LEONARD N. NEUFELDT AND MARK A. SMITH Going to Waiden Woods: Waiden, Waiden, and American Pastoralism This is an essay about the literal and literary significance of the Waiden Woods Henry Thoreau made famous. Thus it is also about Waiden Pond and Waiden. This connection is notable in longstanding debates over what to make of Waiden Woods, debates which have implicated the meaning of Thoreau, his memorable work, and American pastoralism. In the last decade disputes sparked by plans to develop sectors of the Waiden Woods area have involved memorialists, naturalists, ecologists, political activists, local civic leaders, Massachusetts politicians , a former United States Senator and Presidential candidate, pop performers, highbrow artists, historians, literary scholars, civic leaders, and entrepreneurs on the stochastic issue ofwhat Walden/Walden means. The dispute over what to make of Waiden Woods today (discussed at length in the third section) is not new; in part, it is yet another chapter in the historical debate on the proprietary ties of Thoreau's legacy and his Waiden to a 2680-acre tract in the towns of Concord and Lincoln , Massachusetts, a tract of which approximately sixty percent is currently protected from any development.1 Because the shared interest of most of those who have experienced Waiden and Waiden has something to do with a literal or literary pastoral and with American pastoral ideology, the adjective "stochastic" in an earlier sentence is enfolded by the concept of the pastoral, more precisely, by various hard (meaningful and viable) and soft (trivial and non-viable) notions of the pastoral. Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 16 10 58Leonard N. Neufeldt and Mark A. Smith The virgule between Waiden and Waiden in the first paragraph might have suggested that they are interchangeable; they are not. Indeed, the record of Thoreau scholarship offers numerous examples of Waiden examined without reference to any geographic, historical, or cultural world. Likewise, the history of pastoral literature offers many examples of an ideal vision (the author's or critic's) whose only concession to time and place seems to be homage to particular conventions in the histoty of a genre. But in the realm of cultural symbolism Waiden and Waiden are linked. To wit, without the physical Pond, Waiden Woods, and Thoreau's cabin on Emerson's lakeside woodlot, we wouldn't have Waiden, and without this book, the debates on the uses of Waiden Pond and Waiden Woods would have been notably different from the ones that have lately taken place. To give this discussion a Thoreauvian twist, one might note that "literal" and "literary" share a common etymology and several common root meanings, yet by and large point in opposite directions. As Daniel Peck has noted, however, even as opposites the two were inseparable for Thoreau: an actual geographic site "is an analogue for the self, and for the privileged and protected isolation Thoreau hopes to achieve at the pond" (84). The inseparability of the literal and literary in what several American interest groups have brought to Waiden and Waiden also helps to contextualize the term "pastoral" culturally. Rather than delving into classical origins and meanings of "pastoral," or into its semantic history, or into the pragmatics of its overdetermined use in our century so as to uncover its real meaning, this essay begins with three assumptions about the term. First, there is a European and American history of the concept, and these two histories, while not identical, overlap, especially in literary uses of the pastoral.2 Second, the term is a variable which, when coupled to an argument, becomes a rhetorical topos, a familiar place for invocation, prescription, and invention—as it was fot Thoreau. Applied to Waiden and Waiden, "pastoral" links the Waiden narrator's question of why he went to Waiden Woods (a question soliciting various substitutions of questioner) to certain elements in the semantic history of "pastoral," principally those that have to do with the cultural and private value of rurality as both sign and site. Third, as a rhetorical topos in American literary debates, the pastoral has often included rurality, that is, a natural environment not fundamentally and irrevocably transformed...