Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies

Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies
Author(s): John S. Pipkin

Source: Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 91, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), pp. 527-
545
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John S. Pipkin
Department of Geography and Planning, State University of New York at Albany
For Henry David Thoreau, penetrating landscape observation provided an unfailing point of departure for natural
description, ecstatic contemplation, and violently paradoxical social commentary. His texts express, question, nat-
uralize, and deploy many presuppositions about geographic order in the landscape. His writing life, ending in 1862,
spanned a time when teleological explanations of the landscape were challenged by the gradual "detheologization"
of scientific thought. The new views on the ultimate geographic role of Providence all made some room for empir-
ical, proximate explanations of geography's grand theme: the fit between humanity and the earth. The effect of
Thoreau's development from transcendental idealism to a penetrating yet fussy empiricism was to dissolve the unity
of the human and natural worlds. His odd, shifting, rhetorical appropriation of place, his resistance to unqualified
generalization, and his purported aversion to travel (outside of Concord) all contrast with the path geography took
during the second-Darwinian-half of the century. Because he was well informed about the science of his time and
about Humboldt and Guyot in particular, and because his texts are rich literary contrivances, geographers may fruit-
fully examine his work in two ways: first, as a register of educated thought about landscape before geography's
modem institutionalization as a discipline, and second, as a complex of written landscapes, inscribing and erasing
places in varied ways, expressing the contradictions of early modemism. Key Words: geographic thought, Thoreau,
writing landscapes.
he idea that human geography can profit by at- education and the high hopes of his transcendentalist
tending more closely to literary explorations of mentors. In the handsome biographical sketch he pub-
place is hardly new. However, fresh impetus has lished in 1863 on the premature death of his "best
come from several directions, including the new cultural friend," Ralph Waldo Emerson (1883) sounds a note of
geography, gender and postcolonial studies, and recent disappointment and failed promise. Thoreau should
work on symbolic, ideological, textual, and discursive have been "pounding empires" rather than "pounding
practices (e.g., Barnes and Duncan 1992; Rose 1993; beans," but he became merely "captain of a huckleberry
Mitchell 1994; Groth and Bressi 1997; Schein 1997; party" (1883, 448; Richardson 1986, 299). In the same
Cosgrove 1998). Oakes (1997), in particular, asks geog- posthumous tribute, Emerson (422) profoundly misreads
raphers to turn to literary texts to reinsert the concept of Thoreau's relation to the science of his day, asserting that
place into discourse on modernity. Although place is "though very studious of natural facts, he was incurious
alive and well in various postmodern guises, he argues, of technical and textual science."
analyses centering on modernity tend to devalue place Twentieth-century literary and environmental schol-
by conflating it with community or casting it in the role arship worked to rescue Thoreau from the judgments of
of a nostalgic site of bygone traditions and values. Oakes his neighbors and his mentor and to reappraise his rela-
asks us to look back from postmodernity and reconsider tionship to science. This scrutiny deflated the magisterial
the role of place as a key terrain on which the struggles universality that is such a marked characteristic of Tho-
and transformations of modernity have been represented reau's style. The near invisibility of women in his texts is
in literature. In this article I follow Oakes's cue and at- the most egregious among many erasures and evasions.
tempt to assess a writer whose works from 1840 until his He has appeared to some critics as "a recluse, cold, humor-
death in 1862 comprise an extraordinarily rich series of less, inhuman ... a skulker ... a sentimentalist ... frail,
representations of landscape and place, exemplifying on freakish, ... a bundle of inhibitions" (Cook 1949, xiii).
many levels the tensions of early modernism. Yet his star continued to rise through the twentieth cen-
Henry David Thoreau's neighbors in Concord saw tury. The turn of the millennium finds the author of "Slav-
him walking around the edges of their world observing ery in Massachusetts" (1973a), "Civil Disobedience"
wildlife and doing odd jobs. He was a surprisingly capable (1965a), and Walden ([1854] 1989) recognized as an icon
and accurate part-time land surveyor, to be sure, but fun- of radical individualism, a prophet of environmentalism
damentally he was an idler and a marginal figure, one and deep ecology, a protolibertarian, a sometime coun-
who had failed to live up to the promise of his Harvard terculture hero, and an influence on Gandhi and Martin
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(3), 2001, p. 527-545
? 2001 by Association of American Geographers
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
528 Pipkin
Luther King. His exemplary actions-his refusal to pay define a genre subsequently populated by many expert
taxes to slavery and the Mexican War and the resulting writers such as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez. However,
night in jail, his two years in the hut by the pond, his they are equally nonfictional. They take upon them-
passionate concern for the wild, his purism, and his "rev- selves the same kinds of obligation to fact as historical
olutionary abstinence"-continue to exercise deep texts, while reserving the right to an extraordinary flexi-
power over the imagination. "This power has given Tho- bility of interpretation and metaphor. Thus, Thoreau
reau an extraordinary reputation and influence on our casts the "facts" of place, landscape, and nature in a dis-
own time" (Stoehr 1979, 21).1 concerting variety of forms. He feels none of the obliga-
Almost all of Thoreau's published work deals with tions of consistency and few of the explanatory agendas
places: Cape Cod ([1865] 1988), The Maine Woods of science. Beneath multiple layers of irony and paradox,
([1864] 1972), A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers he poses as realist, a poet, a transcendentalist, and an en-
([1849] 1980; hereafter referred to as Week), "A Walk to voy from Eastern mysticism. He claims to be well in-
Wachusett" (1906d), A Yankee in Canada (1961), and formed about the landscapes he sees, but at the same
various other essays, and of course Walden ([1854] 1989) time he systematically alienates himself, claiming a
itself. Along with his Journal, these works surely repre- whole new apprehension-an outsider's view-of the
sent one of the most sustained attempts to scrutinize mundane and domesticated lands around Concord.
landscapes and write them down that has ever been In this article I argue for a rereading of Thoreau by
made.2 His journals and notebooks process and rework geographers for two specific disciplinary purposes. They
landscape observations and "theory," particularly ideas correspond to the two principal works of his life: the see-
from transcendentalism and liberal political and eco- ing and the writing of landscapes. The first reading looks
nomic thought, in a fashion that is acutely attentive to at the contents of Thoreau's landscapes and the kinds of
the science and philosophy of his time, particularly Har- order he finds there. His obsessive interrogation of land-
vard, Agassiz, Darwin, and the new biology. It is curious, scape provides a window into the intellectual world at a
then, that he remains a marginal figure in the disciplin- crucial time in geography's American history, after
ary purview of geography. Kant's "detheologization" of geographical knowledge
Because of Thoreau's intense concern with place, sev- (Livingstone 1992) but before Darwin, while the word
eral literary scholars have linked him with geography in "geography" and the ideas of Humboldt, Guyot, Ritter,
its general sense. For example the first page of Garber's and others were current, but well before the institution-
Thoreau's Fable of Inscribing (1991, 1) uses the words "ge- alization and professionalization of the field in the
ography," "cartographical," "mapping," and "landscape," United States.
confirming, if nothing else, the power of mapping meta- The second level on which Thoreau merits geo-
phors in cultural and literary analysis (Pickles 1999). graphic reappraisal is as a canonical writer of landscape.
Other Thoreau scholars draw upon the discipline of ge- His is a thoroughly bookish and "writerly" approach to
ography more directly. For example, Buell (1995a) is very the land. He encrusts it with allusions to his reading and
well informed about work of humanistic geographers.3 thinking on everything from local history, geological
One of the latest points of contact, which connects far surveys, and botany to travelers' tales, Hindu philosophy,
more deeply with geography's roots, is Laura Dassow Greek and Roman literature, Goethe, economics, and
Walls's (1995) reconstruction of Thoreau as a Humbold- contemporary natural philosophy. Presented with the
tian, aligning him directly with one of the founding fig- pretense of fresh and uncluttered apprehension, his land-
ures of geography. Within geography itself, though, Tho- scapes are in fact the most skillful literary contrivances,
reau has mostly been accorded brief comments for his fruits of unremitting experimentation and growth as a
vision of the wild, as a radical individualist, and as a piv- writer. They exhibit a multitude of ways in which places
otal figure in Americans' appropriation of their own and landscapes can be constituted and dissolved, seem-
landscapes free of the trappings of European thought ingly for their own sake, but also to serve Thoreau's
(e.g., Lowenthal 1976). Lowenthal elsewhere presents deeper rhetorical and narrative purposes.
him as an aesthetic counterpart to a more practical and In the following sections I attempt to outline these
central figure in geography's genealogy, George Perkins two potential geographical readings of Thoreau. First, we
Marsh (Lowenthal 1958, 272; 2000a, 2000b). examine his trajectory as he moved away from Emerson's
Lowenthal's comparison of Thoreau with Marsh is distinctively American form of a natural theology of
telling. It is futile to seek Marsh-like rigor in Thoreau's landscape toward his own amalgam of idealism and hard
texts, which delicately position themselves between sci- empiricism, and we explore connections between this
ence and literature. They are clearly literary; in fact they vision and the work of two of the most progressive geog-
Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies 529
raphers of his time, Arnold Guyot and Alexander von soothing, but they are not interesting for their own sake.
Humboldt.4 Then we turn to Thoreau's actual writing of Differences between places are elided. Their relation-
landscapes, aiming to demonstrate how slippery geog- ships are harmonious not because of the working out of a
raphy becomes in his work and asking what purposes this causal order toward other than human ends, but by design.
reworking of the landscape serves. Finally, we suggest Epistemologically, the way to understand the order of
what these two readings have in common, and what in- the landscape is to apprehend the whole: "The charming
terest they might have for contemporary geography. landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made
up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field,
Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But
none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in
The Transcendent and the Empirical
the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can
in the Landscape
integrate all the parts, that is, the poet" (Emerson [1903]
As Livingstone (1992) notes, natural theology pro- 1968, 8). Emerson (66) criticized specialized and partial
vided an inevitable background to geographical knowl-

vision, which he equated with the empirical: "Empirical
edge in the pre-Darwinian years but took a wide variety

science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowl-
of forms. Thoreau's starting point was the distinctively

edge of functions and processes to bereave the student of
American version of providential doctrine he encoun-

the manly contemplation of the whole. The savant be-
tered first at Harvard in Emerson's Nature, published in

comes unpoetic." Ideally, though, Nature is knowable as
1836 ([1903] 1968). Transcendentalism combined domes-

"the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher
tic and German roots. The American roots were un-

laws than its own shines through it" (34). Onto this nu-
equivocally religious, reacting against Calvinism and some

minous, timeless whole of landscape, Emerson (31) cast a
of the doctrines of the Unitarian church, asserting the

mild antiurban bias, an aversion to the "roar of cities or
unity of the natural and the divine, the immanence of

the broil of politics," which Thoreau was to take much
God in the world, and the accessibility of the absolute.

farther. Finally, he (41) maintained that landscape, like
Emerson's Germanophile circle fused this view with ele-

everything else in nature, is pervaded by moral law:
ments of Kant's idealism, writings of Coleridge, and Ori-

"every natural process is a version of a moral sentence."
ental philosophy to assert the fundamental unity of the

This, then, is American transcendentalism's version
natural and moral worlds, of art, literature, philosophy,

of a natural theology of landscape. It provided the matrix
and natural science (e.g., Miller 1960, 1965, 1967; Porte

from which Thoreau broke away on his own idiosyn-
1965; Koster 1975; Stoehr 1979; Richardson 1986). Sci-

cratic path, just as the nascent discipline of geography
ence and natural history were implicitly devalued. In

began to move beyond natural theology at about the
Emerson's hands, transcendentalism eschewed the gritty

same time. Many of Emerson's contemporaries strongly
details of the world (carpentry and chemistry, as he put

criticized his brand of majestic, neoplatonic generaliza-
it), and made little room for empiricism for its own sake.
tion.5 Thoreau, on the other hand, began as a true dis-
The study of nature was a path to the ideal. The differen-

ciple. Providential ideas left pervasive traces in his writ-
tiation of the world was illusory. All places and times

ing until the end, just as Livingstone (1992) detects
could indifferently be appropriated and transcended by a

them in geography up to and after the Darwinian revolu-
human nature which, although at root unchanging, had

tion. Yet Thoreau's whole bent was at odds with Emerson's,
to be honed by assiduous "self-culture."

and his perceptions developed in directions altogether
The relation of the human to the natural world was

more empirical, deeply problematizing the self-evidence
an explicit transcendentalist theme, which Emerson

of the "thing itself" while maintaining until the end easy
([1903] 1968, 10) developed at length: "The greatest

rhetorical access to the tropes of transcendentalism.6
delight which the fields and woods minister is the sugges-

The metaphors in which the transcendental land-
tion of an occult relation between man and the vegeta-

scape was cast were organic.7 Emerson ([1903] 1968,
ble." Emerson (12) insisted that the world provides for

200) thoroughly mystified the idea: "In all animal and
humanity, a property that he termed commodity: ". .. the

vegetable forms, the physiologist concedes that no
steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his
chemistry, no mechanics, can account for the facts, but a
support and delight on this green ball which floats him

mysterious principle of life must be assumed." Emerson
through the heavens." The outline of a transcendentalist

himself said of Thoreau, "His determination on Natural
theory of landscape (which Emerson did not write but

History was organic . . ." Characteristically, he went on
Thoreau, arguably, sometimes did) are clear: the con-

to diminish Thoreau's version as parochial and domesti-
tents of landscape are noble, beautiful, and sometimes

cated: Thoreau was "restrained by his Massachusetts cul-
530 Pipkin
birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass
ture" and "he played out the game in this mild form of
from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering
botany and ichthyology" (1883, 440).
butterfly.... Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as
Certainly, although Thoreau took pride in his own
if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water
practicality as an artificer and odd job man, the alterna-
plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree
tive mechanistic metaphor of geographic pioneers such
itself is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose
as Maury had no appeal (Livingstone 1992, 153). One
pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova
searches his texts in vain for application of "machine,"
of insects in their axils. ([1854] 1989, 306-7)
"mechanism," and so on to the natural world. He reserves
The reference to towns and cities in the last sentence is
the terms for the human world, almost always with critical
significant: it is the farthest Thoreau ever pushes the
intent, for example in "Civil Disobedience" (1965a, 637):
metaphor of crystalline botany and the closest he ever
"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly,
comes, I think, to subsuming the human and the natural
but as machines, with their bodies." In the late work Wild
landscapes under one model. It is a model of stasis con-
Fruits (2000), he voices very specific objections to the
cealed below variety. It has irresistible unseen powers
explanatory use of machine metaphors (e.g., 242).
eternally filling out the same preordained forms. This is
Thoreau's attitude to science and landscape at the be-
not a metaphor which problematizes adaptation and fit
ginning of his writing life, and his early mobilization of
between the parts, but it offers an a priori account of why
organic metaphors, are nicely represented in his review
they fit: they are preordained to do so.
of "A Natural History of Massachusetts" (Thoreau
With its stress on morphology, we may connect this
1906b), which appeared in the transcendentalist journal
metaphor to Foucault's classical episteme of resem-
The Dial in 1842. The essay is framed as a review of sev-
blances, and it is reasonable to associate Thoreau's shift
eral scientific reports on the flora and fauna of the state.
to a more contingent and probing account of the wild
He strikes a thoroughly providential note-"Nature has
with the transformation of the concept of organic order
taken more care than the fondest parent for the educa-
from its traditional visual basis (the "resemblances" of
tion and refinement of her children"-while diminishing
the classical episteme), to order predicated on the func-
human busyness-"more is adoing than Congress wots
tional and the genetic ("the transition from the visible
of"-and claiming nature as the site of repose: "In society
structure to the taxonomic character" [Foucault 1970,
you will not find health, but in nature" (124, 104, 105).
159; see also Gregory 1994, 21]). According to this
He (105) reproduces romantic claims of the health-
account, the classical episteme of ordering by resem-
giving properties of the wild (Thompson 1976): "There
blance is supplanted by a concern for representations.
is ... [no] ... fragrance so penetrating and restorative as
This drives a wedge between word and thing. In this
the life-everlasting in high pastures." Throughout the re-
crevice, natural history is born. Natural history then
view he stakes his own claim to intimate knowledge of
strives to redefine the connection between words and
the wildlife of the state, and he engages a theory of forms
things. On the one hand, proliferating technical vocabu-
which much attracted him in the earlier part of his life.
lary provides more precise labels; on the other, a thing is
He (126) calls it "crystalline botany." It was based on
problematical and anomalous until it is correctly named.
Goethe's model of the leaf as a fundamental template of
Particularly in his later botanizing, Thoreau shows pre-
inanimate and animate growing forms (Richardson 1986).
cisely these obsessions with mastering taxonomic vocabu-
For students of Thoreau's epistemology, perhaps the
lary and with deeply probing each observation until a label
most visited passage in all his work is a section in
is found. This probing vision is restrictive and exclusionary:
the "Spring" chapter of Walden in which he develops this
it is concerned with "seeing a few things systematically"
idea by tracing morphological resemblances and infer-
(Foucault 1970, 134). This accords exactly with Thoreau's
ring a common vital impulse in natural forms ranging
own accounts of the hard work of seeing (the "intention
from channels in thawing clay to human forms in the
of the eye," as he puts it in Cape Cod [(1865) 1988, 95]).
landscape. Greatly abbreviated, the passage runs:
As early as 1842, he (1906b, 131) writes that "[w]e must
I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world
look a long time before we can see," while in the essay
and me,-had come to where he was still at work ... with
"Autumnal Tints" he (1906a, 285-86) claims:
excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about . . . this
sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the The greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this
vitals of the animal body. You find thus in the very sands an reason concealed from us all our lives.... There is just as
anticipation of the vegetable leaf. ... The atoms have al- much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared
ready learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhang- to appreciate,-not a grain more.... The scarlet oak must,
ing leaf sees here its prototype.... The feathers and wings of in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see
anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it In transcendentalist and organicist usage, the world is
into our heads,-and then we can hardly see anything else.

adapted to humanity. In Darwinian usage, the subject of
the verb changes and life adapts to its environment.
This hard-perhaps obsessive-work of seeing and
Thoreau very rarely uses words such as "fitted" or
naming was informed by Thoreau's voracious, though
"adapted" in senses that specifically acknowledge the ad-
skeptical, reading of natural history. Thoreau was in-
aptation of living things to their settings. More often
creasingly at odds with the teleological, taxonomic ver-
than not his usage seems ambiguous, equally interpret-
sion of the organic being developed at Harvard by the
able as "outfitted by Providence" (e.g., Journal entries on
preeminent naturalist Agassiz (Walls 1995). Agassiz,
6 April and 11 December 1855). As late as 1860, he is
who knew Humboldt and also associated with Emerson,
convinced that the concealment behavior of a bittern
arrived in 1848, bringing high prestige from his develop-
(imitating a vertical reed or stick) was "designed," and
ment of a theory of ice ages and glaciation. He strove to
speculates about whether it cooperates with its maker,
systematize and professionalize American science, mar-
"who contrived this concealment" (Journal 17 April
ginalizing field naturalists, including groups such as the
1860). Some months later, when we can be sure that
Boston Society of Natural History. Thoreau initially en-
Thoreau had absorbed ideas in The Origin of Species and
gaged with the new regime at Harvard and provided
when he was occupied by detailed measurements of tree
many specimens. He met Agassiz at Emerson's and re-
sizes, distributions, and growth rings, we find rather more
corded skepticism of Agassiz's powers of observation and
Darwinian accounts of tree succession (e.g., Journal 5
of his conclusions (Richardson 1986, 367). Thoreau's
November 1860).
growing alienation from this dry, taxonomic brand of sci-
To the end, though, Thoreau remained averse to the
ence, culminating in his refusal to join the American
language of competition and struggle for survival. Words
Academy, constitutes a well-known chapter in Thoreau
such as "selection," "struggle," "survival," "fittest," "fit-
scholarship (Richardson 1986; Walls 1995, 146).
ness," "competition," "contest," and the like are rare and
Increasingly, the engagement with "textual science"
hardly ever used in any recognizably Darwinian senses in
led his landscape observations to split into two registers.
his latest texts. If Thoreau's crystalline botany marks the
In the domains of plant and animal taxonomy, and bot-
beginning of his systematic thought about order in na-
any in particular, his vocabulary became more technical.
ture, his final decade-long observations on wild fruits,
In other spheres, even in physiography, his tone re-
seed dispersals, and the succession of forest trees mark its
mained visual and devoid of technical vocabulary (some
end-a major step toward a modern, ecological, and em-
rudimentary geomorphology recorded in the Journal for
pirical view of nature's workings (Thoreau 1993; Hoag
30 January 1860 provides a good example of this). Even
1995; Walls 1999).
his reading of Agassiz seems to have been selective,
focusing on Agassiz's conservative, anti-Darwinian biol-
ogy. In fact, Agassiz was most progressive and had the
Traces of Guyot and Humboldt
greatest lasting impact in glaciology. His thinking on a
universal ice age had made European geologists "glacier-
Writing of Thoreau, Henry Canby (1939, 334) suggests:
mad" before he came to Harvard (Turner 1985, 196).
However, Thoreau did not work contemporary glaciol- If he aspired to any science which was more than classifica-
tion and collecting it was to geography, a science scarcely

ogy into his thinking in the way he did botany. For exam-
adolescent in Thoreau's day, although with Humboldt and
ple, on repeated trips to Cape Cod he only notes the
the young Darwin it had been brought out of its infancy.
power of the sea in reshaping the land.8
Geography is the study of man's environment with refer-
In assessments of how progressive Thoreau's scientific
ence to its effect on man [sic]. There could be no better de-
stance was, attention necessarily focuses on his encoun-
scription of hundreds of pages of Thoreau's later Journal
ter with evolutionary theory. Thoreau had been aware of
than this.
Darwin since his encounter with the Voyage of the Beagle
As an outsider's reading of the discipline in the 1930s,

in 1851. The Origin of Species arrived in Concord in Jan-
this is a revealing statement. However, putting its deter-

uary 1860 (Richardson 1986,376), and Thoreau attended
minist overtones aside, Canby's perception underlines

closely to it. It probably spurred him to apply some of its
the holistic and humanistic elements in Thoreau's read-

ideas on natural selection and the wasteful prodigality of
ings of nature, along with his (increasingly problematic)

nature in his study of plant dispersions (Thoreau 1993).
attempts to connect the human and the natural. During

Darwin not only contradicted Agassiz's notions on the im-
Thoreau's lifetime, American geography, by that name at

mutability of species but also held a diffusionist view of
where they originated (e.g.,Journal 3 June 1858). least, was indeed a weak and marginal endeavor. He
532 Pipkin
graduated in 1837 from a Harvard where the word "geog- one-time Governor General of Canada, and dryly com-
raphy" had flickered in and out of the curriculum: it was ments: "This statement will do ... to set against Buffon's
first included in the list of studies in 1642, but then account of this part of the world and its productions."
apparently was subsumed under cosmology and physics, Guyot was much concerned with explanatory nomen-
although Guthrie's and Morse's geographies were used as clature and with developing, integrating, and organizing
texts in the late 1700s (Martin 1998, 5). Studies of Tho- concepts: "the discovery of the laws," as he put it (cited
reau's voracious reading and wide intellectual interests in James 1972, 508). Organic and vegetative metaphors
record many encounters with gazetteers, travelers' tales, lay at the heart of his explanations of the relationship be-
and other reports, as well as with classical, European, tween humanity and the physical world. He ([1849]
and American travelers and forerunners of geography.9 1970, 72) outlines a seemingly explicit machinery of ex-
He was acquainted with Buffon's work, with Jedidiah planation: a "law of life and of growth" with its "rhythm,"
Morse's Universal Geography, with several gazetteers, its "mutual exchange of relations," based on difference,
including Morse's and McCulloch's, and with various to- duality, and inequality. This exchange, in "incessant
pographic descriptions, including the work of local histo- alternation," constitutes "that movement which we call
rians and the U.S. Army's Corps of Topographical Engi- life" (72). The developmental process continues through
neers (Sattelmeyer 1988). organic life, on to animal and human societies, accompa-
Thoreau typically uses the word "geography" in the nied by diversification and specialization of functions,
eighteenth-century topographic sense distinguished by through the savage state to the "industrial talents that
Anne Marie Godlewska (1999). In one of his accounts of have their birth in the wants of luxury, and are revealed
a map, he ([1865] 1988, 180) draws an explicit distinc- by the thousand elegant nothings displayed in our draw-
tion between enthnographical, zoological, botanical, and ing rooms" ( 77).
geographical information. He assumes that geographers The richness of New World vegetation is a recurring
are the ones keeping track of the length of rivers (1961, theme in Guyot's work. With his characteristic sweep, he
116), the proportion of the globe covered by water (1980, declares that "[n]ot only is the vegetation abundant in
238), and the location of ancient Troy (1980, 385). He the New World, but it is universal, and this is a further
did, however, encounter work by two figures who were characteristic distinguishing it from the Old" ([1849]
heirs to the far grander, universalizing tradition of geogra- 1970, 190). "This luxuriant vegetation... seems to stifle
phy: Arnold Guyot and Alexander von Humboldt. the higher life, in the animal world" (191). Possibly Tho-
Thoreau read Guyot's Earth and Man in 1851 (Walls reau had Guyot's vegetative account in mind in The
1995, 130). This volume developed from lectures by Maine Woods ([1864] 1972), in which he writes loggers
Guyot at the Lowell Institute in Boston, after Guyot had thoroughly into their landscape with pictures of cloy-
joined his close associate Agassiz in the New World. Al- ingly dense vegetation. In "Walking," too, we find strong
though Guyot's book begins with advocacy of a more reliance on vegetable metaphors (e.g., 1965b, 617).
modem, integrative usage of the words "geographer" and However, the breadth of Guyot's generalizations was
"geography," Thoreau continued to use them sparingly unpalatable to Thoreau. He (1965b, 610) explicitly dis-
and in conventional ways. However, a good deal of Guyot tances himself from some aspects of Guyot's thought in a
would have appealed to the transcendentalist side of Tho- characteristically ambiguous sentence: "The geographer
reau, including a Ritterian commitment to a harmonious Guyot, himself a European, goes farther,-farther than I
world as an explicit expression of a divine order. There am ready to follow him; yet not when he says,-'As the
was much to please a Jeffersonian sensibility, too, includ- plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is
ing Guyot's ([1849] 1970, 298-99) placement of America made for the animal world, America is made for the man
in the human (read "European") vanguard of "the geo- of the Old World."' Broad racial generalizations and en-
graphical march of civilization" with immigrants "tak[ing] vironmental determinism are cases in point. Aspects of
a fresh start, recommenc[ing] a new existence." This vi- deterministic generalizations about race and the rela-
sion of the New World as the frontier of human develop- tionship of human activity to climate had been endemic
ment, emancipated from the Old, would have been con- in geographic thought since ancient times and were part
genial to Thoreau, who was quite well informed about the of the cultural air Thoreau breathed. He would have ab-
tendency of European geographers to diminish the Amer- sorbed the pervasive connections that both Guyot and
icas. In the late essay "Walking," for example, he (1965b, Humboldt draw between climate and ways of life, along
611) quotes an extravagant catalog of New World super- with the former's routine generalizations about racial
latives-"the sky is bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is in- character and the latter's judicious conclusions about the
tenser, the moon looks larger," etc.-by Sir Francis Head, reciprocal influences of humanity and the environment.
However, he would have also noted Humboldt's insis- mental determinism. The Massachusetts of the 1840s
tence on the unity of humanity and the ability of all and 1850s bore many signs of human remaking. Defores-
tation was extensive (Williams 1982). As Foster (1999)

people to escape from the control of natural forces
demonstrates in fine detail, the landscapes of Concord

(James 1972, 163).
The surfaces of Thoreau's texts deploy all kinds of ra- were patchworks of cultivation. Trees were far rarer than
cial and ethnic contrasts for rhetorical and humorous ef- they are today. Even the woods of Walden were a small
relic. Yet the landscape already showed signs of the reces-

fect. A Yankee in Canada (1961) presents a series of sim-
ple cultural contrasts with racial overtones, comparing sion of farming and the regrowth of forest that followed
Indians, Protestants, Catholics, French, English, and completion of the Erie Canal, the emergence of new pat-
Yankees, with predictable conclusions about Yankee terns of regional specialization, and the industrialization
freedom, progressiveness, and emancipation from the of New England. As Foster (1999) shows, Thoreau's texts
kinds of church and state he finds in Quebec. are rich in pictures of prosperous farming, showing culti-
Nevertheless, Thoreau had a profound interest in Na- vation as a bold and energetic new enterprise on newly
cleared and burned land. The disruptive work of humans

tive Americans. Guyot ([1849] 1970, 193-94) sum-
marily placed them low on the human scale as passive, is sometimes criticized, and it is often assumed that
"melancholy, cold, and insensible," stamped with a "veg- acquiescence in a "natural" order of the land is morally
etative nature." Thoreau's accounts are far more nu- superior, as in a Journal entry of 11 May 1856:
anced. His most extended and deliberate encounter with
In the West the prudent settler avoids the banks of rivers,
Indian life is in the third section of The Maine Woods
choosing high and open land. It suggests that man is not
([1864] 1972). Here he mixes amateur philology, topon-
completely at one with Nature, or that she is not yet fitted
ymy, and linguistics with stereotypical presentations of
to be his abode.... Only a portion of the earth is habitable
Indians' skills in hunting, way-finding and the like, while
by man. Is the earth improving or deteriorating in this
ventriloquizing about Indian life through the mouth of
respect? Does it require to be improved by the hands of
his guide Joe Polis (who was in fact a significant land-
man, or is man to live more naturally and so more safely?
owner). Crude generalizations reminiscent of Guyot al-
Such acquiescence is presented as a moral choice, not as

ternate with readings of Indian life that are sometimes af-
ineluctably determined. This fluidity is typical of Tho-

firmative, sometimes nostalgic, and at root sympathetic.
reau's interpretations of the central questions of deter-

Through his shifting tropes of place and time, he is able
minism. The explanatory mechanics and the rigidity of

to write them in and out of his landscapes in all manner
what we might call "high" environmental determinism,

of ways. Indians are marginal figures, appearing occasion-
with its explicit referral to Darwinism and its vocabulary

ally in Concord to sell baskets, and in "degraded" settle-
of control, response, ontogeny and the like, lay in the fu-

ments in lower Maine. Yet they pervade the landscape
ture. The kinds of insights into human modification of

and their traces are everywhere.
the landscape that Thoreau notes sporadically were to be

Indians also provide metaphors of Rousseauian savage
expressed far more systematically two years after his

nobility. Thoreau resists reproducing the formative Puritan
death in Marsh's Man and Nature (1864).

myths (Bowden 1992) of pristine forest and lack of Indian
Undoubtedly the most interesting connection be-

agriculture. He is specifically aware of the role of Indians in
tween Thoreau and geography is to be found in Walls's

adjusting the pine-oak balance in New England forests and
argument for a strong Humboldtian strain in Thoreau's

also of their agricultural practices. Yet he diminishes these
approach to nature (1995). Walls takes further Susan

in very revealing passages. His ambivalence about native
Faye Cannon's claim that Humboldt provided a form of

occupance sometimes leads to curious convolutions of
avant-garde science that was particularly attractive to

argument. For example, in "Walking" he (1965b, 617)
Americans (Cannon 1978; Walls 1995, 82). Walls's

notes the superiority of the plow and spade over the "clam
argument is not specifically geographic. She (83) states

shell" and concludes: "I think that the farmer displaces the
that "Humboldt's innovative science was never incor-

Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so
porated into any tradition." This is somewhat startling,

makes himself stronger and in some respects more natu-
because histories of geographic thought invariably place

ral." By virtue of superior technique, the farmer is para-
Humboldt (with Ritter) at the center of our moder

doxically inserted into the landscape as "more natural."
disciplinary genealogy (e.g., James 1972; Livingstone

Just as he resists the rigid racial categories found in
1992; but see Taylor 1985 on the political dimensions of

Guyot, so too Thoreau's texts reveal a very nuanced view
this canonization). Yet the statement is true to the ex-

of what was, in his day and for eighty years more, a cen-
tent that Humboldt's idealist, holistic epistemology was

tral theoretical issue of academic geography: environ-
534 Pipkin
rapidly abandoned. Margarita Bowen (1981) points to and so on. His voice is one of profound erudition and au-
the moribund state of American geography in Hum- thority in two registers. First, he brings to bear immense
boldt's time, mired as it was in the reproduction of text- botanical, geological, and ethnographic knowledge, and
book knowledge, gazetteers, and travelers' tales, being is capable of detailed linguistic and historical digressions.
outflanked on all sides by specialized sciences. She shows Second, he speaks from direct field experience. He is by
how much geography's substantive content and intellec- no means as sweeping as Guyot in laying out explicit
tual prestige stood to gain by association with this Euro- technical vocabulary, but he strongly stresses the integra-
pean polymath. Yet she goes on to show how rapidly tive view and the need to connect observations. In par-
Humboldt's humanistic and idealistic facets came to be ticular, he unremittingly seeks integration of the physical
seen as romantic and dispensable appendages to his spe- and the human in the landscape, and he is less dogmatic
cialized empirical work and his innovative techniques, than Guyot about environmental determinism.
including careful thematic and isopleth mapping. Up to this point, in tracing Thoreau's movement away
Godlewksa describes the sharp decline in the prestige of from the landscape of natural theology toward a more
"universal geographies" between the late eighteenth probing and empirical stance, we have been attempting
century (when they "still seemed useful and scholarly") to find parallels with general scientific thought and
and the mid-nineteenth (when they had become "mam- evolving geographic ideas of the time, as, for example, in
moth" and incoherent). "Even one of the most synthetic the search for taxonomic vocabulary and the questioning
thinkers of the century, Alexander von Humboldt, could of environmental effects on humanity. Walls (1995) is
not make the genre work" (Godlewska 1999, 313). surely correct in asserting very strong similarities in style
It is fascinating to assess which among Humboldt's and rhetoric between Thoreau and Humboldt. Many of
habitual geographic explanatory moves might have in- Humboldt's commitments-such as the integrative im-
fluenced Thoreau's thought on the workings of land- pulse, the affirmations of the unity of the races of human-
scape. An excellent text for this purpose is Aspects of Na- ity, the reticence about the divine, and even the leaning
ture ([1850] 1970), which Thoreau is known to have toward botany-were clearly very congenial to Thoreau.
studied (along with Kosmos; Richardson 1986, 208; Sat- Likewise, Humboldt's magisterial, polymath tone, draw-
telmeyer 1988). A late work, it represents Humboldt's ing on history, classics, esthetics,and natural history,
maturest views and is aimed at a popular audience. Gen- came very naturally to Thoreau, while Humboldt's con-
erally speaking, it presents sweeping portraits of land- scientious precision in instrumental measurement must
scapes on a large scale, usually taking topography or geol- have impressed the surveyor in him. This empirical, qua-
ogy as a point of departure. In these "zones" (he uses the siscientific register of Thoreau's thought will bear more
word far more frequently than "region"), Humboldt study as a reflection of the intellectual milieu in which
stresses the integration of the physical elements of cli- modern geography took shape.
mate, botany, geology, and soil. He makes constant ro- Nevertheless, Thoreau's idiosyncratic, "poetic" inter-
mantic judgments of the moods landscapes evoke (e.g., rogation of nature in landscape diverges both in its prac-
"severe," "grand," "melancholy"). He sees nature as a place tice and its thinking from the natural philosopher-
of repose: for example, "He, therefore, who, amidst the un- geographers such as Humboldt. These differences are
reconciled discord of nations, seeks for intellectual calm, underlined by two decisive characteristics of Thoreau's
gladly turns to contemplate the silent life of vegetation, work: its localism and its intermittent social criticism. We
and the hidden activities of forces and powers operating will glance at each in turn.
the sanctuaries of nature" (42). There are intimations of
competition between "races" of plants and of their fine-
grained adjustment to climate, along with references to
The Limits of the Local
the purity of nature unsullied by human occupance. Hum-
In contrast, for example, to that of Ritter or even

boldt (30) lays down as an objective for general geography
to "compare the natural conditions of distant regions," and Guyot, the principal source of Humboldt's authority was
he continually refers to these regions' suitability for human direct observation in world-ranging exploration and
habitation. He is very attentive to human migrations. He fieldwork. Despite early dreams of travel, Thoreau was
endlessly collects specimens and makes trigonometric mea- trapped-or trapped himself-in Concord. He visited
surements of distance, elevation, latitude and longitude. Quebec once and Maine and Cape Cod several times
Humboldt's presentation is very visual and picto- each. He worked in Staten Island for a spell, visited
graphic. His texts are full of phrases such as "trace a pic- Pennsylvania, and made a convalescent trip to Minne-
ture," "picturesque," "prospect," "let us cast our eyes," sota not long before his death. Beyond these excursions,
his range was extremely local. A good deal of his rhetoric neers from whom he draws a counterpoint of measure-
is driven by the contrasts and contradictions that follow ments, elevations, and observations. He plays the ignorance
from his limited scope. In fact, a central irony of Tho- of locals against the informed scientific gaze of an out-
reau's work is that this writer of ostensible travelogues- sider. For example at the confluence of the Chesuncook
who begins major works with rhetorical flourishes about and the Mattawamkeag he (12) searches " ... carefully
his desire to seek new places-in fact resolutely denies for [Indian] relics, though the men at the bar-room had
the significance of geographic differences, points to the never heard of such things." And he (16) classifies the
triviality of travel per se, and asserts that truth and the people themselves: "There are three classes of inhabit-
wild can be found anywhere. His quips debunking travel, ants, who either frequent or inhabit the country which
we had now entered."

or at least travel for the wrong motives, are well known,
One of Thoreau's farthest excursions from home was

e.g., "It is not worth the while to go round the world to
count the cats in Zanzibar" ([1854] 1989, 322). Christie to Montreal and Quebec in 1850. This encounter with
(1965)10 explores this central paradox of Thoreau's work, the truly foreign yielded the surprisingly pedestrian and
indicating the tremendously wide range of Thoreau's critical text of A Yankee in Canada (1961). The encoun-
reading in the literature of travel and exploration and ter with French and English Canadians draws Yankee pa-
also his habit of collating these texts, bringing them to triotism forth from the dispassionate transcendentalist.
bear on his other readings or his own observations. The narrative is unusually simple and direct and includes
It is clear that, for Thoreau, intimate local knowledge some of the most sustained (and critical) discussions of
was a powerful source of authority as an author, and also urban space in all of Thoreau's texts.
in the counsels of Emerson and the handful of others in To put it briefly, then: in describing truly unknown
Concord who had an inkling of what he was about. places, Thoreau's style approaches much more closely that
When he addresses his fellow townspeople at the Mid- of a hypothetical geographer of his time (perhaps even
dlesex Agricultural Society in 1860, he flatly tells the Humboldt), juxtaposing in fairly unproblematic ways
farmers that "taking a surveyor's and a naturalist's lib- systematic observation and the resources of prior scien-
erty" he has come to know their lands much better than tific reports, with far simpler narrative structures than
they do. "I have several times shown the proprietor the those he brings to bear on known spaces. This change in
shortest way out of his wood-lot. Therefore, it would voice and in the treatment of space-only a matter of de-
seem that I have some title to speak to you to-day" gree, to be sure-marks off the bounds of Thoreau's per-
(1906c, 185). This insider's authority is modeled in Walden sonal knowledge and engagement with places as he
([1854] 1989) by Thoreau's claim to a peerless ability to moves between the roles of "authority" and "explorer."
navigate his world even in total darkness (e.g., 169-70). Despite Christie's demonstration of the depth and in-
Clear stylistic differences exist between Thoreau's sight Thoreau reveals in his sifting of travelers' reports (in
presentation of well-known places and such "traveler's the style of Ritter rather than Humboldt, perhaps), David
reports" as Cape Cod. As we shall see below, it is precisely Harvey is undoubtedly correct in his diagnosis of Thoreau's
local and well-known places that he most violently dis- "famous and influential exploration of Walden" as an ex-
solves with his tropes of alienation and reinscription, as emplary place-based account, which "yields only limited
he obsessively refines and localizes the Humboldtian natural knowledge embedded in ecological processes op-
range. His characteristic moves with known places in- erating at a small scale. Such knowledge is insufficient to
volve layering and interpenetration at ever finer scales, understand broader socioecological processes occurring at
refining and subdividing, estranging and appropriating scales that cannot be directly experienced and which are
"new" places, and finding the unknown and the wilder- therefore outside of phenomenological reach" (1996, 303).
ness everywhere. In the face of the genuinely unknown,
his tone changes significantly. In The Maine Woods
([1864] 1972), for example, he continually registers gen-
Social Criticism
uinely new experiences, not least an epiphany in the face
Despite the unity presupposed by transcendentalism,

of the truly wild near the summit of Katahdin. His text is
and despite Thoreau's close attention to the holistic

often direct and topographical: "I will give the names
thought of Humboldt and others, he draws increasingly

and distances, for the benefit of future tourists" (45-46).
acerbic contrasts between the human and natural worlds,

He provides a Humboldtian record of miles, elevations,
often casting social criticism in the language of econom-

and drainage basins, along with rigorous orderings of the
ics and business. It is hard to convey how saturated Tho-

landscape. He continually invokes and amends conclu-
reau's texts are with contempt for "the immorality of

sions of botanical, ornithological, and geological pio-
536 Pipkin
trade, and all the common modes of getting a living" vectors of diffusion: mammals and birds for hardwoods,
(1973b, 162). He was capable of ironically subsuming his the wind for many kinds of pine, water for both. He notes
own activities in the language of business-as "self- the profusion and the mass waste of natural processes.
appointed inspector of snow storms," in keeping "an ap- Although he (1906c, 187) lightly comments on the ef-
pointment with a beech-tree" ([1854] 1989, 18, 265), forts of the "managers" in the "seat of government of the
and so on. In Walden ([1854] 1989), Thoreau reinscribes universe," he focuses mainly on empirical mechanisms.
farming in his beanfield theme: in the most punctilious He appreciates the role of humans in landscape change,
language of business and husbandry, he seeks to demon- but makes no pretense of an integrated view of the hu-
strate the absurdity of contemporary agriculture and model man and the natural. In fact, profligacy and waste is a vir-
what an alternative connection to the land could be. In tue in one world and a vice in the other. Invoking his cus-
his later work, his increasingly technical and taxonomic tomary economic metaphor, he (190) speaks to his
knowledge of natural science and botany yields increas- neighbors of a natural "rotation of crops," rejoicing in
ingly stinging critiques of the human order on the land. the profligacy of nature.
Thoreau's interest in human ties to the land, and the In the privacy of the Journal (e.g., 16 October 1860),
sympathy of his presentation, stand in inverse proportion he rails against wasteful and inefficient management of
to the modernity and urbanity of the practices he in- land by precisely the farmers he addresses in the Middle-
scribes. There are sympathetic vignettes, not only of the sex speech. Gone is the unity of crystalline botany and
marginal people of Concord, but of loggers in Maine and the integrative vision of a simple template that will
seaweed gatherers on Cape Cod. In the Massachusetts of account for ice crystals, sand ripples, birds' wings, towns,
his day, despite the newly arrived railroad and telegraph and villages. Common explanations and forms for the
and the initial industrialization even of a relative back- human world and its settlements and the natural world
water such as the Concord River, the principal axis of are dissolved in oppositions and contrasts. Nature is
wealth and status was still tree-felling, brush-burning, wasteful-but infinitely productive; farmers are waste-
money-making landed property. Thoreau's use of the word ful-and stingy and inept.
"improvement" still has its solemn eighteenth-century In hindsight, Thoreau's ecological thought might
application to the land. Farming practices, therefore, seem to be tending to an extension of competitive ideas
bear the brunt of his critique in works such as Wild Fruits to the human world, in something akin to the human
(2000), the later Journal, and The Succession of Forest ecology that lay roughly a century ahead.1- However, he
Trees. Increasingly he was able to level this critique using actually reveals how unthinkable such an extrapolation
hard empirical arguments. For example, in the Journal was at that time. His intellectual world yielded no ex-
(16 October 1860), he shows how a farmer ("the fellow planatory machinery for the superorganic.12 For him, the
who calls himself its owner") had ineptly burned over a ecological (to use this word is anachronistic, of course)
field destined to be a woodlot and sowed rye there for and the economic-which were ultimately to converge
short-term gain, thereby destroying a nascent oak wood in neoclassical and human-ecological models of geo-
which "nature had got ... ready for this emergency, and graphic space-were antitheses. Of the human sciences,
kept... ready for many years ... So he trifles with nature. economics was the one that most readily came to his pen,
... That he should call himself an agriculturalist!" His always with critical or satirical intent. Thus, Thoreau's
critique is more abstract too, as in the scathing and satir- probing of the natural and the human in landscapes, his
ical comparisons of tobacco farming and a vision of increasingly critical view of the human world, his grow-
huckleberry husbandry in Wild Fruits (2000, 51). ing competence in botanical taxonomy, and his proto-
One of Thoreau's last published works, "The Succes- ecological insights, along with his yen for paradox and
sion of Forest Trees" (1906c), along with roughly con- contradiction, his aversion to sweeping generalization
temporary Journal entries, shows us how far his quasi- a la Guyot, and his high tolerance for unresolved ambi-
scientific, empirical thought had come (see also Thoreau guity, led to an increasingly fragmented presentation of
1993, 2000). In this speech to the Middlesex Agricul- landscape. Thoreau's actual writing of place, to which we
tural Society, he specifically rejects the rustic idea that turn next, evinced a similar tendency.
plants appear spontaneously without seeds. Although he
gives credence to special cases, he rejects the idea that
seeds routinely endure for very long periods in the
Writing Places: Subverted and Averted Vision
ground before germination. Thus, he firmly links ob-
served patterns of succession in pine and oak forests to The problematic of place is central to Thoreau's writ-
empirical, short-term seed dispersals. He lays out the ing because most of his texts present themselves as trav-
537
elogues (Walden [(1854) 1989] itself is an exception). Thoreau traffics back and forth between mediational ab-
Whether one journey, as in the Week ([1849] 1980) and stractions and what they cannot, on closer view, abso-
"A Walk to Wachusett" (1906d), or composites of sev- lutely organize, assess and explain." As Wallace (1993,
eral trips, as in Cape Cod ([1865] 1988) and The Maine 179) puts it: "Thoreau works in radical paradox, counter-
Woods ([1864] 1972), the narrative journeys are punctu- ing his own most extreme statements with equally oppo-
ated by symbolically situated events and revelations. In site extremes, describing the line of his thought by the
the loosely structured Week, many small epiphanies oc- movement of boundaries." Elizabeth Harvey (1984), too,
cur. The first part of The Maine Woods is structured as a probes Thoreau's obsessive delineation and dissolution of
pilgrimage, culminating in an ascent of the summit of limits.
Mount Katahdin. Geographic transitions drive these One may crudely generalize about some of the place-
texts in local and global ways, as changes of place provide mapping tropes that Thoreau habitually uses. First is a
closure and narrative impetus in the local texture of inci- universalizing process, a denial of the ultimate signifi-
dent and description and in the organization of chapters cance of differences between places. They may be appro-
and sections. priated in strictly egocentric terms: "Wherever I sat,
Thoreau's initial appropriation of place is almost al- there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me
ways visual. He is most certainly implicated in the objec- accordingly" ([1854] 1989, 81).13 Alternatively, place-
tivity claims and the symbolic and ideological operations lessness may be affirmed as an admirable state of mind.
(distancing, appropriating, gendering, concealing, alien- For example, Joe Polis, the Indian guide on the third
ating, and so on) that such gazes entail (e.g., Rose 1993; Maine trip, says: "It makes no difference to me where I
Mitchell 1994; Urry 1995). He is very adroit at pictorial am," to which Thoreau ([1864] 1972, 296) remarks,
writing, and his texts abound in set-piece visual descrip- "Such is the Indian's pretense, always." These tropes rep-
tions, often from high vantage points (see, e.g., the ex- resent not so much detachment from place as an ability
traordinary panorama from summit of Mount Monadnock to engage with all places equally. Elsewhere, Thoreau
recorded in the Journal 6 August 1860). His sensitivity to ([1854] 1989, 132) universalizes places in a more affirma-
such vistas increased after his encounter with William tive way, with a sense of kinship with place itself: "I
Gilpin, whose work he read in 1852. Gilpin's penetrat- thought no place could ever be strange to me again."
ing, pictorial account of landscape, his attention to color, Sometimes this universalization of places has a purely
his contrast between the beautiful and the picturesque, human tone, implying camaraderie, though of the
and his finely graded treatment of distance-effects, had a strained and limited kind afforded to passers-by: "Who is
"great and liberating effect" just as Thoreau was begin- a stranger to those who have the habit of speaking
ning another revision of Walden (Richardson 1986, 263). kindly?" (1980, 203). Another, more subtle repudiation
His continuing thoughtfulness about writing the visual is of differences between places is a symbolic spiritual de-
revealed in his negative reaction to Ruskin's Moderm parture from them: "Where I lived was as far off as many
Painters (Journal 6 October 1857). Emerson had seen the a region viewed nightly by astronomers" ([1854] 1989,
visual as the entree to deep and tranquil unity. This trope 87-88). Finally, Thoreau routinely asserts the pointless-
was always available to Thoreau, who was not immune, ness of seeking truth anywhere but here, and implies that
even in his late work, to the appeal of numinous order in place is irrelevant to his true purposes.
the landscape. A second trope, diametrically opposed to the first, can
However, his instinct was always to subvert it. Con- be termed externalization: it insistently implies that truth
sidering the centrality of landscape, place, and geo- is anywhere but here, and that, no matter how a place is
graphic description in his texts, Thoreau's actual presen- defined, what we seek is always beyond it. For example,
tations of them-his framing, definition, bounding and the wild is often defined as a frame, or bound, within
integration-are startlingly fragmentary and elusive. Vi- which lies the familiar world of the tame: "Our village
sual unity, and with it the integrity of place, dissolves life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored for-
very rapidly. Buell (1995b, 185) shows Thoreau the nat- ests and meadows which surround it" ([1854] 1989, 317).
uralist segmenting the landscape into microlocales and Recession from strictly human space is a frequent accom-
also notes the complexity of his tropes of marginalization panying theme, as "man and the memory of man are ban-
and inversion of conventional evaluative orderings of ished far" (1980, 232). The word "beyond" is always a
space. In an extraordinary discussion, Abrams (1991) freighted one in Thoreau's texts. In the first part of
goes so far as to call Thoreau's procedures an "antigeogra- The Maine Woods, the wild continually recedes before
phy." Abrams (255) captures very clearly both the visual the travelers: "five miles beyond the last log hut"; "on
impulse of Thoreau's writing and its limits: "Ultimately, either hand, and beyond, was a wholly uninhabited
538 Pipkin
wilderness"; "[b]eyond, there was no trail"; "[b]eyond, ex- together, I have not yet exhausted them.... Two or three
tended ranges of uncultivated hills"; and so on ([1864] hours' walking will carry me to as strange a country as I
1972, 3, 16, 35, 73). This notion of a continually reced- expect ever to see" (1965b, 602). A variant of this trope
ing wilderness is allied to a tropism toward the west- claims to be able to penetrate known spaces in new and
locus of the real and symbolic frontier-which Thoreau unknown ways, while also diminishing the human pres-
records in "Walking" (1965b, 607) and Walden ([1854] ence: "I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number
1989): "Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by
free ... I believe that the forest which I see in the western any house, without crossing a road except where the fox
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun." and the mink do" (1965b, 603).
Unlike Barthes on the Eiffel Tower (1982), Thoreau These processes of shifting vision might be termed
does not use synoptic views to systematize and render areal discrimination. They do not aspire to express co-
legible the known. Rather, his subtle, Gilpinesque views variation; if anything, they seek to undermine it. In par-
often serve to extend it: ticular, they are not informed by any nuanced concept of
region. Searching Thoreau's texts for the words "region,"
I found my account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall
"zone" "district," "locale," and "place" reveals them only
white-pine, on the top of a hill; and though I got well
deployed in their colloquial senses or used metaphori-
pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new moun-
cally. A partial exception seems to be the word "zone,"
tains in the horizon which I had never seen before,-so
which occasionally takes on a technical meaning in
much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have
terms of vegetation or climate. Sometimes Thoreau

walked about the foot of the tree for three-score years and
seems to aim at an ironic, quasiscientific register in his

ten, and yet I certainly should never have seen them.
(1965b, 629-30) zonations. On Cape Cod, in a landscape with a total am-
plitude of perhaps a hundred feet, Thoreau ([1865] 1988,
A third trope might be called reorientation. It reframes
46-48) recapitulates a report of a "frigid rocky region" in
landscape from an oblique or unexpected angle: "The
Greenland, and then carefully delineates microregions of
most familiar sheet of water viewed from a new hill-top
sand and vegetation. However, undifferentiated collo-
yields a novel and unexpected pleasure. When we have
quial and metaphorical uses are the norm in his texts. For
traveled a few miles, we do not recognize the profiles
example, in Wild Fruits (2000, 16, 17, 19), we find men-
even of the hills which overlook our native village, and
tions of"virgin and untoiled regions in perfection," "that
perhaps no man is quite familiar with the horizon as seen
twilight region," "some remote, wild northern region,"
from the hill nearest to his house" (1980, 349). On Cape
and so on. This generally loose construction of region
Cod, "we did not care to see those features of the Cape in
and a more precise use of zone (with climatic and altitu-
which it is inferior or merely equal to the mainland, but
dinal overtones) seems to reflect Humboldt's own usage
only those in which it is peculiar or superior. We cannot
in Aspects of Nature ([1850] 1970).
say how its towns look in front to one who goes to meet
The following dichotomy captures many of Thoreau's
them; we went to see the ocean behind them" ([1865]
symbolic mapping operations. First is a penchant for lay-
1988, 203-4). Or a landscape may be seen anew:
ering-for detecting what would have once been called
Sitting with our faces now up stream, we studied the land- sequent occupance. It is a metaphor of succession, pre-
scape by degrees, as one unrolls a map, rock, tree, house,

supposing local homogeneity, but with relics, inliers, and
hill, and meadow, assuming new and varying positions as

outliers. Because of its implied time-depth, it is often
wind and water shifted the scene, and there was variety
linked to nostalgia for the past. It is applied in the large
enough for our entertainment in the metamorphoses of the
and the small and is often triggered by finding relics such
simplest objects. Viewed from this side the scenery ap-
as Indian arrowheads, which are far denser on the ground
peared new to us. (1980, 349)
in Thoreau's texts, perhaps, than in Massachusetts. Lay-
Differentiation, a fourth characteristic trope, involves ering is also presupposed as a model of space in his study
dissection of known spaces to discover the wilderness, or of plant succession.
traces of earlier occupancy, or the pristine economy of The second operation involves interpenetration, juxta-
nature at work, by refining and drawing distinctions position, and coexistence expressed in metaphors of re-
within a place previous presented as a whole. Thoreau treat, secrecy, and inaccessibility. Again, Thoreau claims
points to his ability to discover the wild close at hand, to have entree into the wilderness anywhere. He knows
often on the margin of a tame space. "My vicinity affords farmers' lands better than they do, but his paths rarely
many good walks; and though for so many years I have cross theirs. This trope rests on numerous, contempora-
walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days neous small scale distinctions and on oblique approaches.
On a larger scale, it figures in a set-piece panorama from kept in close touch during his residence, and Emerson's
the summit of Mount Monadnock, in which the entire household, where he briefly boarded and worked, are also
settled area of Vermont is folded into invisibility: invisible. Instead, Thoreau (155-56) gives time-depth
to his claim by invoking the deepest of all personal ties to
The Connecticut Valley was one broad gulf of haze which
place, childhood memory:
you were soon over. They were the Green Mountains that
we saw ... and all of Vermont that lay between us and their
When I was four years old, as I well remember, I was
summit was but a succession of parallel ranges of moun-

brought from Boston to this my native town, through these
tains. Of course, almost all that we mean commercially and

very woods and this field, to the pond. It is one of the oldest
agriculturally by Vermont was concealed in those long

scenes stamped on my memory. And now to-night my flute
and narrow haze-filled valleys. (Journal 6 August 1860).

has waked the echoes over that very water. The pines still
stand here older than I.
These shifting constructions of place, with their con-
The memorial claim is strictly individual. Thoreau never

tradictory mappings of deeper dichotomies onto particu-
directly deploys the "socially organized memories that

lar places, empower Thoreau to have his rhetorical cake
are invoked as authoritative sources of being able to

and eat it too. He expresses simultaneously the sense of a
receding wilderness, of a wilderness accessible by draw- speak a place" (Urry 1995, 27). The claim is further legit-
imated by other self-mythologizing individual practices:

ing fine distinctions in local spaces, and of one that is
uniquely penetrating observation, the construction of

accessible to the right frame of mind anywhere. This var-
the cabin, the peerless ability to navigate noted above,

ied and opportunistic characterization of place, subservi-
ent to the broader narrative and rhetorical businesses of and the symbolic agriculture of the beanfield.
The landscapes into which Walden ([1854] 1989) in-

the text, allows Thoreau to assert both sides of dichoto-
serts Thoreau, with ideal ties of a hermit's labor in the

mies by continual remapping and reinscription-in fact,
beanfield and with actual ties of competence and child-

by a subversion of vision.
By aversion of vision, on the other hand, I mean the hood memory, are landscapes he has radically depop-
ulated and selectively recolonized with expert locals,

selective writing out and reprioritizing of landscape ele-
sympathetic marginal people, and various other iconic

ments, which are equally characteristic of Thoreau's style
figures. Richardson (1986) notes that the protagonists

and which, of course, profoundly undermine its preten-
who are identified in Thoreau's landscapes are the situ-

sions to synoptic completeness. The most striking aver-
ated ones, the ones whose ties to place he judges to be

sion in Thoreau's landscapes is his turning away from the
authentic. For example, in one of Thoreau's finest chap-

contemporary human world (Roorda 1998) and his sym-
ters-the spring portion of Walden-he presents the

bolic repudiation of his own social ties. In contrast with
pond as a world free of humans, subject only to his

straightforward retreat narratives, such as John Muir's ac-
knowledgeable scrutiny, detailing the microclimatology

counts of his various Wilderness Journeys (1987), which
and hydrology of the ice-thaw. Then there abruptly

deal with travel in unknown and half-wild places, Tho-
appears an "old man, who has been a close observer of

reau's wilds were the tamed and populated lands around
Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard to all

Concord, into which he ventured on daily hikes from the
her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks

secure base of the family home and business. In these
when he was a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel . . ."
spaces he resolutely conceals his parents' home and his
large family, his mentors, his associates, and his varied (303). He reveals to Thoreau a surprising and noisy
movement of the ice toward the shore. The textual

means of subsistence. On longer trips, such as the jour-
authority for his presence is that he knows more than

neys to Cape Cod and Maine, he systematically writes
Thoreau, and his knowledge is profound local knowl-

out his traveling companions. His first published book,
edge. The Journal (unpublished in Thoreau's lifetime)

Week ([1849] 1980), records a trip with his older brother,
tells a rather different story, of course. It reveals very

whom the text renders anonymous and as nearly invisi-
routinized patterns of rambling, and densely covers the

ble as possible.
landscape with the names of familiar people and places

The ties to place staked in Walden ([1854] 1989), too,
that are withheld to serve the purposes of the pub-

are consistently individualistic and asocial. The hermit-
lished work.
age of the text, which was on Emerson's property, is shorn
Just as Thoreau writes out people, so too does he reori-

of its intimate connections with transcendental thought
ent the landscape itself. An antiurban alignment of land-

(in which experiments in agricultural self-sufficiency14
scapes is common. In The Maine Woods ([1864] 1972) he

and retreats to huts or cabins were commonplace aspira-
moves quickly away from towns, and in Cape Cod ([1865]

tions; Stoehr 1979). Thoreau's family, with whom he
540 Pipkin
life,-how silent and unambitious it is.... What an admira-

1988) he systematically avoids them. His published texts
ble training is science for the more active warfare of life. In-
almost never take us to towns or cities and rarely have
deed, the unchallenged bravery, which these studies imply,
anything good to say of them. In the Journal, his aversion
is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the war-
becomes even less guarded. For example, on 2 May 1860,
rior. I am pleased to learn that Thales was up and stirring by
crowds in towns include "vermin even of the human
night not unfrequently, as his astronomical discoveries
kind," "gamblers," "dog-killers," "rag-pickers," and so on.
prove. (1906b, 106-7)
And, in an extended Journal passage from 22 September
1859, he sees human settlement as virtually a blight on Smith (1992) notes that in our time we have problems
the earth: "a curse seems to attach to any place which has expressing the aesthetic, and that looking at landscapes
long been inhabited by man." has dwindled from an endeavor involving the high seri-
Finally, Thoreau reorients and re-evaluates his land- ousness and generous investment of care and time with
scapes to focus on margins and marginal people (see, e.g., which the Italian nobility gazed on their gardens or the
Buell 1995a, 134). Walden ([1854] 1989) itself scarcely ever English romantic poets took in the Lakes to become a
takes us into the village of Concord. Some of its most thoroughly marginal activity, and not in the least an
touching passages are in the section entitled "Former In- effortful one. In contrast, Thoreau insisted that his Lin-
habitants," which reorients the space onto marginal people naean probing of the world was the hardest of work,
and marginal places-ex-slaves, their children, and a which yielded beauty as an elusive but ubiquitous strand
sick Irishman-as sympathetic personal sketches and in nature. Characteristically, he does not present fulsome
dense allusions to Roman classics, botany, local history, set-piece descriptions of "glorious" and "sublime" views,
personal memory, and nostalgia reinscribe these people as Muir constantly does. Instead, Thoreau stresses covert
into the Concord landscape in a profoundly new way. and unexpected beauty, and sets the aesthetic at odds
A final facet of Thoreau's writing of landscapes is with practical human purposes.
worth noting. Like Muir and many other contemporar-
ies, he succeeds in integrating an unselfconscious cele-
bration of beauty into his descriptions. For Thoreau,
Assessment: Dissecting and Writing
landscapes are full of an intrinsic beauty that comes from
the Landscape
within and from beyond the visible world. Beauty is in-
I suggested at the outset of this essay and explored in

herent everywhere. It may take us by surprise: "When I
the preceding sections two readings of Thoreau that are

turn round half-way up Fair Haven Hill, by the orchard
of interest to contemporary geography. The first would be

wall, and look northwest, I am surprised for the thou-
a project in intellectual history, seeking to make a specif-

sandth time at the beauty of the landscape, and I sit
ically geographical entry in the vast literature on Tho-

down to behold it at my leisure" (ournal 7 October
reau's work. Because of the richly informed diversity of

1857). Or we must work hard for it, cultivating the right
his narrative resources, his texts provide a kaleidoscope

kind of vision (see the quotation from "Autumnal Tints"
of the ways in which a culturally literate observer in the

[1906a] above). Right vision is oblique or fresh vision:
1840s and 1850s could generalize about the land and hu-
"To perceive freshly, with fresh senses, is to be inspired
mans' relationship to it. The second reading would focus

(Journal 11 December 1855). Beauty cannot be found
on the rhetoric and mechanics of Thoreau's writing of

with the wrong, acquisitive motives: "And so is it with
places. In their protean construction and destruction

him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky
of landscapes, their mappings of moral and social dichot-

falls, he will not bag any" (1906a, 287). It is entirely or-
omies onto real places, Thoreau's texts provide an an-

thogonal to utility or to human purposes, an argument
thology of ways a skilled writer can inscribe and erase

that Thoreau, characteristically, brings home with bitter
places that is highly pertinent to moder discourse- and

economic metaphors: "Beauty and true wealth are always
text-oriented geography. Form and substance align closely

thus cheap and despised. Heaven might be defined as the
in such a self-conscious writer. The two readings are ulti-

place which men avoid" (1906a, 257). Beauty is accessi-
mately inseparable. The contrast with John Muir's elo-

ble in solitude, because it has an "inexpressible privacy,"
quent but guileless texts, or with George Perkins Marsh's

but the mindset required to find it is no different from
highly organized and purposive ones, is vivid. Thoreau

that of the scientist:
dissects landscapes with the double vision of a poet and a
well-informed naturalist, using all manner of paradoxes
When I detect a beauty in any of the recesses of nature, I am
and contradictions, and reconstitutes them on his own

reminded, by the serene and retired spirit in which it re-
quires to be contemplated, of the inexpressible privacy of a terms.
541
His point of departure was providential theology's notes on the seasonal abundance, feeding, and behavior
Emersonian form, which taught the moral and aesthetic of birds and mammals. These observations combine
significance of landscapes, but also the ultimate triviality acute attention to ecological processes with rhetorical
of differences between places. This could fortify a young providentialism. Nature is very often an agent, "provid-
and marginal New England writer, enamoured of Goethe ing," having "moods," exercising "license," and so on.
and with the highest aspirations, reassuring him of the Thoreau (Journal 8 February 1860) himself reflects on
validity of his insights and of his own provincial arena this dual vision:
and providing a fruitful source of tropes denying the cen-
As it is important to consider Nature from the point of
trality of the classics and European culture in general.
view of science, remembering the nomenclature and sys-
"One might write Iliads in Concord, then," as Richard-

tem of men, and so, if possible, go a step further in that di-
son (1986, 26) puts it.

rection, so it is equally important often to ignore or forget
Thoreau's move away from transcendental unities all that men presume that they know, and take an original
and unprejudiced view of Nature, letting her make what

took him to the brink of Darwinism and to studies of
impression she will on you, as the first men, and all children
plant succession and dispersal that prefigure moder
and natural men still do. For our science, so called, is al-
ecology. Here, Thoreau's thought shows a movement
ways more barren and mixed up with error than our sympa-
which parallels geography's own: away from the glib ho-
thies are.
lism of natural theology toward a more probing empiri-
cism. This move has often been mapped onto the axis More specifically, during the development of Tho-
Thoreau used himself, from poet to naturalist. It is reau's writing, geography's grand theme of the relation-
marked, all critics agree, by a continuous shift through- ship between the human and the physical landscapes
out his short life to more systematic observation of na- becomes problematic. In his hands, against his integra-
ture, increasing mastery of scientific nomenclature, criti- tive impulses and commitments, but as a matter of fact,
cal evaluation of contemporary specialists (particularly the human and the natural began to fall apart, as com-
Agassiz), and obsessively careful and copious record- parison of his early and late work-say, between Week
keeping. These efforts are recorded in the Journal and the ([1849] 1980) and Wild Fruits (2000)-reveals. In Week,
unpublished drafts of Wild Fruits and other pieces. These despite its satire and criticism of the social world, we find
were once seen as the raw materials and the leavings easy movement between the human and the natural, a
from his published books, but they are increasingly being voracious interest in history and human artifact in the
placed at the center of his work (see, e.g., Cameron 1985; landscape, and serious claims to unified understanding.
Hoag 1995; McGregor 1997). Assessing this evolution, In Wild Fruits, we find a botany that is attentive to the
Emerson and other contemporaries regretted the lost aesthetic and to human uses, but which is almost exclu-
promise of a transcendentalist gone astray, wasting his sively critical and satirical in its analysis of human so-
last years botanizing. Another view sees Thoreau as a ciety in general and farming in particular. The transcen-
protoscientist, reorienting himself to empiricism and dentalist vision of unity between the human and the
making contributions that foreshadowed moder ecol- natural dissolves, not merely into duality, but into an ac-
ogy. Finally, some, including Walls (1995), have resisted tual opposition, in which one aspect is deployed to criti-
the dichotomy of poet and naturalist just as Thoreau re- cize the other.
sisted it himself, and have argued for a more integrative Thoreau resisted two commitments that geography
view of his work. was unequivocally to embrace. First were the sweeping
The Journal of the last years reveals particularly clearly generalizations on large geographic scales about ab-
the distance Thoreau had come. The bulk of the text stracted traits of the human and natural worlds. Despite
records daily excursions around Concord, along with di- their unity of sentiment on human impact on the land,
gressions prompted by these observations.15 The Journal this is why Thoreau is so far from Marsh: he foregoes the
contains far more names, places, family and social ties, latter's broad, systematic vision and his didactic consis-
and references to contemporary events than Thoreau tency, pedantic emphasis, international scope, and sci-
permitted himself in his published work, and occasional entific intent, and shows few of the impulses to broad
plural pronouns reveal that Thoreau did not always walk generalization evident throughout Marsh's work. He
alone. However, the voice is still a solitary one of radical also resists the rigid, crude, and premature synthesis of
alienation. Views of landscape are fleetingly composed, environmental determinism that he finds in Guyot.
with intense interest in subtleties of color. Practices of Second, he remained to the end suspicious of simple
farmers are noted and criticized. There are detailed causal explanations. As he (2000, 242-43) cryptically
records of tree species, ages, and dispersions, along with puts it:
542 Pipkin
The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a

aloofness Thoreau was able to maintain. And, as sug-
fine effluence ... The cause and the effect are equally eva-
gested above, his treatment of the aesthetic is particu-
nescent and intangible, and the former must be investi-
larly subtle, forming part of a complex and self-critical
gated in the same spirit and with the same reverence with
gaze. It is significant that Thoreau only rarely problema-
which the latter is perceived. Only that intellect makes any
tizes the act of writing, or searches publicly for the right
progress toward conceiving of the essence which at the
word, but incessantly speaks of the vagaries and problems
same time perceives the effluence.... Shall we presume to
of seeing landscapes. His gaze is masculinist (Rose 1993)
alter the angle at which the Maker chooses to be seen?
and possessive as it simultaneously appropriates and dis-
It was precisely these two commitments-unflinching tances the landscape, colonizing it with scientific names
generalization and causal explanation-that the father and consigning parts of it-and most of its inhabitants-
of moder, institutionalized geography in the United to invisibility. Yet it is as much a gaze of alienation as pro-
States, W. M. Davis, embraced. He found "causal or ex- prietorship. It constantly questions not only the human
planatory" connections between the organic and inor- patterns it records, but its own operations of seeing.
ganic worlds to be "the most definite ... unifying princi-
ple I can find in geography" (Davis, cited in James 1972,
359). Arguably, then, despite a thoroughly holistic ethos
Conclusion
and intent, Thoreau's path presaged more strongly our
current condition, including the separation of physical If we read Thoreau on his own terms as a naturalist, or
and human geography (Johnston 1997, xiv, 344), than it as a Humboldtian (as Walls [1995] does), or even as a
did geography's increasingly dogmatic integration of the kind of geographer (as Canby [1939] does), his relationship
physical and the human in the decades after his death at to the science of his day provides a fascinating historical
the age of forty-four in 1862. window into the intellectual context of the discipline.
We must call Thoreau's geographies, in one word, His work brings home to us the contingency of the path
fragmented. In addition to the fundamental interest of that geography actually took (to institutionalization,
the substantive and literary aspects of this dissolution, professionalization, environmental determinism, and sub-
several other facets of his work resonate with concerns in stantial marginalization in the academic division of labor).
contemporary human geography. They include issues of The space created by the slow recession of natural theol-
ideology, "moral geography," aesthetics, and the visual ap- ogy was one of intellectual crosscurrents and exhilarating
propriation of landscapes. His strident individualism- possibilities. When geography found a tenuous institu-
"I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two tional niche with Davis's appointment as instructor in
minds much nearer to one another" ([1854] 1989, physical geography at Harvard in 1878, it espoused pre-
133)-and his resolute attempts encounter the natural cisely the kinds of explanation and generalization that
unmediated by the social (Cameron 1985) constitute an ex- we find Thoreau resisting. The universalizing project
treme point in American ideologies of self-emancipation. failed, just as Humboldt himself failed to make the genre
He reframed the world about him in his own terms and work (Godlewska 1999). However, it was the road not
then scrutinized it in a lifetime of solitary attention, in a taken by Thoreau or Humboldt-the causal generaliza-
fashion unique in literature. David Harvey (1996) lo- tions of environmental determinism-that proved to be
cates this iconic individualist, along with Wordsworth the true dead end. Perhaps we could agree with Bowen
and Schiller, in the conflict between ideologies of domi- (1980, 3) that Humboldt's morally, ecologically, and so-
nation and the politics of self-emancipation. Indeed, cially informed vision holds out a "meaningful alterna-
Thoreau's deadpan mobilization of the language of busi- tive for science today," or agree with David Harvey
ness and politics for scathing social criticism forms an (1998, 723) that we have unfinished business with Hum-
unforgettable moment in this conflict. boldt. If so, we might join Walls (1995, 1999) in associ-
Thoreau reads landscape in both of the contradictory ating Thoreau with this progressive moment in geogra-
ways in which Demeritt (1994) distinguishes it: as a text phy's history.
of socially inscribed traces and as a site of autonomous If, on the other hand, our reading of Thoreau is pri-
agency, both natural and providential. Like Ruskin's, his marily literary, taking him on his own terms as a poet and
moral geographies involve hard, intentional looking, as a lifelong writer of landscapes, we find much that is of
and he, too, find lessons in repetitive organic forms and direct interest to contemporary, textually oriented cul-
harmonious wholes (Cosgrove 1998, 245). However, in tural geography. His fastidious and resourceful writing
his own terms his readings do not falter, or at least lead to works through what I have termed subversions and aver-
despair, as Ruskin's did-perhaps because of the blithe sions to deconstruct the unities of place and landscape.
543
in work by James and Nancy Duncan, Entrikin, Meinig,

With his radical individualism, his commitment to his
Relph, Salter, Soja, and Tuan, among others (see, e.g., 461).
own brand of science and to the future, and his simulta-
4. This reading of influences (or at least affinities) between
neous yearning for absolutes and for radical change, Tho-
Humboldt and Thoreau is greatly indebted to the work of
reau was a prototypically moder figure. Much of the
Laura Dassow Walls (1995).
power of his texts comes from finding or projecting con- 5. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1842: "Mr. Emerson is a
great searcher for facts, but they seem to melt away and be-
tradictory positions onto the landscape.
come insubstantial in his grasp" (quoted in Koster 1975,
This suggests, I think, that Oakes (1997) is precisely
41). Herman Melville was less charitable and satirized Em-
right in asking us to complement postmodern perspec-
erson in The Confidence Man ([1857] 1971).
tives by seeking in literary representations the fullest ex-

6. Contrasts between Emerson and Thoreau have been drawn
pression of modernism's historical ambiguities about unendingly since their lifetimes, and the comparison, if hack-
neyed, remains fruitful. Porte (1965) draws the contrast as
place.16 Certainly, the open-ended nature of literary style
one between intellect (Emerson) and the senses (Thoreau).
affords authors the freedom to probe place in many ways,
7. As a root metaphor, Pepper (1970) traces organicism back
some mutually contradictory. In the work of a writer as
to Hegel. In an extended discussion of organism in relation
competent and as addicted to contradiction as Thoreau

to Thoreau's natural history, Walls (1995) traces a tradition
of idealist organicism back to the natural theology and prov-

was, we are left with an inclusive compendium of the
idential views of the seventeenth century, through German
ways an early modernist sensibility could appropriate and
idealism and Coleridge, through Emerson's transcendental-
transcend place. Thoreau is an intellectual extremist.
ism and forward, beyond Thoreau's death, into the organi-
His impulses move in the two contradictory directions
cist science of Agassiz. In this Coleridgean view, the whole
sanctioned by modernism: universalization and relent-

is prior to its parts. Walls (60) notes that, in the political
realm, Coleridgean organicism-which she terms "rational

less reductionism. Places are torn apart in the process.
holism"-gives primacy to the state in constituting citizens,
His ability to juxtapose contradictions without resolving
thereby solving in a sense the problem of order, in contrast
them and yet without comprising the credibility of his
to the bottom-up concept of the state as a potentially fragile
narrative voice is a triumph of writing the landscape. It
consensual construct in the Jeffersonian view of democracy.
leaves us with a beguiling maze of beautiful contradic- She (84) suggests that Thoreau distanced himself from ra-
tional holism and moved toward "empirical holism."
tions. Place is implicated (and dissolved) in all of them.
8. About a decade after Thoreau's death, John Muir was able
What could be more modern?
to preach a very well informed glacial theory in Yosemite
(Turner 1985, 198). Sattelmeyer (1988) documents several
of Thoreau's encounters with Agassiz's biological writings.
Thoreau's own personal library included a volume of Agassiz

Acknowledgments
and Gould's Principles of Zoology (1848). However, appar-
ently his only encounter with Agassiz's writings on glaciol-
The important resource provided by the Thoreau In-
ogy was a borrowing from Harvard College Library in 1854.
stitute and its Web site is gratefully acknowledged. Por-
9. They include, among many others: Herodotus, Strabo, Bar-
tions of this article were presented at AAG meetings in
tram, Carver, Drake, Raleigh, Michaux, Joseph Banks, Les-
Boston (1998) and Pittsburgh (2000). Helpful com-

carbot, John Smith, Captain Cook, Richard Burton, Lewis
and Clark, and John Franklin. Thoreau had read Grosnold's

ments from colleagues in these sessions, as well as from
Voyage, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and Captain
anonymous referees, are also gratefully acknowledged.
Cook's Journal (Christie 1965; Richardson 1986; Sattel-
meyer 1988).
10. Christie's (1965) work was produced with the cooperation
Notes of the American Geographical Society and the assistance of
David Lowenthal. It was issued as the Society's Special Pub-
1. The biographical and critical literature on Thoreau is im- lication no. 37.
mense. The Myerson (1995) collection brings together a va- 11. Bradley Dean's editorial notes for Thoreau's Faith in a Seed
riety of perspectives. Richardson (1986) provides a standard (1993) and Wild Fruits (2000) provide many insights on the
account of Thoreau's life and intellectual development. ecological tendencies in Thoreau's late work.
Milder (1995) and McGregor (1997) exemplify the contin- 12. Of course, the superorganic, anthropological connotations
ual reassessment of his work. Sattelmeyer (1988) gives a of the word "culture" lay decades ahead. Emerson, Thoreau,
comprehensive account of Thoreau's reading and intellec- and their circle invariably used it only in the senses of edu-
tual influences. Bradley Dean has been engaged in editing cation, nurture, or cultivation.
and disseminating Thoreau's later nature writing (Thoreau 13. While walking north on the Atlantic side of Cape Cod, Tho-
1993, 2000). reau is acutely aware of the nearest land to his right-in Iberia.
2. All citations to and quotations from Thoreau's Journal are "At first we were abreast of that part of Portugal entre Douro e
taken from the electronic texts available on the Thoreau In- Mino, and then Galicia and the port of Pontevedra opened to
stitute's Web site at http://www.walden.org/thoreau/. us as we walked along; but we did not enter, the breakers ran so
3. Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature high. The bold headland of Cape Finisterre, a little north of
Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995a) takes east, jutted toward us next" (Thoreau 1988, 140).
544 Pipkin
14. Communitarian experiments on the fringe of transcenden- Foster, D. 1999. Thoreau's country: Journey through a transformed
talist circles included Ripley's Brook Farm and Bronson Al- landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
cott's vegetarian Fruitlands (Koster 1975; Stoehr 1979). Foucault, M. 1970. The order of things. New York: Vintage Books.
15. In a radical reassessment of Thoreau, Sharon Cameron Garber, F 1991. Thoreau's fable of inscribing. Princeton, NJ:
(1985) gives the Journal precedence over all of Thoreau's Princeton University Press.
other work, including Walden (1989). She (24) sees the Godlewska, A. 1999. Geography unbound: French geographic sci-
Journal as an obsessive, lifelong attempt to see nature, and ence from Cassini to Humboldt. Chicago: University of Chi-
nature in relation to the human, without interposing the so- cago Press.
cial, thus expressing a "passion for nature divorced from Gregory, D. 1994. Geographical imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell.
social meaning." Thoreau felt constraints in filling the so- Groth, P., and T. Bressi, eds. 1997. Understanding ordinary land-
cially acceptable forms of published work, which forced him scapes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
to "civilize" his perception of the intrinsic worth of nature Guyot, A. [1849] 1970. The Earth and man. Reprint, New York:
into acceptable terms of beauty, health, utility, and the like. Amo Press.
The Journal, perhaps intended for a posthumous audience, is Harvey, D. 1996. Justice, nature, and the geography of difference.
absolved from these distortions. Oxford: Blackwell.
16. A similar argument for a turn to the humanist and the liter- .1998. The Humboldt connection. Annals of the Associ-
ary was made at the end of a recent review of Simon ation of American Geographers 88:723-30.
Schama's Landscape and Memory (Williams 1997). Harvey, E. 1984. Speaking without bounds: The extra-vagant
impulse in Thoreau's "Walking." In The dialectic of discov-
ery: Essays on the teaching and interpretation of literature pre-
sented to Lawrence E. Harvey, ed. J. D. Lyons and N. J. Vick-
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Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies

Author(s): John S. Pipkin

Department of Geography and Planning, State University of New York at Albany

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91(3), 2001, p. 527-545

? 2001 by Association of American Geographers

ary purview of geography. Kant's "detheologization" of geographical knowledge

ography," "cartographical," "mapping," and "landscape," United States.

up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field,

Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond. But

none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in

The Transcendent and the Empirical

the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can

vided an inevitable background to geographical knowl-

edge in the pre-Darwinian years but took a wide variety

of forms. Thoreau's starting point was the distinctively

American version of providential doctrine he encoun-

tered first at Harvard in Emerson's Nature, published in

1836 ([1903] 1968). Transcendentalism combined domes-

tic and German roots. The American roots were un-

equivocally religious, reacting against Calvinism and some

of the doctrines of the Unitarian church, asserting the

unity of the natural and the divine, the immanence of

God in the world, and the accessibility of the absolute.

Emerson's Germanophile circle fused this view with ele-

ments of Kant's idealism, writings of Coleridge, and Ori-

ental philosophy to assert the fundamental unity of the

natural and moral worlds, of art, literature, philosophy,

and natural science (e.g., Miller 1960, 1965, 1967; Porte

1965; Koster 1975; Stoehr 1979; Richardson 1986). Sci-

ence and natural history were implicitly devalued. In

Emerson's hands, transcendentalism eschewed the gritty

details of the world (carpentry and chemistry, as he put

The study of nature was a path to the ideal. The differen-

tiation of the world was illusory. All places and times

could indifferently be appropriated and transcended by a

human nature which, although at root unchanging, had

to be honed by assiduous "self-culture."

The relation of the human to the natural world was

an explicit transcendentalist theme, which Emerson

([1903] 1968, 10) developed at length: "The greatest

delight which the fields and woods minister is the sugges-

tion of an occult relation between man and the vegeta-

ble." Emerson (12) insisted that the world provides for

humanity, a property that he termed commodity: ". .. the

support and delight on this green ball which floats him

through the heavens." The outline of a transcendentalist

theory of landscape (which Emerson did not write but

Thoreau, arguably, sometimes did) are clear: the con-

tents of landscape are noble, beautiful, and sometimes

botany and ichthyology" (1883, 440).

butterfly.... Even ice begins with delicate crystal leaves, as

Certainly, although Thoreau took pride in his own

if it had flowed into moulds which the fronds of water

practicality as an artificer and odd job man, the alterna-

plants have impressed on the watery mirror. The whole tree

tive mechanistic metaphor of geographic pioneers such

as Maury had no appeal (Livingstone 1992, 153). One

searches his texts in vain for application of "machine,"

of insects in their axils. ([1854] 1989, 306-7)

"mechanism," and so on to the natural world. He reserves

The reference to towns and cities in the last sentence is

significant: it is the farthest Thoreau ever pushes the

intent, for example in "Civil Disobedience" (1965a, 637):

metaphor of crystalline botany and the closest he ever

Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies

Hiding Places: Thoreau's Geographies