Thoreau’s Materialism: From Walden to Wild Fruits

Abstract

Notes that during the 1850s, Thoreau increasingly engaged in participatory observation of nature while becoming increasingly radical in his political beliefs. Suggests these concurrent developments were closely related manifestations of an underlying trend toward increasing commitment to a materialist understanding of the ecosocial world. Claims Walden is a transitional text: it articulates a materialist analysis of capitalist social relations and the moral effects of the market and competition, but also offers an idealist response, centered on individual self-reform, to that problem. Posits that Wild Fruits, the guide book Thoreau left in manuscript, offers a second answer to the same problem. In it he argues that commerce and private property limit access to the wild, alienating urbanites and the poor from fulfilling relationships with nature. Suggests the book convokes a utopian democratic community, bound together by the collective devotional exercise of gathering and eating wild fruits, and calls for collective direct action to protect tracts of wild land by holding them forever as common property.