"Spending for Vast Returns": Sex, Class, and Commerce in the First Leaves of Grass

Through a series of self-publicizing acts, Whitman hoped to orchestrate the entry of Leaves of Grass into literary history. For the first edition (1855), he placed the portrait of himself by Samuel Hollyer opposite the title page. "[H]at on, shirt open, head cocked, arm akimbo," Whitman exudes street-wise physicality in this "first poetic pose" as the "worker/poet" (see fig. 1). ¹ Then, some 500 lines in to the text, the anonymous "I" abruptly becomes "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos." ² In the first of three anonymous reviews of his own work, he again describes himself as "[o]ne of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free." ³ This now canonical Whitman first received critical elaboration in F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance (1941): "As the son of a common man, as a casual worker in his own turn," Whitman "knew how the poor really lived. . . . [H]e is typical of the aspirations and struggles of the working class in the America of his time." ⁴

But Whitman's working-class identity is not as straightforward as it may seem, even in his own self-representations. In another unsigned review, for the Brooklyn Daily Times, Whitman describes himself as "a man who is art-and-part of the commonalty," who so "loves the streets" that he would "leave a select soiree of elegant people any time to go with tumultuous men, roughs, receive their caresses and welcome, listen to their noise, oaths, smut, fluency, laughter, repartee." ⁵ Here Whitman delineates the polarized social spaces of antebellum New York: a domestic, feminized world of "elegant people" and a homosocial working class of "tumultuous men." ⁶ But his own position [Begin Page 337] is somewhere ambiguously in between, a liminal space marked by "leaving" one in order to "go with" the other. The Whitman presented here seems to have a foot in both camps. The potentially awkward and unsettling effects of this ambiguous identity are brought out in Stephen Alonzo Schoff's engraving, used as the frontispiece in Whitman's first major revision of Leaves of Grass (1860; see fig. 2). Gone is the "rough's" bare-neck physicality of 1855. In its place is a much more conventional, head-and-shoulders portrait of a bearded but immaculately coiffured Whitman, wearing a Windsor tie and jacket: the image of a man who appears ready to join a select soiree.

In these self-reviews and revisions, Whitman puts himself into circulation as a figure of liminality, constructing an identity that crosses class boundaries with apparent ease. This fluid self, I suggest, is a feature of a market society characterized by the notion of exchange. ⁷ And this marketing of the self is particularly pronounced among members of the lower middle class, whose identities are dependent on both their limited resources and their own resourcefulness. As a journeyman printer who worked variously as a teacher, carpenter, journalist, and government clerk, Whitman belonged to a Jacksonian lower middle class undergoing the transition from an agrarian, artisan culture to an urban, market economy. The artisan system's hierarchical order of owner-master, skilled journeyman, and apprentice held out the reasonable expectation that apprentices would eventually become masters, achieving not wealth necessarily but a competency. In medieval guild fashion, buying and selling were carefully regulated according to a list of just prices. The essence of the artisan system was small property, craft skill, and self-contracting labor. Artisans were part of the antebellum lower middle class, because like shopkeepers and small farmers, they had a measure of independence lacking among members of the unskilled working class, but their social position was below that of the larger property holders of the middle class: merchants, professionals, and the new group of factory owners (CD, 23–60).

What radically unsettled the...