Despite the sexual frankness of Whitman’s poetry, he had a moralistic attitude toward pornography. Surveying the popular literature of the antebellum period, he said he saw “In the pleantiful [sic] feast of romance presented to us, all the novels, all the poems, really dish up only one figure, various forms and preparations of only one plot, namely, a sickly, scrofulous, crude amorousness.”1 In “Democratic Vistas” he complained that in “the prolific brood of the contemporary novel, magazine-tale, theatre-play, &c.,” he found “the same endless thread of tangled and superlative love-story.”2 He was puzzled that some inferred from his poetry that he would take an interest in what he called “all the literature of rape, all the pornograph of vile minds.”3 He sharply distinguished Leaves of Grass from this material: “No one would more rigidly keep in mind the difference between the simply erotic, the merely lascivious, and what is frank, free, modern, in sexual behavior, than I would: no one.”
When it came to the content of popular literature, he was careful to praise morality and denounce obscenity. He attacked “the perfect cataracts of trash” produced by foreign sensational writers like Eugene Sue, Frederick Marryatt, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Charles Paul de Kock.4 He was also dismayed when many American popular writers followed in the footsteps of the Europeans. In the wake of Eugene Sue’s immensely popular expose The Mysteries of Paris (1842–43), scores of lurid novels about the “mysteries” of American cities appeared. By 1857, in the Daily Times, Whitman could generalize: “Within the last ten or fifteen years a new school of literature has come into existence. We refer to what has aptly been called the ‘sensation novel.’” So popular was this genre that he identified the love of sensationalism as America’s leading characteristic: “If there be one characteristic of ourselves, as a people, more prominent than the others, it is our intense love of excitement. We must have our sensation, and we can no more do without it than the staggering inebriate can dispense with his daily dram.”5
Although not explicit by today’s standards, antebellum sensational fiction weirdly combined sex and violence and sometimes became daring, particularly in the hands of George Thompson, who churned out nearly a hundred pamphlet novels. Thompson dealt with all kinds of sex: group sex, child sex, miscegenation.
Given the popularity of sensational fiction, it is understandable that after Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was criticized by some for its sexual openness, several of Whitman’s defenders were quick to point out its relative purity when compared with the mass literature of the day. His friend William Douglas O’Connor asserted that the eighty or so sexual lines in Whitman did not merit his being lumped with “the anonymous lascivious trash spawned in holes and sold in corners, too witless and disgusting for any notice but that of the police.”6 Similarly, John Burroughs insisted, “Of the morbid, venereal, euphemistic, gentlemanly, club-house lust, which, under thin disguises, is in every novel and most of the poetry of our times, he has not the faintest word or thought—not the faintest whisper.”7
Indeed, Whitman wrote his poems partly as a response to the popular love plot, with its fast young men and depraved women. In planning his sexual cluster of poems “Children of Adam” he specified in his notebook that he wanted to present “a fully-complete, well-developed, man, eld, bearded, swart, fiery” as “a more than rival of the youthful type-hero of novels and love poems.”8 Later on he wrote: “In my judgment it is strictly true that on the present supplies of imaginative literature—the current novels, tales, romances, and what is called ‘poetry’—enormous in quantity and utterly unwholesome in quality, lies the responsibility, (a great part of it anyhow,) of the absence in modern society of a noble, stalwart, and healthy and maternal race of Women, and of a strong and dominant moral conscience.”9 “Romances,” a popular equivalent of novels in his day, became a word of opprobrium in his lexicon. “Great genius and the people of these states must never be demeaned to romances,” he declared in the 1855 preface.10
He incorporated his protest against romances into his poetry, as in “Song of the Exposition,” where he wrote:
Away with old romance!
Away with novels, plots and plays of foreign courts,
Away with love-verses sugar’d in rhyme, the intrigues, amours of idlers,
Fitted for only banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide,
The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few,
With perfumes, heat and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers.
He found a powerful weapon against the perfervid sensuality of romances in the natural approach to sex and the body offered by the ascendant science of physiology. Popular physiologists like those associated with the scientific publishing firm of Fowlers & Wells, distributor of the first edition of Leaves of Grass and publisher of the second, opposed pornography as one of several unnatural stimulants that threatened to disturb the mind’s equilibrium by overexciting the brain’s faculty of amativeness.
In one of their main books on physiology the Fowlers emphasized, “Though the world is full of books attempting to portray this passion [love]—though tales, novels, fictitious writings, love-stories, &c., by far the most numerous class of books, are made up, warp and woof, of love,… yet how imperfectly understood is this whole subject!” Such stories, he argued, made the brain’s organ of amativeness overactive by exciting imaginary love. In another book, in an admonitory chapter on “Yellow Covered Literature,” they unequivocally advised, “Read no love-stories unless you have health and sexuality to throw away.”11 The earliest publishers of the nineteenth century’s most sexually frank poet, therefore, had a deep-seated hatred of the kind of scabrous popular literature he also denounced.
Whitman saw in the emerging class of popular physiological books on sex a healthy alternative to the prevalent lewdness of literature and conversation. In several best-selling works on physiology and phrenology Orson Fowler argued that married couples must have regular sex to keep their systems in balance. It was almost certainly Orson Fowler who was responsible for taking on Leaves of Grass as a Fowlers & Wells book in the mid-fifties, since by then his views on sex accorded almost exactly with Whitman’s.
Both Orson Fowler and Whitman had a deep-seated belief in the sacredness and purity of sex when rightly treated. Both stood opposed to the desacralization of sex in popular culture, and both hoped to reinstate sex as fully natural, the absolute center of existence. In his book Sexual Science Fowler set out views on sex that were very close to Whitman’s. Sex is to people, he wrote, “what steam power is to machinery—the prime instrumentality of its motions and productions,” the very “chit-function of all males and females.”12 This was close in spirit to Whitman’s poetic lines, “Sex contains all, bodies, souls, / […] Without shame the man I like knows and avows the deliciousness of his sex, / Without shame the woman I like knows and avows hers.”13 Or, as Whitman later declared to Traubel, “Sex is the root of it all: sex—the coming together of men and women: sex: sex.”14
With Fowler as with Whitman, all organs and acts connected with sex were holy. Both placed special emphasis on motherhood, the womb, the phallus, and semen. Just as Whitman in his poetry virtually deified mothers as initiators of life, so Fowler wrote, “She is the pattern woman who initiates the most life, while she who fails in this, fails in the very soul and essence of womanhood.” Just as Whitman poeticized the folds of the womb whence unfolded new life, so Fowler praised the womb as “the vestibule of all life,” insisting that “every iota of female beauty comes from it.” Just as Whitman in “A Woman Waits for Me” would write that all is lacking in woman if sex is lacking, so Fowler underscored the necessity for woman’s full enjoyment of the sex act. “PASSION ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY IN WOMAN,” he headlined one section of his book. “The non-participant female,” he wrote, “is a natural abomination.” The outlook of both Fowler and Whitman was sex-based, womb-centered, phallic-centered, but also intensely religious. If Whitman’s sexual passages often soar quickly t
o the mystical, so do Fowler’s. For instance, the holiness Whitman saw in the “seminal milk” and “fatherstuff” was seen also by Fowler, who wrote of the semen, “Great God, what wonders hast Thou wrought by means of this infinitesimal sway!”15
Among the methods the physiologists used to educate the American public about the body and sex was the distribution of anatomical drawings and artistic prints. The Greek revival style that swept through American domestic architecture and cemetery design during this period was also manifested in the sculpture of Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers. Greenough called for an honest treatment of the nude, and his call was heeded by a number of artists, including Hiram Powers. Powers’ “The Greek Slave,” a neoclassical study of a mournful, very naked slave woman whose chained hands fall strategically over the genital region, became the most famous American sculpture of the period. Other such vehicles were life-sized anatomical drawings of the nude human body, in color and on rollers, which Fowlers and Wells sold to schools and sometimes individuals.
Whitman saw in such aesthetic and scientific works a model for his poetic treatment of the body. “I prefer the honest nude to the suggestive half-draped,” he would tell Traubel.16 His attraction to the “honest nude” was stimulated in part by “The Greek Slave,” which he thought even the most innocent could enjoy without being sullied. The aesthetic sensibility behind Powers’ nude he also found in the “model artists,” or tableaux vivants, which became the rage throughout the country in the late 1840s. In New Orleans he regularly attended model artist exhibitions, in which nude or lightly draped women and men enacted scenes from the Bible or classical myths. He denounced as “sickly prudishness” opposition to the model artists, which he thought revealed “Nature’s cunningest work—the human frame, form and face.”17
His interest in such public exhibitions of the nude informed his treatment of the body in his poetry. In the 1855 preface he described the healthy effects of reproducing artistic nudes: “Glean and vigorous children are jetted and conceived only in those communities where the models of natural forms are public every day.”18 He emphasized that Americans “shall receive no pleasure from violations of natural models” in sculptures or illustrations; specifically, “Of the human form especially it is so great it must never be made ridiculous.” Such candid nudity was exemplified for him not only by sculptures and model artists but also by the physiologists’ anatomical models. When planning in his notebook “a poem in which is minutely described the whole particulars and ensemble of a first-rate Human Body,” he reminded himself: “Read the latest and best anatomical works/talk with physicians/study the anatomical plates.”19
In his poetry he treated sex and the body in a physiological, artistic way as a contrast to what he saw as the cheapened, often perverse forms of sexual expression in popular culture. “Who will underrate the influence of a loose popular literature in debauching the popular mind?” he asked in a magazine article.20 Directly opposing the often grotesque versions of eroticism appearing in sensational romances, he wrote in the 1855 preface: “Exaggerations will be sternly revenged in human physiology […] As soon as histories are properly told, there is no more need for romances,” a sentiment he repeated almost word for word in his 1860 poem “Suggestions.”21 Priding himself, like the physiologists, on candid acceptance of the body, he announced in his first poem: “Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean.” He sang the naturalness of copulation and the sanctity of the sexual organs: “Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, perfect and clean the womb cohering.”22
Whitman always emphasized the physiological connection. “I have always made much of the physiological,” he once told Traubel.23 After the first three editions prompted some adverse criticism because of their frankness, to ward off further attacks he wrote an opening poem, “Inscriptions,” which placed his poetry in the clean realm of physiology:
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy
for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.24
It is significant that these lines move quickly from physiological praise of the body to a feminist assertion of woman’s equality, for in Whitman’s mind the two subjects were interconnected. “[O]nly when sex is properly treated, talked, avowed, accepted,” he wrote, “will the woman be equal with the man, and pass where the man passes, and meet his words with her words, and his rights with her rights.”25 With women’s rights activists of the day he shared a concern for the right of woman to equal opportunity in society. Like advocates of free love, he thought relationships must be based on mutual attraction and respect rather than on money or one-sided desire.
For Whitman, there was great power and creativity in both motherhood and fatherhood. He was surrounded by physiologists who believed, in Orson Fowler’s words, that “PARENTAGE is EVERYTHING.”26 Whitman deified the womb as the emblem of almost divine power. He writes of women, “[Y]our privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest, / You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.”27 His 1856 poem “Unfolded Out of the Folds” sang praise to both the literal and metaphorical powers of the womb:
Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded,
and is always to come unfolded,
Unfolded only out of the superbest woman of the earth is to
come the superbest man of the earth, […]
Unfolded out of the strong and arrogant woman I love, only
thence can appear the strong and arrogant man I love,
Unfolded by brawny embraces from the well-muscled woman I
love, only thence come the brawny embraces of the man, […]
First the man is shaped in the woman, he can then be shaped in himself.28
Whitman’s poetic paeans to what he called “sane athletic maternity” are explainable as attempts to present a model woman for all to observe. In establishing this model, he drew off several emerging theories of womanhood. One was related to the athletic woman.
Such athletic prescriptions for women were common during a period when what has been called a cult of “Real Womanhood” was coming to the fore in American life and letters. The Real Woman, although strong and economically self-reliant, believed in marriage and opposed political feminism. Whitman’s poetry was one of the period’s clearest expressions of the Real Woman: athletic, sturdy, self-reliant yet also maternal, family-based. Given the ideal of the Real Woman, there was no contradiction between the athletic and motherly roles he praised in his poetry. The woman in “Unfolded Out of the Folds,” for instance, embodies tender maternal “sympathy” but also is “strong and arrogant,” “well muscled,” and capable of “brawny embraces.” Another Whitman poem praised women who “know how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, advance, resist, defend themselves.”
Whitman also learned much from the women’s rights movement, which became active and visible in America between 1848 and 1855, just when he was maturing as a poet. The world’s first women’s rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848. Whitman once declared that Leaves of Grass was “essentially a woman’s book, … it is the cry of the right and the wrong of the woman sex.”29 It was so, in the most far-ranging sense.
With his background in Quakerism and freethought, Whitman was predisposed to respond to the women’s rights movement. He was a close observer of woman’s oratory and became a poetic celebrant of woman’s new public role. He had especially high regard for the feminist orators Fanny Wright, Lucretia Mott, and Ernestine Rose.
Women participated in parades, processions, and religious revivals in unprecedented numbers during this period. Whitman approvingly recorded woman’s suddenly public posture in “Song of the Broad-Axe,” picturing a city “Where women walk in public processions in the streets the same as the men, / Where they enter the public assembly and take place
s the same as the men.”30
Before the Civil War, women’s rights activism centered on property-holding, education, employment, and marriage. It was these issues that would always loom largest in Whitman’s mind. He was painfully aware of what happened to a woman’s wages or property holdings in marriage: They were turned over to the husband. In marriage, early-nineteenth-century American women forfeited their legal and economic existence
He watched with fascinated yet sometimes puzzled interest in the various reforms that arose in response to flawed relations between the sexes. Antebellum America was an extremely fertile breeding ground for various religious and secular groups who practiced alternative lifestyles in an effort to put sexual relations on an entirely new basis. At one extreme were the Shakers, who practiced celibacy, at the other were free lovers, who called for the abolishment of marriage and the reestablishment of relationships on the basis of “passional attraction.”
Free love was the most pertinent of these movements with regard to Whitman. Between 1850 and 1855 America witnessed the formation of two free love communities, at Modern Times, New York and at Berlin Heights, Ohio, as well as various free love clubs, journals, societies. At Modern Times, an anarchist and free love community established in 1851 near Whitman’s birthplace on Long Island, legal marriage was abolished. Couples signified their union by tying a colored thread on their finger and took it off when the passion fizzled.
Free love was a direct response to what was seen as the enslaving marriage institution. Free love writers such as Marx Edgeworth Lazarus and Stephen Pearl Andrews argued that marriage in America had become little more than legalized prostitution. But the free lovers did not emphasize promiscuity. Free love for them did not mean indiscriminate love but love freely given, freely shared. The precondition for sexual relations should be love, not marriage, and the woman should determine when sex took place. Thus the free lovers, though often castigated, considered themselves chaste and pure.
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