What Is Walt Whitman's Treatment Of Women

Walt Whitman is the self-identified representative poet of the nineteenth century. His poetry focused on current events of the time and his own opinion, but his most infamous legacy is that of claiming to represent all of the great nation of America in his work. One of his sweeping claims of representation states, "I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man, / And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men" ("Song of Myself," section 21). In this section, Whitman claims to be the poet of men and women, but quickly turns to say that "there is nothing greater than the mother of men". This line places both men and their mothers at the top of the hypothetical populous hierarchy.

Whitman contradicts this when he suggests in a letter to a friend that "American women will become "greater than man ... through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical attribute." The capacity for childbirth, then, tips the scale, making women superior to men" (Whitman qtd in Pollak, 222). For Whitman, the woman can only hold a superior position if she embraces her maternal destiny. This theme of idealizing motherhood continues throughout Whitman's life work as printed in his book Leaves of Grass. The representative poet may lay claim to value all through his work and I do not attempt to argue any different, but instead to highlight Whitman's fervent passion for the mother figure. Whitman throughout his poems presents heterosexual sex as a necessary and ultimate act for reproduction and the growth of the country. He looks at children as a blank slate ready to be molded by society and the new liberating America that he envisions. To produce these children, Whitman needs mothers; and so, it is mothers that he

For speaking publicly about their sexuality in any regards. Writers in Whitman's time did not address women. Their sexuality and own desires were considered taboo and offensive. Whitman was not unfamiliar with taboo subject matter breaking boundaries with his free verse, unstructured poetry, and addressing matters in a new less romantic way than his contemporaries. With his added negation of himself as the representative poet Whitman was notorious for doing things the way nobody else did or had before him. Many female critics of Whitman's time acknowledged him for this and sent praise his way. Fanny Fern and Anne Gilchrist are two of the women who did this. Fern has called Leaves of Grass "unspeakably delicious" (798). She also celebrates his uses of sexuality nudity, calling his uses "healing" (799). She enjoys being addressed as a woman reader and given some agency in Whitman's work. Gilchrist follows a similar rationale to Fern, citing Whitman's "calm wisdom and strength of thought" (802). Gilchrist praises the ways in which Whitman speaks of the body so candidly as the body is the protector and root of the soul (802). This paper does not seek to diminish Whitman's modernity of thought in the nineteenth century, or these women's opinions and critiques of Whitman. Instead it looks to show how, despite his strengths, Whitman