Following Milder
We are not the first to cover this ground. In his 1995 book Reimagining Thoreau, Milder, just quoted, makes extensive use of Ronald Clapper’s 1967 PhD dissertation, The Development of “Walden”: A Genetic Text, in an effort to understand various aspects of Walden by tracing Thoreau’s revisions across the work’s seven extant draft versions contained in HM 924, the manuscript of Walden at the Huntington Library.Ronald E. Clapper, The Development of “Walden”: A Genetic Text (PhD diss., UCLA, 1967). Milder writes at length about Thoreau’s revisions to “Higher Laws” in particular. He notes that most of the material that would become “Higher Laws” enters Walden beginning in the fourth or “D” draft, following the period from 1849 to 1852 in which Thoreau, who had completed his first draft while living at the pond, pulled back from consistently active work on the manuscript. Whereas the germ of “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s “A” draft of 1846–1847 is, in Milder’s words, “unequivocally triumphant,” the published chapter of 1854, having passed through Thoreau’s subsequent drafts, is “tortuous” and even “schizophrenic” in its logic, enacting a “dramatic self-deconstruction.”Milder, pp. 132, 134. It is only from D forward, Milder shows, that Thoreau pursues the line of thought in “Higher Laws” that centers notions of purity and chastity, betraying an awkward discomfort with his own animal urges—sexual urges in particular, Milder maintains, reading the chapter’s emphasis on diet as a metaphor thinly veiled to us, if not to its author. Milder seeks an explanation for these changes in Thoreau’s personal struggles of 1852–1853, as documented in the Journal, and in what evidence we have of Thoreau’s attitudes towards human sexuality, such as the essay he enclosed in his September 1852 letter to H.G.O. Blake, published in the Princeton Edition volume Early Essays and Miscellanies as “Chastity & Sensuality.”
Our interest at present is not to assess Milder’s reading of Thoreau’s motivations, conscious or otherwise, for revising “Higher Laws” but simply to show the evidence of revision in the manuscript itself, so that readers can reach their own conclusions, at least with respect to where and how Thoreau shaped his material. That said, we do agree with Milder’s broad conclusion that the “Higher Laws” material in A reads very differently in its original context and its context from D forward; and as we move through this portion of the manuscript, we will explain why.
We have one other interest as well. Thoreau’s revisions to “Higher Laws” represent an excellent case study in the value of consulting the digitized manuscript of Walden itself, rather than relying entirely on attempts to model Thoreau’s revisions such as Clapper’s 1967 dissertation or our own digital re-casting of the dissertation, Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition. As valuable as such models can be for re-constructing the phases of the manuscript’s conceptual development, being models, they are unavoidably imperfect. For all that they reveal, they occasionally conceal. In the present case, they are limited by a methodology that arranges Thoreau’s material across all seven drafts by the order of that material in the published Walden. As a result, passages that lie cheek by jowl at some places in the manuscript end up separated from one another in the model.We discuss this issue at length, with examples from “Higher Laws,” in a blog post on the Digital Thoreau website, Representing Re-ordering.
With all this in mind, let us turn now to the manuscript.
We focus here on manuscript pages that belong to the “A” draft of Walden. These pages contain material that in the published Walden lands variously in “The Village,” “The Ponds,” “Higher Laws,” and “Baker Farm.” It is important to know that there are no chapter divisions in Thoreau’s first draft of Walden; the stretch of writing on these pages represents a more or less continuous whole that, across subsequent drafts, comes to be broken up and distributed into the chapters that finally organize the published work. “More or less” continuous because some pages in this sequence are missing.
The table below indicates the sequence of material in A, labeled by the ultimate location of the material in the published Walden of 1854.
| Chapter (1854) | | Paragraph or Sub-Paragraph |
|---|---|
| The Village | 1d |
| The Ponds | 1a, 2a, 4, 3a |
| Higher Laws | 1c |
| The Ponds | 28a |
| Missing Leaf | |
| The Ponds | 5b, 8b, 7a, 7b, 6a |
| Missing Leaves | |
| Baker Farm | 5, 6, 8 |
| Missing Leaf | |
| Higher Laws | 5a, 1c, 3a, 1b, 3b, 1d, 3d, 5b, 7 |
Where material in A on the manuscript pages in question lands in the published “Walden.” In A, the text on these pages is a continuous sequence in the order shown here, except for several missing leaves. There are no chapter divisions in A. Paragraph numbering here follows that of “Walden: A Fluid-Text Edition.”