Glances from the Shore: Thoreau and the Material Landscape of Cape Cod

Abstract

Material culture–accessible, visible, durable–afforded several generations of American cultural geographers entree into study of the human landscape. This approach leaned toward the visual, the rural, and the antiquarian. More recent approaches are apt to read material landscapes in symbolic or ideological terms. In the 1840s and 1850s Henry David Thoreau scrutinized landscapes in rural, visual, and historical registers strikingly analogous to those of traditional cultural geography. This paper explores the rhetorical paths to and from the material landscape in his Cape Cod (1865). Thoreau's rich and complex readings well illustrate the insights the material landscape may yield when combined with careful looking and copious background reading. But his selective gaze, seeking authentic, natural, and "necessary" landscapes on the Cape also reveals the ways in which artifacts can be exploited to regulate discourse between insiders and outsiders to achieve an author's rhetorical purposes.

Everything told of the sea, even when we did not see

its waste or hear its roar. For birds there were gulls,

and for carts in the fields, boats turned bottom

upward against the houses, and sometimes the rib of

a whale was woven into the fence by the roadside.

—Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod.