The Thoreauvian Pilgrimage: The Structure of an American Cult

rHE subject of canonization has prompted much innovative work in recent American literary history and theory. This scholarship has established that canons are culture-specific instruments of promotion and exclusion, and it has begun to explain canonical formation and change in terms of models of cultural hegemony more complex and hard-headed than traditional historicists and New Critics employed: models that take into account not just aesthetic fashion and the philosophical temper of the age but also the more tangible power conferred by race, gender, and class. Since it began as a challenge to the received conception of who are the major authors deserving close study, the newer scholarship has understandably concentrated on the claims of figures marginalized by the received canon and on questioning the unexamined assumptions behind such exclusions. Little has been written about the phenomenon of canonical investment itself: that is, the rituals of remembrance through which those regarded for whatever reason as literary heroes become enshrined. Hence the present article, which examines the major forms of public reverence for Thoreau in particular and Transcendental Concord in general. Since Thoreau has become the closest approximation to a folk hero that American literary history has ever seen, and since Concord is still America's most sacred literary spot, this will be a case study representative in the Emersonian rather than in the statistical sense. But by the same token it should help to show that the sacral vocabulary drawn from biblical studies and hagiography by critical discussions of literary canonization points to patterns of behavior and experience that run deeper than such analogizing generally claims, patterns that substantiate the present climate of skepticism toward