Thoreau's Inner Animal

In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal

In a well-known 1856 letter, Thoreau wrote to his friend H. G. O. Blake about Walt Whitman, whom he had met for the first time the previous month. Thoreau reports that he has just read the second edition of Leaves of Grass, which "has done me more good than any reading for a long time" (Correspondence 444). Yet his enthusiastic praise for this "exhilarating" new poetry is qualified from the start by reservations about the explicitness of what he calls its "sensuality." He complains, "It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt, there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants" (444-45). Thoreau figures overt erotic expression as animal speech, suggesting that his anxious concern with sexuality is caught up in the question of the distinction between the human and the animal, often understood to hinge on the possession of language. What seems troubling about Whitman's poetry is imagined as boundary-crossing, animals exhibiting a human-like capacity for speech, or humans speaking as animals would if they possessed language, openly discussing beastly matters.¹ Shame also signals the transgression of this boundary between human and animal, the impropriety that Thoreau attributes to Whitman's poetry. Men have reason to be ashamed of their sexuality (and perhaps would feel no shame without the faculty of reason); shame appears here to be a uniquely human emotion. Only in "dens" inhabited presumably by animalized humans can "such deeds" be recounted without shame. Shame distinguishes us from animals, but it also reveals that we are not fully separate, since what elicits shame is the manifestation of the animal in us. If, in Thoreau's conceit, animals acquire human powers of speech in Whitman's erotic poetry, men seem to abdicate their humanity by losing their ability to blush.

Thoreau's letter to Blake is remarkable for its ambivalence and inconsistency, its rapid shifts from strong assertion to seemingly contradictory opinion.² Whitman's distasteful penchant for uninhibited erotic expression ("disagreeable to say the least") is also an admirable openness and honesty (on the topic of sexuality, "he has spoken more truth than any American or modern that I know" [Correspondence 445]). His explicitly sensual poetry "may turn out to be less sensual than it appeared" (444-45). These uncertainties extend to Thoreau's impression of Whitman himself: in another letter to Blake written a few weeks earlier, Thoreau acknowledges that "I am still somewhat in a quandary about him,—feel that he is essentially strange to me, at any rate" (441).³ Thoreau seems unable to make up his mind about Whitman or his poetry. This irresolution certainly is provoked by the central place of sexuality in Whitman's poetic project, but it is figured here in terms of the uncertain difference between humans and animals, especially the troubling presence of animality within the human. Whitman's extraordinary yet unsettling poetry is a site where the distinction between human and animal is blurred or threatened. Thoreau's response to this disagreeable intermixing is to wish for an incorruptible purity: "I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men & women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them" (445). Thoreau envisions purity here as an innocence free of knowledge, as if the inability to understand is the only certain prophylaxis against Whitman's eroticism. Thoreau often imagines human purity as a renunciation of the animal, the bestial, but in the letter to Blake he suggests that such purity may be inhuman, an impossible ideal.

The concern with human animality implicit in Thoreau's response to Whitman echoes his much more expansive and explicit engagement with these issues a few years earlier in Walden. The chapter "Higher Laws" in particular explores the contested boundary between...