Travelogues of Independence: Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau
Author(s)
Birkle, Carmen
Abstract
Educational journeys have long been considered central to the development of a human self and to the formation of identity. Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes (1844) and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) are two distinct examples of travelogs written in what travel-writing and linguistics expert Mary Louise Pratt calls an “autoethnographic” mode representing America and American landscape from a native and decolonized perspective. Both texts go beyond a merely spiritual theme to delineate pragmatic aspects of an American identity in the context of a newly emerging nation that turns its back on Europe. By way of a personal encounter with nature, Fuller and Thoreau criticize the destructive intrusion of human beings into nature and reject past and present images of Native Americans as “noble” or “ignoble savages.”
