Whitman's Readers and the Politics of the Canon
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1997 Receiv'd with Plaudits in the Capitol: Whitman's Readers and the Politics of the Canon Alan Edward Kozlowski Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Kozlowski, Alan Edward, "Receiv'd with Plaudits in the Capitol: Whitman's Readers and the Politics of the Canon" (1997). Dissertations. 3709. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3709 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1997 Alan Edward Kozlowski LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO "RECEIV'D WITH PLAUDITS IN THE CAPITOL": WHITMAN'S READERS AND THE POLITICS OF THE CANON A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY ALAN EDWARD KOZLOWSKI CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 1997 Copyright © by Alan Edward Kozlowski, 1997 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe thanks to the many people who provided suggestions and comments, read various portions and versions of the manuscript, and offered generous support. First, I extend special thanks to James E. Rocks, who took up the direction of this project in mid stream. I cannot imagine a more gracious and supportive mentor. I thank the other members of my committee, Allen J. Frantzen and Gregory S. Jay, for their readings and comments; additional thanks to Allen for fostering my interest in reception studies and to Greg for allowing me to sit in on a graduate Whitman seminar at Northwestern University, which gave me a firm foundation. Thanks to colleagues, scholars, and friends for various contributions: Bill Brock, Christopher Lambert, Mary Linderman, Robert K. Martin, Claire Nicolay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, LuAnn Swartzlander-Kraus, and Steven Wartofsky. Thanks to my sister Karen Kozlowski, for a sympathetic ear; to John Schuchert, who, over long years, provided unimaginable support and constant reminders that there is life outside of scholarship. Finally, I dedicate this to the memory of my parents, Catherine and Henry. 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . iii INTRODUCTION .............................................. 1 CHAPTER 1. "I CONTAIN MULTITUDES": VOICE, IDENTITY, AND REVISION IN LEAVES OF GRASS ................... 13 2. "THE CITY OF ROBUST FRIENDS": MODERNITY, HOMOSOCIALITY, AND HOMOEROTICISM IN SYMONDS, SAINTSBURY AND DOWDEN ............. 49 3. "OPPOSITE EQUALS ADVANCE": THE UNTWINING OF THE GENTEEL AND ACADEMIC STRAINS OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN CRITICISM ..... 94 4. "THE MOTHER OF MANY CHILDREN": NOSTALGIA FOR THE MATERNAL AND THE PRE-INDUSTRIAL IN BROOKS, SANTAYANA, PARRINGTON, ARVIN, AND MATTHIESSEN .................................. 155 WORKS CITED .............................................. 231 VITA ....................................................... 239 iv INTRODUCTION In 1860, Walt Whitman published the line, "When I heard at the close of the day how my name had been receiv'd with plaudits in the capitol, still it was not a happy night for me that followed." Later in the same poem, he related what gladdened him: "For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the same cover ... And his arm lay lightly around my breast-and that night I was happy." But, as Whitman's central position in the canon and curriculum of American literature attests, Whitman was received with plaudits in the literary capital as the Victorian "Good Gray Poet," at the expense of his radical views on class, gender, and sexuality. I have always been fascinated by the fact that Whitman, whom I consider a fundamentally radical figure, personally and textually, somehow made it into the Canon, a thing that, as I learned in graduate school, is supposed to be exclusive and insidiously controlling of national representations and identities. How, then, did Leaves of Grass, including as subjects working men, mothers, prostitutes, and what appears to be very intimate male friendship, containing endless catalogues of objects, and flouting, at least in early editions, conventions of punctuation and even titles, make it into this exclusive club? In the course of my research and writing, I have learned that neither Whitman nor canons were exactly what I believed 2 them to be. I still believe Whitman is a profoundly radical poet and presence, but I have come to discover that his famous self-contradictions make ·him somewhat like the Bible, sometimes•misread or taken out of context, to support any of a number of positions. Whitman enables such readings through his seduction of the reader and through the inclusion of diverse personre throughout his poetry. I have also discovered that canons, like conspiracy theories, are overrated. As it seems to me unlikely that most alleged conspiracies could remain hidden long enough to be effective, so also in my work here I have discovered that the contradictions inherent in canons make them fragile things, and that in their cracks are sown the seeds of their own potential destruction, or at least refiguration. And so in this study I examine these contradictions, in the first chapter looking at some revisions Whitman made himself after the Civil War, imagining how they might be useful to the project of Northern, industrial ascendancy in the Gilded Age. More significantly for my study, though, the refashioning of Whitman was done by his readers constructing the canon of American literature, who were able to make use of Whitman by making out of him a text to answer their various anxieties, whether they be over modernity or masculinity. In chapters two through four, I examine how readers of Whitman at various stages from the late nineteenth century to the 1940s refashioned and conventionalized Whitman's texts and his image to correspond to their agendas for the study of 3 American literature. I am particularly interested in the intersections of class, gender and sexuality in this history: how these issues were read through one another as if through lenses, each to diffuse the others. I do not think Whitman's sexuality is irrelevant, but, while my own subjective interest in what I call Whitman's sexuality is ever present, I do not want to project an experience of modern homosexuality onto Whitman's erotic practice. Though the modern period differentiates greatly my study from the ancient period of David Halperin's, I think his admonition is well-taken here: The real issue confronting any cultural historian of antiquity, and any critic of contemporary culture, is, first of all, how to recover the terms in which the experiences of individuals belonging to past societies were actually constituted and, second, how to measure and assess the differences between those terms and the ones we currently employ. For, as the very controversy over the scope and applicability of sexual categories illustrates, concepts in the human sciences-unlike in this respect, perhaps, concepts in the natural sciences (such as gravity)-do not merely describe reality but, at least partly, constitute it. 1 My intention is not to side with some current critics who would deny the existence or the relevance of Whitman's homoeroticism, like David Reynolds, who minimizes Whitman's sexuality, saying "his relations with men ... can be best understood as especially intense manifestations of the kind of same-sex passion that was seen everywhere in antebellum America .... [O]vert displays 1 David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990) 28-29. 4 of affection between people of the same sex were common."2 Nor do I agree with Kenneth Lynn, who believes Whitman was ashamed of his homoerotic expressions and controlled and tempered them through socially acceptable outlets, i.e., Civil War nursing and Drum Taps. 3 My admiration for Robert K. Martin's ground breaking The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry is genuine, even though almost twenty years later, in the wake of Foucault and Halperin, it seems naive. Martin, by privileging his own gay subjectivity, performed the necessary work of making it impossible not to talk about Whitman's sexuality. Unlike Michael Moon, I am cautious about the claims made for Whitman's sense of his own sexuality and his contemporaries' awareness of it. Moon believes "one chief design of the successive editions of Leaves of Grass was to counter the privatizing, standardizing, domesticizing, misogynist, and homophobic social arrangements of industrial, commercial, and (in the post-Civil War era) corporate capitalism that eventually replaced earlier arrangements." I, however, do not believe homophobia was yet an issue in the Unitied States, a country that lagged behind in the formulation of sexuality as a discourse. 4 2 David Reynolds, Walt Whitman's America (New York: Knopf, 1995) 198. 3 Kenneth S. Lynn, The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 36-37. 4 Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1991) 10, emphasis added. 5 Though sexuality may not play a primary role in each of my chapters,