SOURCE: Murray, Donald M. “Symbolic Landscape in the Greylock Episode of Thoreau's Week.” American Transcendental Quarterly 1, no. 2 (June 1987): 123‐32.

In the following essay, Murray offers a Freudian reading of the ascent of Mt. Greylock, claiming that Thoreau was motivated by Oedipal conflicts.

We are closer than ever before to an understanding of young Thoreau's psychological problems, and we see more clearly than ever before the formal patterns in his book, A Week On the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Yet certain striking features of the chapter “Tuesday” remain unexplained. There is an arresting quality in the brief portrait of the young woman in a dishabille whom Thoreau meets on the ascent of Mt. Greylock (which he calls Saddle‐back) as there is in the longer portrait of the uncivil man, Rice.¹ It is a quality not fully accounted for by the fact that these people had been part of the...