Raymond Steding
Professor Colacurcio
English 166C
June 15, 2015
In “The Bean Field” chapter of his memoir Walden, Henry David Thoreau describes to the reader in prose that oscillates between romanticism and realism his bean farming experiences. “The Bean-Field” does not subordinate the practicality of farming to his relationship and understanding of nature, but rather intermixes the reality of farming with his philosophical considerations of nature to arrive at a synthesis of the two. Although some may conclude that the poetic prose and lofty diction detract from the narrative, Thoreau combines images of realism and romanticism, and uses many tropes and literary devices such as personification, metaphors, mythical symbolism, and illeism to get to a level of meaning beneath the denotation of individual words, and express to the reader a sense of his spiritual affinity with nature. “The Bean-Field” seems to be written as a means for the author to understand what “Heaven knows” he was doing (107) during a time when “he was determined to know beans” (111).
Thoreau romanticizes elements of nature by personifying beans. He says that the beans “were impatient to be hoed,” and “were not easily to be put off” (107). He wonders what his beans will learn of him (107). Further, he says he was “making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves . . . making the earth say beans instead of grass” (108); They were beans cheerfully returning to their wild and primitive state that I cultivated, and my hoe played the Ranz des Vaches for them” (109). Thoreau, by way of his personification of the earth and the beans, implies that nature is as much a component of raising a bean-field as he is. Additionally he says that his “auxiliaries are the dews and rains” (107). In this way he reveals his connection to the transcendentalist philosophy that all of nature is of the individual and one mind.
The author's use of ancient cultural references is prevalent throughout “The Bean-Field,” and seems to be used by Thoreau to ascribe a sense of numinous significance to otherwise ordinary items. The author first applies such significance to beans when he says the beans “attached [him] to the earth, and so [he] got strength like Antaeus”--a Greek mythological giant that derives his strength from the earth (107). He associates the “the spotted salamander” with “a trace of Egypt and the Nile” (110). Rather than saying the beans gave him gas, the author gives his reason for not eating beans by saying that he is “by nature Pythagorean:” Pythagoras forbade his disciples from eating beans (111). The author ennobles husbandry when he says that “[a]ncient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art” (114). The paragraph in The Bean-Field in which Thoreau includes the most Roman symbolism is one in which he suggests that modern man learn the values of nature from their husbandry instead of “regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property” (114). Here he uses the gods Ceres and King Saturn to imply that farmers had a special honor “they who cultivated [the earth] led a pious and useful life” (114). Thoreau says that the modern farmer “sacrifices not to Ceres [the god of corn and harvests] . . . but to the infernal Plutus [the god of riches]” (114). He speaks of weeds as Trojans and himself as Hector “that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades--” his beans (111).
A Roman narrative technique that Thoreau employs is illeism—a way to give the text a sense of objectivity. The author does this when he switches from the first person narrator to the third person narrator as he speaks of killing weeds: “disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously cultivating another. making such unjust distinctions . . . and sedulously cultivating another” (111). The word “his” separates the narrator from reader identification with the one carrying out the diligent but unjust decisions concerning which weeds may live, and which must die.
Thoreau uses a metaphor when he describes the Massachusetts militia practicing a mile and a half away in Concord:
It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody's bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil's advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again. And when the sound died quite away, and the hum had ceased, and the most favorable breezes told no tale, I knew that they had got the last drone of them all safely into the Middlesex hive, and that now their minds were bent on the honey with which it was smeared. (110)
The bees represent the militia, and the romantic elements are the tintinnabulum,—a Roman Catholic bell that is on the end of a pole—the reference to Virgil, and the honey, as a metaphor for pride and honor. Even though the metaphors detracts from the realism of his narration, he quickly corrects the imbalance in the next paragraph with the following statement: “I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and of our fatherland were in such safe keeping; and as I turned to my hoeing again I was filled with an inexpressible confidence, and pursued my labor cheerfully with a calm trust in the future” (110). The balancing between the author's artistry at describing in poetic prose the militia and the realism of his statement of “As I turned to my hoeing again . . . [I had] . . . trust in the future” exemplifies how the author not only unifies, or synthesizes mundane and disturbing elements of realism with the mystery of nature, but also how the author's style gives him the ability to express his unity with nature to the reader (110).
In addition to the above example of realism, Thoreau includes an entire accounting of his finances, for his bean farming expenses and profits, which adds a visually realistic appearance to the “The Bean-Field:”
In all.................................. $14.72-1/2
My income was (patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet), from
Nine bushels and twelve quarts of beans sold.. $16.94
Five " large potatoes..................... 2.50
Nine " small.............................. 2.25
Grass........................................... 1.00
Stalks.......................................... 0.75
————
In all.................................... $23.44
Leaving a pecuniary profit,
as I have elsewhere said, of.............. $8.71-1/2. (112)
The author's inclusion of the phrase “patrem familias vendacem, non emacem esse oportet,” which means “A householder should be one who sells, not one who buys,” is significant (112) because a primary feature of elements of realism in literature is detail—detail helps the narrative be considered real by the reader. Here Thoreau adds directly to such detail a romantic language—a Roman phrase. On a larger scale Thoreau applies this same principle as a matter of style throughout Walden whenever he ascribes romantic qualities to his realistic detailed descriptions of nature.
In a sequence that begins with other farmers passing by his bean-field, stopping to give him advice, Thoreau begins a three paragraph long series of gradual transitions out of conversation with “hard-featured farmers” into poetic verse that culminates in an experience of joy as a sense of oneness with Nature. The sequence begins when, as narrator, Thoreau switches his point of view and refers to himself in the third person: “sometimes the man in the field heard more of travellers’ gossip and comment than was meant for his ear” (108). He objects to the hard-featured farmer’s expression of ‘“Beans so late! peas so late!”’ (108), and thinks to himself: “here were two acres and a half of furrows, and only a hoe for cart and two hands to draw it” (108). With an air of authenticity, he admits that his field was not one of the respected fields found in books on agriculture, but goes on to counter that perspective with a value judgment: “by the way, who measures the value of crop which Nature yields in the still wilder fields unimproved by man?” (109); He chooses to value his apparent layman farming methods not on its agricultural merits but with its function as a part of Nature: “[as a] connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized . . . [his] field was, though not in a bad sense, a half-cultivated field” (109). He goes on to justify his reason for not using a covering of plaster or leached-ashes as pest control by telling of how a brown-thrasher bird that lands to survey his field, one that has no appetite for beans, chirps atop a tree and prevents predators from entering his bean-field: “It was a cheap source of top dressing in which I had entire faith” he says. In a tone of sincerity tempered by light-hearted rationalization, Thoreau then takes the opportunity to express a oneness with nature through transcendental imagery that begins when he disturbs the ashes of “unchronicled nations:”
When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was accompanied to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans”
The mundane act of hoeing his beans seems to unite him with a historic mystery of “unchronicled nations:” past and present become united with him in Nature.
In the next sentence the text establishes reader identification with the narrator’s separation from his contemporaries: “[I] remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios” (109). Pity and pride are two paradoxical emotions that create a psychic polarity out of which the author’s poetic prose arises to carry the reader to sense what the author experiences from bean farming. Thoreau continues to add imagery that includes a night-hawk that soars like a mote in heaven’s eye, the paradox of a torn yet seamless cope, imps of folk-lore and a hawks flight as a simile to waves of the sea. Then dreamily in a reminiscent tone he says:
Or sometimes I watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky, alternately soaring and descending, approaching, and leaving one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish spotted salamander, a trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible entertainment which the country offers. (110)
The progression, from listening to the advice of hard-featured farmers to the use of poetic prose, filled with romantic imagery to console feelings spurred by thoughts of his “acquaintances,” synthesize through Thoreau’s diction to arrive at joy in an experience of oneness with nature. This is why Thoreau hoes his beans. And this is how Thoreau expresses the meaning through his diction to arrive at a level of understanding beneath the meaning of the words used. It is through multiple modes of expression, sincerity, reader identification, gradual progression, and the use of various tropes that combine and build off one another to form a collective sense of understanding. This is exactly what the author alludes to as being his reason for bean-farming when he says, “some must work in the fields if only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day” (111).
Works Cited
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, Third Edition (Norton Critical Editions). Third ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. Print.
---, Walden, Oxford University Press: 1997. Print.
---, Walden, Oxford University Press: 1997. Print.
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