“The great psalm of the republic”

1. “The great psalm of the republic” Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass 1855

2. From the preface “There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile .. perhaps a generation or two .. dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place.A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest.”

3. “Song of Myself” Comprised of 52 sections equalling 2,000 lines. The speaker celebrates the individual while also transcending a specific subjectivity in order to embody the complexity and variety of personages found in the organic life of the new nation. It imagines life through a poetic style informed by a democratic conception of inclusive citizenry.

4. Grass “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loaf and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” (section 1)

5. Section 6 “A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands” “It must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt.”

6. “the produced babe of vegetation” “uniform hieroglyphic” “the beautiful uncut hair of graves” The “curling grass” may “transpire from the breasts of young men” or may be “the mothers’ laps.”

7. 5 “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not even the best, Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.” “How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

8. And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart, And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.”

9. Section 10 “And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north, I had him sit next to me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.”

10. 11 “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.” “Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.”

11. “The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge     to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them,They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,They do not think whom they souse with spray.”

12. 15 This section lists a panoply of American identities linked by a common thread: Singer, carpenter, children, sailors, hunters, deacons, spinning-girl, farmers, lunatic, printer, surgeon, quadroon girl, drunkard, machinist, coachman, biracial, immigrants, bondmen, overseer, musicians and dancers, Michigander, squaw, connoisseur, wives, workmen, conductor, drug-users, prostitutes.

13. Aesthetics of Democracy “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them,And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

14. 21 “ I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul, The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me, The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. I am the poet of the woman as same as the man, And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man.”

15. 24 “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding. No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,No more modest than immodest.

16. “I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy,By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” “Through me forbidden voices,Voices of sexes and lusts, voices veil'd and I remove the veil,Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigur'd.”

17. Henry Louis Gates estimates that 60,000 people escaped the “peculiar institution” by fleeing to the Northern states or Canada. 100 bondmen and bondwomen wrote book- length narratives of their experiences. Between 1703-1944 6,006 former slaves had narrated their story of captivity.

18. “In this process of imitation and repetition, the black slave’s narrative came to be a communal utterance, a collective tale, rather than merely an individual’s autobiography.” Bestsellers. Frederick Douglass’ narrative sold 5,000 copies in four months and by 1860, 30,000 copies had sold.

19. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 1861 Issues of authenticity—Lydia Maria Child editor then Jean Fagan Yellin. Jacobs assumes moral authority from “cult of true womanhood.” Jacobs masters the conventions of popular women’s fiction such as the sentimental and gothic novel. Also emphasizes literacy. Jacobs presents an opportunity for a frank discussion of rape culture and female sexuality.

20. Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood Points to Barbara Welter’s identification of the “cult of true womanhood” as gender norms which instructed chief virtues for women in the 19th century: piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Women’s appearance was considered a reflection of their character/constitution so that “delicacy” or “fragility” contrasted with “strength.”

21. “God breathing machines” “My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor.”

22. Beauty is a curse for bondwomen Scene with “sisters” I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister.” “She was also very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.”

23. Rejects the veracity of mistress’ faith “Mrs. Flint, like many southern women, was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash.”

24. “O, you happy free women, contrast your New Year’s day with that of the poor bond-woman! With you it is a pleasant season, and the light of the day is blessed” compared to bondwoman who “sits on a cold cabin floor, watching children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.”

25. Slavery an explicit threat to family “No matter whether the slave girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by friends who bear the shape of men. The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage.”

26. Jacobs offers alternatives to the cotw. Although Flint had “power and the law on his side,” Jacobs “had a determined will” and “there was might in each.” Resourcefulness, strength, defiance, fortitude bolstered the bondwoman’s pride and her position as mother. Her grandmother Martha stands as a more ideal version of motherhood and womanhood.

27. Freedom replaces and transcends purity She reconciles her outwardly scandalous decision to become Sands’ lover as a “deliberate calculation.” “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to have to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.”

28. Jacobs directly addresses the reader “Pity me and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel.” “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way with marriage.”

29. “One woman begged me to get a newspaper and read it over. She said her husband told her that the black people had sent word to the queen of ‘Merica that they were all skaves; that she didn’t believe it, and went to Washington to see the president about it. They quarrelled; she drew her sword upon him, and swore that he should help her to make them all free.”

30. “She clasped a gold chain round my baby’s neck. I thanked her for this kindness; but I did not like the emblem. I wanted no chain to be fastened on my daughter, not even if its links were of gold. How earnestly I prayed that she might never feel the weight of slavery’s chain, whose iron entereth into the soul!”

31. Storage shed crawlspace Ch 21 9 feet long, 7 feet wide, 3 feet high. 7 years concealed She becomes the mad woman in the attic as figuratively portrayed in gothic fiction. Fugitive Slave Act (1850) renders North no longer free soil.

32. Andrew Levy’s discussion of dialect Draws empathy “O pray don’t massa.” Signals resistance rather than capitulation. “you ain’t got many more years to live, and you better be saying your prayers. It will take ‘em all, and more too, to wash the dirt off your soul.” Dialect disrupts dominant ideology of slavery. Characterizes moral inferiority.

33. The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar An “anxiety of authorship” shadowed and inhibited women writing in the 19th century. The madwoman figures prominently in women’s writing of the era as a stylistic tool for exploring and exorcising gender norms which limited women. Although the madwoman is destroyed, the other characters and the reader must first acknowledge her presence. The madwoman “doubles” for the woman author’s anger.

34. The Female Malady by Elaine Showalter Eighteenth century view of madness Psychiatric Victorianism (1830-1870) Psychiatric Darwinism (1870-1920) Psychiatric Modernism (1920-1980)

35. “The Yellow Wallpaper” It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity--but that would be asking too much of fate!”

36. John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)--perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.

37. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” Karen Ford’s argues for its treatment of women’s discourse in terms of contradictions; she points out that “the conjunction of contradiction—’but’—occurs 56 times.” And, so, only, besides are also used to mean “but.”

38. “John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency.”

39. “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide--plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.”

40. “Looked at in one way each breadth stands alone, the bloated curves and flourishes--a kind of "debased Romanesque" with delirium tremens--go waddling up and down in isolated columns of fatuity. But, on the other hand, they connect diagonally, and the sprawling outlines run off in great slanting waves of optic horror, like a lot of wallowing seaweeds in full chase.”

41. “The Critic as Artist” 1890 “that in the best days of art there were no art-critics.” “Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is all. But with regard to your statement that the Greeks had no art-critics, I assure you that is quite absurd. It would be more just to say that the Greeks were a nation of art-critics.” “what is our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit.”

42. Critical faculty & artistic creation “the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one.” “For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.”