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Due largely to the work of ecocritics, Henry David Thoreau's legacy has in recent decades shifted from that of a purely Romantic transcendentalist to a proto-ecologist (Buell, Foreword ix). The distance between these two conceptions seems particularly conspicuous with regard to Thoreau's The Maine Woods. This posthumous collection does not neatly fit within the corpus of Thoreau the transcendentalist, as its final two essays contain far more scientific and Latinate language than Emersonian correspondence or mythic personification and as Thoreau's enthusiasm for untrammeled wilderness paradoxically turns into terror in “Ktaadn.” As a result, for many years, critics mostly ignored “Chesuncook” and “The Allegash and the East Branch,” while “Ktaadn” remained the “most misunderstood of Thoreau's writings” (Marshall 229). Recent ecocritical treatments of The Maine Woods have demonstrated Thoreau's movements away from egocentrism (and transcendentalism) and his development of an ecological consciousness (Myers 69). While I agree that The Maine Woods reflects Thoreau's developing ecocentricity, I will suggest that Thoreau demonstrates the limits of ecocentricity. While The Maine Woods does contain thematic consistencies, I do not see the teleological progression found by ecocritics such as Myers. This essay takes a different approach, focusing on how Thoreau witnesses various ambiguities and symbolic contrasts in Maine's wilderness. These moments, which I subsequently refer to as “contact zones,” stem

"Who Are We? Where Are We?": Contact and Literary Navigation in The Maine Woods