I. Why Is Teaching Gender and Identity in Whitman
Necessary?
II. Why Are Previous Guides to Teaching Whitman
Inadequate?
III. Why Are the Advantages of Using Hypertext
to Teach Gender and Identity in Whitman?
IV. A Narrative Bibliography
V. Works Cited in the Bibliography and
Throughout the Site
For a general discussion of the rationale for the format of the site, see the Introduction
Why Is Teaching Gender and Identity in Whitman Necessary?
WE two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the
turf or the sea-beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.
How should we teach the above poem from Whitman's "Calamus" cluster?
One way we might teach it would make the poem fit very well into an American
literary tradition of boyhood and the frontier. The poem, with its
"sailing, soldiering, thieving," etc, would be looking back to Natty
Bumppo and forward to Huck Finn in its emphasis on the development of a rugged
American individualism. Another way we might teach it is to see it
anticipating the Civil War as a loss of innocence. Focusing on
the line, "North and South excursions making," and the fact that the poem
was first published in 1860, we would see the poem as a final "foray"
before the national Fall. Yet another way to teach it would be as
a poem about same-sex love, about an uninhibited enjoyment of (to use Whitman's
terms) "adhesiveness" or "the love of comrades."
Each of these interpretations of the poem
is "right" in its own way. But if we look at these interpretations
as somehow separate and distinct from each other, we are missing, I would
contend, the central argument of the poem. The argument of the poem--and
the entire body of Whitman's poetry, for that matter--is that literary history,
American history and gender and identity are intimately tied together.
The boys begin lines three and four, for example, "Power enjoying"
and "Arm'd and fearless," and they end those same lines "fingers clutching"
and "loving." The literary, political, and sexual transgressions in
the poem (signified in the various meanings of the next line's "No law
less than ourselves") are part of the same project.
Whitman articulates this project not just in "Calamus"
but in "Song of Myself" as well. In section 24
("Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son"),
Whitman asserts: "I give the sign of democracy." As the poem continues
and he offers a list of what his "democracy" entails, we see that Whitman
is forcing us to rethink our notions of poetry and the nation in terms of
the body. The "many long dumb voices" he channels "through" his
untraditional verse include the "Voices of the interminable generations of
prisoners and slaves" as well as the "Voices of sexes and lusts."
Whitman's poetic-democratic voice here does not exist in an abstract,
transcendent position in relationship to his and others' bodies, as most
literary and even historical interpretations of his poetry would lead us
to believe. Whitman is, instead, reconceptualizing poetry and
democracy as, in their truest forms, expressions of the body.
As teachers of Whitman, we need to recognize the full range of what
Michael Moon calls Whitman's "radical body-politics":
In the face of an increasing tendency in his culture to hypostatize and to idealize a limited range of types of writing as 'literary' and thereby to separate them definitively from political and sexual-political discourses, Whitman insisted on the interconnectedness of these realms....The long process of revisionary elaboration that Leaves of Grass gradually underwent produced a series of texts that powerfully articulate a politics comprehending ranges of experience as ostensibly disparate as the pleasurable and painful phases of male-homoerotic love...and the national trauma of the sectional division of the country over slavery....Whitman revises readerly subjectivity in the direction of a heightened, transforming sense of the constructedness and hence the dense politicality of all bodily experience, erotic and otherwise (3-4).
Moon--to whose theoretical work this entire site is greatly indebted--reminds us that Whitman's "body-politic" works both ways. Politics are transformed by the awareness of different bodies and sexualities; and the bodies themselves are transformed by their awareness of their own "politicality." In this sense, Whitman's poetry, insomuch as it is a body itself or represents other bodies, intervenes into the politics of his time; but it also recognizes that it itself is in a precarious position, and that readers will intervene into it and embody it in radically different ways.
It is my hope that this site will allow students (and
teachers) to become active readers of Whitman, to understand what
is at stake for themselves in his poetry. Part of the reason for including
so many daguerreotypes, photos, drawings, and paintings from 19th-century
America is to enable students to recognize some of the bodies involved in
Whitman's poetic process (in this sense, it is also important to
combine the exercises on this site with, for example, the exercises
in the
"Whitman
and Race" section of the
Whitman Hypertext
Archive). Part of the reason, furthermore, for emphasizing Whitman's
revisionary process is to help students understand how Whitman's own body
and body of work are connected in various ways with the other bodies he
discusses.
Finally, the inspiration for the final (as yet unfinished)
portion of the site is the hope that students will come to see that their
own bodies are at stake in their readings of Whitman's poetry.
It is important for students to realize that Whitman invites interaction
between his readers and his body and body of work. The site
does allow students to journey back to 19th-century America, but it does
not want them to stay there or to leave Whitman there. If anything,
the site should be hypertextual proof that Whitman's revisionary process
continues.
Why Are Previous Guides to Teaching Whitman Inadequate?
While Michael Moon and others have opened up a very interesting and productive theoretical debate about gender and identity in Whitman, we are still afraid to teach gender and identity in Walt Whitman below the graduate-level. Beyond my personal experience teaching Whitman to undergraduates, I draw this conclusion from a close study of guides to teaching Whitman.
Even the most recent of these guides ignores issues of gender and identity almost completely. And while a few essays in these guides do address these issues, they do so in such a way--and in the context of so many other essays about other, inevitably more abstract concepts--that they tend to compartmentalize readings of Whitman. A reading that combines the literary, historical and sexual aspects of his poetry appears inconceivable after reading through these guides. Finally--while purporting to be guides to teaching Whitman--these guides offer very few practical classroom exercises. They still rely on the teacher to do the most daunting and challenging work, to transfer the theoretical ideals into the curriculum.
The Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching Leaves of Grass (1990) and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative's The Teachers and Writers Guide to Walt Whitman (1991) are the two most recent guides to teaching Whitman. Of the thirty-five essays in both volumes, only five of the essays address issues of gender and identity in any significant way, and only one of those five attempts to address those issues historically. In some sense, the avoidance of these issues merely reflects the trends of Whitman studies in general. Until Michael Moon's book and the recent collections of critical essays on Whitman in Walt Whitman of Mickle Street and Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, we have not possessed the theoretical framework to discuss fully issues of gender and identity in Whitman. The great majority of the essays in these volumes, as a result, are approaching Whitman from the standpoints of formalism or a very basic, straightforward historicism. While I do not deny that students can benefit from these approaches (being basic and straightforward is a good teaching skill to have), discussions of Whitman's use of language or of his stance toward the Civil War are incomplete and misleading without reference to his "body-politics," his attempts to embody himself and others within the poem and the nation.
The avoidance of issues of gender and identity in these teaching guides cannot ultimately be entirely accounted for by trends in Whitman studies. We must face the reality that, outside of the theoretical confines of the graduate-level classroom or of the academic conference, we are uncomfortable discussing the various bodies in Whitman's poetry--including our own body. To discuss the body with our students requires that we allow are classrooms to get a little playful, a little erotic, a little out of control--as Whitman does in many strategic ways when confronting issues of sexuality (see "Whitman Camping" by Karl Keller). It also requires us, at the same time, to address seriously the cultural forces that Whitman faced when writing about these issues and to provide our students with the context through which to understand what a contentious site the body was in 19th-century America. To do this, we need to be willing to admit that the body is a still contentious site for us today.
This is a very tall order, I realize. It is not just
a matter of teacher's overcoming their inhibitions toward teaching the body;
it's a simple matter of time and resources. That is where the
hypertext nature of this site comes into play...
What Are the Advantages of Using Hypertext
to Teach Gender and Identity in Whitman?
In the spirit of hypertext, here are some rather random speculations:
One of the great divides between our theory and our practice
when it comes to teaching literature below the graduate-level is the difficulty
of historicizing the texts we are reading. Unless we are privileged
enough to teach an interdisciplinary American Studies course, we inevitably
feel the need to sacrifice historicization in order to cover a wide variety
of literary texts. One of the main purposes of this site, therefore,
is its ability to provide a ready-made method of historicizing Whitman that
is self-directed, interactive, and challenging--that frees the teacher to
act as a supervisor and guide and allows to student to roam and discover
her or his own connections between historical and literary texts.
This self-directed historicizing is not confined to the
Historical Contexts section of the site.
In the Revisions section, thanks to the Whitman
Hypertext Archive, students are able to compare editions of Leaves of
Grass at the touch of a button and even analyze various early manuscript
pages from "Calamus." What previously had been an exercise only for
advanced scholars of Whitman is now an exercise that can be part of every
student's approach to the poet.
An advantage of the self-directed historicizing is that it
provides anonymity for the student in approaching historical and literary
texts--especially those texts that deal with "taboo" subjects, such as
masturbation and homosexuality. I suspect that many students (and
teachers, for that matter) would shy away or feel uncomfortable with these
subjects if they first had to discuss them with others. This
site allows the first experience with the materials to be unmediated and
one-on-one.
It is not coincidental, I would argue, that Whitman himself
seems to call for that one-on-one intimacy in poems such as
"Whoever You Are Holding Me Now In Hand."
For Whitman the political consequences he seeks rise out of this personal
interaction.
Whitman, I think, would also appreciate how identities are
blurred in electronic communication. One of the options teachers have
after guiding their students through the site is to hold an anonymous
"chat" about the experience (an ongoing chat or, at least, a bulletin board
will become an official part of the site very soon). Much like Whitman,
students can claim many virtual bodies as their own.
The final and possibly most important advantage of hypertext is access. By being on the Web, this hypertext teaching guide can used by my brother who teachers teenage kids of Mexican immigrants on the South Side of Chicago as well as by professors at any college or university, large or small (presuming, of course, that they have Internet access). While we are right to celebrate the technical innovation that HTML brings to the presentation and interpretation of literature (see Jerome McGann's "The Rationale of Hypertext" and "Imagining What You Don't Know: The Theoretical Goals of the Rossetti Archive") we tend to overlook one of the basic, originary purposes of HTML, which was to provide a universal language of sorts for a variety of computers on all different platforms to communicate. This has economic consequences, especially when even a high school or college whose computers are supposedly outdated can access the same information as other institutions with more advanced systems.
Oh, yeah, one another advantage of hypertext is that, much more easily than Whitman, I can keep expanding and revising my thoughts here--which are, of course, incomplete. I realize that many of them could use a little clearer and more detailed articulation. Be assured that this is (and always will be) a work in progress.
Bernie Heidkamp
University of Maryland, College Park
The Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves of Grass, published in 1990, has a very good narrative bibliography that can help teachers decide which edition of Leaves of Grass they should order for their classroom and that also provides a solid guide to relevant literary criticism of Whitman published before 1990. In this bibliography, therefore, I will concentrate on some of the ground-breaking criticism on Leaves of Grass that has been published since 1990, and on some of the primary and secondary historical texts that I have used in compiling this site.
This bibliography will completed some time in 1999.
Works Cited Throughout the Site and in the Bibliography
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of
Walt Whitman. New York: New York University
Press, 1967.
---. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. New York: New York University Press, 1975.
Beach, Christopher. "'A Strong and Sweet Female Race': Cultural Discourse
and Gender in Whitman's Leaves of
Grass." American Transcendental Quarterly
9:4 (December 1995): 283-298.
Beecher, Catharine E. A Treatise on Domestic Economy. Boston: Marsh, Capen, Lyon, and Webb, 1841.
Bennett, Paula and Vernon A. Rosario, eds. Solitary Pleasures: The
Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourse of
Autoeroticism. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Bloch, Ruth H. "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of
the Moral Mother: 1785-1815." Feminist Studies
4 (June 1978): 101-126,
D'Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History
of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper
and Row, 1988.
Erkkila, Betsy and Jay Grossman. Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American
Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996.
Graham, Sylvester. A Lecture to Young Men. Providence: Weeden and Cory, 1834.
Gregory, Samuel. Facts and Important Information for Young Women
on the Subject of Masturbation: With Its
Causes, Prevention, and Cure. Boston: Geo.
Gregory, 1857.
Kapff, S.C. Admonitions of A Friend to Youth. Philadelphia: Schaefer and Koradi, 1858.
Keller, Karl. "Walt Whitman and the Queening of America." American Poetry 1:1 (1981): 4-26.
---. "Walt Whitman Camping." In Campgrounds: Style and
Homosexuality. Ed. David Bergman. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996.
Kummings, Donald D., ed. Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves
of Grass. New York: The Modern Language
Association, 1990.
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman:
Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991.
Newfield, Christopher. The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission
in America. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996.
Nissenbaum, Stephen. Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America:
Sylvester Graham and Health Reform.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Padgett, Ron, ed. The Teachers and Writers Guide to Walt Whitman.
New York: Teachers and Writers
Collaborative, 1991.
Pancoast, Seth. Boyhood's Perils and Manhood's Curse. Philadelphia: 1858.
Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House: The Betrothal. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856.
Sigourney, Lydia. Letters to Young Ladies. Hartford: 1835.
---. Letters to Mothers. Hartford: 1838.
Sill, Geoffrey M., ed. Walt Whitman of Mickle Street: A Centennial
Collection. Knoxville: University of Tennessee
Press, 1993.
Trall, R.T. Home-Treatment for Sexual Abuses: A Practical Treatise. New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1853.
Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860." In
The Many-Faceted Jacksonian Era: New
Interpretations. Ed. Edward Pesson.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Wiegman, Robyn. "Writing the Male Body: Naked Patriarchy and Whitmanian
Democracy." Literature and
Psychology 33: 4 (1987): 16-23.
Woodward, Samuel. Hints for the Young in Relation to the Health of Body and Mind. Boston: G.W. Light, 1856.