"Our Great Country" - Literary Colonization in "Canadian Wildflowers"

I find myself making quite a few notes on Canadian Wildflowers so far, so I thought I would share a few of them. I am mostly interested in the possibility of a nativist/colonial drive behind natural studies like this.

The authors of Canadian Wildflowers have several goals in mind, some of which they make explicit in the Preface. First, they consider the book as a potential financial success, displaying an awareness of the market (“It is difficult to please two parties”), and a hope “that success will follow publication.” Second, they aim to produce a scientific document: "to compile a native Flora, or even domestic Herbal of the Wild Plants of Canada," of which there is a dearth. They also hope to encourage thoughtfulness about the downtrodden flowers that merely "grew in the paths" of the early settlers, like nuisances (this calls to mind the meditative, "Book of Hours" aspect of nature work, which we discussed in relation to Cooper). Related to both of these latter rationales, the authors also hope to document (or historicize/preserve in print) vanishing natural phenomena "as the onward march of civilization clears away the primeval forest."

At least one goal is not made explicit in the Preface, however, despite a wealth of textual support for its pervasiveness. The documentation of these flowers, we're told, is a result of "patriotic pride." It seems to me that this assertion is crucial for understanding (at least part of) what motivates work like this at this particular historical moment – especially since we have seen this kind of “patriotism” (which is really more like nativism) at work from Audubon to Thoreau. For instance, there is much emphasis not only on the “work” involved in the production of Canadian Wildflowers, but on the source of that work – its emphatically/exclusively Canadian origin (in the shape of printers, publishers, etc.) and the role of the individual authors (i.e.: “by her own hand,” “without any foreign aid” - italics original). There is an anxiety, here – an assertion of ownership over this book that extends (or is meant to appear to extend) to the natural objects documented therein. These authors seem to be staking some sort of claim to the objects they translate into print.

What I am detecting here, as I said, is a hefty nativist bent – a desire to be fully and indisputably inaugurated within a national group, or system of identity/belonging, and to legitimize that system by ossifying the original colonial claim.

Here is the passage in which I am particularly interested:

"The unlettered Indians, indeed, culled a few of the herbs and barks and roots for healing purposes, and dyes wherewith to stain their squaws' basket-work and porcupine quills; and some of the old settlers had given them local and descriptive [8] names by which they may be recognized even in the present day, but there was no one to give written descriptions, or to compile a native Flora, or even domestic Herbal of the Wild Plants of Canada. The subject seemed to excite little interest, unless in some chance traveller whom curiosity or business brought to the country. But now the schoolmaster is abroad, and better things are, we trust, in store for this our noble country."

This passage first acknowledges the Indian practice of naming, studying and understanding wildflowers (although it downplays it with “a few”), and then illegitimizes it based on their illiteracy: “but there was no one to give written descriptions” (italics mine). 

In an act of (what I have been calling) textual colonization, Canadian Wildflowers seems to claim Canadian nature for the literate settler, as if their coverage of nature in this book of science (by way of drawing, describing, documenting, researching) is tantamount to physical coverage, or colonization. They learn, name, copy, and thus conquer these uniquely Canadian phenomena, drawing them possessively under the umbrella of “our great country.”

Further, the authors include “Indian” knowledge of the plants, not as a body of knowledge in its own right, but as part of their scientific study – as if the “Indians” and their ancient relationships with these plants are merely a part of nature to be studied, like the flowers themselves. This portrayal certainly holds true in the case of the Indian Turnip (Plate I): “The Indian herbalists use the Indian Turnip in medicine as a remedy in violent colic, long experience having taught them in what manner to employ this dangerous root.” By documenting the Indians within the same space as the flowers (much as Cooper does in Rural Hours, describing them as if they were birds or squirrels), Canadian Wildflowers subsumes them, proclaiming them mere specimens, while the authors are, by contrast, the scientists/historiographers/owners.

This also brings to mind the self-conscious naming and re-naming we have seen throughout the semester - especially in Audubon and Cooper – all of which suggests that the relationship between naming (or “identifying,” in every sense of the word) and owning is strongly felt at this time. Like a flag in the ground, it seems important to the authors of Canadian Wildflowers that they are the ones who get to inscribe the names upon cultural memory.

Three Letters by Henry David Thoreau

Travis Shaw

L632—19^th Cent. Am. Nature Writing

Prof. Irmscher

“Three Letters by Henry David Thoreau”

American Literature Manuscripts Collection

IU Lilly Library

            In Walden, Thoreau says, “To speak critically I never received one or two letters in my life…that were worth the postage” (89).  If that is true, then the contents of this essay, three letters written by Thoreau housed in in the Lilly Library, are perhaps not very interesting. 

Fortunately, Thoreau is not being completely truthful when expresses his disdain for news and letters in Walden, a fact which emerges in the opening lines of the first letter, a missive written to Emerson on Jan. 24^th 1843.  The letter opens: 

“The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.  I had not spoken of writing to

you, but as you are about to write to me when you get my letter, I make haste on my

part in order to get yours the sooner.  I don’t well know what to say to earn the forth

coming epistle.”

Thoreau is clearly interested in his correspondence with Emerson, and I would argue that this and other discrepancies between his letters and Walden are what make this sort of textual comparative analysis so enjoyable.

            By far, the contents of the first letter are the lengthiest and most interesting of the three and, for this reason, require a bit of background.  By Jan. 1843, Thoreau had been living with the Emerson family for nearly two years.  At the time of writing, Emerson is away from home, touring New York City’s lecture circuit and thinking about the upcoming edition of the Dial, which he edited with the assistance of Thoreau.  The letter actually comes from a series of exchanges between Emerson and Thoreau that took place in the few months of 1843, during which they worked out some of the editorial plans for the upcoming issue of the magazine.  For this reason, the series is referred to by the Thoreau Society’s website as “The Dial Letters.”  The letter in the Lilly collection is the first letter in this series.

On Jan. 24, 1843, Thoreau, the Emerson’s live-in handyman, is at home with the rest of the Emersons:  Lydia, Emerson’s wife, and Edith and Ellen, their two young daughters.  Thoreau’s letters describe a busy and lively household, and despite whatever he says about domestic life in Walden, he seems to be enjoying himself.  He says Edith, the younger of the two daughters, is making “rapid strides” in her speech “as well as well as over the carpet,” and the improvements in her speech keep Thoreau entertained throughout the series of letters.  For example, on Feb. 10^, 1843, Thoreau writes, “[Edith] talks a language of her own while she understands ours.  While she jabbers Sanscrit, Parsee, Pehivi, say ‘Edith go bah!’ and ‘bah’ it is.  No intelligence passes between us.  She knows.  It is a capital joke,--that is the reason she smiles so.”

            The sentiment between the Thoreau and the Emerson’s seems as genuine as Thoreau’s interest in baby Edith’s language games is, which shows that Thoreau was intimately involved in the day-to-day events around the house.  Thoreau jokes that Lidia “almost persuades [him] to be a Christian” though he fears he “as often relapse[s] into Heathenism,” he says Ellen tells him every morning that “Papa may come home tonight,” and he reports that (friend? relative?) Elisabeth Hoar “flits about these cleanings.”  A passage written as a post-script in Thoreau’s letter to Emerson dated Feb. 20 speaks volumes of the Emersons’ regard for Thoreau:

            “Last evening we had the ‘Conversation,’…of which Henry was the champion, and

Elizabeth Hoar and Lidian…his faithful squiresses…I have given you no idea of the

Scene, which was ineffably comic, though it made no laugh at the time…Henry was

Brave and noble; well as I have always like him, he still grows upon me.”

The scene in Lydia’s description is hard to follow in the original letter but her affection for Thoreau is obviously generous and sincere.

            Thoreau goes on to report that he had tea at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s place with a Mr. O’Sullivan.  Again, the letters and the lore do not match.  “To a philosopher,” Thoreau says in Walden, all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea” (89).  The irony is not only in that they are having tea, but also that the subject of the men’s conversation happens to be editing and publishing.  Thoreau reports that Mr. O’Sullivan expresses his admiration of Emerson’s poems and requests a list of them, and that he (Mr. O’Sullivan) would like Thoreau to write for his “‘Review,” which Thoreau is “glad to do.”  Yet another level of irony is the way Thoreau weaves the report gossip fit for any tea-party of old women:  [Mr. O’Sullivan] is a rather puny looking man, and did not strike me.  We had nothing to say to one another, and therefore we said a great deal!”  Though definitely not the epic meeting of philosophers, the scene has an ordinary charm all its own.

            The rest of the letter recounts a local bit of gossip that actually turns out to have enormous significance in the life of Thoreau, the near jailing of Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane for the nonpayment of poll taxes.  The event foreshadows Thoreau’s famous arrest in July 1846 for the same (mis)deed.  According to Thoreau’s letter, Alcott and Lane’s run in with “the state” seems to have caused a local stir, and Thoreau adds, with amusement, “a good anecdote to the rest” of the reports.  The story is brief and jumps around incoherently (to me) but the upshot is that he and Lane decide they “should agitate the state” and storm off to protest, so it seems, but they wind up at the Universalist Church, and there, Thoreau’s anger cools off:

            “…when over the audience I saw our hero’s head moving in the free air

            of the Universalist Church, my fire all went out—and the state was safe as far as I

            was concerned, but Lane, it seems had cogitated and even written on the matter in

            the afternoon…”

Though Thoreau tells the story for comic effect, the issue itself—paying taxes to a government that actively supported slavery—was quite serious, nearly provoking a violent confrontation, it appears, between Thoreau and some of Concord’s radical intellectuals and the local state authorities. 

The story is also interesting because Alcott and Lane’s brush with the law set a precedent for Thoreau when he was arrested for not paying his poll taxes in July 1846.  In fact, biographical sources say he developed their defense into an elegant rhetorical argument of civil disobedience[i].  The Lilly letter seems to corroborate this fact.  Thoreau says that Sam Staples—Thoreau’s friend and the jailer who would infamously arrest Thoreau and keep him locked up overnight in jail—tells Thoreau’s sister Helen that he is not sure what motivated Mr. Alcott:  “‘I vum—I believe it was nothing but principle—for I never heard a man talk honester.’”  This principle, so it seems, would develop into Thoreau’s impassioned defense for civil obedience.

            The letter closes with a sincere expression of gratitude to Emerson and his wife for their “long kindness” to him:  “I have been your pensioner for nearly two years and still left free as under the sky—It has been as free a gift as the sun on the summer—though I have sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance of…but for once thank you as well as heaven.”  Perhaps the relations are a bit more strained than the rest of the letters in the Dial series suggests.  It is not clear whether Thoreau is issuing an apology for a specific offense or perhaps feeling the effects of two years’ dependence.  In either case, the friendship and generosity the Emerson’s gave to Thoreau continued unabatedly.  In March 1845, Thoreau began building his famous cabin on Emerson’s fourteen acres at Walden, where he lived for two years.  The gratitude Thoreau expresses to Emerson in this letter seems, indeed, to be heartfelt.  And yet, as critics have often pointed out, that type of appreciation much more subdued in Walden.   

            The next two letters are short, the first of which is dated Oct. 30, 1850, and the second one Sep. 22, 1856.  The recipient of the first letter is Charles Sumner, who seems to have lent Thoreau some geographical survey reports.  Thoreau says he is pleased with the “faithful reports with their admirable maps and plates,” and then he trenchantly says the books give “some atonement for the misdeeds of our government.”  In the briefest of thank-you letters, Thoreau memorably bristles at (we can presume) the government’s policy of slavery. 

The second letter, since we have already discussed it in class, does not need much comment.  It is written to an admirer who asks for Thoreau’s advice on what to bring on hiking trip to the White Mountains.  Thoreau advises him not to take a gun, which Thoreau believes “will affect the innocence of your enterprise.”  Not that he would need a gun; for the mountains are now disappointingly tame:  “If you chance to meet with a wolf or a dangerous snake, you will be luckier than I have been, or expect to be.”  Thoreau then gives some advice regarding equipment.  About clothing, he says, “Wear old shoes; carry no thin clothes.”  Not only is this ostensibly banal comment actually quite humorous, it also shows how remarkably consistent Thoreau’s thinking can be.  As we talked about in class, Thoreau spends a lot of time discussing the importance of sturdy, well-fitting clothing, particularly in “Economy.”  One particularly salient link between the letter and Walden relates “thick” clothing to good economy and moral character:  “While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars…where is he so poor that, clad in a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?”

            In summary, these three letters in the Lilly’s American Literature Manuscript Collection reveal a different side of Thoreau.  We see a young man who is neither as self-reliant nor as solitary as he presents himself.  In the first letter his dependency on the Thoreau’s seems to be a source of some pain and tension, and in the second letter he is returning a batch of borrowed books.  Furthermore, we see in all of the letters that Thoreau is quite sociable, even over tea.  Though a cynical reader might want to cast judgment and clamor about the discrepancies between these sides of Thoreau, I believe that it makes more sense to read Walden in tandem with the letters, seeing the two as different modes, indeed different moments, of discourse, each with its different set of rhetorical aims.      

---

[i] “When Thoreau went into town to pick up a shoe at the cobbler’s in 1846, he was confronted by Sam Staples, who charged him with the nonpayment of his poll taxes.  Thoreau’s nonpayment had been a protest against government support of slavery.  Staples and Thoreau were good friends, but Thoreau’s refusal to bend (and Staple’s refusal to back down) forced the issue, and Staples marched Thoreau off to the county jail.  Hearing the rumor, his horrified mother ran back to notify the family, and someone—probably Thoreau’s Aunt Maria—appeared at the jail shrouded in a veil and paid the tax; Sam, however, had settled in for the night and was not about to set Thoreau free.  The next day, Thoreau was, in Staple’s words, ‘as mad as the devil’ and refused to leave until Staples threatened to throw him out bodily, whereupon Thoreau retrieved his shoe and disappeared into the huckleberry fields where, he wrote in the essay that immortalized his protest, ‘the State was nowhere to be seen.’  The incident aroused much commentary, especially among Thoreau’s friends.  Legend has it that Emerson, seeing Thoreau behind bars, exclaimed, ‘Henry, why are you here?’  To which Thoreau replied, ‘Waldo, why are you not here?’  Alcott recorded in his journal an ‘earnest talk’ with Emerson, who though Thoreau’s action ‘mean and skulking, and in bad taste.  I defended it on the grounds of a dignified non-compliance with the injunction of civil powers.’  Thoreau’s reaction was to develop Alcott’s line of defense into an elegant and impassioned essay, which he tried out first as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in Jan 1848, then published as ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ in the first and only issue of Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers, May 1849." ("Biography" of Thoreau, more or less quoted from Book Rags:  http://www.bookrags.com/biography/henry-david-thoreau-dlb3/). 

Fishing in the Sky: An Explication of Thoreau’s ‘Time is but the stream…’

Travis Shaw

L632

“Fishing in the Sky:  An Explication of Thoreau’s ‘Time is but the stream…’”

In the passage “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in…” (93), Thoreau shows his flair for shifting between modulations of time and space, quite unexpectedly, and between polar perspectives of the minimal and maximal, the microcosmic and macrocosmic, the mundane and the celestial, and the transient and the timeless.  The key metaphors Thoreau employs draw on the height of the “stars,” the shallow depths of the “sandy bottom,” and the movement of the stream’s “current.”  The image begins with Thoreau leisurely fishing in the shallow stream of “Time,” watching the “thin current” of water slide “away” over the “sandy bottom” of the bedrock.  It is an ancient trope:  the river is a symbol of time’s transience and the material world’s impermanence.  But Thoreau makes a surprising move, drawing a comparison between the sand and stars, bringing together the mundane and the celestial, so that only “eternity remains.”  In short, he is now in transcendental mode:  “I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars” (93).  What has he just said?  To Thoreau’s transcendent imagination, the difference between the stars in the sky and the sands at the bottom of the stream are eternally indistinguishable.  They are not the same—Thoreau wants to move beyond the transience of the pebbles and experience the “deeper” transcendence of the “stars”—but for Thoreau, they are are vitally connected.  The ordinary, everyday enterprise of fishing opens with way for the spiritual enterprise of fishing “in the sky.”

The next section of the paragraph extends this play on perspectives, but here Thoreau shifts his interest from the metaphysics of time to the epistemologies of space.  By clearing away the systems of knowledge he has learned in society—he says he “cannot count to one” and does not know the “first letter of the alphabet” (93)—by becoming as “wise” as an infant, Thoreau makes a Cartesian move, skeptically ridding himself of inherited knowledge (as if that were possible) in order to build a new system of knowledge upon a reliable foundation.  He has already begun this move this in the previous paragraph when he calls on the reader to “spend one day as deliberately as Nature” and move “downward” with him through all of the “mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance” that serve as an opaque surface to the “hard bottom” of “reality” (92).  Like Emerson, reality for Thoreau is not to be found in surface of appearances but in the spiritual realm beyond or beneath materiality.  Thus, society, the site both of materiality and transience, becomes for Thoreau (and Emerson before him) the “alluvion” through which he must “work and wedge” his way to a “point d’appui” (92), the base or support upon which he will build his knowledge.  More literally, this “point d’appui” can be regarded as an analogy to the material foundation upon which he builds his cabin.

The next key point in the passage regards the “intellect,” which is the tool (“a cleaver” (93)) that Thoreau will use to penetrate the temporal and spatial appearances of society and reach the “secret” of the spiritual realm.  In other words, Thoreau will use his “head”—he will read, write and think; he will lead the life of the philosopher-poet in the woods—and he does not want to labor with his “hands” any more than he is “necessary” (93).  To think:  that is mostly what the cryptic phrase “my head is hands and feet” means.”  Thoreau’s “best faculties” are “concentrated” in his rational mind (93).  But also, he is making a more universal comparison between the human’s animal nature, likening the human sensorium to that of a mole-like species whose “head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws” (93).  With his intellect and imagination, Thoreau will burrow his way toward eternal reality, which he senses is nearby in the woods. 

The last key point is the “divining-rod,” the second tool mentioned explicitly in the passage.  In the context of fishing, the “divining rod” is a reference to the fishing rod Thoreau casts into the stream of Time.  That it is a “divining-rod,” though, implies that this is a rare fishing expedition.  Taken literally, the dowser’s rod is used to locate the presence of underground water or minerals, and thus, the fish Thoreau would like to catch represent nature, or the reality of the natural world.  But the “divining-rod” also carries the sense of making nature divine, and in this use of the word, the metaphor signifies the poet-philosopher’s pencil, which is the extension of the intellect and imagination.  As we see in the next chapters, the celestial “thin rising vapors” ascending toward the sky continues the motifs in this passage.  The “stars” represent the transcendent and timeless poetic language Thoreau aspires to write, while the transient vapors signify the common speech of ordinary life.

Which Way is Up? (Emancipated Space in "Walden")

My thoughts on this passage have taken two directions, but I suspect they’re related. The first deals with the structure of the passage as reflective of an alternative (emancipated) worldview proposed in Walden. The second hypothesizes an anti-eschatological (and perhaps even anti-religious?) bent based on what precedes the passage (and which forms part of this emancipated worldview).

I've been wrestling with the slippage others have noticed in this passage, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is certainly deliberate. I think Thoreau’s evasiveness here (detailed comprehensively by Mary) reflects a deliberate unwillingness to shackle his prose to a definitive meaning. I see this unwillingness as part of a more general resistance to confinement in terms of physical space – even (especially?) indoors – in Walden. Thoreau professes to avoid enclosed property, describing it in terms of “imprisonment,” and taking pains to exempt his own house from that category: "It was not so much within doors as behind a door where I sat" (56, emphasis mine). It is also important to him, here, that he "did not feel crowded," even though the view from his door was "somewhat contracted" (57). Horizons seem acceptable – as long as they sit at an appropriate distance. The idea is to obtain "pasture enough for [his] imagination" (57). This all reveals an important assumption about the reciprocity between physical and mental space in Walden – one that Thoreau toys with in this disorienting passage.

Thoreau’s interest in the particular shape of one’s surroundings brings to mind an especially resonant passage from Rural Hours:

[I]t is particularly pleasant to wander about at will over so broad a field, confined to no track, and without an obstacle to arrest one’s progress, all which gives a freedom to these walks upon the lake, beyond what we are accustomed to in terra firma, where roads, and fences, and bridges must be consulted at every turn. (7)

Cooper seems to share Thoreau’s consciousness that modes of enclosure alter the texture of one’s lived experience (and therefore one’s inner landscape). What Thoreau illustrates in this complicated passage is that the same holds true of language. It, too, can be confining, and altering its shape here is comparable to deconstructing Cooper’s roads or fences or bridges; Thoreau emancipates meaning, or extends the mental horizon, to carve out a space large enough for contemplation.

Second: the passage’s stream/sky disorientation (located by Hiromi in the idea of the fish-bird) reproduces that “which way is up?” feeling we’ve all experienced in water. I think this is precisely the confusion Thoreau wants to evoke, hoping that we emerge from this passage with an altered perspective – literally – a new sense of which way is “up.” 

To contextualize this a little: the previous pages ponder our tendency to abstract ourselves from the here and now, “imagin[ing] rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system” (57). He pairs this observation with the idea that we have: “somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify god and enjoy him forever”” (59). Thoreau seems, instead, to propose a heavily presentist mode of existence, eschewing all distractions (into which category he seems to relegate things like...the afterlife!) from what is “real” (64). What this progression suggests (and what culminates in the final passage of this section) is that if we reorganize physical and mental space in a particular way, we can find space enough for meaningful contemplation right here, without sending our thoughts to some distant (or unknown/hypothesized/fantastical) location (or by projecting them onto an infinite being) where they have room to expand. If one only has the right kind of space here (which, as we see in the passage, is a state that might be partially obtained through language), one might discover the vastness of the celestial in a stream. This is how one lives here, now – or, as Thoreau terms it, “live[s] deliberately” (59). This worldview implies a bold shift in the locus of the “real” (64), which Thoreau locates not in God (or in heaven, or hell…) but on earth, or where we live now.