Henry David Thoreau's Walden: Immigration, ecocriticism, and otherness

Abstract

This essay aims at revisiting Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), especially the episode in chapter X, "Baker Farm,"where Thoreau introduces the reader to an Irish immigrant, John Field. A hard-working farmer, Field thinks he is moving his way up the American social ladder and, presumably, dream, when, in fact, Thoreau tells us he is toiling just to feed unnecessary body needs. Whereas Field views his coming to America as a blessing for he could purchase these commodities, Thoreau notes that "the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these."This episode will assist me in my discussion of Thoreau's environmental concerns by way of focusing on Otherness - in this case, an Irishman, a victim of the Hungry Forties. I will attempt to show Thoreau as a man complicit with racial stereotyping considering that in this passage he viewed the Irish as slovenly, dirty, imbecile, and good-for-nothing. Throughout the nineteenth-century, such racial stereotyping would be extended to other ethnic minorities arriving at the turn-of-the-century and a subject of inquiry by ethnologists and sociologists. The Irish, who had to fight for their whiteness, were not alone in this battle considering that Southern Europeans - with the Portuguese, in particular - were said to possess "some negro blood,"as Donald Taft has argued in Two Portuguese Communities in New England (1923). This rhetoric would be later on fine-tuned during the Eugenics movement in the 1920s and culminating in the Holocaust during World War II. My contention in this essay is that Thoreau was complicit with America's paranoia about the boundaries of whiteness.