Part 1. What happens to the link between the human and the natural in "The Shipwreck" when Thoreau confronts hostile nature, very different from the domesticated one of Concord and Walden Pond?
The tranquil view of nature in Concord and Walden Pond makes Thoreau want to immerse himself in nature. This perspective renders nature inspiring, calming, reviving, and fascinating-a view in which Thoreau feels at one with nature. At Walden Pond, he actually integrates himself into nature, separating himself from the accouterments of civilization to find his "roots," so to speak. Walls points out that "Romantic writers fundamentally rejected the mechanistic and soul-deadening rule of science in favor of the integrative power of organic nature," and this is precisely what Thoreau does at Walden Pond (18). Here, the link between the human and the natural is one of mutual accord, since Thoreau sees himself as part of nature, as proceeding from nature, and acknowledges that he is in some ways irrevocably connected with it.
In the face of the shipwreck, however, Thoreau's depiction of the link between the human and the natural changes drastically. Where at Walden Pond he saw only the joys of communing with a gentle and beautiful nature, after the shipwreck, he sees the devastation wrought by a hostile nature. The body of the dead girl is a tragic emblem of the uncaring side of nature, which ended her newly begun life in its tempest. One woman sees the body of "her child in her sister's arms, as if the sister had meant to be found thus; and within three days after, the mother died from the effect of that sight" (Thoreau 7). Thus, the calming, gentle link with nature depicted at Walden Pond in which man and nature commune together becomes a link by which man is victimized under the power of the much greater and eminently destructive natural forces around him.
After witnessing the grisly sight of the stor
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