Henry David Thoreau, American Subversive: Sensory Balance in Walden

Abstract

The notion that Henry David Thoreau was the first American nature writer has been adequately disproven, but he was certainly the first to change the way Americans wrote about nature in a number of important ways. Not least of these was how Thoreau subverted the predominance of sight in previous American nature writing by portraying a more balanced representation of the senses in his most famous work, Walden. Thoreau’s sensory balance is a convention that continues today and can be found in any number of acclaimed works of American nature writing. The cultural privileging of sight in the West influenced how early Americans wrote about their environment. As Europeans arrived in America and began writing about their environment, sight was the preferred sense through which to engage the landscape because it allowed Europeans to evaluate it from a distance. In an effort to appeal to European audiences, naturalists like Catesby and Bartram presented American nature in hypervisual terms. It would take the arrival of Henry David Thoreau to break the hypervisual streak in early American nature writing. Thoreau wrote about all five senses, and his sensory balance model leaves the reader experiencing the place he writes about as fully as possible, a convention that continues in contemporary American nature writing.