Transcendentalism in Thoreaus Walden - Essay Example

Transcendentalism in Thoreau's Walden The Transcendentalist Movement was a reaction against eighteenth century rationalism and manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of nineteenth century thought. The movement was based on a fundamental belief in the unity of the world and God. The soul of each individual was thought to be identical with the world - a microcosm of the world itself. The doctrine of self-reliance and individualism developed through the belief in the identification of the individual soul with God. Transcendentalism was intimately connected with Concord, a small New England village, 32 kilometers west of Boston. Concord was the first inland settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful town, close enough to Boston's lectures, book-stores, and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far away enough to be serene. Concord was the first rural artist's colony, and the first place to offer a spiritual and cultural alternative to American materialism. It was a place of high-minded conversation and simple living (Emerson and Thoreau both had vegetable gardens). Emerson, who moved to Concord in 1834, and Thoreau are most closely associated with the town, but the locale also attracted Hawthorne, Fuller, Alcott and Channing. The transcendental club was loosely organized in 1836. Unlike many European groups, the Transcendentalists never issued a manifesto. They insisted on individual differences - on the unique view point of the individual. American writers often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. It is the writing of Thoreau and of Emerson that has been the most enduring product of American transcendentalism. Thoreau and Emerson's friendship blossomed during the autumn after Thoreau returned home from college in 1837. "Emerson was then at the height of his intellectual and creative powers. His philosophy of striving and self-reliance strongly attracted Thoreau, who had the good fortune to be granted the society of America's leading progressive thinker just as he began his career." (Cafaro, Philip. Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue.) Thoreau accepted Emerson as his mentor and began to keep a journal on his suggestion. Emerson criticized Thoreau's articles and sent them across to different editors, with mixed reviews. He provided the site for Thoreau's experiments at Walden Pond. While Emerson was disseminating his mature philosophy, Thoreau was still trying to formulate his own message, acquire the necessary skills to write creatively and gain a foothold so that he could at least make his ends meet. Given Thoreau's extreme individualism and his sense of independence, this relationship of dependence was bound to give rise to discontent. The two men were two different personalities and differed greatly in temperament. Emerson was active socially whereas Thoreau preferred to his solitary mode. Emerson owned some property and was a family man, which made him regard the social norms with some respect. Thoreau on the other hand, was explicitly critical of what he considered hypocrisy, pettiness, and herd mentality. Quite naturally, these personality clashes gave way to grave intellectual differences: "one of their first recorded quarrels occurred during an afternoon walk when Thoreau, noting the proliferation of fences along the road, declared that he would not abide by them, as he had as much right to "God's earth" as anyone. Emerson responded with a defense of the institution of private property. Harmon smith suggests that Emerson's subsequent essay, "The Protest", was directed towards Thoreau. In it, Emerson warns aspiring youths of the dangers of letting their frustrations at society's shortcomings consume their time and talents." (Cafaro, Philip. Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue.) Gradually, when Thoreau began to think on his own, their relationship was further strained. "Emerson was a generous open-minded man, but as Thoreau moved away from his earlier idealism toward a more complex mixture of idealism and naturalism, Emerson found his views less congenial. While Emerson extolled great engagement with nature, Thoreau's immersion in and love for actual nature was much greater. This inevitably colored his philosophy." However, despite these differences, Emerson and Thoreau remained best friends. On Thoreau's death, Emerson said in his eulogy, "the country knows not yethow great a son it has lost." Thoreau's Walden, published in 1854, is one of the most cherished pieces of American literature. Though published after the height of Transcendentalism, Walden was written during the twenty-six-month period when Thoreau lived at Walden Pond. Rather than settling into one of the professions for which Harvard had prepared him, Thoreau moved from job to job, trying everything from teaching to being a handyman. He wanted time to walk outdoors, to think, and to write, and he was happy to live simply so that he could work little. He had a gift for surveying, an occupation that he enjoyed because it allowed him to be outdoors and to interact more with nature than with people. Throughout his life, when he needed to take temporary work to make money, Thoreau often turned to surveying. Emersonian themes including self-reliance, anti-institutionalism, the centrality and symbolic significance of nature for human development, the role of the great individual in history were found a prominent place in Thoreau's Walden. While living at Walden, Thoreau built his own cabin from trees he lumbered himself, farmed and grew his own food, and generally lived a life of self-sufficiency. Although it was Emerson who developed the notion of self-reliance and taught to defy institutions, arguing that every person had the ability to seek truth without the help of books and sages, he however did not practice what he preached. It is quite apparent that he was merely well read and perhaps knew the sages well enough to quote them heavily. Thoreau his ardent follower, however, applied the principles that Emerson talked about in his essays. Emerson made popular the idea of non-conformity but it was Thoreau who actually implemented this idea in his own life. Emerson wrote in his journal, "Thoreau gives me in flesh and blood () my own ethics" (Cloninger, Feeling Good: The Science of Well-being). In addition to providing a detailed log of his expenses and budget for his time at Walden, he writes at great length in the first chapter, "Economy," about the state of labor in America. Thoreau recognized that industrialization had a grip on the country and that people's labor was being exploited to feed the system. His answer was deliberate living, and Walden can be read as a manual for this type of living. Thoreau explains his reasons for his Walden experiment in the oft quoted and treasured lines: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." (Thoreau. Walden) The goal of the transcendentalist is to experience God within. Thoreau exulted that living immersed in nature at Walden Pond allowed him to attain this goal often. Thoreau writes that reading must be complemented by direct experience. This is in keeping with his transcendentalist philosophy, which emphasizes direct, intuitive experience of nature, truth and the divine. Even when Thoreau's ideas were not really new, they were not second hand; he had arrived at them independently, and he expressed them in a vigorous and pithy style which, in spite of a fundamental earnestness and occasional moral indignation, never really lost its bearings or its sense of humor. Despite his literary success, many of his neighbors in Concord, and his literary peers saw him as an extremist, and he was often the object of insult and ridicule. He was an eccentric. In America, where democracy and conformity are often confused the non-conforming Thoreau was frowned upon, and critics argue that often it was for reasons good enough. He was not of a very pleasant disposition. He lacked affability. He was also known to have set fire to the Concord woods. The neighbors found his behavior extremely childish and looked at him disdainfully. Many critics are tempted to refer to him as a man of 'crooked genius.' "He was a fragile Narcissus embodied in a homely New EnglanderAll of his writings represent a continuous and carefully documented projection of the self. Walden is an idealized and romantic account of his sojourn into the woods. In his books, we find an ideal self and not the Thoreau Concord knew It maybe a small matter, but he, who abjured vanities and called on men to simplify their lives, listed among the meager belongings he took to Walden pond, a three by three inch mirror, he who had all of Walden in which to look at himselfHe shrugged his shoulders at the tools of society but constantly used them." (Edel, Leon. Henry David Thoreau.) Thoreau's most quoted remark from his book Walden was that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." This statement is quoted by critics because they safely assume that Thoreau himself was never desperate: that even though most men led wasted lives, he had at least led a tranquil and philosophical life. Ironically, the farmers of Concord who witnessed his indefatigable habit of keeping a journal, would consider his life far more desperate than their own, even if it involved daily work. In all his work, one can detect a sense of forced calm. Unknown and unexplained undercurrents of anxiety characterized his writings. Two acts are said to be responsible for his fame and his myth. "The first was his building of a comfortable, heated, plastered cabin beside Walden Pond; this he did out of a "prefabricated" hut purchased for a few dollars from an impecunious shanty dweller. He set it well within the range of the railroad and of his fellowmen and pretended that he lived self-sufficiently in his wilderness." (Edel, Leon. Henry David Thoreau.) In Walden pond, he lived for over two years. It is claimed that he had himself maintained a record of precisely twenty six months of stay, which also includes the one whole month he stayed over at his mother's house, while he waited for the plaster to dry and also the period during which he made a trip to the Maine woods. Such information can give an impression that he was unable to stay away from the lure of the city, which he professed to abhor. Despite his rant about working independently, to sustain himself, it sounds very hollow when one learns that all this while he was not too far away from his mother's cookie jar. It has also been brought to notice by a few of his critics that he relished sundry dinners here and there, once in a while and it did not make him shy to boldly state his stance on individualism. "The second source of his fame was his act of civil disobedience. He gave us that valuable formulation of the privilege of dissent. He refused to pay his poll tax and went to jail-for one night-someone else paid it -"interfered" said Thoreau and the jailer ousted his from his cell. In truth, he did not fancy martyrdom. He was willing to allow others -society- to do for him what he would not do himself. He was willing to use existing tools so long as these enabled him to pursue his private course and in his own distinctive way." (Edel, Leon. Henry David Thoreau.) Like many other authors of his time, Thoreau attracted a lot of critical attention. While not all were pleased with his work, it would be misplaced to say that his work had no literary merit. Some reviews were positive. ''It is a strikingly original, singular, and most interesting work,'' wrote a reviewer in the Salem Register. The Lowell Journal and Courier noted, "The press all over the country has given the most flattering notices of it" and predicted, "without doubt it will command a very extensive sale. It surely deserves it." Deserving or not, the book did not sell well. In 1996, Nicholas Bagnall reviewed a new edition of Walden in New Statesman. Nichols echoed the early twentieth-century opinion of The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. "I was . . . hooked on Thoreau's fine indignation and the swagger of his prose," Nichols wrote. "His observations on nature . . . which make the bulk of his book, are both lyrical and exact." But Nichols went on to characterize Thoreau's philosophizing in the book as a "relentless search for epigrams" that offered nothing new or notable. Works Cited Cafaro, Philip. Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue. University of Georgia Press, 2004 Cain, William E. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. Oxford University Press US, 2000 Lebeaux, Richard. Thoreau's Seasons. Univ of Massachusetts Press, 1984 Harding, Walter Roy. Henry David Thoreau: Studies and Commentaries: Studies and Commentaries. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press, 1972 Berry, Faith. From Bondage to Liberation: Writings by and about Afro-Americans from 1700 to 1918. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006 Scholnick, Robert J. American Literature and Science. University Press of Kentucky, 1992 Conn, Peter J. Literature in America: An Illustrated History. CUP Archive, 1989 Myerson, Joel. Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge University Press, 1992 Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford University Press US, 1968 Cloninger, Robert C. Feeling Good: The Science of Well-being. Oxford University Press US, 2004 Edel, Leon. Henry David Thoreau. U of Minnesota Press, 1970 Read More