Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
5. In Chapter XLI, what ironies, if any, does Jacobs note in her situation of
having to be sold in order to be free? How do America’s laws contribute
to the irony? How do America’s laws contribute to the ironies of the
Dodges’ economic problems and the “value” in which they hold Jacobs?
4.21 HENRY DAVID THOREAU
(1817–1862)
Henry David Thoreau sought to live
an essentialist life, one devoid of the
unnatural excrescences loaded upon
individuals by society and societal
institutions. By realizing self-unity and
being true to his individual self, he
sought to realize his true selfhood as an
organically-rendered microcosm of the
macrocosm that is the world in nature.
For Thoreau, nature has subjective
value and meaning and shapes not only
the body but also the mind and spirit.
When such external institutions as the
church and the government divert the
individual from the overarching unity
of themselves and nature, then Thoreau
thought the individual should prefer Image 4.19 | Henry David Thoreau
Photographer | Unknown
integrity over conformity.
Source | Wikimedia Commons
Thoreau distills philosophical
License | Public Domain
thought—such as Transcendentalism—
and objective, sensory, scientic collection of concrete facts—such as Darwin
claimed as his methodology—into a unique expression of integration: of self with
nature, of self with culture, of culture with nature. He expressed these views both
lyrically and plainly in the two books published during his lifetime—A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1848) and Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854)—in the lectures he gave from Boston to Bangor, Maine; in his published
essays, including “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849) (later retitled “Civil
Disobedience”); and in the personal journals he started at Emerson’s urging, kept
throughout his life, and that lled twenty volumes when published after his death.
The actions of his life, though not apparently earth-shaking, reect Thoreau’s
self-integrity. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, to John Thoreau and
Cynthia Dunbar. His father made a meager living as a store-keeper before
manufacturing lead pencils. Thoreau and his brother John attended the Concord
Academy. Thoreau’s devotion to reading made him the strongest family candidate
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