as in making the unit of analysis that of communicable experience, not an abstract presupposition of divine truths (as is the Emersonian manner-of-working):

Thoreau himself has elucidated both the meaning and the value of his long preoccupation with “wholeness.” … He subsequently shifted his symbols to correspond to his own mode of existence, and grouped them not around the warrior hero but around the scholar, who, if he is wise, “will confine the observations of his mind as closely as possible to the experience or life of his senses. His thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body ... Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” (96)

Though Emerson did take pleasure in some physical activity, it constituted not much more than a stroll about Main Street or some light gardening. By contrast, Thoreau was an accomplished woodsman, boatsman, and general rambler by hobby, and a surveyor by trade. It seems simple enough that the life habits of these authors would have some contributing effect on their approach to thinking through and building a transcendental aesthetic, but it seems as though not many have focused exclusively on this difference through an examination of Thoreau’s literary trajectory, rather focusing on a principle work, usually Walden.

3 As Matthiessen goes on to say, again quoting Thoreau here, “In this respect more than in any other was the practice of Thoreau’s scholar more thoroughgoing than Emerson’s. He never wavered in his belief that ‘steady labor with the hands, which engrosses the attention also, is unquestionably the best method of removing palaver and sentimentality out of one’s style, both of speaking and writing.’” Thoreau attached such great significance to the nature of experience that he believed that if one meditated long enough on strenuous physical activity, that one’s writing style could be hewn down to a point by that activity. This is the foundation of what I would call the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. As further quoted in Matthiessen, Thoreau had a physiological analogy for particularly rousing speech, saying that it is “vascular.” Ideally, in my own interpretation of this analogy, Thoreau strove for a transcendental aesthetic that embodied a kind of vascular phenomenology. That in order to know anything about a place and the people that inhabit it, one must first measure the landscape, survey it, plumb its depths, and as a transcendental philosopher, imbue meaning into the shapes and forms that that landscape presents to the spiritual traveler. I admit, regarding my inclusion of some biographical detail, the minutiae of Thoreau’s biography could not by itself illuminate the philosophical development of his work as a uniquely American transcendental philosopher. I am not necessarily of the New Historicists regarding literary analysis. The art must necessarily be separated from biographical details of the artist in critical study, and the best method for that is an old-fashioned close read. For a thoroughgoing account of the details of Thoreau’s life, Robert D. Richardson’s biography, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, is the text to read. However, I am not attempting to place Thoreau’s work in direct relation to his biography. For my purposes, the inclusion of some of these biographical details serves more to humanize the author to the reader, to show his own course of development as a naturist poet-philosopher, and to provide some context to that project. The issue with Thoreau is that much of his literary works were drafted out of his journals—creating a ripe mixture of personal reflection and literary activity—and I feel it should be measured as such. Keeping a journal, a practice encouraged by Emerson, begun in 1837 at

4 the beginning of his development as a writer, was clearly an influence on the development of his unique transcendental literary aesthetic. His experience became the basic material with which he constructed his phenomenological approach—a Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. In order to further explore Thoreau’s early literary aesthetic, to the development of his own experience-driven reflection, I’ll be focusing at some length in textual analysis of his most widely-studied work, Walden, published in 1854, alongside his possibly least-studied and last written Cape Cod, published posthumously in 1865, in chapters three and four, respectively. Emerson’s philosophical influence over the young Thoreau is evident in his earlier writings, with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” address to Thoreau’s Harvard graduating class—also in 1837— being an obvious rhetorical cornerstone in Thoreau’s forthcoming literary activity, in his early work and even in his later writings, Walden in particular. I will briefly build on the importance of understanding Emerson’s transcendental aesthetic and its influence on Thoreau’s process in the upcoming chapter. But here, I would like to return to where we started and underline this pivotal moment in Thoreau’s life—which later became the raw material for the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic as expressed in Cape Cod. In October of 1849, as he sets out for the Cape to contemplate the vast and titanic natural features of that landscape, Thoreau has broken with Emerson socially, and philosophically, and returned to the isolated environs of his parental home. He has failed in his budding literary endeavors and been largely labeled a lesser imitation of the champion of “self-reliance”, essentially discarded by the intellectual literary community of transcendentalism which he had hoped, however vaguely, to rise in the ranks of, to be more than a sometime contributor to The Dial. His attempt at somewhat commandeering Emersonian aesthetics in his writing had perhaps left him reflecting on his approach. Not to say thatWalden is a simple reproduction of Emerson’s philosophy. As I’ve said, we’ll explore the issues further on. But for my part, I believe that Thoreau was increasingly self-aware of his shortcomings as a writer and a poet, his overdependence on Emerson for friendship, guidance, and vocabulary, and his position as somewhat of a social pariah in the transcendentalist community. I believe in

5 this moment, in this journey away from Concord, he intended to strike out for himself on a more fulfilling philosophical project. He set himself to the task of building an experience-based, uniquely phenomenological transcendental aesthetic that was decidedly American in its scope. An aesthetic that would incorporate his love of landscape, historiography, with a nod to natural history, and incorporate both etymology and entomology. The journey to Cape Cod, and therefore the text of Cape Cod, represent a shift in Thoreau’s developmental writing process and the invention of his own transcendental aesthetic. I must reiterate that on this first journey in October 1849,Thoreau had also not yet completed the latter chapters of Walden, which in tone, style, and aesthetic approach are decidedly different from the earlier chapters. I believe this phenomenon in Walden can be partially attributed to Thoreau’s lecture schedule, which in turn made Walden a socially constructed text in a way that Cape Cod is not. But this stylistic element of Walden can also be attributed to this Cape Cod transformation, of Thoreau wanting to return to a more unique, individualistic project. The fragmented style of Walden, which mimics as much as mocks the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic, is a far different experience than that of the text of Cape Cod, and as such continues to be problematic for modern students of American literature and a subject of much scholarship among the Ecocritics and Naturists, and the Pragmatists as much as the Americanists. I see these two texts as follows, and I will spend the body of this thesis showing how to read them as such—Walden is concerned with an Emersonian proto-modernist aesthetic that focuses on the development of the self, within a rapidly changing American economy and culture, and in the context of classical and Oriental philosophical aesthetics adopted and developed under the guidance of Emerson. The text of Cape Cod, however, is an American phenomenology, concerned with the cultural development of our nation in a naturalistic, historiographical sense. The latter text represents the culmination, and the clearest example we have, of the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. His approach to the development of the text was singularly unique and decidedly phenomenological, and its execution in tone, style, and

6 poetics represents a unique achievement when considering the rest of the body of his work. This is Thoreau as he meant to write. Or as Thoreau put it simply in one of his untitled poems, “My life has been the poem I would have writ,/But I could not both live and utter it” (Thoreau 662). He was able to travel rarely, but when he did escape to Cape Cod, it was in order to live out the life of a simple poet, natural historian, phenomenological rambler, and cultural historiographer. I must add a short note here that Thoreau would not have intentionally used philosophical framework from the German idealists, though he did have exposure to some of the cognitive residue of German idealism in its heavily redacted form as French Eclecticism during his time at Harvard. During a sabbatical semester, Thoreau came under the tutelage of the New

England intellectual and Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson, who encouraged him to read the foundational texts of that philosophy by Benjamin Constant and Victor Cousin. Shortly after completing this work, he discovered, read, and reread Emerson’s Nature during his senior year (Sattelmeyer 19-22). Though much of the philosophical underpinnings and assumptions of German idealism and transcendentalism are shared, there is little evidence that even Emerson, with his access to good libraries like the Athenaeum in Boston, had a broad exposure to German idealism, and there’s no evidence of him reading anything outside Hegel’s oversimplifiedLectures of the Philosophy of History, tracked by Kenneth Cameron in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Reading (78). This may seem tangential, but I want to be clear about the development of Thoreau’s process as it aligns with my terminology. In my earliest drafts of this thesis, I attempted to trace connections between the two schools of thought. And I will refer to Thoreau’s approach as building a natural religion, or phenomenological in its scope, or dialectical in its presentation, because his work presents itself definitionally as such. His work in Walden is an approach to understanding this particular mode of being-in-the-world. At times, a reader can feel as though he’s read Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. And Cape Cod is built on a foundational phenomenological approach to American cultural development. In any case, to presuppose that Thoreau would self-consciously base any of his work on any specific philosophical frameworks, or systematic argumentation, is highly doubtful. As Ellery Channing

7 describes in his memoir of Thoreau—“metaphysics was his aversion” (qtd. in Sattelmeyer 28). Despite being one degree of separation from the philosophical school of German idealism, Thoreau’s approach is fundamentally original and marks the development of his own brand of transcendental thought, heavily based on the study habits of a natural historian and bound up in a phenomenological approach to understanding cultural development alongside the natural signs of the experiential world. He went through his safe variations on Emerson’s transcendental aesthetic in Walden, and within that text attempted to develop a more Thoreauvian variation, but by the time he wrote Cape Cod, he had truly struck out on a pilgrimage for a farther shore.

8 CHAPTER II

AN AMERICAN SCHOLAR: A PERSPECTIVE

ON THOREAU’S DIVERGENT

INTERPRETATION

OF EMERSON

The singular constant of philosophical thought that comes from the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic which carries over into the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic is the idea of the role of a nationalistic intellectual and actionable hero-figure as outlined in Emerson’s “American Scholar.” In Walden, Thoreau describes what this figure might look like and makes his attempt at drafting a template, or model, for the development of the scholar in modern American life. In Cape Cod, he has progressed to being actively engaged in doing the work that this heroic American figure would do. As a member of Harvard’s graduating class of 1837, Thoreau witnessed the mystical orator Emerson deliver the “American Scholar” speech for his commencement. That same year, as I would like to reiterate, Emerson encouraged the young Thoreau to begin writing in a journal. It seems then that in that pivotal year of Thoreau’s life, Emerson gave him both a practical medium with which to develop his writing and a theoretical mode for his writing. He had catalogued his observations in a notebook before, but nothing so organized and distinctly literary in its scope. As the first entry of Thoreau’s journal reads: “‘What are you doing now?’ he [Emerson] asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to- day,” accompanied by the dictum in German, learned from Emerson, “Es ist alles wahr wodurch du besser wirst,” that is, “Everything through which you are bettered is true” (1). Clearly, Thoreau saw his journal as a project through which to become more “true,” or at least, search for

9 some truth—some knowledge—within his own observations and reflections. He introduces in the “Solitude” chapter of Walden the concept of being “beside yourself in a sane sense” through the act of self-conscious reflection (429). Every journal entry is a deliberate act executed with this understanding. Therefore, his mentor Emerson had given him everything he needed, a project, and the tools with which to work at it. It seems interesting, but perhaps inevitable, that Emerson’s “American Scholar” address has gone on to have a literary life of its own, outside of the context in which it was delivered, as a staple of American transcendentalist thought. But within the context of its delivery, and its reception by the young Thoreau, this oration is perhaps more foundational even than Emerson’s

Nature or Self-Reliance when considering Thoreau’s rhetorical purpose. For, as I am arguing, the content of this address came to define the literary project of his life. For my purpose, I will work with the text directly in a close-reading, and given the context of my analysis, I will track some of young Thoreau’s meditations on the ideas of the “American Scholar” that appear in his early journal. In order to sound out the aesthetic concerns that Thoreau came to utilize in his unique transcendental aesthetic, I wish to explore the direct relationship that Thoreau had to Emerson’s intensely confrontational, proscriptive rhetoric that was pointedly meant to charge the task of developing a modern American cultural identity to a class of up-and-coming American scholars. I feel that a major catalogue of contemporary literary analysis on the “American Scholar” would not do this critical move justice and would instead confuse the reader as to the point of this section of my thesis. And as Joel Porte’s Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed is a much more focused study of Thoreau and Emerson’s philosophical interplay, I will refrain from a direct comparison between the two in their literary lives. I may refer to some relevant critical perspective now and again, but only with the intent to more fully outline Thoreau’s aesthetic development under these Emersonian edicts. This section should be seen as a measure of Thoreau’s early contemplative activity regarding Emerson’s “American Scholar” address. Now that I have stated my aims, let us move to the text. Emerson’s “American Scholar” is a linearly structured, highly organized, and to-the-

10 point piece of writing for a lecturer who was known to often wax poetic and have nearly incomprehensible tangential relations thrown together from one rhetorical move to the next. But here, we see a very poised rhetorical argument, broken up into sections, located in and composed out of the current cultural moment so that it may be clearly synthesized by its listener. His argument is reflective, focused, and more importantly, actionable. I will look at each of the sections of Emerson’s argument individually to make connections between Emerson’s influence here on Thoreau’s reflective activity. Emerson famously opens his argument by abruptly stripping away the post-colonial malaise of the current American cultural and intellectual climate; he declares, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close … I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our association, seem to prescribe this day,—the AMERICAN SCHOLAR” (53). The emboldened text is in the original text, and I imagine Emerson roaring the words as a kind of clarion call. What follows is a rough assessment of the economic conditions of modernity—that each man’s tasks have been specialized to a particular focus of attention—that the work of men is not made by a mutualistic, singular effort, but by parts performing their individual jobs, collectively, to benefit the whole of society. How then is our culture shaped? Who does this work? One Man—the scholar—the “Man Thinking” as he refers to the work of this imposing yet compartmentalized figure (54). On what should this scholar focus his individual attentions? Ironically, given the case of Emerson and Thoreau’s personal dynamic of hopeful mentor and disappointing protégé, this scholar is instructed here to dismiss the pursuit of money or power, in fact, Emerson explicitly warns against those endeavors. Instead, the American scholar must focus on the following true and worthwhile influences in his meditations. What is worthwhile? Simply put: nature, books, and actions. Let us consider each of these individually with the context of Thoreau’s direct reflections on them. Emerson begins with the natural world. Before Thoreau, there were other moderately successful and widely read American nature writers. But none that wrote about their formative experiences of the natural world in the manner that Emerson describes here. Emerson claims that

11 “What is nature to him [the American scholar]? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he can never find” (55). To anyone who has read Walden, this near-Hegelian reflection on “spirit” is a familiar theme. Interestingly, however, Emerson goes on to prescribe to the American scholar the behavior of a kind of natural scientist—that the work of cataloguing artifacts, developing hypotheses, turning his perceptive faculties toward a more complete understanding of the natural world through his own insight should be the bedrock of his intellectual development. Granted, he turns this manner of working into a further exploration of “spirit”—that there is nothing in nature that wasn’t already in the spiritual essence of the American scholar’s own mind. That he must find himself in nature to learn more about the workings of his own consciousness. As Emerson concludes, “‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study nature,’ become at last one maxim” (56). This closeness to nature, and specifically thinking of nature as an extension of spirit or self-consciousness, is distinctly Emersonian, and Thoreau comes to reckon with this epistemological approach throughout the text of Walden, both espousing and deriding this manner-of-working. But what does he think of it, here and now, in this moment of his young life? Though much of Thoreau’s early journals are clearly influenced by a liberal education and much reading of classical literature, there are moments when Thoreau freezes on images of nature, clearly prompted by this Emersonian edict. Thoreau reflects in his journal on November 21, 1837, “One must needs climb a hill to know what a world he inhabits. In the midst of this Indian summer I am perched on the topmost rock of Nawshawtuct, a velvet wind blowing from the southwest. I seem to feel atoms as they strike my cheek. …” (2). Here we see the beginnings of Thoreau putting himself in the Emersonian mode, dealing with the abstract and the particular in nature in quick succession. Not only is he taking the mode of being-in-nature to pontificate on his position in the world, he uses scientific language to evoke the sense that he can feel the essence of his surroundings on a molecular level. Nancy Rosenblum writes in her essay “Thoreau’s Democratic Individualism” that, “Several of Thoreau’s great set pieces are perspectivist riffs on

12 the variability of how things look and what they mean depending on where we stand, and on the instability of anyone’s standpoint, including his own” (71). Clearly, this is a theme that is continually developed by Thoreau over a lifetime of literary activity. A few weeks later, on December 5, 1837, Thoreau recounts a meeting with Emerson at the frozen Walden Pond, “My friend tells me he has discovered a new note in nature … Chancing to throw a handful of pebbles upon the pond where there was an air chamber under the ice, it discoursed a pleasant music to him. Herein resides a tenth muse, as he was the man to discover it probably the extra melody is in him.” Emerson, by demonstration, interacting with the natural phenomenon of a frozen Walden Pond, in Thoreau’s mind he rises to the level of muse. It seems too metaphorically rich to ignore—Emerson, Thoreau, Walden, inspiration, all within the same moment. I can almost hear some passage from the “Pond in Winter” chapter of Walden being drafted here. Thoreau is doing the Emersonian work of putting his mind to task in nature to find where and how “it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he can never find.” Thoreau is in the act of locating himself using this Emersonian compass. And, though his unit of analysis may change, Thoreau will never lose his nearness to nature and its forms. Thoreau was a rambling young boy before he went to Harvard, before he heard Emerson’s call to nature, and yet he returns to Concord a woodsman. Who went out-of-doors first? Emerson’s second proviso, which he goes on at length to define and qualify, is to study “the mind of the Past” through the extensive reading of books. However, Emerson has a strategy for reading that has clear boundaries. And indeed, Emerson spends three times the length discussing the usefulness of books to the American scholar when compared with his treatment of nature. I will need to work with this section at some length. First, he espouses the heroic idea of the book, that, “The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out of him, truth” (56). In the Emersonian manner-of- study, the world around is meditated upon and transformed into universal truth through the particular process of self-conscious, reflective activity. It seems as though he is, again, advising

13 a particularly scientific approach to writing; the raw materials must come from the writer’s own life and experience of the world. In this moment, Emerson seems more Thoreauvian than at any other point in his speech, and perhaps, this passage commanded particular relevance for Thoreau. But Emerson rushes to clarify himself, in his own way:

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect … so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought … Each age, it is found, must write its own books. (56)

Indeed, Emerson still seeks a unifying theory, a collective principle, or a universal signifier for experience, culture, and knowledge. But, he acknowledges, that is largely unavailable to the writer, or the reader. Each age must create its own literature, to reinterpret the near-universal lessons of “the Past” within the contexts of new experience, within current events. Emerson is writing the assignment on the chalkboard; he is asking for the literature of modern America to be drafted, as well as it can be, given the limitations of our interpretive faculties. And yet, notice that he moves from this discussion to a temperament of it. Emerson, ironically while giving this speech at the oldest, most respected American college, begins to pick apart and level some charges at the impediments that academia can impose on forward thinking and the generation of culture through a backward-looking study of literature. Perhaps, this explains why he wasn’t invited back to speak at Harvard for half a lifetime. Emerson advises against the kind of hero worship associated with the study of great minds without the context of the actuality of their lives, of their own generative methodologies. Of this worship of study, that the theory that books are perfectly complete, he writes, “Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles” (57). Emerson is calling for the rise of the individual, of well-informed minds making their own marks, their own records of things. No individual experience can be taken as absolute, everything is particular. “Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, Locke, and Bacon

14 have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.” Is Emerson calling for the American scholar to cast aside his studies and run from the hallways, the dormitories, the libraries of higher learning? No, but, he is calling for a removed kind of reading. The lessons learned from the minds of the past may not be universally applicable today, no matter the seeming depths of their authors’ written conjectures and assertions. “Books are the best of things, well used” Emerson famously says, “… abused, among the worst.” Well, then, it seems that we must figure out what it means to read in the Emersonian manner, as Thoreau in this moment begins to understand it, and locate the value of his just-completed liberal education within his budding aims as a writer. Emerson has a few dictums for Thoreau in this regard: “Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times” (58). As in, books are sources of inspiration, when the darkness of writer’s-block descends and a writer forgets that he has anything to say at all. Or when he is lost in the wilderness of grief. Or when he loses sight of himself and his project—as Thoreau often did—the writer can return to his own thoughts via the conduit of literature. Furthermore, as Emerson suggests, “One must be an inventor to read well … There is then creative reading as well as creative writing” (59). Interestingly enough, Thoreau became an actual inventor in the service of his family’s pencil- making enterprise. But here, being shaken by Emerson’s combative rhetoric, he is reflecting on his education, his own reading. In the last few lines of Emerson’s strategies for assimilating books into the American scholar’s theoretical toolkit, he states, without pretense, that plain facts of science and history must be learned by laborious study, and in that capacity, colleges are a great boon to the development of the American scholar. They provide more raw materials for the imagination of the American scholar. In processing these approaches to reading, reading creatively, reading for inspiration, reading heroically, Thoreau often develops a pastiche of classical, historical, and scientific lessons and observations in his journals and letters. It is as if he is in the act of going back

15 through his reading and deciding what themes to remember and consider, which points to possibly posit in his own opus, which sections of thought to critique, and which theories to discard all together. This is a clear example of the dialectical manner of hashing-out his aesthetic aims. In the journal, Thoreau is in the act of creatively reading and creatively writing, all in an extemporaneous fashion. And of course, journals led to lectures, which led to articles, which led to his own books. Consider another early entry, December 27, 1837, where we find Thoreau is having a moment of revolutionary sentiment. He seems, in fact, to be reflecting on the very content of Emerson’s speech, addressed above, and perhaps, how to actualize its aims. He writes:

Revolutions are never sudden. Not one man, not many men, in a few years or generations, suffice to regulate events and dispose mankind for the revolutionary movement.The hero is but the crowning stone of the pyramid,—the keystone of the arch. Who was Romulus or Remus, Hengist or Horsa, that we should attribute to them Rome or England? They are famous or infamous because the progress of events has chosen to make them its stepping- stones. … The most important is apt to be some silent and unobtrusive fact in history. In 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast … (2-3)

I imagine that Thoreau saw himself as perhaps one of these silent and unobtrusive facts, but in fact, he became more and more the hero. More and more the embodiment of Emerson’s American scholar. But he begins here, supported by historical references to the founding revolutions of Rome and of England, and their historical heroes, by using books to pick apart the spirit of revolutions—of dramatic cultural shifts—the kind of movements that Emerson is speaking for and about. Thoreau is finding for himself, through a reflection on history, that the hero is an important locus for collective revolutionary sentiment, the catalyst which changes that sentiment into revolutionary action. And perhaps, Thoreau saw Emerson as that hero. But, tested by the trials of his life, and by spending the work of his literary life locating his imagination within the literal and cultural landscapes of his time, Thoreau become more heroic in his literary efforts, in his day-to-day endeavors, with each passing year. Here, we see a young Thoreau, mulling over the seedlings of these Emersonian ideals, which would later blossom into a forest of heroic possibilities. Reflections on history and science, and of identifying patterns and trends therein, are all well and good. But what about actions? How does our hero, the American scholar,

16 make revolutionary sentiment actionable? What does this American scholar look like, in the actuality of him? Emerson swiftly moves on from his discussion of book-learning to his treatise on actions and engaging in actionable life. His first few lines admonish the idea that the scholar must be a reclusive figure, hidden like Wilhelm Meister in a white tower, a looming figurehead of the illuminati. But rather, he must be a salt-of-the-earth character. Just as the American scholar cannot blindly accept the dogmatic views of the past, he cannot model himself on the inactivity associated with the learned-men of the past. Here, Emerson gives the example of the scholastic caste of the clergy, muted in their actions, stripped of their sexuality, and collectively addressed as women. Left to their lot, transcribing and translating religious and historical texts through the ages. But in this age and this country, the American scholar must be both “Man Thinking” and Man Doing. Emerson writes:

The so-called ‘practical men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because they speculate or see, they could do nothing … Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth … Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. … Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not. (60)

As before in Emerson’s discussion on the noble idea of books as a reflection of a scholar’s collected life experiences, again we see him wavering on his unit of analysis here. The more Emerson discusses actions, the more he begins to sound like Thoreau in his epistemological approach. In this moment, Emerson is saying quite flatly that his knowledge comes directly from his life experience, and that experience is the conduit through which to approach truth. And in a distinct way, he begins to outline what comes to be a defining characteristic of the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic—of measuring human imagination in landscape. He goes on, “So much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his discourse.” Emerson is quite literally calling the American scholar to task. He has outlined

17 a critical stance, a rhetorical bedrock for revolutionary action—in a way, laying the framework for Manifest Destiny—but if the American scholar rests on his laurels and lets the work of the day pass him by, his learning will be lesser for it. Actions are the seedlings of reflection, which are the starts of truth. But let’s not forget this is Emerson speaking here, and he does invoke a sense of cosmic truth or spirit into his musings. Following his call to action, he does pause for a moment on a concept that is, for all intents and purposes, the same philosophical point that I mentioned earlier from Walden, where Thoreau is describing his strategy for self-conscious reflection: that the American scholar may step outside his immediate experience “in a sane sense” and, in that altered state of consciousness, discover something new about his actions and relations, having redirected his reflective activity. Emerson starts off down this same transcendental path here— guiding Thoreau to this particular conclusion—that after actions, an idea, an inkling of truth “detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption” (61). In the journal,Thoreau begins to rewrite this concept, preparing it for his own forthcoming writing, by locating himself in the universe with his own individualistic reflective activity. Consider the vast and titanic Emersonian features of Thoreau’s writing here, on August 13, 1838:

If with closed ears and eyes I consult consciousness for a moment, immediately are all walls and barriers dissipated, earth rolls from under me, and I float by the impetus derived from the earth and the system, a subjective, heavily laden thought, in the midst of an unknown and infinite sea, or else heave and swell like a vast ocean of thought, without rock or headland, where are all riddles solved, all straight lines making there their two ends to meet, eternity and space gambolling familiarly through my depths. (8-9)

These are the beginnings of Thoreau’s understanding of Emersonian reflective activity, a near- meditative state, of locating one’s self within the cosmos, a place where experience can be transformed into “a thought of the mind.” In Thoreau’s writing, this is later paired with a more rigorous understanding of actions with secondary reflective, individualistic, contemplative activity, which becomes the metaphor-rich bedrock of the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. After the Walden experiment, wherein Thoreau attempts to universalize the particular in a

18 distinctly Emersonian way, Thoreau does not reckon with the idea of innate truths or higher laws in the same fashion. But he does continually draw from his experiences, and his reflections on those experiences, as the basis of all knowledge—particularly in his later writing, as in Cape Cod—which I will track, outline, and explore. But here, in these final phrases of Emerson’s oration, he even goes so far as to outline a potential manner-of-working, which Thoreau seems to adopt quite literally in his approach to life and the minutiae of his day-to-day. Just as Emerson told Thoreau to keep a journal, which largely gave him access to a more deliberate literary life, so too Emerson is telling a young Thoreau to engage in a natural cycle of action and reflection. The actuality of Thoreau’s own life makes

Emerson’s “American Scholar” musings actionable. Emerson declares, and I will quote him at length here because he is really getting to the heart of his argument for the American scholar-as- actionable, as reproducible, as a figure of a populist democratic experience:

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town,— in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank discourse with many men and women; in science, in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived by the poverty or the splendor of his speech. (62)

And what does the actual Thoreau spend the remainder of his simple life doing? He is inset deeply in the heroism of taking action—action that took him towards and further into the natural world, and the scientific study of it that was available to him—of setting himself toward actually doing country labors by working as a surveyor in his homeland, and engaged in spirited discourse with all kinds, mostly to his benefit, simple country folk.And in this truly American individualistic mode of being-in-the-world, he cast off the expectations of his family and his mentor, and ultimately, found himself at the seashore, to loosely quote from Cape Cod, with all America behind him. Emerson’s commencement speech draws a template for the American scholar as an Any-Man, and Emerson’s disciples and emissaries set forward from here in a studious fashion to accomplish manifold manifestations of his instructive lessons here. Another classmate of

19 Thoreau’s, Richard Henry Dana Jr., took this Emersonian call to action out to sea, joining on as a merchant sailor from which experience he writes Two Years Before the Mast—a text which drew the blueprint for Melville—and laid the groundwork for seafaring narratives in American cultural consciousness. While, alternately, Thoreau made for the woods to extend his imagination into his American landscape, to brood thereon, and at once descend back into himself a more complete American. Eventually, he hiked out from the forest to ponder the history of America as metaphorically distilled in the environs of the northern cape of New England, Cape Cod. So perhaps, Thoreau and Dana circled round one another to gain their bearings and somehow met philosophically at the seashore. By synthesizing an epistemic approach to the natural world with a world-class liberal education and a healthy love of walking, Thoreau took in this Emersonian template, and took the place of the hero that was needed to actualize Emerson’s proposed cultural revolution, to develop an actionable, collective-yet-individualistic democratic experience. Through his self-conscious reflection, Thoreau began to construct his own American transcendental aesthetic from the raw material of his experience. This is his most heroic act. Much of that work can be found within the pages of Walden, and I will turn now to charting the variations of that metaphorically-rich literary landscape in order to further track the development of Thoreau’s transcendental aesthetic as it is developed within the ebb and flow of that quintessential American book.

20 CHAPTER III

AESTHETIC VARIATIONS IN

TRANSCENDENTALIST

THOUGHT: A READING

OF WALDEN

The fact that in 1845, Thoreau journeyed into the backwoods of Emerson’s property and built his cabin there in that forested landscape, seems too apt a potential metaphor to ignore. Emerson had inarguably sparked, and philosophically and materially supported, Thoreau’s fascination with natural history when he prompted him to write the previously mentioned, somewhat contentious “Natural History of Massachussetts” essay for The Dial. There’s no record of Thoreau having read any books of natural history before his requisite research in drafting the piece. Afterward Emerson continued to support him in his interest, and in this way provided him with a secure, secluded place for his excursion into that docile but uncivilized natural world (Sattelmeyer 35-6). So he set up camp on the edge of Emerson’s land holdings, much as he set up his literary career on the edge of Emerson’s aesthetic vision for transcendentalist thought. Out of this move, Thoreau developed his most successful, in the 19th-century and in modern literary contexts, widely read, and eponymous American text, Walden, drawn from the sketches he made in his journals of his 26 months spent in that small cabin, near that memorably metaphorical pond. This complex and imaginative transcendental text has been studied with an intense vigor by Americanist scholars, and read as everything from an early example of nature writing to a bildungsroman or kunstlerroman. The wild growth of interpretive critical responses to this text from post-structuralism to ecocriticism are almost as vast and titanic as the natural features that 21 Thoreau describes, and just as varied. For my part, this only serves to further demonstrate and solidify the inviting quality of its style, the openness of its metaphors, and its enduring place in American cultural consciousness and the discipline of literary study. Gary Scharnhorst is qualified to conclude in hisThoreau: A Case Study in Canonization that, “There is, in a word, no mythical or mystical ‘test of time’ Thoreau must continue to withstand. By the same token, as the history of his canonization may indicate, we should not discount the resiliency of his reputation or the variety of his appeal” (100). I argue that Walden has room for all of these interpretations in the leaves of its pages, but that the text is not of them. Despite the voluminous body of work on Walden, it has lost none of its mysterious and timeless efficacy in inspiring new readers to imaginative and reflective activity, bringing the book into the life of the mind, reanimating its movements with the warmth of one’s thoughts like the metaphorical bug which hatches from the farmer’s milled applewood table in the “Conclusion” chapter. Others go so far as to try to make this story anew in their own lives by reenacting the material conditions of its basic project, literally journeying into the wild as an individualistic lifestyle obsession, or a religious or spiritual activity. As if by simply being in nature, it will make you whole again like a kind of baptismal cleansing, and afterward you may, metaphorically, return to your own Concord, Massachusetts, a wiser and broader human fellow. All of these manifold interpretations of his book are useful, and I think, Thoreau would’ve appreciated the varied perspectives. But for my study, I don’t think that any critical undertaking has heretofore captured the essential quality of Thoreau’s developmental aesthetic in Walden quite as well as Stanley Cavell does in his pivotal The Senses of Walden. Cavell opens his phenomenological close-reading and interpretation of the text with the simple premise that the work is “perfectly complete, in that it means every word it says, and that it is fully sensible of its mysteries and fully open about them” (4). This approach to the text, I feel, is crucial to understanding Thoreau’s proto-modern individualistic project, but moreover, to track his aesthetic development in the text. The voice of Walden does have a distinctive first-person

22 narrative style that jumps between seemingly disparate identities. One moment the speaker is a studied naturalist, then he is a high-minded philosopher, then he waxes poetic on the rippling surface of the pond. As Cavell goes on to say, “Once in it, there seems no end; as soon as you have one word to cling to, it fractions or expands into others” (13). It’s an assemblage of possibilities being shakily negotiated by, at best, an acutely metaphysically-minded and sensitive transcendentalist speaker, at worst, an unreliable narrator. But if we read this internal conflict of narrative voice as an unintentional byproduct of Thoreau’s personal eccentricities, of which there is record of many, then we will surely lose sight of reading the text for what it is—a construction of literature. If we take a path of interpretation that is staked out by these limitations, Walden seems to be not much more than a Luddite manifesto, composed out of the confused ramblings of a misguided Harvard intellectual, bemoaning his failed bean-farming enterprise, engaged in a personal war with woodchucks, and grumbling about the rapid expansion of America’s burgeoning industrial complex and the subsequent influx of Irish immigrants. And on some level, it might be that. But if one accepts Cavell’s strategy for reading, and acknowledges that the work is fully open and self-conscious about the fact that it does in many ways complicate and even undermine or contradict itself, Walden becomes more primarily a negotiation, a “dialectic” if you will, between its writer and its reader on what the process of epistemological activity should look like in modern American life. The speaker is involved in the process of building a system of self-knowledge in an individualistic sense, dedicated to producing a sense of self that is not particularly beholden to the goings-on of community, nor dependent on that community for validation, support, or even recognition. This is perhaps one of the defining elements of American culture, probably most originally studied and written about in the anthropological depiction of America found in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which Thoreau read in college, and seems to have taken to heart. In some sense, a bulk of Walden is more an extension of de Tocqueville’s work than an example of early nature writing, a treatise on environmental conservationism, or a work of religious mysticism. But again, as I said

23 before, it has room for these interpretations, but none of these gives a complete picture of the developmental transcendental aesthetic in the work or the rhetorical stance of the text. More importantly, as Cavell asserts from the start of The Senses of Walden, “To discover how to spend our most wakeful hours—whatever we are doing—is the task of reading Walden as a whole; it follows that its task, for us who are reading, is epitomized in discovering what reading in a high sense is and, in particular, if Walden is a heroic book, what reading Walden is” (5). Thoreau was particularly fascinated by the notion of the classically heroic during his studies at Harvard, and during his formative years as Emerson’s protégé, from Emerson’s own essays on the subject, and his transcendental contemporaries, so the connection that Cavell makes here to this classical approach is meaningful, illuminative, and grounded in Thoreau’s experience (Sattelmeyer 31-35). I would like to temper this reading a little, because it may be a self-conscious study on heroism in the life of the individual, or it may be a manifestation of the conceptual framework from Emerson’s “American Scholar,” which as I have shown is a kind of rhetorical constant through Thoreau’s intellectual development. In either case, the philosophical implications of these two rhetorical stances are so similar that a transcendental aesthetic approach to either would probably look the same. Albeit, in the case for the “American Scholar” being his inspiration, I would argue that the aesthetic tendency would be toward particularly American cultural features. And American cultural features abound in Walden’s discussion of historical and contemporary issues, largely through subtextual metaphor, like the Mexican- American War and the dangers of aggressive nationalism, as discussed in the “Sounds” chapter. But as Cavell writes of the project of Walden as a heroic book, he goes on to remark on its fiercely declarative tone in the early chapters, and posits Parrington’s assertions regarding the book as a “transcendental declaration of independence” (qtd. in Cavell 8). But the real issue at hand, as Cavell sees it, necessitates asking the following question, “From what is [Thoreau] supposed to have declared his independence? Clearly not from society as such; the book is riddled with the doings of society. From society’s beliefs and values, then? In a sense—at least independence from the way society practices those beliefs and values. But that

24 was what America was for; it is what the original colonists had in mind” (8). To be sure, that Thoreau describes himself as ‘building his house’ on Independence Day, 1845, is a strong self- conscious metaphorical choice—but more importantly—one that is based in actual experience. Independence is a strong term by itself, bringing to mind all the variations of individualism that have been played out in the history of American culture. But even in this reflection, Thoreau is more actively appropriating those narratives of individualism in the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic more than Emerson ever does. Because, clearly, narratives of individualism, and its cultural history, are largely focused on individual experience. Emerson’s project, as I see it, is largely about communal activity, a project of building an intellectual community, though the nature of his prose often obfuscates that meaning. By looking at Emerson’s social concerns, he enjoyed his friends and needed the activity of an intellectual community to develop his life- of-the-mind. Strikingly, Thoreau, the lone wolf of transcendentalism, did not. Although, it is interesting to note that Walden, a text much concerned with the individual, was in part socially constructed from Thoreau’s lectures in front of a live audience. But in that way, I would argue, it is more dialectical than communal. In any case, I imagine that here, as Thoreau is in the middle of drafting Walden, he is declaring his independence from Emerson’s influence and committing himself to developing his own transcendental aesthetic. While considering these factors in attempting to discover what reading Walden is, it’s perhaps even more important for the reader to keep in mind that Thoreau has also constructed the literary character of the anonymous, unnamed, and instable speaker. Remember that this is a construction of literature. This character is not Thoreau per se, but a kind of meta-Thoreau, a character born from the process of Thoreau’s journals and giving lectures from those journals, such as “A History of Myself,” a lecture about his more than two-year long, Concord, Massachusetts, Walden Pond experiment. But in meditating on his relationship to Emerson, and his personal study of natural history, he condensed all his experiences into this Emersonian-like attempt at a universal, transcendental literary form that follows the even more metaphorical single cycle of the seasons. This, then, is not Thoreau’s vision of a single transformative

25 experience within his life, but a constellation of experiences transmuted by his aesthetic approach at the time into a kind of natural religion. It seems a relevant reminder here, that Thoreau was engaged in revisions of Walden for nine years, creating seven distinct drafts, even as he requested and received borrowing privileges at Harvard’s library, and was devoting himself increasingly to his study of natural history and of the historiography of the cultural heritage of America. This in and of itself may account for the dramatic shifts from Emersonian to Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetics within the text. Cavell also points out that it’s also often overlooked that this speaker is engaged in the task of writing and therefore is bound by the related process of studious self-reflection.

The speaker is essentially writing himself into being, a task that American culture of the 19th-century, according to Emerson, needed to undertake, as this was this end of a few major contributions to American identity in the preceding decades. Rapid industrialization had moved from the cities to the unknown territories of the West, with the expedient development of new modes of communication and transportation rapidly shrinking the subjective size of our nation. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was some years off, and perhaps because of these ideological connections between Western expansionism and the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic, so centered on individual experience, Thoreau’s work enjoyed a posthumous revival during this later period of American history. America needed a new kind of epic poetry to guide its burgeoning cultural development. It seems no coincidence either that the monolithic proto- modern American cultural artifacts, Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are published in such rapid succession. In this way then, the speaker of Walden is a speaker, or a chanticleer as he refers to himself, and I will refer to him as such from here out in my analysis to help keep this concept at the forefront of our thinking. It is essential to understanding this notion of how this character functions in the work. One final thought inspired out of this approach to readingWalden as developed by Cavell, is that to read Thoreau’s approach in Walden as being particularly proscriptive would be as limiting as viewing the text as a meaningless collection of rambling observations. The work

26 of Walden is a process, not a result, or even a particular answer to the problem of being-in-the- world, or the problem of being-an-American-in-America. That is its focus, its area of inquiry, but as a text it offers no concrete answer to this problem. It seems prudent to point out that this is a fundamental feature of the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic. That epistemological truth is universal, outside of individual experience, and thus the individual can only hope to see its form and meaning by focusing on being a “transparent eyeball”, annulling one’s individuality to gain a glimpse of higher truth. Though Thoreau, later in Walden, does somewhat temper his use of this particular aesthetic device. In the “Conclusion” chapter in particular, he seems to discard it almost entirely and take on a singularly persuasive and individualistic rhetorical style, moving toward the development of his own Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. Despite these moves toward a more stable presentation, or practical advice even, in these last moments of the text, Walden is still couched in this kind of intense contemplation of practices and problems without actionable solutions. Expanding on this concept of locating Walden within the context of American cultural history, Lawrence Buell in his The Environmental Imagination notes that the speaker is driven by “a period-specific ‘American’ malaise or ferment … a romanticist combination of self- abandoning zest for the inspired visionary creative moment and restless at being bound by it, heightened and complicated by postcolonial uncertainty” (379). To say that Walden is bound primarily by post-colonial uncertainty, instead of a broader, more inclusive sense of American cultural instability is fairly reductionist, but it does make good sense that this is going on in the text and part of what the speaker is responding to. Part of the development of Thoreau’s project in Walden, and in his professional and personal life before and after the Walden-experiment, does seem to be to attempt to engage in the shaping of the American character within his historical moment. Consider his refusal of taxation and his subsequent jailing, his writing of Civil Disobedience, and his participation in the Underground Railroad to name a few heroic actions to immediate cultural problems (Sayre 1046-1048). But Buell goes on, and I agree with him in this, to warn against trivializing Walden as an artifact of a particular historical mood in American

27 culture. That would be imposing another limitation to its communicative potential and do more to mute the ways in which new readers can discover and rediscover the project and process of Walden, than open the text for further interpretive academic work. This is not a history-specific book, as contemporary critical attention shows, but an essential exploration of individualism as a mode of being-in-the-world, often focused on the Emersonian variations of this theme, but also shows a trajectory to the more experiential Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic of the “Conclusion” chapter which attempts to focus on the implications of individualism in a global cultural economy. But again, even here, Emerson’s influence rings, as Thoreau’s study of Orientalism under the guidance of Emerson comes through in his consideration of global cultural unity. Before we get to working with the text, it seems right to thoughtfully consider a few academic approaches and critical literary opinions other than Cavell’s, on the development of what I have been referring to as the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic as it is visibly hashed out, and as I am arguing, halfway refined in the text ofWalden . Leo Marx writes of Walden in his pivotal work in the development of ecocriticism, The Machine in the Garden, that “In Walden Thoreau is clear, as R.W. Emerson seldom was, about the location of meaning and value. He is saying that it does not reside in the natural facts or in social institutions or in anything ‘out there,’ but in consciousness” (264). For my part, what Marx is seeing here is more a difference of style rather than a difference of unit of analysis. Emerson is exceedingly frenetic in his writing and very rarely ever lands on a clear thesis. But taken as a whole, the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic is focused on the discussion of consciousness, a unifying consciousness, in a truly collectivist sense. A kind of Platonic truth-apparatus that we see shadows of in our caves of personal experience. Thoreau is exploring that in Walden, in fact, that is exactly what he is in the act of doing. Earlier I referenced Harmon Smith’s portrayal of the same issue, which also appears in Sattelmeyer’s bibliography, Matthiessen’s work, Cavell’s meditation, and Buell’s and Marx’s above, as well as so many other critics, that this was a feature of Thoreau’s developing aesthetic

28 from his earliest essay in The Dial—a kind of Platonic-Aristotelian split over the unit of analysis for transcendental philosophy. In this way, Thoreau is not operating under the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic in the sense that he does not place “transcendence” outside of what is able to be experienced by the individual—any individual, in a truly populist sense. Or as Philip Fisher succinctly summarizes the concept in his Still the New World, that “Thoreau’s Walden was a Jeffersonian experiment to define the unit of self-sufficient life … It is the repeatable pattern for a nation of self-sufficient poet-farmers” (45). Despite Fisher’s fascinating thesis on the creative destruction that is inherent in the development of each epoch of American literature, he does little work to further examine Thoreau’s project, preferring Whitman’s metaphors, and gives him little further mention. If only, perhaps, Fisher had read Cape Cod, he would have found the ample destructive potential he was looking for. In any case, I argue that self-sufficiency, in an economical sense, is not a major concern of the text. The economic metaphors are employed primarily to get a sense of the influence of the budding commercial, capitalist culture of the time. Thoreau does not appear to have had much concern for economic gains and viewed the pursuit of capital, in his life and in his writing, with ambivalence. Thoreau did actually live simply and was socially derided for it. To the detraction of all of his friends and acquaintances, particularly Emerson, he never was particularly concerned in his life with making something of himself on any kind of contemporary economic model for personal success, through the development and distribution of his work, or by participating in the modes of capitalist investment ventures. As Thoreau writes to Harrison Blake, his longtime friend and philosophical correspondent, edited and arranged by Bradley Dean and published in the excellent Letters to A Spiritual Seeker, Thoreau writes in his second letter, March 27, 1838, “Do men know nothing? I know many men who, in common things, are not to be deceived … who are said to be prudent and knowing, who yet will stand at a desk the greater part of their lives, as cashiers in banks, and glimmer and rust and finally go out there. If they know anything, what under the sun do they do that for?” (36). Clearly, Thoreau had no use for material, worldly definitions of success. After he had used his engineering prowess to

29 greatly improve the refinement of graphite for the family pencil-making business, even going one further to invent a machine that would simultaneously bore the hole and insert the graphite shaft within the pencil—essentially inventing the modern writing tool we now take for granted—he completely neglected to pursue or expand that enterprise. Again to quote Nathaniel Hawthorne’s assessment of his character, as it seems simultaneously accurate and sharply evocative of Thoreau’s social standing in the community of his intellectual peers, that he “seems inclined to lead an Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood.” As is often quoted from his journal, Thoreau found “employment enough” watching the change of the seasons.

But returning to the trajectory of my argument, the text of Walden does continually challenge and circumvent the interpretive faculties of its reader. This result comes from the form, structure, and presentation of its rhetorical strategy, which is heavily steeped in a kind of dialectical process. This is an example of just how developmental Thoreau’s transcendental aesthetic was. Much of this fragmentation of meaning-making activity in the reader comes primarily from Emerson’s approach. But Thoreau adopts this technique to affect his reader to ends that do not always align with other guiding principles of the Emersonian manner of working. For one, Thoreau’s literary aspiration did not actually involve the construction of a homogeneous American culture as a nation of poet-farmers, as Fisher claims. In Thoreau’s aesthetic, the betterment of the self comes before the betterment of community. And though there is much of the goings-on of the social world in the text, as Cavell asserts, there is little talk of community outside of metaphors that function as natural religion within the text. And while this is a seemingly mocking jest by Fisher, it is also a reductionist view of what the text is attempting. Again, I have to bring Cavell back into this discussion and reiterate that the entire notion of farming in particular, within Walden, is framed by its metaphorical potential. Cavell writes, “Whatever else Walden is, it certainly depends on the tradition of topographical poetry—nothing can outdo its obsession with the seasons of a real place,” and furthermore, Cavell’s assertion that this idea of “hoeing beans” is a metaphor for writing, with the use value of this metaphor being

30 that “the writer’s power of definition, of dividing, will be the death to some, to others birth” (21- 22). Walden is a thought-experiment, then, in forming an American natural religion. The speaker is engaged in projecting his cognitive activity into the natural forms that he sees by writing about them, reading them in their self-imposed metaphorical state, and then drawing himself out of them again. This “self” must be affirmed by the individual reader for himself, as a kind of religious affirmation. The speaker is doing it, and so he invitesWalden ’s reader to do it too. And by doing this, the individual reader becomes an American, as in, he is dedicated to a universal but somehow also individualistic activity—a part of a whole—a singular synecdoche.

This literary concept is in sense proto-post-modern, as the speaker, and the reader, and the hypothetical reader-writer, are all aware of this conceptual exchange. It seems often within criticism that Thoreau is compared to modernist American poet Wallace Stevens—so many modern Thoreau scholars make this connection—including Fisher, perhaps because of his nearness to Whitman. But as Fisher continues to write of Walden, “Thoreau’s aesthetics depend on the existence of a universal essence that could ground a social democratic experience,” and that Thoreau’s aesthetics, “have as their enemy privacy and individuality” (98-99). Again, understanding the text in this way limits the variety of interpretations within the narrative, and reduces the possible interpretative outcomes to an overly simplistic one. But it’s obvious why Fisher would have this impression—the text is tinged with the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic. I argue that it is the act of self-affirmation that is key to understanding Thoreau’s speaker’s overall project in the latter half of the text. And it isn’t one of universalization, but rather strongly, even pathologically towards the individualization of the social democratic experience. In other words, as John Gatta puts it in his treatment of Thoreau in the chapter “Rare and Delectable Places” in his book Making Nature Sacred, that, “Instead of fetishizing the Concord woods as exotic or monumentally sublime, Thoreau cherishes them as home ground

… This place, in other words, becomes for him at once exceptional and commonplace —and as Transcendental commonplace, opens toward anyone’s spiritual epiphany …” (131). Thoreau’s

31 approach to the natural world makes epistemology and self-conscious reflection a national pastime rather than an isolated hermetic study. Walden is, therefore, phenomenological in its approach. It is using the sense-experience of closeness-to-nature as a unifying experience to build from within a conceptual framework of a natural religion, but it is wholly dialectical in its execution. As I have said, Walden’s speaker projects the concept of himself—of the individual—into the natural forms that he sees. He makes this clear within the “Solitude” chapter when he writes that, “With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences; and all things good and bad go by us like a torrent” (429). And by this act of natural religion “standing beside himself” in contemplative action, he puts himself into the forms of nature, and reads those forms, and then reintegrates them into a reinvigorated and reified sense of self by writing about it. As Robert Milder reflects on the “Solitude” chapter ofWalden in his book Reimagining Thoreau, that this process is the “touchstone experience of grace in nature, theorized about in ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,’ sought after in ‘Reading’ and ‘Sounds,’ and now intimately realized down to the immediacy of Thoreau’s present tense” (86). But to accomplish this dialectical back-and-forth of working with the reader, the work is filled with complex compare-and-contrast scenarios: discovering companionship with the self and self-consciousness found in “Solitude” versus the isolation of unwanted interaction with others; the industriousness of nature compared to the machinations of mankind; or contemplative high-mindedness contrasted with stoical country simplicity. But none of these sentiments is more strategically composed than Thoreau’s meditations on the necessity of experiential knowledge in forming a self-conscious identity. This is clearly a response to the call by Emerson for an American scholar and could serve as a template, and it is in these moments where we start to see the development of the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. There may be a chapter in Walden called “Higher Laws” but there is no “higher meaning” in this chapter outside of what the individual, through a self-reflexive attitude, can learn about himself by measuring himself against the natural world. The cultural modes of being discussed are hidden there within the physical.

32 The dense descriptions of the physical world are there for its metaphorical potential within this construction of literature. But, it seems, not quite in an Emersonian transcendentalist sense. Again, Emerson is looking for and is reading the signs left in nature by a divine power—immutable, immaterial, and unchanging—untouchable by human experience. While Thoreau is putting himself into the place, breathing it in, measuring his imagination in landscape, and pulling a new sense of self out of that reflective experience. It’s a distinct shift away from Emerson’s epistemology in this transcendentalist philosophical approach, and in that way, attempts to bring transcendentalism down-to-Earth. High-mindedness can be pursued by the most humble countryman in his morning walks. As Buell writes in his treatment of the “Higher Laws” chapter, “This chapter of Walden, more explicitly than any other, makes clear the insufficiency of pastoralotium , the space of leisure, as an explanation of what the turn to nature properly means,” and this sounds very much like Cavell’s assertion that the work of Walden is to discover how to spend our most wakeful hours, and that, “It declares full allegiance to the ideal of rigorous self-discipline, which produces the intense ‘deliberateness’ that Thoreau throws into each multilayered sentence” (391). It is an individual, physical, experiential process. So let’s get closer to the text and look at how this approach functions within the actual work. And I see no better place to start than with the chapter I was just discussing, “Higher Laws”; this chapter opens with descriptions of Walden’s speaker returning from a triumphant day of fishing. Though not self-consciously referenced by the text, this brings to mind visions of the speaker as a biblical fisher-of-men in some kind of natural religion. Much like that other religious text, the speaker is seeking in this chapter to establish his own system of epistemic moral philosophy. In that sense, this chapter essentially establishes the grounding ethical and epistemological framework of Walden. As such, I intend to focus on close-reading this chapter for some specific textual examples of the dialectical process, and theThoreauvian transcendental aesthetic as it appears, as these relate to the development of a natural religion. Earlier chapters in Walden deal with the preliminary acts of nation-building. As is often

33 referenced, Walden’s speaker picks July 4th to set into the woods, and spends a good deal of the early chapters outlining his deeply metaphorical and uniquely American efforts, such as picking a geographical locale and establishing a settlement in “Economy” and “Where I Lived & What I Lived For”, establishing his personal independence and what-should-be constitutional ideals in “Reading” and “Sounds”, and negotiating finer and finer degrees of interrelations within a wider community from “Solitude” through “Baker Farm.” Of course, these are obtuse categorizations of wholesale chunks of a deeply complex and dialectical progression, but by outlining this general thematic development through Walden up to our starting point here at “Higher Laws”, I mean to highlight the lack of a more self-conscious approach to epistemology in previous chapters. How does an individual, or a nation, come to know itself? In “Higher Laws” all of the speaker’s previous individualistic sense-experiences, involving his close proximity both physically and metaphorically to the natural world, are reflected upon and more concretely shaped by Thoreau to do the work of inspiring a similar activity in his reader. It’s a natural religion that speaker is developing here, and more importantly, as I’ve said, he is modeling it within a dialectical relationship to his reader. Let us also consider whether these movements are uniquely Thoreauvian or Emersonian in their scope. After describing his haul of fish—the speaker reflects that, “I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wilderness which he represented” (490). As Frederick Garber writes in Thoreau’s Redemptive Imagination, “The meeting with the woodchuck is a moment of epiphany, the sudden opening out to Thoreau of a singular level of being he had known of and perhaps experienced but was unprepared to meet at that time and place” (37). As in, the speaker isn’t hungry in his physical body for the nourishing flesh of the stout rodent, but the life—the wildness—that he represents.This woodchuck is self-sufficient and has a harmonious relationship with the natural world that he inhabits. He is an animal that is in his natural place, his most ideal state of being-in-the-world. This, perhaps, is a station which Thoreau’s speaker means to attempt to inhabit, or at the very

34 least, try on for a while. Within Walden, the woodchuck is a recurrent symbol that has a planetary meaning, which most often seems to serve as a metaphor for wildness and symbiotic existence. But it is also a creature that behaves in a similar fashion to mankind writ-large—an industrious creature capable of great things—for good and evil. They are bound by their place in the world to do what they do, instinctually, tied somehow more directly to their most basic impulses. Just as Thoreau came to the woods outside Concord and found that, “Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength” so too is the woodchuck, the man, required to adapt their imaginations to the space of the landscape (331). As Garber continues, “It was Thoreau’s habit to localize whatever consciousness could absorb, and since the most local was the selfhood within him, all alien material ultimately ended up there … Everything beyond Concord eventually had reference to the town, since it could be used for the town’s understanding of itself” (64). One million woodchucks, one million Thoreaus, and one million Concords all in concentric relation to one another in both form and content. This perspective is decidedly unique to the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. Following this preamble, the speaker offers some suggestions for how to read this chapter. He states that “when some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered, yes,—remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education,—make them hunters, though sportsmen only at first, if possible, mighty hunters at last, so that they shall not find game large enough for them in this or any vegetable wilderness” (491). It is this deeply individual experience of self-reflection that takes place during the acts of hunting and fishing that Thoreau is advocating. In a way, these simple acts of country living are used as a metaphor for the youth to begin to find himself within the hierarchy of nature. He goes so far as to call it an “education.” As the speaker states, “Such is oftenest the young man’s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself” (492). In the forest, the young man can have a clear view of himself because he can be closer to his basic instincts—his true original self. And by taking part in the operations of nature, he can come to find himself just as another part of it. And here, we still see the influence of Emerson on

35 Thoreau’s thinking, that there is a universal to derive from this particular. That nature may be an extension of consciousness, a formation of consciousness. After this assertion, the speaker moves into an interlude where he discusses the difficulties within some other religions at aligning one’s physical self with the kind of idealistic life that comes with the development of self-consciousness—in attempting to glimpse universal truth. He describes a kind of Buddhist monk, who limits his diet, wishing to live off the stuff of self-conscious reflection alone “though the result were bodily weakness” (495). It is this kind of self-indulgent and all-consuming obsession with universality that the speaker is particularly critical of in the development of the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. This kind of self- consciousness is a denial of the physical realities of life, and again, much like the differences between Aristotelian and Platonic epistemologies, Thoreau draws a line here between the concept of pure self-conscious reflection of the monk-like idealist and being able to measure one’s interrelation to the conditions of the material world. As the speaker shows:

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself … Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man … It is a little stardust caught, a segment of the rainbow … Yet, for my part, I was never unusually squeamish; I could sometimes eat a fried rat with a good relish, if it were necessary. (495)

This kind of self-consciousness becomes self-consuming—and though it may seem like a pursuit of “higher principles”—Thoreau sees no use for this kind of self-consciousness in American life because it is a narcissistic solipsism. Thus, devouring a fried rat becomes a symbol of a healthy affirmation of one’s place in the wildness of the physical world, just as devouring the woodchuck would. It represents a reintegration of the natural metaphor into the physicality of the body, that wildness. The American life must be based in experience, self-discovery through the experiential learning of the natural religion, that is, more pointedly that there isn’t one. It doesn’t come to you. Nature is there to function as a kind of dialectical community. Each species or function of nature works on its own individual project in reference to another natural mechanism. And all

36 experiences are interlocked with one another to create a patchwork of experiential knowledge. As Garber speaks of this section of Walden, “Natural wildness is embodied in natural materiality, his own wildness in his own materiality and his attraction toward the one has to live side by side (as it does in ‘Higher Laws’) with his revulsion for the other. Whatever the changes in his attitude toward nature, Thoreau sought to establish continuity with every manifestation of wildness he ever encountered” (121). In this way, reaching out for the physical, the animal body is the location of knowledge. To devour the woodchuck, or the “fried rat”, is to acknowledge that self- consciousness and the body are inextricable. By staging this dialectical progression within a discussion of Eastern philosophy, as a kind of American version of the Buddhist’s “middle way,” alongside “Hindoo” lawgiving, and the writings of Thseng-tseu, Thoreau attempts, by another compare and contrast scenario, to establish a distinctly American brand of self-conscious moral life. Fittingly, it’s in this progression that Thoreau begins his contemplations on the abandonment of reason through giving-in to the sensual pleasures, the ever present problem of selfishness and self-indulgence within an individualistic mentality. Thus, two extreme polarities of selfishness are established. One can live a life of the contemplative mind or the life of the “reptile” sensual physicality (498- 499). However, what is being gently negotiated by the speaker is a different “way” entirely. A natural religion, when you bring yourself humble to nature, to reflect upon yourself through natural metaphors. In this section we see Thoreau beginning to reject the influence of Orientalism on his aesthetic development, and search for a more stable epistemological grounds—which ultimately in the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic becomes the ground, indeed, that one stands upon. Buell writes of this moment in Walden that, “Not many modern readers can follow this move without falling into vexation or snickering. For nowhere else in Walden does Thoreau so blatantly advertise his ‘Victorian prudery’ as here … this prudishness seems blatantly inconsistent, for suddenly it appears that nature has become the enemy,” however, “It may look as if Thoreau has forsaken nature in his quest for moral purity … But the point of the chapter is not that we should turn our backs on nature but that we must imagine the ulterior benefits of the

37 original turn to nature …” (392). I think that Buell falls into the critical mode of being bound by understanding the speaker of Walden as Thoreau himself, but, this point on the treatment of sensuality in nature in this part of “Higher Laws” is carefully negotiated. The speaker of Walden is outlining a turn towards, and then a turn away from immaterialism, of a high-mindedness that is alienated from the experiential, the physical, the conditions of immediate life. The unit of analysis for the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic is being hashed out here. To conclude “Higher Laws,” the speaker builds a thought-experiment on a hypothetical American individual he refers to as John Farmer. He writes of this American figure caught up in a moment of deep self-reflection, “Why do you stay here and live this moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? [I interpret this to mean mainstream transcendentalism— and perhaps the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic] Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these.—But how to come out of this condition [the material, experiential world] and actually migrate thither [to the immaterial, abstract ideals]? All that he could think of was to practice some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect” (499-500). I’ve interjected some parenthetical observations here to highlight my take on these symbols. Read as such, this passage can be seen as Thoreau coming to outright reject the idea of universal truth in his writing. John Farmer himself may very well be Thoreau himself. The star imagery comes into play again—a representation of the notion of universal truth—a message imbued by a divine power into nature. But the speaker is quick to come to terms with this self-reflective activity, and attempts to develop a process whereby self- knowledge can be found through an experiential relationship to the physical world. The physical experience of being-in-the-world comes first, only through this attitude does one find himself in nature and is thereby able to echo an earlier quote stand beside himself. As described, this is not a pure form of transcendentalism, or colored by Emerson’s influence, because of this final shift back towards the physicality of knowing one’s self. Thoreau is building a system of self- affirming knowledge that values individual experience above all; it is a populist philosophical approach to individualism, in a sense, because even the simplest “John Farmer” can participate

38 in this kind of generative American cultural activity. Through Walden, then, Thoreau models a process of individual development that is distinctly American in the scope of its project. It attempts to empower the individual. And it is this process, this experiment of putting on various formations of consciousness and seeing how each is bound by its subsequent being-in-the-world, which forms Walden as a literary experience. Someone who approaches this kind of being-in-the-world like Emerson does in Nature wants to find facts in the foliage, signs woven by a divine hand into the fibers of the natural world, and sermonize about their greatness. And in doing so, he diminishes the role of the individual in this process so much that he becomes likened to a “transparent eyeball.” Thoreau himself had difficulty when dealing with Emerson’s imposing presence, for he writes in his journal on May 24, 1853, after one such meeting with the man, “Talked, or tried to talk with R.W.E. Lost my time—nay, almost lost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind—told me what I knew—and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him” (187). Interestingly, Thoreau did become somebody else in opposition. There doesn’t seem to be much division between who Emerson- the-man was and his transcendental project regarding the varieties of religious experience. And to be sure, Walden’s speaker frequently lapses into this mode of didactic preaching. This is indicative of the influence of the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic on his thinking and his writing. But after such outbursts in the latter chapters, he often comes to censure himself, and in that way, plays on the reader’s perception of advocacy within the text. What mode of being-in- the-world is Walden more clearly advocating? At times, the speaker seems to give some credence to the Emersonian transcendentalist approach. Returning to the quote mentioned earlier regarding “greeting the day and night with joy”, notice that he describes this mode-of-being as focusing on the self, a kind of meditation blessing one’s self. Perhaps more interesting, directly following this thought, he launches into an impassioned treatment of the “intoxication” that he associates with an unquestioning belief in the purely abstract, immaterial, universality. He writes, “I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-

39 eater’s heaven” (495). In other words, he’s glad to see the sky for what it is, to measure his imagination, and refresh himself with its realness, not lull himself into an illusion of universality, connection, oneness. Walden’s speaker is beginning to position himself as the Aristotelian answer to Emerson’s Platonic dialogues. Continuing this progression through Walden, the moment when the speaker goes about measuring the actual depth of Walden Pond in “The Pond in Winter” serves as a well-formed example for the thesis I’ve laid out so far, and is a symbol that is directly carried over into Cape Cod, that of finding bottom—or imagining bottomlessness. This simple act of throwing a heavy stone tied to some string into a pond is a complex metaphorical act of the speaker measuring his imagination within a landscape. And metaphorically takes on the larger issue of American cultural identity. What should the ideal American scholar come to value? Elaborate and beautiful myths that stimulate the imaginative potential of the individual, or hard natural history clearly detailing the functions at work in the natural world and the individual’s place in it? Is there a compromise to be made between the two? The simple townsfolk described by the speaker of Walden attempt to measure Walden Pond only to “fathom their truly immeasurable capacity for marvelousness”—but the idea that there could be such a thing as a bottomless pond is a different, somehow preferable imaginative creation to Emerson’s notion of universality writ- large (549-550). By believing in this kind of myth, there may be an implicit sacrifice of a sense of place in-the-world. How can the individual find his place within the infinite, the bottomless? If the speaker can build some critical human commentary out of a natural symbol—locating the issue within a physical space—he can redeem himself in finding experiential knowledge by measuring his imagination in that landscape. In the context of this example, the pond freezes over in winter, and the speaker is able to skate out onto the infinite and stand upon its surface, watching the fish, like angels, passing beneath him. Perhaps, the rhetorical purpose here is to show that no individualistic identity, the kind of identity that a modern America is in need of, can be developed out of the idea of a homogenous universality. Instead, we’re offered some kind of specific, local, natural infinite—a glimpse of the sublime. A democratic populist folklore that can

40 be located within a specific physical place. And there is a kind of infinite metaphorical potential for measuring the self with an infinite yardstick, again from Emerson, it is a way of measuring self-consciousness through circular power returning into itself, or earlier from Walden, standing beside one’s self in a sane sense. As Walden’s speaker claims after finding Walden Pond’s true depth of 100-or-so feet, “Not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol. While men believe in an infinite some ponds will be thought to be bottomless” (551). If drained of its water, he writes, Walden Pond would appear to be no more dramatic in its depth than “a meadow no more hollow than we frequently see.” So too, if drained of its imaginative potential, the human mind would appear to be no more than a shallow meadow of fleeting thoughts and day-to-day concerns. However, to believe this bottomlessness as a universal is opposed to the developing sense of the critical American scholar. The bottom must be sounded, measured, and recorded in order to understand its ability to measure a man’s thoughts—the limits of landscape are the limits of imagination. Indeed, no system of philosophy or idea stands without some basic bedrock assumption. But that something taken for granted should not be too far outside the realm of what can be experienced. In this sense, there is as much to learn from the real Walden Pond as there is to learn from the mythical one. As Walden’s speaker goes on to assert in the “Spring” chapter, “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomable by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features … We need to witness our own limits transgressed …” (575). Witnessing these “limits transgressed” spurs the mind of the individual to measure his imagination—to measure himself against such a monolithic landscape. We must see our imaginative limits transgressed by the vast and titanic features of nature. Perhaps, this is as close as Walden’s speaker comes to the Emersonian idea of continuance. That perhaps, in the minds of men, some ponds need to be bottomless, or at the very least, unimaginably deep.

41 Is this transcendentalism? This must be Thoreau’s version of it, because we must remember that it is the individual’s, the speaker’s own actions within the realm of experience that drive this contemplative activity. There is little of the Emersonian transcendental aesthetic by the conclusion of Walden. Instead, the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic is developed by outlining the individualistic self-renewal that is possible through engagement with the natural, physical, experiential world. The Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic developed through Walden’s speaker, then, asks the reader to take a walk with him through the dialectical woods of reading the book. He wants the reader to bring the book back to life in the mind, like I referenced earlier, the imaginative metaphor of the “strong and beautiful bug” that he describes at the end in the “Conclusion” chapter, which, after being dormant for 60 years, gnaws its way out of the farmer’s apple-wood table (587). Maybe, at the end of this difficult, confusing, even frustrating journey, the reader of Walden will build a mind-cabin among the leaves of its pages. Or better yet, take his imaginative potential into the experiential world—wherever that may be. But, and this is an interesting point, Thoreau’s speaker does not expect any individual to stay in the mental state of being engaged in deep individualistic self-reflection within every moment of everyday life.As he writes, “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one” (579). The speaker becomes Thoreau-in-himself again, and the various identities of his speaker coalesce into a consolidated life. He makes it clear, in the whole of the “Conclusion” chapter, that one should be able to return to that measured landscape of individual self-reflection, in order to continually reaffirm the mode of the American scholar within the American cultural landscape. In a sense, to stay engaged in the practice of being essentially American; the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic makes individualism a social democratic experience. As he defines it, “to be ‘the Mungo Park, Lewis and Clarke and Frobisher, of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes …’” (578). Measure your imaginative potential in your landscape; find yourself out there. I believe that these more distinctly Thoreauvian parts of Walden were developed in later

42 revisions of the text, as Thoreau did sit with this text for nine years, lecturing on it, going through seven revisions, before its publication date. Nancy Craig Simmons notes in her essay “Speaking for Nature,” found in the collection Thoreau’s Sense of Place, that there occurred a distinct shift in Thoreau’s manner-of-working, and in regards to his developing transcendental aesthetic, says that by cataloging and working directly from the experiential data of his journal, “Increasingly, he valued facts in themselves. What this implies is a different kind of nature writing than Thoreau had learned from Emerson, whose ‘Poet’ ‘turns the world to glass.’ He was defining this new role at the time when he was completing his final draft ofWalden …” (224-225). His concurrent journeys to Cape Cod, and the resultant text from those forays, contain a distillation of the thesis he began in Walden. Armed with vocabulary and critical strategies from my analysis of Walden, I now turn to Cape Cod to collect the transcendental driftwood from its shores and show how it is in many ways a more illuminative American text. As Cavell puts it when he is discussing Thoreau’s account of Walden Pond’s depth, “The human imagination is released by fact” (75). Or as Thoreau writes in his journal 9 November 1851, while discussing one of his outings with Ellery Channing (who accompanied him on several trips to Cape Cod), “Facts should only be as the frame to my pictures; they should be material to the mythology which I am writing … I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies” (111-12). In that spirit,Cape Cod is a collection of carefully gathered factual observations of the ocean’s power to shape a landscape, but also a mythology of New England, of a foundling America, of continual cultural destruction and reclamation. There are moments in Cape Cod that in their facts resound with such startling clarity as is rarely found in Walden’s varied textual landscape. The landscape of Cape Cod and its metaphorical potential expressed in Cape Cod were a fathoms wide yardstick by which to measure Thoreau’s imagination: violent shipwrecks, the relentless roar of crashing waves, and an ever-changing landscape, alongside the complicated history of New England that he is in the process of rewriting, in the sense of the American scholar, within the context of his time.

43 CHAPTER IV

NAUTICAL IMAGES, SEA SIMILES, OCEANIC

METAPHORS: FATHOMING CAPE COD

AS AMERICAN PHENOMENOLOGY

When Thoreau set out for his first foray at Cape Cod with Ellery Channing in tow in 1849, following his tenure at Walden, his “Civil Disobedience” lectures, and the publication and painful public failure of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I believe that he was in the process of actively rethinking his relationship to the transcendental philosophy of his time. Thoreau was a teacher for a good portion of his life, and as such, I believe that he sought to be instructive in his texts. His work on Walden was socially constructed, pieced together from journals, conversations with his mentor, and extensive lectures. And as I have shown, it is written in a distinct dialectical address in order to be, in the experience of reading the text itself, a social democratic experience. But there is a noted shift in the mode of expression in Thoreau’s final texts that were composed for public consumption. The beginnings toward a unique Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic can be found in The Maine Woods, and in Cape Cod, Thoreau comes full circle to return quite plainly to the heroic work of the American scholar. Only this time, he puts himself and his readers directly into the actual experience of the landscape, without giving in to abstraction or a focus on much of anything resembling spirit. Essentially, both Maine Woods and Cape Cod are more representative of how Thoreau lived. Cape Cod, in particular, is a collection of intense experiences located in a particular place, as Thoreau puts it, in a pivotal quote which I will return to in turn, “There I had got the Cape under me, as much as if I were riding it bare- backed … I found it all out of doors, huge and real, Cape Cod!” (893).

44 A reader of only Walden may balk at such frank directness from our transcendentalist guide. Rather than a catalogue of oftentimes a priori thoughtful reflections, here we find a bold-faced assertion of the primacy of individual experience within landscape, rather than transcending it to some other dimension. But, at this time of his life, we findThoreau in a rebellious state of mind. He has had a brief career as an arsonist. He is flatly rebelling against his government and its unjust laws. He has dismissed the capitalist credo of making something of himself, and as I’m arguing, he is striking out against his mentor and the intellectually stifling effects of being wholly associated with the transcendentalist community—some of whom wanted to live on a farming commune with one another—a kind of living that Thoreau said he’d rather put up in Hell than take up residence in such a heaven. This was anathema to Thoreau’s manner of working, and he justifiably didn’t want to be read as a follower of Emerson’s transcendental aesthetic. As Edward Emerson said in his remembrance, “Thoreau was Thoreau,” but I think that Thoreau wasn’t quite Thoreau until this moment in his literary career. As a philosopher- poet-naturalist he was self-consciously stripping away the superfluous from his writing, and in doing so, he began by focusing on the importance of the primary experience of a place, by doing the actual work. As Emerson put it in the “American Scholar”, “Years are well spent in country labors; in town,— in the insight into trades and manufactures; in frank discourse with many men and women; in science, in art” (62). And in Cape Cod, this is what we see Thoreau doing. As I imagine him, in this Cape Cod transformation, he was finally discovering how to “live deep and suck out the marrow” of his life project—or what was left of it as his health was slowly wrecked by his worsening tubercular consumption—to compose a truly instructive, dialectical, phenomenological, heroic American book. And as I will show, this text represents a synthesis of Thoreau’s major transcendental themes, disguised in the simple package of a country travel narrative. Immediately accessible, imminently repeatable, and easily actionable by the everyman. A truly Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. As Thoreau writes to Blake, a month after his journey to Cape Cod, “I too love Concord best; but I am glad when I discover in oceans and wildernesses far away the materials of a million Concords” (61). And we too, can be a million

45 Thoreaus. How was he to conduct and construct this project? Laura Dassow Walls in Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science, comments on Thoreau’s manner of working through his journal that, “Apart from the value of the journal as an accumulating timescape of experience in the land, coherent by virtue of its totality, smaller patterns were emerging and clustering around phenomena less conducive to literary convention’s single convergent law: continuance, rather than narrative closure” (182). And that after beginning to conduct himself scientificallyin the field by writing down his observations of the variances and patterns in seasonal change and animal behavior, “Such observations cued Thoreau into acts of attention which, instead of spiraling him up and beyond the material world, lured him ever more deeply into it.” In working at his philosophical project this way, Thoreau’s interpretive path took a turn toward the experiential, the concrete, rather than the purely deductive. Other critics have written on Thoreau’s relationship to contemporary scientific inquiry, but Walls explores this idea and its far reaching effects on Thoreau’s approach, as this method of working had become a refined process by the time Thoreau turns his attention to writing onCape Cod. Now that he had a distinct manner-of-working from observation and experience, what form should this writing take? Not a scientific analysis, per se, but as Buell writes of Thoreau’s reading habits, “Travel narratives appealed to him more than any other kind of contemporary writing, he is known to have read nearly two hundred books in the genre,” and that, “No contemporary book interested Thoreau more than Charles Darwin’s Journal of Researches … during the Voyage of HMS Beagle” which in its form and presentation, “Darwin does not organize his account into discrete sections of narrative and scholarship but arranges it chronologically, alternating topographical, botanical, and geological description with micronarratives in a daybook” (416-417). Not only does Thoreau adopt this method-of- working from perhaps the most famous observational scientist, he also brings his narrative to the sea, the proposed origin of all speciated life. And there he finds human and natural phenomena transposed over one another in a perceptually dense froth of metaphorical potential.

46 And this focus on the continuousness of nature as part of its vastness, its titanic features, its destructive power but also its redemptive quality becomes, for Thoreau, fully realized and manifested within Cape Cod in the metaphorical potential of the sea and its associated landscape. Throughout Thoreau’s work and in his journal, he speaks of the oceans of the earth with a special reverence. Not only are they the connecting tramways of world culture and economic exchange of his time, but they are nature’s richest metaphor, to again echo Emerson’s “American Scholar”, the ocean is quite literally “always circular power returning into itself” (55). With its unending roar and rhythmic tidal movements, the ocean has an unknowable depth, as Thoreau writes in “The Beach Again” chapter of Cape Cod, “… it appeared to have no friendly relation to land, either as shore or bottom,—of what use is a bottom if it is out of sight … and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it …” (935). And with its associated landscape, this body of water, appearing at times as a Hellmouth gnashing the bodies it claims, becomes the natural symbol with which Thoreau measures his imagination, measures the wreck of his corporeal form, and extrapolating from those particulars, writes and rewrites the history of the modern American people. And as he reads that rewritten history to us, it is not only shaped by the attitudes of the pilgrims, puritans, and natives together, but informed by every detail of this sublime natural world—and I mean sublime in the classical Greek sense, as rewritten by Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle—and by those who allow themselves to be shaped by this landscape. Those sea-side folk who find in every simple fact of their surroundings the basis of a mythology become a measure of the redemptive quality of human nature. These Cape Codders have true grit, and though he writes them into being with a kind of anthropological remove, it’s clear he has a reverence for their solidarity, in their ability to survive in such a place, to reclaim from the wrecks a deeper meaning wrought from such a close association with the sublime. As Walls goes on to say, “Nature may call, but you will never hear it until you attend, until you look for a thing instead of waiting for it. It amazed Thoreau how many things had been so little attended to. And once he was looking with intent, he found himself a practitioner of science.” Though Thoreau scoffed at what he perceived to be the limited perspective of scientific

47 inquiry, which to him ignored the poetic aspects of the experience of the natural world. Instead he focused on the metaphorical potential of his recorded landscape. Regardless, according to Walls he was actively conducting himself as a scientist of his time. Indeed, he was clearly influenced in the development of his generative approach by the scientific methods of his time. And in this way he became a kind of biologist, botanist, geologist, natural historian, and poetical researcher, in turn, doing a good deal of research and reading into each. As I referenced earlier, in his journal Thoreau reflected, “I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologies” (111-112). Thus, his scientific studies and the facts charted in them became personal, heroic, culturally significant truths. And as to Walls’ idea that “Nature may call, but you will never hear it until you attend …” the sea is the loudest, most intemperate call that nature can utter. Thoreau makes constant references to the roar of the Atlantic and the ocean that, in his immediate experience of the place, sounds so incessantly. He even goes so far as to instruct his reader, also in “The Beach Again”, midway through the text of Cape Cod, “Though we have indulged in some placid reflection of late, the reader must not forget that the dash and roar of the waves were incessant. Indeed, it would be well if he were to read with a large conch-shell at his ear” (938). Let us take a moment to pull up alongside Cape Cod, and consider its features with a shell at our ear. Since this is the most important and unique argument in my thesis, I will not be limiting myself to specific chapters, but taking the entirety of the text into account here, instead tracking thematic progressions. There are several phenomenological formations that are recurrent within the text: the symbolic and literal wrecks of the cape both man-made and sea-made, the recurring sound of the ocean as metaphor considered alongside its depth and its imposing dominion over the landscape, and the historiographical context of this region of New England that Thoreau works over and rewrites in the context of his narrative aims. There are a number of scholars who have written essays on this last literary work of Thoreau’s, but for my part, the work deserves a more thorough study. I won’t have the time or length to fully explore the potential of this text as American phenomenology within the confines of this thesis, as it truly

48 is requiring of a larger scholarly work. But before turning to that textual analysis, I would like to take a moment to consider a few noteworthy critical perspectives on Cape Cod and put forth their arguments on how to approach reading Thoreau’s final literary project in order to locate and develop my own. One of the earlier genuine, non-dismissive close-reads of Cape Cod can be found in Joan Burbick’s Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language, which, in its scope captures a similar progression to my own here, a semi- chronological look at Thoreau’s philosophical development through Walden and Cape Cod. Her chapter on Cape Cod, “Tracks in the Sand,” brings her assumption that “the naturalist and the poet were for Thoreau necessarily one, and that through this merger he carried out his desire to write uncivil history” to this study of the northmost cape of New England (12). Her analysis relies heavily on Thoreau’s variations of interpretation that were recorded in the journal, and she relies on an understanding of Thoreau’s approach as far more Emersonian and traditionally transcendental than I allow here, as she writes, “Thoreau experiences himself as two separate forces, matter and spirit” (86). A view with which I take some exception. Nevertheless, her close-read of Cape Cod is a worthwhile place to start for a Thoreau scholar who intends to chart these nor-eastern waters, as its approach and complex synthesis of Thoreau’s immediate reflections in his journal to his experiences in the landscape do the text more justice than earlier writings on its basic epistemological approach by Sherman Paul, or its portrayal as a purely romantic text by James McIntosh. Both critics measure Thoreau too much by his association with Emerson or alternately with his similarity to the Romantics, which I do not find much of the classically romantic in his work, if anything, Thoreau is a cultural pragmatist. I omit these critics here because I can’t reconcile my arguments with theirs in this space. But with that exception, Burbick is worth quoting. She writes of Thoreau’s Cape Cod vision:

In one respect, Cape Cod is an exploration of the very possibility of writing an account of the Cape at all. After the first chapter [“The Shipwreck”], in which uncivil history splinters against the associations of death, the text consistently plays with the conventions of representing nature, periodically startling the reader with the reminder that the description is significantly different from the thing represented, that representations are as 49 dependent upon culture and history as upon poetic inspiration. (91-92)

I align myself with Burbick in her assessment here of the location of Thoreau’s thesis in Cape Cod, as it surely relies on the variability of measuring one’s imagination in the landscape, and is delivered in a multi-layered narrative that is composed from Thoreau’s journey alongside the many referenced historical journeys of countless other multi-cultured explorers, pilgrims, puritans, and natives, presented throughout but particularly concentrated in the “Provincetown” chapter. Thoreau is clearly making the experience of this landscape into a kaleidoscope of history and natural history, and he locates that discussion within a confrontation of the sublime, shifting landscape. Burbick is also right to point out that Thoreau knew what he was doing in positioning himself within contemporary representations of nature, “He had read Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, and Udevale Price and was therefore aware of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque as styles of representing natural landscape. … In addition, he was better acquainted with the naturalist and historical accounts of Cape Cod than with the Cape itself. In a sense, the text comes at the end of a long tradition of natural history writing” (95-96). And there is much of the sublime, in particular, within the text of Cape Cod—it is continually referenced, alluded to, and described via details of the landscape. The effects of the sublime are measured in the inhabitants of the Cape, and their resultant mythologies and recurrent symbols. But perhaps the most unique and critically valuable moment in Burbick’s read of Cape Cod is her notion of Thoreau’s direct invitation to his reader to participate in a similar journey. She writes, “At the end of the book … [Thoreau] challenges his ‘townsmen’ to ‘step into the cars’ and come to the scene of Cape Cod itself. He notes that if the reader had started ‘when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh …’” (98).Thoreau’s experience is made actionable, and in that way, it is presented as a social democratic experience of cultural reflection, much in the same rhetorical vein asWalden . These experiences can be had, and thereby, a similar experiential journey can be traced, by his reader, no matter their place in real time or American history. She goes on, “The suggestion that the reader could catch up with him on the beach invites the miraculous. As Thoreau continually points out, the sand is often the

50 great enemy of man, the eraser of culture and the evidence of incessant change.” So then must culture, and therefore reflection and interpretation, be based on a foundational epistemology of continuance, again from Emerson, ‘circular power returning into itself.’ There is no time when a journey to an ideological Cape Cod becomes unnecessary in modern American life. The work of the American scholar will continually need to find its way to the seashore of experiential knowledge and reflect on his position within both the actual landscape and the history of the cultural landscape he inhabits. And perhaps, in turn, come to terms with his limits transgressed, through a contemplation of nature sublime. There is a dearth of more modern critical perspectives when considering Cape Cod, much of the work of assessing and dismissing the text having been written out in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but among them Philip Gura’s essay, “‘A wild, rank place’: Thoreau’s Cape Cod” collected in the Cambridge Companion to Thoreau’s work, gives the text an important but brief and at times shallow treatment. He writes that while Thoreau’s difficulties with his publishers over when and how Cape Cod was to be developed stunted his ability to give the text a foreseeable public life, but as a literary endeavor, “he thought enough of this project to continue to work on it until his death in 1862, incorporating material from his later visits and from his voluminous reading in the early history of the area” (143). The book as we know it, was prepared for publication by Thoreau’s walking companion, the other half of the “we” in Cape Cod, transcendental poet Ellery Channing. Gura continues, “Having already used a similar format in his Week, Thoreau assembled his account of Cape Cod as a travelogue, a popular genre … But what most engages Thoreau’s imagination is the way in which the immense fact of the ocean constantly impinges on the lives of the Cape’s inhabitants.” Here are our titanic features, our sense of the sublime, but what would it be like to live alongside the sublime? How to exist with its roar always in your ear? It’s also interesting that Gura makes this stylistic connection to A Week, as earlier in this Cambridge Companion collection, Robert Sattelmeyer in his essay “Thoreau and Emerson” makes the claim that, “A Week was intended as a memorial to his brother John … but it was also a testimonial to Emerson’s influence, a summing-up of Thoreau’s efforts to fulfill the duties

51 of the American Scholar” (29). In making a connection between these critical perspectives, it occurs to me that this must be a deliberate stylistic choice for Thoreau to return to this genre, perhaps, to write a memorial for himself, but also, to more fully realize the work of the American scholar in his own way, by focusing on the mythological potential of facts, and to have the last word in transcendental epistemology on the importance of immediate experience as the proper measurement of truth. In the reality of the matter, and rather symbolically too, Emerson wrote and delivered Thoreau’s actual contentious eulogy. Gura goes on to focus on the more human elements of the text by drawing connections between Thoreau’s historiographical studies of the region on its original explorers and considers

Thoreau’s immediate anthropological perspectives on the Cape’s current inhabitants, but for the most part, he uses the text of Walden to describe Thoreau’s project here, and quotes more from that text than he does from Cape Cod. Obviously, given the previous chapter, I too consider Walden to be a helpful critical lens when considering the project of Cape Cod, but, I also deeply wish that Gura had spent more time getting into the grit of the text that he is attempting to give a critical treatment of. In any case, Gura writes, quoting from Walden, using the tonal shifts scattered throughout that text to give some context for the uniqueness of Thoreau’s tone in Cape Cod, “‘And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble,’ he continues, ‘only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us’ … At times like this, Thoreau ceases to be a transcendentalist; that is, he clearly tells us that a desire to transcend reality, to move, as Emerson urged, through nature to the realm of the Spirit, is fatuous” (147). Again, we arrive at the problem of finding epistemological bedrock between these two titans of transcendentalism. It is of course, for me and many other scholars of transcendentalism, one of the most important discussions when considering the two 19th-century American literary figures. Gura goes on to outline his Cavellian approach, which draws him to this conclusion regarding Cape Cod as a continuation of the Platonic/Aristotelian split (though conspicuously neglects to cite Cavell as an influence), that, “Once we recognize the true radicalism of his vision (which we might best call that of a ‘naturist’), we begin to see how much of what he writes seemingly

52 as figuration he meansliterally .” He concludes with another somewhat shoehorned analysis of Walden, which attempts to show how radical Thoreau’s literal approach really was. This essay is useful for my aims in two distinct ways: Gura claims that Cape Cod is a text grounded in the history and experience of a place and its landscape and that, stylistically it is a return to the literary project of A Week. This, for me, signals a similar return, borrowed from Sattelmeyer’s assessment of A Week, to the thematic contemplation of the American scholar. Or as Burbick has it, “[Thoreau’s] preference for naturalistic description [in the manner of A Week] suggests that there are ‘truer’ representations of nature, a theme that runs throughout Cape Cod, and these truths may indeed be dependent not only on culture, but also on the moral characters of the perceiver and the knowledge of the writer” (96).Thoreau is reworking these earlier ideas into a more distinctly Thoreauvian shape. But, overall, Gura’s limited essay prompts me to plumb the text of Cape Cod and its manifold themes to greater depths. A perhaps more illuminative and supportive contemporary essay on Cape Cod from the eminent Michael Breitweiser, “Henry David Thoreau and the Wrecks on Cape Cod,” found in his excellent Americanist text, National Melancholy: Mourning and Opportunity in Classic American Literature, focuses largely on the symbology of wreckage within the text and the redemptive quality of those wrecks, both in the landscape and of human shape and kind. I must credit Breitweiser’s essay for giving me the idea to track Thoreau’s metaphorical wreckage through the text and to collect this phenomenological driftwood and make a contemplative bonfire from it. As Breitweiser starts towards this argument, “The reader must salvage what can be salvaged, using Walden as an aid, wondering in what way Cape Cod might be called a sequel,” and after a quote from Cape Cod regarding Thoreau’s wish to experience the ocean in such a way that it would “lose the pond-like look” it may have to a casual beach goer, Beitweiser continues, “The ocean is yet more profound, and sublime, than the elusive bottom of Walden Pond. … So Thoreau, in Cape Cod, pursues a more radical investigation of the stringent need to divest oneself of encumbrances than he did in Walden” (144-145). That is, in Cape Cod we find, as Breitweiser calls him, “This most severe Thoreau … who loiters on Cape Cod, averting his

53 eyes from the ocean only to pick among those scraps the ocean has finished with.” He goes on to assert that when compared to Walden, the text of Cape Cod “is truly extravagant and peripatetic, partly because Thoreau died, but only partly, because this method is a direct result of the book’s themes as well” (155-156). The beach is strewn with the wreckage of experiential knowledge, and how then, to piece those parts together into an American phenomenology? Breitweiser makes a conjecture here, just as I have done, that in order to properly scour the beach of Cape Cod’s literary project, a wise reader would use Walden as his initial guide. Thoreau himself refers to it directly, saying quite plainly in the opening of Cape Cod that he is both physically and philosophically journeying directly from one place to the next. And, as I’ve shown in the previous chapter, a wise reader will approach the text informed by a particular mode of critical analysis. Knowing further still that Thoreau’s manner of working in this text was wholly unique, informed by historical study of the region but also, as I am borrowing from Walls, was composed out of his journaling and his scientific manner-of-working. Thoreau did compose directly from his journal, and as Burbick shows through carefully navigating Thoreau’s journal, it served his literary projects as a cache of experiential knowledge. His journal was the phenomenological catalogue of his immediate experience in-the-world. And both etymology and entomology are equally important in finding meaning in the landscape forThoreau, and in Cape Cod, Thoreau is meditating directly on the possibilities, as Walls says, of “continuance, rather than narrative closure” in his consideration of the sublime power of the ocean (182). Perhaps, there is life after wreckage, new to be repurposed from old, a phenomenology that can stand on its own merit. As Breitweiser argues, a thoughtful reader will consider Thoreau’s prose in this fragmented, but somehow more complete text, as a reflection of his immediate experience.This, as I am arguing, was Thoreau’s primary concern in the composition of his unique transcendental aesthetic. And Cape Cod is perhaps, outside of the journal, where we see Thoreau at his most raw, as his most immediate and unedited self. At this point, he knew he was in the grips of his own death process. Thoreau had just seen his sister taken by tuberculosis earlier in this year of

54 1849, and, he knew that he had the same affliction. Surely, as Breitweiser claims here, this was weighing on his consciousness. He may very well have been writing his own memorial with this text, as he wrote a memorial for his brother in A Week. But I do not see Thoreau succumbing to a melancholic disposition, as Breitweiser seems to be suggesting here. I think that Breitweiser makes the mistake of not finding the comedic irony in Thoreau’s tone that accompanies the text’s darkest moments. A kind of double consciousness, perhaps of mourning, that shows both the tragedy and the comedy of his (and our) place in the world. I findCape Cod, despite its seemingly grotesque meditations, to be an overwhelmingly hopeful text. It is a text focused on a process of finding salvation in salvaging. And this late Thoreau within the text leads by example in attempting to rewrite the history of New England for a new generation of Americans. Thoreau embodies, and in that way uniquely accomplishes, Emerson’s assignment from the “American Scholar.” He makes himself into the American scholar, by actively doing the work. And the whole work too, bit by bit, not piecemeal. I don’t mean to diminish Breitweiser’s essay, because I think it’s one of the most important pieces of recent scholarship on Cape Cod, but rather, I wish to run up alongside his claims to offer my own. In the latter half of the essay, it seems his opinion on the tone of Cape Cod swings more towards my own, as he begins to outline and consider the redemptive moments of “wreckage” within the text. Breitweiser writes:

Thoreau, tired of and cramped by available ways of writing, tried to nourish a new growth on the continent of literature. He felt such a new style would come as a compensation, as an unexpected return gotten from the wreck of the past … In his journal for March 16, 1952, he wrote that ‘decayed literature makes the richest of all soils.’ Past the various appropriate sorrows, the further result of wreck is the accumulating loam in which new literature prospers. (145)

Thus, the sublime power of nature’s greatest destroyer can be seen not only for its capacity for destruction but also in the metaphorical potential of that destruction. It is the great equalizer of all the things of experiential knowledge—living things, inanimate objects, and ideological stances—reduced to their essential parts, stripped down to wrecks. Those pieces of history, of folklore, can thereby be reallocated into new visions, new mythologies, new literatures. While

55 Breitweiser is arguing that Thoreau is writing in a mode where he sees the age of the “Book” has passed, given Thoreau’s harsh (but again, ironic and comedic—isn’t Thoreau our guide here?) criticism of the travel guide he often cites in the text. But perhaps in its place, an age of experiential knowledge can be advocated for. Each everyman can be empowered with the basic critical tools to construct his own local, useful, experiential epistemology, just as the wreckers of the Cape do with their rods of sailcloth. Wasn’t this the foundational thesis of Emerson’s Americanist call-to-action? Breitweiser is also locating Thoreau’s thesis in Cape Cod within the context of the American scholar, and while not directly naming it, he is simultaneously attempting to render this text down to its essential parts. In another illuminating passage,

Breitweiser goes on to focus on Thoreau’s negotiation of the sublime to inform his critical perspective within the text, that:

The ocean sheds its ‘pond-like look’ when it is seen as the murderous sublime, not the picturesque sublime. Cape Cod indirectly recounts the learning of the former sense, revealing it in symbol and (as I will argue) style. Writing begins in a severely stoical and constant attention to death’s sublimity. To see naked nature is to acknowledge the ascendancy of death over affection (including, crucially, self-affection) … (154-155).

After which he quotes a section of Cape Cod which describes the cyclical wash of the waves, turning over the husks of various sea creatures alongside the “carcasses of men and beasts” that concludes with the line, “There is naked Nature,—in-humanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray.” Indeed, Thoreau does approach the many instances of death within the text with a kind of stoicism, or as I would argue, anthropological remove or comedic irony, depending on the situation. But he seems to find comfort in the fact that when reduced in death, all parts of the natural world are made equal, and there is a kind of quiet dignity in it. Nature, while unforgiving, is “sincere.” The gulls swoop like angels at the edge of this destruction, making their calls in celebration. When all things are wrecked, both bodies and books, their various parts may have an afterlife of usefulness in some reconstituted state, even as intimated in the earlier quote from Cape Cod, as sustenance for roaming packs of dogs. As Breitweiser concludes, after a treatment of the symbolic motif of the

56 wrecked vessel Franklin, which was apparently wrecked on purpose, so that its owners might reap some hefty insurance claim on it but whose plan was foiled by a damning letter found in the Captain’s valise which drifted ashore afterward, he writes, “Thoreau here testifies to his belief in a more celestial insurance company … With this insight we open Thoreau’s valise and find the letter within: wreck may be less a lamentable than a desirable and exhilarating event, if we can only know it” (159). Informed by these perspectives on Cape Cod, and remembering the lessons from approaching Walden, let us turn to navigating a textual analysis of this patchwork of experience, of beach wreckage, of ocean sounds and depths, of a rewritten history of New England. As I stated earlier in this chapter, these are the three phenomenological motifs which I wish to draw attention to and track through the text, and I will work at them in that order as they are more- or-less arranged within the text in a similar fashion. Wrecks open the text and are meditated on for some time, the sounds and depths of the ocean are discussed throughout, and the text is evenly made up of historical reflections, but it ends with a particularly thorough treatment of the available literature on the history of New England. Each of these motifs are drawn within a truly Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic to achieve the goals of Emerson’s “American Scholar.” In contrast to my approach in discussing Walden, I will refer to the narrator of Cape Cod as Thoreau, because I think in this text Thoreau is more directly modelling his transcendental practicum than in his earlier work, which was more developed, as I’ve argued, as a socially- constructed second-voice in the form of a narrative speaker. Here we find Thoreau-in-Thoreau, perhaps, a more natural place for him to speak from. He is also traveling with a companion, and as such, writes from the pronoun “we” which has the effect of more directly including his readers in the journey alongside him as he experiences each varied fact of this place. I will have to give a brief, but hopefully inspiring, treatment of the metaphorical motifs of Cape Cod within this thesis. Perhaps this work will serve to inspire others, or be taken up in a larger scholarly work at a later time. In any case, let’s begin by attempting to know the exhilaration in salvaging wreckage, through a treatment of Thoreau’s discussion of the various kinds of wrecks found

57 on the shores of Cape Cod, both of man and landscape, and their deep metaphorical potential within the text. Let’s also consider Thoreau’s perspective on the wreckers that comb the beaches to claim these manifold treasures, and perhaps, find his proviso for navigating these modes of being, so shaped by their close relation to the sublime. The opening chapter of Cape Cod is aptly titled, “The Shipwreck.” It opens with a rhetorically poised, deeply metaphorical treatment of the etymology of the words “cape” and “cod” which was added late in the drafting of the text, after Thoreau had lectured on it. This reflection is as follows, “from the Latincaput , a head; which is, perhaps, from the verb capere, to take,—that being the part by which we take hold of a thing” and “the Saxon word codde, ‘a case in which seeds are lodged,’” from which I take to mean that this book means to model for its reader the taking-hold of a new philosophy from a collection of seedling ideas (851). Whenever the narrator/speaker/Thoreau in a Thoreau text mentions seeds of any kind, a wise reader should be attentive to his meaning. Burbick has this to say of this moment, “Thoreau in his inventive and associative etymology is working from words that immediately refer material things to their place in the culture of naming and human activity” (99). In that way, Thoreau is positioning his text already as a dialectic. And after a brief description of the geography of the place, with a startling jolt, the reader is given a jarring introduction to wreckage. What follows is a steely-eyed description from Thoreau of the wreck of the brig St. John on the Cape at Cohasset. This ship hailed from Ireland, containing hundreds of common immigrants, seeking a New World across the sea, as many Americans had done before them. Their bodies now dashed against the rocks in Old Testament fashion, the Atlantic Ocean cast in the image of God. The metaphorical potential of this wreck is too much to not explore. As our Thoreau states, putting the wreckage into its proper context, “Why care for these dead bodies? They really have no friends but the worms or fishes. Their owners were coming to the New World, as Columbus and the Pilgrims did,—they were within a mile of its shores; but, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of …” (857). Thoreau likens the bodies of these immigrants to hulks, husks left behind, immutably transferred from hopeful possibilities to cold, hard, facts.

58 Opening his opus with this gruesome event gives it some special significance, and I think, a certain metaphorical import. This wreck must represent the hope of the immigrant, tending westward toward America to pursue a material kind of redemption, but instead that immigrant is lifted from his corporeal form to some other redemptive activity. Perhaps, then, Thoreau can salvage something from these dashed hopes. Thoreau moves without ceremony from body to body, describing them in their various states of brutalization. Are his readers to be found among the drowned corpses? Or Margaret Fuller, whose body he once travelled there to find? Or is it Thoreau lying there somewhere? Who is moving on to this higher redemptive plane? Thoreau goes on to quote from a poem attributed to none other than “Columbus, dying” which likens death to a sailing journey onward, to some unknown isles of the afterlife. As the story goes, Thoreau on his deathbed breathed out the words, “Now comes good sailing,” and perhaps that’s as good a description as any for the imagination. It’s also said that he breathed out the words, “Moose” and “Indian” referring to the unjust killing of a great moose by his native guide in The Maine Woods. In either case, perhaps both these texts were on his mind at his passing. I think that here, however, with these last words attributed to a mythical Columbus, the firstsettler , Thoreau is signaling the expiration of this particular mode of American identity—the immigrant as the explorer, the Pilgrim, the settler—has faded from cultural memory and needs to be, perhaps, reinvented in a new context, rewritten within the specific context of the present, in the manner of the American scholar in this time of expedient cultural expansion. Thoreau moves swiftly from this scene, this very brief chapter, to describe his journey along the Cape in the chapter, “Stage-coach Views.” And in this he begins to see, indeed, all the townships of the Cape in light of their similarity to wreckage. He writes, mocking his travel-guide, “But I think our villages will bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with Nature,” for how could a transcendentalist compare these wrecks of civilization with the sublime? “I have no great respect for the writer’s taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages … Such spots can be beautiful only to the weary traveler, or the returning native,—or, perchance, the repentant misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has just come out of

59 the woods” (863). In this self-referential moment, Thoreau is describing his views—modern civilization is an assembly of wrecks pulled up alongside one another. And in order to see the symbolism of these things, one ought to come at the issue from the woods, having stripped away his sense of sentimentality. Later in the chapter, he gets to the heart of the matter when travelling along “the highest land on the Cape,”—a proper vantage point. He again consults his guide, “‘The view has not much of the beautiful in it, but it communicates a strong emotion of the sublime.’ This is the kind of communication which we love to have made to us” (867). It is with this unflinching gaze Thoreau looks towards the sublime, accompanied by the sense of terror it should invoke, according to the ancient Greeks, Edmund Burke, and Thomas Carlyle, and renders these New England townships, the makings of civilization, in their proper relief as wrecks, or even in some cases, relics. When he breaks his gaze from the sublime, he sees it everywhere, even in the architecture, in his treatment of the Brewster township—named after a forgotten “elder”—“There were many of the modern American houses here … I call them American, because they are paid for by Americans, and ‘put up’ by American carpenters; but they are little removed from lumber; only Eastern stuff disguised with white paint, the least interesting kind of drift-wood to me” (868). All of New England, a culturally bleached collection of the driftwood of outmoded civilization, an Eastern import, backward-looking. But what of driftwood? Thoreau gives a treatment of this specific kind of wreckage in “The Beach” chapter. He writes of the wreckers of Cape Cod gathering driftwood for their hearths, focusing on one specific example of such a man, “With a bleached and weather-beaten face … It was like an old sail endowed with life,—a hanging-cliff of weather-beaten flesh,—like one of the clay bowlders which occurred in that sand bank” (889). He goes on in his rendition of this character to say that, “He may have been one of the Pilgrims,—Peregrine White, at least,— who has kept on the back side of the Cape, and let the centuries go by.” And as he describes his work, an industry of salvaging driftwood, chips, the smallest scraps of wood, boards and joists of lost ships, dragging them up the beach to dry and collecting them, claiming them to be his own—a code not breached by honest wreckers—by a pair of crossed sticks driven in the sand, in

60 turn to be collected upon the seasonal shift to winter to provide necessary warmth to his home. In a reverent tone, Thoreau writes, “He is the true monarch of the beach, whose ‘right there is none to dispute,’ and he is as much identified with it as a beach-bird” (890). Thoreau’s vivid depiction of these Cape Cod natives drew detraction from his publisher at the time and largely doomed the work to stand dead-in-the-water during the last years of Thoreau’s life, but for my part, he shows a true appreciation and honest assessment of these folk, a more gentle treatment than his Walden neighbors, to be sure. They are shaped by their position in nature, by their nearness to this roaring, monolithic example of the sublime, the Atlantic. They are so in tune with their environment that they are seen as a natural part of it. And as such, perhaps, they have been reduced to their essential parts as well. Wrecks of folks, eking out their living, perchance, for centuries. An original Pilgrim, hulking his way through the sand and foam, a waterlogged barnacle himself, subsisting on driftwood alone. Earlier in the text in the “Plains of Nauset” chapter, Thoreau describes a Cape Cod woman in a similar fashion, and treats her as an essentially genderless being, stripped of all the natural, nurturing warmth of a woman via her nearness to this great-destroyer of the ocean. Before noting her features, he describes this Nauset region as one where all the men, husbands and sons, are out sailing, or drowned, and thus their mothers and wives are left at home with no one but the minister to keep them company in their bereavement and loneliness. But this wreck of a woman is, perhaps, an alternative to that fate of succumbing to sentimentality. A post-gender woman whose imagination has been wholly shaped by her relation to a sublime landscape. He writes of her that she, “Did not look as if she was ever troubled with hysterics … or perchance, life itself was to her a hysteric fit,—a Nauset woman, of hardness and coarseness such as no man ever possesses or suggests … braced against the world, talking like a man-of-war’s-man in petticoats, or as if shouting to you through a breaker” (881). Such is her symbiotic relation to her environment that the very sound of her voice is likened to the crashing of waves. He writes an account of her as being capable of infanticide, brotherless, fatherless, wholly devoid of any natural relation to men. An outlier of a being, the end result of such a place.

61 This relationship to the sublime is, of course, unsustainable. In “The Beach Again” chapter, a synthesis of his later journey to the Cape—a journey which he undertook because Emerson wished him to search for and possibly recover the body of the writer Margaret Fuller, who was taken in a shipwreck—Thoreau in turn finds the remains of an anonymous body lying on the beach, a torso, stripped of life, of limb, of every relation to even resembling something human. Thoreau writes of his search for these remains, another kind of wreckage, “The sandy beach, half a mile wide, and stretching farther than the eye could reach, was so perfectly smooth and bare, and the mirage toward the sea so magnifying, that when I was half a mile distant the insignificant sliver which marked the spot looked like a bleached spar” (924).That is, within the context of this sublime landscape, everything is consumed by the magnifying effect of it. This body, covered with cloth and marked with a stick, stands out as though marked by the mast of a ship towering above the sand. But, as he goes on, these artifacts are simultaneously minimized by their relation to this immense presence:

Close at hand they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them, in fact, only a slight inequality in the sweep of the shore. There was nothing at all remarkable about them … But as I stood there they grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them, and I was impressed as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my sniveling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it. (924)

I quote Thoreau at length here because I feel that this moment has great significance within the development of his aesthetic argument. Thoreau is putting himself into the experience of the folks of the Cape, but here, he has found, perhaps, the end result of that relation to the landscape. These small relics of what was once, perhaps, a philosopher, a writer, a contemporary transcendentalist, are in perfect relation to the sublime, and leave Thoreau out of their conversation, limited in his “sniveling sympathies” of human sentimentality. Thoreau here is confronting the end result of his project. He has found himself on this beach, and is in the process of writing his own memorial. In isolating himself in a relation to the sublime, perhaps he can find himself in a perfect relation to nature, or conversely, find himself stripped of all his 62 human attributes. For it seems, to transcend the boundaries of the natural world necessitates death, physical and spiritual. As Laura Dassow Walls writes of Thoreau’s perspective on this division of the poetic from the scientific, of “wilderness” and “wildness,” in her essay, “Believing in Nature,” found in the Thoreau’s Sense of Place collection, “Only a purified nature, free of human contaminants, could open so exhilarating a space for liberation from human limitation. Only a pure nonhuman nature could become the site of spiritual renewal …” (23). But a compromise must be negotiated between these modes of being, or rather, of being or not- being. Walls proposes an answer, “The act of perception draws us ever deeper into the absorbing complexities of natural phenomena, and the self, now fully embodied, acts not as an agent of transcendence but as the independent site for experience in the world.” This concept culled from Walls’ studies of Thoreau’s scientific approach to composition in the last decade of his life maps directly onto my argument of Thoreau’s epistemology being necessarily grounded in experience. These other folks, the wreckers, the true inhabitants of this place racked by the sublime, are perhaps the lone survivors of a collapse of reasonable cultural modes of being. The man made of sailcloth, is given no proper wood for his fire by the landscape, for none grows there, and thus he must salvage what he can and piece together his living from the wreckage that washes ashore. The plainswoman, alienated in this context from her civilized relation as a wife and mother, grows harder than any man. And the relics of a wrecked body, in such perfect relation to the sea, has nothing of the human left to it. These are the folks that have been near the sublime for so long that they have been washed entirely of their relationship to civilized culture and society. They are wrecks, presented as wrecks, but what can we salvage from them? I believe that Thoreau has a reverence for these folks, but puts them forth as curiosities-of-being, intending to find an alternative. In the “Conclusion” ofWalden , Thoreau recognizes that an individual cannot be given wholly over to the process of self-conscious reflection that is advocated in the text; he must come out of the woods. I see here that he is recognizing that the individual cannot be given over wholly to the process of de-culturalization through consideration of the sublime. Living alongside the cyclical, unending, murderous force of the ocean can’t be the answer to his

63 question. But, perhaps, it can be part of the process. In coming down from the woods to the sea, Thoreau is washing himself of his relation to Walden, and as I’m arguing, his relation to the methodologies of contemporary transcendentalism. As he writes near the end of “The Beach Again”—“The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore … From time to time we saved a wreck ourselves, a box or barrel, and set it on its end, and appropriated it with crossed sticks; and it will lie there perhaps, respected by brother wreckers, until some more violent storm shall take it, really lost to man until wrecked again” (929-930). Maybe this is the way—in taking up the mode of salvaging wreckage, Thoreau joins a brotherhood of wreckers, looking for hope, for spiritual sustenance in the fragments of a broken and crumbling relation to cultural modes of being. One needn’t end up as the relics on the beach to understand the mode of the wrecker. Thoreau goes on, having had the good fortune to find a bottle full of ale “which still smacked of juniper” buried in the sand:

—all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world,—that great salt sea on the one hand, and this little sea of ale on the other, preserving their separate characters … But as I poured it slowly out on to the sand, it seemed to me that man himself was like a half- emptied bottle of pale ale, which Time had drunk so far, yet stoppled tight for a while, and drifting about in the ocean of circumstances; but destined erelong to mingle with the surrounding waves, or be spilled amid the sands of a distant shore. (931)

Here is Thoreau’s solution, then, to preserve an independent mode of being while remaining in relation to the sublime. Here is a way that a spiritual traveller can salvage the separate characters of human sentimentality and the experience of having one’s limits transgressed, as he outlines in Walden and in Cape Cod in more explicit terms, while in a contemplation of the sublime. One can only flush one’s mind of cultural influence in relation to the sublime for a time, or else end up a wrecked spiritual relic, devoid of human features. Or alternately, transcending human experience entirely, in death. The development of culture is—as advocated here—one of confluence, of multiculturalism, of commingling, a pilgrimage. Through Thoreau’s experiential relation to the sublime, and through the tracking of his observations here, he is beginning to find a new American phenomenology through salvaging these wrecks.

64 Thoreau is listening too, for guidance, from this sublime prime mover. And he is hearing an unending roar. The sounds & the depths of the Atlantic are a source of much contemplation for Thoreau. Given that I have spent such lengths considering the wrecks of the Cape, I will attempt to condense my treatment of sounds, depths, and the cultural history of New England into one thematic progression. They are, in fact, closely related in the text. For the most part, the roar of the Atlantic is another feature of its sublimity. It is unending, it is intemperate, and it washes immediate thoughts out of the mind of the hearer—and to the chagrin of Thoreau—it is nearly impossible to communicate the experience of it in writing. As he writes in the final chapter of “Provincetown”, in a quote referenced earlier in Burbick’s analysis:

If you had started when I first advised you, you might have seen our tracks in the sand, still fresh … —for at every step we made an impression on the Cape, though we were not aware of it, and though our account may have made no impression on your minds. But what is our account? In it there is no roar, no beach-birds, no tow-cloth. (1036)

In referencing the sound of the ocean, he is directly beckoning the reader out to experience this sublime force for himself. His descriptions may lack this sublime roar, but Thoreau invites his reader to join him, reminding his reader that at the outset of this text, he advised to set out immediately. Thoreau first mentions this relation to the sounds of the sea perhaps in “The Plains of Nauset” chapter, as he writes, “All the morning we heard the sea roar on the eastern shore, which was several miles distant; for it still felt the effects of the storm in which the St. John was wrecked,—though a school-boy, whom we overtook, hardly knew what we meant, his ears were so used to it. He would have more plainly heard the same sound in a shell” (876). Perhaps this is how the sublimity of a landscape resounds in the imagination, as a dull roar receding, slowly normalized by a close relation to it. The loud and demonstrative declarations of the sea are later compared in the same chapter to the sermons of the first minister who settled in the region of Nauset.Thoreau often tracks and gives out the historical facts of when, and perpetrated by whom, a region of the Cape was beaten into civilization by whatever radical pilgrim religion, Calvinism or Puritanism, had established itself in the foundling years of 17th-century New England. But this minister, in his way, is unique

65 among them. Thoreau does not often take the time to quote directly from any sermonizing that was done in the efforts of forming the cultural landscape of early New England, but he feels that Rev. Samuel Treat deserves such a moment within his text, perhaps, because of the wild rancor of his tone and his likeness to the sea sounds; he quotes directly from his sermonizing: “Consider, God himself shall be the principal agent in thy misery,—his breath is the bellows which blows up the flame of hell forever;—and if he punish thee, if he meet thee in his fury, he will not meet thee as a man; he will give thee an omnipotent blow” (883). Thoreau continues, quoting his source on these sermons that Rev. Treat had “‘the advantage of proclaiming the doctrine of terror, which is naturally productive of a sublime and impressive style of eloquence,’” but despite this, Thoreau adds, “he could not attain the character of a popular preacher. His voice was so loud, that it could be heard at a great distance from the meeting-house, even amidst the shrieks of hysterical women, and the winds that howled over the plains of Nauset” (884). These themes of sound, sublimity, and cultural influence occur alongside one another within the text, and as such, I believe they are directly connected in their metaphorical potential. Thoreau provides the reader with a direct transcript of Rev. Treat’s sermon of terror by hellfire, accompanied by an acknowledgement of its sublime influence on the folk that settled there, and notes the great volume of his oration. Is Thoreau referencing the sea, or the reverend, in turn? It seems that both the religious cultural bedrock of the place and the sublime landscape have shaped the imaginations of the inhabitants of New England, and largely, by extension and influence, the cultural bedrock of American life. How is Thoreau to find room in this cultural pastiche to build his own epistemology of experience? Perhaps, we can break down these philosophical modes into their parts. Wreck them on the beach, in order to remake their meaning in a more useful context. And reasserting the work of the American scholar, what can be found to be heroic here among these hollow sounds? Located further on in “The Beach” chapter, Thoreau reminds his reader, “Though for some time I have not spoken of the roaring of the breakers, and the ceaseless flux and reflux of the waves, yet they did not for a moment cease to dash and roar, with such a tumult that, if you had been there, you

66 could scarcely have heard my voice the while.” And in an appreciation of this sublime fact, he claims across the inferred space and time between him and his reader that, “They are dashing and roaring this very moment, though it may be with less din and violence, for there the sea never rests” (894). From which, in turn, he casts himself in the role of Chryses “though in a different mood from him, we walked silent along the shore of the resounding sea.” And here, he quotes from what appears to be Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek, saying, “I put in a little Greek now and then, partly because it sounds so much like the ocean,” accompanied by the footnote to explain the linguistic nuances of this moment in the text, “We have no word in English to express the sound of many waves, dashing at once, whether gently or violently … to the ear, and in the ocean’s gentle moods … to the eye.” There is much to be unpacked here. First, we have Thoreau repositioning the sound of the sea as both eternal, cyclical, and moreover, that it is and should be louder than Thoreau’s own voice to his reader. In fact, we should be imagining Thoreau’s voice being washed out in the crash of these waves. Moreover, in a move to capture this moment of waves within the context of epic Greek poetry, he compares the resounding of the sea to Greek language, a heroic language. These waves, always recommencing, remind the listener of his position in this relational world, a finite moment in an infinite, a man among gods.And, in this appreciation of this nearness to the sublime, to listen attentively to their Homeric, indeed, stoical advice. Thoreau is quick to position this cross-cultural, classical inference alongside an acknowledgement of the cultural present of the region. Directly following this assertion, Thoreau pits this fearsome natural force against the paltry preaching of his time, as he writes, “The attention of those who frequent the camp-meetings at Eastham is said to be divided between the preaching of the Methodists and the preaching of the billows on the backside of the Cape … I trust that in this case the loudest voice carries it. With what effect may we suppose the ocean to say, ‘My hearers!’ to the multitude on the bank!” (895). To be a “hearer” of the ocean is to be caught in a conversation with a more real and immediate god. The sea has been cast in the text thus far in the role of the Old Testament God, and here, as a Greek god in a dramatic

67 Homeric sense. Clearly, this terrifying fact of nature is all-powerful in the same ways as those characterizations of cosmic influence. But it is, as Thoreau calls it “huge and real!” (893). It can be experienced by every individual, and in this case, heard quite clearly over the didactic preaching of mere mortals. One needn’t be a prophet or a hero to experience this force. An everyman must merely journey from his home to the edge of the coast, and listen for himself, perhaps, in a prophetic and heroic state of mind. The secondary feature of this sublime landscape is, of course, the inferred depth of the ocean. A dark and endless chasm, a bottomless infinite to hold the mythologies and imaginations of seaside townsfolk, seafaring adventurers, and naturalist philosophers. A treatment of Cape

Cod wouldn’t be complete without a mention of its depth in comparison to Walden. As I quoted briefly earlier, Thoreau writes in “The Beach Again” chapter that, “As we looked off, and saw the water growing darker and darker and deeper and deeper the farther we looked, till it was awful to consider, and it appeared to have no relation to the friendly land, either as shore or bottom,—of what use is a bottom if it is out of sight … and you are to be drowned so long before you get to it … ?” (935). In a comparison to Walden’s bottom, it can be sounded as Thoreau does in that text, with a canoe, a long rope, and a heavy stone. But the bottom of the ocean can’t be found. No man can plumb it, no anchor can reach it, nothing can be known about it except what it chooses to share with the landsman through wreckage washed up on the beach, mostly, shipwrecks and carcasses. What kind of symbol then can it be in this Thoreauvian transcendental context? It is the one feature of the ocean which can never be experienced. In describing the death of the “famous” 16th-century navigator Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Thoreau writes that his final words (as it seems, rather significantly, so many heroic figures’last words are to be found in this text) were reportedly, “‘We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land.’ I saw that it would not be easy to realize.” Perhaps both of these myths of the infinite sea and infinite afterlife are equally useless in Thoreau’s transcendental aesthetic, and best kept out of the imagination of the rational man. But, as he continues, he describes many parts of the ocean’s floor which can be touched by more than just the imagination, that the oceans of the world each have their shallows that can be sounded

68 with nothing more than a long wooden pole, and when measured against a common metric don’t seem quite so mysterious after all. As Thoreau writes, rather wryly, “A pond in my native town, only half a mile long, is more than one hundred feet deep” (936). He goes on to note the scientific perspectives of his day, including Darwin, which assert that the sea is the origin of all life. How then to plumb the depths of this bigger pond of primary creation? Near the end of the text, in the chapter “The Sea and The Desert”, we find perhaps Thoreau’s only comparison between the two in this text. In his desire to watch an oncoming storm throw the ocean into a fit, Thoreau journeys out to the beach again. And looking out on this unforgiving sea, stirred up into a frothing rage from a fierce storm, Thoreau writes, “As we stood looking on this scene we were gradually convinced that fishing here and in a pond were not, in all respects, the same, and that he who waits for fair weather and a calm sea may never see the glancing skin of a mackerel, and get no nearer to a cod than the wooden emblem in the State-House” (996). It’s interesting that he calls this symbol “wooden” as it is also covered in gold. Perhaps a moment of political commentary, to show that our real government is not to be found in the brilliant overlay of man’s intent but in the natural substance underneath. In order to get at this more true knowledge, to fish in the waters of the sublime, one must approach this task with heroic intent. The reward is to be had in the risk, in the journey, in the outlaying of one’s principles and immediate perceptions. A new mode-of-being, a new epistemology, a new American culture is to be built by the heroic throwing-to-the-wind of an acceptance of old modes of thought. What is it to see the likeness of a cod in the State-House when the real thing can be had outside any government hall? The philosophical bedrock of this American culture must be built on primary experience, even at the risk of life and limb. This is a revolutionary thought, moreover, a call to revolutionary action. The final chapter ofCape Cod, “Provincetown”, finds Thoreau in contemplation of the multi-cultural patchwork history of New England. How it had been lost, found, refound, rewritten, and reclaimed by various immigrant populations at odds with native peoples. And, really, this chapter deserves a deep analysis and studious tracing of this dense collection of

69 historiographical connections. Thoreau read deeply into the history of New England in the last years of his life, and littered the pages of this text with the many facts of it, which when stated, take on a mythological tone. He attempts to collect them here, for the most part, and it seems these were his final efforts. Facts so imposing, they resounded as myths. He concludes his meditation on the sublime with a much different tone than he began. With a cheerful, inviting demeanor, he affectionately refers to “the big Atlantic Pond” and invites his reader to come and experience it, however briefly, in a real and genuine way. Thoreau writes, “What are springs and waterfalls? Here is the spring of springs, the waterfall of waterfalls. A storm in the fall or winter is the time to visit it; a light-house or a fisherman’s hut the true hotel. A man may stand there and put all America behind him” (1039). He instructs his reader to come at the worst time of year, when the storms rage, to stay in simple lodging, and walk as he walked, with the dashing of that sublime sea always in your periphery. And figuratively, and quite literally, turn your back to the entire American continent. What is innately American, then, is the phenomenological experience of measuring imagination in landscape. There are no collective principles to uphold or social modes of being. But rather, the wreckage of the culture of New England, reimagined in an ideological swash, swirling in a turn toward modern individualism, as imagined in a world economy of ideas; it is a pilgrimage of the self.

70 CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION: A COMMENTARY ON

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THOREAU’S

TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC

Within this thesis I have attempted to execute a distinctly phenomenological approach to understanding the development of Thoreau’s transcendental aesthetic over the course of his life, as a writer, a poet, a historian, a scientist. By focusing first on Emerson’s influence, through a close read of the “American Scholar” lecture, I have showed how Emerson set a highly influential assignment for Thoreau’s work, and many others, to follow. Emerson calls for American cultural life to come to terms with its transition into modernity. I’ve referred to Thoreau’s work as pre-modern, and proto-post modern, because it is concerned with individualism in a way that was only concurrently expressed in the mid-19th century by, perhaps, Whitman in his Leaves of Grass, and later explored in all its manifold variations by the modernists and post-modernists. In seeing Thoreau coming to terms with these conditions of modernity through his journal in direct relation to Emerson, I then turned to take an analytical walk through the varied transcendental self-reflective woods ofWalden . As I see it, Walden is a text more Emersonian than Thoreauvian in its form and content. In Walden, we see a younger Thoreau grappling with his Emersonian influence, molded by the exhaustive tinkering that came after its initial drafting in his journal during his stay in Emerson’s back yard, where he took Emerson’s axe to Emerson’s land. This made the text into a shape that, perhaps, he thought could be an Emersonian treatise on individualism measured in a distinctly American forest landscape. Thoreau locates the process of Walden within one cycle of the seasons, using the reflective

71 surface of a pond as a contemplative mirror for self-conscious reflection. I argue that in that way, this text begins to move out on its own towards what I refer to throughout as the Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic. From there, I decided that it was right to follow Thoreau through his shifting modes of working and of self-expression in the remainder of his literary life, and pivot just as he did to his meditations on the sublime in the text of Cape Cod. My approach throughout has been to consider the most relevant biographical details of the author’s life, in conjunction with a selection of classic and current criticism, to inform my unified argument that by the end of his literary career, Thoreau had become Thoreau. In my estimation, to more fully develop these ideas would be a book-length undertaking, and require a more thorough consideration of the two other full-length examples of the Thoreauvian trascendental aesthetic that we have, A Week and The Maine Woods, which have much in common with the development of Thoreau’s project toward Cape Cod, in the way they were written and in how they were written, in genre, presentation, and aesthetics. Among them, Walden is the odd-one-out. Many of these ideas have been written on at length in some capacity by the Thoreau scholars that I have relied on to ground my arguments, and even more critics that I have not had the space, time, or place to mention. But in developing a critical lens through positioning some of these fundamental texts alongside my own arguments, I mean to enter the discussion and find my own path through these forests of literary criticism, to the beaches of Thoreau’s final text, and cross my sticks in the sand over it, claiming this wreckage, in some way, as my own. I feel that no proper treatment, in the likeness of Cavell’s Senses, has been undertaken in service of Cape Cod. And I believe that, despite its dismissal as an incomplete work, the text stands on its own merit as a distillation of Thoreau’s transcendental aesthetic. Cape Cod is a more straightforward and less mysterious text than Walden, but for my part, that makes it all the more interesting a study. By this point in his career, Thoreau had expanded on his unique generative methodology, a manner-of-working that moved outward through careful scientific observation, by surveying the land of his Concord, Massachusetts, and its surrounding environs both physically and metaphorically. In so doing, he located his transcendental

72 epistemology in the experiential world, drawing largely from the primary text of his journal. He constructed his Thoreauvian transcendental aesthetic from a direct relationship to his own immediate experiences of nature. Thoreau’s journey inward, then, in a modern sense, was prompted by his ability to then take these direct experiences and rewrite them through a variety of alternate perspectives, born from the process of self-conscious reflection, to stand beside himself, in a sane sense. But in Cape Cod, his perspectives are decidedly more anthropological, etymological, and historical, as he had begun to incorporate his more scientific modes into his literary composition. There is less of the elevated style that comes with navigating the various formations of consciousness of Walden’s speaker, but rather, Thoreau in Cape Cod is located in a very particular physical place. And it is not coincidental that the metaphorical potential of the landscape quite literally represents “circular power returning unto itself.” Remarking on his journey home, Thoreau writes, “When we reached Boston … I had a gill of Provincetown sand in my shoes, and at Concord there was still enough left to sand my pages for many a day; and I seemed to hear the sea roar, as if I lived in a shell, for a week afterward” (1036). It seems Thoreau has sanded my pages here as well. In that capacity, I am sure that Cape Cod is worthy of a good deal more critical attention in contemporary circles of Thoreau scholarship, and in my mind, stands out as a return to form for Thoreau. The text of Cape Cod is born from Thoreau’s direct interaction with his landscape. It is written more as he lived than most of his other texts, and it is written from his immediate perspective. Because of this, his vision is more clear, his metaphors more direct, and his approach more communicative as to his literary aims than in his other writing. I use Walden as an example to critically approach and philosophically locate Cape Cod by contrast, which was a more socially constructed text, compiled from extensive drafting and lecturing. I can picture Thoreau lecturing from his Walden papers at the Boston Lyceum and musing to himself, “Hmm … The loon! They like it when I talk about the loon.” But in Cape Cod, as I have shown, Thoreau was intentionally returning to the bedrock of his project as a writer. Composing the text as a travel narrative, his most personally beloved genre of writing, he is able to assemble a

73 multilayered vision of scholarly, American reflective activity in relation to the sublime power of the ocean landscape for wreckage and redemption. I am fully aware that I have not done justice to the extensive historiography within the text. That would require, indeed, at least another chapter or two. But by casting his reflections, on landscape, imagination, and history within a travel narrative, Thoreau is able to develop a nuanced expression of the true philosophical significance of Emerson’s “American Scholar” address in American life that was poised to be popular, and in that sense, populist. The fundamental principles of Cape Cod are available to and actionable by every American, by basing his epistemology on experiential knowledge. Don’t read this book! Go for yourself, Thoreau advises. Go out to the seaside, and follow the impressions of his steps left there in the sand, in the ever-shifting flotsam and jetsam, the tidal movements of American culture. Put all America behind you. And perhaps, in the same way, Thoreau was also writing a kind of memorial for himself, one that would potentially hold up to erosion by the tidal movements of culture and time. There are moments in Cape Cod, where he describes the ocean as “dashing and roaring this very moment,” wherein a reader, no matter their place in the world, can find themselves in immediate relation to this fundamentally universal experience. This phenomenological bedrock makes Thoreau’s work so continually immediate and essentially relevant. In so carefully negotiating his relationship to the natural world, Thoreau established himself as the true embodiment of the American scholar. Each lesson of his can be recreated in the immediacy of every reader’s own experience, and in that sense, it seems Thoreau anticipated the individualism that came with modernity. In order to make this point more clearly, I would like to return briefly to a particularly evocative moment in Cape Cod. The chapter “The Beach” opens with a parallel commentary on the sea depicted as, from Emerson, “always circular power returning into itself” (55). Thoreau describes its movements, “The white breakers were rushing to the shore; the foam ran up the sand, and then ran back as we could see (and we imagined how much farther along the Atlantic coast, before and behind us), as regularly, to compare great things with small, as the master of a choir beats time with his white wand” (888). A fitting comparison, I think, to these natural

74 rhythmic movements. As he begins to walk the beach of Nauset for himself, and measure its length with his own steps, Thoreau becomes comparatively exhilarated at the great sound and visibly shifting nature of this landscape. To return to this quote from the beginning of my earlier Cape Cod chapter, Thoreau writes of this epiphanous experiential moment, “There I had got the Cape under me, as much as if I were riding it bare-backed. It was not as on the map, or seen from the stage-coach; but there I found it all out of doors, huge and real, Cape Cod! As it cannot be represented on a map, color it as you will; the thing itself, than which there is nothing more like it, no truer picture or account; which you cannot go farther and see” (893). Here is Thoreau, as described in Walden, building his castles in the air and putting the foundations under them. Or as

Walls writes, “—knowing became for him a social activity, grounded in his (and our) relationship to material objects: he developed an epistemology of contact rather than transcendence” (134). Thoreau finds his epistemological bedrock in the landscape ofCape Cod in all its sublime metaphorical potential. As I stated earlier, a reader of Walden might find his directness here surprising. But quite clearly, he is making a declaration for the primacy of experiential knowledge in his transcendental phenomenology. What is to be transcended? Outmoded formations of conscious that minimize the role of the individual. How to reinvent this process for yourself? You must go to whatever is your version of the outdoors, find your own vast and titanic features, huge and real! As Thoreau says—“you cannot go farther and see”—meaning, you cannot move past experience to find a higher truth. As Thoreau wrote in the first few months of his journal in 1837, “One must needs climb a hill to know what a world he inhabits.” Truth is found from this elevated but grounded vantage, by measuring imagination in landscape.

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