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American Literature 74.3 (2002) 640-642



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The Erotic Whitman . By Vivian R. Pollak. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. 2000. xxiv, 261 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $18.95.

Scholars trying to reconstruct historical connections between Walt Whitman's sexuality and his poetics tend either to overnormalize nineteenth-century homosexuality—such that homoerotic friendships are represented as a treasured rite of passage for most young men—or they make it so transgressive that every word of Whitman's oeuvre becomes hermetically coded with culturally prohibited desires. Happily, Vivian Pollak's The Erotic Whitman suffers from neither of these problems. Her focus on Whitman's ambivalence about sexuality—his own and others'—helps her present a relatively nuanced [End Page 640] portrait of desire in writings from every decade of Whitman's long career. The careful claims she makes about Whitman's sexual ideology lend her final chapters about Whitman's post–Civil War politics and his "visionary" (though clearly limited) feminism real strength and originality. Problems with Pollak's close readings, however, submerge her decidedly modest argument, threatening both its plausibility and its relevance for many of Whitman's contemporary readers, especially in the first three chapters. Readers frustrated with muddy or unsubstantiated local interpretations may not stick with The Erotic Whitman long enough to reap Pollak's more global insights.

An early weakness of Pollak's reading involves Whitman's relationship with his father. Although her preface states that "the sources of Whitman's early and enduring disaffection are overdetermined," she returns again and again to "the model offered by his all-but-silenced father, Walter Senior" (xix). Pollak's project is bolstered by the care with which she avoids a too-easy Freudian reading of the Whitman family's problems; in its place, though, she often seems to work from an implicit (and ahistorical) version of family systems theory, in which Whitman's grandfather, an early employer, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln emotionally supersede Whitman's distant and incompetent biological father. In the abstract, perhaps, these substitutions make some sense (especially if Pollak shares, in a broad way, Gertrude Stein's belief [expressed in Everybody's Autobiography] that "there are far too many fathers now existing"); however, in the absence of much hard data about either Walter Senior's individual parenting style or early-nineteenth-century fathering more generally, the constantly reappearing ghost of Walter Senior seems intrusive and irrelevant.

Interpretative non sequiturs too numerous to catalog also make Pollak's local arguments hard to follow in the first half of the book. Sometimes these problematic readings are the clear result of Pollak's hermeneutics of desire; she wants a particular passage from Whitman's poetry to support a much larger claim that she is making, and she occasionally works the passage much harder than most of her readers would. At other times, however, her readings are simply vague or even dreamy, and their logic, difficult for the reader to trace, becomes the sandy basis for further claims. Even when these subsequent claims are supported by historical evidence or more prudent reading practices, the reader's credulity is strained.

Two examples suffice. At the beginning of her chapter on Whitman's transition from Walter to Walt, she identifies the poet's "amused, complacent, compassionating" persona as the "bachelor gentleman" who makes a quick appearance in "Song of the Answerer." She argues that, for Whitman, this "gentlemanly" persona opposes the "rough" that other critics have emphasized and celebrated. But even after the pieces of Pollak's argument are in place, many readers may continue to question the "aristocratic hauteur" she ascribes to the Whitman who is "both in and out of the game" (57). Reading class privilege into this persona enables Pollak to analyze Whitman's ego-synthesizing goals in more or less convincing terms, but nagging uncertainty [End Page 641] about the validity of her earlier interpretation remains. Later in the book, when Pollak argues on convincing biographical grounds that Whitman's sister Hannah Heyde was the basis for the "twenty-ninth bather" in "Song of Myself," she paradoxically undermines her...

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