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American Literature 76.3 (2004) 610-612


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Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation . By Jay Grossman. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2003. xii, 273 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95.
Whitman Possessed: Poetry, Sexuality, and Popular Authority . By Mark Maslan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 2001. xii, 221 pp. $41.95.

Calling Emerson and Whitman a crucial nineteenth-century (non)pair, Jay Grossman begins Reconstituting the American Renaissance by examining the constitutional debates to which both were, in some measure, responding. Grossman argues that "the distinction between the political and the literary is itself profoundly complicated in an American context in which language-making and nation-making are so profoundly inter-implicated" (4). The constituting to which his title refers is thus a witty evocation of the Constitution itself, the founding document from which Grossman's argument takes its origin, and another word for any kind of writing that depends on "an original foundational fluidity" (7). Describing "the nation's persistent conversation on the nature of political representation"—a "conversation," Grossman adds, that has not always been carried out verbally—Reconstituting finds in the Founders' [End Page 610] "theme (and scheme) of representation" a structuring "rhetoric" for subsequent generations (2). Although Grossman's opening example is a narrow one, drawn from a 1999 Supreme Court decision involving the Census Bureau and its project of statistical sampling for purposes of congressional apportionment, this is not a book that assumes a reader with an extensive background in legal and political theory. Rather, its contribution lies in its understanding of the ambiguity of constitutional rhetoric and its compelling reading of nontotalizing, yet pivotal, episodes in the careers of Emerson and Whitman.

As it turns out, it is not necessary to share Grossman's passionate interest in the Constitution and the debates over its ratification to appreciate his reexamination of Whitman's indebtedness, or lack thereof, to Emerson. Following the intricate opening moves, Reconstituting reads Emerson and Whitman within larger discursive and material contexts, "structured by the concept of 'representation' in its multiple senses, only partially stabilized in the complex disagreements of the Founders" (6). For example, Emerson's use of his father's notebooks anchors a chapter on "Class Actions," and the discussion does indeed demonstrate that "[t]o examine the class-inflected dynamics present in the writings of these two men makes visible features of their relationship previously obscured" (121). The chapter concludes with a brilliant reading of Christopher Pearse Cranch's illustration of the "transparent eye-ball" passage in Nature, which furthers Grossman's argument that even as a visionary, Emerson sought to dominate his social inferiors. Throughout, Emerson is faulted for his class-based elitism and for standing above and apart, even from his own audiences. Whitman, on the other hand, is described as having inherited the socioeconomic position of a free white laborer, an inheritance that determines important features of his more democratic poetic, for example, its lack of irony. (Irony is conceived as a trope that depends on hierarchy.) Despite Grossman's initial overinsistence on the homogeneity of Whitman's class affiliation, a flesh-and-blood literary worker soon emerges, in no small measure because he is granted his "autocratic tendencies" (147). Grossman's concluding chapter offers a reading of the journalist–poet-to-be in New Orleans that is a classic of its kind, emphasizing "Emerson's and Whitman's shared reliance in their depictions of the human body on rhetorics associated with the practices of American slavery" (163).

Whitman Possessed also links the emergence of Leaves of Grass to a crisis of political representation in the antebellum period, but the book's focus, at least initially, is narrower; and rather than unsettling the disciple model, Mark Maslan invokes Emerson's understanding of poetic inspiration to argue that Whitman understood his creativity as emanating from forces beyond his control. Although this idea may seem overintellectualized and counterintuitive, it provides a useful purchase on Whitman's construction of sexuality and...

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