SOURCE: Westling, Louise H. “Pastoral Ambivalence in Emerson and Thoreau.” In The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction, pp. 39-53. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Westling examines ideas about gender at the heart of the nature writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.]

What James Fenimore Cooper defined through fiction as white Americans' innocent inheritance of the landscape, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau addressed explicitly in Nature and Walden, through deliberate acts of self-evaluation and national mythmaking (Lewis, American Adam, 13-27; Nash 2-10, 67-95). Oelschlaeger claims that as Thoreau's reputation has grown, Emerson has come to be seen more as a popularizer of European ideas than as an original thinker (133). But among scholars of American literature Emerson has experienced renewed popularity as a deconstructive thinker in the past fifteen years. In any case Walden grows so directly out of Nature, and echoes it so richly, that the two works must be considered together. Walden is as interlaced with European learning as Nature is, in spite of both writers' protestations of independence from the past. We have already seen how masculine opposition to the feminine metaphoric identification of land and nature is implicated in that past, and David Leverenz's Manhood and the American Renaissance reveals the intense ambivalence of Emerson's reliance on the self-conscious virility of his day (42-71). Because Emerson and Thoreau approached the question of American identity and the landscape so directly and were so influential, they define the basic ground of our modern assumptions and illustrate the dynamic play of gender at their core.

Emerson chose to make his first claim to literary prominence with Nature, an ambitious attempt at philosophy focused on what he must have considered central to the identity of the new nation. As scion of a long line of Puritan clerics, Emerson's intellectual inheritance was the best classical and theological education Boston Latin School and Harvard College could provide. He added to it an enthusiastic absorption of German philosophic idealism gleaned from Coleridge and Carlyle. But when he set out to formulate an independent American vision of human destiny, the basically untamed physical landscape of North America was all the new culture could claim as its own. Thus, in Roderick Nash's paradoxical formulation, “Wilderness was the defining symbol of the national civilization” (xv). As we have seen, the idea of wilderness was intimately entangled in troubled relations with indigenous peoples just beyond the range of Emerson's vision.

There were also personal reasons leading Emerson to turn his attention to the natural world for his first major literary effort. Evelyn Barish describes the salutary effect of the warm natural paradise of Florida on his health at the age of twenty-three, when the family malady of tuberculosis had nearly blinded him, crippled his hip, and literally threatened his life (177-97). In fleeing the harsh New England climate, Emerson was also escaping the oppressive weight of a paternal theological heritage that he resisted in an agony of doubt. He turned away from this bookish realm to the languorous physical world of virtually unsettled Florida tropics around the little village of St. Augustine where he spent several months. A visit to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris five years later, on a voyage taken to relieve his grief after the death of his first wife, also seems to have turned him toward Nature as an alternative to the burden of history and the European cultural heritage (Barish 239, Ellison 85).

Many have remarked upon the fierce rejection of cultural fathers that begins Nature, and Eric Cheyfitz urges us to read the work as an oedipal drama of deeply conflicted sexual identity in which the narrative sings “the siren song of a savage, hermaphroditic figure that, aligning itself with a growing feminine power, is luring us into drowning in a dream of the father” (113, 167). Cheyfitz's study ingeniously explores the sexual ambivalence of the work, but I would argue that the essential identification of the narrator is always firmly masculine, however complex his oedipal hostilities may be. This is a son eager to escape from the dry bones and sepulchres of the cultural fathers, but one seeking access to the supreme Father who legitimizes his oracular voice: the God behind Nature. The most profound anxiety revealed in Nature is fear of the feminine, with a corresponding need to ensure the subjective distance from it that defines male control. That Nature is feminine is a cultural given, as we have seen. It is everywhere apparent in the essay, from the consistent use of feminine pronouns to explicit personification of Nature and feminine clothing metaphors. The problem for Emerson's persona is an infantile yearning for passive bliss in a maternal embrace. This “effeminacy” must be fought and overcome by manly assertions of will.

Emerson lived in an era deeply troubled by the emergence of women into the cultural mainstream of the West. Ann Douglas has described a general nineteenth-century feminization of the American clergy and popular culture, placing Emerson in its midst and alluding to his fear of effeminacy (19-20). And Cheyfitz cites Tocqueville's reactions to the confident and assertive “virile” women of the new country as background for the sexual ambivalence of Emerson's narrative voice (132-41). The problem must have been intensified for Emerson by his deep personal reliance on his aunt Mary Moody Emerson, the only positive parental figure in his childhood and the major intellectual influence in his upbringing.¹ She introduced him to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman and prepared him to be responsive later in life to strong women like Margaret Fuller, the aggressive Muse he invited to lay siege to him (Douglas 275). In a defensively “virile” intellectual culture (Leverenz 60-61), Emerson must have felt especially uneasy about his lifelong identification with strong women.

Given this background, it is neither surprising that Nature should reject the patriarchal past and yearn to be “embosomed” in the life-giving floods of nature, nor that the essay should ultimately reassert the language of the father and retreat from an identification with the feminine world of the “not me.” Toward the end of Nature Emerson self-consciously protests, “I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest” (28). He is guiltily aware of the central paradox in this manifesto that ends with a call for the realization of “the kingdom of man over nature” (36). Reverence for nature's power and the contrasting will to conquer oscillate through the essay in a tension that is reiterated in the more complex texture of Thoreau's Walden.²

In the famous transparent eyeball passage of Emerson's essay, the human subject ecstatically communicates his union with the sublime, healing natural environment that is his direct access to Truth and God. “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God” (6).

From this early point on, however, Emerson's essay quivers with ambivalence toward physical Nature, and in its course the passive ecstasy of the transparent eyeball passage is quickly relegated to a lower, effeminate level of apprehension so that the male will can properly assert itself over the material world and a Platonic movement up the hierarchy toward the disembodied ideal can be effected. As Myra Jehlen puts it, “The stillness and the pull of oceanic surrender are there in Nature, but so is a thrusting energy that can at any moment turn Emerson's movement out of himself, all the way around, and make God part or parcel of him” (97). Just before the passage, Emerson had asserted that “Nature never wears a mean appearance,” but just after it he claims that “nature is not always tricked in holiday attire” but is changeable, and in fact ultimately depends on the male observer's moods for her aspect (5-6). “Tricked” is a demeaning pun that suggests feminine ornamentation designed to mislead a male admirer. It harmonizes more effectively than Emerson may have realized with the Greek word kosmos, meaning both order and women's clothing and decoration (Liddell and Scott 447), which he uses to characterize Nature's beauty in chapter 3. Emerson betrays an uneasiness about the physical beauty of Nature, arguing that it is mere appearance and requires a “higher, spiritual element,” the controlling human will, which preserves the onlooker from “effeminacy.” Exemplars such as Spartan warrior king Leonidas and Swiss military hero Arnold Winkelried show how “every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate” (10-11). The goddess Nature who clothes her darling child Columbus with the beautiful landscapes of the New World and “stretcheth out her arms to embrace man” in chapter 3 becomes by chapter 5 “thoroughly mediate,” receiving the dominion of man “as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour rode” (19). Emerson bestows only a guilty backward glance upon the mother with her gentle nest, as his prose marches on to the heroic call to conquest in the essay's final passage.

Emerson's cavalier refusal to be bound by the kind of consistency he called “the hobgoblin of little minds” delighted iconoclastic readers like Nietzsche and has led recent commentators to celebrate the dialectical play of the essays. But many others have been troubled by profound contradictions such as those in Nature and have tried to reconcile them.³ Because Thoreau followed Emerson in this rhetorical habit, obviously in part to discomfit his readers and wake them out of complacency just as Emerson wished to do, the problem of how the pronouncements of both are to be taken is central to my discussion. It should be clear by now that I think both writers accountable for participation in a long tradition of gender politics that is not part of any complex philosophical exploration or mimetic representation of a difficult and confusing world. While Emerson may have conflicting impulses regarding the feminized Nature that is the subject of his essay, I think he comes to a decision about them by the end. His narrative movement is hierarchical, recalling the movement of Plato's Symposium, and in its light there is no doubt about the gender or position of the speaker of the final paragraphs. Emerson cannot both adore Mother Nature and urge his readers to conquer her. As David Leverenz remarks, “Emerson's ideal of manly self-empowerment reduces womanhood to spiritual nurturance while erasing female subjectivity” (44).

Nature was published when Thoreau was a senior at Harvard and became so central to the younger man's thinking that his own writing began immediately to echo Emersonian terms like “not me” in assertions of the opposition of nature and mind (Sattelmeyer, TR, [Thoreau's Reading] 22-23). Critical readers of Walden have often noticed the conflict between Thoreau's desire to become part of the natural environment at the pond on the one hand and his need to maintain distance and control on the other.⁴ But dismissals of this conflict as source of productive intensity or useful irony fail to acknowledge what seems an implicit betrayal of the original pastoral purpose. Although Thoreau experiments more playfully with subjective positions and distances from nature than Emerson does, “she” is always other than himself; the witty narrator is always a male in control of the relationship. I think we must recognize that in spite of lifelong efforts to immerse himself in the natural world, Thoreau is trapped by his literary heritage and masculine loyalties into a position very similar to Emerson's.

While Emerson retreats almost dizzily from imaginative fusion with Nature in his essay and appears to have had little interest in physical experience of the natural world, Thoreau physically sought “the occult relation between man and vegetable,” mineral, and other animals that Emerson only rhapsodized about. Yet Thoreau also finally shrinks away from the feminization inherent in too close an identification with the nonhuman world. As he shaped his journal entries into the increasingly literary form of the published Walden, he exalted the “father tongue” of the written word and his intellectual heritage over the “mother tongue” of embodied speech, which he called “almost brutish” (101). He too withdrew from immersion in the physical world, most obviously in the much-discussed ascetic chapter “Higher Laws” and in his departure from Walden Pond at the end of his experiment, but also in many more subtle ways while he still lived there. Walden, like Nature, enacts a dramatic dance back and forth between attraction and repulsion, love and disgust, in an imagined female presence from which the author's masculine identity compels him to distinguish himself.

At the time Thoreau was writing Walden, advances in natural science and movement toward technological human control of the American landscape placed his ruminations at the pond in a complex, ironic matrix. Robert Sattelmeyer and William Rossi have discussed Thoreau's debt to geologist Charles Lyell in his emphasis on minuscule presence of humans in earth's evolution.⁵ Yet at the same time, humans seemed to be gaining ever greater control of the vast landscape that had seemed an inexhaustible wilderness only a generation earlier. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the deforestation of New England was almost complete, and the region's Indians were equally devastated, reduced to small bands of ragged paupers by European disease, colonial appropriation of land and natural resources, and ecological transformation that made traditional subsistence impossible (Cronon 102-56). Philip Fisher explains that it was clear by the 1840s to thoughtful observers like Francis Parkman that the continent was tamed and its native peoples soon to be swept “from the face of the earth” by streams of white settlers (38). With the Indians, of course, wildlife and an older ecological reality would also be swept away. Something parallel was happening in medicine, regarding that other landscape that loomed so large in the deep cultural imagination. In the 1840s American gynecologist Marion Sims was describing himself as a Columbus discovering the vagina as his “New World” landscape, so that traditional gendered definitions of landscape and geography were projected back onto the female body in gynecological research of the time (Gilbert and Gubar 2: 33). In sum, though natural history decentered humans in the physical world, modern industrial civilization's enormous project of controlling the landscape of North America seemed to have success in view. A colonization of the female body as a kind of landscape was simultaneously under way among medical pioneers.

Thoreau's Walden Pond was a microcosm of the already corrupted American landscape. As many have observed, it was no wilderness but instead a colonized space from which Indians and most wildlife had already been removed. During his sojourn there, it was used as a quarry for raw materials like ice and lumber.⁶ Thoreau himself calls attention to the instability of the physical place he idealizes in his book. He is only a mile and a half from Concord and can see the village through a vista opened up by the deforestation of a nearby hill (86-87). He makes his famous bean field in an area cleared fifteen years previously (156), and he indicates that Walden has been destroyed in his lifetime. The pond of his boyhood, “completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods,” is by the final writing of Walden—some years after he lived there—circled by denuded shores laid waste by woodchoppers like the Canadian used in the narrative as a model of the natural, heroic man (191-92). In the end, Thoreau was not as interested in a particular place as he was in seeking to use his experiences as rhetoric, “for the sake of tropes and expression” (162). Most of the experiences he describes in Walden are defined by literary and philosophical allusion in a sort of free-floating Platonic realm of traditional ideas. Thus we must question Oelschlaeger's claim that Thoreau “becomes a man of Indian wisdom, a person-in-contact with wild nature, with the Great Mother” (170). The gender dynamics of Walden reveal that sustained contact with wild nature and the Great Mother are exactly what he cannot afford.

Thoreau's Journal unselfconsciously uses gendered definitions of the landscape and natural world, as when he refers to the Indian's cleanly use of his “untrimmed mistress” the earth, in contrast to “something vulgar and foul” in the white farmer's greater closeness as a tiller of the soil (J [Journal] 2: 100). Similarly, botanical imagery used to describe the mind relies on a female earth and erotic processes of masculine penetration:

So the mind develops from the first in two opposite directions: upwards to expand in the light and air; and downwards avoiding the light to form the root. One half is aerial, the other subterranean. The mind is not well balanced and firmly planted, like the oak, which has not as much root as branch, whose roots like those of the white pine are slight and near the surface. One half of the mind's development must still be root,—in the embryonic state, in the womb of nature, more unborn than at first. For each successive new idea or bud, a new rootlet in the earth. The growing man penetrates yet deeper by his roots into the womb of things. The infant is comparatively near the surface, just covered from the light; but the man sends down a tap-root to the centre of things.

(J 2: 203)

For Thoreau such depth of involvement in “the womb of things” is obviously unfortunate, moving the mind away from the superior sunlit realm of transcendence identified with the masculine.

During the period when he was living at Walden, the journal also constantly defines the place in terms of classical models. His cabin is a place for the gods like the halls of Olympus, the light and air are like the atmosphere that inspired Grecian art, he hears Aeolian music all about him, and his reflections are saturated with references to Homer, Alexander, Achilles, Patroclus, Cicero, and so forth. On July 7, 1845, he writes, “I am glad to remember tonight as I sit by my door that I too am at least a remote descendant of that heroic race of men of whom there is tradition. I too sit here on the shore of my Ithaca, a fellow wanderer and survivor of Ulysses” (J 2: 156).

When Thoreau recast his materials for publication, he continued to emphasize the Homeric ideal that had been central to his education, “naturalizing” his citizenship in a culture that defined itself by aggressive action, in opposition to the feminine. Thoreau may cast this tradition in an ironic light, as in the famous mock-heroic descriptions of the ant battle or the bean field, but he never seriously abandons it as the ground of his manly identity. Time and again he contrasts passive “effeminacy” to virile action, as Emerson had done before him in the standard formulation of their era.⁷ In “Reading” he champions the reading of Homer and Aeschylus in Greek as a way of avoiding “dissipation or luxuriousness” (100) and opposes this activity to the degeneracy of the majority of his fellows, “a race of tit-men” who content themselves by “sucking the pap” of provincial newspapers and other cheap popular writing (107, 109). High culture is male, low culture unmistakably feminized.

In shaping a statement of purpose for Walden, Thoreau applied Homeric military imagery to earlier journal material. On July 6, 1845, he had written: “I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which where [sic] the phenomena or actuality the Gods meant to show us,—face to face, And so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is—what it does? If I am not quite right here I am less wrong than before” (J 2: 156). The revised version states his purpose in terms that are much more specific and forceful: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life. … I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner” (90-91).

Echoing Francis Bacon's language of violent attack upon Nature to open her secrets, Thoreau presents “life” as an animal he must kill and eat, a field he must harvest, or some hunted beast he must drive into a trap. The Emersonian sense of “life” as wild nature or the “not me” is clearly implied here (Rossi, “Limits,” 94). Man the predator and domesticator of the landscape is only half hidden in these metaphors, as Slotkin noticed some years ago (519).

The chapter ends with a paragraph that describes his enterprise, not in terms of physical involvement with the material environment of Walden Pond, but rather as a primarily intellectual effort: “The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills” (98). Thoreau is definite about not wanting to waste time with physical tasks here. Yet once again he uses the imagery of physical attack. The reference to a cleaver brings to mind the butcher shop and hacking of flesh. His imagining his head as “an organ for burrowing” at first might suggest the relatively benign work of some animal like a mole or badger that seeks only a nest and safety in the earth. (And of course there is the possibility of a phallic pun.) But the word “mining” differentiates his work from that of such creatures, linking it to large-scale industrial processes that ravage and poison the landscape. Even though Thoreau refers to intellectual activity in this passage, his violent metaphors are related to the physical work that he says allows him to know the Nature around him at Walden Pond. For instance, when he fells a number of pine trees to frame his little house, the pitch (their lifeblood, in effect) imparts a fragrance to the bread of his lunch and creates a sense of intimacy. “Before I had done I was more the friend than the foe of the pine tree, though I had cut down some of them, having become better acquainted with it” (42). The action of knowing in this friendship is the action of killing.

At the heart of Walden is Thoreau's extended meditation on “The Ponds” describing Walden's shape, exact physical measurements, aspect in various weathers, colors under various skies, and most important for Thoreau, its meaning in the landscape: “A Lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows” (186). Here Thoreau has elaborated the transparent eyeball image of Emerson, but he has completely changed its reference. Emerson defined himself as speaking subject, transformed into an organ of vision or into the function of vision. Thoreau has transposed the metaphor onto the landscape, thus personifying earth, which we have already seen is consistently feminized and set apart from the poet.

This feminine “other,” which is the land and all living things outside the male subject, is beautiful and magnetic but somehow horrifying in its material being, subject to decay like the body. His ambivalence toward his body and sensuality in general is most fully displayed in “Higher Laws,” a section whose rhetorical structure seems designed to follow the Platonic progression from physical to higher spiritual realms that Emerson mirrors in the structure of Nature. “Higher Laws” begins with a wild, Dionysiac urge toward sparagmos and omophagia, expressing Thoreau's desire to snatch up a woodchuck, tear it to pieces, and eat it raw. One wonders whether Euripides' Bacchae might not be hovering behind Thoreau's conscious construction here. But very soon he backs away from these impulses almost in horror; these are the antithesis of man's higher, moral being. “We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies” (219).

Eating, drinking—even the Puritan's brown crust and water—are potential experiences of degradation and brutishness. By the end of the section, Thoreau has decided, “Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome” (221, my emphasis). As Michael West remarks, “Thoreau remains haunted by a profound ambivalence toward the body and toward those excremental processes that he explicitly undertakes to defend in ‘Higher Laws’” (1046). This material reality is feminine, and the consumption that was ravaging Thoreau's own body and would cause his early death was blamed by popular medical theory on “effeminacy,” which could be counteracted by an ascetic regimen (West 1054).

It is no wonder that when Thoreau describes his most peaceful and intimate moments of communion with Walden Pond, he is really abstracted from it, as in the emblematic description of fishing in the pond at night.

These experiences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blundering purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very queer, expecially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

(174-75)

From the outset his purpose is predatory. Yet he defines the scene as a cozily domesticated space in which animals serenade the fisherman and in which charming fish pattern the moonlit water for his benefit. Separated from the pond by his boat, he only communicates with its life by a deadly fishing line. Though it may appear that he gives himself over to the forces of Nature by allowing his boat to drift to and fro in the darkness, this movement is circumscribed because the boat is anchored. He condescendingly describes his prey as being of “dull, uncertain blundering purpose.”

Not only is Thoreau physically separated from the body of the pond, but also he is abstracted from the life of his own body. He describes his thoughts transcending his physical being and wandering “to vast cosmogonal themes in other spheres” so that he needs the jerk of the captured fish, struggling vainly to escape death, to link him up to Nature again. (One of my students suggested that the fishing line could be seen as a kind of umbilical cord connecting Thoreau to the body of Mother Nature. If so, it is temporary, carefully controlled, and dangerous.)

Water, of course, is traditionally connected with the feminine. Such associations permeate Celtic mythology, European literature is full of them, Freud made much of them, and Klaus Theweleit adduces scores of examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature that express a combination of ecstatic sexual abandon and horror at the dissolution of ego boundaries accompanying male immersion in water (276-88). Perhaps such associations led Thoreau to concentrate his attention upon his manageable experiences with the water of the pond rather than to provide close descriptions of his daily morning swim or other experiences of immersion, in spite of all his emphasis on bathing.

Even the famous celebratory description of the thawing spring earth late in Walden is darkened by an undercurrent of physical revulsion accompanying the emphasis on liquid metamorphosis that, as we might expect, is identified with the feminine. Thoreau likens patterns of flowing liquid and sand to foliage and “such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.” The divine male Artist who made the world sports erotically in the spring muck of the crumbling bank, making the very atoms pregnant with these designs. Man is “but a mass of thawing clay,” part of this exhilarating riot of physical life (306-7). Along with his excitement, Thoreau mildly admits an uneasiness that flowers into an image of the ruptured bodily boundaries of Mother Earth, an excremental and chaotic mass of internal organs flowing across the surface: “True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character, and there is no end to the heaps of liver lights and bowels, as if the globe were turned wrong side outward: but this suggests at least that Nature has some bowels, and there again is mother of humanity” (308). Attempting to pull out of this morass, Thoreau retreats into the more distanced terms “frost coming out of the ground,” “Spring,” the analogy of mythology preceding true poetry for the mucky liquid earth “that precedes the green and flowery spring.” Yet as the passage concludes, he returns again and again to suggestions of excrement and decay as the essential facts of the living maternal earth.

Nevertheless, Thoreau genuinely sought to reconcile his philosophical heritage with his physical experiences at Walden Pond and with the natural science of his day. He attempted to define an Eden in the middle ground between the frenzy of industrial civilization and the inhuman wastes of wilderness. Robert Sattelmeyer says that Thoreau saw Native Americans as potential guides “toward some wisdom gained through the appreciation of nature that had been lost by civilized people” but was never able to adapt his voluminous notes on Indians for his own literary pursuits (100). I would argue that he could not do so because of his entrapment within the insistently gendered consciousness central to both the literary heritage he shared with Emerson and the emerging scientific paradigms of his time. He represents what Donna Haraway would call “one half of the system of desire mediated by modern science and technology, the half dreaming of reclosing the broken cosmos” (136). His understanding of himself was defined by the ethic of heroic assertion and exploitation at the heart of this system that can be traced all the way back to Gilgamesh, destroyer of the wild cedar forest sacred to Inanna/Ishtar. Like Cooper and Emerson before him, Thoreau was genuinely drawn to the idea of Nature and the landscape as alternatives to the sepulchres of the European cultural fathers. But their authority as writers remained grounded in a semiotic network that defined itself in opposition to the feminine. The emergence of women into nineteenth-century intellectual and political life threatened the position of men like Emerson and Thoreau in “nonvirile” professions at the historical moment when science was emerging as the new field for heroism. Science had manipulated the traditional female codes for earth, in Donna Haraway's words, “in order to legitimate deeper penetration by a virile lover/actor/knower” who could hardly afford to identify with “the natural-technical objects of knowledge which his fertile mind and hands generated from her raw materials” (136).

Thus Emerson and Thoreau move insistently to abstract themselves, no matter how reverently they may speak of the beauties of the physical world. What has been associated in the popular mind with the most benign appreciation of Nature has actually been an ultimate rejection of the physical because of its “feminine” identification. Both writers consolidate the imperialist nostalgia that has always been at the heart of American pastoral—a sentimental masculine gaze at a feminized landscape and its creatures that masked the conquest and destruction of the “wild” continent. As Lawrence Buell has recently advised, there is much to be gained from seeing American pastoral in this kind of postcolonial context (477).

At least Thoreau dramatized the problem in the record of his ingenious, multifaceted, and passionate efforts to live a different reality than the one his culture imposed upon him. He understood and tried to accept the necessary violence involved in human survival—the sacrificial logic of sparagmos and omophagia by which we must destroy and eat other living creatures. If he was also horrified by the fact of our decaying materiality, he was honest enough to articulate the paradox. As we move to our primary focus on twentieth-century fiction, we will see that Thoreau's version of American pastoral has been reiterated by male writers down to our own time. Hemingway's Nick Adams and Faulkner's Ike McCaslin perform similar escapist nest-building rituals in eroticized landscapes, and gendered responses to Nature even motivate environmentally conscious essayists like Edward Abbey and Barry Lopez. In contrast, women writers usually identify with and draw strength from symbolic landscapes. But all this behavior locks them into patterns of meaning appropriate to our ancestors of fifteen thousand years ago—patterns that are inappropriate and dangerous for the threatened Earth at the end of the twentieth century. The radical experiments of twentieth-century art and philosophy may have exploded, estranged, and scrambled much of our cultural heritage, but they have not apparently shaken these deep and ancient habits of thought. In fact the mythological and anthropological interests of twentieth-century writers may actually have restored the vigor of the mythic heritage. The question we must ask as we examine the highly charged landscapes of twentieth-century fiction writers is whether they succeed in breaking out of the destructive gender oppositions and imperialist nostalgia endemic to American pastoral traditions and find a way to project a more realistic and responsible sense of Americans in their land.

Notes

1. Cheyfitz goes so far as to claim that Emerson grew up in “a mob of hermaphroditic figures,” with his father dying when the boy was eight and the widowed household run by a grimly frugal mother and the paternal aunt whom he called “Father Mum” and “my heroine” (160-63). Ellison (7) tells us that Emerson associated his Aunt Mary with the sublime, but Barish balances the picture with a fuller biographical study crediting Mary Moody Emerson's warmly supportive role in her nephew's development while also tempering Cheyfitz's overemphasis upon Emerson's one epistolary use of the term “Father Mum” (36-53).

2. This same contradictory dynamic can be seen more clearly in the movement back and forth between sentimental homage and condescension in Emerson's 1855 address on “Woman,” reluctantly presented to a women's rights convention (Complete Works 6: 335-55).

3. See Ellison 75-77. F. O. Mattheissen's attempts to find organic unity in both Emerson and Thoreau have been followed by more recent efforts like Jehlen's argument that Emerson was attempting to define a transcendent unity behind his apparently oppositional dualisms (83-84). Cheyfitz, Ellison, and Barish are more interested in the forces causing such instabilities and in his courage in facing them. Ellison sees Emerson as a typical romantic, writing the “heterogeneous, self-critical prose” that characterized his era and prepared for our own century (232-37).

4. See, for instance, James McIntosh 21, and Michaels 140-46.

5. Sattelmeyer explains that Thoreau read Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) in 1840 and continued through the rest of his life reading widely in the controversial new work in natural history by writers including Louis Agassiz and Charles Darwin (Thoreau's Reading 81, 78-110). Rossi discusses in detail the influence of Lyell's work on the Journals and Walden in “Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science.”

6. Leo Marx, for example, calls attention to the traditional pastoral unreality of the setting, the temporary quality of Thoreau's sojourn, and the many ways he emphasizes the middle ground he occupies between the industrial modern world of Concord and the untamed landscape of precolonized New England (242-65). Philip Fisher calls Walden Pond “the already pacified and cleared annex of a society” (81), while Joan Burbick takes a more positive position and concentrates on Thoreau's reconciliation of nature and civilization at Walden Pond (59-82).

7. Michael West claims, “No English writer since Milton and Pope has more assiduously sought to adapt the Greco-Roman ideal of nobility to modern culture” (1053). But West sets Thoreau apart from other nineteenth-century “Heroic Vitalists” such as Carlyle and Nietzsche in offering a democratic, egalitarian version of the ideal.

Works Cited

Barish, Evelyn. Emerson and the Roots of Prophecy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Burbick, Joan. Thoreau's Alternative History. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987.

Cheyfitz, Eric. The Trans-Parent: Sexual Politics in the Language of Emerson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.

Ellison, Julie K. Emerson's Romantic Style. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford Authors Series. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

———. “Woman.” Vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Edward Waldo Emerson. 12 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903-4. 335-55.

Englesman, Joan Chamberlain. The Feminine Dimension of the Divine. Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1979.

Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford, 1964.

McIntosh, James. Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.

Michaels, Walter Benn. “The Vanishing American.” American Literary History 2 (Summer 1990): 220-41.

———. “Walden's False Bottoms.” Glyph 1 (1977): 132-49.

Sattelmeyer, Robert. “The Remaking of Walden.” Writing the American Classics. Ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1990.

———. Thoreau's Reading: A Study in Intellectual History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.

West, Michael. “Scatology and Eschatology: The Heroic Dimensions of Thoreau's Wordplay.” PMLA 89 (1974): 1043-64.