Lost in the Customhouse: Authorship in the American Renaissance

7. Whitman's Idea of Women

7 · Whitman's Idea of Women n an age when physicians rejoiced that neither the "emancipated" woman nor the prostitute "propagates her kind," Walt Whitman claimed that Leaves of Grass was "essentially a woman's book." 1 He said so in 1888 about a book first published in 1855, but he undoubtedly alluded to the whole of Leaves, which took final shape in the early 1880s, in the sixth edition. By this time the doctors, who exerted at least as much influence as the ministers on society (perhaps more), had coined the term "neurasthenia" to describe the state of nervous exhaustion middle-class women suffered from being (we would conclude today) depicted as "creatures inferior to men yet somehow akin to angels ."2 The woman's place was in the home, maintaining the values or "moral affections" of her society, while also providing it with what Whitman called in "Song of Myself" "bigger and nimbler babes." 3 Whitman 's mother had stayed at home and given that society six boys and two girls. His sister Mary had five children and his sister-in-law Mattie two. Only his sister Hannah failed in the propagation effort, probably because she had married a landscape artist and developed "neurasthenia"; today Whitman's biographers diagnose it as hypochondria in view of the fact that she outlived all her brothers and sisters. None of the Whitman women had been "emancipated" in the sense of working outside the home, and yet they were, with the possible exception of Hannah, the models for the women in "A Woman Waits for Me," who know "how to swim, row, ride, wrestle, shoot, run, strike, retreat, [ 1 09] Whitman's Idea ofWomen advance, resist, defend themselves" (p. 102). In other words, they were "working women" who-given an equal chance in society-could have performed equally well in most male-dominated pursuits. "The idea of the women of America," he wrote in Democratic Vistas (1871), was to be "extricated" from the "daze, [from] this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady." Such women were to be "develop 'd, raised to become robust equals, workers, and it may be, even practical and political deciders with men." 4 Whitman sounds like a feminist of the first order (in the nineteenth century, at least), but the rest of his sentence suggests that he is at best advocating what Harold Aspiz calls "a positive feminism." 5 Not only are women potentially as great as men, Whitman says, but they are "greater" because of "their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical attribute." This superiority may not detract or distract from their equal qualifications with men in all other "departments," but it does add an important dimension to the woman's role in the future of America. For in using the West as a metaphor for America's development, he called not only for "vigorous, yet unsuspected Literatures , perfect personalities and sociologies," but also "perfect Women, indispensable to endow the birth-stock of a New World." 6 In an era when there were no female athletes, he welcomed athletic women who would develop their own identities in society, but he also valued this unprecedented athleticism in terms of female fecundity. As Aspiz notes, "The women who are depicted in the poems exhibit healthy sexuality and the capacity for excellent motherhood."? I emphasize the conjunction here because it points up Whitman's dilemma with the "Woman Question": that of the womarl's unresolved division of labor with regard to the burden of her sexuality. At a time when medical theorists discouraged all but the most irlfrequent sexual intercourse between married parties (mainly because "recreational" sex with spouses drained the male of vital fluids-one ejaculation thought to equal the loss of forty ounces of blood), it must be said that Whitman called not only for a liberated view of human sexuality but for the "complete" woman-that is, a life that included the female's "animal want" as well as the male's, her "eager physical hunger"; yet it was the purpose to which that passion was to be ultimately directed that may have brought him full circle in his argument for female emancipation. [ 1 1 0 ] Whitman's Idea ofWomen Whitman sought to free the American female, as he did the male, from the same Victorian ideology about sex that had led to the threatened expurgation of Leaves ofGrass in 1881...