“This Enchantment Is No Delusion”: Henry David Thoreau, the New Materialisms, and Ineffable Materiality

Abstract

[A]ll things, from bacteria to ourselves, are closely related at the biochemical level. All material things are in some sense man's kindred, and subject to the same laws with him. In the inaugural issue of the recently established journal J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls for literary scholars to foreground in their work “the relations between and among people and things that make life meaningful.” Invoking the New Materialisms and particularly Jane Bennett's work on enchantment, Dillon proposes that such scholarship in the humanities might function as “acts of reassemblage” and provoke “enchantment.” Dillon then clarifies that enchantment “is a form of ethical engagement rather than delusion” (177, my emphasis). Dillon's distinction between enchantment and delusion undoubtedly is motivated by the scholarly tendency of recent decades to regard the pursuit of such topics as enchantment as unproductive and unsophisticated.1 Indeed, those of us working in the environmental humanities have been especially sensitive to accusations of practicing a naïve romanticism or engaging in what Stacy Alaimo has called “fantasies of transcendence” (“States” 477). However, even in the nineteenth century, America's now-quintessential practitioner of transcendence, Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), apparently felt a similar need to distinguish enchantment from delusion. He had made precisely this same claim—that “enchantment is no delusion” (5: 272).2

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