Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

Claiming Maine: Acquisition and Commodification in Thoreau’s The Maine Woods

Claiming Maine Acquisition and Commodification in Thoreau’s The Maine Woods loriaNNe disabato I n the opening chapter of Walden—significantly titled “Economy” —Henry David Thoreau describes his literary endeavor in economic terms: “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business, not solely on account of the railroad and the ice trade; it offers advantages which it may not be good policy to divulge; it is a good port and a good foundation.”1 In Walden, Thoreau borrows the language of capitalistic enterprise to describe his literary task in order to mock the overly acquisitive habits of his money-minded neighbors. In The Maine Woods Thoreau’s use of the language of economic acquisition and commodification is more problematic. In this work, a posthumous collection of three travel narratives, Thoreau once again mocks his money-minded contemporaries: in this case, those who claim Maine in order to log its forests and harvest its wildlife. However, in The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s critique of his fellows’ economy (literally, house-keeping) is problematized by his own lack of householding: he speaks as a visitor to the Maine woods rather than as a resident. In denouncing the loggers, hunters, and speculators who venture into the Maine wilderness only to ClaimiNg maiNe • 247 reap monetary profit, Thoreau incriminates himself for his practice of venturing into the wild only to reap literary profit. In his discussion of the Thoreauvian literary excursion, Lawrence Buell asserts, “It was a succession of confrontations with nature, from each of which the observer is expected to extract as much as he can.”2 Buell’s word choice is suggestive. To describe the writers of nineteenthcentury travel narratives as confronting nature and to suggest that these writers extracted meaning from the landscapes they described makes their literary task seem more exploitative than is commonly believed. To apply such terminology to a writer such as Thoreau seems particularly ironic. That the writer who railed in Walden against a neighbor for exploiting his land by thinking “only of its money value”3 should have himself confronted nature in order to extract value from it is more than a bit surprising. However, Buell is not alone in seeing themes of acquisition in the writings of nineteenth-century American Romantics. In American Romanticism and the Marketplace, for example, Michael Gilmore notes the “commodified thinking concealed in symbolization.”4 According to Gilmore , both writer and speculator see natural objects on two levels: as what they are and as what they betoken. What Thoreau condemns in his neighbor is the fact that “the something else has totally displaced the concrete reality”5; in other words, money matters more than nature. However, Thoreau himself can also be criticized for overlooking nature; although his writing is filled with intricately detailed observations of the natural world, one could argue that the natural world is important to him mainly as a conduit whereby he receives poetic inspiration and finds the raw material for his writing. Thoreau began writing the first essay in The Maine Woods, “Ktaadn,” during his stay at Walden Pond and continued working on it while finishing the second draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and the first draft of Walden.6 The essay was first published as “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods” in New York’s Union Magazine, where it appeared in five monthly installments from July through November 1848. According to Steven Fink, “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods” was “Thoreau ’s longest and most important publication before A Week.”7 Thoreau’s diatribe against the economic exploitation of the Maine wilderness begins very early in “Ktaadn.” Having introduced his readers to his 1846 excursion to Mount Ktaadn and the other explorers who 248 • Nature as Commodity had published accounts of expeditions there, Thoreau considers the falls of Penobscot “which furnish the principal power by which the Maine woods are converted into lumber.”8 Thoreau rails against loggers and the figure of “Mr. Sawyer,” the men who through their business turn trees into “lumber merely”: “Mr. Sawyer marks off those spaces which decide the destiny of so many prostrate forests.”9 In his marking off of destinies, Mr. Sawyer dares to take up the work of God, measuring and deciding the fate of logs brought to him for judgment. Yet in assuming this role, Mr. Sawyer and his fellows are diabolical: “The mission of men there seems...