SOURCE: "Walden's False Bottoms," in GLYPH, Vol. 1, 1977, pp. 132-49.

In this excerpt, Michaels explores the strategies employed by Walden's readers in order to deal with the text's many contradictions.

Walden has traditionally been regarded as both a simple and a difficult text, simple in that readers have achieved a remarkable unanimity in identifying the values Thoreau is understood to urge upon them, difficult in that they have been persistently perplexed and occasionally even annoyed by the form his exhortations take. Thoreau's Aunt Maria (the one who bailed him out of jail in the poll tax controversy) understood this as a problem in intellectual history and blamed it all on the Transcendental Zeitgeist: "I do love to hear things called by their right names," she said, "and these Transcendentalists do so transmogrophy . . . their words and pervert common sense that I have no patience with them."¹ Thoreau's Transcendentalist mentor...