Thoreauvian Disappointment: Losing the Plot in The Maine Woods

Abstract

Thoreauvian Disappointment:Losing the Plot in The Maine Woods Rachael Dewitt (bio) Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods (1864) is a muted drama of curtailed ambitions.1 The posthumously published compilation of his three Maine excursions (the first two of which previously appeared in periodicals) follows a distinctly unsatisfying structure. The biggest excitement (and literal climax) comes at the start when Thoreau climbs Mt. Katahdin, and then the book carries on for an additional two expeditions that are ostensibly driven by the hunting of moose—a task for which Thoreau repeatedly expresses his abhorrence. The narrative lurches and idles just as its narrator gets waylaid by dammed rivers and delayed stagecoaches. Disappointment suffuses this travel narrative, and within its unresolved, inconclusive, and misdirected logics, we can glimpse an ironic, self-deprecating addition to the normatively triumphalist travel genre. If The Maine Woods follows a downward trajectory, its critical tradition has done the opposite. The Maine Woods was a disappointment to early twentieth-century architects of the American Renaissance who revered Thoreau.2 But today it stands out as an early and thoughtful work of environmental nonfiction. As if in compensation for the many failures that it narrates, scholars have emphasized [End Page 487] its success on and off the page, focusing on Thoreau's enlightenment, improvement, and transcendence. The alpine sublimity that Thoreau experiences in the first essay ("Ktaadn") and his call for the preservation of wilderness at the end of the second essay ("Chesuncook") became iconic passages in early environmental humanities.3 This focus on novelty and excitement represents a critical tradition that persistently characterizes The Maine Woods as a series of isolated episodes in which Thoreau creatively overcomes his context to uncover new truths about wildness and wilderness.4 This article departs from that tradition by approaching The Maine Woods as an ironic travel narrative that accomplishes very little—beginning with initial success in "Ktaadn" followed by mild disappointment in "Chesuncook," and concluding with disillusionment in "The Allegash and East Branch." I read the traveler's devolution across the three essays as an exercise in non-transcendence in which Thoreau sketches the limits of his own epistemology and reveals his own perspective to be as small as the mosquito biting his arm. Here, I return to early scholars' sense of disappointment with The Maine Woods and suggest that disappointment is rather the point. By contextualizing The Maine Woods within the genre of travel literature, and then by tracking the devolution of language across its three essays, we can see Thoreau accept—rather than resolve—his limitations and failures. When Thoreau wrote "Ktaadn," he was already a seasoned botanist whose enthusiasm for nature was shaped by the ideology of manifest destiny and his writerly ambitions. When he wrote "Chesuncook" a decade later, he had yet more knowledge of science, and consequently diminished hopes for wilderness's ability to survive humans' accelerating consumption. He also had lower hopes for his own writing career, and a growing distain for all markets, literary included. By the time he wrote "The Allegash and East Branch," he had an even wider scientific foundation [End Page 488] (which he used when sprinkling the essay with binomial nomenclature) and a clearer sense of how what he was looking at was not wilderness at all but a landscape shaped by indigenous and settler cultures. He also possessed so little interest in publishing that he withheld the essay from publication until the end of his life. The Maine Woods gathers all these frustrations between two covers, offering its reader only mild humor in compensation. I argue that we can see this text in a new light when we consider disappointment itself as a kind of Thoreauvean insight. In his final decade—between traveling to Maine in 1856 and preparing his Maine book in 1862—Thoreau gazed clear-eyed upon his personal, professional, and intellectual frustrations. Through them, he penned a sarcastic guidebook that is loudly critical of Maine settlement and industry, and softly appreciative of Penobscot knowledge. In keeping with recent readings of The Maine Woods from scholars John J. Kucich and Laura Dassow Walls, I view Thoreau's shifting attitudes toward the Penobscot people as a...