THE LEAVES OF GRASS

The Leaves of Grass

The Leaves of Grass

Introduction

"Leaves of Grass is essentially a woman's book: the women do not know it, but every now and then a woman shows that she knows it: it speaks out the necessities, its cry is the cry of the right and wrong of the woman sex--of the woman first of all, of the facts of creation first of all--of the feminine: speaks out loud: warns, encourages, persuades, points the way." Walt Whitman made this remark to Horace Traubel in the late summer of 1888, thirty-three years after the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published. This seems a curious statement, especially since Leaves of Grass has, with very few exceptions, been read primarily as expressive of male sexuality and desire. An overview of critical studies of Whitman's work reveals that the poems have been read for the most part with an emphasis upon masculine sexuality: phallic imagery, so evident throughout Leaves of Grass, homosexuality as expressed in the Calamus cluster and elsewhere, the lyric erotic passages in "Song of Myself." At first glance, this focus seems warranted, for these themes and issues are central in Whitman's verse. Nor have the qualities of receptivity, expansiveness, and connection gone unnoticed in Leaves of Grass; however, in some instances they can be understood as stemming from the kind of writing which Hélène Cixous and other French feminist writers describe (Kaplan, 1979).

Argument Statement

In many places throughout Leaves of Grass, Whitman refers to an equable, democratic treatment of gender. He writes, for instance, "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." If this is so, if Whitman is the poet of the woman as well as of the man as he claims to be, then women's sexuality and voice in Leaves [Leaves of Grass] certainly call for a more developed critical consideration. In general, Whitman's portrayal of women and women's sexuality in Leaves of Grass has generated several critical approaches; one approach is to acknowledge (and sometimes, lament) Whitman's perceived reduction of women to types, and to examine these types as indicative of negative or positive societal values (for instance, the prostitute or the mother). Another approach is to point out the inconsistency of Whitman's attitudes about women, his assertion of democratic equality versus the depiction of women in his verse. These critical approaches to women in Leaves of Grass (and, certainly, these categories are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive) are due, to some extent, to the larger problematic of the expression/repression of women's sexuality in nineteenth-century America; Whitman can be taken to task for some of the restrictive stereotypes in his verse, but it should also be noted that these constrictive images are, to some degree, reflective of societal mores as well (Miller, 1962).

Discussion and Analyses

Whitman's rendering of women's body and women's desire, especially his treatment of women's eroticism, has been relatively ...