Book Chapter

Ecocriticism and the Uses of Nature Writing

Newman, Lance

2005

Overview

Just as Thoreau projected his ambitions onto an idealized nature, so do we see ourselves in him. His extravagant descriptions of the natural world have produced remarkably divergent readings. The first verdict, passed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell, was that he had failed to live up to his potential greatness, managing no more than to become a describer of pretty scenes. This judgment was influential enough that early attempts to revive his reputation, such as by Vernon Louis Parrington and Van Wyck Brooks, were carried out by ignoring the nature writing and emphasizing the democratic political implications of his radical individualism. Then, in the mid-century climate of political reaction, scholars limited themselves to reading Walden as a well-wrought urn. In Perry Millers words, it was “a highly schematized pattern of words … designed not so much to make a sociological point, as to become a thing of beauty” in and of itself. Similarly, R.W.B. Lewis gave us a Thoreau who was the paradigmatic “American Adam,” the self-creating artist, sporting there alone in the universe. Walden was a portrait of a self-reliant consciousness soaring above a utilitarian society. On this reading, Thoreau’s nature was seen as little more than a rhetorical strategy: Walden Pond and figures like the hawk in this passage were vehicles of self-reflexive metaphor, the raw material of the literary craft that was his true concern.1

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
• Subject: Nature Writing / Political Reaction / Rhetorical Strategy / Terra Firma / Wilderness Recreation
• ISBN: 9781349530229, 1349530220