In 1855, through the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman emerges on the landscape of American literature with his message of liberation.  Integral to this message is his unabashed language of sexuality.  He advocates having, "The gag remov’d from one’s mouth," in defiance of all sexual propriety (141).  Issues of homoeroticism, masturbation, and voyeurism mingle with the accepted procreative function of sex in a discourse that at once harshly confronts the reader and gently invites them in.  Harriet Jacobs also addresses her readers with a jarring portrayal of sexuality in the nineteenth century.  Appearing just six years after Whitman, Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself presents quite a different aspect of the power of sexuality.  Jacobs writes, of a young slave girl, "If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse," and then proceeds to recount how she arrived at this maxim through the experience of her own beauty amidst slavery (28).  Taken together, these two disparate accounts reveal not just the experience of sexuality at two different poles of society, but the power of the sexual discourse of the time to permeate them both. 

Whitman’s sweeping poetic project seeks to encompass the very nature of life, death, and democracy in these United States.  But, as David S. Reynolds points out, Whitman declares: "Sex is the root of it all: sex–the coming together of men and women: sex: sex" (198).  Women, then, become the gateway to life and all it entails.  It now becomes evident why, for Whitman, sex is inextricably linked to the experience of mortality, democracy, and poetry itself.  In "A Woman Waits for Me," we see what kind of progeny this mixture of sex and poetry will engender:

The drops I distil upon you shall grow fierce and athletic girls,/ new artists, musicians, and singers,/ The babes I beget upon you are to beget babes in their turn,/ I shall demand perfect men and women out of my love-spendings,/ I shall expect them to interpenetrate with others, as I and/ you interpenetrate now.  (137)

Here Whitman’s "love-spendings" can be read beyond the literal allusion to semen, but the very words we are reading.

In this poem, we see Whitman with sagacity far beyond that of conventional wisdom.  In a time when science perceived the womb as merely housing the babe and the semen containing all information relevant to the child’s formation, Whitman says, "A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking" (my italics).  This sentiment is truly revolutionary, yet he does not downplay the partnership, for: "All were lacking if sex were lacking, or if the moisture of the right man were lacking" (136).

Whitman doesn’t stop with his egalitarian view of women in the sexual relationship, he further suggests that no "love-spending" can be misspent.  In "Spontaneous Me," he recounts a masturbatory experience where we see "The pulse pounding through palms and trembling/ encircling fingers, the young man all color’d, red,/ ashamed angry" (138).  In this passage we experience the shame of a young man who exemplifies what Foucault has called "the Perverse Implantation."  Foucault posits the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a locus for the "proliferation of discourses" whose purpose was "Governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction" (36).  Whitman seeks to weaken this chokehold on sexual discourse and by the end of the poem we experience Whitman’s ejaculation:

The geed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw,/till I saturate what shall produce boys to fill my place/ when I am through,/ The wholesome relief, repose, content,/ And this bunch pluck’d at random from myself,/ It has done its work ¯ I toss it carelessly to fall where it may.  (140)

Taking the place of the guilt-ridden boy, Whitman becomes the contented, relieved man who tosses carelessly away the fruition of his sexual fantasy.  But, lest we think it wasted, we see that the semen has "done its work."  It has engendered this poem and now exists in a metaphoric relationship to the words that constitute it.

Ejaculatory sexual experiences, however, are not given precedence to those that are simply pleasurable.  Whitman recreates scenes of voyeurism that obfuscates the line between watcher and watched as in the scene of twenty-eight young men bathing by a shore in "Song of Myself."  The scene tells of a woman observing these men. Vivian R. Pollack, in The Erotic Whitman, notes, "As a literary character, she is unable to respond to the poet who ‘see[s]’ her, and in seeing her, tries to imagine a way to make her desire visible to others" (114).  This is something Whitman achieves seamlessly, because we can see that the woman’s desire mirrors his own.  The line that separates Whitman and this voyeuristic woman blurs "Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,/ The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them …An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,/ It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs" (Whitman 73).  Pollack says this hand "Reconfigures erotic identities that are both culturally and personally specific.  Identities fuse as they disintegrate, turning on a word, ‘hand’" (116).  This hand is not only that of the woman, but that of the man writing this poem.

The fusion of which Pollack speaks gives us a glimpse of the truly capacious nature of Whitman’s sexual discourse, which does not exclude homoerotic desire.  In "I Sing the Body Electric," Whitman speaks of a man that "was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person," he speaks of, "The shape of his head, the pale yellow of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners," and says, "You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other" (129-130).

In Walt Whitman’s America, David S. Reynolds states that this kind of eroticism "Can best be understood as especially intense manifestations of the kind of same-sex passion that was seen everywhere in antebellum America" (198).  Whether or not one agrees with his estimation depends largely on how one views the gender roles of the time.  While Reynolds says they were, "fluid, elastic, shifting in a time when sexual types had not yet solidified," it is clear that Whitman exhibits no complacency toward the gender roles of the time (198).

After considering Whitman’s liberal views on gender and sexuality, it is easy to overlook the social position that allowed him not only the right to express these opinions, but also the voice to use in that expression.  Whitman’s stated goal to "proceed with perfect non-chalance," after all, could only be attempted (not to mention conceived of) by a white man in antebellum America.  Considering a view from the other end of the telescope, then, will allow for a more capacious definition of sexuality in this time.

In her essay, "Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl," P. Gabrielle Foreman writes "The right to speak freely, to articulate one’s rights, was clearly and constitutionally denied to African Americans in Jacobs’s antebellum South" (80).  It is this fact that stands as the foundation for the nebulous language that Jacobs employs when referring to sexual issues in Incidents.  As Foreman says, "Denied access to unrestricted speech, Jacobs maneuvers with the sphere of more sanctioned speech" (80).  When one compares this with the fact that Whitman was also aware of "the sphere of more sanctioned speech," but chose to defy (expand) it, the magnitude of the power of sexual discourse begins to come into view.

Jacobs leaves the nature of Dr. Flints’ abuse unclear, but her allusions have caused many scholars to infer that what she was dealing with was literal rape.  When Flint begins his abuse, Jacobs says only "My master began to whisper foul words in my ear …He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of.  I turned from him in disgust and hatred" (27).  Here is an example of sexual discourse as weapon, whispered into the ear of a child by a man who had the weight of the entire society to back his claim that she "was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing" (18). 

This was the society that showed Linda Brent innumerable examples of miscegenation, and the consequences for the slave who was forced into complicity.  Jacobs relates the story of a particularly brutal beating of a slave who "quarreled with his wife in presence of the overseer, and had accuse his master of being the father of her child" (13).  This scene of corporeal punishment is worth comparing to Whitman’s notions of the body.  Whitman says, "Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,/ Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest" (66).  Compare this with Linda walking into the barn after the beating and seeing "The cowhide still wet with blood, and the boards all covered with gore" (13).  Where Whitman’s body is unified and cohesive, the body of the slave is defiled, represented only by parts of his being ripped from himself by the cowhide.  In this scene, we can see the gore as a metonym for the body.  Hence, Whitman, the white man, and his body are indissoluble, while the black body is reduced to gore.

We can see the perception of the physical body in the antebellum South is directly tied to its position in the political body.  Linda, like the whipped slave, will also come to hate her body as it stands as a point at which her oppressor can access her mind.  As her brother says, "He did not mind the smart of the whip, but he did not like the idea of being whipped" (19).  William’s sentiment reflects the way the body stands as the gateway into the political realm: by issuing physical pain, the slave master communicates an idea that is far more powerful than any corporeal sensation.

Linda learns this lesson when she is forced to hide from Flint.  From her tiny cell she, "Longed to draw in a plentiful draught of fresh air, to stretch my cramped limbs, to have room to stand erect, to feel the earth under my feet again" (121).  The locus for her oppression is her own physical body.  Although there is no direct whipping, she is forced into a cramped space devoid of light and air for seven years.  This is the idea that William referenced, the idea of being whipped.

At this point in Incidents, Linda takes on a peculiar role in the story that mimics not just Harriet Jacobs, but the rhetorical device employed by Whitman.  She is the "disembodied narrator."  She can only watch from her cramped, lofty peak:

Another time I saw a woman rush wildly by, pursued by two men.  She was a slave, the wet nurse of her mistress’s children.  For some trifling offence her mistress ordered her to be stripped and whipped.  To escape the degradation and the torture, she rushed to the river, jumped in, and ended her wrongs in death.  (122)

Whereas Whitman inserts himself into a scene by the river to explore aspects of the liberating qualities of sexuality and the body, Harriet Jacobs, through Linda Brent, tells of the river and the body serving quite a different purpose. 

Whitman wants his readers to have full access to his own body as well as those he portrays.  In Jacobs, the reader is thrice removed from the scarred body of the slave girl who finds her release, not as Whitman does in the exploration of sexual fantasies, but in the dissolution of her physical body.  She takes from the oppressor his weapon.  Her revenge is that she denies the master access to that which she has been unable to access because of his cruelty.  All the while, Linda can only observe, from a locus of near immateriality.  She lays, hidden, robbed of a corporeal existence, like Whitman in Leaves of Grass, "Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,/ Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it" (67).

Whitman is not mute on the plight of the slave. In "I Sing the Body electric," he notices: "A woman’s  body at auction,/ She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,/ She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers" (133). What is mentioned here represents the pinnacle of the power that a slave master has over the body of a slave woman.  She is the mother.  She insures the continuation of the race.  Killing the mother kills the race.  Defiling her does likewise.

 This is, perhaps, the place where Whitman and Jacobs most comfortably meet.  Whitman seeks to expand the sexual sphere, and redefine the discourse therein; Jacobs seeks to reveal how this sphere is a locus for oppression in the slave states.  Both of them see motherhood as the sacred solution.  After a violent episode with Flint and a consequent fainting, Linda says, "My life was spared, and I was glad for the sake of my little ones.  Had it not been for these ties to life, I should have been glad to be released by death" (78).  Here we see motherhood as that which ties Linda to life.  It is her children, representing the hope of the future, which allow her endure her pains.

John Ernest, in his essay "Motherhood Beyond the Gate," has said:

By all cultural standards, ideological motherhood in this narrative of national life has been violated and corrupted, and Jacobs argues that it is only by acknowledging and studying the terms of that violation and corruption that motherhood can be restored to integrity.  (184)

This encapsulates Jacobs’s project in Incidents: she illustrates the means by which the body is defiled in an effort to redeem this body.  She posits motherhood as a pure institution that inherently contains this redemption.  Though this institution is manipulated by the slave state, it exists in a "natural" realm, outside the political, that even the imposed physical separation of mother and child cannot dissipate.  Is there any doubt that watching her children’s lives and not being able to participate is the greatest source of pain for Linda during her seven years of hiding?  Can it then be denied that the one thing that kept her going was the knowledge that she was watching over them and the hope that she might ensure their freedom?

Whitman and Jacobs stand removed from their texts for different objectives.  The body in Incidents is Linda Brent’s, but it represents that of Harriet Jacobs.  At this distance, she can recount the atrocities of slavery and the ways in which her sexuality was manipulated and used as an agent of oppression.  Whitman creates many "selves" and "bodies" in his text.  He stands in a certain relation to all of these, but it is the relationship that he holds in common them, that of author, that he is able to proceed with his project of showing a path of liberation through the freeing of one’s physical body as well as one’s notion of sexuality.  It is necessary to juxtapose these two texts as examples of two disparate positions in mid-nineteenth century America, if we are to come to a more nuanced understanding of sexuality at that time.  Jacobs illustrates sexuality as a weapon, in Whitman’s text it is most often a path to freedom, but both seem to recognize it as the root of all life, therefore worthy of redemption.  As Whitman says:

Urge and urge and urge,/ Always the procreant urge of the world./ Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,/ Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.  (65)

 

 

Works Cited

Ernest, John.  "Motherhood Beyond the Gate: Jacobs’s Epistemic Challenge in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl."  Garfield and Zafar  179-199.

Foreman,  P. Gabrielle.  "Manifest in Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl."  Garfield and Zafar  100-130.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle and Zafar, Rafia.  Eds.  Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays.  New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality Vol 1: An Introduction.  Trans.  Robert Hurley.  New York: Pantheon, 1978.

Jacobs, Harriet A.  Incidents in the Life of a Save Girl, Written by Herself.  Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.

Pollack, Vivian R.  The Erotic Whitman.  Berkeley: U California P, 2000.

Reynolds, David S.  Walt Whitman’s America.  New York: Vintage, 1996.

Whitman, Walt.  The Complete Poems.  Ed. Francis Murphy.  New York: Penguin, 1986.