Thoreau's divide: rediscovering the environmentalist/agriculturalist debate in Walden's "Baker Farm".

Cummings, Robert

A persistent worry in contemporary environmentalist circles concerns the reception of activists, who research and proclaim theoretical advice on sustainable agricultural practices, by agriculturalists--those who live upon and work the land and develop another knowledge system founded on practical experience. But this tension is not new: it is actually covered in the oft-overlooked "Baker Farm" chapter of Walden. In "Baker Farm," Thoreau's narrator visits the house of John Field, his impoverished Irish immigrant neighbor. During the visit this narrator dispenses a great deal of advice on thoughtful, sustainable living, to a very skeptical audience. What's more, the narrator's tone appears to be out of keeping with the spiritual awareness expressed by Thoreau throughout Walden: unlike that thoughtful narrator, the narrator of "Baker Farm" appears condescending and arrogant. He presses his advice on John Field to the obvious discomfort of Mrs. Field and without much regard for the limitations imposed by the family's hardships, so that many readers have puzzled over exactly how to interpret this short chapter of Walden. This essay offers that "Baker Farm" should be read as satire: the narrator's arrogance is positioned by Thoreau as a comic airing of the author's own anxieties over his role as dispenser of potentially unwelcome theoretical advice. The drama of the Field house, therefore, should be viewed in the light of the conflict between environmental activism and agricultural practice. Chapter after chapter, Thoreau formulates his own thoughts on sustainable living in the relative isolation of his own mind. Like the contemporary environmental activist, however, Thoreau is invested in the reception of his ideas by other practitioners and is anxious to envision reader reactions. "Baker Farm" is in keeping with the punning humor elsewhere in Walden as it allows the author to satirize both himself and other theoreticians while he exorcises his anxiety over the reception of his message. Further, evidence of this ideological divide provides the reader with an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between theory and sustainable life practices.

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At a recent symposium sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) one particular question continually resurfaced in disparate discussions: How are environmental scholars and activists perceived by those who work or live on the land of environmental conflict? Throughout the conference, a generalized and growing concern for the relationship between environmentalists and people who work the land for a living was never far from formal and casual conversation. It seems that many environmental speakers and scholars are worried about a growing rift between themselves and agricultural workers, including both owners and laborers. But it might have surprised conference goers to learn that while this conflict is troubling, it is by no means new. Because contemporary environmental issues might appear novel, we sometimes overlook sources of literary inspiration for treatment of these issues. The tension between environmental activists and agriculturalists is old enough not only to be foreseen by a nineteenth-century author such as Henry David Thoreau, but, as this essay will show, also important enough to warrant the focus of a Walden chapter. (1)

These contemporary conference goers are worried that to the many people who work the land, professional environmentalists often seem at best, out of touch, and at worst, a threat to their livelihood. Environmentalists will arrive suddenly and unannounced at the scene of a land use controversy with seemingly prepackaged judgments on complex issues that a farmer may have been engaged with for the better part of a career. In any given situation, the environmentalists tend to see a land use issue, whereas the farmer sees a home and a job. Environmentalists--at least the professionals--are more likely to live away from the land that is central to a dispute, perhaps even in an urban area, while those who work the land often live on it (with the important exception of corporate agribusiness ventures). In the May/June 2002 issue of Sierra, Gerald Haslan reports on how difficult it was for Brian Blane, the head of California's largest pecan growing and processing organization, to join with environmentalists to defeat a common foe. Blane said, "A lot of farmers genuinely believe that environmentalists are out to destroy agriculture. Many things can be done that would be good for farmers and the environment, but suspicion keeps people from working together." (2) On the other side, Scott Dye, a Sierra Club organizer, reported, "Some farmers think a Sierra Club organizer will show up looking like their image of an environmentalist, with a long ponytail and sandals.... When I show up looking like an average farm kid, well, they're more likely to listen." (3) This conflict takes on many forms: it could include the flooding of arable fields by state agencies to create additional wetlands in Hennepin, Illinois. (4) It could be the debate over whether ranchers throughout the Western U.S. should sell cattle grazing rights in national parks back to the federal government. (5) And it is a truly international conflict as well, that could manifest itself in the Pume of Venezuela, who seek to preserve an indigenous culture of hunting and gathering through the formal declaration of land tenure rights in spite of the call of ecotourism developers and low wage jobs that remove them from the land. (6) In all of these cases, those who garner practical knowledge from living on and working the land find themselves at odds with those who have cultivated a theoretical understanding of land use.

People who work the land are often tied to it for economic reasons that aren't always addressed in the environmentalists' pleas for sustainable land management. Individual, private farms in the United States are often held by several generations of the same family. The assets of a typical family farm frequently range into the millions of dollars, and the legal and tax codes that surround the operation of that family business are staggeringly complex. More often than not, people who work the land feel trapped by it. It's no secret that America loses a substantial number of family farms each year: from 1986 to 1999, an average of 1,517 U.S. family farmers each year sought the protection of chapter twelve of the bankruptcy code, a temporary chapter of the code written specifically to address this epidemic. (7)

Many people who work the land they have inherited yearn, like all of us, for the simple financial power to control their own fate. The losing business they have inherited often sprouts from depressed real estate values in the underlying property. They can look longingly at their neighbors who are "lucky" enough to sell out to real estate developers who convert pastures to sprawling residential subdivisions. These land owners observe the relative freedom of environmentalists and think, "How in the world can you make a living at trotting over the earth spewing unwanted advice? I'd give anything to leave this albatross." While these views summarize several anecdotes, they capture a prevailing sentiment of the tensions between those who work the land within our capitalist system and those who seek, either through political activism or scholarship, to preserve the wilderness experience for all who would share it. But "the news" of this split between contemporary environmental activist and contemporary land worker is, of course, not news at all. The split between a distanced, circumspect, informed, and privileged land use perspective and a philosophy born of an everyday, necessary, hands-on practice is certainly as old as our touchstone of the American literary experience with environmentalism, Henry David Thoreau's Walden.

The production of an author with his own economic anxieties, his own diurnal gardening habits, and his own circumspect, writerly connection with the land, Walden is a text simply fascinated with the divide of consciousness fostered through the human connection with land. Walden's intense narrator casts the reader as witness to a self-conscious and activist land-use relationship, as opposed to the underrepresented thoughts of characters who work the land, such as the Fields. In this essay I propose that the tension between the two land use perspectives, activist and agricultural, occurs in Walden in a previously overlooked nexus--the "Baker Farm" chapter. Thoreau's purpose in "Baker Farm" is not to take a stand in this divide, but rather to host an exploration of the two perspectives. Further, not only does Thoreau anticipate our contemporary divide on activist versus agriculturalist land use, but he also clearly indicates the depth and permanence of the division through the split between Thoreau the narrator and Thoreau the writer. The delicacy of the relationship between these two knowledge systems is handled most aptly through Thoreau's use of humor, a strategy of self-parody that allows the author freedom to speculate on the complex reception of his ideas by agriculturalist thinkers through the foibles of his activist narrator.

"Baker Farm" is a chapter often overlooked or, perhaps more often still, misread, as a misanthropic diatribe against the poor, ignorant, working class bogger. In Thoreau's sketch of John Field's house, it is appropriate to conceive of the narrator as the nineteenth-century equivalent of the professional environmentalist of contemporary land use conflicts. Like our professional environmentalist, Thoreau's narrator arrives at the farm suddenly, un-announced, quickly surveys the family's surroundings, and begins prescribing remedies for problems that he alone diagnoses. And just like our imagined contemporary family farmers, the Fields' reactions range from Mr. Field's bewilderment to Mrs. Field's anger. Additionally, the rupture between Thoreau and the Fields corresponds rather neatly to the contemporary tension between environmental scholars and agricultural owners. Thoreau's narrator is a character born out of an environmentalist's anxieties, a spontaneous growth of the writer's fears.

The presence of this anxiety suggests not only that this tension is an old one, but is also perhaps an ideological divide between two types of knowledge: theory and practice. On one hand are Thoreau the narrator and our anecdotal environmentalists, interpreting observations of overall human interaction with wilderness, and attempting to formulate an exportable message based on their personal nature experience as well as a theoretically-derived understanding. And on the other hand are the farmers and agricultural land workers, past and future, who employ a very different--and equally valid--knowledge based on the actual day to day living with the land. Thoreau's interaction with the Fields suggests that this divide was just as substantial for him as it is for us.

I. One Curious Narrator

As the creator of his own story, Thoreau plays the dual roles of author and narrator when he casts himself into the work. In the "Baker Farm" chapter, Thoreau the narrator is caught by a sudden downpour while on the way to a fishing pond on a neighbor's farm. He seeks shelter in "the nearest hut," which he believes to be uninhabited, but which proves to be the dwelling place of an Irish-American laborer and his family. There, not unlike the prototypical environmental activist imagined in the preceding sketch, Thoreau freely and presumptuously offers his philosophy and advice to the family.

Thoreau the narrator first views the infant of the family, coldly describing her as "the wrinkled, sybil-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palace of nobles, and looked out from its home in the midst of wet and hunger inquisitively upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line, and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat." (8) The narrator then transfers his paternalistic attitude to his address of the family generally. He presumes to know their qualities, merits, and inner thoughts--in short, the content of their character--all, apparently from glancing around this hut. He continues: "An honest, hard-working, but shiftless man plainly was John Field; and his wife, she too was brave to cook so many successive dinners in the recesses of that lofty stove; with greasy round face and bare breast, still thinking to improve her condition one day; with the never absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere." (9)

Thoreau's narrator assumes from the poverty prevalent in the Field house that the family is in need of his help, that their simple lifestyle devoid of possessions is something to be corrected, regardless of the fact that Thoreau the author has spent prior chapters of Walden extolling the virtues of materialist minimalism. There may be no evidence that their poverty is calculated, as is the author's, but the narrator never seems even to entertain that possibility. Here the narrator exhibits what one reader--Richard Bridgman--has called his "bigotry." (10) The narrator assumes that the Fields possess an ignorance that is responsible for their poverty, while his equally simple lifestyle is a product of his considered thinking. Such an assumption merely adds to the reader's perception of the narrator as arrogant. But the fact remains that witnessing the Fields' poverty is a challenge to Thoreau's own condition. Thoreau's narrator must then seize on the difference in causes for the same effect: the Fields are unintentionally poor and therefore unhappy, but Thoreau is intentionally poor and liberated. Conceptually it is this calculation, or deliberate determination to live lightly, that the narrator relies upon to separate his brand of poverty from the Fields'. Seeing the Fields living in a presumably miserable condition suggests the ultimate power of material realities (i.e., that being poor and doing without is an undesirable approach to living regardless of the ideology one attaches to it) and perhaps necessitates the elaborate narrative pontification of "Baker Farm" to gird up Thoreau's conception of his lifestyle's potential to yield desirable results for all who would partake in it.

Thus the poverty of the Fields is taken by the narrator as a direct challenge to the power of the worldview that drives his own style of living. The fact that Thoreau's narrator assumes that the Fields live in a poverty of ignorance, without exploring the opportunity that their poverty is a manifestation of conscious choices, reveals mostly anxiety about his own choices. His poverty is intentional, theirs is not; but does poverty in and of itself have the power to determine the narrator's fate? Over time will the material condition triumph over the spiritual will? In some manner then Field presents the narrator with a test case--if the narrator can export his perspective successfully to the Fields, then he will know that one's deliberate intention to live in poverty is more powerful than material consequences of living in that same poverty. Though John Field will, at least in the narrator's eyes, prove himself inept later in this chapter by failing to catch any fish, and thereby lead the narrator to conclude that John Field is beyond help, the narrator's approach to his visit in the Field house compels him to distinguish his own poverty from the Fields' on the grounds of intentionality.

This scenario's explicit discussion should remind us again of the contemporary split between environmental activists and agriculturalists. The heart of the debate between the activist and agriculturalist is appropriate land use and a general approach to living. Like our Sierra Club activists, Thoreau's narrator advocates a theory for sustainable living to those faced with the realities of warding off poverty. And like our contemporary California nut growers, the Fields listen warily as an uninvited guest professes his theories to them. But "Baker Farm" does more than provide us with an easy parallel for the casting of the actors in these contemporary debates--"Baker Farm" also captures the underlying fears that charge this debate with emotion. For the activist, the theory is just that: partially tested knowledge that the proponent truly hopes will be successful for the farmer if he or she will only adopt it. And Thoreau's lifestyle is still in the theoretical stages--it works for him, but he cannot honestly say that it will be successful for all who apply it. These fears can cause the activist to claim the truth of the theory with even greater certainty. Similarly, the agriculturalist fears the uncertainty of the advice as well. As the California nut grower states, he or she knows that there is validity in the activist's message, and is willing to grant that there is a problem dire enough to require new approaches. But the agriculturalist necessarily remains fearful of any proposition that asks him or her to gamble family assets on another's advice.

Yet unlike the contemporary split, the narrator's stance introduces the issue of ethnic bias. Thoreau's "Baker Farm" narrator betrays a sense of superiority in his relationship with this Irish-American immigrant family, based on his status as having arrived first in America. After looking around the cabin and noting its deficiencies, the narrator remarks, "There we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked least, while it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this family to America." (11) By claiming a prior relationship with their residence, the narrator implies a superior relationship with the space these immigrants inhabit due simply to his status of having lived longer in America. In this reflection it is easy to detect a callous attitude of landed and established Americans towards recent arrivals. The narrator notes that the Fields' current home was not deemed worthy of inhabitation prior to their arrival: "I made haste for shelter to the nearest hut, which ... had long been uninhabited." (12) The fact that the property had been, prior to the Fields' arrival, a sort of public shelter, additionally indicates a loss on behalf of the narrator and others who might have shared in its use; the Fields' possession of it as their residence now precludes its employment as a gentleman's fishing camp. Then the narrator reminds us that through the immigrants' very presence, the landed Americans are made materially worse: they have lost not only the use of the shelter for leisurely fishing trips, but they have also lost the ability to envision the leaky shelter as insufficient to pass as a person's primary residence. Thus the landed Americans are comparatively worsened through the presence of the impoverished immigrants. Rather than feeling wealthier through the immigrants' presence, the established Americans are disturbed by the presence of those who are desperate enough to occupy their cast-off housing. This perspective creates in the narrator an underlying tone of strained benevolence, which is revealed when he remarks that he hopes John Field does not read his commentary unless--reminiscent here of the "White Man's Burden" ideology--Field might improve himself by it: "Poor John Field!--I trust that he does not read this, unless he will improve by it,--thinking to live by some derivative old country mode in this primitive new country." (13)

In this interaction with the Fields, the narrator seems to embody and give voice to the very sense of authority against which the majority of Walden rebels. This presentation of the narrator as condescending "bigot" cannot help but be a bewildering experience for the reader who has listened to the author insist on living by experiment and charting one's own course. Worse still, readers will note that this narrator's own "tight, light, and clean house" was originally the property of another Irish-American immigrant family; given the ramshackle condition of the Field house in comparison to his own, and given that the narrator has done (in his own view, at least) quite well with essentially the same materials, the narrator's experience with the same raw materials seems to further his conclusion that these immigrants simply lack the ability to live well in the land of plenty. As the narrator presents it, the poverty problem lies with the inhabitants--not with the raw materials, not with their new culture.

Though this discussion has only begun to look at "Baker Farm," we must stop at this point and acknowledge that the text has offered the reader a lot to absorb. Thoreau has presented himself as the "bigot" Bridgman describes--a character far removed from the thoughtful author who has inspired the reader for chapter upon chapter of witty observation and philosophical contemplation, ranging with ease from mundane daily chores to man's teleological fate, and the interconnections between. How is the reader to reconcile the extreme differences between the tone of the narrator in "Baker Farm" and the remainder of Walden? Most critics who have wrestled with this strange interlude in Walden have not framed "Baker Farm" as a focal point of the book, but rather as a transition between more substantial sections. Lawrence Scanlon's reaction is an accurate assessment of most critical attention when he states that "The tendency has been to ignore it entirely, or to treat it ... as merely "transitional" between "The Ponds" and "Higher Laws." (14) But for reasons introduced herein, I would like to argue that it is time to begin framing "Baker Farm" in terms of the activist/agriculturalist divide. In "Baker Farm" Thoreau casts himself as a rube. This fool-for-a-narrator plays an important role, however: by intersecting the heretofore theoretical and introspective Walden narrative with the daily life of the Fields' house, Thoreau is able to humorously project how his inspired advice for daily living might be received in a real household.

Like any theorist, Thoreau is looking for a pause to reflect on the practice of his ideas. "Baker Farm" provides that respite, and more, since we also need to account for the self-absorbed manner in which the narrator presents his material: one can envision many fictional ways to entertain the reception of Thoreau's inspired living without the ill-considered perspective of the "Baker Farm" narrator. The narrator's lack of tact is in fact proof of the endurance of the activist/agriculturalist divide. The author necessarily worries over the audience's reception of his or her ideas, and in "Baker Farm" Thoreau creates this brazen narrator out of an authorial anxiety over the potential reception of his message in order to fictionalize the worst possible presentation of his advice on living. In order to cope with the worst case scenario of how his activist thoughts on informed-living could be received, he steals the thunder of his harshest potential agriculturalist critics by fictionalizing the worst possible presentation of his ideas to the least prepared audience. Exorcising the authorial anxiety over the agriculturalist reception to the activist message is one of the purposes of "Baker Farm," and is the source of the tension that drives its humor. This approach can provide a compelling explanation for the unsolicited advice to which Thoreau's narrator subjects the Fields.

After hearing of a poor bargain Field has made for his bogging services, the narrator presumes to offer the following advice about how to overcome poverty: "I tried to help him with my experience, telling him that he was one of my nearest neighbors, and that I too, ... who looked like a loafer, was getting my living like himself; that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to; and how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own." (15) The narrator then continues to relate his philosophy of materialist minimalism: if you work hard, you must eat great quantities, but if you don't work as hard, and do without meat, butter, eggs, etc., then your demands will be proportionately less.

The narrator remarks, "I purposely talked to him as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one." (16) This is certainly true: he is focused here on his abstract principles of simple living, and ignores some of the obvious problems of applying his philosophy to his neighbors' lives. First, and most importantly, Thoreau commits to material sacrifices for himself alone. His neighbors, however, must think about providing for offspring. Even if John Field were to agree with Thoreau's philosophy, his sacrifices would also be borne by his wife and children. Additionally, Thoreau the narrator doesn't seem to address his remarks to Mrs. Field. Whether or not it was customary to assume that the husband should make the decision for this family, Thoreau's address to the husband reinforces patriarchal authority, a traditional social dynamic that Thoreau's radicalism would certainly wish to resist obliquely if not directly. Last, and perhaps most problematic, the most glaring omission on Thoreau's part is that his own hut rests on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land: he lives, in a sense, on Emerson's good graces, a unique situation that few can choose to participate in. Never mind that in spite of his philosophy, Thoreau could traverse a two mile walk home to his mother's house for a hearty meal at any time, a privilege that he availed himself of frequently. In light of these considerations, Thoreau can seem, at times, something like a boy who has pitched a tent in his mother's back yard. For him, the safety of home is never far.

Readers should not ignore that most of Thoreau's conversation occurs in front of Mrs. Field. And readers can certainly anticipate her reaction. Arriving on her doorstep, the town crank and self-described "loafer" attempts to extol the virtues of "doing without" to her husband in the midst of their grinding poverty. Critic Leonard Neufeldt characterizes the narrator's reputation this way: "Many Concordians viewed Thoreau pretty much as the narrator views Field: a ne'er-do-well who isn't eager to take good advice, wastes too much of his time in shiftless pursuits like fishing, and cannot figure out how to make a good living in an America of opportunity." (17) Mrs. Field, however, enjoys none of this comfort as she struggles to cope with hunger. She and her children depend completely upon her husband's labor for their current meager income and food. Surely only good manners prevent her from sending the narrator out the door and on his rear when she hears Thoreau's narrator propose living on less food. And yet from the narrator's eyes, he's made a persuasive case for helping his neighbors. Through Mrs. Field's reaction to his argument, the reader, however, can clearly sense how Thoreau's remarks are received. Thoreau ends his discourse by pointing out that if this family were to follow his approach to farming, "they might all go a-huckleberrying in the summer for their amusement. John heaved a sigh at this, and his wife stared with arms akimbo ... 'You'd better go now, John,'" she adds, nudging him back to work "with glistening and hopeful face." (18)

Mrs. Field provides the comic foil for Thoreau's narrative bachelor. By gendering this conflict, and placing John Field in the middle of an argument between Thoreau's narrator and his wife, Thoreau changes a competition of lifestyles into a battle between a carefree bachelor and mother busy with the serious business of raising a family. This gendered reception presents the impractical theoretical thinking as "bachelorized"--immature and selfishly conceived, not yet ready for a world of family responsibilities. Thoreau satirizes his theories on simple living by placing the narrator's advice to "go a-huckleberrying" against the stark relief of family responsibilities. Does this mean that Thoreau is abandoning these ideas? Of course not. Again, the role of "Baker Farm" within the larger context of Walden is to provide a safe place to relieve authorial anxieties over the agriculturalist reception of his advice on "light living." By placing this advice up against the hard demands of family living, represented here by the clash of a bachelor resting in the household of an exhausted wife, Thoreau maximizes the satire by sharpening the contrast between activist and agriculturalist into bachelor versus wife. Thoreau may not be the ponytailed Sierra Club environmentalist arriving at the family farm, but the underlying authorial anxiety over the impracticality of his message is more easily parodied in front of a stem Mrs. Field. For the comedy to work, there needs to be tension, and her arms akimbo stance provides this. Readers of "Baker Farm" have to ask themselves how it is that the thoughtful, philosophical, and contemplative character of the first part of Walden has transformed himself into this myopically self-centered giver of unwanted advice? If we see Thoreau's presentation through the light of the activist/agriculturalist conflict, then "Baker Farm" fits back into the theme of Walden. Unfortunately, most critics--even those who have actively looked for humor--have not interpreted the chapter by this light.

II. The Critical Bog

A survey of recent critical readings provides a fairly accurate idea of the dour tenor of reader responses to Thoreau the narrator in "Baker Farm." The first readerly impulse is to simply digest these descriptions of the narrator's thoughts and actions as the author feeds them to us, open-throated like a baby bird in the nest. In Dark Thoreau, Richard Bridgman finds that "Baker Farm" evidences Thoreau's inhuman impulses, as he collapses the distinction between Thoreau the narrator and Thoreau the author. Bridgrnan argues that "In general, 'Baker Farm' is a disturbing chapter, for it seems to reveal a bigotry and megalomania in Thoreau that are difficult to credit." (19) Bridgrnan looks to Thoreau's other writings to find more incidents of anti-Irish sentiments, and finds that "Thoreau's pronouncements on the Irish were in general negative...." (20) Bridgman also sees no palatable answers for the narrator's behavior in other readings of "Baker Farm" when he states that "At best, defendants of Thoreau on this matter have pointed out that, in time, Thoreau's attitude toward the Irish changed," referring to the work of three additional Thoreau scholars. (21)

Indeed, Bridgman's reading seems to be typical of most scholarship on "Baker Farm." Bridgman finds additional support for this reading of a "bigoted" Thoreau in the Field house in Leon Edel, whom Bridgman cites as characterizing the segment "as cruel as it is sanctimonious." (22) Bridgman also cites Frank Buckley who, in his article "Thoreau and the Irish," concludes in a dour tone that Thoreau's evaluation of the Irish is condemning: "[T]he occasional praise of individual Irishmen do[es] not justify the conclusion that Thoreau after 1850 became a consistent friend and defender of the Irish. As his praise increased so did his condemnation, and when he found fault he was likely to include the whole race." (23) Thus, like many readers, Buckley too envisions Thoreau as pronouncing sonorous judgment upon Irish-Americans. Bridgman also cites George Ryan, who notes more broadly still that Thoreau was not alone in condemning the Irish immigrant. Ryan writes that both Emerson and Hawthorne tossed equally crude labels onto the Irish immigrants in efforts to decry their selfishness, drunkenness, and inability to contribute to and share in a prosperous America. (24) Although Thoreau offers at least one poem, "Johnny Riordan," as an entire work dedicated to admiring the Irish, the prevailing critical opinion considers Thoreau as sitting in judgment on Irish-Americans. For those readers, "Baker Farm" presents no exception to Thoreau's overall attitude toward the poor.

Yet these readings should leave us wholly unsatisfied, for they offer no way to make sense of "Baker Farm" in terms of Walden as an overall work. To view "Baker Farm" in this anti-immigrant light leaves the reader of Walden with an inspiring, meditative reflection on nature and individual experience, wrapped around an interlude of shortsighted arrogance and ignorance. Critic Charles Anderson attempts to address this gap in his book The Magic Circle of Walden. (25) Anderson's remarks seek to preserve the unity of the "Baker Farm" narrator's remarks and the author's remarks elsewhere in the book. It's an impossible task. Anderson takes his cue from the opening and closing of the chapter, those first and last paragraphs that provide a curious frame to a dialogue otherwise rooted in the narrator's visit to the Fields. Anderson concludes that The economic lesson of Field's involuntary poverty set over and against Thoreau's voluntary poverty is only an illustrative episode. The real theme is a contrast between the elevated and the degraded life, between freedom through imagination and serfdom through stupidity, between a poet's desire to soar into the life of the spirit and a clod's resignation to being bogged down in squalid materialism. The pun was intended, for Field ... is portrayed as a bogger ... at heart as well as by trade, stuck in the mire of his miserable life. On the contrary, Thoreau is always presented as a vigorous and radiant youth ... leaping the brook en route to Baker Farm, running down the hill to Fair Haven when he leaves it, and in the last sentence taking off on winged heels into the aspiring "Higher Laws" that follow in Chapter 11. (26)

Anderson does the reader a service by attempting to digest the entirety of "Baker Farm," including the imagery of its beginning and ending paragraphs. Yet this reading is as unsatisfying as others that ignore the visitation with the Fields: the rainbow and "talaria" imagery of the opening and closing paragraphs do indeed deserve attention, but they do not negate the problematic nature of the "bigoted" behavior of the narrator, especially when that behavior stands in such contrast to the overall tone of the book.

Perhaps the most conclusive look at humor in Walden is Michael West's Transcendental Wordplay. (27) This book-length study of punning in the American Renaissance is remarkable for its understanding of the nuances of nineteenth-century language as well as its dedication in mapping out underlying meaning based on the ear of that era's readers--meaning otherwise lost to most contemporary readers. Perhaps because of his penetrating critical stare, when West broaches "Baker Farm," his vision remains narrowly focused on the mechanics of puns, rather than on the overall context of "Baker Farm" within Walden, a context necessary for viewing the chapter's narrator with irony. West's reading of "Baker Farm" is consistent with that of most critics, who label this chapter a "nadir." West further resists an ironic reading when he writes, "The Yankee animus against philanthropy that sparked some of his most brilliant and truthful pages in 'Economy' functions well in the abstract, but this theme resists dramatic treatment.... The sight of the celibate Thoreau airily patronizing Field and his family in the name of philosophy, urging him to drop his job, change their diet, and go a-huckleberrying, is as unsettling and vaguely repellant as it would be to see Socrates persuading Phaedo and company to commit suicide." (28) Could it not be, however, that this chapter, and this speaker, are to be laughed at rather than cried over? West seems to miss this possibility as he labors to define the chapter to fit his overall reading of "Scatology and Eschatology." West celebrates and investigates the humor of Thoreau's writing, but mainly at the sentence level, as he transforms John Field to a "merely symbolic entity" to escape the issue of the narrator's comparatively inhuman characterization of Field. (29) But wouldn't he and other analysts of Thoreau's humor better serve us if they instead placed the advice to go a-huckleberrying in context with the overall work? Instead, the image of Mrs. Field and the domestic necessities of the Field household command such sympathy from Walden's humorist critics that they abandon their ability to laugh at the narrator's foolish behavior.

What would cause such a serious reaction? Why would Thoreau include a chapter so far out of context with the overall tone of the work? The driving forces would be fairly powerful, indeed. Again, the most logical explanation for humor that the critics have missed is the ironic airing out of authorial angst. For chapter upon chapter Thoreau has journaled in relative isolation, and "Baker Farm" has become the place for the theorist to check back in with his audience. In other words, at some point the environmental theorist is driven to meet the agricultural practitioner, and the anxiety of this long delayed meeting has run high. Reading the humor of "Baker Farm" on a fragmented, sentence-level perspective, rather than working the humor back into a larger reading of Walden, does not help.

III. Laughing All the Way to the Pond

Instead, a reader might look again at the opening paragraphs of "Baker Farm" with an awareness of the activist/agriculturalist debate and find that the sentence-level analysis of humor supports this reading. The first sentence is indeed quite poetic, focusing as it does on the natural imagery surrounding the narrator on his way to the pond. The trees are clearly incorporated with a spirituality: "These were the shrines I visited both summer and winter." (30) And yet there is an important clue in the second sentence that offsets the spiritual/tree imagery: "Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees." (31) As he hints here, Thoreau is carefully constructing a split between a scholarly knowledge based on abstractions, and a more meaningful knowledge based on first-hand experience. The difference between these two types of experience is quickly established. Given that most of Walden is Thoreau's effort to capture through writing his own participatory experiences with nature, here again we see that much of "Baker Farm" comes to focus on the anxieties born of trying to communicate that experience to others.

As stated above, it is humor's insistence on duality in meaning that makes it uniquely suited to capturing the dual existence between narrator and author. Critic Edward L. Galligan is already on this path when he writes: "Is there evidence in Walden itself that we are to take the book as comedy? Indeed there is. To perceive the evidence all one needs to do is adopt the simple, fundamental strategy of making a distinction between the writer and the narrator." (32) The reader's first clue to Thoreau's satire lies in the family names. "John" is used by Thoreau as a ubiquitous moniker for any American man, as opposed to "Jonathan" for any British man. The name "John" is Thoreau's equivalent of John Doe. Recall that Walden's final paragraph begins with the sentence "I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize this." (33) This statement indicates not only Thoreau's belief that "average" readers may not be able to grasp his more difficult conclusions, but also his tendency to use the name John as an anonymous pedestrian stand-in. Also, when we consider John's last name--Field--the reference to land and land use questions becomes almost irresistible. When joined together, "John Field," can be read as "the everyman of the land."

Word play and trickery exist throughout Walden, alerting the reader to the author's playful sense of style. One of the more famous examples of Thoreau's punning occurs in "The Ponds, " where Thoreau refers to the unsuccessful fishermen he encounters as being members of the religious group the "Coenobites," or, translated for effect, the "see no bites." Humor also lies in the heart of the instructional story of the traveler who asks the boy if the swamp has a hard bottom before entering with his horse; when the horse sinks to its girth, the traveler asks the boy if he didn't just tell him that the swamp had a hard bottom, and the boy replies that it does, but the traveler hasn't gotten halfway to it yet. Readers should note that this story is central enough to the message of Walden to be repeated: it appears first in the "Economy" section and then reappears in the "Conclusion." In its own way, it prepares us nicely for the longer exposition of "Baker Farm" by pre-figuring the roles of the traveling outsider who is at the mercy of the humble local for practical knowledge of his environment. Thoreau's narrator in "Baker Farm" has more local knowledge about their surroundings than the Fields do, but in most cases the displaced activist is at the mercy of the locals to gain his or her beatings. The anecdote also hints at the difficulty of those two groups--visiting activists and local agriculturalists--attempting to transcend their communication gap.

In "Conclusion," Thoreau states "it is life near the bone where it is sweetest." (34) But it is the "Baker Farm" chapter that offers a necessary and pragmatic counterpoint to his personal philosophy: it is only for those who elect it. How can it be otherwise? At the end of "Baker Farm," Thoreau's narrator requests a drink from his humble hosts before leaving. Here, Thoreau the author cannot resist elevating the pompous attitude of Thoreau the narrator yet another notch; the character states that when he asks for the water, he asks not because he is thirsty, but because he was "hoping to get a sight of the well bottom, to complete my survey of the premises." (35) Once supplied with the requested water, Thoreau the character notes that the water contains impurities that have not yet settled. But the language that he uses to relate this conclusion is particularly revealing of self-deprecating intent; he states that "such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes, and excluding the motes by a skillfully directed undercurrent, I drank to genuine hospitality the heartiest draught I could" [emphasis added]. (36) Interestingly, Merriam-Webster's etymology and definition of "motes" provide a key for reading this sequence. As one might suspect, the definition is "a bit of foreign matter in food or drink." (37) But more compelling still is that biblically inspired phrase that the dictionary's editors found to be integral enough to the overall usage of the word so as to include it with the definition. The editors tell us that "a mote in the eye" (recall again that Thoreau's exact phrasing places the word "eye" near the word "motes") means: "a comparatively slight fault noted in another person by one who fails to see a greater fault in himself." Webster's also glosses the following quote from the gospel of Matthew as the source of the expression: "Why do you see the speck in your neighbor's eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?... You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye" (Matt. 7: 3-5). Considering Thoreau's consistent references to a wide range of spiritual texts, and his explicit penchant for reworking common biblically inspired sayings, it is more than likely that the placement of these phrases is intentional. Our narrator Thoreau is laughable in the Field house, with a log in his eye. And perhaps most important, our author is quite aware of this, as he reports on the narrator's ability to shut his eye: "Such gruel sustains life here, I thought; so, shutting my eyes,... I drank the heartiest draught I could" [emphasis added]. (38) Clearly ironic, Thoreau the author can't resist one last laugh at Thoreau the narrator when he reflects that "I am not squeamish in such cases when manners are concerned." (39)

We must think again that the tension of "Baker Farm," and therefore the power of its comedy, lies in the attempt to export Thoreau's philosophy to an unwilling audience. As Stanley Cavell notes, Walden is a project that situates itself in the gap between two communities. Cavell writes that Thoreau's problem concerning his readers "is not to learn what to say to them; that could not be clearer. The problem is to establish his fight to declare it." (40) The best approach to establishing that right to declare a message to both sides of the gap, it would seem, is not only to present both sides of the issue in conflict, as is done in "Baker Farm," but also to present both sides of that issue throughout Walden. If "Baker Farm" works as comedic airing of tensions between the differing perspectives of agriculturalists and activists, it is only because the author has previously portrayed both of these groups with a convincing familiarity.

Surely no reader could come away from Walden without a profound respect for an author who can so movingly lament the loss of natural wilderness and still hold a deep and abiding respect for the individuals who make their living from the commodification of nature. In "Higher Laws," Thoreau writes: Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. (41)

We see this familiarity in numerous other points within Walden. Though Thoreau does portray himself as the activist in "Baker Farm" through his narrator, he comes to his understanding of the differences between the two perspectives with honesty, as his chapters "The BeanField" and "Where I Lived, What I Lived For" demonstrate. Thoreau may be ruminating on Eastern and Western philosophy, but he is honestly applying it to the business of day-to-day agriculture. His hands are as dirty as any of his farming neighbors. And though authorial angst over the reception of his philosophical ideas by the practical-minded drives "Baker Farm," this should not cause us to see Thoreau as out of touch with his practitioner neighbors. We cannot forget that in "Visitors" Thoreau spends a good deal of time observing and generally praising the working style of a Canadian logging acquaintance, Alek Therein.

Therein is portrayed by Thoreau as a character study into the consciousness of a simple working man. Thoreau writes: "In him the animal man was chiefly developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock." He presents a man perhaps capable of a greater intellectual life but hampered by an education that has driven out his will to question and has left him subsumed by the desires of others: "He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child." (42) It is interesting then, to think of how characters such as Therein can inform our reading of John Field. Statements about the simplicity of workingmen cannot be taken alone--in the case of Alex Therein or elsewhere in the case of the farmer Hosmer, as simplicity is always offset by complexity. Writing of the complexity hidden within Therein's simplicity, Thoreau notes, "To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet sometimes I saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of a stupidity." (43) In fact, Thoreau specifically introduces our conflict between theorist and pragmatist in his descriptions of Therein when he states, "It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have had dealings with him." (44)

Similarly, in "Winter Visitors," Thoreau remarks that his farming neighbor, Edmund Hosmer, is also unlikely to meet the stereotypical land owner, who either fails to extract practical knowledge from working the land or fails to have enough "book learning" to philosophize. In introducing Hosmer to the reader, Thoreau even links him to Emerson's ideal individual as expressed in "American Scholar": "[Hosmer is] one of the few of his vocation who are 'men on their farms'; who donned a frock instead of a professor' s gown, and is ready to extract a moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard." (45)

But we should not look to "Baker Farm" for any such portrayal of complexity under the simple exterior of the workingman. As the portraits of Therein and Hosmer indicate, these workingmen are complete individuals, with complexities to complement their simple exteriors - for those capable of looking. John Field is no different from Therein or Hosmer, but his narrator is different from Therein's and Hosmer's. "Baker Farm" asks the reader to choose between a world of complex characters, as developed in Walden outside of "Baker Farm," or a world where the "Baker Farm" narrator sums up the entirety of the souls of folks like John Field with a few anecdotes. In the last part of "Baker Farm" we see John Field fail to catch any fish, regardless of how the narrator attempts to accommodate him: "[H]e, poor man, disturbed only a couple of fins while I was catching a fair string, and he said it was his luck; but when we changed seats in the boat his luck changed too." (46) This portrait of John Field is consistent with the overall ironic narrative of "Baker Farm." There might be as much complexity to John Field as we see in Therein or Hosmer, but we won't get it from this narrator. It is doubtful that Thoreau the author would approach the Field household with the pat answers for their family's affairs that we hear from Thoreau the narrator. It is much more likely, given the sensitivity shown elsewhere for those who live close to the land, that the author would view the actions of his narrative persona as laughable as the confident traveler who charges into the swamp on horseback.

The comedy of "Baker Farm" is inspired by the genuine difficulty of addressing the conflict between theoretical speakers and wise practitioners. Thoreau's comedy is a way of highlighting the difference between the two camps and simultaneously paying tribute to both systems of knowledge. As we have seen, this is an active and ongoing conflict. Placing "Baker Farm" in the light of this current conflict both contextualizes those concerned with today's activist/agriculturalist divide and further informs Walden's readers of the book's permanency and contemporary relevance. The tension between activists and agriculturalists, which leads to Thoreau's comedic exorcism in "Baker Farm," is therefore both contemporary and historical. Though comedy suggests a static divide between these two camps, perhaps even a sense of futility born of an immutable conflict, the following passage suggests that Thoreau places each camp's claims to truth within a sense of ultimate truth: No face which we can give to a matter will stead us so well at last as the math. This alone wears well. For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. Through an infirmity of our natures, we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out. In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is. Say what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe. (47)

Walden's conclusion underscores a connection between all human communities, as well as the necessity and urgency of effective communication between individual approaches to math. The link between audience and message is an enduring problem for those in the environmental community and those who work the land. Thoreau's comedy can be an effective tool to do more than merely disarm the tensions between today's communities of workers and scholars, as well as the gap between practical and theoretical knowledge--it can raise a contextual awareness that each speaker offers a credible stance rather than an exclusive hold on truth.

By casting "Baker Farm" as the relieving of authorial anxiety over the differences between activists and agriculturalists, this inquiry sees in Walden the roots of an enduring land use conflict. Though the immediacy of this problem is easy to witness in contemporary land use discussions such as those at the ASLE conference mentioned at the outset, few articulate it as well as Wendell Berry. It is fitting then to hand this conflict over to Berry, having traced its roots to Thoreau. Fortunately, Berry also gives us a glimpse of a way out, a strategy in which the environmental activist and the agriculturalist can coexist. In his 2002 article for Sierra, Berry too sees the necessity of closing the gap between two "sides" by actively conceiving of their interconnectedness: I am a conservationist and a farmer, a wilderness advocate and an agrarian. I am in favor of the world's wildness, not only because I like it, but because I think it is necessary to the world's life and to our own.... As a part of my own effort to think better, I decided not long ago that I would not endorse any more wilderness preservation projects that do not seek also to improve the health of the surrounding economic landscapes and human communities. Whatever its difficulties, my decision to cooperate no longer in the separation of the wild and the domestic has helped me see more clearly the compatibility and even the coherence of my two allegiances. The dualism of the domestic and the wild is, after all, misleading. (48)

University of Georgia

Notes

(1) All quotations from Walden are drawn from the Norton Classic edition, ed. William Rossi, 2nd Edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

(2) Gerald Haslan, "Growers and Greens Unite," Sierra (May/June 2002): 56.

(3) Haslan, 58.

(4) Associated Press, "Conservation Project Funded through Legal but Controversial Loophole," September 29, 2003.

(5) Holly Fretwell, "Cash Crop: Proposal to Pay Ranchers for Grazing Permits Fraught with Problems," Rocky Mountain News, November 29, 2003, Saturday final ed., 12C.

(6) Cultural Survival, Inc. "Into the Life of the Nation: Use and Self Determination among Traditional Pume Hunter-Gatherers in Venezuela," <http://www.culturalsurvival.org/special_projects/americas/pume.cfm>. 3 Feb 2004.

(7) United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service Briefing Room, "Bankruptcies: An Historical Perspective of Farmer Bankruptcy," <http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/bankruptcies/Data/Bankruptcies Table1.htm>. 10 Dec 2001.

(8) Thoreau, 137.

(9) Ibid.

(10) Richard Bridgman, Dark Thoreau (U of Nebraska P, 1982), 108.

(11) Thoreau, 137.

(12) Ibid.

(13) Thoreau, 140.

(14) Lawrence E. Scanlon, "Thoreau's Parable of Baker Farm," ESQ 47 (1967): 19-21.

(15) Thoreau, 137.

(16) Thoreau, 138.

(17) Leonard J. Neufeldt, "Baker Farm" and Historicism: The Rainbow's Arch," in Approaches to Teaching Thoreau's Walden and Other Works, ed. Richard J. Schneider (New York: The Modem Language Association, 1996), 129-37.

(18) Thoreau, 138.

(19) Bridgman, 104.

(20) Bridgman, 108.

(21) Bridgman, 106. Bridgman offers the following authors for support: Walter Roy Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (Princeton UP, 1982); George E. Ryan, "Shanties and Shiftlessness: The Immigrant Irish of Henry Thoreau," Eire-Ireland 13, no. 3 (Fall 1978): 54-78; and Frank Buckley, "Thoreau and the Irish," NEQ 13 (September 1940): 389-400.

(22) Leon Edel, Henry D. Thoreau, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 90 (Minneapolis, 1970), 27.

(23) Buckley, 397.

(24) Ryan, 58-59.

(25) Charles R. Anderson, The Magic Circle of Walden (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1968).

(26) Anderson, 143.

(27) Michael West, Transcendental Wordplay: America's Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature (Ohio UP, 2000).

(28) West, 452-53.

(29) West, 453.

(30) Thoreau, 135.

(31) Ibid.

(32) Edward L. Galligan, "The Comedian at Walden Pond," The South Atlantic Quarterly 69 (1970): 24.

(33) Thoreau, 223.

(34) Thoreau, 220.

(35) Thoreau, 139.

(36) Ibid.

(37) Philip B. Gove, Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language Unabridged (Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1993), 1474.

(38) Thoreau, 139.

(39) Ibid.

(40) Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden (New York: Viking, 1972), 11.

(41) Thoreau, 141.

(42) Thoreau, 99.

(43) Thoreau, 100.

(44) Ibid.

(45) Thoreau, 178.

(46) Thoreau, 140.

(47) Thoreau, 219.

(48) Wendell Berry, "For Love of the Land," Sierra (May/June 2002): 50.