"Walden or Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau belongs to the vivid and memorable American works of classical literature. The personality of the author and the pages of his famous book highlight anti-capitalist, romantic, and utopian ideas that received considerable spread in the United States in the 30-40-ies of the last century and these ideas were a kind of protest against the brutality of the bourgeois industrial progress and its accompanying social ills.
The ideological pioneers of the anti-capitalist and romantic-utopian protests were called transcendentalists. It is a circle of prominent representatives of the American democratic intelligentsia, initially grouped around a philosopher, poet and essayist called Ralph Waldo Emerson. The "Transcendental Club" at various times included between 15 and 20 people, including Orestes Brownson, the leader of the American labor movement in those years, Theodore Parker, a prominent abolitionist, Amos Olcott, a promoter of advanced pedagogical ideas in the United States, George Ripley, a prominent member of the American Fourierism, Margaret Fuller, literary critic and women's equality ideologue, and others. The club at one time was close to the famous American romantic Nathaniel Hawthorne. Concord became a centre of transcendentalism, it is a small town in New England, Massachusetts, where Emerson and Thoreau lived (Furtak, "Henry David Thoreau.").
New England is the oldest US state in the north-east coast of the country. It became the scene of a new ideological movement not by chance. While broad and rapid development of capitalism in the United States refers to the decades after the Civil War of the 1860s, New England in the 40s greatly progressed industrially and dramatic clash of the coming bourgeois-industrial way of life with the retreating patriarchal farmers was pretty evident.
At the end of the 30s, severe crisis broke out in the United States. Speculative fever associated with the construction of new means of communication (railways, canals), ended in financial collapse. Unemployment and massive wage cuts led to the impoverishment of the working people. No less than five years of American life, at least in the eastern parts of the country was marked by economic disaster.
During the 40s, many observers were forced to recognize the conspicuous abnormalities in American life. The most thoughtful of them found it necessary to revise the established idealized representations about ways of development of American bourgeois society. The American press gradually began to illuminate the plight of the factory proletariat in the United States. The women's labor in the textile industry of New England was highlited at that time. Most of workers were ruining their health, mental strength and morality, without achieving even the slightest improvement the material living conditions.
American life shocks required active action,that is why Henry Thoreau, one of the youngest members of the transcendental club, decided to replicate the social experience of Brook Farm alone. He built himself a hut in the woods, and shut it for two years, living alone, and giving up all that was considered wrong in modern civilization. In practice, this solution was reduced to the isolation from society, and Thoreau left only to historical curiosity, a belated "Robinson Crusoe", if he did not write a book about it, which gave a sharp criticism of contemporary American life and expressed the desire for a bright and full life, that is impossible for a person in the conditions of capitalist civilization (Furtak, "Henry David Thoreau.").
Considering the heterogeneous mix of peasant utopian, petty-bourgeois socialist, reform, and other elements in the program of the transcendentalists, one can not lose sight of the basic tendencies of development of American society: steady movement on the path of capitalist progress and the dominant role of bourgeois ideology in the United States.
After the Civil War transcendentalism was quickly leaving the stage and it dissolved in bourgeois ideology. It’s philosophy was becoming more a servant of philistinism. Orestes Brownson, who in 1840, predicted the social revolution in the United States, denied the labor movement and went to Catholicism. Many former US Fourierists finished their public career as a bourgeois liberals. That is historically unique and attractive, which resulted in the ideology and practice of transcendentalism, as it were crystallized in a short life and remarkable literary activity of Henry Thoreau.
Thoreau presents readers his experience as a practical task. How should live an indigent writer and lover of nature, so as care for the daily bread does not take of all his time and all the energy? Thoreau, resulting in the recording of his expenditure and revenue, proves that his company was break even. Money spent on furnishing, was returned by selling the crop, and, moreover, he was able to feed himself without borrowing. Besides, all these two years he was the only free and happy man around Concord, while others languished in captivity, no matter if they realized it or not ("Henry David Thoreau.").
According to Thoreau, the life of his contemporaries is a life of lunatics who can not distinguish right from wrong and disastrous from useful. Most people, even in our relatively free country, by mistake or simply out of ignorance are so obsessed with fictional worries and unnecessary toil of life that they can not collect the best of its fruits. The accumulation of property and care for its augmentation are exhausting for man and drive him headlong down the road of life. He barely has time to recover before his death, and to recognize that his life has flown wasted. This happens everywhere and to everyone.
However, Thoreau thinks that evil is still can be overcomed, if a person would voluntarily give up from needless worries that burden himself. First of all, he should give himself a strict account of what he really needs and what is superfluous. Then it is easy to realize that it is good to limit material needs with basic necessities. A huge part of luxury, and much of amenities of life, is not needed by a man, but it positively interferes with the progress of the human race.
In a special chapter, titled "Solitude", Thoreau disputes the need for communication between people in the form of forced neighbourhood, which a modern urban civilization offers. He draws his life in the forest as a blissful state of man, freed from the shackles of civilization. Not surprisingly, Thoreau draws a dangerous city for the visitor as a dirty brothel, in the best case as the ridiculous product of modern civilization.
This unrestrained idealization of seclusion surrounded by nature and criticism of all forms of human cohabitation should not yet be considered as claim, although in general they reflect the individualistic tendency of author. It would be imprudent to fully identify the hero of the book with the author's personality. Although author talks in the book in first person, "Walden" as a literary work has two plans: it is not only the blog of author, concerned with social problems of contemporary American life, but it is also a romantic utopia, with a protester hero-individualist in the center, prone to most extreme polemical generalizations("About Thoreau: Thoreau and the Environment.").
Thoreau was not very famous. The income from his literary pursuits was small and random. Already being the author of "Walden", he continued to earn money, mainly surveying. Thoreau's first book ’’A Week on Concord and Merrimack River’’, was published in 1849 at his own expense and it received enthusiasticall comments by Emerson and Alcott, bit the book itself was not successful at all. Out of the total circulation of one thousand copies, bookseller sent the seven hundred-odd back to the author. The success of "Walden" was very limited. In the 60-s, thanks to the efforts of friends, some of his articles and speeches and several books devoted to the American nature were posthumously published, continuing in its genre line of "Walden". Major works and his extensive diaries are included in the 20-volume (so-called Walden) collection of his works, were published in 1906.
Thoreau's prose attractiveness owes much of its merits as a journalist. However, the style of Thoreau also has less visible internal features that have received the utmost importance for the further development of American literature. Partly driven by the pathos of a natural-science description language Thoreau achieves high accuracy, specificity and simplicity, and in this respect is one of the forerunners of the modern American realistic prose.
Public outcry in "Walden", as has been shown, at times limited to the individualistic trend is also the author of the book pages are found, where Thoreau is no stranger to the moral and philosophical intricacies of his fellow Transcendentalists. With all that in "Walden", it has brilliant critique of bourgeois possessiveness and exploitative bourgeois morality. Features in personal appearance and in the literary and social position of Thoreau are reflecting a certain provincialism of American intellectual life of the XIX century, but it should not overshadow the remarkable positive features of his moral character that enabled him to become one of the most persistent opponents of "American way of life" of his time.
Loud fame of Thoreau begins in the twentieth century, when the "Walden" (like "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville) was finally recognized in the United States as a classic American literature. If the bourgeois American sociologists strongly extol Thoreau’s individualism, "anarchy" and distrust of politics is largely disputed by himself at the end of life, the writers of the anti-capitalist direction, beginning with Theodore Dreiser, clearly show the value of Thoreau’s protest for the American culture. In our days, when issues of interaction between culture and the environment have gained unprecedented relevance and global significance, we pay particular attention the books of writers of the past, who praise the unity of man and nature.
Works Cited
Furtak, Rick Anthony. "Henry David Thoreau." Stanford University. Stanford University, 30 June 2005. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
"About Thoreau: Thoreau and the Environment." About Thoreau: Thoreau and the Environment | Walden Woods. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
"Henry David Thoreau." Bio.com. A&E Networks Television. Web. 12 Apr. 2016.
