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Self-Reliant Transcendentalism in Five Modern American Nonfiction Texts

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Self-Reliant Transcendentalism in Five Modern American Nonfiction Texts CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by South East Academic Libraries System (SEALS) 1 Self-Reliant Transcendentalism in Five Modern American NonFiction Texts A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts at Rhodes University by Jason Brits November 2016 Supervisor: Professor Gareth Cornwell 2 Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without the unwavering guidance of my supervisor and friend, Gareth Cornwell, a swashbuckler of the American literary outback who managed to tame my stress-related outbursts with his reassuring, sagacious temperament. The inhabitants of the Rhodes English Department have become family over the last six years, and the encouragement from them has helped me persevere with this thesis. My heroic mother’s overwhelming natural intelligence, strength, and caring disposition, together with my father’s valiant ardour and inspiring compassion, have made them the support structure and encouragement of not only my work on this thesis, but my existence in general. Lastly, I need to thank my significant other, Kate Lowen, who has picked me up off the floor and supportively nudged me down the driveway on the little plastic tricycle that has come to be this thesis. Opinions expressed, and conclusions arrived at, are those of the author and not necessarily to be attributed to Rhodes University. 3 Abstract This thesis is concerned with the persistence of Self-Reliant Transcendentalist thought in modern American nonfiction. It traces the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (as progenitors of the Self-Reliant strand of the Transcendentalist movement in America) in the patterns of thought and endeavours of individuals as documented in five notable nonfiction texts published between 1968 and 2013. The texts are Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man, and Will Harlan’s Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island. Each of the seemingly Romantic individuals portrayed in these texts not only seeks to live a life similar to that of Thoreau during his famous sojourn at Walden Pond, but also seems to embody some of Emerson’s and Thoreau’s key Transcendentalist ideas. These modern and contemporary individuals, and the way in which they are portrayed in texts that fall under the general rubric of “creative nonfiction,” are testament to the continuing relevance of Transcendentalist thought in the United States - and in Western society more generally, as it seeks to negotiate a new relationship with Nature in the shadow of massive impending ecological disaster. 4 Contents Acknowledgements................................................................................................................... 2 Abstract..................................................................................................................................... 3 Introduction................................................................................................................................5 Chapter 1: Transcendentalism: An Overview 1.1 A Complex Movement........................................................................................................ 9 1.2 Unitarianism.......................................................................................................................11 1.3 External Influences and The Transcendental Club............................................................16 1.4 Transcendentalism Divided: Socialist Transcendentalism................................................23 1.5 Self-Reliant Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.......26 Chapter 2: Understanding Creative NonFiction......................................................................57 Chapter 3: Self-Reliant Transcendentalism in Selected Modern American Creative NonFiction Texts 3.1 The Desert Rat: Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968)............................................... 63 3.2 Waterside Transcendentalism: Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).............74 3.3 Tramping for Ideals: Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild(1996)............................................... 85 3.4 The Mountain Man of Turtle Island: Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Last American Man (2002)...................................................................................................................................... 93 3.5 Wilderness Warrior: Will Harlan’s Untamed (2014).......................................................102 Conclusion: Durable Ideals: The Implications of Self-Reliant Transcendentalism in Modern American Society...................................................................................................................113 Works Cited 123 5 Introduction There is a striking continuity between contemporary environmentalist and ecological movements and certain ideas traceable to thinkers broadly associated with nineteenth-century Romanticism in its New World inflection. The ideas of American Transcendentalism have persisted into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emerging recently in association with solitary, eccentric, nature-loving individuals whose exemplary lives are documented in works of creative nonfiction. The conduct and thinking of these figures are strongly aligned with the Self-Reliant strain of the American Transcendentalist movement, of which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the two most iconic representatives. Transcendentalism was a social and intellectual movement in America that widely emphasized individualism, idealism, intuitive knowledge, and a spiritual connection to Nature and the allegedly divine source that animates it. Emerson and Thoreau forged the Self-Reliant dimension of this movement, choosing to focus on the individual’s capacity for spiritual self-upliftment through (mostly) the contemplation of Nature in solitude. This can be distinguished from the thinking of those who advocated communal and socialist approaches to putting Transcendentalist ideals into practice. The core Self-Reliant ideas of Emerson and Thoreau include the value of cultivating the self as a unique subject rather than conforming to the norms of society and other man-made systems; the universal spirit or Over-Soul that unites and is within all living things, and which can be accessed intuitively through introspection and harmonious engagement with Nature; the value of Nature in practical Self­ Reliant living (and thus the importance of protecting the environment); and the notion of balancing wilderness and civilization in order to accomplish a workable form of Self­ Reliance. The ideas of Emerson and Thoreau are well known, and traces of their legacy are to be found in a great variety of literature. To cite but one example, a notable work of fiction that portrays the influence of Emerson’s ideas on a fictional character is John Edward Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing (1960), recently re-issued on the back of the international rediscovery of Williams’s masterpiece Stoner. It tells the story of an idealistic young man named William Andrews, who - inspired by Emerson’s iconic “Nature” essay - drops out of university in the 1870s and heads West to find himself in the American wilderness 6 (Williams*). As in large part an ironic subversion of Emersonian ideals, Butcher’s Crossing is a reminder that there is a rival and opposing tradition of thinking about Nature and the place within it of human beings. This tradition, central to the vision of Modernists like Joseph Conrad, sees the universe as insentient and indifferent, if not actively hostile, to human purposes. In Butcher’s Crossing, the young Andrews discovers a natural world utterly at odds with the ideals he has absorbed from Emerson’s writings. When he looks out across the plains he finds that “[t]he naturalistic force present there is so different than the one he is accustomed to that it feels as if someone or something is messing with him mentally” (Lezy 13): Another strangeness was waiting for him when they left the trail and went into the Colorado territory. His half-closed eyes nearly recaptured the sharp engravings he had seen in books, in magazines, when he was at home in Boston; but the thin black lines wavered upon the real grass before him, took on color, thenfaded. He could not recapture the strange sensations he had had, long ago, when he first saw those depictions of the land he now was seeking. (Williams 79-80*). Andrews discovers a natural world different from the “mental images” he had created when reading about and idealizing the wilderness: “[t]hese images clash with what he experiences firsthand,” leading him to find that the real western wilderness does not “evoke a sense of freedom and individuality” as he had hoped (Lezy 13-14). Thomas Lezy observes that the natural events that occur in the book are not exceptional but normal for the American frontier (15). Andrews and the group of buffalo hunters with whom he is riding experience anxiety, frustration and even despair as natural forces, chiefly in the form of the harsh winter that nearly kills them when they are snowed in for the season up in the mountains. But Andrews’s first intimation of the strangeness of nature occurs much earlier: As far as he could see, the land was flat and without identity. The blades of grass that stood up stiffly a few inches from his nose blurred and merged into the distance, and the
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