‘A Greater Vital Force’: Rhetorical Affinities between Thoreau and Darwin

Abstract

This essay explores the parallels between Darwin’s style in the opening chapters of the Origin and Thoreau’s approach in his late essay “Wild Apples,” highlighting the affinities between these works’ strategies for overcoming resistance to their authors’ ideas, and showing Thoreau’s admiration for both Darwin’s ideas and method. Most striking to Thoreau are Darwin’s skill at and clear love of observing, as well as his ability to use vivid storytelling to convey nature’s vitality and capacity for endless metamorphosis. In contrast with Darwin, Thoreau is less concerned with achieving a new, persuasive explanation of change in nature than with showing that every aspect of the world including human language and thinking are alive and evolving. Thoreau had already explored his vision of the linked, dynamic processes of linguistic and physical metamorphosis in the picture he created of the sandbank in Walden and elsewhere. In “Wild Apples,” with Darwin’s help, he considers more deliberately the reader’s need to be prepared for such a way of seeing.