By Bryan McMillan, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is undoubtedly ecocriticism’s urtext, and Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the last author that one might expect to see mentioned in an essay on Gothic environmentalism. Yet reconsidering him puts the proverbial nail in the coffin regarding how we define and employ what is now called the ecoGothic. While scholars have debated the merits of defining the term as either a lens or a mode, I maintain the former view because doing so allows us to re-see supposedly ‘non-Gothic’ narratives in a different light and to uncover new interpretive valences. For instance, no one has interpreted Walden as a Gothic text, and rightly so. But, what about those moments when Thoreau feels at his wits’ end? In these moments, it seems that only Gothic expressions will do.
Take Thoreau’s concept of ‘wildness,’ for example. At the core, he represents this idea as unmitigated freedom. It is light, idealistic, and even benign. But reimagining this idea from an ecoGothic lens – which Thoreau subtly suggests is permissible – transforms what Dawn Keetley and Matthew Sivils call the ‘innocuous natural world found in the writings of the Transcendentalists’ (48) into something of a nightmare. It renders Thoreau as someone not unlike Mary Shelley’s monster and so magnifies the Walden landscape as a space of conflict rather than harmony.
Indeed, if we consider Thoreau’s woodchucks it becomes clear that they pose the author continual problems as they ransack his beanfield. As readers might have expected, Thoreau responds by trying to determine how to rid himself of this nuisance without violence. Laura Dassow Walls observes that when Thoreau ‘asked a local farmer how to trap them without injury,’ the farmer responded, ‘“Yes, shoot ’em, you damn fool”’ (203). Thoreau’s incessant pursuit of harmony with the nonhuman world contributes heavily to the legends that characterise him as ‘a modern Orpheus … or an American St. Francis of Assisi,’ which circulated during his lifetime (Walls 203).
However, the opening of his chapter “Higher Laws” paints a self-image at once ruthless and bloodthirsty. Thoreau’s wildness surfaces not as a utopian ideal that promotes harmony with nature, but as something joyfully combatting the nonhuman for survival:
As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. (202)
Thoreau is of course beginning the chapter’s contrast between humans’ primal instinct and his own ‘higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life’ (202). His description of the primal instinct seems heavily Gothicised, however. Isolated by woods during the night and imaginatively combatting the wild animal, he evokes quintessentially American Gothic features reminiscent of Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799). Huntly, a sleepwalker, awakens in the night and finds himself in a cave when a panther attacks him. After he overpowers and kills it, he drinks its blood and consumes its flesh.
Thoreau presents his scene as even more disturbing than Brown’s because he regularly refers to nonhuman species as his ‘neighbors,’ like mice and birds in the chapter “Brute Neighbors,” and in so doing humanises them. That context renders the author’s primal urge to hunt as the desire to ‘cannibalise’ the woodchuck; and Thoreau’s language appears especially brutal when he only mentions seizing and consuming his victim raw, forgoing any suggestion of killing it first. This kind of wildness, Thoreau seems to imply, is often combative, transforming him on occasions into a ‘half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment’ (202). But as he marks this feeling as ‘strange,’ he subtly implies that his battle with woodchucks implicates human attitudes and behavior as the source of this discord. Indeed, ‘I found myself,’ he remarks, ‘and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverenced them both’ (202, emphasis added).
Thoreau’s opening passage seems to associate utter wildness with the horrid violence witnessed in so many Gothic narratives, yet it also implies that the inverse, excess spirituality, estranges us from nature. Thoreau’s Gothicised wildness enables him to accentuate the danger of these extremes and promote balance. ‘These beans,’ he recognises, ‘have results which are not harvested by me. Do they not grow for woodchucks partly?’ (161). As Walls puts it, “There was no word in Thoreau’s lifetime for what we now call ecology, but his growing awareness was turning his thought—far in advance of his time—to ecological relationships in which humans participated but could not declare dominance’ (205). Read in this light, Thoreau’s opening image suggests the monstrosity of the human’s desire to dominate his environments and the other species that also live there. The ecoGothic lens casts a different light on this familiar text, demonstrating how one of America’s preeminent Nature writers deployed Gothicism to make his environmental argument.
Works Cited
Keetley, Dawn and Matthew Wynn Sivils, editors. Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Routledge, 2017.
Thoreau, Henry D. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, Yale, 2004.
Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. University of Chicago, 2017.
Author Biography
Dr. Bryan McMillan recently received his Ph.D. from the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he presently teaches literary studies and composition courses. His research focuses on nineteenth-century American and British gothic fiction and ecocriticism. And he is currently writing a monograph that investigates the ideology of ‘improvement’ in nineteenth-century gothic novels.
What is this CREATURE that WE have instilled with life…?