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Thoreau, Extravagance,
and the Economy of
Nature
Richard Grusin
ing both for the individuals involved in the exchange and for
the object exchanged, especially when that object is human
labor. Thoreau's "quarrel with the marketplace is in large
measure ontological," Gilmore explains: "Thoreaubelieves
that along with the degradation of the physical object in ex-
change there occurs a shriveling of the individual" (38).
I argue, however, that Thoreau sees nature's symbolic
value (like its monetary value) to be the product of exchange
(whether expenditure, destruction, gift, sacrifice, or loan)
and that an importantdifference between these two values is
that market value makes the calculation of economic value
explicit, while symbolic value conceals or postpones it. This
difference is set forth in two late natural history essays,
"Wild Apples" and "Autumnal Tints," both of which ob-
scure the economic basis of Thoreau's relationship to na-
ture. Each essay takes as its subject naturalobjects that soci-
ety thinks of as useless and valueless (wild apples and
autumn leaves) and proceeds to show that both are invalu-
able. Thoreau aims to point out that his contemporaries mis-
value naturenot because they insist on seeing it in economic
terms but because they insist on understandingits economy
in terms of market exchange rather than symbolic expendi-
ture.
Gilmore finds the paradigmatic expression of Tho-
reau's antipathy to exchange in the indictment of the mar-
keting of huckleberries in "The Ponds" chapter of Walden,
where Thoreau asserts that because "the ambrosial and es-
sential part of the fruit is lost with the bloom which is
rubbed off in the market cart," huckleberries "do not yield
their true flavor to the purchaser of them, nor to him who
raises them for the market,"but only to those who pluck the
fruit for themselves (173). In "Wild Apples," however, it is
clear that his quarrel is not with exchange itself but with
market exchange. Like the huckleberries passage, "Wild
Apples" criticizes the "particularly mean man" who is so
foolish as to think that he can transportthe "evanescent and
celestial qualities" of his "fair and fragrant early apples to
market" (Excursions 363). In representing huckleberries
and apples as having spiritual qualities, Thoreau is not sim-
ply ascribing to them an organic value independent of ex-
change; instead he articulates a symbolic economy in which
the "volatile and ethereal quality which represents [the]
highest value" of "naturalproducts" is made available only
when the fruit is plucked, that is, only when it enters into a
AmericanLiteraryHistory 39
ing each one with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on
a London dock, what a privilege!" (Excursions 312). And to
reiterate his conviction that the symbolic value of aesthetic
judgment cannot be accounted for by the limited economism
of the market, Thoreau concludes his discussion of purple
grasses by asking rhetorically: "Who can doubt that these
grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him, find
some compensation in your appreciation of them?" (Excur-
sions 315).
Thoreau takes up the nature of this aesthetic "compen-
sation" with respect to the season's "principalleaf-harvest"
in "Fallen Leaves" (324). The philosophical center of his
essay, this section is an extravagantriot of metaphorical lan-
guage in which Thoreau uses fallen leaves to conceal the
ground both literally and figuratively. Again, in an extended
series of metaphors, he describes sailing down the Concord
and Assabet rivers "the day after the principal fall of leaves"
(Excursions 326-27).
Arriving at the river, Thoreau begins his extravagant
account: "I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with
the leaves of the Golden Willow under which it is moored,
and I set sail with a cargo of them rustling under my feet....
I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out, but accept
them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my car-
riage" (Excursions 327). Having transformed his cargo of
fallen willow leaves from litter to matting, Thoreau pro-
ceeds to convert them into fellow boats, a metaphor for
imagining a pantheistic voyage:
Notes
1. Herbert Smith provides a fuller discussion of Thoreau's economic
thought in relation to the classical economic tradition of Adam Smith,
Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Although Smith sees Thoreau,
like Marx, as creating "a viable and certainly'no less revolutionary alter-
native to the economic theories of the classical economists" (114), this
alternative, like Marx's own, does not challenge the assumptions of
classical economics in which production and acquisition, not destruc-
tion and loss, are seen as the fundamental aims of all economies.
3. Although the term ecology was not coined until after the publication
of The Origin of Species, it was Darwin's portrayal of the economy of
nature that helped motivate Ernest Haeckel to introduce the neologism
in 1866. Defining ecology as "the body of knowledge concerning the
economy of nature,"Haeckel made his debt to Darwin explicit when he
further described ecology as "the study of all those complex interrela-
tionships referred to by Darwin as the conditions of the struggle for exis-
tence" (qtd. in Stauffer 235; Worster 192).
Works Cited
Schuyler, David. The New Urban Werge, Thomas. "The Idea and
Landscape: The Redefinition of Significance of 'Economy' Be-
City Form in Nineteenth-Century fore Walden." ESQ 20 (1974):
America. Baltimore: Johns Hop- 270-74.
kins UP, 1986.
Worster, Donald. Nature's Econo-
Smith, Herbert F. "Thoreau my: A History of Ecological Ideas.
among the Classical Economists." 1977. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
ESQ 23 (1977): 114-22. 1985.