The Wild Thoreau

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadzenne d'etudes amer1caines Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 1995, pp. 127-136 The Wild Thoreau Jane Bennett 127 H. Daniel Peck. Thoreau's Morning Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Henry David Thoreau. The Writings o{Thoreau: ]oumal. Edited by John C. Broderick. Volume 4 (1851-1852) edited by Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Robert F. Sayre, ed. The American Novel: New Essays on Walden. Cambridge , England: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Edmund A. Schofield and Robert C. Baron, eds. Thoreau's World and Ours: A Natural Legacy. Golden, Colorado: North American Press, 1993. Whatever has not come under the sway of man is wild-In this sense original & independent men are wild-not tamed & broken by society. (Thoreau 1992, 34) Much recent writing on Thoreau aims to free him-both from labels that give hiswork "classic,,stature (e.g., transcendentalism, romanticism, individualism, American exceptionalism), as well as from those that confine him to a single discipline or agenda (naturalist, civil disobedient, writer). The four books under review here, including the one by Thoreau, all participate in this task; all seek to expand Thoreau's range of movement within contemporary cul- 128 Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue canadienne d'etudes amb-tazmes ture. I will discuss the two edited texts briefly, and then engage Peck's book and Thoreau'sfourmzl in a more sustained way, focusing on the question of Thoreau's relationship to what he called "the Wild." Thoreau's World and Ours is a collection of forty-one essays written for the Thoreau Society's 1991 Jubilee Celebration. Its sheer volume testifies to the diverse character of the audiences to which Thoreau can speak: poets share him with geologists, musicians with psychoanalysts, environmental activists with museum curators, architects with newspaper editors. Schofield and Baron (1993) even force scholars to yield some ground to other cranks, like Rella Ritchell, who mailed copies of her original poetry ("personally inscribed with great flourishes 11 [xviii]) to Thoreau Society members, and then sent each a bill.1 The essays range from "Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Civil Disobedience" by Jack Schwartzman, to "Bedrock Geology of the Walden Woods" by Patrick J. Barash. To the sound of these voices is added the many strains of Thoreau's own: each of the seven sections begins with relevant excerpts from his writings. All the essays are tributes to Thoreau; some are simple musings, others musings in a more philosophical vocabulary and a more self-conscious prose. One of the best examples of the latter is Phillip Round's "Gentleman Amateur or 'Fellow-Creature'?: Thoreau's Maine Woods Flight from Contemporary Natural History," an account of the role Mt Ktaadn played in Thoreau's efforts to transcend the ''hard, material body of the dominant culture" (Round quoted in Scofield and Baron 1993, 322). New Essays on Walden is a less diverse text, but it too seeks to free Thoreau, this time from a historicism which insists that he exists most authentically in his own time and place. Each of its four superb essays shows instead how Thoreau is alive and well in late modern debates about liberal education; about the relations between texts, power, and politics; and about the permeability of the boundary between nature and culture. Read alongside Walden, I can think of no better way to introduce undergraduates to Thoreau and to issues of contemporary cultural criticism. Lawrence Buell's contribution is a canon study, an account of the contingencies through which Thoreau's works became American classics; Anne LaBastille writes of the influence Thoreau has (and has not) had on her life Jane Bennett 129 in the woods; H. Daniel Peck confronts Thoreau's alleged romanticism, arguing that Walden is not a utopia but a "pastoral," an "'island experience,' whose joyful simplicity is always qualified by a sense of the experience's fragility and precariousness" (Sayre 1992, 76}; and Michael Fischer shows how Thoreau anticipates Wittgenstein and Cavel! in responding to "the problem of overcoming authority without claiming the wrong kind of authority for oneself." Thoreau, Fischer writes, "invit[es] us to try on his universals for size, to see...