Song of My Self-Help: Whitman’S Rehabilitative Reading Jess Libow

Common-place Journal, Spring 2019 Song of My Self-Help: Whitman’s Rehabilitative Reading Jess Libow By presenting literature as rehabilitative, Whitman reconceives of both able-bodied “health” and, as a result, the “manliness” to which it was linked by mid-nineteenth- century self-help culture. ears before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he claimed. His 1858 column, “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” republished for the first time in 2015, portrays the Ymid-nineteenth-century United States as overrun with “feeble” men.[1] Throughout the column, Whitman argues that “physical inferiority, in one form or another, is the rule rather than the exception” and offers insight into how readers might remedy this condition. Over the course of thirteen weekly installments, he insists that the American male physique is in desperate need of revitalization, something he proposes literature might supply. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the self-proclaimed “poet of the Body” also authored an instructive physical training text.[2] Whitman published the se- ries in The New York Atlas under the name Mose Velsor in 1858, between editions of Leaves of Grass (fig. 1). While the poet’s prescriptions are fairly representative of nineteenth-century health regimens—strict diet, routine exercise, sexual re- 24 straint—Whitman’s essays are remarkably attentive to their own textuality. “Man- ly Health” not only recommends healthy habits, but also presents text as itself an agent of cure. Henry David Thoreau suggested in Walden (1854) that, “to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise… It requires a training such as the ath- letes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object,” and Whitman takes this proposition seriously, providing as methodical instruction in reading as he does in his more conventional health recommendations.[3] Attending to such metatextuality in “Manly Health” allows us to reconsider the relationship between text and reader both in and beyond the column, as Whitman draws on the prescriptive project of self-help to articulate a broader theory of literature as a rehabilitative technology. Ultimately, his framing of text probes the parameters of masculine American identity by providing a conduit between “inferior” readers and conceptions of ability. This approach to literature emerges at a critical point in the poet’s career. Zachary Turpin has noted that when Whitman composed “Manly Health” he was consid- ering abandoning poetry for more instructive genres, possibly in response to the looming threat of war.[4] The column’s literary preoccupations, however, situate it not as a departure from Leaves of Grass, but as a complement to Whitman’s ante- bellum poetry. The timing of the publication of “Manly Health” is significant, as its 1858 appearance bridges the second (1856) and third (1860) editions of Leaves of Grass. The second edition had been published by Orson Squire Fowler and Samuel Wells, two of the most prominent U.S. phrenologists, and this association may have informed Whitman’s interest in exercise and related health sciences.[5] While the mid-century science of phrenology Whitman encountered during this period is perhaps best remembered for its claims to decipher the contours of human skulls, experts in the field paired this deterministic practice with an investment in transforming individual character through physical training.[6] As Fowler puts it in an 1855 manual, “health of body produces health of mind and purity of feelings… While, therefore, phrenologists should scrutinize the size of organs closely, they should observe the STATE OF HEALTH much more mi- nutely.”[7] While phrenologists insisted that the human body was akin to a text that could be both read and revised, Whitman proposes that the act of reading itself could be a catalyst for rebuilding the body. This rehabilitative logic that governs “Manly Health” also extends to the editions of Leaves of Grass that bracket it, suggesting Whitman’s investment in rethinking literature’s influence on the body beyond the self-help genre. 25 Figure 1. A detail of the article from Sunday Morning New York Atlas(September 12, 1858) “Manly Health and Train- ing” – page 1. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. A newspaper page. The masthead reads, “The New York Atlas.” A headline beneath that reads in smaller lettering, “Manly Health and Training, With Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions” by Mose Velsor. 26 Such a porous boundary between body and text has been the subject of much Whit- man scholarship.[8] In Disseminating Whitman (1991), Michael Moon argues that in the ongoing revisionary project of Leaves of Grass, “discourses of the body and discourses of the literary interact in ways which extend readers’ conceptions of both realms, and of the range of possible relations between these two realms.”[9] “Manly Health” introduces another “possible relation” between the corporeal and the literary. Along with the “affectionate physical presence” that Moon argues Whitman imparts from writer to reader in Leaves of Grass, the authorial “We” that offers advice throughout “Manly Health” cultivates an instructive ethos that purports to alter the reader’s physicality by training him.[10] Whitman’s column highlights the specifically therapeutic bodily contact imagined by his prescriptive as well as poetic works. Despite this uniquely metatextual approach, Whitman was not alone in his as- sessment of the nation’s health, nor in his desire to intervene. In the wake of increased industrialization, the maintenance of an active, healthy body became a key concern of self-help texts. This literature for middle-class white men and women proliferated in the mid-nineteenth century, and publications ranged from exercise manuals such as Whitman’s to comprehensive instruction in cultivat- ing “character,” which nearly always recommended physical training.[11] These works were as committed to ideas about sex difference as they were to promoting health.[12] While Eliza Ware Farrar’s The Young Lady’s Friend (1837) and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Means and Ends: Or, Self-training (1842) offered advice to the authors’ “young country-women,” the masculinist title of “Manly Health” joins such volumes as William Alcott’s The Young Man’s Guide (1833) and Timothy Shay Arthur’s Advice to Young Men (1848), which guided men in the development of a moral character and a healthy physique (fig. 2).[13] These texts located the body as a site of self-improvement, encouraging corporeal transformation while maintaining strict adherence to a binary understanding of male and female traits. For the men Whitman addresses, then, self-help was always about pursuing a dis- tinct idea of “manliness” as well as health.[14] This self-improvement was in part a response to the supposedly debilitating feminine “cult of domesticity” as well as a strategy for achieving economic success amidst the rise of industrial capitalism. This period saw a national investment in ideas about masculine self-control after Henry Clay valorized the “self-made man” on the Senate floor in 1832.[15] Climbing the socioeconomic ladder, experts insisted, required an impressive degree of disci- pline that included command over one’s body. This economic imperative for corporeal self-control coincides, as disability studies scholar Robert McRuer has shown, 27 Figure 2. Various spines of conduct of life and etiquette books for men from the 1830s-1850s. 1. Timothy Shay Arthur, Advice to Young Men on Their Duties and Conduct in Life (Boston, 1848). 2-3. William Alcott. Young Man’s Guide (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, & Holden, 1833). 4. American Gentleman: True Politeness / By an American gentleman. (New York: Leavitt and Allen, 1848). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Spines of two black books with worn and elaborately decorated covers. The book on the left is black with gold ornamentation and reads, “Young Man’s Guide,” while the book to the right is black with raised botanical motifs and reads, “American Gentleman.” 28 with the emergence of the term “able-bodiedness,” which is defined by the Oxford English Dictionaryas “soundness of health; ability to work; robustness.”[16] Though Whitman doesn’t reference “able-bodiedness,” he does use the term “perfect-bodied.” Such terminology reflects both the ever unachievable fantasy of Whitman’s ideal physique and, because the verb “perfect” implies action, his conviction that such an ideal could be produced through human effort. In its attempt to produce “live, robust American men,” “Manly Health” advances what McRuer calls “compulsory able-bodiedness,” which privileges certain bodies and minds as normal based on aesthetics or functionality, and positions others as deviations. Additionally, though Whitman’s use of the label “feeble” predates the consolidation of “feeblemindedness” into a eugenic category, the term was widely used in the mid-nineteenth century to describe people with disabilities. [17] Whitman’s proto-eugenic language for those lacking idealized health (as well as manliness) denotes his concerns about disability. By offering reading as a means of training the ubiquitous “feeble” male body, Whitman escalates middle-class ideals about masculine self-help into a comprehensive rehabilitative project. The compulsory nature of the agenda of “Manly Health” is made explicit by the suggestion that merely reading the text constitutes abiding by its scripts. From its inception, the column is intimately aware of its interactions with readers. The opening line of the first installment addresses the reader as “you whose eye is arrested by the above headlines.” The text’s title, this introduction implies, acts on the reader, not merely catching his attention, but also immediately ensnar- ing him in its rehabilitative project. “Manly health!” the column proceeds, “Is there not a kind of charm—a fascinating magic in the word?” The rehabilitation process commences without warning, beginning before the reader has consid- ered the actual health recommendations detailed in the column.

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