Walden By Henry David Thoreau

By and large, Walden is an ode to nature, a book for nature and about nature, it is a demonstration how a man who has little more than a one-room cabin and some not so-profitable beans can live life fully and shed accepted opinions, assumptions and traditions and get rid of the dictates of fashion ad civility. He explains how man can live with motto of “simplicity, simplicity ,simplicity”. Nonetheless, Walden seems faithful to the writing fashion of its time which employs the default gender as masculine. A man reading Walden is a freer, more knowledgeable and more self-reliant man. Whereas a woman engaging in the same task is one who gets more and more alienated and excluded. In Walden, women are reduced to a silence, an absence, and a nullity.

He also boasts of his ability to lead a simple life and get rid of sophistication, which he considers his greatest skill “My greatest skill in life has been to want but little” (89). This boastfulness is apparently only half-hearted given his style which brims with sophistication in its wealth of figurative language, allusion and double-entendre. His style is as sophisticated as the 19th Century America of his time. Walden’s text embraces all that its own author preaches against: complexity, luxury, fashion and sophistication. Exactly like his fellow townsmen, Thoreau’s work departs of his way of life, challenges him, and rebels against him if only to show that, like clothes and houses, “Walden” itself is bound to be a product of fashion that should follow the fashion of its time. Nevertheless, Walden remains a joyful book, preaching before all and over all the joy of life. The pages of this book are filled with its author’s sensual delight in nature: every sound is a melody, every sight is a work of art and there isn’t a berry or a chipmunk in the area that he is not willing to