Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism by Alda Balthrop-Lewis (review)

Reviewed by: Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism by Alda Balthrop-Lewis Maire Mullins Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism. By Alda Balthrop-Lewis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.ISBN 978-1-108-83510-7. Pp. xxiii + 308. $76.12. Thoreau's Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism is indispensable not only for Thoreau scholars, but for all readers who wish to gain deeper knowledge of Thoreau's work and the culture in which he lived. The book's central focus is relational justice in Walden, and its five chapters provide different layers of insight into a timeless American classic. The book's subtitle defines Thoreau's religion as Alda Balthrop-Lewis understands it: the woods, social justice, and asceticism. His time in the woods recentered Thoreau's perspective; the way humans treat one another and the world they live in shapes politics; and daily ascetic practices form character. In the five chapters that follow, Balthrop-Lewis revises the standard approach to Thoreau's life and work: critics whose admiration verges on "adulation" (9), and who thus apprehend Thoreau's asceticism as a form of ineffectual, punishing quietism (13). She argues instead that in the woods Thoreau encountered an alternative multispecies society that affected his political views; it afforded him a religious asceticism (renunciatory but grounded in "positive practices") that impacted the way he lived and the way he wrote. The book ends with a wider consideration of environmental ethics, a discussion of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and climate change. In chapter 1, Balthrop-Lewis examines the received views on Walden and "Civil Disobedience"—the nature piety of the former and the commitment to social justice of the latter. What interests Balthrop-Lewis, though, is Thoreau's political asceticism: the way our everyday choices comprise our politics. The act of withdrawing/withdrawal influences the practitioner as well as the community and society, especially illustrated in Walden's dynamic of "sociability and solitude" (41). Though Thoreau could be viewed as a "social hermit," in fact, she argues, he had many friends. Among his friends: plants, animals, the human dead, visitors—a "multispecies" (43) assortment. Thoreau's work in the woods required first, a recentering, a "perspectival shift" (48) that allowed him to understand the "country"/"woods" as the center rather than the "city"/"village." Thoreau, then, left one form of society to join another, one made up not just of [End Page 458] human beings but of the natural world and of those whose presence in the woods remained after their death. While some readers of Walden interpret its focus on the self as narcissistic and isolating, Balthrop-Lewis disagrees: Thoreau was not asocial—he simply left "one society and joined another" (60). Astute readings of two chapters from Walden ensue: "Visitors" and "Former Inhabitants: and Winter Visitors." The woods and the pond may be considered in some ways as a neighborhood with a history. Balthrop-Lewis carefully delineates the small community of enslaved persons that once inhabited the woods: Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, Brister and his wife Fenda. These, and other former inhabitants, comprise one of the spiritual communities that helped Thoreau to "improve" (80). Walden pond and its environs can thus be seen in a new light: as richly social, a community that includes "frogs, birds, trees, winds, rains, but also foreigners, outsiders, and even the now-dead" (87). Walden may be reconfigured not as a place where former inhabitants died, but as a place where former inhabitants lived. Balthrop-Lewis imaginatively recasts Thoreau's life in the woods. Thoreau did not leave: he found. Chapters 2 and 3 will be of interest to readers who want to know more about Thoreau's political and economic perspective. In these chapters, Balthrop-Lewis examines "Civil Disobedience" and the "Economy" chapter from Walden. Thoreau's critique encompassed "emerging industrial capitalism" (97) and extended to the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts (not far from Concord)—thus helping readers to understand Thoreau's preference for simple clothes, not unlike today's thrifting movement. Examining Thoreau's journals, Balthrop-Lewis uncovers connections...