Michelle Neely, "Reading Thoreau's Animals"

Michelle Neely

Connecticut College

“Reading Thoreau’s Animals”

Thoreau writes about animals wonderfully, and often. In Walden, The Maine Woods, the journals, some of the essays, and elsewhere he shows himself to be a careful and sympathetic observer of nonhuman animal life, yet his ethical reasoning from his observations does not always please. Walden’s exploration of the ethical, intellectual, and spiritual consequences of taking animal life in particular seems frequently to annoy both readers and critics put off by what they see as Thoreau’s “exasperating” fixation on purity,[i] but even Thoreau’s fine depictions of squirrels, chickadees, and other “brute neighbors” in Walden, the journals, and other writings, can be dismissed as fanciful flights of anthropomorphism. 

Perhaps Thoreau’s “instinct”[ii] about killing animals and consuming animal bodies cannot be conveyed to any who have never felt its like; ethical insights can be individual and incommunicable, a truth the philosopher Cora Diamond has named “the difficulty of reality.”[iii] But some of the value of reading Thoreau’s animals, and the challenging nature of his thinking about the material world, can, I think, be illuminated. In the longer essay from which I draw my presentation, I will offer a brief close reading of one of Walden’s most famous “animal” passages and then explore some of the more significant ways in which Thoreau’s engagement with nonhuman animals resonates with recent theoretical developments in posthumanism, new materialism, materialist ecocriticism, and Object-Oriented Ontology. Ultimately, I wish to demonstrate that Thoreau’s animal thought frequently decenters the human and displays his commitment to giving “materiality its due,” as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have said of “the New Materialisms” more generally. In the process, I will make a case for paying greater attention to the way that Thoreau’s ethical thought may often be grounded in careful observation the material. Finally, I will argue that Thoreau’s evident pleasure in boundary confusion is an important part of his ability to imagine a more open and ecological form of community.

In the case of Walden in particular, and in much of Thoreau’s work more generally, I would further like to suggest that anthropomorphism is a mode rich with ethical and epistemological possibilities: for Thoreau the naturalist, philosopher, and poet, anthropomorphism is not simply an act of imagination, it’s frequently a fact of attention to the ontology of the nonhuman. Moreover, anthropomorphism has real ethical possibilities. Kari Weil, building on trauma theory’s concept of “critical empathy” as a “conjunction of affect and critical awareness that may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy not grounded in affinity,” has suggested that we “call an ethical relating to animals (whether in theory or in art) ‘critical anthropomorphism’ in the sense that we open ourselves to touch and be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing that we can know their experience” (20). Thoreau’s anthropomorphism is indeed a vehicle for imagining nonhumans as fellow subjects, and for noticing the shared experience of being.

What is shared, most fundamentally, is mortality, and a vulnerability to pain, hunger, and “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” as Hamlet put it. “Shall we not have sympathy with the muskrat which gnaws its third leg off, not as pitying its sufferings, but, through our kindred mortality, appreciating its majestic pains and its heroic virtue? Are we not made its brothers by fate?,” Thoreau muses in an 1854 journal entry celebrating a muskrat’s attempt to free himself from a trap.[iv] It is this recognition of the shared bodily experience of human and nonhuman creatures that leads Thoreau to characterize animal killing as “murder” in the passage with which I began.[v] Donna Haraway, following Derrida, claims that the question of murder is at the heart of human exceptionalism, the claim of absolute difference between human and nonhuman animals. In When Species Meet, she writes, “only human beings can be murdered…Every living being except Man can be killed but not murdered.  To make Man merely killable is the height of moral outrage; indeed, it is the definition of genocide” (78). For this reason, using the word “murder” to describe the deliberate killing of animals is not simple hyperbole, it’s a fundamental challenge to the anthropocentric logic by which only human lives merit moral consideration. After Thoreau describes the brutal ant battle he witnesses in “Brute Neighbors,” he disrupts the easy distinction between the value and meaning of human and nonhuman death when he reflects, “I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference” (220-221).

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[i] Richard J. Schneider writes “most readers find ‘Higher Laws’ …to be exasperating in its puritanic insistence on the virtues of a vegetarian diet” (100). Nancy Mayer’s consideration of the ethics on display in “Higher Laws” is also representative of this position when Mayer claims that “Thoreau doesn’t, after all, really have much to say about actual animals, and, towards the end of the chapter, the whole argument dissolves discouragingly into a prudish diatribe against coffee, tea, and gluttony that begins to sound suspiciously like an unwitting revelation of the author’s private foibles” (27). In this essay I hope to demonstrate that Thoreau does, in fact, have important things to say about “actual animals,” and as I have argued elsewhere, Thoreau’s “prudish diatribe” against the substances named by Mayer is in fact a complex intervention into antebellum debates about capitalism, citizenship, freedom and the body. For this argument, see Neely, “Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden.”

[ii] Walden, 206.

[iii] Philosophy and Animal Life, 45-6. See also page 92.

[iv] Journals, February 5, 1854.

[v] In his annotated edition of Walden, Jeffrey Cramer points out that Thoreau made other references to taking an animal’s life as “murder.” In The Maine Woods Thoreau uses the word to describe the moose killing, and in an 1847 letter he uses the word to describe killing animals for scientific specimens. See Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, 204.

Works Cited

Cavell, Stanley, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Cary Wolfe. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.

Mayer, Nancy. “Hunting the Human Animal: The Art of Ethical Perception in "Higher Laws." The Concord Saunterer 17 (2009): 27-43. Print.

Neely, Michelle C. “Embodied Politics: Antebellum Vegetarianism and the Dietary Economy of Walden” American Literature 85.1 (2013): 33-60. Print.

Schneider, Richard J. “Walden.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Journal Vol. 7: 1853-1854. Eds. Nancy Craig Simmons and Ron Thomas. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009. Print.

--. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition Ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. Print.