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Scatology and Eschatology : The Heroic Dimensions of Thoreau's Wordplay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Michael West
Michael West*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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Abstract

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , October 1974 , pp. 1043 - 1064
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 1061 My references to books owned by Thoreau depend on the list in Walter Harding, Thoreau's Library (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1957).

Note 2 in page 1061 Letter to ?. B. Wiley of 26 April 1857, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey, 20 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1906), vi, 301. Subsequent references to Thoreau's Journal are by date of entry in this ed., except for entries in the “lost” journal of 1840–41, ed. Perry Miller as Consciousness in Concord (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1958). Of course, given Thoreau's habit of reworking his entries from material in an Ur-journal, these dates in no way constitute termini a quo for his ideas. Other works are cited by vol. and page from Writings, except for Walden, cited from The Variorum Walden, ed. Walter Harding (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963). On the importance of Thoreau's classical philology, see esp. Ethel Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951), p. 12 et passim.

Note 3 in page 1062 See esp. Roger Langham Brown, Wilhelm con Humboldt's Concept of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).

Note 4 in page 1062 Cited by Benjamin T. Spencer, The Quest for Nationality: An American Literary Campaign (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1957), p. 184; cf. pp. 90–91, 150.

Note 5 in page 1062 For the text of Channing's essay, see The American Literary Revolution, 1783–1837, ed. Robert E. Spiller (Garden City, ?. Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 113.

Note 6 in page 1062 Cited by Spencer, p. 185; see also pp. 130–31.

Note 7 in page 1062 On the Study of Words, 2nd ed. (New York: Redfield, 1853), pp. 123–25. For Thoreau's interest in the book see his Journal for 15 Jan. 1853 and 27 Jan. 1853.

Note 8 in page 1062 Cited by Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), p. 107; both of Stewart's examples reappear in Walden, pp. 4,112. On this entire subject see esp. Chs. i-iii; also my “Walden's Dirty Language: Thoreau and Walter Whiter's Geocentric Etymological Theories,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 22 (1974), 117–28.

Note 9 in page 1062 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection, with a Preliminary Essay by James Marsh (Burlington: Goodrich, 1829), pp, liii, lviii; for his projected Apology see Anima Poetae, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (1895; rpt. London: Folcroft, 1969), p. 225.

Note 10 in page 1062 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Literary Ethics” (1838), in Works, ed. James Elliot Cabot, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1883–93), i, 171.

Note 11 in page 1062 The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 175.

Note 12 in page 1062 “The New School in Literature and Religion” (1838), in The Transcendentalists, pp. 194, 196; A Statement of Reasons for Not Believing the Doctrines of Trinitarians, 12th ed. (1833; rpt. Boston: American Unitarian Assn., 1880), p. 138, and see Sec. 7, “On the Principles of the Interpretation of Language,” and Sec. 8, “On a Fundamental Error concerning Language.”

Note 13 in page 1062 Cited by John B. Wilson, “Grimm's Law and the Brahmins,” New England Quarterly, 38 (1965), 238, q.v.

Note 14 in page 1062 See Harold A. Durfee, “Language and Religion: Horace Bushnell and Rowland G. Hazard,” American Quarterly, 5 (1953), 57–70; also my “Charles Kraitsir's Influence on Thoreau's Theory of Language,” Emerson Society Quarterly, 19 (1973), 262–74.

Note 15 in page 1062 Perhaps most useful for background is Donald Allen Crosby, “Horace. Bushnell's Theory of Language: A Historical and Philosophical Study,” Diss. Columbia 1963; see also Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), passim.

Note 16 in page 1062 See René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), ii, 101–06,176.

Note 17 in page 1062 On Renaissance wordplay see esp. ?. K. Ruthven, “The Poet as Etymologist,” Critical Quarterly, 11 (1969), 9–37. Thoreau owned at least two books treating Renaissance wordplay with some sympathy: J. C. D'Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, and the Literary Character Illustrated (New York: Leavitt, 1848), whose fondness for puns embraced both the sanitary and the obscene (e.g., pp. 5, 12, 25, 69, 72, 81, 141); and Gulian Verplanck, Discourses and Addresses on Subjects of American History, Arts, and Literature (New York: Harper, 1833), who sought to base a true American style not upon English neoclassicism but upon the “irregular greatness” exemplified by the Puritan and republican Milton, at once “gigantic and childish” in his puns (pp. 21–22). Thoreau likewise relished baroque wordplay (24 June 1856).

Note 18 in page 1062 See Jean-Georges Ritz, Le Poète Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., 1844–1889: L'Homme et l'œuvre (Paris: Didier, 1963), pp. 178, 297–99; also David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, Versatile Vermonter (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 202 et passim.

Note 19 in page 1062 See Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Style in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966); also Arthur Voss, “Lowell, Hood, and the Pun,” Modern Language Notes, 63(1948), 346–47.

Note 20 in page 1062 David Skwire, “A Check List of Wordplays in Walden,” American Literature, 31 (1959), 282–89, tabulates 122 of the more obvious wordplays. This list is considerably augmented by John Joseph Moldenhauer, “The Rhetoric of Walden,” Diss. Columbia 1967, pp. 252–409, but Molden-hauer's admittedly tentative list of ca. 450 wordplays also needs revision.

Note 21 in page 1062 See Charlton Laird, “Etymology, Anglo-Saxon, and Noah Webster,” American Speech, 21 (1946), 1–15; “Diversions of The Diversions of Purley in the New World,” Rendezvous, 1 (1966), 1–11.

Note 22 in page 1062 “Remarks on National Literature” (1830), in The American Literary Revolution, pp. 359–60; cf. Channing, Works (Boston: American Unitarian Assn., 1899), p. 487, with Walden, pp. 245–46.

Note 23 in page 1062 See John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953; rpt. New York: Norton, 1965), pp. 41–45.

Note 24 in page 1062 Noted by Allen Beecher Hovey, The Hidden Thoreau (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1966), p. 124.

Note 25 in page 1062 A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 85, 88. Such excrescences as footnotes can scarcely discharge the fundamental debt I owe both to this seminal book and to study with Poirier, although substantial differences of opinion and emphasis will become evident in the course of my argument. See also Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking, 1972), for a suggestive but rather less persuasive account of Thoreau's punning.

Note 26 in page 1062 Walter Harding makes anality the subject of a laconic and gingerly annotation in the Variorum Walden, p. 315. But although, in A Thoreau Handbook (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 26–27, Harding approvingly summarizes some possible psychological interpretations as “problems that all serious future biographers of Thoreau must at least consider, if only to refute,” in his fine The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1965; hereafter cited as Days), the dean of Thoreauvian studies quite ignores this Freudian concept, first applied to Thoreau by Raymond Dante Gozzi, “Tropes and Figures: A Psychological Study of David Henry Thoreau,” Diss. New York Univ. 1957. Gozzi reports inter alia that when Thoreau's description of the thawing sandbank was shown anonymously to two trained Rohrschach analysts, each classified its author as anal-aggressive (p. 117). But anality remains a minor theme in Gozzi's relentlessly Oedipal analysis. His groundbreaking interpretation of Thoreau's psychodynamics was admittedly tentative and now seems particularly implausible in the following respects: (1) in overemphasizing the unconscious and obsessional nature of Thoreau's imagery, ignoring the degree to which even in the Journal it was elaborated as a conscious artistic symbology; (2) in isolating psychological themes from Thoreau's intellectual concerns rather too much in the manner of Freud, going so far as virtually to exclude Walden from the portrayal of his mind; (3) in stressing conflict on the level of genital sexuality (actually, art seems to have sublimated his torpid libidinal impulses rather well), whereas it was oral and anal activity that most persistently bothered Thoreau; (4) in using very scanty evidence to hypothesize unconvincingly about his parental relationships; (5) in positing a dramatic regression-crisis in late maturity to account for a death fully explicable in somatic terms. These weaknesses are incorporated in the derivative study by Carl Bode, “The Half-Hidden Thoreau,” Massachusetts Review, 4 (1962), 68–80. Although Gozzi's psychoanalytic interpretation is rightly dismissed by Albert Gilman and Roger Brown, “Personality and Style in Concord,” Transcendentalism and Its Legacy, ed. Myron Simon and Thornton H. Parsons (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1966), p. 120, n., their psychological approach seems unduly pessimistic in claiming that “we can not now hope to discover the cause of Thoreau's chastity” (p. 93), especially since they point in the right direction.

Note 27 in page 1063 Cited by Charles R. Anderson, The Magic Circle of Walden (New York: Holt, 1968), p. 166.

Note 28 in page 1063 Leaves of Grass, ed. Emory Holloway (New York: Book League, 1942), p. 86. See Arthur Wrobel, “Whitman and the Phrenologists: The Divine Body and the Sensitive Soul,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 17–23.

Note 29 in page 1063 Cited by Joseph Jones, “Transcendental Grocery Bills: Thoreau's Walden and Some Aspects of American Vegetarianism,” University of Texas Studies in English, 36 (1957), 146, and see Jones throughout.

Note 30 in page 1063 On Thoreau's attitude toward fungi and death, see esp. Joel Porte, Emerson and Thoreau: Transcendentalists in Conflict (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 181–90; also Perry Miller, Consciousness, pp. 55–79.

Note 31 in page 1063 Complete Poems (New York: Holt, 1949), p. 521.

Note 32 in page 1063 Thoreau transcribed these lines from Percy's Reliques into his poetical copybook, now in the Library of Congress, in 1842. See Ann Whaling, “Studies in Thoreau's Reading of English Poetry and Prose, 1340–1660,” Diss. Yale 1946, pp. 101–02.

Note 33 in page 1063 Describing a bogtrotter's typically ragged attire, William Carleton stressed the same detail in his Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry (1830), rpt. in An Anthology of Irish Literature, ed. David H. Greene (New York: Random, 1954), p. 322. Carleton's very similar sketch of a shanty family substantiates Thoreau's complaint that the Fields lived in a “derivative old country mode” (p. 159).

Note 34 in page 1063 See the N.E.D, s.v., and cf. the terms boggard and bog-house. For a similar exegesis of Thoreau's themes in this chapter see Magic Circle, pp. 131–43.

Note 35 in page 1063 See Harding, Days, pp. 351, 362; also John C. Brod-erick, “The Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” American Literature, 33 (1961), 133–42. Cf. my discussion of Wilkinson on motion below, pp. 1057–59. On irrational fear of bacterial parasites as part of an American ideal of hyper-cleanliness, see Theodore Rosebury, Life on Man (New York: Viking, 1969).

Note 36 in page 1063 Discussing muck and mixen s.v., Tooke connects them respectively with mingere and miscere. Although he distinguishes these words, explaining mix etymologically as to digest, he cites Junius and Skinner as authorities for linking both meanings in a way that would have encouraged Thoreau to derive mingle from mingere. For Thoreau's reliance on Tooke, see Writings, vu, 398.

Note 37 in page 1063 Etymologicon Magnum (Cambridge, Eng. : Deighton, 1800), pp. 54–55.

Note 38 in page 1063 So Miller, Consciousness, pp. 96, 227–28, following Gozzi. Harding, Days, pp. 77–78, considers and sensibly rejects this interpretation.

Note 39 in page 1063 Cited in Magic Circle, p. 165. On the psychological basis of misogyny, see esp. H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (New York: Simon, 1966).

Note 40 in page 1063 See Paul Henri Mallet, Northern Antiquities, trans. Bishop Thomas Percy, ed. J. A. Blackwell (London: Bohn, 1847), p. 567; for Thoreau's familiarity with Mallet see the Journal (15 and 16 Feb. 1852) as well as Cape Cod, in Writings, iv, 192. On Thoreauvian heroism see in addition to Hovey, pp. 34–48, Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1958), pp. 29–38, 80–89, 126–38, et passim. For Emerson's influence see Theodore L. Gross, The Heroic Ideal in American Literature (New York: Free Press, 1971), pp. 3–17. But all this work ignores the intellectual context admirably sketched by Eric Russell Bentley, A Century of Hero- Worship: A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche with Notes on Other Hero-Worshippers of Modern Times (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), which is indispensable for a full understanding of Thoreau.

Note 41 in page 1063 Sir Walter Raleigh, ed. Henry A. Metcalf (Boston: Bibliophile Society, 1905), p. 86.

Note 42 in page 1063 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: University Books, 1963), pp. 363–64; the heroic character of James's own ethics emerges most prominently from his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.”

Note 43 in page 1063 See esp. Magic Circle, pp. 252–57; also Stephen Railton, “Thoreau's ‘Resurrection of Virtue,‘ ” American Quarterly, 24 (1972), 210–27.

Note 44 in page 1063 See Lawrence Willson, “Thoreau's Medical Vagaries,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 15 (1960), 64–74; René Dubos and Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (Boston: Little, 1952), esp. pp. 39–63.

Note 45 in page 1063 Six Lectures on the Uses of the Lungs; and Causes, Prevention, and Cure of Pulmonary Consumption (New York: Carlisle, 1847), p. 76. During Thoreau's life this best seller by a popular home medical authority went through some 40 editions, and at the century's end it was still selling.

Note 46 in page 1063 James Harvey Young, The Toadstool Millionaires: A Social History of Patent Medicines in America before Federal Regulation (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 79, 38. On other American authors sharing Thoreau's preoccupation with excrement see Martha Banta, “American Apocalypses: Excrement and Ennui,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 7 (1974), 1–30.

Note 47 in page 1064 Pliny's Natural History, trans. Philemon Holland, ed. Paul Turner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1962), p. 75.

Note 48 in page 1064 Dio Lewis, Weak Lungs and How to Make Them Strong, or Diseases of the Organs of the Chest, with Their Home Treatment by the Movement Cure, 28th ed. (1863; rpt. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1881), p. 205; see also pp. 184, 188, 217. Connecting consumption with excretion, as Fitch does, and believing that “Christ died to save us from dyspepsia” (p. 118), Lewis echoes most of the earlier authority's recommendations.

Note 49 in page 1064 Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1932), p. 214. For further exegesis of the linguistic dimension to Thoreau's eschatology, see my articles on Kraitsir and Whiter cited above.

Note 50 in page 1064 Channing, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts, 1873), pp. 321–22.

Note 51 in page 1064 So Porte, Emerson and Thoreau, pp. 183–88, following Miller, Consciousness, p. 68.

Note 52 in page 1064 Cf. On the Study of Words, p. 219, and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.6. See also Thomas Woodson, “The Two Beginnings of Walden: A Distinction of Styles,” ELH, 35 (1968), 456; and for a clearer pun on stereotyped, see Journal, 1 July 1840.

Note 53 in page 1064 See Perry Miller, “From Edwards to Emerson,” New England Quarterly, 13 (1940), 603–12; also Magic Circle, pp. 89–90.

Note 54 in page 1064 Introduction to the History of Philosophy, trans. Henning Gottfried Linberg (Boston : Hilliard, 1832), p. 187. See Kenneth Walter Cameron, Emerson the Essayist (Raleigh: Thistle Press, 1945), i, 303–19, and “Thoreau Discovers Emerson: A College Reading Record,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 57 (1953), 328; also Emerson R. Marks, “Victor Cousin and Emerson,” in Transcendentalism and Its Legacy, pp. 63–86; and Georges J. Joyaux, “Victor Cousin and American Transcendentalism,” French Review, 29 (1955), 117–30.

Note 55 in page 1064 Cited by Wellek, ii, 17; see also i, 233.

Note 56 in page 1064 Work and Play, or Literary Varieties (New York: Scribners, 1871), p. 22.

Note 57 in page 1064 See Emerson, Journals, ed. Edward W. Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes, 10 vols. (Boston: Houghton, 1909–14), vu, 526, and ix, 88.

Note 58 in page 1064 Emerson, Representative Men, in Works, iv, 108; English Traits, v, 237–38. On Wilkinson's American vogue, which led Elizabeth Palmer Peabody to include his essay “Correspondence” in her Aesthetic Papers (1849) together with the first printing of “Civil Disobedience,” see DNB.

Note 59 in page 1064 Cited by Wellek, ii, 175. On Thoreau's revisions see J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden, with the Text of the First Version (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 28–31 ; also Broderick, “Movement of Thoreau's Prose,” p. 141.

Note 60 in page 1064 Cited by Sylvan Barnet, “Coleridge on Puns: A Note to His Shakespeare Criticism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 56 (1957). 606, n., q.v.

Note 61 in page 1064 See Kathryn Anderson McEuen, “Lowell's Puns,” American Speech, 22 (1947), 24–33.

Note 62 in page 1064 Cited by John Clubbe, Victorian Forerunner: The Later Career of Thomas Hood (Durham, N. C: Duke Univ. Press, 1968), p. 34.

Note 63 in page 1064 See J. C. Reid, Thomas Hood (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 235–37.

Note 64 in page 1064 The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kauf-mann (New York: Viking, 1969), pp. 152–53; see also Kaufmann's comments, pp. 106–11; The Case of Wagner, trans. Thomas Common, in Nietzsche's Works, ed. Alexander Tille (New York: Macmillan, 1896), xi, 24–25.

Note 65 in page 1064 “Thoreau,” in Works, x, 448. Since the esthetic interpretation of Thoreau has been vigorously challenged by Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Misconceptions in Current Thoreau Criticism,” Philological Quarterly, 47 (1968), 563–70, its origin in Emerson's own perceptions is worth noting.

Note 66 in page 1064 Cited by Harding, Days, pp. 102,109, q.v.

Note 67 in page 1064 Cited by Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1955), pp. 18–19, q.v., esp. Chs. ii, iii, v, on heroism rooted in play.

Note 68 in page 1064 Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. 292–93.

Note 69 in page 1064 Henry David Thoreau: A Critical Study (Boston : Houghton, 1916), p. 109.