Henry Thoreau as Performance Art

 Far from being a hermit and a recluse in the woods, Henry Thoreau actually lived a very public life, and he was every bit a citizen of his Concord community. As I've noted before, if Thoreau truly hated people and wanted to go off and live in the woods somewhere secluded, he easily could have and would have. Instead, as Laura Dassow Wells notes in her esteemed biography, "... the circumstances meant it [his journey] would be performed on a very public stage. His two years living at Walden Pond became and remain an iconic work of performance art."

Thoreau's experiment at the pond was meant to be seen and talked about, for he intended to be "a rooster crowing to bring in the dawn." He had a strong message to deliver to his neighbors, whom he feared lived "lives of quiet desperation," and he wanted to be asked about his work, his thoughts, his realizations, and his insights. The economic argument in which he grounds - and introduces - his performance was enthusiastic social commentary, calling out and even mocking the drab, dour existence of the Puritans as well as the work-driven existence promoted by Adam Smith.

Because the market economy and the rise of consumer culture treated people inhumanely as simple cogs in a machine, and because writers like Smith promoted well-being and self-worth solely through material wealth and the exchange of labor for money, Thoreau saw people diminished to an inauthentic human experience. He sought to explore and model a life lived for experience and knowledge. And, in many ways, the philosopher in him took the action of living his performance as a test of whether man could live as he believed.