Title: Gendering Thoreau: Contextualizing the Two Hardings

Abstract:
	'Space-time continuum' may seem a term better left in the realm of science fiction than one used in 19th century American literary studies, but this is far from the case.  Any self-respecting archaeo-historicist must recognize that the categories of their day's literary theory - from its 'common sense assumptions' through to its most avant garde beliefs - often create horribly inaccurate biases when retroactively applied to authors and texts now well over a century 'out of date'.
	One such victim of poorly overlapped horizons in space-time is Walter Harding's still foundational work regarding Henry David Thoreau's sexual persuasion.  In a number of publications ranging over a quarter-century, Harding's picture changes from his 1966 portrait of Thoreau as a confirmed bachelor after Ellen Sewall refused his marriage proposal to a 1991 depiction of pervasive homoeroticism at times bordering on pedophilia. Each reading unfortunately seems to speak more to popular theories of gender within the time of their writing than to have authentically tackled the body of Thoreau's work.  These anachronistic, time-dependent readings artificially and quietly collapse the temporal distance between the discursive spaces of the two men, creating faulty representations of their subject.
	This study takes a critical look at Harding's two readings, emphasizing the difficulty inherent in using today's lexicon to catalog yesterday's literature.  Doing so results in another, hopefully more accurate, picture of Thoreau's gender, one built on his own idea of a "third sex", which, if not conventionally and contemporarily postgendered, is still perhaps best considered transcendent.