Years before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he claimed. His 1858 column, “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” republished for the first time in 2015, portrays the mid-nineteenth-century United States as overrun with “feeble” men.^[1] Throughout the column, Whitman argues that “physical inferiority, in one form or another, is the rule rather than the exception” and offers insight into how readers might remedy this condition. Over the course of thirteen weekly installments, he insists that the American male physique is in desperate need of revitalization, something he proposes literature might supply.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the self-proclaimed “poet of the Body” also authored an instructive physical training text.^[2] Whitman published the series in The New York Atlas under the name Mose Velsor in 1858, between editions of Leaves of Grass (fig. 1). While the poet’s prescriptions are fairly representative of nineteenth-century health regimens—strict diet, routine exercise, sexual restraint—Whitman’s essays are remarkably attentive to their own textuality. “Manly Health” not only recommends healthy habits, but also presents text as itself an agent of cure. Henry David Thoreau suggested in Walden (1854) that, “to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise… It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object,” and Whitman takes this proposition seriously, providing as methodical instruction in reading as he does in his more conventional health recommendations.^[3] Attending to such metatextuality in “Manly Health” allows us to reconsider the relationship between text and reader both in and beyond the column, as Whitman draws on the prescriptive project of self-help to articulate a broader theory of literature as a rehabilitative technology. Ultimately, his framing of text probes the parameters of masculine American identity by providing a conduit between “inferior” readers and conceptions of ability.

This approach to literature emerges at a critical point in the poet’s career. Zachary Turpin has noted that when Whitman composed “Manly Health” he was considering abandoning poetry for more instructive genres, possibly in response to the looming threat of war.^[4] The column’s literary preoccupations, however, situate it not as a departure from Leaves of Grass, but as a complement to Whitman’s antebellum poetry. The timing of the publication of “Manly Health” is significant, as its 1858 appearance bridges the second (1856) and third (1860) editions of Leaves of Grass. The second edition had been published by Orson Squire Fowler and Samuel Wells, two of the most prominent U.S. phrenologists, and this association may have informed Whitman’s interest in exercise and related health sciences.^[5]

While the mid-century science of phrenology Whitman encountered during this period is perhaps best remembered for its claims to decipher the contours of human skulls, experts in the field paired this deterministic practice with an investment in transforming individual character through physical training.^[6] As Fowler puts it in an 1855 manual, “health of body produces health of mind and purity of feelings… While, therefore, phrenologists should scrutinize the size of organs closely, they should observe the STATE OF HEALTH much more minutely.”^[7] While phrenologists insisted that the human body was akin to a text that could be both read and revised, Whitman proposes that the act of reading itself could be a catalyst for rebuilding the body. This rehabilitative logic that governs “Manly Health” also extends to the editions of Leaves of Grass that bracket it, suggesting Whitman’s investment in rethinking literature’s influence on the body beyond the self-help genre.

Such a porous boundary between body and text has been the subject of much Whitman scholarship.^[8] In Disseminating Whitman (1991), Michael Moon argues that in the ongoing revisionary project of Leaves of Grass, “discourses of the body and discourses of the literary interact in ways which extend readers’ conceptions of both realms, and of the range of possible relations between these two realms.”^[9] “Manly Health” introduces another “possible relation” between the corporeal and the literary. Along with the “affectionate physical presence” that Moon argues Whitman imparts from writer to reader in Leaves of Grass, the authorial “We” that offers advice throughout “Manly Health” cultivates an instructive ethos that purports to alter the reader’s physicality by training him.^[10] Whitman’s column highlights the specifically therapeutic bodily contact imagined by his prescriptive as well as poetic works.

 

Despite this uniquely metatextual approach, Whitman was not alone in his assessment of the nation’s health, nor in his desire to intervene. In the wake of increased industrialization, the maintenance of an active, healthy body became a key concern of self-help texts. This literature for middle-class white men and women proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century, and publications ranged from exercise manuals such as Whitman’s to comprehensive instruction in cultivating “character,” which nearly always recommended physical training.^[11] These works were as committed to ideas about sex difference as they were to promoting health.^[12] While Eliza Ware Farrar’s The Young Lady’s Friend (1837) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Means and Ends: Or, Self-training (1842) offered advice to the authors’ “young country-women,” the masculinist title of “Manly Health” joins such volumes as William Alcott’s The Young Man’s Guide (1833) and Timothy Shay Arthur’s Advice to Young Men (1848), which guided men in the development of a moral character and a healthy physique (fig. 2).^[13] These texts located the body as a site of self-improvement, encouraging corporeal transformation while maintaining strict adherence to a binary understanding of male and female traits.

For the men Whitman addresses, then, self-help was always about pursuing a distinct idea of “manliness” as well as health.^[14] This self-improvement was in part a response to the supposedly debilitating feminine “cult of domesticity” as well as a strategy for achieving economic success amidst the rise of industrial capitalism. This period saw a national investment in ideas about masculine self-control after Henry Clay valorized the “self-made man” on the Senate floor in 1832.^[15] Climbing the socioeconomic ladder, experts insisted, required an impressive degree of discipline that included command over one’s body. This economic imperative for corporeal self-control coincides, as disability studies scholar Robert McRuer has shown, with the emergence of the term “able-bodiedness,” which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.”^[16] Though Whitman doesn’t reference “able-bodiedness,” he does use the term “perfect-bodied.” Such terminology reflects both the ever unachievable fantasy of Whitman’s ideal physique and, because the verb “perfect” implies action, his conviction that such an ideal could be produced through human effort.

In its attempt to produce “live, robust American men,” “Manly Health” advances what McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness,” which privileges certain bodies and minds as normal based on aesthetics or functionality, and positions others as deviations. Additionally, though Whitman’s use of the label “feeble” predates the consolidation of “feeblemindedness” into a eugenic category, the term was widely used in the mid-nineteenth century to describe people with disabilities.^[17] Whitman’s proto-eugenic language for those lacking idealized health (as well as manliness) denotes his concerns about disability. By offering reading as a means of training the ubiquitous “feeble” male body, Whitman escalates middle-class ideals about masculine self-help into a comprehensive rehabilitative project.

The compulsory nature of the agenda of “Manly Health” is made explicit by the suggestion that merely reading the text constitutes abiding by its scripts. From its inception, the column is intimately aware of its interactions with readers. The opening line of the first installment addresses the reader as “you whose eye is arrested by the above headlines.” The text’s title, this introduction implies, acts on the reader, not merely catching his attention, but also immediately ensnaring him in its rehabilitative project. “Manly health!” the column proceeds, “Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the word?” The rehabilitation process commences without warning, beginning before the reader has considered the actual health recommendations detailed in the column. According to the second installment, the rest of the title, “Training,” has an equally mystical effect. “[T]here we print the magic word,” Whitman writes, “that can remedy all the troubles and accomplish all the wonders of human physique!” The effects or “charms” of these words are activated the moment the reader encounters them. They operate according to what Alison Kafer calls “curative time,” or an orientation towards disability—what Whitman here calls “troubles”—that “not only expects and assumes intervention but also cannot imagine or comprehend anything other than intervention.”^[18] Whitman’s “magic” diction produces an intensified strain of curative time in which the process of rehabilitation is initiated the very instant it is described. 

A similarly immediate and involuntary transformation takes place in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”^[19] Like “Manly Health,” the 1856 and 1860 versions of the poem begin with a claim that the text physically alters the reader: “I celebrate myself,/ And what I assume you shall assume/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.” Moreover, “Manly Health’s” self-proclaimed effect of “arrest[ing]” the reader’s “eye” is echoed and elaborated on by the metamorphosis “Song of Myself” supposedly catalyzes. For the reader to “assume” what Whitman’s speaker does means not only sharing his knowledge, but also adopting his physical qualities. The command “you shall” makes the impact of text on reader compulsory. As in “Manly Health,” it is the reader’s contact with the poem, and not an intentional engagement with its content, that initiates physical transformation, here at the molecular level.

“Manly Health” does, however, invite the reader’s active participation. Just as Whitman recommends health-promoting dietary, hygienic, and exercise routines, so too does he outline a disciplined engagement with his column. He warns against incomplete reading, advising, “to those of our readers who have seen only partial sections of this series, we can only repeat our charge and wish that they procure the entire series.” Echoing an earlier suggestion that all men “form the habit” of a daily swim in order to maximize its health benefits, Whitman advocates for habitual reading of “Manly Health.” He also recommends adherence to this practice throughout one’s life. As the first installment states, physical training is suited “to all ages of life, from the beginning to the end of it.” “Manly Health” purports to be of value across a similar longevity, requiring of its audience, “the careful reading, once or twice every year, during the remainder of their lives.” Similarly, when Whitman invites his readers to heed his advice, he articulates this process as a physical activity, asking readers “to ponder, with all the strength and comprehension of their minds, upon what we are here trying to impress upon them.” Comprehending the text apparently requires the very “strength” sought out in other sections of the column, and this “pondering” is also more literally embodied. “We call upon you, reader,” Whitman writes, “to mark this, for it is well worth pondering upon.” Beyond asking the reader simply to take note, this request invites a physical act where annotation represents assent to instructions the author deems especially important. These carefully prescribed practices suggest that reading “Manly Health” demands the same discipline required by its more conventional prescriptions.

Whitman does not reserve this physically active reading for “Manly Health” alone, but rather promotes a shift in general reading habits. In addition to the metatextual commentary that pervades the column, he also quite literally offers reading aloud as a prescription:

We would recommend every young man to select a few favorite poetical or other passages, of an animated description, and get in the habit of declaiming them, on all convenient occasions—especially when out upon the water, or by the sea-shore, or rambling over the hills on the country [sic]. Let him not be too timid or bashful about this, but throw himself into it with a will. Careful, however, not to overstrain his voice, or scream, for that is not the object that is aimed after. A loud, slow, firm tone, as long as it can be sustained without fatigue, and agreeably to the ear, is the test.

Here reading is presented with the same detail afforded to other “physical exercises” in Whitman’s column, as it apparently “helps, indeed, the bodily system in many ways.” A far cry from the “not a bit tamed…barbaric yawp” Whitman claims to “sound” in Leaves of Grass, this scene of reading aloud requires carefully controlled vocal exertion.

This strict approach to vocalization is not Whitman’s own invention, but rather draws on the “vocal gymnastics” described in physician Andrew Comstock’s A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to the Phoneticon (1854). Proper use of the “vocal organs,” Comstock explains, can “invigorate the lungs, and consequently, fortify them against the invasion of disease.”^[20] Much like “Manly Health,” Comstock’s manual asserts that proper reading can directly affect health. Whitman likely encountered this concept of “vocal gymnastics” (a term Whitman himself never uses) in the work of physician Russell Thacher Trall.^[21] Between 1855 and 1856, Whitman contributed regular pieces to Life Illustrated, the weekly newspaper distributed by his new publishers, Fowler and Wells. Trall served as assistant editor during this period, and Fowler and Wells published Trall’s own health manual, The Family Gymnasium, in 1857, one year before “Manly Health” appeared in The New York Atlas.^[22] In a chapter on “Vocal Gymnastics,” Trall offers his own “practical hints” with the aim to “improve the respiration and articulation.” He advises readers to “declaim in a loud whisper,” select passages “which require firm and dignified enunciation,” and keep the mouth “freely opened” (emphasis original).^[23] Whitman takes up these guidelines in “Manly Health” by specifying that readers select “animated” texts and “declaim” them at a regulated volume and pitch.

These images of physically active reading by Whitman and others resemble a section added to the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass. In this first revision, Whitman added a new conclusion to what was then titled “Poem of the Body” (retitled “I Sing the Body Electric” in 1867). In this addition, the speaker addresses his body directly. “Oh my body!” he cries, “…I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with my poems.” He then offers an exhaustive taxonomy that begins with body parts such as “[h]ead, neck, hair, ears” and evolves into more active processes. One line in particular, “Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,” could pass for “Manly Health’s” table of contents, as it is only after these have been detailed that the list’s final object, “the exquisite realization of health,” emerges. The logic of active reading presented in “Manly Health” indicates that long before Whitman had revised the title to its canonical declaration—“I Sing the Body Electric”—he had begun to take stock of the sonic value of his poems. It is not only that the poet, by describing the body, attaches literary value to presumably mundane corporeality. More crucially, the list qualifies as just the kind of “animated description” recommended in “Manly Health” for therapeutic reading aloud, providing insight into the “electric” function Whitman would ascribe to the poem by 1867.^[24] The poem both sings and invites a range of sonic expressions—what it describes in the 1856 version as “The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud”—to promote an active, enlivening vocalization of its content.

Likewise, when read in light of “Manly Health,” Whitman’s claim in “Poem of the Body” that the body “shall stand or fall with my poems” reflects contemporary debates about reading posture. In his history of posture, Sander Gilman traces efforts to correct the damage wrought by sedentary reading to Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s 1776 volume, On the Health of Men of Letters.^[25] Trall takes up this issue in a section in The Family Gymnasium on comportment “during study.” He insists, “it ought to be among the first duties of parents and school teachers to guard those under their care against improper attitudes.”^[26] He illustrates this point with juxtaposed sketches of adult men reading while standing (fig. 3). The upright figure, eyes focused ahead, is captioned “standing erect,” while the reader with his head and shoulders tilted down toward his book is labeled “malposition in standing,” perhaps critiquing bookishness as an antisocial orientation.^[27] Whitman engages this idealized reading posture when he insists that declamation “provokes the habit of electricity through the frame … and gives a dash and style to the personality of a man.” This association of “frame” and “personality” reflects the Enlightenment-era belief that “‘bad’ posture incorporated all the negative qualities: illness, ugliness, immorality, and lack of patriotism.”^[28] Whitman’s reading prescriptions, then, correct for not only the “feeble” qualities he perceived in American men, but also the potential implications of such disability on “manliness.” Indeed, “Manly Health” at one point defines “manly beauty” as “an upright attitude” as well as “the capacity of being agreeable as a companion … always welcome” (emphasis mine). For Whitman then, erect posture facilitates not only individual able-bodiedness, but also masculine belonging.

 

This link between health and sociality is essential to “Manly Health’s” rehabilitative vision. Whitman describes “a wonderful medicinal effect in the mere personal presence of a man who was perfectly well,” and similarly wonders, “what can be more debilitating than to be continually surrounded by sickly people?” (emphasis original). This logic extends to not only face-to-face interactions, but also those facilitated by text. “Poem of the Body” declares that a “well-made man”  “conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more” by simply walking past the speaker. In “Manly Health,” text transmits this “medicinal effect” between men, beginning with the authorial “We” that narrates the series. The plurality of this masculine narrative voice signals the phrenological category of “adhesiveness” that, for Whitman, found its “fullest expression … in male-male relationships.”^[29] Claiming physical proximity, this “We” also professes to connect the reader to a presumably healthy collective. “We fancy,” Whitman writes of the column’s reception, “we see the look with which the phrase is met by many a young man.” The community of men is brought, by way of the text, into close contact with readers.  “Manly Health” reveals that what Moon calls the “fluid” boundary between bodies in Whitman’s text can have therapeutic effects.

This porosity is not without risks, and the supposedly deleterious influences of “sickly people” also extend to literary characters.

There is a class of writers, both in this country and Great Britain, who seem to be doing their best, in their novels, sketches, poems, &c., to present as the models for imitation and approval, a set of sickly milk-and-water men… We hope the young fellows who read our remarks will be on their guard against these writers and their sickly models.

Here Whitman prescribes a strict literary diet, offering instruction not only in how, but also what to read. “Manly Health” imagines a literacy in which readers expose themselves only to images of healthy embodiment that they intend to emulate. What Byrne Fone terms the “masculine landscapes” of Whitman’s writing are populated by able-bodied men, distinct from the feeble populations that dominate both literature and the nation (fig. 4).^[30] Here the compulsory element of “Manly Health’s” able-bodiedness emerges, as there’s simply no place for “sickly” figures in Whitman’s literary culture. Whitman suggests that only healthy men can produce such edifying representations, and he clearly saw himself as one such writer. The 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass includes a flattering letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson praising Whitman’s text as a departure from the prevailing literary models, which he deems plagued by “too much lymph in the temperament.” Whitman draws on this assessment in “Manly Health” when he calls for a new cohort of writers to correct—or revise—the errors made by the “modern puny and dandy tribes of literary men” of the time. By diverging from the column’s focus on the formation of individual habits to comment on the state of literary culture, Whitman suggests that the production of new texts is key to recuperating able-bodiedness on a national scale.

These nation-altering “Poets to Come,” as they are termed in “Chants Democratic,” which was added to Leaves of Grass in 1860, are also, importantly, described in that poem as a “a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known,” highlighting the concerns about progeny and heredity that undergird much of “Manly Health.”^[31] Though it would be more than twenty years before the term “eugenics” was used to describe the practice of selective reproduction in pursuit of genetic homogeneity, “Manly Health’s” anxiety about imperfect bodies complements the proto-eugenic language that pervades the column. At one point, Whitman posits that “feeble paternity and maternity” are equally to blame for national deficiency as the prevalence of unhealthy habits. Even beyond this explicit turn to heredity, however, “Manly Health” warns against the reproduction of certain physiques. While selective reading is certainly distinct from selective reproduction, both abide by eugenic logic. For Whitman, one “sickly” body, fictional or otherwise, begets another.^[32] The then-widespread Lamarckian model of heredity, which posited that acquired as well as congenital traits could be passed on to one’s offspring, is largely compatible with Whitman’s rehabilitative vision.

 

Whitman ascribes reproductive power to writers as well as to parents. In a section titled, “Birth Influences—Breeding Superb Men,” he laments that “there has never yet been found a generation that would shape its course, or give up any of its pleasures, for the greater perfection of the generation which was to follow,” implying that the young men who heed his advice have the potential to catalyze such change. Later, however, this logic reappears in the context of literary cultures. Whitman insists that the literary “models” of masculinity available “are not for live, robust American men—and especially not for our youth. A very different pattern indeed is wanted to be placed before the growing generations.” With more “robust” images available, he reasons, a healthier nation might emerge. Framing “generation” as a concern of both parentage and literature suggests that transforming the health of American men requires a shift in literary representation and consumption. This link between reproduction and literary production also emerges in the final poem that was added to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, “So Long!” This original iteration of the poem opens with the declaration, “To conclude—I announce what comes after me,/…I announce greater offspring, orators, days, and then depart.”^[33] The reproductive category of “offspring” quickly morphs into figures resembling the previous “Poets to Come,” marking these artists as the speaker’s progeny. This “announcement” is, by Whitman’s own logic, performative; it not only heralds the emergence of a subsequent generation, but also, in doing so, actually produces it. Here the speaker transmits “every atom” of his body to the reader through the textual “announcement.”

Marking his literary descendants as “greater…orators” also positions “So Long!” as a text intended to be spoken aloud, invoking the “declamations” of vocal gymnastics. While Whitman’s description of a sole reader “rambling the hills” conjures the idealized nineteenth-century image of the individualistic frontiersman, the exclamatory “So Long!” implies that these oral poetic productions are social in that they realize the corporeal interactivity of text. One’s declamations or “announcements” can be heard and registered by others, whether or not they seek them out. Emerson, the unwitting endorser of the 1856 Leaves of Grass, articulates a similar sentiment in the introduction to Representative Men (1850) when he writes, “the ideas of the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it…we learn of our contemporaries, what they know, without effort, and almost through the pores of the skin.”^[34] Declaiming does more than fill one’s own lungs with air; it allows ideas to circulate and “infect” listeners, whether or not any “effort” is exerted.

This passive, even involuntary consumption of text widens Whitman’s audience, a consequence that both affirms and complicates the compulsory nature of able-bodiedness in Whitman’s rehabilitative reading. “Manly Health” makes claims of universality that reiterate one of the core concerns in Leaves of Grass: “In all people I see myself.” The column, too, professes a wide, though sex-specific, audience of “every man, rich or poor, worker or idler.” This characteristic expansiveness ultimately challenges the terms of able-bodiedness, even while the text heralds this trait as prerequisite to masculine American identity. While “able-bodiedness” is defined in part as the “ability to work,” Whitman includes the “idler” in his readership. This figure also appears in a stanza of “Chants Democratic” that appears only in the 1856 and 1860 versions, which bracket “Manly Health.” “His shape arises,” the poem declares of the American man, “…worker, idler, citizen, countryman,/… Of pure American breed, of reckless health, his body perfect.” This inclusive definition of a “body perfect” subverts the social categories of Whitman’s time. Building on McRuer’s work on able-bodiedness, Sarah F. Rose’s labor history of disability, No Right to be Idle (2017), traces the association of ability with productivity to the economic shifts of the mid-nineteenth-century.^[35] Whitman’s vision of an able-bodied American male collective, however, paradoxically incorporates the “idler” through his treatment of reading. Though historically associated with leisure and indolence, Whitman presents reading as a form of physical exercise that answers the proto-eugenicist call to improve future “generations” of American men.

This theory of reading allows Whitman’s able-bodied collective “We” to be joined imaginatively as well as physically. The famous eleventh section of “Song of Myself” depicts this very process, by describing a scene of “twenty-eight young men bath[ing] by the shore” and a “lady” watching them from a window. This juxtaposition illustrates the ideas about sex difference that birthed the rise of the self-help genre. The isolated “womanly” observer, “hid[den]” in her “fine house,” is defined by inactivity: she “hides handsome and richly drest.” The bathing men are both part of a community (“all so friendly”) and actively engaged in swimming, a practice “Manly Health” calls “one of the most ancient of health-generating and body-perfecting exercises.” This set-up introduces a strict binary model of “womanly” idleness and “manly health” that quickly disintegrates. As the men bathe, “an unseen hand” emerges that “pass[es] over their bodies” and “seizes fast to them” before an invisible figure’s chest “puffs and declines” after joining them in their exercise. The “womanly” figure at the window now occupies both her original position and that of the men: “You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.” She is at once idle and immersed in this network marked by physical health, representing the possibility of such flexible identities embedded in “Manly Health’s” vision of reading.

“Manly Health” carves out this paradoxical position for its audience. Able-bodiedness, as disability studies scholars have long argued, is not a discrete biological category, but a socially constructed position. By presenting reading as a conduit to able-bodiedness, Whitman’s text unwittingly makes this position more accessible, despite insisting on physiological markers such as “herculean strength, suppleness, a clear complexion.” The prescriptions detailed in “Manly Health” are exclusive in that they insist on certain pre-existing abilities (i.e. walking) not necessarily required by reading. Of course, these presumptions extend to reading as well, which requires literacy and, in some cases, vision.^[36] But Whitman’s “magic words” might also be “animated” by another’s declamation of them, further expanding the possibilities of how reading is accomplished. In this way, “Manly Health” imagines increased, though always incomplete, access to both texts and the position of able-bodiedness.

By presenting literature as rehabilitative, Whitman reconceives of both able-bodied “health” and, as a result, the “manliness” to which it was linked by mid-nineteenth-century self-help culture. What emerges amidst “Manly Health’s” insistence on being read by “every man” is akin to Tobin Siebers’s “theory of complex embodiment,” which straddles social and medical models of disability by “theoriz[ing] the body and its representations as mutually transformative.”^[37] If the reader’s capacity or willingness to abide by Whitman’s more conventional health instructions is relatively insignificant, then perhaps the embodied actions depicted in “Manly Health” are not prescriptions at all. As Whitman suggests in “Song of Myself,” the text is contingent on “every atom” of the reader’s body. By using “Manly Health” to restate the relationship between reader and writer, Whitman reveals that instructive texts are subject to the very transformations they seek to impose.

________________

[1] Walt Whitman, Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body, ed. Zachary Turpin (New York: Regan Arts, 2017).

[2] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn: Fowler & Wells, 1856).

[3] Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts, Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism, 3rd edition., Norton Critical Edition. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 72.

[4] Zachary Turpin, “Introduction,” in Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body, by Walt Whitman, ed. Zachary Turpin (New York: Regan Arts., 2017), 7-9.

[5] M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 59.

[6] Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998), 176-7.

[7] Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With One Hundred Engravings, and a Chart of the Character (Fowler and Wells, 1855), 34.

[8] The 1990s in particular saw a wealth of such readings of Whitman’s writing, many of which focus specifically on the sexual implications of such “fluidity” (Moon). Mark Maslan, Michael Moon, and Tenney Nathanson each consider the author’s endeavor to project his physical body into his work.

[9] Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Harvard University Press, 1991), 7.

[10] Moon, 3.

[11] James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America, America and the Long 19th Century (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

[12] A distinction between sex and gender had not yet been introduced in the mid-nineteenth century and a biological understanding of “manly” and “womanly” traits was central to the health recommendations in self-help texts. Therefore, following Kyla Schuller, I use the term “sex” in my discussion of them.

[13] Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends: Or, Self-Training, 2nd ed. (Harper & Brothers, 1842).; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3 edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

[14] As Gail Bederman has shown, the term “manliness” predates “masculinity,” which came into popular vernacular only in the 1890s (6).

[15] Kimmel, 20.

[16] Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU Press, 2006), 7. Variations of “able-bodied,” according to the OED, appear far earlier, though the now-accepted hyphenated form also emerges in the nineteenth century.

[17] James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[18] Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27.

[19] All quotations from “Song of Myself” (unless specified otherwise) are taken from the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856. Leaves of Grass famously underwent many revisions across the author’s lifetime. In fact, the poem would not take the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881-2 Osgood edition. In 1856, Whitman had given it the title “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American.” I use the title “Song of Myself” here since it has become the most familiar and canonical of the variations.

[20] Andrew Comstock, A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to The Phoneticon (Philadelphia, 1854), 4.

[21] Harold Aspiz, “Specimen Days: The Therapeutics of Sun-Bathing,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1, no. 3 (1983): 49.

[22] Aspiz, 49.

[23] Russel Thacher Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium.. (New York, 1857), 199. Trall’s exercises are designed for children and drawn from Horace Mann’s work on teaching children to read aloud “rhetorical[ly]” (196). Whitman’s “Manly” variation, however, supplants this classroom instruction with outdoor activity. By resituating reading, he transforms an exercise for children into one that invokes the American idealization of the masculinist frontiersman. 

[24] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: W.E. Chapin & Co., Printers, 1867).

[25] Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture (Reaktion Books, 2018).

[26] Trall, 22.

[27] Trall, 23.

[28] Gilman, 308.

[29] Carmine Sarracino, “Dyspeptic Amours, Petty Adhesiveness, and Whitman’s Ideal of Personal Relations,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8, no. 2 (October 1, 1990): 85.

[30] Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, 1st edition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).

[31] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–1861).

[32] As Turpin notes, “Manly Health” is concerned not only with individual health, but also with racial and national fitness and concerns about heredity were crucial to mid-nineteenth-century ideas about health well before the eugenic era.

[33] Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1860–1861).

[34] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), 30.

[35] Sarah F. Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (UNC Press Books, 2017).

[36] Sari Altschuler and David Weimer’s 2019 exhibit, “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read” has highlighted the multi-sensory reading practices that emerged in the decades before “Manly Health’s” publication, specifically Samuel Gridley Howe’s “Boston Line Type,” which provided visual as well as tactile access to the text.

[37] Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25.

 

Further Reading

Sari Altschuler and David Weimer, “Touch This Page! Making Sense of the Ways We Read.” Accessed April 7, 2019.

Harold Aspiz, “Specimen Days: The Therapeutics of Sun-Bathing.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 1:3 (1983): 48–50.

Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United

States, 1880-1917  (Chicago, 1995).

Andrew Comstock, A System of Vocal Gymnastics, a Key to The Phoneticon (Philadelphia, 1854).

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1883).

Byrne Fone, Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text, 1st edition (Carbondale, Ill., 1992).

Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, The Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology: With One Hundred Engravings, and a Chart of the Character (1855).

Sander L. Gilman, Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture (London, 2018).

Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, Ind., 2013).

Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text, N Reprint edition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991).

Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, 3rd edition (New York, 2011).

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York, 2006).

Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, Mass., 1991).

Sarah F. Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill., N.C., 2017).

James B. Salazar, Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America (New York, 2010).

Carmine Sarracino, “Dyspeptic Amours, Petty Adhesiveness, and Whitman’s Ideal of Personal Relations.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8: 2 (October 1, 1990): 76–91.

Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, N.C., 2017).

Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Means and Ends: Or, Self-Training (1842).

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2008).

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: Authoritative Texts,

Journal, Reviews and Posthumous Assessments, Criticism, third edition (New York, 2008).

Jan Todd, Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800-1870 (Macon, Ga., 1998).

Russell Thacher Trall, The Illustrated Family Gymnasium (New York, 1857).

James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind a History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley, Calif., 1994).

Zachary Turpin, “Introduction” in Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body (1858), by Walt Whitman, 1–19. Ed. Zachary Turpin (New York, 2017).

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (New York, London, 2002).

———. Leaves of Grass (1860) Thayer and Eldridge, 1860.

———. Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body. Edited by Zachary Turpin (New York, 2017).

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

---

About the Author

Jess Libow is a doctoral candidate in English at Emory University, where she is also pursuing a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research and teaching interests include disability, health, and gender in U.S. literature and culture.

“Lean and loafe.”^[1] 

Every time Patti Smith comes to Philadelphia—her hometown—she crosses the river to Camden and takes a tour of Walt Whitman’s house.  Someone told me about this habit of Smith’s and I was agog.  “Is the house really that great?  What does she like about it so much?”  My friend, also a nineteenth-century Americanist, shrugged.  “No idea,” she said.

We rarely go to authors’ houses, we literature professors.  We are well-trained in the non-worship of the author, in anti-nostalgic reading practices, superior in our sense of our work as being above fandom.  But if I’m schooled against fandom as a literary critic, no one ever trained me not to geek out about musicians.  So, when I heard about Patti Smith’s regular pilgrimage, I decided I had to visit the house, too.  What, I asked myself, if she’s there?  She wasn’t.  We toured the house with a family from Spain: father, mother, three sons; the father could quote Whitman at length in Spanish, and did so in the bedroom, beautifully.  But what I wasn’t prepared for: if she wasn’t there, he was.

“What I loved about Whitman when I was young,” Patti Smith told Dan DeLuca of The Philadelphia Inquirer in April of 2019, “was how he reached out to the young poets in the future. You know, Jesus says that at the end of Matthew. ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’  And with Whitman it’s more specific. He’s thinking of the poets 100 and 200 years into the future. And then when I became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Whitman was like his mentor. Like his spiritual great-grandfather or something. In fact, when Allen died, we sat with him, and over his bed was a photograph of Walt Whitman.”   It’s interesting to me that Smith jumps to Jesus in this interview, and quotes the Gospel of Matthew rather than Whitman himself.  She thereby connects Jesus to Whitman to Ginsberg via their three deathbeds.  ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’ are the final lines, in the King James Version, of the chapter in which “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1) find the stone rolled away from the tomb and are invited by the angel to come “see the place where the Lord lay” (Matthew 28:6).  In other words, it’s a chapter about the drama of a deathbed.  In the interview, Smith shuttles us between Ginsberg’s deathbed (Ginsberg met Whitman in a poem—“A Supermarket in California” —and believed he was connected to Whitman as a lover through a “gay succession” of partners) and Jesus’s deathbed (or at least the bed on which his dead body was laid).  Whitman’s face hangs above Ginsberg’s bed, right where an image of Jesus might be expected to hang. Smith herself sits beside Ginsberg’s deathbed seeing that picture of Whitman and in the interview she cites the Jesus who might have hung there rather than the Whitman about whom she is speaking.   Together, Smith’s words, Ginsberg’s bed, Jesus’s bed, and Whitman’s photo summon up another deathbed, the one in Whitman’s Camden house, which Smith visits regularly.  The house is centered by the bed in which Walt Whitman died, and for which his final version of Leaves of Grass is named. 

There are several places Smith may be thinking of in Whitman when she, instead, quotes the final lines of the Book of Matthew.  But these, also final, lines of the poem-series “Calamus” must resonate somewhere for her—“Calamus,” which is, in so many ways, structured like the Gospel of Matthew:

FULL of life now, compact, visible,
I, forty years old the eighty-third year of the States,
To one a century hence or any number of centuries hence,
To you yet unborn these, seeking you.

When you read these I that was visible am become invisible,
Now it is you, compact, visible, realizing my poems, seeking me,
Fancying how happy you were if I could be with you and become 
your comrade;
Be it as if I were with you. (Be not too certain but I am now 
with you.)^[2]

You’re reading this poem, Whitman claims.  I’m dead—invisible—and you’re alive—visible.  It’s your body that is “realizing” my poems.  Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of realizing my poem, you were realizing me, myself?  Wouldn’t it be great if realizing a poem were to realize the poet?  Don’t you wish I were your lover?  Go ahead.  Pretend I am.  Then the sly, flirtatious parenthesis:  maybe I actually am your lover. 

“Lo I am with you always.”  “Be not too certain but I am now with you.”  These immortals—Jesus and Whitman—step out of the past alongside us.  “With you,” they both say. They are carried into the future by our next-to-them-ness.   Jesus’s “with you” is a promise that “I’ll love you.”   “I’ll get you off,” Whitman’s “with you” more playfully asserts.   The two speakers from beyond the deathbed offer themselves as companions, accompaniments; lean on me.   In fact, they lean on us.  They step out of the past only with our help, leveraging themselves into being on the strength of our compact, visible substance.  And when we find ourselves side-by-side with the poet/prophet, who is to say which of us is which?

Who am I to deny myself to Whitman?  Who am I to say I’m too anti-nostalgic?  Who am I to refuse to let Walt Whitman leapfrog into being over and into my flesh?  Who am I to put myself outside of gay succession?  We don’t have much to leave one another, certainly almost never estate.  Well, friends, the pretty little house in Camden is free and open to the public.  Patti Smith knows what’s on offer there, what it means to see the deathbed in the artfully disarranged room, which is a careful mess.  It’s as if the poet’s body has just been carried out.  Who am I to say that I know better than Smith and Ginsberg and the Other Mary?  I went to Camden, therefore, on my forty-seventh birthday.  It was summer, so I took the seasonal ferry across the Delaware from Philadelphia, where I live.  And it’s in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” that Whitman really lets rip with his theory of poetic immortality, with his idea that he can reincarnate himself in the bodies of those who think of him from the future.  Believe me, on that ferry, on my way to his house, I felt him laughing at me: “Who was to know what should come home to me? / Who knows but I am enjoying this? / Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?”

The Camden house is the house Whitman died in, and although that is certainly an invitation to meditate on the meaning of life and death, it is the materiality of living and dying that confronts you first.  The fact of his death in the house is mostly palpable because of the paraphernalia of his long illness and his dying that fills the space.  Much of what you see in Whitman’s house are the late nineteenth-century traces of how a group of friends manufactured a living space for a man increasingly disabled by strokes and, unknown to anyone until the epic autopsy of his body performed in his dining room, tuberculosis.  When doctors cut into his body, they discovered the excruciating calcification of nearly the entirety of his lungs and their adhesion to his internal organs and muscles.  The deathbed is a narrow, single bedframe that was moved in to replace the double bed made by Whitman’s father, and this single bedframe supported a water mattress that Whitman’s doctor had custom-made in an effort to help the dying poet find some comfort.  Beneath the bed is a huge, low-sided, battered tin tub, bigger in diameter than the bed itself is wide, protruding a good foot or more out.  This tub was also custom-made so that Whitman could stand in it from his bed and be bathed easily, thus maintaining his love of keeping, as he called it, “delicate.”^[3]  The rest of the room, while not so obviously built around the needs of a disabled man, adds to the story of capacity and incapacity.  The comfortable chair in which he sat, the (very big) shoes just where feet would rest, the piles of papers sloppily crowding close by, the pen—the exact sort of pen he wrote with, donated in the 1920s by the Camden company that still made them then—in his actual pen tray right there at the distance of an arm reaching up and over from the chair.  These furnishings and their orientation attest to the writing habits of a lifetime, but also to the needs of the often half-recumbent, partially paralyzed body that moved about in and used this room.  The sitting and dining rooms downstairs, with photos of friends pasted up everywhere, images of Lincoln en famille, two identical thigh-high garden statues of President William Henry Harrison, and formal horsehair furniture standing around, speak to the social, the vocal, the witty, the campy, the political Whitman.  The upstairs bedroom with its systems in place to maintain health, hygiene, comfort, labor, leisure, and rest, and also to support and make as beautiful as possible the long work of dying, speaks to the embodied Whitman who slept, wrote, bathed, sat, suffered, and ultimately passed on or glimmered out or who knows—who in any case left that once-electric body here, at 328 Mickle Street, on March 26, 1892, buoyed up on that rubber water bed. 

As Sara Ahmed invites us to understand in the long, beautiful, furniture-heavy preamble to her “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,”

Bodies hence acquire orientation by repeating some actions over others, as actions that have certain objects in view, whether they are the physical objects required to do the work (the writing table, the pen, the keyboard) or the ideal objects that one identifies with. The nearness of such objects, their availability within my bodily horizon, is not casual: it is not just that I find them there, like that. Bodies tend toward some objects more than others, given their tendencies. These tendencies are not originary; they are effects of the repetition of “tending toward.”^[4]

From our inclinations, Ahmed draws orientations; “tending” leads, for her, to “tendencies.”  How we live, how our bodies repeat themselves is, she calmly points out, formative.  In Ahmed’s hands “tend” becomes a reflexive verb; you tend towards yourself.^[5]  Repetitions in space and with objects orient you to yourself.  Some people (now myself included) find Whitman’s bedroom to be an orienting space, and return to it multiple times. The objects in the room, their orientations toward one another and toward the needs of the now missing body, summon some sense of tending toward, of wanting to touch and be touched.  “Neither the object nor the body have integrity in the sense of being the same thing with and without each other. Bodies as well as objects take shape through being oriented toward each other, as an orientation that may be experienced as the cohabitation or sharing of space.”^[6]  In Whitman’s bedroom we are not allowed to touch.  Still, one feels as if one could.  Or should.  Whitman wasn’t rich.  The objects are all ordinary.  All well-used, in the service of keeping going, keeping writing, keeping clean, keeping alive.  All these objects. 

For me, it was the cane.  Leaning in the corner.   A simple, crooked cane.  I desperately wanted to grasp it.  I wanted to lean my weight on it.  My hand itched.  I yearned.  I tended toward.  I still do.

I don’t want to be obsessed with Whitman’s cane.  It isn’t dignified.  I’d rather not have these feelings, in spite of having read Whitman, and having recognized his direct addresses to me (to anyone) from out of his poetry.  I never hoped to meet him, in a supermarket or elsewhere.  But again—who am I to refuse the way this room, and in particular this one object, prodded, poked, and knocked me over?  Ahmed leads us through the problem of seeing only one side of a table; we conjure its other sides without seeing them.  For Ahmed’s queer phenomenological reading, “what is behind the object for me is not only its missing side, but also its historicity, the conditions of its arrival.”  There are many ways we could think about the conditions of arrival for this house and all that’s in it.  We know that Horace Traubel wanted the house to be a museum and planned for it before Whitman’s death, but it took a few decades to come to fruition.  We know which objects are original and which are not.  We could talk about practices of curation.  We could talk about the city of Camden and the house’s meaning for that place.  But “lesbihonest”: for visitors to Whitman’s House, or at least for me, a great deal of the queer “backside” of the objects in the house, a lot of the historicity, is some pleasurable sense of the presence of Whitman himself.  He teased us that it might be so.  When he was visible and we weren’t born yet, he told us that when he was invisible (the shoes sit there, the body does not) and we were visible (there we are, in the mirror), he would be “with us.”  Why didn’t—why don’t—we believe him? 

On my first visit, the cane and its particularities were easy to miss.  Leaning in a heavily shadowed corner away from the bed and beside a dresser, it was nothing more than a simple, dark stroke of shadow against the wall, like an elongated comma.  I could barely see it, but I couldn’t look away.  Reduced to a simple shape like that, its beauty held me in thrall.  On my second visit, made just to see the cane, the docent had clearly propped the cane against the bed so I could get a better look at it.  It is made from a sapling of some sort, probably hawthorn, with the nubbles where small branches grew still prominent on the long, tapering shaft.  Those nubbles must make for a pleasing texture to a stroking hand.  A beat-up brass ferule caps the almost-dainty point.  On the bold curve of the crook the bumps are sanded away and the wood is smooth.  On most canes with crooks, the parabola of the crook is tight, and continues until it makes a perfect and symmetrical rainbow arch, a half-circle, then it is sanded into a rounded-off end.  On this cane, however, the crook curves outward in a broader arc, but then it is sliced through a good many inches before the half circle it implies would ever be complete.  If the cane were standing upright with its shaft perfectly straight, the slice comes from directly above, perpendicular to the ground. Rather than a perfect circle, which would be the result were the cane sliced across the logic of the wood, the cut on Whitman’s cane creates a bold, abrupt, upside-down teardrop.  And that blunt, teardrop-shape is covered with a thin, flat cap of ivory.  The curve of the cane with its bone cap looks, therefore, like a huge crooked finger with a white, pointed fingernail. It is both creepy and beautiful, both accusatory and beckoning.  The wood is dark, and I was not allowed near enough to really see, but it seemed that the light shone differently where the crook had been much caressed by the pressure of a heavy hand, a sense that I found seconded by a description of what may have been this cane made during Whitman’s lifetime: “He held in his hand an old cane like a shepherd’s crook, from which the polish had been worn.”^[7]  The second time I visited (only to see the cane) I was not allowed to touch or take pictures, but I sat cross-legged on the floor of the bedroom and drew a picture of it.  Here is my drawing (fig. 1).  But since this cane features in many of the late-life photographs of Whitman, you have, in fact, already seen it. 

 

Today canes are almost exclusively used as support for people who need to rely on them for stability and mobility.  Canes with this use can also be fashionable, self-fashioning and multi-valenced.  But in the past canes served many additional purposes.  It has been a century since a cane was a necessary fashion accessory for a man wishing to signal wealth, power, and high style.  The cane as an adjunct to gentlemanly attire developed in Europe from the carrying of a stick or a sword as a weapon.  Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was an extended craze for canes that could double as other manly things.  Canes concealed weapons, snuffboxes, compasses, alcohol.  They served as hiding places for maps, messages, pornography.   They sported carved or otherwise molded handles in the shape of various symbols of power or desire.  Lion’s heads, snakes, naked ladies, racist carvings of the heads of enslaved people.^[8]  The cane’s serviceability as both a weapon and as a means of support was expressive of a man’s leisure (I can lean, and fill my hands with something that supports my most basic movements) and his aggression (I can carry a weapon through the streets).  As an item that could quickly become extraordinarily expensive through materials and artistry, it was an expression of wealth.  So, at the same time that canes served as literal prop for the body, they also marked the way in which wealth produces leisure that is propped up on the labor of others, the way that it is bludgeoning and priapic and imperious.  The cane was a scepter.  But scepters change hands; the cane also became (and remains) a staple in African American and derivative American dance traditions that mimic and mock class and race pretensions, such as tap dance.  A 1903 film in the Library of Congress records a Cakewalk performed by a single African American man with exceptional cane-twirling skills leading two African American couples, the men each holding a cane and the women holding the men by the elbow.  They dance-walk in a circle, gracefully inhabiting the trappings of white power and privilege through stately dance, while simultaneously scoffing at those trappings.^[9]  In this film, as in many photographs and paintings of the use of fashionable canes in everyday life as well as dance, men escort the women in promenade, reminding us that the gentleman who carries a cane is supportive of a woman on one side, who leans on his arm, while needing or mimicking needing the support of a cane on the other.  The man is the woman’s prop.  What is the cane to the man, with its blunt, round head fitting into the palm, or its thick shaft, about which he wraps his hand, thumb to middle finger? 

We know that Whitman carried a high-fashion cane for a brief period of time as a young man, during a few months in 1842 when he was the editor of The Aurora and felt he had to dress the part: “The Aurora targeted a more sophisticated demographic than Whitman would address for papers he later edited, and he adopted the appropriate accessories—a top hat, boutonniere, and walking cane.”^[10] But we can tell, from a particularly charming editorial, that Whitman felt the cane and other accoutrements of the company of gentlemen got in the way of the sorts of masculine fraternity he actually enjoyed.  Whitman describes himself, in the plural, going on a walk in his fancy duds including cane (and a picture of him from this time features just such a heavy, dark crook cane as he describes [fig. 2]).  Although he is dressed to the nines, Whitman fails to be recognized by anyone as a gentleman:

Then, finding it impossible to do any thing either in the way of “heavy business,” or humor, we took our cane, (a heavy, dark, beautifully polished, hook ended one,) and our hat, (a plain, neat, fashionable black one, from Banta’s, 130 Chatham street, which we got gratis, on the strength of giving him this puff,) and sauntered forth to have a stroll down Broadway to the Battery. Strangely enough, nobody stared at us with admiration—nobody said “there goes the Whitman, of Aurora!”—nobody ran after us to take a better, and a second better look—no ladies turned their beautiful necks and smiled at us—no apple women became pale with awe—no news boys stopped, and trembled, and took off their hats, and cried “behold the man what uses up the great Bamboozle!”—no person wheeled out of our path deferentially—but on we went, swinging our stick, (the before mentioned dark and polished one,) in our right hand—and with our left hand tastily thrust in its appropriate pocket, in our frock coat, (a grey one.)

 

It isn’t until Whitman meets a group of children that he is recognized, and despised, by one of them as a “gentleman.” He is grateful to be redeemed by the appraisal of a second (“handsome,” not “peevish”) teenage boy who sees past the clothing and finds that Whitman doesn’t expect inferiors to step aside for him, but is, rather, the possessor of a “manful . . . disposition” who can make way for the greater claim of the multitudes.  Clothes (and canes) for young Whitman do not make the man:

“Ah!” said one, with a peevish air, to a companion, “we shall have to break the line. There comes a gentleman.”
The boy spoken to was a fine, handsome fellow, of twelve or thirteen years. He turned and looked at us for a moment; then the expression changed, and his face greeted ours with an arch confiding smile, as much as to say “I know, my dear sir, you are too good natured to disturb us, merely to save the trouble of turning out a step!” It is needless to add, we did turn out. What wonderful powers children have of discriminating who is possessed of a courteous, kindly, manful and creditable disposition!^[11]

Elsewhere in his early writings, Whitman is suspicious of fashionable canes as signifying “the trouble of great wealth. . . . What wise man thinks of cumbering up this journey with an immense mass of luggage? Who, that makes pretensions to common sense, will carry with him a dozen trunks, and bandboxes, hatboxes, valises, chests, umbrellas, and canes innumerable, besides two dirty shirts in the crown of his hat, and a heavy brass watch that won’t keep time, in his waistcoat pocket?”^[12]  And in the infamous early story “Death in the School-Room.  A Fact” (1841), a cane—rattan, made specifically for punishment—features as an instrument of grisly post-mortem torture.  The evil schoolteacher Lugare chooses “a long and heavy ratan,” which later in the story becomes his “longest and stoutest ratan” cane, and uses it to threaten sickly young Tim Barker: “I’ll thrash you till you beg like a dog.”^[13]  Eventually he does beat the child, whom he thinks is sleeping, only to discover that the child has been dead for quite for some time, and “Lugare had been flogging A CORPSE.”  The blows that fall are grotesque, but stripped of their sting.^[14]

These early uses of a cane—the fashionable one he carried down Broadway, the canes innumerable, and the cruel rattan weapon—prop Whitman’s explorations of the problems of social hierarchy and the violence of social discipline.  These early canes are prosthetics in the sense of being, as Katherine Ott puts it in her entry in Keywords for Disability Studies, “assistive devices that people use to support what they want to do,”^[15]  to the extent that a sword or cudgel—the fashionable cane’s grandparents—extend one’s capacity to claim power.  But in 1855, with the publication of Leaves of Grass, we see the cane reappear as a more complex prosthetic object, employed now as a prop or crutch to a body in need of its support, a disabled body:  “Agonies are one of my changes of garments; / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person, / My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”^[16] 

The first, 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass was written before the Civil War and therefore before Whitman spent his years in the military hospitals where he witnessed innumerable amputations (“Out doors, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the front of the house, I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart”^[17]).  It was written before, as Ott puts it, the United States’ understanding of “the integrity of the human body” was profoundly affected by “war and its aftermath of injured soldiers [. . .] As a result of the Civil War, federal, state, and local governments entered the business of providing limbs, made by contractors, for the thirty-five thousand amputee soldiers who survived.”^[18]  The 1855 edition was also written before the 1873 stroke that would partially paralyze Whitman and make him dependent on a cane for the rest of his life.  These national and personal crises, which would change forever Whitman’s understanding of the wounded and disabled body, are still in the future.  Whitman’s pre-war, pre-stroke mid-century voice emerges here as demonstrative of the mid-century moment Ellen Samuels has described, when “a crisis began to emerge within modern nations regarding the identifiability and governability of the individual bodies making up their bodies politic.”  Samuels reminds us that the proliferation of state institutions of control, as well as the codification of languages of categorization around race, gender, and disability, began to organize bodies into identities, a shift away from what Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva have described, in early America, as an “idea of disability—that is, a set of stigmatized physical and cognitive impairments around which certain exclusionary practices [were] organized . . . but disability was not yet the singular word used to describe it.”^[19]  The coalescence of disability from idea to identification made the mid-nineteenth century a moment when not only “disability,” “race,” “gender” etc., but also “normalcy” became powerfully embedded in what Samuels calls (negatively) “fantasies of identification.”  In other words, at the moment of the publication of Leaves of Grass, bodies identifiable as “disabled” were becoming useful to state and cultural systems of categorization, repression, and violent control, a use that was twinned with the importance of bodies newly categorizable as “normal.”  Samuels teaches us that, of all the relatively new categories of identification, disability serves as a sort of limit case and therefore is always present (“haunting”) the rest, often invisibly.

Once embedded in the cultural realm, fantasies of identification stubbornly persist, despite being disproved, undermined, or contradicted . . .  Finally, fantasies of identification are haunted by disability even when disability bodies are not their immediate focus, for disability functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.

Whitman introduces the cane in the midst of what we might see as the poet’s long “fantasy of identification,” when he claims the ability to be just about everyone.  But Whitman’s is decidedly not a fantasy of identification in Samuels’s sense of the term.  Whitman ranges across huge numbers of identifications, inhabiting them all, kicking against the rigidity of these newly crystalizing identities as he expansively and seemingly endlessly takes on the embodiment of others.  But although Whitman’s fantasy of identification works, through excess, to critique the cultural obsessions Samuels describes, the entrance of the cane-leaning, disabled poetic voice functions exactly as Samuels says it will.  The cane-leaning poetic voice is not just another “type” Whitman inhabits, but is rather a limit.  The cane signals a retreat from the intensity of his poetic inhabitation of multiple embodiments, and “functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.”  What is that true physical difference for Walt “Every Atom Belonging to me as Good Belongs to You” Whitman?  It is one that arrives with deathly violence, at the limits of the ability of the poetic voice to o’erleap the tortures of gendered and racialized oppression.

A cane only appears once in Leaves of Grass, but it turns up in conjunction with another word that appears again and again in the poem: lean.  “Lean” is a word (much like its cousin “bent”) that I believe expresses a queer relation.^[20] The term “adhesiveness,” which Whitman borrows from phrenology and uses to describe the love of men for men, what would come to be called homosexual love, does not appear in this first edition, but arrives a year later in the 1856 edition.^[21]  The overabundant leaning of the 1855 edition (and all following editions) is, I would argue, the physical stance of adhesiveness appearing in the poem even before Whitman puts a word to it.   Historian of photography David Deitcher points out that phrenologists believed that the “organs” of adhesiveness and amativeness were located in the temples.  At mid-century, photographs of men together reveal “one frequently recurring pose as proof that in the United States highly developed organs of Adhesiveness were virtually epidemic.  Many photographs survive that attest to the popularity of this charming pose, in which men are seen in tight close-ups with their heads inclined so that they touch above, and often a little behind, the ear.  This ‘adhesive’ pose dates back to the second half of the 1850s, to the period of the earliest tintypes.”  In the photos, men tilt sharply toward one another, shoulders cantilevered so that their heads touch, gently but certainly, right at the spot on the temple behind which they believed their love dwelt.  Deitcher goes on to quote phrenologist George Combe (1784-1858), who believed this was a natural, inherent gesture, claiming that loving children were drawn to “put their arms around each other’s necks, and place their heads together, bringing the organ of Adhesiveness in each into contact with the same organ in the other.”^[22]  

Leaves of Grass begins with the energetic and seemingly sufficient celebration of self that immediately becomes a universal interpenetration of self with all others. This overwhelming and energetic self-togetherness gives way in the second stanza to a more contemplative mood and stance: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.”  This leaning, observant, adhesive pose appears again and again in the stanzas that follow, as male bodies lean, seeking support sometimes in pleasure and rest, sometimes in peril and suffering.  The poet leans in to plant a “family kiss” on the cheek of a privy-emptier.  Even when objects lean (“My firelock leaned in the corner”), they lean in the service of facilitating masculine togetherness.  The firelock leans because the speaker has welcomed an escaping enslaved man, and the two are busy living and eating together in harmony; the gun is unneeded.  Leaning is an invitation, an inclination, to “my soul” and to others, a breaking down of social and racial hierarchy, a cantilevering of men who lean toward love.  Without one another, without being able to rest their temples together in an “adhesive” pose, these men are not fully whole.

Michael Moon’s reading of “Song of the Broad-Axe” (which first appears in the 1856 edition and much more forcibly carries on the leaning motif of 1855), suggests exactly this adhesive completion in the mutually leaning pose, though his argument tends in a different direction.   For Moon, the leaning of the priapic father on his son/axe is the completion of an oedipal connection between men.  The “European headsman [who] . . . leans on a ponderous axe” demonstrates a paternity in which “the broad-axe is a fully phallic ‘offspring’–‘born standing,’ one might say—not only ‘to be leaned’ as ordinary babies are, but also ‘to lean on.’”^[23]  The axe is birthed of a human mother (“head from the mother’s bowels drawn!”) it emerges as “Wooded flesh and metal bone! Limb only one and lip only one! . . . To be leaned, and to lean on.” This axe-baby is both a prosthetic limb (wood and metal flesh and bone) and a disabled baby (it has “only” one limb and lip, the “only” serving to mark it as incomplete).   Thus, bringing disability studies to bear here, we can see that the oedipal relation that Moon pursues is also, for Whitman, the relation between a disabled body and its prosthesis. As I will show, the personification of the son/lover in the object of the prosthesis, seen here so clearly, remains essential for Whitman, from this moment until his death.

But these leanings of men against one another and against axes and other sturdy props give way to an actually disabled body leaning on an actual cane only after Whitman enters the body and subjectivity first of a woman burned alive in front of her children, and then of the “hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat.”  The speaker is now interior to the enslaved, no longer helping him, no longer possessed of a firelock.  Now it is the enslaved body that leans, exhausted, against a barrier fence. The description continues, becoming extremely bloody and violent; the man is bitten by dogs, shot at, possibly trampled (by horses absolved of crime), and beaten.  It seems as if this, like the burning at the stake that precedes it, is a scene of murder and will end in death.

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

Immediately after this grimmest of scenes the poet steps back from his list of embodiments and speaks to us in an aside.  “Agonies are one of my changes of garments; / I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”  Something about these last changes of costume, these journeys into murders done legally in the service of preserving white patriarchal supremacy, has bumped the speaker out of his otherwise flowing list of embodiments.  Having delivered his aside, he dives back into embodiment immediately, in a peculiarly aggressive, possessive way that seems to both invoke settler colonial violence and wave aside empathy and sentiment—“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels . . . . I myself become the wounded person.”  But in inhabiting the wounded person and taking on their hurt without asking, the stance of the poetic voice is changed.  He used to “lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing a spear of summer grass.”  Now, ease is gone.  “My hurt turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”  The elements are the same, but the orientation of the objects and therefore the valence of the action they enable—observation—has changed.  The spear of grass has become a cane.  The speaker is now so injured that he needs that spear, that staff, to lean upon in order to pursue observation.  With the spear turned to a cane, and the speaker now disabled, it is no longer clear what the speaker is observing.  Here, perhaps, is Samuels’s limit.

A woman is burned alive, an enslaved man is beaten, probably to death, the poet does not ask how a wounded person feels, he goes ahead and feels the wound himself.  What, then, is the wound?   On one level, Whitman is simply making the typical gesture of abolitionist sentimentality.  This is the wound that the white observer receives from identification (I become the wounded person) with the oppressed other.  The white reader, wounded by identification with the oppressed, is moved from that place of pain and anger (lividity) to take action against oppression on behalf of the powerless.  Under this reading, and on a metaphorical level, the speaker has so fully taken on the wound of identification with the other that he now needs a prosthetic cane in order to continue in his desired action of observing.  But continuing to observe violence further wounds him.  The injury that is “upon” him takes on a blue-gray hue and grows worse. 

But I think this fragment is more complex.  “My wound turns livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe.”  If we take the “turnings” and “leanings” here as simile, if we read them as spatial and bodily—choreographic—rather than temporal and emotional, we can access a more complex understanding.  My hurt turns upon me in the same way that I lean upon a cane.  Now the poet’s self—“me”—is the prosthesis rather than the cane.  “Me” supports the pivoting action of the livid hurt.  Remembering that the speaker essentially invaded this hurt—“I do not ask . . . I become”—the active lividity of the hurt, its increasing pain and rage, may well be turning in rage not only against the injustice of slavery and gendered violence, but against the intruding, inhabiting self of the poet. This choreographic reading produces a much more ambiguous portrait of the identifications of abolitionist sentimentality.  The hurt of racial and gender violence is made worse by the hurt of possessive identification.  And the hurt cannot be controlled.  It uses the self as a prosthetic to enable its own ambiguous actions, and its lividity, its worsening, deepening rage, may as well turn to face the supposedly sympathetic, all-feeling “me” as the violent perpetrators of injustice.

In Narrative Prosthesis (2001), Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell argue that “literary narratives revisit disabled bodies as a reminder of the ‘real’ physical limits that ‘weigh down’ transcendent ideals of the mind and knowledge-producing disciplines. In this sense, disability serves as the hard kernel or recalcitrant corporeal matter that cannot be deconstructed away by the textual operations of even the most canny narratives or philosophical idealisms.”^[24] Certainly Whitman, however complex his acrobatics, introduces disability at the moment of intense violence in just the way Snyder and Mitchell describe.  I think it is interesting, however, that hurt and disability enter here in the poem along with the cane, but the leaning stance, the need and longing for support, have long preceded these things.  Sara Grossman writes evocatively of how “I found love in Whitman for parts of my body that others could not.”^[25]  For Grossman, the lean can be deployed defensively—“Hiding part of your body is all about angles”^[26]—but she also leans toward Whitman’s care. The angles, the queer (aslant) tendencies (leanings), the tilted poise of Whitman in Leaves of Grass ultimately give way to disability—and how different are they?  Much thinking has been done in disability studies about why and how the queer and the disabled are so often theorized together, with arguments on all sides for whether or not that pairing is helpful or harmful, and to what extent.^[27]  Here we see Whitman, writing at the moment Samuels pinpoints as the coalescence of disability as an “identification.”  We see him leaning toward his own identifications of something he will call, among other things, “adhesiveness.”  But we catch him in this moment—before the war and his own ultimate dependence on a cane—apprehending something in a stance that seems to make what-will-come-to-be-called disability and what-will-come-to-be-called homosexuality rhyme, if only in prosthesis for and propped up against one another. 

And yet they are different, and in this example, it is gendered and then racialized violence that produces the difference between the “gay” and the “disabled” stance; before an encounter with and inhabitation of the torture of a burned woman and an enslaved man, “I lean . . . at my ease.”  After, “I lean on a cane.”  In 1989 Karen Sanchez-Eppler notices that, in the draft material leading up to the 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass, Whitman puts the enslaver and the enslaved right at the heart of his definition of his poetic voice.  In the end, he cuts them from the manuscript, leaving only the body and soul behind.  Slaver and enslaved appear elsewhere in the poem, but Sanchez-Eppler’s excavation of them from their original place in the draft is useful.

I am the poet of the body
And I am the poet of the soul
I go with the slaves of the earth equally with the masters
And I will stand between the masters and the slaves
Entering into both so that both shall understand me alike

Sanchez-Eppler’s reading of this draft segment reaches, before the full development of the language of disability studies, for the work disability studies could help her do: “The ‘I’ who ‘will stand between’ gains the ability to be ‘understood,’ and so takes the name of poet, by occupying the place of linkage between the opposing but interdependent roles of master and slave. That the desire to be understood punningly recapitulates the hierarchic standing of master and slave, suggests the precariousness, if not the impossibility, of Whitman’s poetic goal.”^[28]  I want to amplify her argument, and extend it, lifting out the imagery of leaning—“linking . . . opposing but interdependent”—and of walking and standing, as more than simply punning.  Whitman understands his position, “going” between enslaved and enslaver, as a physical journey involving motion, pivot, poise—standing and some sort of penetration—whether of mind or body or both. That he cuts this claim may attest to his understanding that these are not puns, but dangerous, embodied stances.  But elsewhere Whitman is not afraid of that danger.  The “precarity” of the poetic voice that can “enter into both” is not, for Whitman, to be avoided.  The elegant leaning poise of Leaves of Grass’s opening, in which the healthy young poet leans because he is at leisure—“I lean and loafe at my ease . . . . observing” —is changed by the poet’s encounter with the deep historical divides of history (the burning alive and the torture and enslavement of human beings).  Now gravely, perhaps mortally, wounded by “standing between,” the poet’s poise and his activity remain the same as it was in the poem’s second stanza—“I lean” . . . “on a cane” now takes the place of  “and loafe at my ease” . . . “and observe.” 

Written four years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the poem cycle “Calamus” is also sprinkled with propping, embracing, and otherwise mutually supportive entwinement of men by men, but the word “lean” appears only once (“leaning my face in my hands”), then disappears completely in later revisions.  I argue that this is because “leaning” was a euphemism for homosexual love for Whitman, and in “Calamus” he uses “adhesive” and other words instead.  In this poem he tells us that he is trying—for the first time—to say it, to, perhaps, identify it—not embody it:^[29]

Here, by myself, away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talked to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abashed—for in this secluded spot I can 
respond as I would not dare elsewhere,
Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself,
yet contains all the rest,
Resolved to sing no songs to-day but those of manly 
attachment . . .

 

With the absence of leaning, there is also an absence of canes.  There’s no cane in these “Calamus” poems.   Or is there?   “Calamus” is mostly understood to refer to the wetland plant “sweet flag,” which has a flower that looks like an erect phallus.  Sweet flag is Acorus Calamus; “Calamus” is, in fact, not only sweet flag but an entire genus and it refers to many different varieties of palm, plants that are also often called “cane.”  Plants of the Calamus genus make cane seats, and light walking canes, and the rattan cane used by Lugare to beat a corpse.  So, you could say, somewhat jokingly, that the entire poem cycle about men leaning upon one another is actually entitled “Cane.”   Whitman’s friends and readers were in on the joke, and canes were passed between them as gifts.  We know of four gifts of canes that were exchanged.  The first makes the joke most explicit.  Naturalist John Burroughs gave Whitman an exuberant cane, carved into a spiral and tipped with a silver button that reads “To Walt Whitman, ‘A Calamus’” (figs. 3-4).  Whether this is simply a naturalist making a pun about genus names, or whether Burroughs found a clever way of using a plant genus to categorize his friend as genus homosexualus, we cannot know for sure—but the cane is very fancy, with the wood carved into a dramatic corkscrew-like helix.  The second cane Whitman himself gave to his friend, A. E. Johnson.  This blackthorn cane, tipped with a silver button, reading “A.E.J. from Walt Whitman,” sold at auction at Sotheby’s on June 19, 2015, for an astounding $43,750 (figs. 5-6).  The third cane doesn’t exist anymore as far as I know.  Traubel says that in May of 1889, Whitman said to him:

 

“I had a peculiar visit last night after you had gone. Three Hindu fellows came in—the fellows I spoke to you about: they could scarcely speak a word of English. They brought me this bamboo cane, here on the floor.” I picked it up and handed it to Tom to inspect.  “And I have used it a good deal today—it is very nice—strong; Warren is going to have a ferrule put on it for me. They brought me also that gay handkerchief you see there on the chair—pull it out.” It was a gay dotted red and blue silk affair, over which W. laughed goodhumoredly.

 

The Hindu travelers’ gift of a cane reaches across a linguistic divide, and travels in this passage from hand to hand (from the visitors to Whitman to Traubel to Tom to Warren).  Did the visitors truly speak no English?  If not, were they visiting Whitman on the strength of a translation into Hindi?  I can’t find any record of a Hindi translation that early.  Was the gift of a cane a translation of a translation of a joke denoting gayness?  If so, does Traubel’s mention of the “gay handkerchief” that makes Whitman laugh a key to the joke?^[30]  Or is Whitman chuckling in xenophobic/racist condescension?  We don’t know.  The cane is lost, and I, at least, am unable to decipher who the visitors were and why they brought it with them as a gift.

 

 

But the fourth cane, of course, is my cane.  The nobbled, ivory-fingernailed, crook-ended cane that is now in the Whitman House in Camden.  Although I was able to go back and visit the cane by myself, and sit beside it on the floor and draw it, and although I had a long, very informative conversation about it with Leo Blake, the curator of the Walt Whitman House, I was never actually able to get my hands on their accession records for the cane, so I don’t know how the house came to possess it or what they know about it.  It seems, however, to be the cane in the late photographs of Walt Whitman.  The cane in the photos has that cut-off end, and in some photos you can make out the ivory cap and even the nubbles.   Horace Traubel, Whitman’s friend who chronicled his final years in a journal that ultimately filled nine thick volumes, mentions this cane many times in his lengthy, tender descriptions of Whitman’s declining health, and of the rhythm of Whitman’s negotiation of his living space.  Whitman uses the cane for support, as you would expect; “Leaning the one side on the cane, the other on my arm.”^[31]   But the cane’s meaning deepens as Traubel’s references to its presence grow more numerous. The cane is described as a “constant companion,” and Whitman is repeatedly described sleeping with it; “I found him on his bed fast asleep—on his right side—curled together—looked like a babe—hand under his cheek—a steady breath—light low—cane at his side.”^[32]  The cane is “indispensable,”^[33] even magical—Traubel twice calls it a “wand” when describing Whitman asleep: “Face to the south—one hand out of cover, grasping the cane—his wand;”^[34] and again from a particularly beautiful description of Whitman asleep; “He slept peaceably, lying on his back, his face half-turned away from the window, the light only falling on the left cheek and forehead and the straggling beard. The throat is much gone—has lost the strength and set which made it worthy and able companion of that massive head. Hands out on the cover, holding easily the cane (the wand of his need, the call to watchful ears).”^[35]  But wakeful Whitman also uses the “wand of his need” constantly and energetically as a tool: “Now rose—went to his chair—giving the stove door a pull with his cane by the way,”^[36] knocking over the many piles of things that surround his chair as he searches for missing bits of paper; “Would take his cane, give a pile of books, &c., a knock— ‘make matters worse, as he said. ‘To-morrow, I’m sure to hit upon it somewhere.’”^[37] And, again and again, using it to knock on the floor to call for his helpers to come upstairs.  When Traubel imitates the trick, Whitman is amused; “I took his cane from the bed and knocked on the floor. He laughed, ‘Pretty good—but not quite my knock.’”^[38]  This prosthetic, in other words, is no inanimate instrument, but is instead animated and expressive of the body that uses it.  As R. Olkin says of canes and crutches; “When I use crutches I feel connected to them as if they are one of my limbs [. . .] I don’t want anyone to move my crutches without my permission, or to lean on the arm of the wheelchair or rest their hand on the back of it unless it is someone I feel comfortable touching me.”^[39]  We can see something of this understanding of cane-and-bodily self-sameness in Whitman’s rejection of Traubel’s knock, and his claim that only he can call forth the cane’s distinctive voice.   At last, fourteen days before his death, Whitman loses the ability to manipulate the cane, and, in his final mention of the cane in the diaries, Traubel understands this as a terrible turn: “The other night while Warrie was absent the bell became detached from the wire. Mrs. Davis was unable to reconstruct the line, so W. asked for his cane, which she gave him. But after he had got his cane he could not use it—could not comfortably lift it—and so he had to call her when she was wished. This is significant of the subtle loss that is day by day preparing him for the end.”^[40]

But most importantly, this cane, this calamus—if it is the one mentioned so often in the journals and pictures in the photographs—was also a gift to Whitman, and a most important gift.  Its provenance is mentioned three times in Traubel’s journals. 

Monday, June 18, 1888.

Pete Doyle was in yesterday and brought some flowers. “It was Pete who gave me the cane,” explained W., “the cane with a crook in it.  I always use Pete’s cane: I like to think of it as having come from Pete—as being so useful to me in my lame aftermath. You have never met Pete? We must arrange it some way some time.”

 

Peter Doyle was Whitman’s friend and lover.  They met in 1865 when Doyle was twenty-two and Whitman forty-six years old.  When Whitman had his stroke in 1873, Doyle cared for him closely, and perhaps made the gift of the cane to him then, for we know that Whitman always carried a cane after that.   Doyle and Whitman’s passionate and sometimes troubled connection somewhat dimmed after Whitman’s move to Camden.  This flower-bringing visit in June of 1888 is the last documented time we know that Doyle saw Whitman. 

The second mention of Doyle in connection to the cane comes five weeks later, and expands upon the importance of the cane to Whitman, making it clear that Whitman thinks of his lover and the cane as very nearly the same thing.

 

Tuesday, July 3, 1888.

Hobbled about the room. “This cane was given me by Pete Doyle,” he reminded me: “Pete was always a good stay and support.”^[41]

 

The final mention comes a year later, and yet more poignantly compares Peter Doyle to a support, a thing to be leaned upon, a cane. 

 

Sunday, May 26, 1889

Happening to touch his cane, W. said: “You know all about that cane, don’t you? You know who gave it to me?” Then spoke tenderly of Peter Doyle. “I wonder where he is now? He must have got another lay. How faithful he was in those sick times—coming every day in his spare hours to my room—doing chores—going for medicine, making bed, something like that—and never growling!”^[42]

 

 

“Another lay” could be another lover in today’s terminology, but it could also mean another job.  In early nineteenth-century slang, “lay” is a job, a perhaps somewhat-less-than-legal “gig.”  But either way Whitman remembers Doyle most for his faithfulness, his support, his constancy “in those sick times,” as if they had passed.  The cane is clearly not only an extension of Whitman’s body, but also of Doyle’s. We see this in the photo of Whitman and his lover Harry Stafford, whose association with “Hickory Saplings” Don James McLaughlin has discussed in a recent paper.  “Whitman’s references to hickory saplings in correspondence from this moment suggests further that he used coded language around the letters ‘H.S.,’ as a means of alluding to the initials of Harry Stafford, a young man with whom Whitman became romantically involved at the same time he began drafting the segments based in Camden for Specimen Days, and Collect.”^[43]  In the portrait of Whitman and Stafford, the young man stands behind the seated Whitman, his hand loosely propped on the older man’s shoulder (fig. 7).  Whitman sits, his hands loosely grasping the cane.  Look closely, and you can see the nobbles on the shaft and the ivory cap.   The cane is (in all likelihood) a Hickory Stick, made from a Hickory Sapling.  The joke of the photo could be that Whitman is grasping a “staff” that quite quickly can be decoded as H.S., a prosthetic stand-in for Harry Stafford himself.  But also, Whitman allows his shoulder to be leaned upon by the young man, happy to support him; Whitman, however, is supported by his other lover.  “You know all about that cane, don’t you? You know who gave it to me?”

Peter Doyle.

I will close with Peter Doyle’s words, written after Whitman’s death. 

I know he wondered why I saw so little of him the three or four years before he died, but when I explained it to him he understood…It was only this: In the old days I had always open doors to Walt—going, coming, staying, as I chose. Now, I had to run the gauntlet of Mrs. Davis and a nurse and what not. Somehow, I could not do it. It seemed as if things were not as they should have been. Then I had a mad impulse to go over and nurse him. I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him. We loved each other deeply. But there were things preventing that, too. I saw them. I should have gone to see him, at least, in spite of everything. I know it now. I did not know it then, but it is all right. Walt realized I never swerved from him—he knows it now—that is enough.^[44]

Words about knowledge appear over and over again in this short, desperate paragraph.  “Know . . . wondered  . . .  explained . . . understood . . .  seemed . . .  understood . . . understood . . . saw . . . know . . . know . . . realized . . . knows.”  The word “understood” appears three times, and each iteration brings a moment of rest amidst the other, much more anxious words.  The idea of mutual understanding between himself and his lover is a balm to Doyle’s suffering over what Whitman may or may not have known, seen, wondered, realized.  “When I explained it to him he understood . . . I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him.”  The word understand is very old.  The Oxford English Dictionary lists its first English usage, meaning “to comprehend,” from 888.  But English took it from Old Frisian via other Nordic and Germanic languages.  If you clear your mind of its present meaning, the word steps clearly forth as the development of an intellectual act—comprehension—from a physical one—standing under.^[45]    It kept its physical meaning in the stage directions of passion plays until the fifteenth century: “St. John hir body under stude,”^[46] instructing St. John to stand beneath the body of Christ on the cross.  These stage directions were directly linked to the later meaning of understanding: comprehension. According to Jamie Taylor, “in passion plays understanding was conceptualized as positionality — standing beneath, witnessing the suffering body of Christ, and since these plays involved entire communities, it was also a positional and performative way of comprehending that mutual support and community occur when people physically under stand the crucifixion.”^[47]   When we remember that “understand” develops from a physical and spatial relationship of interdependence and meaning- and community-making, we can see why it comforts Doyle in the midst of the many other, more anxious seekings after emotional and intellectual rest in this grief-stricken paragraph.   The “understanding” that Doyle so desperately wanted to feel that he had with Whitman is, at its core, a simple description of mutual physical relation and dependence.  The adhesive pose.  Leaning.  “I was his proper nurse—he understood me—I understood him.”  Hear the word “prop” in “proper.”  Think about the tilt and poise of mutual understanding.   “Pete was always a good stay and support.”    And like a good stay and support, Doyle is steady, strong.  His final self-comfort is a description of that steadiness, of being that staff upon which Whitman could lean. “I never swerved from him—he knows it now—that is enough.”

 

________________

[1] For Heather

[2] This version of the poem is taken from the 1881-2 edition of Leaves of Grass. That Smith leans on the end of the Book of Matthew when thinking (I believe) about the end of “Calamus” is fascinating.  The Book of Matthew begins with a huge series of “begats,” in which fathers breed sons in a male-only lineage from Abraham to Jesus.  It references, many times, the Kingdom of Heaven as a place only the initiated can reach or truly inhabit.  It moves through a few circumscribed engagements with various women named Mary, all of which turn again to male fraternity.  It is interested in discipleship and explores how misunderstood Jesus is by his followers.  It ends with Jesus’s post-resurrection claim, made only to his eleven remaining male followers, to immortal togetherness.  “Calamus” similarly carves out notions of male fraternity and lineage, ties it through tests of understanding to belonging in a future-perfect version of the “States,” struggles with the question of followers and disciples, glances off of women in order to shore up male camaraderie, and ends with a promise of immortality.

[3] Leaves of Grass (1855).

[4]Sarah Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12, Number 4, 2006, pp. 543-574.

[5] A reflexive verb is one in which the verb has the same “agent” and “patient,” or subject and direct object.

[6] “Orientations,” 552.  Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick also writes of spatial cohabitation when she describes the intellectual potential of the preposition beside: “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2003), 8.

[7] From an account titled “An Old Poet’s Reception: How the Majestic Walt Whitman Received His Friends” in The Evening Sun (New York), April 15, 1887.  Collected in: Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks.  Volume II: Daybooks, December 1881-1891.  Edited by William White.  (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 417.

[8] For an expansive compendium of such cane designs, see Catherine Dike, Cane Curiosa: From Gun to Gadget  Cane Curiosa Press, 1983, and, by the same author, Canes in the United States: Illustrated Mementoes of American History, 1607-1953, Cane Curiosa Press, 1994.

[9]American Mutoscope And Biograph Company, and Paper Print Collection. Cake Walk. United States: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1903. Video. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/96520361/>. “Certain derisive meanings were encoded in the dance, but it was read differently by whites who viewed the cakewalk as an amusing attempt at sophistication on the parts of their slaves rather than as a mockery of the matters of their masters.”  Thomas F. Defrantz, Dancing Many Drums : Excavations in African American Dance, University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 71

[10] J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 458

[11] New York Aurora 6 April 1842.  Collected in Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, eds. Douglas A.Noverr and Jason Stacy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 200.

[12] “Sun-Down Papers.—[No.7] 1840 From the Desk of a Schoolmaster.”  Long-Island Democrat September 29, 1840.  Collected in Walt Whitman’s Selected Journalism, 173.

[13] “Death in the School-Room,” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review Volume IX (New York: J. &H.G. Langley, 1841), 178, 180 and 178.

[14] In “Death in the School-room,” Whitman describes the child’s helplessness: “the stripling stood before that place of judgment.”  A “stripling” is one who is thin as a strip—according to the OED, “the etymological notion seems to be one who is slender as a strip.”  And a strip, again according to the OED, is from the Old German and is cognate with strop and strap—in other words, the thong of a whip.  We acknowledge this in the phrase, “thin as a whip.”  The boy, then, is a slender version of the man’s “thick ratan.” The erotic potential is obvious.  But the development of this essay will theorize why and how boy and man are figured as both embodying the cane, both, together, oriented toward “the place of judgment.” In this instance, the cane punishes, in later instances, it solaces. 

[15] Katherine Ott, “Prosthetics” in Keywords for Disability Studies Eds. Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss and David Serlin (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015), 140-5, 140.

[16] Leaves of Grass (1855).

[17] Specimen Days, and Collect (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co., 1882-83), 26.

[18] Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics.  Eds. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, Stephen Mihm (New York and London: New York University Press, 2002), 26.

[19] Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva, “Early American Disability Studies.” Early American Literature, vol. 52 no. 1, 2017, pp. 1-27. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/eal.2017.0000

[20] Bending, leaning, tending; earlier I engaged Sara Ahmed’s reflections on the queerness of tending/bending/leaning, and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick recognized it too; the cover art for Tendencies (1993) makes the kinship between tending and leaning graphic.

[21] See Michael Lynch, “’Here Is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 29: 1 (Autumn, 1985), 67-96.

[22] David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918, (New York: Harry M. Abrams, 2001), 139.

[23] Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 98

[24] David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder eds., Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 49.

[25] Sara Grossman, “Ordinary Bodies,” MQR Summer 2015, 371-376, 373.

[26] Grossman, 373.

[27] See Carrie Sandahl, “Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance.” GLQ 9 (2003): 25-56; Robert McRuer Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013); Kim Q. Hall, “Feminist and Queer Intersections with Disability Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, eds. Ann Garry, Serene Khader, and Alison Stone (Routledge, 2017).

[28] Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “To Stand Between: A Political Perspective on Whitman’s Poetics of Merger and Embodiment,” English Literary History 56:4 (Winter, 1989) 923-49, 925.

[29] With the introduction of a nascent understanding of identity and the concomitant absence of the embodied lean and the embodied, violent “limits” of that stance—the complex relationship between leaning and cantilevered “identifications” across race, sexuality, gender, so important in “Song of Myself,” also vanish.

[30] A handkerchief is, of course, an object signaling romantic love.  For more on adhesiveness and handkerchiefs, see Lynch, 73-4.

[31] Friday, November 16, 1888, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 3 (1914), 108.

[32] Thursday, May 21, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 8 (1996), 215.

[33] Friday, November 16, 1888, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 3 (1914), 108.

[34] Sunday, February 7, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 431.

[35] Thursday, February 4, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 431.

[36] Tuesday, May 19, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 8 (1996), 211.

[37] Monday, September 23, 1889, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6 (1982), 15.

[38] Thursday, June 25, 1891, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 6 (1982), 15.

[39] Rhoda Olkin, “Women with physical disabilities who want to leave their partners: A feminist and disability-affirmative perspective.”  Berkeley, CA: California School of Professional Psychology/Through the Looking Glass, Co. (2009), 23.

[40] Saturday, March 12, 1892, Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 9 (1996), 532.

[41] Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 1 (1906), 415.

[42] Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden vol. 5 (1964), 228.

[43] Citing the work of Edwin Miller and Gary Schmidgall on the significance of the initials “H.S.,” Don James McLaughlin discusses the relationship between this correspondence and Whitman’s erotics of disability in a paper titled “Whitman’s Aesthetics of Paralysis: Embodied Penmanship, the Herbert Gilchrist Depictions, and an Early Manuscript Concept for Specimen Days” delivered at “Whitman at 200: Looking Back, Looking Forward (A Symposium),” University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. March 29-30, 2019. Charley Shively was the first to make this discovery in his chapter on Harry Stafford in the book Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados. (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987).

[44] “Interview with Peter Doyle.” Calamus: A Series of Letters Written during the Years 1868-1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend (Peter Doyle). Ed. Richard Maurice Bucke. (Boston: L. Maynard, 1897): 32-33.

[45] Oxford English Dictionary. (Oxford: 2019).

[46] The Northern Passion Play (ca. 1450), Ed. F.A. Foster, vol 1; (London: Early English Text Series old series 145, 1913)

[47] Personal correspondence with Jamie Taylor

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

---

Bethany Schneider is an associate professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literatures with teaching and research interests in American Indian studies, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, slavery, childhood and concepts of citizenship and belonging. Writing as Bee Ridgway, she is the author of The River of No Return. 

One hundred and seventy-five bunches of asparagus. Sixty-five bunches of radishes. Three varieties of beans. Eleven hundred heads of cabbage. Twenty-four thousand three hundred and seventy-five quarts of milk. Thirty bushels of apples. Three varieties of pears, most plentiful were the Seckel–two hundred bushels. Currants, gooseberries, strawberries, grapes. Altogether the Twenty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees of the New York Asylum for Idiots lists forty-one kinds of produce, their yields, and price. The year is 1875. If you were studying landscape history in upstate New York, you could use these reports to track the yield data across the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But you could also learn about the history of science, international communications, industrialization, education, disability, and the professionalization of social work. In the Superintendent’s Reports, 1851-78, you would come to know the institution’s director, Hervey Wilbur. I like the man and feel assured, after reading nearly thirty years of his remarks, that his interests squarely focused on the wellbeing of his charges. They were mostly young people, ages six to eighteen, New Yorkers who fell into the category widely known as “teachable idiots.” Today, we would describe these children by their diagnoses-names like Down, Asperger, Williams, or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or the general label, autistic. Some of Wilbur’s charges probably acquired their cognitive impairments from malnutrition, high fever, or accidents. But regardless of cause, he understood their humanity and had faith in their possibilities. And perhaps most important, he acknowledged the limits of his and other scientists’ knowledge about the brain’s relationship to the body: “Various methods of classification in the case of idiots have been suggested,” Wilbur reported in 1875, “but these are either arbitrary or based upon pathological distinctions that are valueless, for any practical purposes of classification.” He had been in the field for twenty-five years. He continued, “[A]s to the results of management and treatment or training and instruction, or as it is put the prognosis, I see no guide in such a system of classification for determining this.” The nomenclature has changed, but special education teachers and neuropsychologists today would agree: a diagnostic label is not a prognosis. The categorizing classification term–a medical diagnosis–does not predict or describe the child with a cognitive impairment’s possibilities for competence and achievement. It is one of the most difficult truths about cognitive disability to grasp and accommodate fairly nowadays. Wilbur was advocating the point within the terms of his own day, but even then the classification systems were constantly shifting. Think about the name changes of the New York State Asylum for Idiots, founded 1851. Why does it become, in 1891, the Syracuse State Institution for Feeble-Minded Children; in 1921 the Syracuse State School for Mental Defectives; in 1927 the Syracuse State School? Did the shift in nomenclature reflect an improvement in our understanding of the conditions? the services? the outcomes? In 1973, the onetime “asylum” became the Syracuse Developmental Center, then closed permanently in 1998. Like asylums for the mentally ill, the state-run schools for children and adults with cognitive disabilities found across the United States from the 1850s until the 1990s were usually self-contained communities as isolated from society’s mainstream as prisons are today. The New York State Asylum opened in 1851 with about thirty students; the population doubled by 1853. There were 250 by 1878, 850 in 1922. But even as the crowding worsened and living conditions deteriorated, residents and staff must have found moments of refuge, sources of resilience.

 

I like to think this was possible at the Syracuse New York State Asylum during, say, a few days in September 1880. At work in the kitchen, the women would be swept up in aromatic clouds of cooking pears, applesauce, jellies. Residents and staff working side by side, filling glass mason jars with fruit, listening to the jars jiggle as they boil in vats. I want to believe that in November the entire community, residents and staff, knew the pleasure of eating homegrown pears canned in sweet heavy syrup. That’s when they are best, their texture still firm, the taste of summer still evident. I first tasted home-canned pears as a child in the 1950s. I grew up in a world in which the majority of young people with cognitive disabilities, rich or poor, still lived lives segregated from the community. This ‘other segregation’ is mostly over now. By federal law passed in the 1970s, children with disabilities are integrated in their communities’ public schools. I am an artist, not a historian, but my work is about the historical legacy that people with disabilities encounter. As an artist making documentaries in film and radio, I use history–its methods and records–to seek out the etymologies of habits of thought that persist in the here and now. I need this conversation with the past: Disability history invigorates my vocabulary, my imagination, it satisfies a deep personal need to know, even when what I learn is harrowing or sorrowful. My need to engage in this conversation with disability history arose because I have an on-going dialogue with my children about their encounters with it. At some point, your children may encounter this need too, as disability is the one category of identity any of us can join at any time. To help bridge this generation gap, and to accelerate the opportunities for young people to explore the historical experience of disability and identity as a disabled person in society, I founded a museum. It’s virtual, no bricks or mortar. But it’s a real museum with programs; there’s a library, a museum with exhibits, and an education area. The library is a searchable digital archive of primary sources (text documents, visual stills, and in the future, an audio collection: oral histories, radio programs and advertising, 78-rpm lectures) related to disability history. The museum sector will contain interpretive exhibits that draw library artifacts together and explore themes and topics in disability history. The education sector will provide curriculum materials linked to library artifacts and museum exhibits. Only the library is open now, but the wings will unfold in the foreseeable future. The library ‘borrows’ its materials from public and private collections around the country. It contains digital surrogates of materials about different groups of people with disabilities. The collections are searchable, and because our audience ranges from sixth graders to scholars, the finding aids are quite flexible–there are tools for keywords, dates and date range, sorting, formats, sources, and–for those users who want a quick sense of what’s there, we’ve created general subject directories. We aim to represent the range of disability history resources by selecting representative artifacts from the genres where disability history is found: veterans’ pension documents, the circus sideshow, moral literature, postcards of institutions, deaf- and polio- and blind-community newspapers and newsletters, service-club ephemera and meeting minutes. We love to find and post items that are truly unique. And we include, from 1775-1990, personal accounts and objects created by people with disabilities about their own experiences. We add to our collection at the rate of about one hundred artifacts every four to six weeks. We cannot be comprehensive; historical evidence relevant to the experience of people with disabilities, once you start looking for it, is simply everywhere. People with disabilities, after all, have always been here. The one area where we will not concentrate efforts, unless there is a need to use the materials in a museum exhibit, is traditional medical history–the tools of the trade, the landmark discoveries and experiments. This material is abundantly recorded and available in other collections. The Disability History Museum is interdisciplinary in approach, but the shared experiences of people, not their diseases, are what is most essential to our collecting mission. So, for example, a different sense of the world of Hervey Wilbur and his charges and the staff at the Syracuse Asylum can be discovered in nineteenth-century Sunday-school stories about children with disabilities.

 

Pull up Jessy Allan, a little novelette, first published in 1824. It’s about a girl who must make a commitment to God, but then needs to have a leg amputated, without the aid of anesthesia. Will her commitment see her through? In this tale, religious faith provides palpable comfort. But these stories contain much more than moral visions and proscriptions. Poor Matt; Or, The Clouded Intellect is an 1869 tale about a ‘visitor’ and a cognitively disabled boy seemingly based on fact. Matt’s affliction, and his care, are understood in theological terms. But beyond the theological underpinning you also see the visitor and the local community around Matt practicing what we today call early childhood intervention techniques–speech, occupational, and physical therapy. And he improves; he is educable and in the community. Then there are those tales like Patience and Her Friend, where Patience’s crisis involves submitting to God’s will and its social corollary–never complaining or expressing anger. It’s a restriction that in her case, Patience, a hunchback girl with a beautiful friend, seems particularly cruel. In Crazy Ann, the theological requirement is mercy: compassion is abundant in this story, and mental illness is ascribed to natural, not divine, causes.

 

John Ellard: The Newsboy, 1860, is one of my favorites in this genre. It’s a memoir by one of the founders of the Philadelphia Newsboys’ Home, Frederick Starr. He introduces us to a real boy with abundant character. Though there is the obligatory deathbed salvation scene and accounts of religious services, the intent of the book seems to be to prove that this group of smoking and drinking, urban street urchins is salvageable. This is a well-observed portrait of a proud, independent, adventurous disabled child and his buddies. Starr tells us what he knows about Ellard and friends, where they were born, how they work, their habits and interests, and the role of the Home in their lives. Cleanliness, godliness, drink and risk, they are all in this book, but it is not a fiction, so gentle sentiments are important to it. This is a midcentury account of urban street kids with visible and invisible disabilities. They are orphans, runaways from poverty, abuse or neglect, the children of alcoholics: today you find them on the streets in Rio, Los Angeles, Moscow, Lagos, Islamabad, Chicago. For something related but different in the realm of religious experience, try Thomas Gallaudet’s Sermon, On the Duties and Advantages of Affording Instruction to the Deaf and Dumb, 1824. It’s an inspirational talk, printed and sold as a tract by Isaac Hill. According to a preliminary note the speech was not designed “to solicit pecuniary contributions, but to excite in the public mind a deeper interest than has hitherto been felt for the DEAF AND DUMB.” Fundraising actually was a goal, but contemporary readers will find ‘the ask’ awesome. First, Gallaudet poses a question: Who are the heathen of our day? After listing the unconverted across the continents, he directs his listeners to the nonbelievers here at home, and then he cites another category:

Yes, my brethren, and I present them to the eye of your pity, an interesting, an affecting group of your fellow men;–of those who are bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh; who live encircled with all that can render life desirable; in the midst of society, of knowledge, of the arts, of the sciences, of a free and happy government, of a widely-preached gospel; and yet who know nothing of all these blessings; who regard them with amazement and a trembling concern; who are lost in one perpetual gaze of wonder at the thousand mysteries which surround them; who consider many of our most simple customs as perplexing enigmas, who often make the most absurd conjectures respecting the weighty transactions of civil society, or the august and solemn rites and ceremonies of religion; who propose a thousand enquiries which cannot be answered, and pant for a deliverance which has not yet been afforded them. These are some of the heathen;–long-neglected heathen;–the poor Deaf and Dumb, whose sad necessities have been forgotten, while scarce a corner of the world has not been searched to find those who are yet ignorant of Jesus Christ.

In Gallaudet’s vision we are potentially all God’s children, but only when we know the Protestant Word. Sign language is the means to bring these heathen out of darkness. Gallaudet directed the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, a school he cofounded with Laurent Clerc and Mason Cogswell. He is writing this sermon nearly a decade after studying sign language with Clerc, a French deaf man and teacher. Clerc describes how he learned to communicate–in English–in his Diary of their voyage to America in 1816.

The diary is about a deaf man’s life, a life richly textured, adventure filled. Like many of the artifacts in the Disability History Museum, it makes us ask, what is a disability story? In following the Syracuse Asylum trainees back into the community (and many did return), we need to ask: When does an impairment become a limitation in someone’s existence? When reading Isaac Hunt’s Astounding Disclosures! Three Years In A Mad House, his account of time spent at the Maine Insane Hospital, we need to ask: When does a legal definition of disability, in this case insanity, become more important than a individual’s sense of his or her own authority? What happens when we shift from a moral assessment of a disabling experience to a medical one? What happens when we shift from considering the circumstance of a specific individual with a tragic story about impairment, to considering groups of individuals with similar impairments as minority populations with basic human and civil rights? Disability issues are deeply complex and vexed topics in our culture. This is not new. But today we live in world where a map of the human genome helps predict what kinds of disabilities all of us are potentially vulnerable to acquiring in our life span or passing along to another generation. The historical study of the experience of people with disabilities points toward a historical understanding of the body and its differences: the human species and how we have conceptualized and understood the variations within it. Hervey Wilbur would be glad for the contemporary technologies that let us see inside the structures of the brain and our genes, but I think he would still be skeptical and cautionary about our willingness to confuse categories of classification with prognoses.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 2.3 (April, 2002).

---

Laurie Block founded DisabilityMuseum.org, a virtual museum, in her role as executive director of Straight Ahead Pictures, Inc., a small nonprofit company whose mission is to create innovative media projects and educational forums that use archival materials and oral history to foster community dialogue about contemporary social issues. Block coproduced, narrated, and wrote Beyond Affliction: The Disability History Project, a four-hour radio series broadcast on NPR, and winner of the Robert Kennedy Journalism Award, 1999. She also produced and directed the award winning feature documentary FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body, broadcast on PBS in 1994.

It was mid-May, and it was beautiful outside. I was sitting inside, however, at a table in the reading room of the Connecticut Historical Society. But I wasn’t thinking of the warm sunshine I was missing because I had just opened a manila folder and seen something amazing. It was a fragile sheet of writing paper, which had been folded many times into a tight, small square and had frayed and torn along the folds. Someone had attached the pieces back together with tape and postal seals. The reassembled image had been painted in watercolors: a close-up view of a right foot and ankle, resting against a mattress. They look young and healthy—except for the toes, which are painted a dark, angry black that creeps toward the bridge of the foot. A thin red line frames the image and in the bottom left corner the following words appear, in black script: “Gangren from frost bite” (fig. 1).

I carefully removed this image from the file and found another underneath it, in the same condition, torn and repaired. Again, a shock: a foot rests in the same manner on the mattress, but the toes are gone, replaced by ragged holes painted in vivid hues of red, blue, purple, and yellow. Bits of bone poke through the skin. Again, there is a thin red border and the script: “Gangren from frost bite” (fig. 2). A before-and-after diptych, I thought, a common visual trope in images of amputees and amputation. Then I looked more closely. The amputated toes actually belonged to the left foot, not the right. These were two different feet. Interesting.

I laid the images side-by-side and sat down to ponder them. Whose feet were they? Why one image of the right and one of the left? Had he lost all ten toes? How did he get frostbite? Who made the decision to amputate? Did the amputee himself paint these images, or did someone else? If he painted them himself, why would he do such a thing? And what were the recipients of these intently folded pages supposed to think when they opened them up? I did not—and still don’t—know the answers to most of these questions.

 

 

What I do know is that the paintings—and presumably the feet as well—belonged to James Wilbraham, a soldier who served in Company D, 16th Connecticut Volunteers. His enlistment and discharge papers, also in the file, noted that he had joined the Union army in August 1862 and had been discharged in February 1864 “by reason of loss of toes & heels from frost bite.” A gravestone at the Old St. Patrick’s Cemetery in Enfield, Connecticut, notes that Wilbraham died eight months later, cause unknown.

I came to the Connecticut Historical Society, and to James Wilbraham’s amputated toes, in pursuit of manuscript evidence for my book project, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. I was interested in all different kinds of ruins. The kinds you usually think of in the context of the war—city buildings, plantation houses, slave quarters—but also the ruins of living things: trees shot to pieces by shot and shell, and the bodies of men ripped apart by musket and artillery fire. Through its destruction, I believed, one could come to know the wartime experience, the real Civil War that, according to Whitman, never gets into the books.

I started my search for ruined men in manuscripts: in letters and diary entries. I read broadly through collections stored at various historical societies and libraries in New England and the South. I wasn’t necessarily interested in the most famous of war amputees—Confederate General John Bell Hood or Union General Oliver O. Howard—but in the rank and file. How were these men blown apart and why? How did soldiers and civilians react to the sudden proliferation of disarticulated bodies and veteran amputees that the Civil War created?

 

The letters and diaries contained an abundance of rich material regarding the effects of shot and shell on the human body. They also revealed anxious attention to amputation; soldiers and civilians expressed their fears of it and described watching the amputations of others with a mix of terror and fascination.

There was Massachusetts Captain Richard Cary, who jokingly reassured his wife that, “I told the Doctor what you said about amputation & he promised he would never cut me in half without a consultation,” and Maine private Napoleon Perkins, who wrote about the amputation of his leg with meticulous detail. He woke up twice during the surgery and talked to the surgeons about their progress, and then requested more ether. I compiled hundreds of pages of notes from such sources, from long descriptive accounts of mangled bodies on the battlefield to passing references to amputees.

Napoleon Perkins’ account of his life after amputation—he looked for work unsuccessfully for years, noting that, “The proprietors all seemed to feel sorry for me but they had no work that a one leg man could do”—interested me, as did the responses of his friends and family members to the loss of his leg.

I therefore turned my attention to postwar sources—pension applications, broadsheets that amputees published as moneymaking ventures, and pamphlets published by prosthetics manufacturers. All of these documents gave me a good sense of the valuation of veterans’ missing limbs. In the twenty years after the war ended, the U.S. government (which provided pension funds and other forms of aid only to Union veterans) put prices on absent body parts. A man’s loss of both hands, for example, was worth $25 per month in 1864; by 1875 the payment had increased to $50 per month. By 1880, Union soldiers with one empty sleeve were receiving an annual pension of $432 ($36 per month).

 

The federal government also established a prosthetics program for Union veterans, providing artificial arms and legs (or money to purchase them) after 1862. As a result, the prosthetics industry—which was based in New England and New York—flourished.

And as manufacturers competed for customers, they published thousands of pages explaining their inventions and providing testimonials regarding their quality. The prosthetics pamphlets I read through at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School suggested that not only did soldiers’ missing limbs acquire monetary value during and after the war, they also conveyed complex cultural meanings.

I came to understand that every part of these pamphlets—the introduction appealing to the patriotic spirit and manliness of Union veterans, the detailed illustrations of prosthetic designs attesting to their originality and their technological precision, and the reprinted letters raving about the “natural” feel and look of the product—shaped discussions of American manhood during and after the war. Also, prosthetics inventions and the men who wore them were seen as emblematic of the nation’s industrial “genius” but called attention to the costs of such achievements. If you couldn’t tell that a soldier was wearing a prosthetic limb, then how could you tell what was “real” what was “counterfeit” in American society?

These concerns about whole and incomplete men were also evident in American visual culture in the 1860s and ’70s. As I turned my attention to graphics, most of them held in the vast collections of the American Antiquarian Society, I found hundreds of Civil War amputees. They appeared in political cartoons, lithographs, engravings, woodcut illustrations, and the sketches and pictures that soldiers such as James Wilbraham drew themselves.

During my month of residency at the AAS as a Last Fellow in Graphic Arts, I found (among more than 300 images depicting legless and armless men) two political cartoons that demonstrate the many meanings that Civil War amputees embodied during the war.

Late in the war, a Union newspaper (probably Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, a newspaper devoted to humorous anecdotes and cartoons, its first run in 1859) published a six-panel cartoon entitled “Rebel Bulletins Illustrated” (fig. 3). The first panel depicts a rebel soldier (“Lee’s messenger”) running toward Richmond with a banner that says “Defeat of Grant Victory No. 1.” In subsequent panels, the messenger brings news of further defeats of Grant but loses a limb or two each time. In the penultimate image, the messenger is carried by a “contraband” (a fugitive slave), while in the final panel, a different male slave holds the banner in his right hand, and in his left he holds a basket, filled with the body parts—”all that remains” of Lee’s messenger.

At first I had no idea how to interpret this set of images. Luckily for me, an astute librarian had written the date of publication on the back: July 1864. By that time Grant’s spring campaign had settled into a siege of Petersburg after seven long weeks of campaigning and six major battles. In the cartoon, the messenger’s body is intact after the first battle (the Wilderness) but with every move that Grant’s army makes to the southeast during the campaign, the southern soldier loses limbs. These corporeal losses contrast with the strident messages of the text in the banners, of victories won and “Yankees routed.” An explicit critique of the delusional self-regard and the failure of Confederate war aims by the summer of 1864—and the centrality of emancipation to the progress of the war—”Rebel Bulletins Illustrated” uses amputation and missing limbs as signs of southern military and political weakness.

One year earlier, a cartoon appeared in another northern newspaper: a couple walks close together and away from the viewer, sauntering along a path next to a countryside fence and toward a leafy bower (fig. 4). The woman wears a plain dress with a flowery pattern and the man wears a Union uniform. She has her left arm wrapped around the man’s waist (her white, patterned dress illuminated by the dark color of his uniform) because the soldier’s arms have been amputated. The caption reads: “This may seem very bold, and all that sort of thing, on Julia’s part; but he cannot put his arm around HER waist—and something has to be done, you know.”

Because the veteran amputee can no longer make the first move, Julia has taken control of their courtship. Her boldness is required, for “something must be done, you know” to integrate amputees—who, without their limbs, were somehow less than men—back into the American family through normative heterosexual relationships. However, this reintegration has its cost; Julia’s audacity threatens to upend antebellum gender roles and provide American women with more power than many men (and women) found acceptable. Here, the figure of the veteran amputee provokes discussion about the effects of wartime violence on family relations.

Around 45,000 northern and southern men returned home from the battlefields and hospitals of the South, having given their limbs for their countries. They became primary symbols of both the positive and negative aspects of wartime violence. They also became central figures in its print, visual, and material culture: once you start looking for them, you find them everywhere.

For this I am grateful, not only because this amazing abundance of material allowed me to write a book chapter on ruined men, but also because the shock of seeing them conveys a sense of the “true” war, its material and corporeal reality. That those vivid images of James Wilbraham’s feet have come down to us in a plain manila file folder is somewhat miraculous, given that his relatives did not save much else pertaining to his life. And we should all look at those blackened and then missing toes, the flesh healing over but the bones still sticking out, to know the nature of war and its costs.

Further reading:

For details on James Wilbraham’s enlistment and discharge from the Union army, see Enlistment and Discharge Papers (1862, 1864), James Wilbraham Papers (1862-1864), Connecticut Historical Society. For Richard Cary’s and Napoleon Perkins’ thoughts on amputation see Richard Cary Letters, Massachusetts Historical Society and Perkins, “The Memoirs of N.B. Perkins,” New Hampshire Historical Society.

For further reading on the cultural significance of the broken and amputated bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers in the American Civil War, see Laurann Figg and Jane Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48: 4 (October 1993): 454-75; Lisa Maria Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory, and Body in the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Harvard, 1997); Brian Craig Miller, “The Women who Loved (or Tried to Love) Confederate Amputees,” in Weirding the War: Tales from the Civil War’s Ragged Edges, ed. Berry (Georgia, 2011); Kathy Newman, “Wounds and Wounding in the American Civil War: A (Visual) History,” Yale Journal of Criticism6: 2 (Fall 1993): 63-85. For details regarding federal and state government aid for Union and Confederate veterans, see, for example, Jennifer Davis McDaid, “With Lame Legs and No Money: Virginia’s Disabled Confederate Veterans,” Virginia Cavalcade 47: 1 (Winter 1998): 14-25; Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States(Harvard, 1992); Ansley Herring Wegner, Phantom Pain: North Carolina’s Artificial-Limbs Program for Confederate Veterans (North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 2004).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 12.1 (October, 2011).

---

Megan Kate Nelson is a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard University. She is the author of Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (2005) and the forthcoming Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (2012).

 

Equipped with a map of Newport, Rhode Island’s, famed Common Burying Ground in one hand and a camera in the other, I climbed the hill toward Desire Tripp’s arm’s gravestone. That’s right: I was looking for a 1786 gravestone that commemorated a woman’s amputated arm. I was told to keep an eye out for it among a row of Tripp family stones, but the stone—which was much more diminutive than I had anticipated—proved difficult to locate among the sea of slate slabs (fig. 1). As noontime approached I began to get hungry. I was considering trying again the next day when suddenly, the arm came into view (fig. 2). After reading the inscription that surrounds the arm—”WAIT daught./of/WILLIAM and/DESIRE TRIPP/died April 24/1780 Aged 10/Mo 10 days,” and, “Also WILLIAM/their Son/Died March/17^th 1784 Aged/22 Mo/Also his Wifes/Arm Amputated Feb 20 1786″—I plopped down onto the grass and began sketching the gravestone. I am not a skilled artist, but the exercise helps me wrap my mind around the objects I study (fig. 3). On that afternoon in May 2011, though, the record of the material world yielded more questions than answers. Who was Desire Tripp? Why was her arm amputated? Why did she bury it? What does the gravestone mean? These questions drove my research in the summer of 2011 as a fellow in historical interpretation at the Newport Historical Society. Ultimately, all but the most basic facts about Desire Tripp’s life remained elusive. This makes Desire’s arm’s unusual gravestone all the more important: it provides a unique portal into her life through which we can investigate how she dealt with impairment (or loss of a physical function of the body due to an event such as an amputation), death, and memory in late eighteenth-century Newport.

But it also figured into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Newporters’ interpretations of disability in everyday life. Historical memory, or how observers have interpreted and remembered history and the legacy of those interpretations, played a significant role in my wrestling with the gravestone’s meaning. These memories do not always reinforce one another; often, they do not represent the “original” meaning (assuming we can figure that out) of a specific historical event or object such as the arm’s gravestone. Like me, the observers whose interpretations I traced wrangled with the stone’s unique attributes, such as the arm’s realistic representation and the unusual coupling of a traditional memorial for two children with a memorial for an arm. The gravestone surely served as a memorial for Desire Tripp and her family, but, as I came to learn in the course of my research, it also served as a site of local memory for individuals who never knew the family personally.

A curiosity since at least the mid-nineteenth century, the gravestone commemorates William and Desire Tripp’s two deceased babies, who died in 1780 and 1784, and Desire’s arm, which a local physician amputated in 1786. What makes the stone so unusual is the fact that the carver to whom the stone’s decoration is attributed—John Bull—carved a realistic representation of Desire’s arm, oriented lengthwise, into the center of the stone (fig. 4).

What I uncovered about Desire Tripp and her family was not limited to the biographical details I found on the stone itself. Yet as is so often the case with early American women, what we can unearth about them comes from records associated with their male kin. Even the gravestone refers to Desire in reference to William. Legal documents such as deeds, newspapers, and the Tripp family gravestones indicate that Desire Tripp married the once-widowed William, a tanner, between 1770 (the year William’s first wife Betsy née Robinson died) and 1780 (the year Desire’s first child Wait was born). Records from the Second Congregational Church at the Newport Historical Society document William’s active church membership through 1799. When he was not attending church, William Tripp’s work life as a tanner likely consumed much time and energy. Tanning and currying, notoriously malodorous crafts, required substantial space and water. The Tripps’ home and work site—on the outer limits of late eighteenth-century Newport—would have provided both of those assets. An 1802 real estate advertisement published in the Newport Mercury included a detailed description of the Tripp property:

LARGE and commodious Dwelling House, with an excellent Tan-Yard, formerly occupied by William Tripp., situated in the centre, and on the west side of Broad-street, containing about half an acre of land, fronting three public streets, together with a Currying-house [where tanned hides were processed], and all the Out-houses thereunto belonging, which are many, and calculated for every conveniencey. The House has a good shop in the front, a paved yard, and an excellent well of water, which is never dry. The house will be sold separate from the tan-yard, or together, as may best suit the purchasers.

Additional details about the Tripps’ Newport lives remain scarce. We can only imagine the personal stamp Desire put on this busy household and shop, particularly while William was out serving as the town corder of bark or as a state representative of Newport, as newspapers indicate that he did in the late eighteenth century.