"Just apply a weight": Thoreau and the Aesthetics of Ornament

Abstract

Questioning the view that Thoreau abandoned aesthetics in order to know nature, this essay argues that he articulated an alternative, ornamental aesthetics. Far from rejecting his era's taste for ornament, Thoreau developed nineteenth-century understandings of ornament into an aesthetics focused upon impact and reaction, and crossing between the natural and man-made. Taking ornamental forms as the result of pressures in the material world, such as the way ice bends trees into feathery shapes, Thoreau ultimately understands form as a contingent effect. He also presents ornamental writing as a result of pressure, rather than expression, and suggests that it is the thought indicated by gnomic sentences that is ornamental (rather than, as we might expect, the material form of lettering). Thoreau's ornamental aesthetics, fascinated by the provocation of effects by blunted pressures, sidesteps an aesthetics concerned with reshaping the natural world into the expression of human thought. Still, his preoccupation with pressure and force indicates that even a recessive, posthumanist aesthetics will entail impact, transformation, and even damage. This makes his ornamental aesthetics both a model and a warning to contemporary critics concerned with rethinking the aesthetic.