I have a confession to make.

In the course of writing my book on art and illusion in the early republic, I was taken in by a trompe l’oeil object.

It was October 2002. I had completed my doctoral dissertation the previous year and was just beginning the work of revising it for publication. In the meantime, I had contributed a number of entries to an exhibition catalogue for a large show about trompe l’oeil that was being organized by the National Gallery of Art,Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil Painting. At the exhibition’s opening, I was thrilled to see many of the pictures I had studied, pondered, and written about. Cleverly positioned near a museum staircase was Charles Willson Peale’s trompe l’oeilStaircase Group (1795), a double portrait of Peale’s sons Raphaelle and Titian Ramsay that reportedly fooled no less a figure than George Washington back in the day. In another room I encountered the marine artist Thomas Birch, leaning out from the space of his portrait to rest his arm on the picture frame. Elsewhere was Raphaelle Peale’s masterful Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (c. 1822), which appeared to conceal a picture of a female nude behind a cloth. According to family lore, Raphaelle’s wife—presumably peeved by her husband’s naughty imagination—took a swipe at the painting in an attempt to remove the cloth.

I knew all the tricks of trompe l’oeil walking into this exhibition. I knew the stories of spectators deceived by wily pictures, of birds that pecked at painted grapes and dogs that climbed the step of theStaircase Group. I knew better than to get taken in by an illusion. And then my vanity got the better of me.

I rounded the corner of a gallery and spied the exhibition catalogue resting on a bench. Another reader had carelessly left it upside down and open, so that its cover was clearly visible and its spine within easy reach. I hadn’t yet laid my hands on a copy of the catalogue, and I was eager to see own my own entries in print. I made a beeline for the bench. I grasped the book.

It didn’t budge.

It was a fake. An expertly crafted simulacrum of the real catalogue, affixed to the bench and perfectly positioned to ensnare the gullible. I had been deceived.

In the space of an instant, I realized my mistake. Gasping with surprise, I beat a quick path out of the gallery, hoping that no one had witnessed my gaffe. I think I may have actually hidden behind my husband when I finally located him in another room. In a gushing whisper, I relayed the embarrassment of what had occurred. He took a long, steady look at me and burst into laughter. And then I began to laugh, too. Once we’d collected ourselves, we crept back into the gallery to inspect the trompe l’oeil catalogue, to marvel at its predatory conceit and its capacity to trump and surprise. For several long minutes, we enjoyed a good chuckle at ourselves. Well, at me.

I’ve thought often of this incident over the past few years as I researched the ways in which spectators reacted to trompe l’oeil objects during the post-revolutionary decades. Between the 1790s and 1820s, in cities large and small, early national Americans created, displayed, experienced, and wrote about a tantalizing array of pictorial and optical deceptions, including trompe l’oeil portraits and still life paintings, like those made by the Peales and their Philadelphia cohort; “philosophical” instruments, such as solar microscopes, zograscopes, and phantasmagorias, that magnified tiny things to magnificent proportions, threw flat pictures into three dimensions, or generated illusions of ghosts; even mechanical devices—such as the “Invisible Lady,” a popular visual and aural illusion—that vexed and delighted Americans up and down the East Coast for years. Spectators encountered these deceptions in an equally varied range of places, from Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum to taverns, houses, and assembly halls temporarily transformed into public exhibition rooms.

Into these spaces, spectators carried a host of assumptions about their abilities to detect a deception—and the cultural stakes of being able to do so. Common Sense philosophy taught early Americans to trust the evidence of their senses, to believe that perspicacious vision would see through illusion and discern the truth of a situation. Political writers turned this sensory faith to partisan advantage: Republicans advised the people to sharpen their eyes against Federalist deceit, while Federalists cautioned against Republican myopia. How, I wanted to know, was this politicization of the senses relevant to the concurrent culture of visual illusions? How did art and politics inform one another during the early republic?

I found some answers to these questions in the accounts of deceptions that early national Americans confided to letters and journals or published in newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Not unlike my own experience at the National Gallery, spectators exhibited a mixture of embarrassment and wonder in response to trompe l’oeil illusions. Such emotions may seem trivial (they did to Sir Joshua Reynolds, the period’s leading British aesthetician, who never failed to remind his audiences that trompe l’oeil was cheap and vulgar in comparison to the civic-minded, edifying genre of history painting). But, like trompe l’oeil itself, there is more to these responses than initially meets the eye. Trompe l’oeil exacts several things of its spectators, and in the reactions it yields, we can understand something of its broader cultural and political significance.

First, trompe l’oeil is fun. There is good reason why so many early modern optical illusions were commonly known as “pleasing deceptions.” Trompe l’oeil produces surprise, giggles, chatter, appreciation. It can make dupes of unwitting observers, serving them up for mockery to the bemusement of onlookers already in the know. Yet it also invites us to laugh at ourselves. It’s safe to say that there are few genres of art capable of generating an adrenaline rush. But my own encounter with the trompe l’oeil catalogue proves that this can occur, and my research suggests that early national spectators experienced something similar.

Consider the case of the Invisible Lady. This enticing mechanical illusion took the form of a glass ball suspended by wires from a ceiling. A square railing surrounded the center, with trumpets positioned atop vertical posts at each corner. Entering the rooms in which this unusual contraption was installed, visitors encountered the sounds of the invisible woman who purportedly inhabited the space. Voices, breathing, and even singing seemed to emerge from the trumpets. And while it was clear that an unseen speaker could see the audience, she herself was nowhere to be seen. Spectators professed confusion—how did the deception work?—but mostly they expressed enjoyment. The illusion elicited admiration (its mechanics were so “ingeniously veiled as hitherto to elude all discovery,” effused one witness) and gave rise to flights of fancy (one wit claimed the lady “kissed some single gentlemen” but “blows upon married men and old bachelors”).

Accounts of the Invisible Lady reveal another crucial aspect about trompe l’oeil: it takes awhile to experience its ruses and pleasures. Critics like Reynolds often dismissed trompe l’oeil out of hand, presuming that its artistic purpose was ephemeral and its significance therefore negligible. But reports of the Invisible Lady suggest otherwise. Writers from Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser took their time at a Philadelphia exhibition of the illusion in 1804. Their narrative presents a careful inspection of the device and its environment, retracing the cautious movements they made around the gallery (“there are closets, but they are well closed, and in whatever part of the room you stand, the voice is heard from the trumpets only”). Such comments reveal trompe l’oeil to be an art of duration. It catches the eye (or ear or hand) in a second with its exacting simulations and imitations, but it also invites us to linger, marveling at its execution. To put it in twenty-first century terms, trompe l’oeil is slow art.

What’s more, these unhurried pleasures amount to a phenomenon that is less about being deceived than it is about undeceiving. Trompe l’oeil beckons the viewer close to inspect its surfaces and manufacture; it challenges us to look, touch, and listen, as the Invisible Lady’s admirers did, in order to understand the artistry by which it effects its illusions. In invites us to undeceive ourselves of the fiction before us, and in so doing, it posits that the senses can detect and explain deception.

It’s in this space of possibility that trompe l’oeil engaged early national concerns about dissimulation —about demagogues, counterfeiting, forgers, and charlatans—and tested the visual acuity of American citizens. Throughout the Revolutionary and early national periods, the capacity to discern differences between truth and falsehood, or to see through artifice and design, was prized as a sign of able citizenship. What did it mean, then, to encounter illusionistic objects at public exhibitions that staged this very challenge? The frequent display of trompe l’oeil pictures and optical devices invites us to understand early American exhibition rooms as spaces of citizen formation, as places where sensory perception was tested, honed, and performed. At Peale’s Museum, in art galleries, and in the vernacular sites where the Invisible Lady was shown, the cultures of trompe l’oeil and politics coalesced around the prospect of undeceiving.

What of the early national spectators, then, who encountered trompe l’oeil catalogues at these exhibitions, as I did at the National Gallery? Well, that’s a subject I explore in my book. A real book. You can even pick it up.

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Wendy Bellion is associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware. Her book, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (2011), explores the changing forms and functions of trompe l’oeil illusion during the early republic.

The forgotten history of an American shrine

Common-place asks Scott Casper, whose Sarah Johnson’s Mount Vernon: The Forgotten History of an American Shrine was recently published by Hill & Wang, “how did you come to see that the story of Mount Vernon was an untold chapter of African American history central to the ways we imagine America itself?”

In the fall of 1998, I was doing research for a different sort of project about the ways Americans imagined their presidents’ families and domestic lives prior to the advent of radio or television. Among many sorts of sources, I was collecting evidence of people’s visits to presidents’ homes. Mount Vernon was far and away the most popular, during and especially after George Washington’s lifetime. Thousands of people went there every year; I read more than a hundred accounts spanning the nineteenth century. One of those visitors introduced me to Sarah Johnson, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

On September 4, 1865, the northern writer and abolitionist John Townsend Trowbridge stopped at Mount Vernon as part of a southern tour. Five months after Appomattox, Trowbridge had a contract with a northern publisher for a travel book about the defeated South. It came as no surprise to me, given the work of historian David Blight and others on Civil War memory, that Trowbridge depicted slaveowners as morally indefensible, freedpeople as industrious and heroic, and the abjection of the former Confederacy as just punishment for slavery and rebellion and as a starting ground for a new South. It also came as no surprise that Trowbridge saw African Americans working at Mount Vernon, because dozens of other travelers also recounted seeing black people there.

The surprise was that Trowbridge recounted his conversation with one of these black workers, complete with dialogue. She was a young woman, twenty years old, with a husband and four-year-old son. Trowbridge encountered her “industriously scrubbing over a tub” and described her as “intelligent and cheerful.” According to this young woman, she had formerly belonged to John A. Washington, who “kept me hired out” because he could make more money off her that way. She said that the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association (MVLA) had brought her back as an employee after the war and that she now earned seven dollars a month, “a heap better ‘n no wages at all!” In her words, “The sweat I drap into this yer tub is my own; but befo’e, it belonged to John A. Washington.” Trowbridge didn’t get her meaning at first, so she elaborated, “You know, the Bible says every one must live by the sweat of his own eyebrow. But John A. Washington, he lived by the sweat of my eyebrow. I alluz had a will’n mind to work, and I have now; but I don’t work as I used to; for then it was work to-day and work to-morrow, and no stop.” Mount Vernon, formerly a slave plantation, had become an icon of emancipation.

At first, I thought that this episode fit right into the book I thought I was writing: it showed how white Americans like Trowbridge read their own ideas (in this case, about race) onto presidential homes (in this case, Mount Vernon). A magazine article twenty-two years later, in which a southern traveler recounted her own meeting with a woman selling milk at Mount Vernon, seemed the perfect bookend. In that piece, Sophie Bledsoe Herrick described the MVLA employee as a totem of Old South hospitality. The milk usually cost “Fi’ cents a glass,” said the woman, “onless, ladies, you will kindly accept it from the ‘sociation.” Servants like this one made visitors feel like Washington’s guests, not participants in a commercial transaction. They melted away the distance between slavery days and the present. Here, I thought, was marvelous evidence of what Blight describes in Race and Reunion: white Americans’ shift from “emancipationist” to “reconciliationist” notions of the Civil War, as white people put the Civil War behind them, romanticized the Old South, and cast African Americans anew as faithful servants (and slavery as picturesque paternalism).

 

In other words, visitors’ accounts seemed to support a historiographical interpretation that I already knew well. They dovetailed too with a lot of the revisionist work then coming out about historic preservation—scholarship that emphasized the political roots of preservation and the ways the managers of historic sites perpetuated now-antiquated views of slavery. For more than a century, the history of American historic preservation has been written about (and often by) the elite women and men at the center of the story, the people who saved places like Mount Vernon from dilapidation and speculation. But in the past decade or so, historians have told another sort of story, about the often conservative political agendas of those preservationist pioneers.

At the same time, sociologists and anthropologists have done another kind of work: analyzing the performances and presentations of history at such current-day sites as Plimouth Plantation, Colonial Williamsburg, and former southern plantations. These scholars interview interpreters and other front-line employees to consider their perspective on the history they presented. As I read this work, I started asking different questions about the women John Trowbridge and Sophie Herrick spoke with. What was it like to be on their side of the exchange? What did Mount Vernon’s employees make of the visitors and of their own presence at this American shrine? And how did Mount Vernon look through their eyes—not just as African Americans, but also as the people whose home it became long after George Washington died?

The first question was more practical: how could I tell that story for people who lived and died more than a century ago? Looking at two sorts of records began to persuade me that it might be possible. First, the United States census: according to the 1870 census, a twenty-five-year-old employee named Sarah Johnson lived with her nine-year-old son, Smith, at Mount Vernon. The ages matched; she could have been the person Trowbridge interviewed five years before. Second, the MVLA’s own annual reports and council minutes, which listed the employees annually from the 1870s on: there was Sarah Johnson, throughout the 1870s and 1880s and until 1892. Based on descriptions of her work, I soon realized that Trowbridge and Herrick had been speaking to the same person, twenty-two years apart.

 

This discovery led to more questions: how much could I learn about this woman? At first it became a detective story, a puzzle to piece together. Thanks to Mount Vernon’s remarkable archive, which includes the diaries and journals of John Augustine Washington (the last Washington family member to own the place) as well as the voluminous records of the MVLA itself, I figured out that Sarah had been born there in 1844 as a slave; that Washington had indeed hired her out in the late 1850s; and that she returned after the Civil War and worked there for twenty-seven years, steadily rising in authority, esteem, and pay until she retired in 1892. Thanks to the Fairfax County Courthouse Archives and other records in public sources, I learned that she had bought land in the late 1880s—four acres that had once belonged to her former owner and before him, to George Washington. It was potentially a great story.

And it was more than just one woman’s story. Immersed in the archives, I came to see Sarah as part of a community of African American families who lived and worked at Mount Vernon through the nineteenth century. Reconstructing those kin connections through national censuses, slave lists, wills, and other documents was critical. About two hundred slaves inhabited Mount Vernon from 1815 to 1861; the MVLA’s post-Civil War employees came mostly from this group. (To keep all the names straight, I created my own “census” of Mount Vernon’s enslaved population after 1815.) Equally important was placing these people within Mount Vernon’s geography and infrastructure across the nineteenth century, for example as this once-isolated plantation became increasingly connected to nearby Alexandria by roads, steamboats, and eventually electric streetcars. (To keep all the places straight, I filled an office wall with maps and plats of Mount Vernon and Fairfax County across the nineteenth century and today.) Visitors approached Mount Vernon from those routes and conveyances—and black people shaped their experience at Washington’s home, a critical part of my story. But those same African Americans employed the same roads (as well as byways known only to locals) and vehicles (as well as their own feet) to maintain links to nearby family and friends, conduct Mount Vernon’s daily business, or get into town for holiday shopping or church.

 

In short, what had begun as a project in cultural history took a clear turn toward social history.

That turn, I now think, was the key to telling a different kind of story. It’s an alternative history of American historic preservation, in which the leading characters aren’t elite white women, although they are still essential. It’s the local story of a national place: Mount Vernon in the neighborhood, not just in the national imagination. It’s the African American laboring history of a seemingly very white, elite site: Mount Vernon from the bottom up. And perhaps above all, it’s the nineteenth-century story of a supposedly eighteenth-century place—a story about life going on there long after the apparent lead character, the Father of his Country, was laid to rest—told from the perspective of a twenty-first-century historian intent on conveying that story from multiple points of view.

 

 

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

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Scott Casper, professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno, and (for 2008-2009) visiting editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, studies and teaches nineteenth-century U.S. history, American cultural history, and the history of the book. With Jeffrey D. Groves, Stephen W. Nissenbaum, and Michael Winship, he edited A History of the Book in America: Volume 3: The Industrial Book, 1840-1880 (2007). His first book, Constructing American Lives (1999), looked at biography and culture in nineteenth-century America. He has taught in K-12 teacher institutes across the United States, including Mount Vernon’s residential summer institutes since 2000, and edits the Journal of American History’s annual “Textbooks and Teaching” section.

We will probably never know whether Thomas Cornell committed matricide. He was accused of stabbing his mother and burning her body in their Rhode Island home on a February night in 1673, although only circumstantial evidence pointed to his guilt. His trial left an assortment of unanswered questions, and eventually an unsatisfied community tried two other people for the same crime. To modern Americans this probably borders on perversion, since Cornell had long since swung from a rope by the time an Indian servant and Cornell’s widow were separately prosecuted in 1674 and 1675. Those left with a lingering uneasiness in the aftermath of Cornell’s execution, however, were not convinced that the person responsible for Rebecca Cornell’s death had been punished. If the actual murderer had successfully evaded the law’s reach, justice had not been served. So they sought out another potential killer. And then another.

Today’s standards suggest that such zealous attempts to redress a wrong were excessive. At the same time, the premise on which they acted is no less compelling today than it was three hundred years ago: justice demands punishment for wrongdoing. The quandary that survives the centuries—and defies resolution—is how to establish legal procedures that will rout the guilty without jeopardizing the innocent. In Thomas Cornell’s case, the victim’s ghost tried to help but provided only ambiguous testimony. The body bled in the presence of the defendant, but such evidence was hardly failsafe. The Anglo-American legal system was steeped in ancient traditions that had evolved over time, but jurists on both continents were aware that no rules, no guidelines, no laws could guarantee an equitable result each time. Sometimes a guilty person was acquitted; sometimes an innocent person was convicted. The real questions, then and now, are how to minimize those risks, safeguard defendants’ rights, and make certain that the result is “just.” And if those early Anglo-Americans resolved these issues differently than we have in the twenty-first century, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the modern American judicial system is any better equipped to ensure that justice prevails.

It was probably a good idea to dispense with spectral evidence, since ghosts routinely resist cross-examination. And a bleeding corpse lends itself to several possible interpretations, only one of which might divulge a murderer. In the interest of a fair trial, therefore, we no longer rely on such indicators of guilt or innocence.

But there are other rules of evidence that have been abandoned since the seventeenth century—rules that, despite their archaic foundations, might lead to a more accurate assessment of a case and reduce the possibility of an erroneous verdict. Thomas Cornell’s jury may have had it right the first time. And they had a better chance of getting to the truth of the matter because of a seventeenth-century convention that we’ve since discarded: the notion that hearsay mattered.

If the men who composed Cornell’s jury were not his peers—he was, after all, an elite member of the community—they were still folk who had rubbed elbows with him on any number of occasions. They had served alongside Cornell on committees, they owned nearby property, they traded cattle, they drank together, and they sued each other in court. By the standards of early Rhode Island they were acceptable jurors precisely because they knew Thomas Cornell, or, at the very least, they knew about Thomas Cornell. Before his trial began they had heard the gruesome details of the case, and may have already leaned toward one verdict or another. Local jurors frequently knew more about a high publicity case than either the attorney general or the superior court judges, but how much of that private information was aired in open court or shared during deliberation is beyond retrieval. We do know, however, that hearsay—the gossip and rumors that our legal system reviles but theirs prized—received considerable attention as the jury weighed testimony that eventually led to Cornell’s conviction. Indeed, Cornell’s background and character were matters of public knowledge, and he was judged on that record as much as on any other evidence introduced during his trial. Before her death, Rebecca Cornell told anyone who would listen that she was “neglected” and “disregarded.” She confided to friends that her son had reneged on his promise to provide her with a maid and to pay her rent. He owed her money and denied her food. Thomas’s unkindness extended to language: he was always “very cross,” Rebecca complained to her neighbors. He “nasht” his teeth at her. She was convinced that her life was in danger and she shared that fear with others. Such were the rumors that circulated in the community and were introduced at trial as evidence of his bad character.

If it is true that twenty-first century jurists would reject such testimony as hearsay—not to mention a deprivation of Sixth Amendment rights—it is because our modern sensibility interprets those rights from the perspective of current realities and concerns that favor the individual over society. In modern America’s densely populated communities, the likelihood that a juror will know a defendant is minimal. Moreover, information about a defendant’s background and character is rarely communicated to a jury (and only in special circumstances) on the assumption that such revelations might negatively influence the verdict. Criminal behavior in the past, so the theory goes, is not indicative of future guilt. Although it is true that information about a previous conviction might be prejudicial, it is no less true that criminal behavior is often repetitive. In other words, arsonists continually set fires, robbers repeatedly steal, and rapists are not usually satisfied with a single victim. Thus, if justice—holding the guilty accountable—is actually a social priority, is it not possible that knowledge of a defendant’s past might further that end? Since recidivism is widespread, information about a defendant’s criminal behavior might bring about a more equitable ratio of guilty verdicts to guilty defendants, while simultaneously reducing the crime rate by taking such culprits out of circulation. Conversely, affirmative evidence about a suspect’s character could be beneficial: positive testimony about a defendant’s life might persuade a jury to acquit, rather than to convict.

In a country that sanctions the death penalty and occasionally executes innocent people it is, perhaps, gratuitous to suggest a legal device that could boost the conviction rate. Nevertheless, since the American judicial system stands on an English foundation, we should not ignore the way in which our British cousins are attempting to renovate their constitutional framework in an effort to trim a rising crime rate. In July 2002 they proposed far-reaching changes that will all but transform the English judicial process. They are very open about their motives: to rebalance the system in favor of victims and society at large. At the same time, Home Secretary David Blunkett denies that such changes will erode a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Whether this is true or not will depend on how they redefine a fair trial. That definition has always been a function of time and place, an ephemeral concept that reflects the collective mood at any given moment, just as the notion of cruel and unusual punishment cannot be extricated from its social context. An impartial jury is just as vague an ideal since impartiality is more a fictional aspiration than a fait accompli.

The many procedural changes that are being considered in England (one can’t really say “introduced” since they are merely lapsed components of the legal tradition) include the use of testimony relating to a suspect’s criminal past. Hearsay evidence will be permissible once again. This seems to imply that the sorts of gossip and rumors that led to Thomas Cornell’s conviction will merit consideration in the modern courtroom.

Cornell was convicted against the weight of material evidence. No weapon was found, and there were no witnesses. Other possibilities to account for his mother’s death, such as suicide or an intruder, were dismissed. Cornell was a respected member of the community, a sometime legislator, and possibly the highest ranking colonist to have been hanged for a capital crime. But his reputation as a bad head of household dishonored him, and his undutiful behavior toward his mother followed him into the courtroom. Friends and neighbors testified that his mother spoke of threats: hearsay in contemporary language.

Was Cornell denied a fair trial? Not in his time and place, surely. Maybe not in ours, either, if we are willing to reexamine seventeenth-century jurisprudence with a little more respect and a lot less hubris about our own modern superiority. Those of us who confess to a Whig disposition subconsciously cling to the belief that change and progress are transposable concepts. We have unhesitatingly accepted the idea that the constitutionally mandated impartial jury is one that knows less, rather than more, about a defendant. But in the ongoing tug of war between individual interests and the common good, maybe the British have it right. Again.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 3.2 (January, 2003).

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Common-Place asks Elaine Forman Crane, professor of history at Fordham University and the author of Killed Strangely: The Death of Rebecca Cornell (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002), whether seventeenth-century Anglo-Americans had a keener sense of justice than modern Americans.

In a three-day period in August 1835, Baltimoreans engaged in a tumultuous riot that killed five people, injured twenty others, and caused extensive property damage. As Americans slowly climb out of the Great Recession, the Baltimore Bank Riots remind us of the deep historical roots of Americans’ animosity toward banks. Historian Robert Shalhope, who has written numerous books and articles on Jeffersonian republicanism, the Second Amendment, and Jacksonian party development, provides a persuasive account of one of the most influential political events of the antebellum era. Shalhope’s monograph joins other recent books by Richard Kilbourne Jr., Stephen Mihm, and Richard Ellis, all of which portray the seamier elements of antebellum banking. Overspeculation, excessive leveraging, and fraudulent pyramid schemes—all of which have been blamed for our current financial crisis—were alive and well in the 1830s. As Shalhope explains, The Baltimore Bank Riot is a morality tale where “good people suffer at the hands of scoundrels whom they believe to be good people” (12).

 

With thousands of investors bankrupt, including many who lost their entire life’s savings, public outrage boiled over.

With a close reading of Baltimore’s leading newspapers, combined with political cartoons, broadsides, legislative committee reports, obscure pamphlets, and intimate knowledge of the existing historical literature, Shalhope argues that the riot stemmed from three principal causes: general anti-bank sentiment, a belief in popular sovereignty, and growing outrage over the frauds associated with the closing of the Bank of Maryland (2-3). The questions raised by the riot and its legal aftermath helped transform political parties in Maryland from loose factions centered around personalities to a diametrically polarized two-party system.

As the two parties developed coherent ideologies, they responded to local conditions in Maryland and adopted contrasting interpretations of popular sovereignty and the legacy of the American Revolution. Jacksonian Democrats, hailing the Lockean social contract and the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson, embraced the people’s right to revolt. They “envisioned an egalitarian, democratic society” and believed that government should be continually responsive to the people (4). Whigs, on the other hand, emphasized social stability and favored a market-oriented society. One needed law and order to protect republican institutions from tyranny (116). Only a powerful state with strong institutions could protect private property, which, in turn, secured investment, commerce, and prosperity. These ideological differences shaped Maryland politics for the next thirty years, particularly during a state constitutional crisis in 1836 and Maryland’s flirtation with secession in 1860.

Shalhope begins by discussing the origins of Maryland’s anti-bank sentiment with particular attention to how the Bank of Maryland’s directors engaged in shady financial schemes. The bank’s main directors—Evan Poultney, Hugh McElderry, David Perine, John Glenn, and Reverdy Johnson—organized a “club” where they could embezzle customers’ deposits to pay for Bank of Maryland stock at inflated rates (33). The club then used this stock as collateral to invest in the newly created General Insurance Company. In addition, club members opened up numerous branches of the Bank of Maryland in several states and speculated in $500,000 worth of Tennessee state bonds. As homeowners today ruefully realize, this type of risky leveraging works so long as the underlying capital continues to appreciate. But when the Second Bank of the United States restricted credit in late 1833, forcing smaller banks to call in loans, the Bank of Maryland quickly became insolvent. The financial house of cards collapsed.

With thousands of investors bankrupt, including many who lost their entire life’s savings, public outrage boiled over. During the three days of rioting, angry mobs ransacked houses, lit bonfires in streets to destroy expensive furniture, and fueled further frenzy by consuming copious amounts of fine wine. On the third day of rioting, a counteroffensive led by General Samuel Smith quieted the flames. While prosecutors achieved convictions for a few of the mob’s leaders, the trials for the bank’s directors had more far-reaching consequences. These trials ignited fierce political debates between popular sovereignty on the one hand, and social stability on the other.

The Baltimore Bank Riot should appeal to both academics and laypeople alike. By qualifying his theoretical assumptions up front, Shalhope strengthens his intellectual credibility. He emphasizes language and ideology in party development, but stresses that his model applies only to Maryland. Moreover, Shalhope recognizes that republicanism and the market revolution—historically, two popular, though dichotomous, analytical paradigms that describe the antebellum era—do not suffice to explain local political complexities. For instance, both parties held a variety of views on national economic issues such as tariffs, internal improvements, banks, and land sales (9). The book’s prose is also highly readable, and Shalhope does not burden the reader with esoteric jargon.

Readers should pay close attention to Shalhope’s methodology, particularly his nuanced portrayal of social relations. No substantial differences in wealth existed between Democratic and Whig Party leaders, leading Shalhope to conclude that the “search for meaning in the language and ideas … takes on even greater significance,” and that public literature “is essential to any attempt to analyze the emergence of political and social persuasions” (3-4). Careful not to dismiss socio-economic conditions or take language at face value, the author, nonetheless, finds that the rioters’ behavior is best explained by the language, ideas, and discourse available to them through public literature.

Baltimoreans in the 1830s, he says, may have been aware of class distinctions, but they were not class conscious. Rioters did not target wealthy individuals across the board, but only those who were involved in the bank scandal (61). Yet it is clear that one’s social standing mattered a great deal in Shalhope’s narrative. Jacksonian editorials constantly derided Whigs as “monied aristocrats.” In some trials, the testimony of a “gentleman” was enough to jail some suspects without substantive evidence (76-77). The trials, moreover, reflected a concerted effort on the part of Baltimore’s gentry to reassert their power, prestige, and respectability. While there are subtle differences between privilege and class, authors from a different methodological persuasion might look at the same evidence and reach different conclusions. Shalhope correctly points out that Maryland’s Democrats were not anti-capitalist; they only “wanted the market open to all so that they, too, could prosper” (7). Touting the banner of equal rights, Jacksonians rejected corporate monopolies that afforded economic opportunity to a privileged few. But at other times, Shalhope says that Jacksonians held “traditional,” “communal” values and were, perhaps, even pre-modern (3). The evidence Shalhope presents for this characterization is sparse and he could have more clearly defined the terms traditional and modern.

Shalhope, perhaps, overstates his characterization of public opinion by relying heavily on anonymous pseudonyms from newspaper editorials. He argues that anti-bank language from Niles’ Register and the Baltimore Republican fueled visceral anger among many Baltimoreans (26) and that editorials in the aftermath of the trials had a strong influence on public opinion (94-96). While newspaper readership was high, proving this direct causal link is difficult. To his credit, Shalhope also analyzes bank-related public meetings, citizens’ memorials, and other literary devices of political culture. But he does not explore precisely why antebellum newspapers used anonymous pseudonyms and engaged in such vituperative rhetoric. This was, after all, the era of the party press, and newspapers were the key mechanism that connected party leaders with average voters. Editors also had a monetary incentive to publish violent language. Their success was not only dependent on increasing voter turnout, higher subscription rates, and building a party structure, but newspaper editors, through financial necessity, had to seek out political patronage and printing contracts. Publishing extreme commentary could help achieve this objective. Furthermore, pseudonyms such as “A Creditor” and “Junius” were often, in fact, masking editors or elite politicians, not subscribers. In doing so, editors created the illusion of public support for their views and purported to speak for public opinion. In the absence of reliable polling, public sentiment in the antebellum era is difficult to gauge.

The book’s concluding chapter may raise issues for historians of the Civil War. Between 1838 and 1860, slavery, immigration, class animosities, and debates over popular sovereignty in the western territories reconfigured the two-party system, with large slaveholders gravitating toward the Democratic Party (158-159). Yet Shalhope also claims that the “dramatically restructured Democratic Party espoused the same principles presented so forcefully by Samuel Harker and his fellow Democrats during the fall elections of 1836” and that the debate over secession in Maryland “rested upon precisely the same ideological beliefs that sustained the Whig and Democratic persuasions of 1836” (160-161). Drawing a parallel between calls for secession and earlier Jacksonian appeals to popular sovereignty is problematic. The author also indicates his sympathies when he says that with secession repulsed, “popular sovereignty had truly become a political fiction” (163). Throughout the book, Shalhope seems to lament the failure of Democratic appeals to the social contract, as well as the increasing power of state authority promoted by Whigs.

All things considered, however, the book is a must-read. Not beholden exclusively to the back-room wheeling-and-dealing of elite politics, nor the quotidian qualities of daily life, Shalhope successfully integrates political, intellectual, and social history. His chapter on the riot is especially exciting, giving readers a sense of the grass-roots political activism that pervaded antebellum America.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2.5 (March, 2011).

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Stephen Campbell is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of “Hickory Wind: The Role of Personality and the Press in Andrew Jackson’s Bank War in Missouri, 1831-1837,” Missouri Historical Review (2007). His dissertation project analyzes Andrew Jackson’s Bank War with special attention to newspaper editors, political patronage, and bank loans.

In May 1889, Walt Whitman’s friends bought the poet a wheelchair for his birthday. The elaborate celebration planned that year was scheduled to take place on the day of his birth, May 31, when Whitman would turn seventy. But the task of purchasing Whitman a wheeled “out-door push chair” (as it is called in his correspondence) commenced earlier that month.^[1] Finding it increasingly difficult to go outside, Whitman confessed to Horace Traubel on May 6 that he was beginning to feel cooped up at his home at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, New Jersey. “How good it would be,” he said, “to get out into the air—freely to breathe it out of doors once more.”^[2] Traubel mentioned that members of his celebration committee Henry L. Bonsall and Geoffrey Buckwalter had suggested they find Whitman a wheelchair, saying they “would fix the rest of it,” meaning they would cover the expense.^[3] Whitman perked up. “I think we might try it, boy,” he said.^[4] The search was quickly underway.

Whitman already had in mind the kind of chair he wanted. He had become familiar with wheelchairs available for rent at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 (fig. 2). “I know very well the chairs they used at the Centennial, but I want one a little different from them in shape: they were short-backed—I want a back up this high,” he told Traubel, “motioning above his head.”^[5] He continued: “I do not object to plainness—in fact, I want a plain chair, but want comfort—a big back. And the seat must be liberal in size—and it must be strong.”^[6] Later that evening, additional preferences occurred to him. “I want a plain chair—no cushions—not a cushioned chair,” he clarified, “wicker-bottom, something like that—and solid.”^[7] Traubel interjected, “And liberal in size.” Whitman agreed, “Yes—that undoubtedly. But that will come about easily. Most of the users of these chairs are old plugs like me—broad at the beam—who won’t be squeezed down at their time of life.”^[8] By the next day he had prepared a card for Traubel with explicit instructions:

 

Wanted:

A strong first-rate out-door chair for an old 200 lb. invalid—to be pushed or pulled along the sidewalks and on the ferry boats—roomy chair, back high—ratan or reed seating and back (no cushions or stuffing)

Go to Wanamaker’s [Grand Depot, at Market Street and 13^th Street in Philadelphia] first and interview the charge of the chair &c. Department and show hi[m] this card—[9]

 

 

The next day Traubel took the ferry to Philadelphia, accompanied by Whitman’s nurse Ed Wilkins, to see if they could find something aligned with Whitman’s wishes. “At Wanamaker’s we hit upon a chair which Ed fell in love with,” Traubel tells us.^[10] By May 9, it was all Whitman could talk about. “I hate to miss all these fine days,” he told Traubel. “Oh! well—there are plenty more to come!” Traubel adds in his record, “He speaks to everyone of the possibility of getting out at last.”^[11] By May 10, it had arrived at the house on Mickle Street and awaited Whitman’s exploration in the parlor.

Before proceeding with this story—before moving from the chair’s arrival to Whitman’s encounter with it—we use this introduction to frame the themed issue that follows. Coinciding with the bicentennial anniversary of Whitman’s birth, this special issue of Common-place Journal proposes a reexamination of the poet’s life and work, beginning with the birthday of 1889. Two hundred years ago, Walt Whitman was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. Remembered as the poet of many things—of democracy, of the working class, of Lincoln’s mourning, of comradeship—Whitman is again the subject of collective memory. Feeling back toward his presence, local, national, and international commemorations feature celebrations, reunions, festivals, public readings, and public art as well as scholarly reconsiderations, instructive critique, and contested rememberings. This issue participates in these diverse forms of recollection. And yet, rather than starting in the year 1819, we ask what it would mean to start seventy birthdays afterward, the year his friends brought him a new wheelchair from Wanamaker’s. This moment brings together a celebration of life amidst old age and increasing debility. Prompted by this juxtaposition, we take the occasion of the bicentennial to ask: what else is there to say about the Whitmanian body, in particular? What dimensions have scholars missed? Which parts have we left out?          

 

Considering the extent and importance of the scholarship that has been written on representations of the body in Whitman, these questions may seem like an inadvisable starting point. Can there be anything left to disinter, really? Daunting as the task is, we take it as instructive that the poet’s body was never really buried to begin with. Not entirely, that is. Most of his remains reside in an elaborate, granite, self-designed tomb on a hillside in Camden’s Harleigh Cemetery. But not everything made it in. After his death, Mary Oakes Davis, the steadfast housekeeper on Mickle Street since 1885, gave locks of his hair to his friends. The gray strands reached the likes of John Burroughs and Herbert Gilchrist and can now be accessed at the University of Pennsylvania, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and elsewhere (fig. 3). More gruesome is the story of Whitman’s brain. Following the poet’s autopsy on March 27, 1892, Philadelphia physician Dr. Henry Ware Cattell removed Whitman’s brain with the intent of preservation. Under a year later, the preservation effort had gone south. “I am a fool,” Cattell confessed in his diary, “a damnable fool, with no conscious memory, or fitness for any learned position. I let Walt Whitman’s brain spoil by not having the jar properly covered. Discovered it in the morning.”^[12] These details are morbid. But this recollection of Whitman’s dispersed material body—disseminated in the form of relics and as decomposing matter^[13]—is, perhaps, the best place to begin for a revisiting of the Whitmanian body we think we know well. Reliably, as he said would be the case, Whitman’s body exceeds and eludes our best efforts to contain it.  

Building on previous scholarship, we propose that there is more to be said about the ways bodies enter and move across his life and writing. Specifically, this issue aims to draw attention to intersections between Whitman and four growing fields of scholarship that intersect in important ways: the medical humanities; memory studies and its relationship to theories of mind; age discourse; and, most centrally, as an area of inquiry connecting all of the pieces that follow, the field of disability studies.

 

Contextualizing Whitman in Nineteenth-Century Disability History

A brief history of disability studies will help frame the scholarship that follows. Disability studies (DS) has grown rapidly over the last three-and-a-half decades. Beginning in the 1980s, DS importantly distinguished between two models of disability: the medical model and the social model. While medical discourse has traditionally located disability in individual bodies, the social model of disability considers how built environments and social attitudes constitute disabling forces by creating barriers to access. That is, DS focuses less on fixing individual bodies than interrogating the social structures that disable some while enabling others. To politicize disability as a social phenomenon allows us to shift away from seeing bodies as disabled and to consider instead the interactions between those bodies and steep staircases, curbs without cuts, and inaccessible forms of transportation. At the same time, with the expansion of the category of disability beyond the iconic wheelchair user to include people with mental and chronic disabilities, the tension between social and medical models of disability has become the subject of ongoing debate. More recently, scholars such as Beth Linker and Catherine Kudlick have suggested the importance of placing disability theory and medical care in dialogue.^[14] Other scholars such as Tobin Siebers and Alison Kafer have proposed alternative models that consider the material realities of the body alongside their social experiences.^[15] One goal of the scholarship in this special issue is to combine these approaches, recognizing the social construction of disability, alongside potentially intersecting categories such as age and neurodiversity, while also examining and reimagining the intersection between disability, medical care, and questions of access.  

The matter of historical change introduces another dimension. Because disability studies emerged out of the disability civil rights movement of the late twentieth-century U.S., a majority of work in literary disability criticism has focused on post-1945 literature. While Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, in her important book Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature, addressed the proliferation of impairments in the nineteenth-century U.S., Sari Altschuler makes a call for disability studies to more “carefully historicize discussions of disability in American literary and cultural studies.”^[16] We cannot rely on contemporary definitions of disability to frame our understanding of it in the past. Drawing our attention to early novelistic representations, Altschuler notes that in the early nineteenth-century U.S., disability was understood as “impairment” rather than “identity.” Thus, writers tend to cast disability not as a claimed identity but rather as a bodily limitation. In a related argument, Ellen Samuels has shown how mid-nineteenth century shifts in American politics and medicine set the terms for a reconfiguration of political subjectivity through “fantasies of identification,” meaning an impulse to “definitively identify bodies, to place them in categories delineated by race, gender, or ability status, and then to validate that placement through a verifiable, biological mark of identity.”^[17] Tensions between earlier conceptions of disability as impairment and burgeoning cultures of identification grow increasingly prevalent in the postbellum period.

It is significant to note that these historical frameworks do not always fit comfortably with disability activism, given the way historicist scholarship is often used to interrogate and denaturalize modern identity politics. Nevertheless, to understand how people in nineteenth-century and early American contexts understood the social experience of disablement, it is necessary to attend to its diverse forms and terminologies depending on context. Disability studies’ more recent emphasis on impairment and its social effects offers a reminder that pre-twentieth-century historicism and critical theory are not incompatible. Rather, as Altschuler, Samuels, Benjamin Reiss, and other scholars have demonstrated, attention to the historical dimensions of disability provides an opportunity to combine historicist and theoretical models in ways both generative and genuine to the experiences they are used to document and understand.^[18]

This issue of Common-place posits as one of its central premises that disability studies has the potential to transform approaches to Whitman’s oeuvre. Contributors show that Whitman played an important role in shaping conceptions of ability and debility among nineteenth-century readerships. In the poem titled “Broad-Axe Poem” in the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, for instance, Whitman imagines superior health as the engine of human progress. “Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands, / Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands, / There the greatest city stands,” he proclaims. Later in the same poem, he proceeds: “All waits, or goes by default, till a strong being appears; / A strong being is the proof of the race, and of the ability of the universe.” Here Whitman appeals not just to illustrations of wellness but also to superlatives indexing health at its utmost limit—the “healthiest fathers” and “best-bodied mothers” (what the poem elsewhere calls “the brawniest breed”)—as the most important metrics of civilizational worth. He continues by routing these metrics through one of his favorite rhetorical modes: a rhetoric of exemplarity (familiar in the self-descriptive sequence from 1855, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos”), contending that a “strong being” bears the weight not just of its species, but, moreover, of providing “proof” for the “ability of the universe.”^[19] Here and elsewhere, Whitman frames Leaves of Grass as a tribute to superior bodily forms.

Acknowledging the repetition of this emphasis in Whitman’s writing allows us to better understand how his poetry contributed to establishing within nineteenth-century American (and transatlantic) letters what disability theorist Tobin Siebers terms an “ideology of ability.”^[20] With this concept, Siebers designates a social preoccupation with “natural gifts, talents, intelligence, creativity, prowess, imagination, education, [and] the eagerness to strive”—a list closely resembling Whitman’s own penchant for cataloging desired attributes and achievements, particularly of the male physique. Think, for instance, of Whitman’s invocation of the enslaved man at auction in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. A section that advocates for recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, it does so by routing that advocacy through an enumeration of the enslaved body’s signs of exceptional physical capacity:

 

Examine these limbs, red black or white . . . . they are very cunning in tendon and
nerve;
They shall be stript that you may see them.

Exquisite senses, lifelit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breastmuscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, goodsized
arms and legs,

And wonders within there yet.

 

Reliably in Leaves of Grass, in the 1855, 1856, and 1860 editions especially, Whitman grounded his iconic honesty about the natural functions of the human body within a celebration of normative bodily capacity, which he used to unite people divided by other social and economic categories. It would be a mistake to understand this element of the early editions as consistent or ideologically stable. As early as the 1855 edition of the poem that would later be called “Song of Myself,” Whitman troubles his own imperatives, clarifying, I “know that they who have eyes are divine, and the blind and lame are equally divine, / And that my steps drag behind yours yet go before them, / And are aware how I am with you no more than I am with everybody.” Even in the 1856 version of “Broad-Axe Poem” quoted above, Whitman conjures the material body of the axe that introduces the poem as a personification of physiological alterity: “BROAD-AXE, shapely, naked, wan! / Head from the mother’s bowels drawn! / Wooded flesh and metal bone! limb only one and lip only one!” Here and elsewhere, we find a fluid, ever-shifting relationship to age and embodiment to be one of the most prominent characteristics of Whitman’s writing. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that Whitman’s celebration of the capable body, of supreme health without defect, became one of the most familiar qualities associated with his aphoristic style.

Keeping this aspect of Whitman’s work in mind, this issue proposes, simultaneously, that to regard Whitman’s work as operating from an exclusively “able” vantage point is to discount the ways Whitman ventures to inhabit a radically diverse array of embodiments, both in his poetry and in the way he crafted his authorial persona around his work. Reliably, Whitman’s writing undermines imperatives to aspire to a fully normative physicality. The journalism and memoranda composed during the Civil War, deeply informed by his experience as a visitor to Washington’s makeshift military hospitals, embrace and linger with the experience of both physical and affective pain. Increasingly, as Leaves of Grass evolves over time, we find its author dismantling binary conceptions of bodily wholeness and partiality. Following his first stroke, which left Whitman paralyzed on his left side, concise notes jotted down outdoors in New Jersey revel in and unfold alternative mobilities. Broadly speaking, across the last three decades of his life—in his correspondence, autobiographical meditations, and the late annexes added posthumously to Leaves of Grass—we find Whitman articulating with unmitigated candor his familiarity with illness, injury, disablement, and aging. For readers familiar with Whitman’s biography, these turns will not seem surprising. Whitman offers a far-reaching account of disability and its nineteenth-century coordinates because his relationship to it became both proximate and deeply personal. While Leaves of Grass remained complex, retaining the poet’s attachment to virility and youth, from the war onward especially we find Whitman wrestling with difficult questions, from a recurring disenchantment with dominant medical protocol to his strategic manipulation of the fungibility of age discourse in crafting his public persona.

 

Why Whitman’s Body Now, Again?

Whitman’s bicentennial provides an opportunity to put cultural scripts oriented around celebrations of birth and life in dialogue with the transformative understanding of the body we encounter in scholarship at the intersection of disability, aging, theories of mind, and the history of medicine. In our most familiar narratives, birth conjures innocence, defenselessness, and a life yet unimagined. But the commemoration of aging, which birthdays denote, invites a plethora of social maneuverings. Birthdays may occasion merrymaking and quiet meditation. Rarely are birthdays accompanied by a seamless alignment between age and how old one feels. On the contrary, birthdays often disorient the bodies for which they account. As Sari Edelstein observes in her essay in this issue, Whitman was well-acquainted with the paradoxical, socially produced rhetorics of age operative during his lifetime, to the extent that he regularly relied “on age as a performative site of his imagined embodiments and as a strategy for enacting his universalizing project.” Thus, we ask, what better opportunity than Whitman’s 200th birthday to investigate his play with, refusals of, and shifting orientation toward corporeal expectations?

Previous Whitman scholarship has rarely grappled with the poet’s exploration of disability, even as these themes pervade his poetry, prose, notebooks, and correspondence. It is important to acknowledge that work has been done on his relationship to histories of medicine. Critics have discussed the many doctors the poet interacted with over the course of his life.^[21] Much has been said about the medical care Whitman himself provided during the Civil War in Washington’s hospitals. And much has been written on Whitman’s intersection with nineteenth-century medical science, including phrenology,^[22] mesmerism,^[23] hydropathy,^[24] evolutionary biology,^[25] and the chemistry of decomposition.^[26] This previous scholarship informs this special issue, but just as disability studies as a field has urged scholars to explore the history of medicine with a critical lens, in order to illuminate and redefine disability as a social state comprising forms of embodiment that may intersect with but also far exceed medical discourse, so too does it become necessary to place a more precise focus on representations of disability and aging in Whitman’s writings.

A few scholarly contributions stand out for the roles they have played in opening up a conversation about Whitman and disability thus far. In his essay “How Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?” Robert J. Scholnick (one of the contributors to the present issue), provides a formative intervention into the complexity and contradictory nature of Whitman’s writing on disability.^[27] Scholnick demonstrates that, on the one hand, Whitman’s antebellum writing “deployed a rhetoric of health, disease, and disability to address the national crisis” over slavery, exploiting figures of disability to posit a “metonymic” relationship between national crisis and bodily impairment (“The Eighteenth Presidency!” being a prime example). By contrast, Scholnick shows how Whitman’s postbellum work, especially the prose and poetry he began to compose as a hospital visitor during the Civil War, begins to articulate a reconsideration of the significance of debility and a shift toward a national culture built on empathy. Building on Scholnick’s essay, though in the context of writing Whitman did after his stroke in 1873, poet and critic Stephen Kuusisto has proposed that we should understand the poet’s experimental 1882 autobiography Specimen Days, and Collect as a major “progenitor” of the “disability memoir,” characterized by “a wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose.”^[28] In addition to Scholnick and Kuusisto’s work, we find Max Cavitch’s work on Whitman’s poetics of bereavement in American Elegy to be critical for its call to reconsider the relationship between pain and eroticism in Drum-Taps and elsewhere.^[29] In an analysis of the elegy for Lincoln “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” Cavitch shows how Whitman develops a poetics of mourning where the debilitating effects of bereavement prove to be unexpectedly compatible with “the staggering pathos of erotic liberation.”

In addition to these influences, this special issue of Common-place takes particular inspiration from two recent contributions to Whitman scholarship. One is Zachary Turpin’s 2015 discovery of a previously unknown newspaper column from 1858 devoted to health and fitness advice, published by Whitman under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor,” titled “Manly Health and Training: With Off-Hand Hints toward Their Conditions.”^[30] A surname he took from his mother, the Velsor persona gave Whitman a platform to adapt a poetics increasingly invested in fraternity to a readership expected to train their bodies toward its author’s imagined ideals. Why dip into a lesser genre even after the poet had won and publicized the approval of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others? With the 1855 and 1856 editions of Leaves of Grass achieving limited circulation and recognition, Velsor got Whitman paid. However, as contributors to this issue show, a notable ideological cohesion also links Leaves of Grass to Whitman’s exercise advice. Most importantly for the present issue, “Manly Health and Training” provides insight into the evolution of Whitman’s perspective on health, medicine, and antebellum standards of physical capacity. On the one hand, as multiple contributors to this issue discuss, Whitman’s early dread of disease and debility is on full display. “[W]hat can be more debilitating than to be continually surrounded by sickly people, and to have to do with them only?” Velsor writes. On the other hand, as Manuel Herrero-Puertas notes in his review of Turpin’s 2017 edition of the series, published in this issue, contradictions abound, and the series features compelling instabilities wrought by Whitman’s willful appropriation of popular science.

This issue also takes inspiration from one of its contributors, scholar and poet Lindsay Tuggle, whose poetry is featured here and whose 2017 book The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War makes a major contribution to our understanding of Whitman’s intersection with the history of medicine.^[31] Exquisitely written, The Afterlives of Specimens introduces many important insights and revelations, among them a compelling interpretation of Whitman’s approach to the medical concept named in Tuggle’s title, the specimen, and a reading of the rise of embalming practices as they influenced Drum-Taps. As noted in the review of The Afterlives of Specimens published in this issue, although Tuggle does not engage with disability studies in a concentrated way, her book evinces a clear investment in many of the questions scholars of disability pursue. Without a doubt, any scholar engaged in historicizing the intersection between Whitman and nineteenth-century conceptions of disability will find The Afterlives of Specimens to be an invaluable resource, and multiple pieces here engage with Tuggle as they embark upon this work. Four of Tuggle’s own poems appear in this issue, accompanied by a statement on her research methods and the way they influence her poetic craft, an influence that, in turn, offers insight into the practices that inform her scholarship.

Before concluding this introduction, we want to introduce what we take to be the five major contributions to Whitman and disability studies provided in our featured essays. In keeping with our stated intent of putting disability history and critical theory in dialogue, each of the essays articulates an original vantage point for undertaking this work.

Jess Libow’s article “Song of My Self-Help: Whitman’s Rehabilitative Reading” inaugurates this issue by historicizing Whitman’s conceptions of ability through the rise of antebellum self-help literature as a familiar genre. Libow goes further by demonstrating that the 1858 series of articles “Manly Health and Training” can only be adequately understood when it is put in dialogue with the self-help genre Whitman was attempting to imitate. Published between the second and third editions of Leaves of Grass, “Manly Health and Training” took inspiration from contemporary character and exercise advice manuals that emphasized everything from dietary reform and weight training to the practice of emotional expression. In a groundbreaking turn, Libow shows that “Manly Health and Training” likewise incorporates advice on the health benefits of reading, as well as methodological instruction for getting the most out of a literature-inclusive exercise regimen. Through sensitive readings of Velsor’s health advice next to the editorial emendations being made to Leaves of Grass between 1856 and 1860, Libow shows how the series illuminates the material connection Whitman imagined between a praxis of reading poetry and the potential he intended to instill in the lines of his poetry to remake his reader’s body in a healthier form. Libow further demonstrates how “Manly Health and Training” is replete with representations of disability even as it advocates for their removal and effacement.

In “Whitman’s Wandering Mind,” Christopher Hanlon takes us on an exploration of Whitman’s corporeal forms of recollecting lost experience in Leaves of Grass, focusing especially on the third edition of 1860. Hanlon shows how Whitman processes memory in his poetry in the form of a “repetitive, invasive mental experience” of a “touch now absent.” Across the poet’s work, reckonings with loss thus provide an aperture onto forms of memory irreducible to mere cognition. In place of this limited understanding of memory, we find Whitman articulating an intimate, indivisible synthesis of body and mind. As Hanlon has noted elsewhere in scholarship on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s memory loss, during the mid-nineteenth century “mental processes were increasingly understood in terms of a greater integrating of psychic with somatic systems, biological matrixes composed of brain cells, the nervous system, and the electrical, chemical, magnetic, and reflexive processes through which such systems interacted and in which were composed a series of psychological effects.”^[32] Analyzing the poem that begins “Once I pass’d through a populous city,” Hanlon illuminates how Whitman deploys a similar integration of psychic and somatic phenomena. Invoking Margaret Price’s call to acknowledge the contemporary proliferation of discourse on neurodiversity not as an effect of constructed binaries but, rather, as a sign of genuine psychological variation,^[33] Hanlon shows how Whitman advanced a poetics of loss resonant with nineteenth-century explorations of psychopathology, which he embraced as a carefully studied, lifelong praxis.

Robert Scholnick’s article “Dispatches to Henry Raymond’s New York Times” draws our attention to journalistic coverage of the state of Washington’s military hospitals during the Civil War that Whitman published in the New York Times, writings that have tended to receive less attention than better-known works such as Drum-Taps (1865) and Memoranda during the War (1875). In these articles, Whitman endeavored to advocate on behalf of the unmet social and psychological needs of the thousands of injured and dying soldiers transported to Washington’s hospitals. More precisely, Scholnick argues that Whitman recognized the problem of wartime trauma, what psychiatrists now term post-traumatic stress disorder, and that he made it his duty to visit soldiers, many of them processing injury, disablement, and the trauma of the war simultaneously, and to encourage others to do the same. Along the way, Scholnick explores the way Whitman’s journalism for the New York Times illustrated concrete practices Whitman advocated to intervene in standard medical protocol he found neglectful and physically harmful. In this way, Scholnick shows also how Whitman anticipates debates in disability studies concerning how medical and social models of representing injury and impairment shape the way people access medical care.

Turning to nineteenth-century material cultures of disability, Bethany Schneider brings us to Whitman’s cane, which became necessary following the series of strokes that rendered him partially paralyzed. Beginning with her own pilgrimage to Whitman’s deathbed, Schneider describes her fascination with his final wooden cane, currently propped up against a bedroom wall in the Camden house, on display. Sketching an early account of assistive technology, Schneider shows how the verb “to lean” functions in Whitman’s life and poems. Schneider attends to how the cane represents not only disability but class, sexuality, and race relations in the nineteenth-century U.S. Through a philological investigation of the intersection between canes and Whitman’s attraction to the metaphor of the calamus root in Leaves of Grass, Schneider goes on to demonstrate that, in fact, we cannot understand his poetics of same-sex desire without understanding the centrality of the cane as a material referent for the forms of sociality his “Calamus” sequence unfolds. The art of leaning, an action Whitman invokes in dialogue with vocabularies of disablement from the early editions of Leaves of Grass up through the late conversations recorded by Traubel, became for Whitman a primary referent for the adhesive togetherness at the center of his lifelong project.

Delving deeper into the subject of age discourse, Sari Edelstein explores Whitman’s diverse articulations of aging in his postbellum writing and self-fashioning. As Edelstein has argued elsewhere regarding age as an analytic and discursive resource, “Chronological age” came to represent a consolidating “supervisory function” in the nineteenth century, “scripting individuals into age-appropriate behaviors, affects, and relationships.”^[34] In dialogue with these shifting social roles, nineteenth-century literature sometimes functioned as a site of ideological parallelism, but it could also provide a resource for negotiation, contestation, and outright rebellion. In this same work, Edelstein calls for greater attention to points of intersection between aging and disability. While we “cannot equate old age with disability,” she argues, as “embodied, stigmatized statuses” they “overlap as similarly subject to regulation, rehabilitation, and pathologization.”^[35] Exploring a constellation of what she calls “Whitman’s geriatric vistas,” Edelstein shows how Whitman at once insisted on candidly representing his experience of his aging body, while, at the same time, he strategically refashioned conventions of age discourse to his own reputational advantage.

We follow these five featured essays with additional segments that extend our focus on Whitman and disability studies, including two book reviews, a “Poetic Research” segment, and a segment for “Tales from the Vault.” The last of these explores a little-known publication of correspondence Whitman wrote documenting his experience of paralysis to his friend Peter Doyle, published posthumously under the title Calamus in 1897.

 

New Pathways, Alternative Mobilities

As we have noted, birthdays are complicated. They come with a lot of pressure. Occasions for looking backward (have I accomplished enough?) and forward (what is to come?), they impel self-reflection and attention to the body’s relationship to time. Whitman’s birthdays were no different. Some, like the seventieth birthday with which this issue begins, opened up new encounters. This was true of Whitman’s fourth birthday, too, which arrived just four days after his family’s move from Long Island to Brooklyn, a city (not yet consolidated as a borough) for which the poet famously developed a lifelong love. Others that this issue explores arrived in times of sadness, such as the birthday of 1873, which came just eight days after his mother, Louisa, had passed at the age of seventy-seven.

In 1863, the month of May found him volunteering at the war hospitals in Washington. Four days before that birthday, he wrote to Thomas P. Sawyer, “Well, dear brother, the great battle between Hooker & Lee came off, & what a battle it was—without any decisive results again, though at the cost of so many brave men’s lives & limbs—it seems too dreadful, that such bloody contests, without settling any thing, should go on. The hospitals here are filled with the wounded, I think the worst cases & the plentiest of any fighting yet.”^[36] Two years later, Whitman was watching the war come to a close. On May 24, 1865, he wrote, “FOR two days now the broad spaces of Pennsylvania avenue along to Treasury hill, and so by detour around to the President’s house, and so up to Georgetown, and across the aqueduct bridge, have been alive with a magnificent sight, the returning armies.”^[37]

The 1889 birthday was momentous, in no small part because Whitman had successfully obtained the out-door push chair he desired. On the day the chair arrived at the Mickle Street house from Wanamaker’s, Traubel took it up to Whitman’s bedroom on the second floor. “Started to rise instantly,” Traubel says of the moment Whitman saw it.^[38] “It looks like a glorious opportunity!” were the first words out of the poet’s mouth. “Guess I’ll just step into it at once and have the question settled.” Once situated, he expressed his satisfaction immediately. “It seems just made for me—or I for it!” he said. “A perfect fit! And so easy too!” For a moment, Traubel says, he “sat there composedly.” The chair was not manual but designed to be pushed by a companion. Whitman began to direct his friend. “Move it, Horace,” he said, “let us see now how she goes.” Traubel recalls,

 

And when I saw that the mere motion seemed to rejoice him, I said jokingly, “If the worst comes, Ed can wheel you up and down the room [as opposed to trying it outdoors],” he replying, “That is so—but that would be a poor apology indeed for the real thing!”

 

Traubel called Ed into the room, and Ed began to push the chair, too, “moving it about, manipulating it easily.” They did not take it outside immediately. Instead, Mary Davis’s foster son Warren Fritzinger, who was also there, “kissed him good-by and went out.” Ed soon followed. Whitman said to Traubel: “I guess I’ll stay in it a while. With my usual instinct to keep comfortable when I am so, I’ll stay in this good position!” Traubel writes, “And so there he sat, still in the middle of the floor, cane dangling from his hand, when I left.”

On May 11, the day after the chair’s arrival, Whitman went out. Ed guided the chair as Whitman directed. Later that evening, after they had returned home, Traubel records that Whitman was eager to recall the day to him. “[S]it down!” he said. “I have been out at last! The experiment has proved a success!”^[39] He went on, “I was out, I guess, more than an hour and a half. I sat half an hour in the front here, under the trees. We made quite an extensive detour, though we did not start out with that idea. I expected to go around the block, then stop. But when we got down the street, I had Ed go on, so that by going four or five blocks, we got to the [Delaware] river.” Traubel asked how he felt afterward, wondering if he felt “wearied.”^[40] Whitman corrected the misplaced worry. “No—quite the contrary—it exhilarated me.” Traubel says Whitman went on, “in his fervent way,” “And the chair…it was a wonderful true support—a revelation of ease and comfort.” “And we’re going again and again,” he said multiple times, “and we’ll send the good news to all our friends” (fig. 4).

The chair proceeds to become a prominent part of Traubel’s records. In concluding this introduction, however, we want to return to the first scene we receive of Whitman getting to know the new chair in his bedroom and deciding to remain in it as everyone exits the room, sitting “still in the middle of the floor, cane dangling from his hand.” In this evocative scene of Whitman seated, staying with his satisfaction, and seeing that satisfaction as a worthy pathway of its own—worth following, however fleeting—this issue begins. The pathways our contributors seek are divergent and take myriad forms. As Whitman would have preferred, they describe contradictory perspectives and incommensurable ontologies. And yet, they find common ground in the alternative mobilities they take to reach their destinations. The following essays, reviews, and meditations show Whitman’s corpus, notoriously capacious, to take a greater interest than critics have acknowledged in the interface between capacity and incapacity. We thus begin with the wheelchair in Whitman’s bedroom, his motion imminent. Here, once again, Whitman invites us to move with and alongside him.

 

 

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our contributors for their excellent scholarship—Sari Edelstein, Christopher Hanlon, Manuel Herrero-Puertas, Jess Libow, Bob Scholnick, Bethany Schneider, and Lindsay Tuggle, with whom we feel privileged to have collaborated over the last several months. We are indebted to the people at Common-place and the American Antiquarian Society who contributed to making this special issue possible, including Nan Wolverton, James Moran, Caroline Stoffel, Jaclyn Penny, and Catherine Preus. We thank Reuben Gelley Newman for his research assistance as we began to conceive of the call for papers last summer. We would like to thank the many Whitman scholars who have had a formative influence on our thinking. We had the opportunity to have useful discussions with many of these scholars at the Whitman 200 conference at the University of Pennsylvania in March, among them Jay Grossman, Matt Cohen, Meredith McGill, Virginia Jackson, Michael Warner, Ed Whitley, Michael Winship, Ed Folsom, John Pollack, Peter Stallybrass, and Lynne Farrington. We are grateful to the editors of the WhitmanArchive.org, an incalculably valuable resource we relied upon throughout our work on this issue.

 

________________

[1] For references in the letters, see Walt Whitman’s “Letter to William Douglas O’Connor,” May 6, 1889, as well as his “Letter to William Sloane Kennedy,” May 8, 1889.

[2] Horace Traubel. With Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 5. (1964): 139.

[3] Traubel, 139.

[4] Traubel, 139.

[5] Traubel, 139.

[6] Traubel, 139.

[7] Traubel, 140.

[8] Traubel, 140.

[9] Traubel, 144.

[10] Traubel, 152.

[11] Traubel, 154.

[12] For the recent essay that revealed this discovery to scholars, see Sheldon Lee Gosline. “‘I am a fool’: Dr. Henry Cattell’s Private Confession about What Happened to Whitman’s Brain.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2014): 158-62.

[13] For a seminal work on the theme of “dissemination” in Whitman’s life and poetry, see Michael Moon’s Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

[14] See Beth Linker’s “On the Borderland of Medical and Disability History: A Survey of the Fields” in Bulletin of the History of Medicine 87.4 (2013): 499-535 and Catherine Kudlick’s “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’” in The American Historical Review 108.3 (2003): 763-793.

[15] See Alison Kafer’s discussion of the “political/relational model” of disability in Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN, 2013) and Tobin Siebers’s “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body” in American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737-754.

[16] See Altschuler’s “‘Ain’t One Limb Enough’: Historicizing Disability in the American Novel,” American Literature 86.2 (2014): 147.

[17] See Ellen Samuels, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race (New York, 2014). Samuels goes on to demonstrate how disability has at once been shaped by these ideologies of identification and functioned to problematize their basic assumptions. On the one hand, disability “haunts” the rise of identity politics, in that it has reliably “function[ed] as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.” Thus, we find literature on race, gender, and other categories of analysis consistently relying on vocabularies of disability to articulate the effects and nature of their corresponding disenfranchisement, sometimes through the invocation of medical authority, at other times by invoking disability figuratively. On the other hand, Samuels shows how “the disabled body presents a unique challenge to an identificatory system based upon classification, since its nonnormativity manifests itself through a vast diversity of form and function” (13) Thus, disability also exceeds the scope of liberal notions of identification, transgressing the imagined parameters of identity by virtue of its heterogeneous and endlessly proliferating forms.  

[18] For more on the history of disability in early America, see Sari Altschuler and Cristobal Silva’s introduction to the special issue “Early American Disability Studies” in Early American Literature 52.1 (2017): 1-27. For a recent podcast on disability history in the nineteenth century, see Season 2, Episode 5 of the C19 podcast, “Beyond Ahab’s Peg Leg: Disability in 19th-Century American Literature,” featuring a conversation between Altschuler, Reiss, Samuels, and Ittai Orr.

[19] To be sure, in this toggling move, Whitman seems to lose control of his own nested extrapolations: the poem imagines comparative capacity as the necessary proof of ability for the universe itself. Yet, by virtue of its infinite totality, the universe has no exterior referent by which to measure the scope of ability Whitman alleges to evaluate.

[20] Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory. (Ann Arbor, 2008).

[21] Charles Feinberg. “Walt Whitman and His Doctors.” Archives of Internal Medicine Vol. 114, No. 6 (1964): 834-842.

[22] Michael Warner, “Introduction.” The Portable Walt Whitman. Penguin, 2003.

[23] See Catherine Waitinas, “’Animal Magnetism’: The ‘Cotemporary’ Roots of Whitman’s ‘Is Mesmerism True?’.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 34 (2016), 55-68.

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

[25] See Robert J. Scholnick, “Science.” J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

[26] See Maria Farland, “Decomposing City: Walt Whitman’s New York and the Science of Life and Death.” ELH, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Winter 2007): 799-827.

[27] Robert J. Scholnick, “‘How Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?’: Whitman and the Dis-ease of the Perfect Body.” Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities, edited by Sharon L. Snyder, et. al (Modern Language Association, 2002).

[2] Stephen Kuusisto, “Walt Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days’ and the Discovery of the Disability Memoir.” Prose Studies, vol. 27, No. 1-2 (2005): 155-162.

[29] Max Cavitch, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. (Minneapolis 2006).

[30] See Zachary Turpin’s edition, Manly Health and Training: To Teach the Science of a Sound and Beautiful Body (New York: 2017).

[31] Lindsay Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War (Iowa City, 2017).

[32] Christopher Hanlon, Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style. (Oxford, 2018): 26.

[33] See Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor, 2011).

[34] Sari Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age. (Oxford, 2019), 6.

[35] Edelstein, 13

[36] Walt Whitman, “Letter to Thomas P. Sawyer” (May 27, 1863).  

[37] Walt Whitman. Specimen Days, and Collect (Philadelphia, 1882): 73.

[38] Traubel, 167

[39] Traubel, 169.

[40] Traubel, 170.

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

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About the Authors

Don James McLaughlin is an assistant professor of nineteenth-century American literature at the University of Tulsa and the 2018-2019 Hench post-dissertation fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. He earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017. His writing has appeared in American Literature and the New Republic and is forthcoming in Literature and Medicine and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Clare Mullaney is a visiting assistant professor of English at Hamilton College. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her dissertation, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932,” considers how bodily and mental impairments—from eyestrain and word-blindness (the late nineteenth-century term for dyslexia) to war wounds, melancholy, and old age—transformed everyday practices of reading and writing.

“Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,/
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?”^[1]

 

When you think of Walt Whitman, you likely imagine him in one of two flamboyant performances of age: either striking his proletariat pose as “one of the roughs,” youthful and ruddy, or as the “good gray poet,” wizened, seated, and a bit disheveled. With these two strategic images of his aging body, Whitman aimed to condition readings of his works, and they have continued to shape our understanding of his career as a poet and public figure. But these iconic personas of youth and old age also direct us to consider the treatment of age in Whitman’s oeuvre and to reflect on how his own aging and debility register in his work, inspiring and constraining the scope of his poetic imagination (fig. 1).  

Some of the best-known lines from Leaves of Grass invoke age as a way of gesturing to the poet’s fantasy of inhabiting the subjectivities and bodies of all Americans. That is, Whitman recognized age as an important category of difference but also one that he believed he could transgress through poetry, at least in 1855.  Consider these well-known lines from “Song of Myself”:

I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuffed with the stuff that is coarse, and stuffed with the stuff that is fine.

Here and elsewhere in the poem, Whitman imaginatively inhabits the bodies of children and adults, setting up old and young as consequential and opposing statuses.  Later, he adopts the persona of a grandmother: “It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman’s,/ I sit low in a strawbottom chair and carefully darn my grandson’s stockings.” Whitman imaginatively assumes her habitus, claiming her body as his own. And in “Song of Joys,” he again ventriloquizes an elderly woman: “I am more than eighty years of age, I am the most venerable mother.” That he specifically calls attention to the bodies of old women might suggest an attunement to the marginalized or discounted members of society. But Whitman’s use of age in 1855 is no more progressive than his engagement with other subordinated subject positions; instead, age categories offer a figurative avenue for Whitman to signal his capacious democratic sensibility and his psychic mobility. Along with class, race, and gender, Whitman relies on age as a performative site of his imagined embodiments and as a strategy for enacting his universalizing project. 

But how did Whitman experience his own aging? What did it mean for him to become old, to inhabit an aging body, not merely to imagine it? Over the last few decades, critics have devoted increasing attention to Whitman’s later work, acknowledging it as an overlooked aspect of his oeuvre and theorizing its neglect.^[2] For example, Elizabeth Lorang points to “the prevailing assumption … that Whitman in old age is neither as interesting nor as radical as the poet of the 1855 Leaves of Grass.”^[3] And Anton Vander Zee observes that it has now “become common… to note that Whitman’s late work has been unjustly overlooked and neglected.”^[4]  

Whitman criticism tends not only to discount his later work, as these scholars acknowledge, but it also overlooks how the poet himself engages with age as a trope, as an analytic, and as a politically significant category of identity.^[5] Indeed, the prodigious new volume Walt Whitman in Context includes virtually every possible lens for reading the poet with the exception of age, despite its importance in his work, his career and persona, as well as its heightening ideological prominence in the culture at large during his lifetime. Attending to a portion of Whitman’s later work, primarily his 1888 newspaper poetry, this essay shows how his old-age poetry exploits—and violates—cultural scripts for late life, as they emerged at the end of the nineteenth century.     

As with any life, it is difficult to know when Whitman’s old age begins. After all, “old age” is a constructed category that tends to recede as one grows older; that is, even while aging is a biological reality, the stages of life are culturally produced categories, shaped by demographic, economic, and social conditions. With Whitman, we might mark the onset of his old age to 1873 when he suffered the first of several strokes. Or we could see the commencement of this phase of his life with Specimen Days, and Collect (1882), his war and disability memoir, which Lindsay Tuggle calls “the largest and arguably most significant work of Whitman’s old age.”^[6]  Or perhaps Whitman’s old age begins in 1884, at which time he moved into the house on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, supported by a rotating cast of caregivers and housekeepers.

 

Given the fact that old age is a social status as much as a biological one, we might trace the beginning of Whitman’s old age to his assumption of the persona of the “Good Gray Poet.” As Whitman scholars well know, William Douglas O’Connor coined the sobriquet “Good Gray Poet” in an 1866 pamphlet published to purify and dignify the poet’s reputation after he was expelled from a government job with the Secretary of the Interior because of the perceived indecency of Leaves of Grass the year before (fig. 2).  In his impassioned defense of Whitman, O’Connor described the poet with “flowing hair and fleecy beard, both very gray,” observing, “The men and women of America will love to gaze upon the stalwart form of the good gray poet, bending to heal the hurts of their wounded and soothe the souls of their dying.”^[7]  Significantly, this image invokes Whitman’s experience as a war nurse to cast him in the role of benevolent old man—that is, O’Connor essentially rebrands Whitman through age discourse, relying on the cultural assumption that old age and sexuality are incompatible, even unthinkable, together. In other words, the invention of the “Good Gray Poet” is a tactical deployment of the normative life course, which, in Jane Gallop’s words, “dictates which segments of life are properly sexual and which are not.”^[8]  Given that Whitman was only forty-six years old in 1866, the construction of this bearded old man is itself a beard to conceal the deviance with which he had become associated.

Whitman entered old age in a period when aging began to signify differently in U.S. culture. While old age was never a purely vaunted status in the U.S., it was more venerable—for white men—in an agrarian economy that looked to older generations as sources of wisdom. With the rise of market capitalism, urbanization, and mass media over the course of the nineteenth century, older people began to occupy a degraded position in the culture. The professionalization of medicine, along with the rise of social science, catalyzed a shift in the way Americans understood and experienced aging.  As historian Carole Haber writes, doctors and statisticians alike articulated a view of “senescence as a distinctive and debilitated state of existence.” Indeed, as older people lost their utility to the prevailing economic system, the aging body came to be seen as a sign of failure and a site of revulsion.^[9]

We might therefore see the second half of the nineteenth century not only as the era in which institutional care emerged for the aged but also as the era in which ageism itself was institutionalized. The management of elderly people in this period coincides with the regime of surveillance applied to disabled people, which resulted in the “ugly laws” and other strategies to remove “unsightly” and dependent people from public spaces.^[10]  Consider this 1875 article in Scribner’s: “Is it desirable that all men and women should become centenarians? Manifestly not. These shrunken, shriveled relics of a past age, in the knotted and tangled line of whose life personal identity has barely been preserved, would, if familiar to our eyes, produce a depressing effect on the living.”  This piece encapsulates the burgeoning cultural anxiety about old age as a state that challenges “identity” as well as the notion that old age is offensive to “our eyes,” in other words, unpleasant to see. Old people, according to this article, are “depressing” to the “living;” thus, they are not even alive.

Whitman, however, did not acquiesce to this notion of old age as irrelevant or unworthy of attention. On the contrary, he strategically capitalized on the persona of the Good Gray Poet, seizing upon the mutability of age as a discursive resource.^[11] In an anonymously published article, “Walt Whitman’s Actual American Position,” which appeared in the West Jersey Press in 1876, Whitman described himself as “old, poor, and paralyzed” but ignored by editors and publishing houses. Indeed, where his earlier self-promotional work cast him as an undiscovered literary ingénue, here Whitman characterizes himself as a poor, feeble, underappreciated old man, who is viewed with “disgust” by the mainstream literary establishment. As he puts it, American publishers and authors have met his poems with “determined denial,” and agents have “taken advantage of the author’s illness.”^[12] Whitman’s article draws on the pathos of old-age impoverishment, referring to “bleakness of the situation,” in order to heighten his own celebrity and sales.

Beyond this savvy management of age discourse for marketing purposes, Whitman meditated frequently on the idea of aging in his poetry. His later work attends to the material effects of aging and complicates the reductive ideas about elderliness that he propagated in self-promotional schemes and that circulated in mainstream culture. With the publication of his essay “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads” in the 1885 publication of his collected works and November Boughs (1888), the first annex to Leaves of Grass, Whitman took on his own aging as a vital and multivalent subject. This project of documenting old age culminated with his 1891 pamphlet, “Good-Bye My Fancy,” which became the second annex to Leaves of Grass. And beyond this, he left instructions for the publication of his posthumous work to be published in a volume he titled “Old Age Echoes.”

 

For the remainder of this essay, I turn to a selection of Whitman’s letters and poems from 1888, when he was sixty-nine years old and living on Mickle Street, suffering from a range of chronic conditions, often confined to his bed. For a writer who devoted much of his life to journalism, it is perhaps unsurprising that he continued to read and publish in newspapers as he grew increasingly house-bound, often bed-bound. As Ingrid Satelmajer notes, “Characterizations of Whitman in his final years at Camden depict the poet nearly buried as he read the tide of newspapers and magazines regularly delivered to him”^[13]  (fig. 3).

Until the end of his life, Whitman remained an avid reader of newspapers as well as a prolific contributor.  In 1888 alone, he published thirty-three poems in the New York Herald; these poems would ultimately appear together in November Boughs (1888). While the Herald originated as a sensational penny paper in the 1830s, it retained its focus on short pieces and amusements in the latter part of the century. Amid trivial gossip and entertainment news, Whitman’s poems on graves and dismantled ships and dead emperors stand out as an odd fit for the paper’s front page and its tone of levity and impersonality. Reading these public poems alongside Whitman’s correspondence with friends and relatives during this same year introduces a range of questions: What is the relationship between his declining health and his prolific output?  How can we interpret his decision to publish in the Herald during a time when he was grappling with immobility and chronic pain? (fig. 4) 

 

Whitman’s 1888 letters offer a starting point for thinking about how experiences of aging and disability shaped his poetry. The letters share a set of conventions, constituting a kind of genre unto themselves. Without fail, Whitman comments on his health (often noting the state of his bowels), reports the weather, and describes his meals, noting that he often only eats twice per day. (Some of his favorite foods are “corned beef & mince pie,” “chocolate & buckwheat cakes,” and Graham bread.)  Whether he is writing to O’Connor, William Kennedy, or Jerome Buck, there is little variation in these letters; a characteristic line is: “All goes as well & monotonously as usual (No news is good news).”  

In light of his own repeated claims to having “no news,” Whitman’s relationship with the Herald provided a way of remaining ambulatory, relevant, and in circulation. As he explained to Herbert Gilchrist: “I AM more disabled perhaps in locomotion power & in more liability to head & stomach troubles & easiness of ‘catching cold’ (from my compulsory staying in I suppose)…. I am writing little poetical bits for the N Y Herald.” Here, he pairs his lament about his loss of “locomotion power” with his report about publishing in the Herald, setting up a link between his “compulsory staying in” and his desire to send “poetical bits” out into the world. Juxtaposed with the reference to his stomach troubles, the phrase “poetical bits” invokes waste, excretions, or half-digested food. Read this way, Whitman is repurposing his waste by publishing it and sending it into circulation, echoing the regeneration cycle he describes in “Song of Myself,” in which grass operates as a metonym for the interconnectedness of all things. The ephemeral nature of newspapers reinforces this notion of poetry as embedded in a cyclical process. 

 

Whitman similarly positions the newspaper as a vehicle for mobility and sustenance in his letter to John Burroughs in April 1888. “With me things move on much the same—a little feebler every successive season & deeper inertia—brain power apparently very little affected, & emotional power not at all—I yet write a little for the Herald.” Here, the Herald serves as a counterbalance to the report about his feebleness, as if his connection to the newspaper is a life-source or evidence of his vitality in spite of his physical incapacities^[14]  (fig. 5).

Significantly, however, these old-age poems are not the ecstatic encounters with nature or diverse swathes of humanity with which we typically associate Whitman. On the contrary, most of these newspaper poems are meditations on aging and offer unsentimental reflections on the later stages of life. Given their appearance in the pages of a mainstream newspaper, Whitman’s poetry enacts a disruptive function, forcing readers to confront his aging and ailing amidst coverage of the weather, short discussions of home remedies, and bits of humor. Whitman, in other words, makes his own aging front-page news, disrupting the socialized invisibility of elderly people^[15] (fig. 6).

 

These late-life poems demand an alternative way of reading Whitman’s relationship to the body and to poetry itself; to borrow Simone de Beauvoir’s words, they describe the “body as a situation,” as a cultural text as much as a biological fact.^[16] Whitman, in other words, inhabits not merely the materiality of his body but also its significance in a social order that attaches rigid meanings to disability, elderliness, and illness. In “As I Sit Writing Here,” Whitman reflects on the disciplinary work of aging scripts, acknowledging that one is not supposed to write about bodily decrepitude:

As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,
Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,
Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,
May filter in my daily songs.

Whitman worries here that his “aches” and “constipation” will intrude into his “daily songs.” Of course, the irony of the poem is that it is fundamentally about those “ungracious glooms,” about the inseparability of one’s body from one’s poetic imagination and creative work. His “burden” then is not merely the monotony of his days or his indigestion but the expectation to keep one’s ailing body out of the public sphere and to silence the “whimpering ennui.” Whitman’s lament that his poetry will bear the marks of his sickness and age locates him within a cultural moment that scrupulously monitored which bodies could appear in public and sought to “repress the visibility of human diversity” through a range of legal, medical, and social tactics.^[17]  

In spite of the critical tendency to read Whitman’s treatment of the body as utopianizing, invincible, erotic, and transcendent, Whitman’s later poetry suggests embodiment might also be intransigent and restrictive. Indeed, Benjamin Lee makes the incisive point that when we think of Whitman as the “poet of the body,” we only think through the Civil War, but we need to extend that consideration through his old age. These late-life poems suggest a development in Whitman’s attitude toward the body and aging, a turn in his theorization of embodiment. If, in 1855, he whimsically wrote of being a widow, darning socks for grandchildren, Whitman in 1888 has come to a different perception of the body. These old-age poems align with Edward Said’s definition of “late style” as that which “involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension.”^[18]  No longer does poetry serve as a device for assuming other selves; the elderly body cannot be evaded.

This shift in Whitman’s scope and sensibility is also palpable in “A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine,” which meditates on his chronological age and aging body in relation to the landscape of the nation. The poem begins by looking outward, with a familiar nationalist imagery of the “rivers, prairies, States,” but as it progresses, the poem tightens, moving inward to the body. From the “mottled Flag,” Whitman turns to his “jocund heart” and his “body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed.” Where in “As I Sit Writing Here,” Whitman worries that his bodily ailments will bleed into his poems, “A Carol Closing Sixty-Nine” enacts that usurpation. Whitman’s lofty patriotism is interrupted by his material existence:

A carol closing sixty-nine—a résumé—a repetition,
My lines in joy and hope continuing on the same,
Of ye, O God, Life, Nature, Freedom, Poetry;
Of you, my Land—your rivers, prairies, States—you, mottled Flag I love,
Your aggregate retain’d entire—Of north, south,
east and west, your items all;
Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,
The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—
the strange inertia falling pall-like round me;
The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,
The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.

Even as his body is “old” and “wreck’d,” Whitman refers to the “burning fires down in [his] sluggish blood,” suggesting his capacity for arousal and physical pleasure. These “not yet extinct” fires in his blood and the “heart yet beating” are linked to his “groups of loving friends,” which affirm the potential for intimacy to co-exist with paralysis and old age. The poem ultimately becomes an occasion for Whitman to reflect on the  “strange inertia” of his life—the odd stillness and monotony that defines his existence even while his heart beats and his blood flows. His body in this poem is at once sluggish and fiery, vigorous and paralyzed, a reminder that old age does not cancel sensation even as it might compromise mobility.

Encountering Whitman’s meditations of his “wreck’d” body in the Herald impels readers to contemplate the realities of old age and to encounter the iconic Whitman anew. While Stauffer claims that Whitman was “determined to keep as much as possible of his own sickness and pain out of his poems,” on the contrary, we can see these poems as a public engagement with physical decline and the frustrations of inactivity that often characterize the end of life as well as with the unpredictable, inarticulable longings and affective experiences of old age.^[19] 

While Whitman’s longtime assistant and friend Horace Traubel and others saw the approach of his seventieth birthday as an occasion to fete the poet, Whitman saw it as the subject for introspection and reflection. Take, for instance, “Queries to My Seventieth Year,” in which he wonders whether turning seventy will signify “strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis.”  He refers to himself as “dull, parrot-like and old with crack’d voice harping, screeching”—suggesting the extent to which his physical ailments affect his voice, both his literal speaking voice and his poetic voice. He worries about being repetitive (“parrot-like”) and whiny.

Still, it would be a mistake to see only grimness and suffering in Whitman’s old age and the work he produced in his last decade. His 1891 poem “On, on the same, Ye Jocund Twain!” is less somber, even cheerful with its exclamation point. Over the course of the poem, he announces himself as chanting the nation, the “common bulk,” and lastly, “old age”—a progression that moves from the abstract to the intimate, from the general to the particular.  Whitman explains that he once wrote “for the forenoon life . . . but [now] I pass to snow-white hairs the same, and give to pulses winter-cool’d the same.” In other words, he sees himself now as writing on behalf of and for older readers, to the “unknown songs, conditions” that comprise the latter phases of life.

An attention to the full range of Whitman’s poetic output helps us to see him as a theorist of the aging body. As he explains in “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” “Leaves of Grass has mainly been the outcropping of my own emotional and other personal nature—an attempt, from first to last, to put a Person, a human being (myself, in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century, in America,) freely, fully and truly on record.” The perpetual expansion of Leaves of Grass suggests his vision of the self as variegated and discontinuous. The clusters he calls “annexes” are poetic extensions that thematize his sense of the self as inherently unfinished and open-ended, which continue to accumulate in old age.  As Amelia DeFalco writes, “Aging involves perpetual transformation that unsettles any claim to secure identity, allowing strange newness to intrude into a subject’s vision of a familiar self, and undermining efforts to construct coherent life reviews.”^[20]  In the ongoing annexation of Leaves, Whitman insists on this impossibility, and perhaps the undesirability, of completing the self. 

Though it has been tempting for critics to read Whitman as resistant to the association of aging with decline, these later poems reveal his struggle with debility, dependence, and loss as a central preoccupation of his old age. As he told Traubel, “Some day you will be writing about me: be sure to write about me honest: whatever you do, do not prettify me: include all the hells and damns.”  Indeed, in a cultural moment that began to repress discussions of aging, conceal aging bodies, and pathologize growing older, Whitman’s poetic dispatches from what he called the “palsied old shorn and shell-fish condition of me” offer an unapologetic candor about the experience of elderliness.

Whitman is far from the only major author whose old-age work has been deemed unworthy of serious attention. Women writers in general are rarely considered in the context of their “late” careers, as the concept tends only to apply to male artists and authors for whom maturation is akin to improvement and refinement.^[21] And in the case of some writers, the late work necessarily complicates or even undermines a coherent or stable sense of their oeuvre, making it more desirable simply to avoid it.^[22] Christopher Hanlon has recently observed a “tendency to sublimate the very facts of Emerson’s senescence,” noting a scholarly reticence to engage with Emerson’s senility as it proves incompatible with the more appealing image of self-reliant individualism for which he is known.

 

Interestingly, Whitman’s aging was spectacularized in the press, analyzed in his own poetry, and celebrated in massive public birthday parties; this was not a figure who receded or retired from public life as he grew older (fig. 7). And yet there is a tendency to read Whitman only in relation to the celebrated antebellum work that sets up a vision of the body as limitless, a kind of material analogue to Emerson’s “transcendent eyeball” even as his late-life poems focus heavily on his own lived experience in his ailing body. Whitman himself saw those years as equally essential, poetically viable, even newsworthy. Of “Sands at Seventy,” a collection of poems that appeared in November Boughs, he wrote:

The Sands have to be taken as the utterances of an old man—a very old man. I desire that they may be interpreted as confirmations, not denials, of the work that has preceded . . . I recognize, have always recognized, the importance of the lusty, strong-limbed, big-bodied American of the Leaves: I do not abate one atom of that belief now, today. But I hold to something more than that, too, and claim a full, not a partial, judgment upon my work—I am not to be known as a piece of something but as a totality.

Whitman clearly understood this late work as of a piece with his earlier work; that is, the “lusty, strong-limbed, big-bodied American” is inseparable from the “very old man” that appears in the poems of the 1880s. His description of himself as a “totality” is an articulation of a desire to be read not only as the voice of vigorous, young manhood but also of illness and debility, an insistence that future readers acknowledge him in relation to a broad spectrum of age identities, embodied and enacted.^[23]    

Most readers are familiar with Whitman “at the beginning of a great career,” but his work and perspective at the end of that career warrant just as much attention. In “The Final Lilt of Songs” (1888), Whitman refers to “old age” as the “entrance price” to a real understanding of literature and art; it is the “last keen faculty” that allows one to “penetrate the inmost lore of poets.”  Far from signaling the diminution of interpretive ability or affective capacity, old age here is linked to critical acumen.  As readers of Whitman, we must likewise attend to his old age as both material reality and performative accomplishment in order to “get at the meaning of [his] poems.”   

 

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Don James McLaughlin, Clare Mullaney, Cecily Parks, and Holly Jackson for their insightful feedback on this essay and to Jackie Penny for her help with the images.

 

________________

[1] Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982): 249.

[2] Donald Barlow Stauffer observed that Whitman’s later work has been “dismissed too lightly.” Similarly, Benjamin Lee writes: “It seems remarkable that his late poetry has inspired so little interest.”  Lee, “Whitman’s Aging Body.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 17 (Summer 1999): 38-45.

[3] Elizabeth Lorang, “‘Two more throws against oblivion’: Walt Whitman and the New York Herald in 1888.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 25.4 (Spring 2008): 167–191.

[4] Anton Vander Zee, “Inventing Late Whitman.” ESQ – Journal of the American Renaissance 63:4 (Jan. 2017): 641-680. Vander Zee offers an excellent comprehensive assessment of the critical reception of Whitman’s old-age work.

[5] Several important studies have engaged with Whitman vis a vis death; see especially Harold Aspiz and Adam Bradford.  

[6] Lindsay Tuggle, The Afterlives of Specimens: Science, Mourning, and Whitman’s Civil War (Des Moines: University of Iowa Press): 14.

[7] William Douglass O’Connor. “The Good Gray Poet.”

[8] Gallop, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (Durham: Duke UP, 2019): 8.

[9] Jane Gallop observes that “in the current moment, the worship of the reproductive future might in fact devalue old people even more than it does queers.” Gallop, Sexuality, Disability, and Aging: Queer Temporalities of the Phallus (Durham: Duke UP, 2019): 11.

[10] Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: NYU UP, 2000): 3.

[11] I am grateful to Don James McLaughlin for this formulation and for bringing “Whitman’s Actual American Position” to my attention.

[12] Reynolds refers to this piece as “shameless” and as “grossly untrue factually” even while he acknowledges the success of this article in heightening Whitman’s celebrity.  Indeed, Reynolds essentially describes Whitman as senile, noting that “he began to get more requests for periodical contributions than his old brain could handle.” Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America (515). 

[13] Ingrid Satelmajer, “Periodical Poetry.” Walt Whitman in Context. Eds. Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2018): 69.  This “tide” of newspapers connects Whitman to many well-known “hoarders,” or people who accumulate in excess as they age, suggesting that old age is a status that is often at odds with capitalism and the relation to consumption it defines as normative. See Scott Herring, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014).

[14] As Elizabeth Lorang writes of Whitman’s newspaper poetry, it serves to alert the “public of his still being alive.”  Lorang, “‘Two more throws against oblivion’: Walt Whitman and the New York Herald in 1888.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 25.4 (Spring 2008): 167–191.

[15] Of the changing social status of aging people in the late nineteenth-century U.S., historian Carole Haber writes, “Mandatory retirement, pension plans, geriatric medicine, and old-age homes were not designed to reintegrate the elderly into the culture… Rather, these programs ensured the separation of the old from work, wealth, and family.” Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (5).

[16] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage, 2011): 46.

[17] See Susan Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: NYU UP, 2000): 3.

[18] Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Knopf, 2006). Said further defines “lateness” in terms of a “vulnerable maturity, a platform for alternative and unregulated modes of subjectivity.”

[19] Donald Barlow Stauffer, “Age and Aging.” J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds., Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998).

[20] Amelia DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Columbia: Ohio State UP, 2010): 22.

[21] For a discussion of the gender politics of aging in American literature, see Sari Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (Oxford University Press, 2019).

[22] Indeed, Edward Said, drawing from Theodor Adorno, defines “late style” as the “moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it.” Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York: Random House, 2006): 8.

[23] Whitman articulated the same viewpoint in relation to Emerson: “The senile Emerson is the old Emerson in all that goes to make Emerson notable: this shadow is a part of him—a necessary feature of his nearly rounded life: it gives him a statuesqueness—throws him, so it seems to me, impressively as a definite figure in a background of mist.” Walt Whitman in Camden, March 28, 1888.

 

Further Reading

On the cultural history of old age in the U.S., see Carole Haber, Beyond Sixty-Five: The Dilemma of Old Age in America’s Past (New York, 1985) and Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History, Eds. Carole Haber and Brian Gratton (Bloomington, Ind., 1993). See also W. Andrew Achenbaum’s Old Age in the New Land: The American Experience since 1790 (Baltimore, 1980), David Hackett Fischer’s Growing Old in America (Oxford, 1978), and Thomas Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging (New York, 1992). On Whitman and aging, see Benjamin Lee, “Whitman’s Aging Body.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 17 (Summer 1999): 38-45, Anton Vander Zee, “Inventing Late Whitman.” ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance 63.4 (Jan 2017): 641-680, Donald Barlow Stauffer, “Walt Whitman and Old Age.”  Walt Whitman Review 24 (1976): 142–148, and especially Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman’s Conversations with Horace Traubel, 1882-1892. Ed. Gary Schmidgall (Des Moines, 1970). On the notion of “late” work, see Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain (New York, 2007), Kathleen Woodward, At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (Columbus, Ohio, 1980), and Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon, “Late Style(s): The Ageism of the Singular.” Occasion 4 (2012).

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

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

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About the Author

Sari Edelstein is associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author of Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women’s Writing (2014) and Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (2019). 

 

 

In the fifth season of the CBS television drama Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993-1998), starring Jane Seymour in the titular role, an episode titled “The Body Electric” opens with Walt Whitman (Donald Moffat) arriving in Colorado Springs for a week-long stay at the local “Springs Chateau and Health Resort.”^[1] Historically, the episode’s imagined detour through Dr. Quinn’s orbit coincides with a trip the poet made out west in 1879. Whitman had experienced a major paralytic stroke in January 1873, after which he was diagnosed with hemiplegia on his left side. As he slowly recovered some mobility, he remained partially paralyzed and required the use of a cane for walking. In the episode, the owner of the health resort, Preston A. Lodge III (Jason Leland Adams), has promised the poet free room and board—a complimentary Silas Weir Mitchell-inspired “rest cure”—in exchange for a poetry reading. “[H]e’s recovering from a stroke,” Preston announces to the townspeople, “and he’s chosen my resort to restore him to health.” Everything changes once rumors spread of the poet’s sexuality, and the episode transforms swiftly into a parable of tolerance. Being forewarned, the assigned physician, Dr. Andrew Cook (Brandon Douglas), cannot bring himself to shake Whitman’s hand. Later, in private, Andrew explains to Preston with earnest eyes, “Whitman is … peculiar.” “Peculiar?” Preston asks. “A deviant,” Andrew clarifies. “A deviant?” Preston inquires, puzzled. Andrew breaks it down as plainly as he can muster: “He prefers the company of men, if you understand my meaning.” Preston is aghast (fig. 1). The poetry reading is cancelled. By the end of the episode, civility is restored when Dr. Quinn overcomes her own intolerance and decides to host the poetry reading herself. None other than Peter Doyle (Steven Culp), in from Washington to visit his “soulmate,” convinces Dr. Quinn her prejudices have been misguided. Most importantly, Seymour’s ever-judicious Dr. Quinn recognizes that Doyle has had a medicinal influence on the poet: where “electrotherapy, hydropathy, phrenology” and her “hot pepper ointment” have failed, the presence of the comrade has succeeded in making Whitman feel well (fig. 2).

 

This episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman directs attention to the intersection between disability and sexuality in Whitman’s life and writing, which became especially prominent from the Civil War onward. Certainly, “The Body Electric” derives plenty of plot from what Desiree Henderson has described as the episode’s epistemology of the closet, the “phenomenon of ‘outing,’” which promises viewer satisfaction via “the spectacle of revelation.”^[2] But “The Body Electric” also moves beyond this prepackaged plot. The dialogue gets a bit heavy-handed here and there. “Have you been using the ointment?” Dr. Quinn asks Whitman in her clinic one day. “Mmhmm,” Whitman replies. He then seizes the moment to make his paralysis into a metaphor: “But some things cannot be altered, dear doctor; you must learn to accept them as they are.” Overwrought as the dialogue may be, it accomplishes something scholarship on Whitman rarely has. When Preston cancels the poetry reading, he explains in a deliberate intermingling of references to the visitor’s paralysis with rumors of his same-sex attraction, “I had no idea the extent of your infirmity, and I see now that a public reading would be all too taxing for you.” When Whitman and Doyle are told they can no longer stay in the chateau, Dr. Quinn invites them to take a spare room in her clinic, instead, thus making the space of illness and medical care into a refuge for their sexual difference. Indeed, by its conclusion, the episode has nearly become a manifesto for the responsibility doctors have to educate themselves about and to adapt their practices to encompass queer health (fig. 3).^[3] These intertwined themes beg the question, why is it that scholarship has generally neglected to put Whitman’s paralysis in direct dialogue with his literary representations of intimacy and eroticism, even as this intersection became central to his published writing, manuscripts, and correspondence?

 

The neglect is not exclusive to Whitman. Popular media is conspicuously lacking when it comes to acknowledging the sexual lives and identities of people with disabilities. As Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow have observed, we live with regimes of sexuality that presume able-bodiedness to be requisite to the experience of sex.^[4] We are told “the sexiest people are healthy, fit, and active: lanky models, buff athletes, trim gym members brimming with energy.”^[5] But even this description doesn’t quite do the matter justice. Popular media’s general reduction of the body to an object of capital-driven consumption has established, through assimilationist rhetorics of physical normalcy, a sexual imaginary disconnected from the diversity of human corporeality.^[6] It is significant to note (considering Whitman’s current legibility as a historical gay icon) that this has been true of mainstream gay male culture, too. Under these representational norms, people with disabilities tend to be either desexualized or, conversely, imagined to signify sexual excess (via the fetishizing of impairment, the pathologization of desire in the context of disability, or the conflation of illness with rhetorics of sexual culpability). Discussing this paradox, Mollow observes, “These contradictory constructions of disability create a double bind for people with disabilities: if disability can easily be interpreted as both sexual lack and sexual excess (sometimes simultaneously), then it seems nearly impossible for any expression of disabled sexuality to escape stigma.”^[7] Dr. Quinn’s dialogue illustrates this double bind: the line “I had no idea the extent of your infirmity” indicates both a negation of capacity and a euphemistic association of the paralyzed body’s capacity for desire with an unknowable “extent” of that body’s pathological state.

Whitman scholarship has sometimes contributed to these omissions. Consider, as an illustrative case, Gary Schmidgall’s biography Walt Whitman: A Gay Life, which draws a stark line between Whitman’s sexuality in youth in New York and the life he led after his paralytic stroke. “[T]o all things, especially to an active sexual life, an end must come,” he writes.^[8] (As we will see below, this was not the case.) Of course, historically, Whitman’s writings have played a role as well. No text demonstrates this better than the 1858 series of fitness-advice articles published in the New York Atlas, discovered by Zachary Turpin in 2015, titled “Manly Health and Training: With Offhand Hints toward Their Conditions.”^[9] Published under the pseudonym Mose Velsor, “Manly Health and Training” promises to educate readers in those habits necessary to achieve what Manuel Herrero-Puertas describes as the fantasy of the herculean “good life”: in Whitman’s words, “a perfect body, perfect blood—no morbid humors, no weakness, no impotency or deficiency or bad stuff in him.”^[10] As Herrero-Puertas notes with a diachronic allusion to contemporary media, here we find Whitman’s Velsor avatar positioning himself as antebellum influencer, his column overflowing with banal advice and relentless enthusiasm.^[11]

And yet, taken as a whole, Whitman’s corpus quickly begins to unravel this antebellum, self-help iteration of what scholars and activists today understand to be an ideology of ability.^[12] The concept of disability was not available to Whitman in the way it is understood today, either as a capacious political category necessitating rights and protections or, in the context of critical theory, as an experience produced largely by structural barriers to access. Nevertheless, across the last three decades of his life especially, Whitman began to engage with and explore forms of disability in his writing. One of the most illuminating representations of this turn appears in the way Whitman began to embrace his paralysis as part of his authorial persona after his stroke in 1873. Whitman used the term “disablement” to describe his physical state in the years that followed and began to redefine his sense of self through the lens of his paralysis. In manuscripts, published writing, and letters from the mid-1870s onward, we find Whitman beginning to refer to himself as a “half-paralytic” with striking constancy. “[H]alf-paralytic as I am,” he says as an aside to his friend John Burroughs in June 1879.^[13] During a trip to Niagara Falls in September 1880, Whitman would refer to himself as a half-paralytic in the conclusions to multiple letters back-to-back: “I am unusually well & robust for a half-paralytic—,” he writes to William Torrey Harris; “Am now pretty well for a half-paralytic,” he says to Frederick Locker-Lampson; and to Rudolf Schmidt, Whitman concludes the brief missive, “I am unusually well for a half-paralytic—.”^[14] Ed Folsom’s digital archive reveals seventeen transcribed letters to and from Whitman that use the word “paralytic” and another fifty-seven letters written by or to Whitman that reference his “paralysis” from 1873 onward. Combined with his prose and poetry, these letters show Whitman resolving to claim and even flaunt his paralysis as a critical feature of his celebrity.

Whitman’s move to incorporate his paralysis into a public identity shares a notable resemblance with the reclamation of “crip” in contemporary disability theory today. Crip theory provides a critical vocabulary for challenging what Robert McRuer has termed “compulsory able-bodiedness,” a term designating cultural pressures to self-present within standards of normative capability.^[15] One senses from these writings that Whitman would have felt a kinship with Nancy Mairs’s influential 1986 essay “On Being a Cripple.”^[16] Discussing her multiple sclerosis, Mairs famously asserts:

I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me….People—crippled or not—wince at the word ‘cripple,’ as they do not at ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled.’ Perhaps I want them to wince. I want them to see me as a tough customer, one to whom the fates/gods/viruses have not been kind, but who can face the brutal truth of her existence squarely. As a cripple, I swagger.

Circulated among correspondents ranging from John Burroughs to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, letters and manuscripts show Whitman identifying as a half-paralytic to establish a comparable public consciousness of his changing body, his personal appearance, and his gait. His paralysis shaped his orientation toward his most intimate relationships, too. 

~ ~ ~

 

Much of my research in nineteenth-century American literature lies at the intersection of the medical humanities, sexuality studies, and historical understandings of illness and debility. In the spring of 2019, while conducting research at the American Antiquarian Society, I came across a book I had never held in person before. There are many writings in Whitman’s corpus that have the potential to change our perspective on how he understood the role of his paralysis in his relationships. This one was published in 1897, just five years after his death, by Whitman’s friend and disciple, Richard Maurice Bucke. Bucke (who alongside Horace Traubel and Thomas Harned served as one of Whitman’s literary executors) titled the book Calamus, a name taken from the sequence of poems in Leaves of Grass celebrating the expression of love between men, first appearing in the third edition printed by the publishing firm Thayer & Eldridge in Boston in 1860 (fig. 4). But the book is not a collection of those poems. Instead, as clarified by the subtitle “A Series of Letters Written during the Years 1868-1880 by Walt Whitman to a Young Friend,” the book features Whitman’s correspondence with Peter George Doyle, with whom Whitman developed a romantic friendship that would last from 1865 until the end of the poet’s life (fig. 5). The selected letters provide a biographical illustration of the kind of relationship Whitman intended to advocate in the “Calamus” cluster.

Bucke, a Canadian physician, became obsessed with the author of Leaves of Grass during the poet’s lifetime. The two met in 1877 and developed a friendship. Today, Bucke is best remembered as the author of a 1901 book called Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind, where he proposes an evolutionary horizon for humanity characterized by the state of mind named in his title. Superseding the mere “self-consciousness” of ordinary humans, “cosmic consciousness” describes a state where understanding of “the life and order of the universe” is attained, along with a “state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individual and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power.”^[17] A “sense of immortality” and fearlessness in the presence of death must likewise be present. According to Bucke, this cosmic consciousness describes a stage of evolution only a handful had reached by the twentieth century. Whitman was one of them. With ecstatic assuredness, Bucke asserts, “Walt Whitman is the best, most perfect, example the world has so far had of the Cosmic Sense, first because he is the man in whom the new faculty has been, probably, most perfectly developed, and especially because he is, par excellence the man who in modern times has written distinctly and at large from the point of view of Cosmic Consciousness, and who also has referred to its facts and phenomena more plainly and fully than any other writer either ancient or modern.”^[18] Bucke even believed he could pinpoint the moment Whitman evolved. On an evening in 1866, an eye witness, Helen Price, recalled that Whitman began to emit a baffling luminescence over dinner: “a peculiar brightness and elation … an almost irrepressible joyousness, which shone from his face and seemed to pervade his whole body … I grew almost wild with impatience and vexation … he did not utter a single word during the meal; and his face still wore that singular brightness and delight, as though he had partaken of some divine elixir.”^[19] Cosmic consciousness descended upon him that night.