UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Reinterpreting Myths: The Wilderness and the Indian in Thoreau's Maine Woods

Identification

Clé publique

openalex:w326001020

Auteurs

James A. Papa

Année déclarée

1999

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:15:09.549375+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:15:09.549375+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

THE YEAR 1991 saw an effort by rock star Don Henley and other musicians and artists to save Pond from developers. They saw in a symbol of pure, untainted nature, a small but accessible parcel of Eden, which Henley described as still, for the most part, exceedingly beautiful and inspiring (Henley, 55). Henley's concern with the fate of Pond stemmed from the pond's position at the center of the now near mythical existence of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's literary treatment of the pond in (1854) secured it a place at the core of American environmental and literary consciousness that it holds to this day: No parallel tract or body of water or place has so captivated the human imagination or so taught us how to relate to the world from which we spring. Nowhere else is there a literary memorial and monument of such breathtaking consequence. In a world devoid of symbols and a landscape almost uniformly for sale, is an international shrine. (Kay, 867) Walden Woods belongs to the world, and as Americans we're stewards of that trust (Starr, 27). The pond and its surrounding woodlands, says Roderick Nash, represents of the shrines of evolving consciousness to the rights of nature in western thought (qtd. in Audubon, 10-11). By 1991 the pond and the parcel of forest that Henley and his crew wanted to save bore little resemblance in fact or spirit to the one Thoreau lived beside. Henley was a hundred and fifty years too late. Even in Thoreau's time the pond was hardly the wild backwoods paradise so many people imagine it to have been. A railroad ran by the shores of the pond, and the land on which Thoreau built his cabin, a wood lot owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had been surveyed, deeded, and exchanged for cash before Thoreau's tenancy. Even the waters of the pond had been commodified; in winter its ice was cut and sold. But by the time of Henley's effort, the growing suburban corridor along Boston's Route had so altered the reality of the pond's existence as to make one wonder just what Henley's Woods Project was out to save. For even if in winter the solitary walker might on an off hour imagine the pond the way it was when Thoreau hiked its shores, the fact is that for over a hundred years now the pond has been anything but an idyllic sylvan retreat. As Jane Kay notes: only twenty years after Thoreau's idyllic pastoral interlude, crowds were coming out ... to visit Walden's Pleasure park, which opened in 1866; city dwellers fled the urban heat for dance halls, lecture platforms and boating. On the busiest days, 500 to 1,000 came from Boston. (868) The promotional rhetoric for Henley's benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden denied this reality and spoke of and its last few acres of unspoiled woods as a pristine national treasure. In truth, Pond today is no more than an outdoor museum piece. Of course, concert-goers, if they cared at all about the actual cause more than the lineup of musicians slated to play, were simply unaware that the parcel they were trying to save from development was separated from the pond by a dump, a tourist parking lot, a trailer park, and route 2 (Lingeman, 505) and honestly believed they were helping to save a virgin piece of the American landscape from bulldozers and pavement. Even Henley later naively remarked that it had never occurred to [him] that the woods wouldn't be now as they were (qtd. in Starr, 27). But even Henley's imagined then is no more than a literary illusion, a metaphor raised to the level of myth through the literary genius of Thoreau. Such a willingness to continue to believe in the myth of betrays a desperate need in the American psyche to believe in that purity of landscape and wilderness whose loss Nick Carraway laments so eloquently at the close of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby: I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. …

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OPENALEX

W326001020

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Famille documentaire

Doctrine

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article

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Forêt · Paysage

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Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1

• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W326001020

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