Week 2 - Deconstructing Thoreau

 Philosophies of bipedalism, David Thoreau, and the male loneliness epidemic

In my mind, there is a loosely related network of items which, taken together, explain why I don’t really like Henry Thoreau. Here they are: 1. A man who walks is of a superior sort, Thoreau posits in his essay “Walking.” The non-walker, by contrast, develops certain traits: “softness and smoothness,” being thin-skinned, and, for women, sleeping all day. 2. Thoreau also posits that his habit of walking in nature, so far from society, mirrors the preferences of “the old prophets and the poets”: Homer, Chaucer, Moses. 3. His other heroes include Romulus and Remus, who, he says, can embody Wildness itself because in the absence of a mother they were raised by a wolf. Unfortunately for the rulers of later Roman kingdoms, these did have mothers instead of she-wolves; Thoreau suggests this was their undoing. 4. Thoreau’s mother did his laundry while he stayed in the cabin. 5. Thoreau writes that he is drawing ever further from society, ever deeper into the wilderness. This is, one gathers from his essay Walking, the ideal state of a man; separation from other people. 6. Another problem with modern people, Thoreau says, is eating stable-fed meat, instead of raw flesh and bones. 7. Thoreau lived on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. 8. Incidentally, Thoreau’s mother also often brought him food.

Taken just as a sum of parts, this collection of facts might seem mean-spirited. Picking on a grown man who lives on his friend’s land while his mother does his laundry and brings him food feels like punching down, more than critical deconstruction of the merit of his work. But understanding Thoreau’s hypocrisies is critical for interpreting his writing, because the way of life and guiding philosophy Thoreau posits in “Walking” has profoundly impacted not only modern society but its concept of masculinity. Thoreau asks us to imagine a man whose immersion in nature has made him so perfectly free from the weakening ties of social life that he has become transcendent; yet Thoreau’s personal life exposes this as a sham. Far from ascending out of social dependency, Thoreau’s lifestyle was only possible because his friend lent him a place to live. Unlike his heroes Romulus and Remus, whose kingdom Thoreau says thrived because a wolf raised them (instead of a woman, he doesn’t say outright), Thoreau did have a mother, and in fact she subsidized his philosopher’s lifestyle by keeping him fed and clothed. Thoreau’s life with nature was possible only because of the two things that seem glaringly absent from his perfect man: social connection and women.

I’m sure Thoreau’s philosophical shortcomings were reflections of his time period, not his personal character. As a friend of mine would say, “it was his first time living too!” But I still think this hypocrisy matters. His ideas have had sticking power, and today a lot of men are still looking towards the idea that somewhere, probably out west, a man exists who has found true independence and true freedom through self-isolation. While they exhaust themselves chasing this ideal, they might notice that along the way they’ve forgotten to make friends, do their laundry or cook their own food. But not to worry - the solution, Thoreau's work might seem to reassures them, simply lies out further in the woods.