March 28-29, 2003

Revising Nature:
Thoreau's Work in the Maine Woods

Judy Schaaf
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

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Judy Schaaf is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where she has served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.  A lifelong student of the literature of natural fact, she teaches and writes in ways that cross disciplinary boundaries and explore the conceptual premises and expectations of literary art.  She received her education from Rice University (B.A., English and Anthropology), Columbia University (M.A., English Literature), Middlebury College (M. Litt., American Literature), and Yale University (Ph.D., English Literature). Professor Schaaf's publications reflect her eclectic interests and include articles on Thoreau’s naturalism, Hawthorne’s nonfiction essays, the discourse of love in a 14th century Arthurian poem, and the ethos of traditional Chinese domestic architecture.  She is currently working on a book about the sources and early development of the Western idea of the Asian “other,” focusing on the accounts of four European travelers during the first century of Western travel to Asia, from about 1245 to about 1330. Professor Schaaf has also taught at North Carolina State University, at Norwich University in Vermont, where she was Charles A. Dana University Professor and Head of the Division of Humanities, and at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, where she was Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American literature.  In Vermont, she served on the governing board of the Vermont Council on the Humanities and chaired the Council’s Program Committee.

-- Abstract --

In the second half of his career, Henry Thoreau broke with the premises of romanticism, especially three related principles: (1) the idea of correspondences that relates natural fact to human “meaning,” (2) the notion of the separation of man from the rest of nature, and (3) the concept of nature as commodity, created for man’s use.  As Thoreau’s faith became unmoored from the idea of correspondences, his writing grew steadily more factual and direct, and more openly questioning.  As he came to believe seer and seen inseparable, he began to objectify and vary his perspective.  And when Thoreau removed the self from the center, where it had stood emphatically in Walden, and instead sent the seeing I on a trek without an itinerary, he did so under the influence of his growing and radical conviction that man, body and soul, exists among nature’s phenomena, not apart from or above them.  The idea of nature as made for man’s use vanished before this conviction.

Thoreau’s changes are evident in the book that spanned his later career, The Maine Woods.  Each time Thoreau ventured to Maine, he went into wilder territory, for a longer time, and with fewer companions, simpler gear, and a more native guide.  He names simple motives for each of his travels: to climb Ktaadn, to botanize and observe moose-hunting, to explore the wild watercourses.  But Thoreau also went to Maine to face the implications of his changing view and to work on a new language of natural fact, one increasingly mindful of the principles and discoveries of the sciences.  Thoreau’s personal case reflects his century’s progression from an ontological sense of the natural world, one evolved from theology and philosophy, often in the face of the evidence of science, to a phenomenological awareness based upon the developing paradigms of the physical sciences.

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February 24, 2003