Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840-1860

Chapter 4: Concord Board: Democratic Domestic as Urban Organic

Chapter 4  Concord Board: Democratic Domestic as Urban Organic The organic form . . . is innate; it shapes as it develops itself from within, and the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1818 An explicit civic-aesthetic problem in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, boarding figures an implicit (and implicitly progressive) literary form in another of greater Boston’s boardinghouse volumes from the period, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854).1 The noted New England naturalist, essayist, and ethical agitator Thoreau might strike the casual observer as an unlikely boarder-author. Even less likely is the notion that Walden reads as a representative boardinghouse text, which it does. Thoreau’s lyrical account of a purifying domestic experiment conducted in his native Concord woods is ostensibly sylvan, not urban, in contrast to much of the work from the city literary tradition to which Walden otherwise belongs. The author furthermore insists from the start of his narrative that the “I, or first person,” must govern the by turns descriptive and ruminative pages of his prose (3), and thereby forestalls his entertaining the public and semi-private concerns that typically inform the substance and structure of so much of the corpus of boardinghouse letters. Walden nevertheless is a classic boardinghouse text. That is to say, Walden, like other examples of the boardinghouse genre examined in this study, is classically modern, and modernist, in the determinedly versatile and fundamentally fractured literary forms that it adopts for the purposes of urban adaptation. It is the free and open play of communal dialogue,2 for instance, and not what the writer calls the “narrowness” of monologue, that informs much of the “action” of 147 a work whose defining rhetorical features situate it within the controlling context of the modern city (3). Inward-dwelling yet outward-tending, subjectively self-conscious yet acutely empirically aware, rurally situated yet city-sophisticated—Walden alongside so many boardinghouse texts is first and last an ambivalent metropolitan’s meditation on the nature and necessity of rootedness in a rootless world. Most pressing among this particular boardinghouse text’s various paradoxes is the dilemma of literary form that necessarily met the antebellum boarder-author: how to construct a suitable discursive shape for a dynamic urban society that itself must have struck contemporaries as utterly shapeless. This chapter accordingly explores two related ideas that speak directly to the present study’s interest in the rhetorical forms of the emergent urban literatures of the United States. First among these ideas is the formalist New Critical concept that scholar F. O. Matthiessen memorialized in his 1941 work American Renaissance as “the organic principle.”3 Building upon the romantic artistic tenets espoused by Thoreau ’s Concord mentor, the celebrity intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson, Matthiessen explains organicism as an abiding literary belief among an elite group of mid-nineteenth-century American authors that “beauty in art springs from man’s response to forms in nature” (American Renaissance , 135). Modern(ist) “Art,” in other words, figures in Matthiessen’s retrospective portrayal as a creative practice sensitively attuned to natural design. The “shapes of leaves, the wheat-ear, the pine-cone, the sea-shell, and the lion’s claw” provide his since-canonized writers not merely with decorative patterns of embellishment to be imitated “endlessly” during the creatively auspicious days of the 1850s (135). Rather, “the organic principle” becomes for Matthiessen’s authorial pantheon a literal species of natural literary structure—at once a base and elevating framework for surpassing through originating acts of creation what Emerson described by journal in 1832 as the“beautiful works”of“God’s architecture”(138). That Matthiessen distinguishes Thoreau’s Walden “as the firmest product in our literature” of “structural wholeness” testifies to his conviction in the “organic” underpinnings of that author’s “craftsmanship” (173). It is a conviction that not a few of Matthiessen’s postwar peers shared, and that certain revisionists in recent decades have perpetuated in studies that purportedly offer alternative readings of Thoreau’s work.4 Here I propose an alternative reading of my own—one that seeks not to abandon or overturn formalist preoccupations with “organic” literary “form,” but rather qualifies both of those critical categories with respect to an urban American discursive milieu that resides as far from Matthiessen ’s exquisite natural splendors as it did and does from Thoreau’s much 148 Chapter 4 [18.119.133.228] Project MUSE (2024...