Thoreau and Fuller

2. Contributions to Early Industrial Sound Culture

Industrialization, particularly 1890-1930, produced a new type of modern noise that challenged prior ways of interpreting life through one’s sonic environment. The rhythmic and dissonant sounds of industrialization began to initiate reinterpretations on personal and urban spaces (Sterne, 2003). What is introduced as noise is soon assimilated into the soundscape of society (Attali, 1985; Keil & Feld, 1994; Thompson, 2002). Fuller was dismayed at the new immigrants’ inability or unwillingness to hear and see the beauty of nature, and rather they readily embraced and accepted the materialization of their new frontier as truth:

"It grieved me to hear these immigrants who were to be the fathers of a new race, all, from the old man down to the little girl, talking not of what they should do, but of what they should get in the new scene. It was to them a prospect, not of the unfolding nobler energies, but of more ease, and larger accumulation. It wearied me, too, to hear Trinity and Unity discussed in the poor, narrow doctrinal way on these free waters; but that will soon cease, there is not time for this clash of opinions in the West, where the clash of material interests is so noisy [Italics added]. They will need the spirit of religion more than ever to guide them, but will find less time than before for its doctrine. This change was to me, who am tired of the war of words on these subjects, and believe it only sows the wind to reap the whirlwind, refreshing, but I argue nothing from it; there is nothing real in the freedom of thought at the West" (Fuller, 1844, p. 18).

Modernity and mysticism were captured through the observations of Transcendentalists like Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Although it might be easily argued that Fuller became one of the movements’ most ardent critics. Through the writings of Fuller and Thoreau, we begin to hear nature’s voice and a sonic identity emerges through their narratives and aural descriptions. The Transcendental movement heightened a sense of environmental nostalgia, as urban and rural spaces collided with modernity. Conventional religion, namely Puritanism, failed to capture the divine organization and spiritual expression within one’s life that might be otherwise revealed, according to transcendentalists, through introspection. The coming industrial age is symbolically represented through Fuller’s steamships and Thoreau’s locomotives, as evidenced by their respective writings on nature of the upper Midwest and New England. Fuller’s 1844 edition of Summer on the Lakes logs her travels through Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois, and some of the sounds that she heard:

"I used to hear the girls singing and laughing as they were cutting down boughs at Mackinaw; this part of their employment, though laborious, gives them the pleasure being a great deal in the free woods" (Fuller, 1844, p. 245).

She saw her experiences as conversations, and much of her writings involve her aural interactions with people of various ethnicities and cultures. In contrast, Thoreau blended into his landscape; he noted his observations and interactions with his environment introspectively. In 1845, he would begin to write about an 1839 canoe trip on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers three years after his brother died. He spent two years in Walden Woods. He had retreated into the solitude of the woods, although he could not completely escape the occasional visitor or sound of the locomotive that signaled the arrival of goods to the merchants gathered in the center of town. The sound of nature and roar of machine, intertwined into one composition, had inevitably become part of the same sonicscape. Fuller and Thoreau were compelled to appreciate and document their spirituality – and that of others - during these transitional years from naturalism toward industrialism. The Transcendental movement heightened a sense of environmental nostalgia, as culture and urban and rural spaces collided with modernity.

Stay tuned - Next in Series, "Modernity Sounds of Walden"