Re-Creating Walden: Thoreau's Economy of Work and Play

Gleason, William

doi:10.2307/2927288

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Like many other careful observers of antebellum US culture, Thoreau expresses a keen awareness of the economic changes happening as a result of the antebellum "market revolution." In fact, Thoreau begins Walden with advice about the management of household affairs that places his book squarely in the tradition of domestic guidebooks and advice literature of the kind being produced by Catherine Beecher, Lydia Maria Child, William A. Alcott, and Sylvester Graham (see Gleason 1993). Walden is thus first and foremost a reform text that takes on the problems confronting American society in an era of profound economic change.…”

Section: Henry Thoreau's Vegetarian Poeticsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden

Neely

2013

American Literature

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Near the beginning of Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells his readers that his “experiment in living” is dedicated to learning “what are the gross necessaries of life... the grossest groceries,” a choice of metaphor that might remind us just how much of his personal and political reform project in Walden hinges on diet and Thoreau's attitude toward literal “groceries.” Thoreau's interest in dietary practices has generally been read as apolitical or even antipolitical, primarily because his dietary and consumptive practices have never been adequately situated amid contemporary antebellum debates about diet and food commodity consumption. A turn to Sylvester Graham's vegetarian movement, however, shows that far from being divorced from civic concerns, the vegetarian dietary theory driving Thoreau's practices at Walden Pond plays a complicated role in the political design of Walden. Uniting private practices with public reform, Thoreau draws on Graham's theory of a universal physiological constitution that all human beings, and perhaps even animals, could be imagined to possess, in order to denominate the human body as a significant site of political reform. Ultimately, antebellum vegetarians such as Graham and Thoreau restricted appetite for animal foods and commodities in order to reform, reshape, and remake what they viewed as a flawed democratic body, reimagining the limits of citizenship and civic participation in the process.

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Section: Henry Thoreau's Vegetarian Poeticsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden

Neely

2013

American Literature

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Sacramental Shopping: Little Womenand the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

Sherman¹

2001

Prosp.

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Although Critics Have frequently observed that Louisa May Alcott's enormously popularLittle Women(1868) is a novel of education, they have not addressed just how much this is a consumer education. This essay tackles the question by placing the novel at the intersection of Victorian religious and consumer cultures. It argues thatLittle Womenengages the emerging “spirit of modern consumerism” through traditional moral discourse, particularly Protestantism and its romantic/sentimental descendants. For not only does the book trace its young heroines' progress toward “little womanhood,” but it sets many of their ethical challenges in a Victorian “Vanity Fair.” And, much as in Bunyan's originalPilgrim's Progress, those challenges are often temptations to idolatrous materialism. In the Protestant imagination, such idolatry found crucial expression in the Roman Catholic interpretation of the sacraments. For the Protestant, the communion bread and wine were merely symbols of divine grace, a grace that only God could confer. For the Catholic, they were the transubstantiated body and blood of Christ Himself, and therefore possessed salvific power. InLittle Women, this anxiety about the proper interpretation of the sacraments becomes anxiety about the proper use of material objects and the qualities they signify. Here the Catholic's belief that the consecrated host could confer grace and transform the spirit threatens Protestant integrity in a new guise, as the modern consumer's faith that fashionable goods can construct identity and deliver happiness.

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Brook Farm and Association

Newman¹

2005

Our Common Dwelling

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Re-Creating Walden: Thoreau's Economy of Work and Play

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden

Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden

Sacramental Shopping: Little Womenand the Spirit of Modern Consumerism

Brook Farm and Association

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