[Nicole Callahan]

<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Katie Schulz makes three damning claims about author Henry David Thoreau. That he was a self righteous, misanthropic, and self-aggrandizing. His grating self righteous nature she finds in his ideology about life. Thoreau abstains from all pleasures of the flesh, living abstinently, never drinking or eating in excess, and abandoning a comfortable life to live in a rustic cabin. His dislike extends to some things considered the basic pleasures of life, like coffee and salt. All of this self-denial, Shulz claims, is “at base, religious.” He comes across as implicitly judgemental and self-punishing in the way that many religious fanatics do. “‘Walden,’ in consequence, is not a paean to living simply; it is a paean to living </span><i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>purely</span></i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>, with all the moral judgment that the word implies.” Her second jab is at his distaste for his fellow man. “He disdained his ostensible friends…he looked down on his entire town.” She brings up his distaste towards foreign places and how he “justified his own parsimony by impugning the needy.” He did not have a charitable bone in his body. Her third point comes to the same conclusion by two different means. One way in which Thoreau partook in self aggrandizing is his dividing of himself from others, people he considered more base and beneath him, saying “‘it seems as if I were more favored by the gods than [other people]…” His other method of self aggrandizing was portraying his conditions in a manner that created a superior image to the reality. </span><i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Walden </span></i><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>would have you believe Thoreau lived in the barren wilderness, miles from fellow man, but the truth is he was close enough to town to walk to his family home, and had company sometimes of tens of people at one time. His self image is made out to more independent, more above it all then he actually was. “He valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people…” </span>

<span style=”font-weight: 400;”>These claims are contested by Jedediah Purdy, who sees Thoreau as less of a libertarian anarchist obsessed with self-sufficiency due to his deep hatred for people and more a “</span><span style=”font-weight: 400;”>a 21st-century liberal’s idea of our best self: pro-­environmental, antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist, reformist, spiritual but not religious.” He believes that, unlike Schulz’s assessment of Thoreau as a misanthrope, he had many “humane preoccupations,” like his well documented abolitionist sentiments, which even Schulz claims as the exception that proves the rule. He claims that Thoreau’s deep connection to protecting wildlife is in and of itself humanitarian and due to a concern for peoples like the different tribes of Native Americans that relied largely on the natural world. Rather than see his sojourn in Walden as a test of purity and superiority, Purdy sees it as an “experiment in material simplicity… an exercise in shaping a style and a self” not meant to pass judgement but simply to improve one’s soul. Despite the same measures being taken Purdy’s perspective puts Thoreau at an immediately more likable and understandable position. Despite his more positive opinion Purdy does believe “Thoreau’s radicalism and social wariness were, at times, closely bound to misanthropy and self-righteousness…” but relates it more closely to Thoreau’s lifetime sense of alienation and self-critique. The man is the same, but the angle through which the two see his life goes to show the complex nature of Thoreau and his contradictory behavior. </span>

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