Scatology and Eschatology : The Heroic Dimensions of Thoreau's Wordplay

Abstract

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.