THOREAU’S WORK IS INCONSISTENT AND PARADOXICAL

THOREAU’S WORK IS INCONSISTENT AND PARADOXICAL

1. WALDEN’S HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL FORCE DEFEATED BY PARADOX

Michael T. Gilmore, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN, 1988, p. 177-8.

In important ways it is a defeated text. Though Thoreau begins with the conviction that literature can change the world, the aesthetic strategies he adopts to accomplish political objectives involve him in a series of withdrawals from history; in each case the ahistorical maneuver disables the political and is compromised by the very historical moment it seeks to repudiate.

Michael T. Gilmore, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN, 1988, p. 178.

This is not to deny Walden’ greatness, but rather to emphasize the cost of Thoreau’s achievement and to begin to specify its limits. . . .But one might say in another paradox, that Walden’s triumphant success is precisely what constitutes its defeat. For underlying that triumph is a foresaking of civic aspirations for an exclusive concern with “the art of living well.” And to say this is to suggest that Walden is a book at odds with its own beliefs; it is to point out Thoreau’s complicity in the ideological universe he abhors.
3. BASIS OF WALDEN WAS NOT AS THOREAU REPRESENTED

Llewelyn Powys, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN, 1988, p. 54.

When we look into the matter there was really little enough to it. At best it was a dramatic gesture. The celebrated hut was actually situated on the outskirts of Concord, within a mile and a half of the village, built on Emerson’s land--in Emerson’s yard one might almost say. With an axe borrowed from his friend Alcott he constructed his habitation out of boards which had been conveyed to the woods from an Irishman’s shanty. It was within sight of the railway and so close to the public highway that the woodland air was continually being impregnanted with tobacco smoke from the pipes of wayfarers on the near-by road. Thoreau declares that he never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude but actually his house was constantly visited by friends. Indeed, it was fitted with a guest chamber.
4. THOREAU OFFERS NOTHING ORIGINAL TO TRANSCENDENTAL INDIVIDUALITY

Llewelyn Powys, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN, 1988, p. 53.

A good case in point is the work of Thoreau which I suspect has been and is today much overrated. Thoreau is cried up as being one of the greatest American writers. In reality, he is an awkward, nervous, self-conscious New Englanders who, together with an authentic taste for oriental and classical literature, developed a singular liking for his own home woods. He does not strike me as an original thinker, bolstered up as his thoughts always are by the wisdom of the past. Mysticism, that obstinately recurring from of human self-deception is, in his case, even more unsatisfactory than usual, while his descriptions of nature that have won such applause are seldom out of the ordinary. I am inclined to think that his reputation owes much to his close association to Emerson, that truly great man, who under so kindly and sedate an exterior possessed so mighty a spirit.
5. “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE” INCONSISTENT

Laraine Fergenson, APPROACHES TO TEACHING THOREAU’S WALDEN AND OTHER WORKS, 1996, p. 156.

Students may note that “Civil Disobedience” seems to contain paradoxical or self-contradictory statements, especially in the discussion of the relation between the individual and society. Jacques Barzun finds in the essay “a series of strong impressions, lucidly expressed but uncoordinated- indeed totally inconsistent.

THOREAU IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH MODERN POLICY CONCERNS

1. THOREAU WOULD HAVE BEEN A UNEVEN ALLY OF KING AND GANDHI

Michael Meyer, APPROACHES TO TEACHING THOREAU’S WALDEN AND OTHER WORKS, 1996, p. 152.

Gandhi, King, and many other political activists who have enlisted Thoreau in a particular cause would have found him an uneven and recalcitrant ally. . . . Thoreau found social reformers nearly as meddlesome as he did the government.

Michael Meyer, APPROACHES TO TEACHING THOREAU’S WALDEN AND OTHER WORKS, 1996, p. 152.

Thoreau’s ambivalence about reformers was matched by his ambivalence about the means by which reform could be achieved. In “Civil Disobedience” he rejects voting and legislative actions as an adequate expression of moral conviction.
3. THOREAU ENDORSED USE OF VIOLENCE

Michael Meyer, APPROACHES TO TEACHING THOREAU’S WALDEN AND OTHER WORKS, 1996, p. 153-4.

Thoreau did not take issue with Brown’s use of violence; instead he endorsed it and refused to worry about reconciling his earlier faith in individual passive nonviolence and his present unqualified support of Brown: “the question is not about the weapon, but the spirit in which you use it.” Students who read “A Plea for Captain John Brown” alongside “Civil Disobedience” are often surprised to see how violently the idea of a peaceable revolution competed with other means of reform.
4. THOREAU ULTIMATELY NOT CONCERNED WITH ISSUES

Michael Meyer, APPROACHES TO TEACHING THOREAU’S WALDEN AND OTHER WORKS, 1996, p. 154.

Thoreau, however, ultimately retreated from this issue because he was, as a transcendentalist, essentially apolitical. His skirmishes with slavery would not deter him from his primary concern with self-reform and idealistic principles; he always chose eternity over the times.
5. THOREAU’S DENUNICATION OF MODERNITY UNDERMINED BY MODERN WALDEN

Michael T. Gilmore, CRITICAL ESSAYS ON HENRY DAVID THOREAU’S WALDEN, 1988, p. 177.

Among the many paradoxes of Walden perhaps none is more ironic than the fact that his modernist text--modernist in its celebration of private consciousness, its aestheticizing of experience, its demands upon the reader--starts out as a denunication of modernity.