The Man in the Field: Thoreau’s "Concern to Be Observed

Undergraduate Review Volume 12 Article 7 2016 The Man in the Field: Thoreau’s "Concern to Be Observed" Don Boivin Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Boivin, Don (2016). The Man in the Field: Thoreau’s "Concern to Be Observed". Undergraduate Review, 12, 27-31. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev/vol12/iss1/7 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2016 Don Boivin The Man in the Field: Thoreau’s ‘Concern to Be Observed’ DON BOIVIN exhibits. It’s no surprise then that Thoreau, as a result of his two-year experiment confronting “the essential facts of life” at Walden Pond (Thoreau 172), came to be known, both affectionately and resentfully, as the Concord Hermit. The myth persists to this day, despite the indisputable facts surrounding Thoreau’s close ties to family, friends, and the Concord community during his stay at Walden, let alone his involvement with the utopian socialist Association movement at Brook Farm and the didactic social motives behind Walden. Emerson himself affectionately referred to his friend as a “hermit and stoic” at Thoreau’s funeral. If Emerson had a soft spot for hermits (the Oxford English Dictionary cites Emerson twice under Up among the jagged rocks and cliffs, its entry for “hermit”), then his casual reference can be excused, Just west of Erving town, though in the words of critic Walter Harding, the eulogy “had a There is a noted spot, the Hermit’s Cave, most devastating effect on [Thoreau’s] fame” (22). The sentimental A place of great renown. and romantic fascination with hermits was not without literary and historical provenance, but the fact is, it distorted both readers’ From far and near they come, and critics’ expectations, interpretations, and reviews of Thoreau’s The high, the low, the rich and gay, Walden, thus conceiving and perpetuating an unwarranted myth To see this strange and curious man, whose steady course centuries of debating critics have been unable And unto him their homage pay. to alter. Thoreau was in no way hiding from the people of Concord, and in fact wanted to be seen and thought about by them. The hermit Then let us mingle with the crowd fallacy, along with its consequent view of Thoreau as a “failure” for That daily gathers at his door, associating often with his townspeople, stands only as an obstacle And learn the reason, if we can, toward a genuine understanding of the true and public quality of Why he calls this world a bore. Thoreau’s model experiment at Walden Pond. The romantic notion of the wizened old hermit sequestered Why he shuns the haunts of men, in a gloomy cave pervaded eighteenth- and nineteenth-century And leads a hermits life, American society. The Massachusetts Hermit, the Pennsylvania Never sighs for the innocent prattle of a child, Hermit, and the Hermit of Erving Castle were some of the well- Or the gentle ministrations of a wife. known recluses romanticized in narrative form. These works made From The Hermit of Erving Castle, 1871 (J. Smith) up a “previously unrecognized American genre” Dowdell calls T “the hermit’s tale.” “Hermit manuscripts,” he writes, are a “direct he term hermit was on the tips of American tongues in the legacy of Defoe’s unique fashioning of the castaway narrative” in early nineteenth century, likely a result of what the critic Coby Robinson Crusoe (135). The much-besotted cave-dweller of Erving, Dowdell refers to as “a sustained cultural interest in both male Massachusetts personifies this ocean-crossing textual unfolding and female hermitic figures during the post-Revolutionary period” in his claims to have been a “professional hermit” in England. (121). Hermits populated poetry, prose, music, and wax museum BRIDGEWATER STATE UNIVERSITY 27 • THE UNDERGRADUATE REVIEW • 2016 An article in the Athol Worcester West Chronicle establishes his assumption that Thoreau meant to live as a hermit, but that as such, assertion: “Among the domains of England’s nobility, it is customary he was doing a very poor job of it. A Boston Atlas review of 1854 to have a romantic spot inhabited by a hermit, with long disheveled stated, “He was no true hermit. He only played savage on the borders hair, matted beard, and fingernails like the talons of an eagle, who of civilization; going back to the quiet town whenever he was unable daily adds additional charms to render the surroudings [sic] more to supply his civilized wants by his own powers” (“D’A” 32). James and more picturesque” (J. Smith). If the citizens of Concord and Russell Lowell, one of Thoreau’s most vehement critics, wrote, “He Boston imagined Thoreau to be their very own hermitic curiosity, was forever talking of getting away from the world, but he must be their fantasies were destined to be disillusioned, as the man had little always near enough to it, nay, to the Concord corner of it” (48). interest in entertaining another’s agenda: “Ne look for entertainment Lowell goes on to contrast Thoreau’s quarters unfavorably to that of where none was” he quotes (Spenser’s The Fairie Queen) in the “a genuine solitary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles “Visitors” chapter of Walden (210). beyond all human communication” (49). Originally denoting one who retires to solitude from Many of the critics of this vein also “accuse” Thoreau religious motives, the term hermit has evolved to encompass just of quitting after two years, implying the author disproved his own about anyone withdrawing into self-imposed solitude (“hermit, n.”), theories by not living out his days in the woods. “When he had though contemporary undertones are of a negative nature; in most enough of that kind of life,” mocks Robert Louis Stevenson, “he of the American hermit narratives, the hermit has been damaged or showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it.” (67). victimized by a person or group of people (the hermit of Erving Charles Frederick Briggs writes, “He was happy enough to get suffered the betrayal of his lover, the Pennsylvania hermit saw his back among the good people of Concord, we have no doubt; for sister executed for infanticide) and has shunned convention and although he paints his shanty-life in rose-colored tints, we do not propriety in favor of a reclusive life far from the perceived failings of believe he liked it, else why not stick to it?” (27). Even his good friend society. “The hermit’s backstory represents the main thematic thrust Emerson contributed to the rhetoric: “As soon as he had exhausted of the hermit’s tale, explaining his or her reasons for withdrawal the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it” (26). No doubt, while underscoring the central crit (...truncated)