| "Walden's Agrarian Context" defines the agrarian context of antebellum American literature and examines responses to these circumstances by three northeastern writers: Andrew Jackson Downing, Donald Grant Mitchell ("Ik Marvel"), and Henry David Thoreau. In the opening chapter, I summarize developments in manufacturing practices, transportation, and agricultural implements between 1815 and 1845 and demonstrate how these unprecedented changes allowed many of America's farmers, especially in the Northeast, to abandon or alter significantly their previous agricultural practices. The consequence of these changes for antebellum Americans, I conclude, was a growing dissonance between inherited agrarian cultural ideals and everyday experiences that were increasingly urban and industrial in orientation. In subsequent chapters, I illustrate Downing's, Mitchell's, and Thoreau's sensitivity to this dissonance and examine their literary responses to it as they are manifest respectively in Downing's editorials for the Horticulturist, Mitchell's My Farm of Edgewood, and Thoreau's Walden. In each instance, I demonstrate how the author's depictions of farmers and farming acknowledge dissonance while simultaneously asserting revised agrarian cultural ideals calculated to keep Americans in the country and close to nature. Analyses of these ideals demonstrate the authors' debts to literary and cultural predecessors as well as their obfuscation of contradictory personal experiences. Studying Walden in this agrarian context deepens our understanding of the complex circumstances that generated it and complicates previous distinctions between the achievements of a "major" antebellum author and his "popular" contemporaries. |
