Nostalgia of the Beginnings

Henry David’s Thoreau book Walden recreates in a literary form the period that the author spent in the woods near Walden Pond. Being a transcendentalist influenced by Emerson’s philosophy, Thoreau reiterates the essential role that nature has in the spiritual and moral development of man. In Walden the author describes a return to a primordial age in which man lived in a state of wonder before the beauty of the universe and in a permanent communion with it. The sacredness of nature is rendered through ritual gestures that accompany man on his road to revelation. Thus, the period of time spent by Thoreau near Walden Pond acquires the qualities of an initiation during which man rediscovers his self and undergoes a spiritual awakening.

Joyful Frugality: Thoreau, Dickinson, and the Pleasures of Not Consuming

Chapter two counters the ethic of recycling with an anti-consumerist, joyful frugality theorized in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and the poetry of Emily Dickinson. It begins by evoking Lydia Maria Child, Sylvester Graham, and a popular culture of antebellum frugality advice literature, demonstrating that such advice literature linked refusing to consume with personal happiness and vibrant democratic citizenship. In this nineteenth-century context, Thoreau’s experiments in frugal living at Walden Pond emerge as central to the book’s political and artistic projects. Thoreau’s radical minimalism in Walden is designed to promote both individual happiness and collective social justice as it challenges the consumerist status quo. The last part of the chapter explores Emily Dickinson’s 1860s and 1870s poetry of desire, possession, and consumption. Against readings that have consistently pathologized Dickinson’s approach to these topics, chapter two suggests that Dickinson is a complex theorist of consumer desire whose emphasis on the pleasures of anticipation and the disappointments of consumption have much to teach us in the Capitalocene. This chapter ultimately suggests that Thoreau and Dickinson together theorize a joyful frugality that shifts the site of pleasure away from consumption, making anti-consumerist lifeways seem not only possible, but—more importantly—richly appealing.

Outhouses

Chapter 7 forays into visionary spaces occupied by writers beyond the domestic. It explores how the processes of writing are imagined within, and more usually beyond, the everyday domestic, with time outside the public hours of the day, and space behind, above, or beyond the public spaces of the house. With special reference to William Cowper’s summerhouse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s hermitage at Ermenonville, Henry Thoreau’s cabin by Walden Pond, Alexandre Dumas’ Gothic folly, and Vita Sackville-West’s tower at Sissinghurst, it considers how writers have dramatized the writing life as an enviable life of the imagination led beyond the everyday and the ordinary, enabling it to plunge its roots deep into wider, national landscapes.