The Queer Auntie-Social Thoreau

One way to rethink Thoreau’s gender performance is by revisiting the print landscape in which his most canonical text emerged. Among the many outlets that celebrated Walden’s publication were domestic periodicals in which material restraint was often presented as a means of deepening social bonds within households. In the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, for example, an early and favorable review of Walden ran just a few pages before the practical household advice column titled “Centre-Table Gossip,” in which a mother gives tips for reducing expenditure on children’s clothes and their upkeep (Review of Walden; “Centre-Table Gossip” 381). Clearly Walden was found to be compatible with the magazine’s other content—content often aimed explicitly at women. But Thoreau’s connection to normative femininity can also be found in sources less directly engaged with the cult of domesticity and with Walden specifically. Indeed, much of what was written about Thoreau by his contemporaries is littered with references to conventional femininity, though not always in so complimentary a manner.

For the more eminent literary gatekeepers commenting on Thoreau, his connection with normative femininity was something to disparage. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s frustrations at Thoreau’s lack of ambition are the most famous: “Instead of engineering for all America, he was captain of a huckleberry-party” (32). For Emerson, Thoreau failed in his duty to produce in accordance with the masculine expectations of an engineer (a word that etymologically references both mechanical and biological reproduction) and instead tended toward more domestic, fruit-related labors. Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1864 review of The Maine Woods makes Thoreau’s effeminacy even clearer. Higginson charges Thoreau with a love of nature that comes at the expense of a love of man—“though he did not personally ignore one duty of domestic life, he yet held a system which would have excluded wife and child, house and property” (36). In other words, far from ignoring his “domestic” duties, Thoreau did them himself with a monastic fervor that compromised his duty to posterity. James Russell Lowell had much snarkier words for Thoreau’s genderqueerness when he grouped Thoreau with “sentimentalists, unreal men, [and] misanthropes on the spindle side” (43). Lowell sneers at Thoreau’s receptiveness to a womanly influence. Emerson’s, Higginson’s, and Lowell’s reactions to Thoreau represent a much larger body of nineteenth-century criticism that views Thoreau’s choice not to marry as unmanly, sexually suspect, and compromising to his intellectual project.

But as Thoreau’s eminence grew in the twentieth century, his ties to women faded from sight. Thoreau’s refusal to start a family soon came to confirm his apparent masculinity and philosophical insight. As Thoreau was canonized, his bachelorhood became the germ of the unconventionality out of which grew his artistic genius. In his influential psychological portrait of Thoreau from 1958, Perry Miller uses explicitly gendered language to contrast Thoreau’s familial and intellectual kinships:

Miller is talking about “friends” in general, but he emphasizes a distinctly gendered threat to Thoreau’s intellectual project that was forged in the struggle against the “entanglement” of “mother” and “sister.” Miller’s language helps expose the implicit misogyny of theories of the American Renaissance premised on the rejection of family life and a practice of original creation rarely recognized in women writers. In this way, Miller exemplifies the extent to which Emerson’s, Higginson’s, and Lowell’s complaints about Thoreau’s femininity were set aside in the process of his canonization.

The misogyny enacted across Thoreau’s reception history was reinscribed by late-twentieth-century queer theorists who read Thoreau as an exemplary antisocialite. For Michael Warner, Henry Abelove, Peter Coviello, and others, it was Thoreau’s dislike of women that made him such an intriguing embodiment of the queer antisocial thesis. Warner, for example, claims Thoreau sounded Walden’s depths out of a longing to evade gendered body relations. The queer-antisocial critical tradition forms an important and insightful dimension of Thoreau studies, yet it underemphasizes the feminine-coded labors and the relationships with women that were a major part of Thoreau’s life.Footnote ² Such an oversight is in part explained by Susan Stryker’s observation that transgender phenomena get misidentified when sexuality forms the “primary means of differing from heteronormativity” (214).Footnote ³ If, however, one recognizes the variant femininity of Thoreau’s gender performance, then a different set of relations emerges in Walden that aligns Thoreau with women.

Far from signaling a distrust of women, Thoreau’s singledom situated him within the predominantly feminine tradition of celibate reformers historicized by Benjamin Kahan (23). Kahan describes the refusal to marry and reproduce as a forceful choice that served nineteenth-century women even more than men. Indeed, to extend Kahan’s brief consideration of Thoreau as a politically inclined celibate, Thoreau’s lack of children can just as easily indicate an affinity for women, a displeasure with conventional masculinity, and an indirect investment in the future. The larger project from which this essay is drawn details a longer tradition of ecologically oriented domestic writers in which Thoreau is an unexpected participant. Here I show that Thoreau rejected direct ties to the future by abstaining from “dominant forms of object-choice, coupledom, family, marriage, sociability, and self-presentation,” in the words of Elizabeth Freeman (xv). Instead, he nurtured kin-like bonds with people and animals outside his biological family that indirectly implicated him in the future and that associated him with the cooking, cleaning, and caregiving that Emerson, Higginson, and Lowell saw as feminine.

Though Lowell’s comment about “misanthropes on the spindle side” was likely intended as an insult to both Thoreau and women in general, it nonetheless gestures toward a common resistance to productivity that characterizes both Thoreau and the spinster—a denigrated historical figure who has come to intimate homosexuality and subvert normative temporality in queer-theoretical approaches to nineteenth-century literature. As Heather Love’s work on Sarah Orne Jewett has shown, the spinster’s supposed “failure” to reproduce makes visible other intimacies, aesthetics, and temporalities worthy of attention (310). Sarah Ensor extends Love’s “spinster aesthetic” into the realm of ecology by arguing that Jewett’s orientation toward future generations mirrors the “intransitive” relations of ecosystems (“Spinster Ecology” 414). Ensor connects this spinster ecology directly to Thoreau in her more recent work, exploring the references in Thoreau’s journal to the spinsterly qualities of plant and insect reproduction. But gender lies outside the scope of Ensor’s focus on sexuality and reproduction, and thus she understates the extent to which such “medial conditions of possibility” are characteristic not only of Thoreau’s scientific observations but also of his personal life and his most canonical work (“(In)conceivable Futures” 48).Footnote ⁴ Here I focus on Thoreau’s connection to normative femininity and consider how his genderqueer performance of domestic labor relates Thoreau to the Walden ecosystem and thus blurs the boundary between domestic sphere and ecological system.

In Walden, Thoreau makes kin with the pond’s critters. In life, he took care of his family, friends, and his friends’ children. Thoreau was apparently aware of his tenuous ties to the future, which he fittingly represented in nonlinear and feminine imagery. Shortly after his father’s death, he wrote, “As I sat in a circle the other evening with my mother and sister, my mother’s two sisters and my father’s two sisters, it occurred to me that my father, though seventy-one, belonged to the youngest four of the eight who recently composed our family” (Letter to Daniel Ricketson 93). Thoreau is struck by his family’s average gender and age as he presents himself in a circle of spinsters, eddied off from the linear currents of time.Footnote ⁵ For Thoreau, the circle epitomizes how all spinsters rest like a period at the end of a descent line. Yet the circle is also a fitting symbol of the spinster’s lived experience—the way she shapes the future indirectly by curling away from her own family’s future toward other lines. With her muted futurity, the spinster is engaged in the present by “looking after” other people’s already existent descendants, instead of generating new life. The spinster’s queer temporality and practice of frugal kin-making offer an early rendering of the symbiogenesis that Donna J. Haraway theorizes in Staying with the Trouble (58). Though she uses different language, frugality is at the heart of Haraway’s search for a kind of genesis that slows human growth. Haraway’s solution is the making of kin across species lines (what she calls “oddkin” [2]), which Thoreau anticipates in Walden by reconfiguring his household to encompass those beings already residing there.

Throughout his life, Thoreau remained committed to living with and supporting others, evidenced by his initial career as a teacher, his ongoing mentorship of the Alcott and Emerson children, his assistance with the Thoreau family boarding house, and his melon and huckleberry parties where he would get people together and feed them (E. Emerson 107). And Thoreau seems aware that he did not share this caregiving tendency with all bachelors, as he observes with regards to the bachelor uncle of his fan-turned-companion Daniel Ricketson. Though Ricketson’s uncle might have performed certain domestic labors, he did not share the spinster’s duty to care for others:

Thoreau notices how Ricketson’s uncle is scrupulous about his own cleanliness and nourishment but closed to the people around him. This is noteworthy to Thoreau perhaps because his own bachelorhood was so much the opposite.

Unlike Ricketson’s uncle, Thoreau was central to the warmth of his own family’s boarding house. Still grieving Henry’s recent death, his sister Sophia wrote to Ricketson lamenting his loss as a genial keeper of house: “I know that our home has lost all its attraction. You are aware what a host Henry was” (S. Thoreau, Letter [26 May 1862] 147). Thoreau’s posture of openness to visitors was something he shared with many unmarried women, who, though they might have sought to avoid courtship, childbearing, and other societal expectations, often resided in the family home and labored on behalf of family or lodgers, as many did who ran boarding houses. Without offspring to carry on the descent line, the spinster’s ties to those she cares for are always indirect, whether through her care for nieces and nephews or by assuming a parent-like role when nursing ailing parents, siblings, and friends. At one point or another, Thoreau performed all these roles, in addition to more stereotypically manly domestic and professional work like house repair, pencil manufacturing, and surveying.

Hosting offers a rich example of Thoreau’s spinsterly involvement in reproductive labor because it features so prominently in both his personal life and his written work. In Walden he brags, “I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof,” with reference to the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society’s annual commemoration of West Indian emancipation, which he frames in terms of the labor of hosting (435). He could accommodate them in a clean, spacious, and well-decorated “withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell,” which was the “pine wood behind [his] house” where “a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order” (435). Though he does not feed his guests, his tenor is clearly in keeping with the domestic literature that advised women in entertaining guests.

Thoreau’s abolitionist activities provided other opportunities for spinster hospitality that further underscore his ties to white womanhood and the cult of domesticity. The Thoreau family housed freedom seekers on the underground railroad, and though there is no evidence to suggest that Thoreau hosted any in his Walden cottage, he did help some people safely reach the next station. On one occasion, he received a thank-you gift for his efforts in the form of a porcelain figurine of Uncle Tom and Eva from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a relic that further demonstrates his proximity not just to abolitionism but to sentimental culture as well (“Figurine”). As Jane P. Tompkins explains, though men read and were persuaded by the abolitionism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the radical political vision that its readers found so compelling was an overwhelmingly domestic one in which the affections of mothers were powerful enough to save humanity. The figurine Thoreau received would have signaled precisely that domestic ideal, bringing the novel into the parlor—that part of the Victorian house that mediates public and private spaces, as Tichi explains (107–12). That the figurine remained in Thoreau’s possession, and remains to this day in his collection at the Concord Museum, suggests that the cult of domesticity, with its explicitly feminine and racialized valences, was something in which Thoreau knowingly and directly participated.

Of course, hosting was also something men did, and it was these male hosting duties that Thoreau fulfilled while Emerson was abroad immediately after Thoreau’s stint at Walden. But during his time at the Emerson house—which involved hosting as well as looking after the Emerson children, pruning the trees, and nursing Lidian when she fell ill—Thoreau appears to have alternated between seeing himself as a husband and seeing himself as a wife. As is to be expected given his gender, Thoreau adopts the role of father. He reports back to Emerson, “I am occasionally Mr. Rough-and-Tumble with [Eddy] that I may not miss him, and lest he should miss you too much. So you must come back soon, or you will be superseded” (Letter [14 Nov. 1847] 163). Here Thoreau is conscious of being a proxy father when he cares for Eddy and Ellen as Emerson would have. But at other moments in his letters to Emerson, he paints himself more as a co-wife to Lidian than a surrogate husband, engaging alongside her in the role of matriarch. He writes, “We have made up a dinner, we have made up a bed, we have made up a party, and our own minds and mouths” (Letter [29 Dec. 1847] 176). Not only are Thoreau and Lidian’s labors one and the same, their bodies are as well. And this was not the only time Thoreau labored alongside wives rather than husbands. When fixing up the Old Manse for the newlywed Hawthornes, he worked with Bronson Alcott’s wife Abigail and their neighbor Eliza Hoar (the unmarried sister of his friend Ed) to prepare for the couple’s domestic comfort (Alcott 103). Such instances of Thoreau working alongside women exemplify how his care-oriented domesticity diverged from stereotypically masculine domestic roles—like that of patriarch in the context of the family and that of hermit in the context of recreation.

Sophia Thoreau’s words offer perhaps the sharpest insistence that caring for others was an essential part of Thoreau’s life. Although she had no children of her own, she clearly thought caring for them was a good thing, and she also thought Henry’s similarity in this regard was one of his finer features. Consequently, she was greatly “disappointed to find that some passages betraying natural affection had been omitted” by Emerson from a draft of Thoreau’s collected letters (Letter [17 July 1865] 166). The affection in question was Thoreau’s fondness for children, and though the publisher, James T. Fields, reincorporated many of the passages that Sophia did not want Emerson to cut, Thoreau’s fondness for children nonetheless faded from his reputation. Sophia laments to Ricketson, “At the close of a beautiful letter to Mrs. Emerson, Henry wrote, ‘Shake a day-day to Edith, and say “good-night” to Ellen for me.’ This ending was omitted, so the world might never have known that he loved the babies” (166). Sophia’s fears were eventually realized, and for some time the world did not know, or has not known, that Thoreau “loved the babies.”

Thus far, I have shown the biographical justification for situating Thoreau within, rather than against, the feminine tradition of domestic writing. In what follows, I shift to a more compositional methodology to explore how Walden’s domesticity, particularly with respect to the cellar, extends and transforms the frugality advocated in domestic-economy literature. I briefly visit two canonical domestic manuals to note their interest in frugality before turning to Thoreau’s adaptation of their form as a method for recycling words, genders, and kin. I argue that Thoreau’s use of recycled forms puts him in dialogue with domestic literature and in intimate contact with the pond community.

The Woodchuck Den: Where Man Stores His Roots

At the outset of Walden, Thoreau addresses his readers and presumes their interest in domestic themes: “Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained” (325). While these lines might be read as merely a framing invocation or a justification for going on to talk at length about himself, they also get right to the point—that such a domestic experiment raises questions of sociality and futurity. Thoreau answers these questions through his domestic descriptions, which echo the thrift and efficiency advocated in domestic-economy manuals.

Frugality forms the most significant convergence between Thoreau and canonical domestic economists who value it as a strategy for living comfortably within material constraint. In A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for example, Beecher makes this point by suggesting that adjusting one’s appetite is the most expedient path to material and spiritual fulfillment:

Here Beecher urges her readers to scrutinize which of their labors are truly necessary so that they may be free to pursue more pleasant and important tasks. Thoreau mimics this when he declutters his desk so that his only encounter with dust will be in the grave—“where man has broken ground” (Walden 351). And the mortal scope of the household ledger is what Child has in mind when she recommends a minimalist decor in The American Frugal Housewife. There she writes that “true economy is a careful treasurer in the service of benevolence; and where they are united, respectability, posterity and peace will follow” (7). Like Child, Thoreau gives domestic details a great deal of importance precisely because they set the conditions for the emotional and spiritual well-being of everyone residing in the home—which for Thoreau includes hares and humans alike.

But Thoreau diverges from Beecher and Child when it comes to the permeability of boundaries—boundaries that constitute both the limits of the domicile and the gender coding of the domestic space. For Beecher and Child, frugal practices such as sealing surfaces and keeping out pests are key performances that constitute normative femininity. Thoreau, however, takes frugality to the extreme and leverages it as justification for keeping boundaries permeable—he makes his home more spacious by including the forest as his withdrawing room, and as he does that, he subverts the gender binary by taking on the feminine-coded role of housekeeper. Throughout Walden, Thoreau fashions new meaning out of old convention, as when he plays with notions of value in “Economy” or when he hears silence as noise and noise as music in “Sounds.” But the book’s most porous boundary lies between Thoreau’s house and the earth, also known as his cellar. And in playing with the boundary formed by the cellar, Thoreau makes frugal housekeeping into an act of kin-making that redefines his household to include the pond’s nonhuman populations.

When one considers domestic economy’s ethic of frugality as Walden’s central animating principle, one starts to see how frugally repurposing finite material informs nearly every dimension of Thoreau’s project in Walden—from its gender-bending to its linguistic play to its ecological descriptions. This repurposing becomes apparent when Thoreau invites the reader’s gaze into his domestic space and performs a de-gendering ritual that abbreviates his chores so that he may have more time for nurturing kinships with nonhuman members of the pond community: he rejects a lady’s welcome mat, ejects traditional limestone desk figurines, and then generously feeds the mouse who pays him a visit (375, 351, 503). Thoreau narrates such acts of animal husbandry as part of his own housekeeping process, thus emphasizing the mutual dependency of ecosystems.

This happens most visibly in the frugal epicenter of Thoreau’s house—his cellar—where ripening food is arrested by the climate, and where Thoreau lives in reciprocity with rodents and insects. Initially, Thoreau’s cellar belonged to different families—dug out by woodchucks and finished with boards that once covered the Collins’s family cellar. When Thoreau writes so effusively about his cellar, he reminds readers that the woodchuck is an excellent domestic—a creature known for its extensive nest building and scrupulous cleaning. The Marmota monax, commonly known as a woodchuck or groundhog, makes its den into multiple chambers reserved for different purposes, including the storing away of food (“Woodchucks”). Thoreau’s cellar would have served its woodchuck creator not only as a cellar but also as a parlor, nursery, and toilet. And it would have served many different creatures too, regardless of Thoreau’s intervention. As is often the case for burrowing creatures, woodchuck residences are eventually abandoned by their builders and soon taken up by other creatures. By narrating the collaborative, multispecies domesticity going on in his cellar, Thoreau suggests that one species’ skills and habits shape and sustain another. In his cellar, Thoreau is supported by and gives support to members of his household that are neither part of his family nor part of his species. When Thoreau delights in the permeability of the cellar, he celebrates frugality as not only a domestic method, but also an artistic and environmental practice.

The woodchuck becomes part of Thoreau’s legacy, as do the hares whom he frets over. His sentimental concern for them exemplifies the way domestic genres facilitate Walden’s ecological descriptions. Thoreau feeds some hares, over whom he watches like an invested caregiver:

Thoreau worries the hares are too thin, but his fears are allayed by their magnificent speed, which he describes with beaming pride. What would otherwise be described as pests are instead kin who elicit worry and joy. And as Xine Yao’s work on the politics of affect demonstrates, both worry and joy are sympathetic sentiments that were essential to performances of antebellum femininity. Thoreau’s sentimentality with respect to the hares provides yet another example of how the pond community was, for Thoreau, a kind of household in which he was a caregiver to kin with whom he was linked by interaction rather than by genealogy.

Although Thoreau watches over the hares, his Walden household is radically nonhierarchical. Thoreau frequently emphasizes the domesticity of others, animating a sense of mutual care that is particularly visible in descriptions of the cellar, which is the room shared by the widest range of species—each with its own building, feeding, and hygienic tendencies. In “House Warming,” the cellar-dwelling moles are themselves housekeepers, “nibbling every third potato, and making a snug bed even there of some hair left after plastering and of brown paper” (524). Thoreau goes on to generalize from this observation of moles: “for even the wildest animals love comfort and warmth as well as man, and they survive the winter only because they are so careful to secure them” (524). The moles repurpose Thoreau’s cellar and add to it with found materials—they are themselves frugal housekeepers, as well as the recipients of Thoreau’s own frugal housekeeping. In this way, Thoreau’s cellar represents ecological dynamics by altering the boundaries that structure both his gender identity and his home.

Lest readers miss the important lateral direction of these domestic rearrangements, Thoreau stitches them into his word choice. Walden’s frequent wordplay often works through connections across unrelated words, such that reading about the doubled uses of Thoreau’s cellar also requires following the doubled meaning of his sentences. When Thoreau muses on the frugal qualities of cellars in general, this radical, lateral relationality hits all registers at once. After describing how his cellar came to be, Thoreau digresses into an extended metaphor about the cellar’s universality that considers how the cellar comes to represent a person in the future. One of the things Thoreau loves most about his cellar is how its simplicity extends to all households, no matter how frugal they are. “Under the most splendid house in the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their roots as of old” (358). In all echelons of society, the cellar is where humans store their “roots,” which refers figuratively to origins and literally to tubers. In the literal sense, Thoreau finds an element of frugality in an otherwise decadent culture. This matters for Thoreau because he holds that people are so often led to toil in pursuit of small pleasures that are rarely worth the effort. They would do well to remember that the pain of pursuing luxury will not always pay off, for they are bound to return to the cellar, joining their ancestral “roots” in the soil. The doubled meaning of “roots” links material and mortal circumstances—when the person dies they will reside in a hole in the ground no different from the cellar beneath their house. The cellar, then, is a symbol of a person’s life and death. As Branka Arsić puts it, “the past will, catastrophically, come to be the dweller’s only future” (297).Footnote ⁶

Thoreau extends the cellar’s temporality in the next line when he writes, “long after the superstructure has disappeared posterity remark its dent in the earth” (Walden 358). The sparseness of the syntax leaves open many possible significations, all of which underscore the centrality of cellars in the legacies of men. Either posterity will comment on the cellar by remembering the man and mentioning the dent left by the superstructure, or posterity will re-mark “its” own new dent in the same spot, effectively repurposing the old man’s cellar into a new one, as Thoreau did earlier in the paragraph with the woodchuck. These different senses of “remark” take on very different forms—one as linguistic form, the other as terraform—yet their effects are much the same insofar as it is the cellar and not the man that endures. Here again Thoreau’s wordplay seems to work metaphysically and materially—as he writes further on in the chapter, a cellar that keeps olives and wine also keeps man a slave to his appetite (360). The cellar is the ultimate signal of value in both the short term (people subsist on its stores) and the long term (it becomes their legacy).

As a metonym for both past and future, the cellar is a powerful signifier. And a brief detour into Thoreau’s linguistic influences shows how such quintessential plays on words are themselves expressions of the same permeable boundaries that he uncovers through his genderqueer housekeeping. The cellar is one of many inanimate things in Walden that gains the power of speech. The thawing sandbank in “Spring” is the most obvious example because of its etymological framing, but the cellar is not so different from the sandbank, because it too functions as a kind of extralinguistic signifier.Footnote ⁷ Thoreau was interested in precisely this kind of beyond-human language from his readings in philology. As Thoreau was editing Walden, he and his transcendentalist friends were excitedly following the philologists Richard Chenevix Trench, who argued that all languages are distant relatives of a single tongue, divinely imbued in man, and Charles Kraitsir, who believed that every word was a distant relative of the thing it represented (Gura, American Transcendentalism 234; West 1044). For critics such as Michael West, Philip F. Gura, and Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s linguistic context ties his peculiar wordplay to his quest for a single law underpinning nature.Footnote ⁸ But such a logocentric view of Thoreau’s linguistic naturalism overlooks the messy and inconsistent relationships Thoreau saw in both nature and language.

The messiness of this natural-linguistic tautology was important to both Thoreau and his sources. Trench states that linguistic diversity grew organically like a tree and was not designed like a house (25–26). But if language was not built like a house, it did behave like the family within the house. Both Kraitsir and Trench use kinship as the primary model for linguistic change, and Thoreau excerpted passages from their writings on this topic into his own fact book (Thoreau’s Fact Book 234). And often these excerpts made specific references to the family. For example, when describing the evolution of referents into the iconographic system of Chinese, Kraitsir lists key examples, and of these Thoreau chose to transcribe “home and heart == temple” (234). That Thoreau chose this cluster over the two flanking it points to Thoreau’s domesticity. Though the subject matter of Kraitsir’s examples would have undoubtedly interested Thoreau (the series reads, “man on a hill==hermit; house and heart == temple; woman, hand and broom==matron” [Kraitsir 85]), what is most instructive here is how, when Thoreau looked inside a word, he saw a set of family relationships that extended across time and around the globe. But these family relationships did not always abide by traditional forms of descent. Kraitsir and Trench note how words drifted together, independent of their derivation, linked by ties more avuncular than parental. From Kraitsir and Trench Thoreau inherited an unusual linguistic genealogy that looked more like a spinster household than a nuclear family. By restricting his words, Thoreau found homophones, synonyms, and synchrony across languages that thickened the meaning of his paragraphs. In short, Thoreau approached wordplay just as he approached his frugal housekeeping—as an opportunity to make new meaning by shuffling boundaries laterally.

Thoreau was interested in linguistics because it helped connect his words to the things in his life. For the most part, Thoreau sculpted his playful syntax out of the nonetymological relationships between words. But occasionally he found surprising etymologies that seemed to undermine linear genealogy. Buried inside the word cellar is a very old “root”—kel, the Proto-Indo-European word for covering—that gets right to the heart of how all things grow, both in language and in nature (“Cellar”). Covers divide and connect—constructing boundaries that make interiors legible and offering points of contact between discrete entities. This can be seen in the range of meanings in the genealogy of cellar, which grew from kel into the Latin cella (used as both the storeroom in a house and the inner sanctum of a temple), which then branched off into cells, both monastic and bodily (“Cellar”). So the English word cellar denotes a space designed for the seemingly opposing goals of barricading and preserving nature. Cellar offers Thoreau an important cleavage with which to play, and a mechanism for promoting the incursion of insects and rodents, which others might try to prevent.

But in case readers miss the cellar’s linguistic depths, Thoreau extends the meditation by way of another etymological track. “The house,” writes Thoreau, “is still but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow” (Walden 358). At first glance this seems consistent with the remarkable durability of the cellar’s dent. But of course, burrow is a member of a different linguistic family with a different range of meanings, and so this line can also be read to mean something broader about man’s place in nature. The English word burrow is of unknown origin, according to the modern Oxford English Dictionary (all bur words were omitted from Thoreau’s own etymological dictionary), but it likely stemmed from the Proto-Germanic bergh (“shelter”), which over the centuries became many words including bergen (German for “save,” “salvage,” or “recover”) and borough (English for “fortification” or “village”) (“Burrow”).Footnote ⁹ The play on burrow and borough works aurally and literally since the two words were spelled interchangeably as late as the seventeenth century (“Burrow”). Here again, taking seriously the frugality of Thoreau’s domesticity and writing style reveals both the mortal and the material significance of his wordplay. The house is the precursor to man’s eventual house—the pine box in the earth—but it is also the antechamber to the house Thoreau scrupulously cares for throughout Walden, the house that includes burrow, pond, and forest. In Walden, Thoreau’s burrow is his borough—his house is but an extension of his habitat.

Throughout this article, I have argued that one should read Thoreau’s house as a literal site of a particular set of material relations without which Walden’s insights cannot be fully understood. But this need not negate the rich metaphoric capacity of the home, with its layers and levels, boundaries and surfaces, interiors and exteriors, a capacity that a great deal of Thoreau scholarship has explored. When Thoreau writes that “[b]efore we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation,” he speaks of housekeeping as a metaphor for life (353). As the house reappears throughout the book, the things it represents change—society, art, the body, and the church are all likened to a house at one point or another. The house stands in so easily for these things because it appears as a discrete entity—a self-contained, enclosed piece of property. But Thoreau’s playful engagement with the cellar reveals that self-containment is nothing more than a fantasy when it comes to both property and people. The cellar offers an important metaphor for the interactions and encounters that constitute the individual insofar as it is the part of the house where outdoor and indoor climates mingle. Testicular and womblike, the cellar is the space in the bottom of the house associated with reproduction and futurity. Like a person’s gender performance, it is constituted by its covering over of reproductive materials. For Thoreau in his queer gender performance of housekeeping, the cellar is a place of ongoing transition.

In its figurative capacity, then, the cellar embodies precisely the kind of transitional posture that Thoreau enacts literally and linguistically through his scenes of domesticity and his frugal wordplay. By considering the queer genealogies of his word choice, one sees how Thoreau approached his art and his house in much the same way—in the fullest sense of the word frugally, meaning not only economical use but also enjoyment.Footnote ¹⁰ This is apparent at the most basic level of the text in the puns and other nongenealogical linguistic associations undergirding Thoreau’s diction and syntax (as shown with reference to re-mark and remark as well as burrow and borough). Such relations are repeated in Thoreau’s scenes of domestic symbiosis, and they supplant the conservationist and conservative etymological strategy elsewhere in Thoreau’s writing. Unlike Beecher’s and Child’s, Thoreau’s use of thrift was promiscuous in so far as it multiplied his intimacy with others. Paradoxically, Thoreau’s frugality turned him away from the rigid gender and parsimonious affiliation of domestic economy toward something less structured by gender and less hemmed in by utilitarian notions of accumulation.

For nearly all its reception history, Thoreau’s more-than-human household has been read as an allegory for self-reliance. But what I am suggesting here is that it should be read not allegorically but as a description of the kind of frugal kin-making that is ongoing throughout every ecosystem. In his cellar, Thoreau presents domesticity as a biological imperative that prompts each species to find its own place in an environment whose limited resources it shares with others, preempting Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, four years in the offing. Only instead of competition, it is caregiving that acts as a catalyst for the succession of generations within a species. This idea of climate and biota responding to each other is most evident in “Spring,” in which man strips Walden of its ice and sets up a chain reaction that alters the geology and biology of the pond. But the same idea of interdependence and the collaborative construction of organic and inorganic matter can also be found in the frugal repurposing of resources and relations that occurs in Thoreau’s cellar.

Tending Walden’s “Sterile Soil”

Thoreau’s woodchuck den is one of many cellars in Walden. In addition to it and the numerous proverbial cellars, there are also the cellars of Walden’s recent and distant past that have been resettled by critters and plants. For example, the “half-obliterated cellar hole” that once belonged to an enslaved man named Cato “is now filled with the smooth sumach, (Rhus glabra,) and one of the earliest species of golden-rod (Solidago stricta) grows there luxuriantly” (527). Here Thoreau frames Cato’s cellar as a site of connection between human and botanical residents, echoing his own multispecies domesticity in earlier chapters. But unlike Thoreau, Cato and Walden’s other previous Black residents were driven there by violence rather than volition, and their domestic economy is the result of exclusion from the broader market economy rather than of abstention.Footnote ¹¹ These conspicuous similarities and differences make the chapter titled “Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors” an interesting prism through which to consider the subtle effects of Thoreau’s frugal housekeeping.

From the colonial period on, domesticity has been an essential discourse of settler colonialism (Brown; Kaplan). Thoreau participates in this discourse when he styles himself a “first settler” in a “ruined garden” and when he infantilizes and elegizes Walden’s former Black inhabitants (Walden 532). He writes, “little did the dusky children think that the puny slip…would root itself so, and outlive them…and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half century after they had grown up and died” (532). Here the pejoratively named “dusky children” are consigned to the past, erased by plants, and superseded by white settlers. Thoreau’s rhetoric explicitly amplifies racist ideology even as it works against this ideology by celebrating rather than disparaging their childless, botanical legacies. Thoreau replicates rather than improves upon Cato’s domesticity. In so doing, Thoreau reorients domesticity’s intended outcome from the moral and material well-being of implicitly white, human families to the ongoing flourishing of biodiverse ecosystems.

Within the broader context of Walden’s genderqueer, frugal housekeeping, Cato’s human-sumach kinship can be read as an example of the spinsterly life Thoreau celebrates. But Thoreau’s most direct spinster antecedent at Walden is likely to have been Zilpha, “a colored woman [who] had her little house, where she spun linen for the townsfolk, making the Walden Woods ring with her shrill singing” (527). And like Zilpha’s ringing voice, Thoreau’s own resounding words unsettle the domestic contentment of the broader culture. With typically Thoreauvian sarcasm, he makes a very sincere point by doubling his meaning and extending the maxim of frugality out to the formal registers of the text—“Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!” (532). These words can be read two ways—either that the memory of Cato and Zilpha tarnishes the landscape or that the mark they made on the landscape enhances Walden’s beauty by virtue of its smallness. Thoreau questions what counts as improvement and what counts as impoverishment.

By thinking about Walden’s domestic scenes, its cellars, and its kinships, Walden becomes a manual for how to go about life with neither industry nor reproduction. Though the pond’s “sterile soil” is not strong enough to deter the persistent entrepreneur from harvesting its ice or the wealthy minister-poet from building a second home, infertility is what saves Walden from development, at least for the time being (532). When Walden turns away from heterosexual reproduction and the accumulation of wealth and instead looks to other means of material flourishing, it gestures toward a mode of relation that yields no lasting product. So perhaps it is Zilpha, with her ruined cellar, rather than the imagined figure of the white male settler, that forms the feminine archetype for Thoreau’s genderqueer housekeeping. Throughout Walden, Thoreau follows Zilpha’s lead by performing a domesticity that frugally extends language and matter into a sterile but sensuous set of relations. Thus, Walden offers a model of nongenerative creation, with its multispecies households and durable cellars, that are lively sites of borrowing, sharing, and sheltering.