Thursday, 23 February: Henry David Thoreau (1735-1752), introduction + “Resistance to Civil Government”

Reader: Joe Myers

Henry David Thoreau-“Civil Disobedience”

Objectives:

·        To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

·        To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (New Historicism), such as equality; race, gender, class; modernization and tradition; the family; the individual and the community; nature; the writer's conflicted presence in an anti-intellectual society.

Overview:

Intellectual heritage of civil disobedience or passive resistance.

Principles:

·        Individual or group decides to obey either “the law of the state” or “higher law”

·        If "higher law," individual or group disobeys "law of the state" but holds "moral high ground" by refusing to use violence while withstanding state violence

·        Often involves lifestyle of voluntary simplicity as means of reducing social or economic pressure available to state

·        May involve willingness to be jailed as form of social protest

“Transcendentalism in America”

Characterized by “optimism about the indwelling divinity, self-sufficiency, and high potentialities of human nature” (Abrams 336).

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2005.

Passages:

In these passages do you see—

instances of the sublime or the romantic?

elements of transcendentalism?

representative problems of the individual, slavery, etc?

p. 1738

“The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.  Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively few individuals using standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.”

p. 1739

“I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

p. 1739

“Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such a man with its black arts, a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under with funeral accompaniments”

p. 1740

“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today?” 

“I cannot recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”

p.1741 referencing Paley on moral questions

“If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.  This, according to Paley, would be inconvenient.  But he that would save his live, in such a case, shall lose it.  This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.”

p.1745

“If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood.  This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.”

“But even suppose blood should flow.  Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.”

p.1747

“As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog.  I saw that the State was half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends form its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.”

“I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and destroys the other.  If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it does; and so a man.”