Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance

3 Loving Oneself Like a Nation Sovereign Selfhood and the Autoerotics of Wilderness in Walden

91 In a journal entry on September 1, 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne observes of Henry David Thoreau that he is “inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men,” noting in particular “the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood.”1 He suggests an “Indian life” entails being outside of the capitalist economy, existing in some space other than that of “civilized men.” Native peoples in New England in this period, however, very much were enmeshed in the political economy of indenture, debt, itinerant seasonal labor, diaspora in search of wage work, and ongoing land loss due to nonnative agricultural and logging interests.2 In Indian Nullification, written as part of advocating for greater Mashpee self-governance and control over their state-recognized territory, William Apess asserts, “The laws were calculated to drive the tribes from their possessions and annihilate them as a people; and I presume they would work the same effect upon any other people; for human nature is the same under kinds of all colors. Degradation is degradation, all the world over” (212). The systemic “degradation” of Native peoples through “laws” and state-sanctioned policies creates ongoing and intensifying forms of imbrication in the settler economy, a steady and coercive incorporation whose aim appears to be to “annihilate them as a people” by making life unliveable in their homelands. Yet, Hawthorne’s offhand reference to the unlikelihood of an Indian livelihood suggests occupancy in a kind of elsewhere in which one might no longer be bound by the norms and imperatives that seem to govern the lives of others. From this perspective, to “lead a sort of Indian life” means simultaneously to be within 3 QW loving oneself Like a nation Sovereign Selfhood and the Autoerotics of Wilderness in Walden 92 Loving Oneself Like a Nation the sociospatiality of mid-nineteenth-century New England and exterior to it, inhabiting a kind of limbo that puts in abeyance the seemingly inevitable requirements of life in a civilized country. While the comment is Hawthorne’s, Thoreau repeatedly characterizes himself in similar terms throughout Walden.3 For Thoreau “Nature” serves as an (imaginary) realm of innocence and integrity in stark contrast to the corruption, artificiality, and excesses of industrialization, commercial agriculture , and bourgeois homemaking, and in order to enter that space of sublime transcendence, one must occupy a kind of subjectivity consistent with it, for which Indian is the name. As Jodi Byrd argues, “The transit of empire . . . depends upon the language, grammar, and ontological category of Indianness to enact itself” (xxxv), earlier noting, “To be in transit is to be made to move” (xv). The notion of the Indian functions as a transit into a supposed realm apart from marriage, commerce, and the crush of population . Unlike in The House of the Seven Gables where Indians mark a wrong form of landholding and generationality, Indianness in Walden helps concretize the existence of a simplified mode of being in/as nature at odds with expanding and intensifying capitalist networks. However, that space must be voided of Native presence in order for it to offer the possibility of a nonnative ethics of purifying regeneration—living like an Indian, not among them.4 The notion of a kind of place separated from circuits of production and consumption provides an avenue for Thoreau to rethink dominant understandings of personhood that tie health to participation in extant economies. In the discourse of the health reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century , “nature” refers to tendencies within the body that contribute toward the smooth working of the polity. Sylvester Graham, one of the movement’s most important figures, argues in his exceedingly popular A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity “that moral and civil laws, so far as they are right and proper, are only the verbal forms of laws which are constitutionally established in our nature,” “however destitute society might be, of all moral and civil restraints , in regard to sexual commerce” (29). For Graham, obedience to the “laws” of “our nature” enacts a biopolitics in which the promotion of personal health necessarily contributes to the promotion of national welfare . In Walden, however, “Nature” suggests less an inbuilt set of propensities that guide behavior in ways that make one a better-functioning citizen than a space beyond the demands of the constitution of the state. For Thoreau, Loving Oneself Like a Nation 93 “[i]ndividuals, like nations, must have suitable...