D.+Jones+on+Christine+F.

Whitman Assignment

Homework: each student needs a total of two postings, covering two separate events.

Event I: Compromise of 1850. The Compromise of 1850 was a series of laws created to help diffuse conflict between Southern slave states and Northern free states. One of the most important, and controversial laws passed as a result of the Compromise of 1850 was The Fugitive Slave Act, which was passed in a response to the weaker Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 that merely required the return of runaway slaves. In contrast to the 1793 act, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 held any Federal Marshal or official who did not arrest an alleged runaway subject to fines up to $1000. The Fugitive Slave act of 1850 was extremely controversial and effectively kindled the ire of abolitionist more so than it assuaged the insecurities of the Southern slave states. In fact, the existence of this act was used as part of the justification for ending slavery just 12 years later. The act also inspired the continued operation of the Underground Railroad.

Event II: The Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad, in operation from 1780 to 1862, was an expansive network of people who helped slaves escape from the South to the North and to Canada. To say, though, that the Underground Railroad was in “operation” may be misleading. The Underground Railroad was not headed by a single person or organization through which the operations of the network were filtered and made to function. Rather, The Underground Railroad was more of an entity comprised of individuals who were aware only of their ability to help locally and who were generally not aware that their efforts were part of a larger network of operations. Because of this, the Underground Railroad operated as a sort of subconscious collective effort, united in a single purpose but largely unaware of the vast network being created in that effort. Some estimate that nearly 100,000 slaves escaped the South from 1810 to 1850 with the help of the network of The Underground Railroad.

Artifact: The Liberator. [|The Liberator] was a Boston based abolitionist newspaper that was in print from 1831-1865. The paper was published by William Garrison, and featured articles from other abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas.


 * Assignment: Choose either A. or B., and consider this an "informal" writing assignment.**

A. In "Song of Myself" Whitman refers to slaves and particularly the fugitive slave in several passages. Using the slave, fugitive slave, or another motif in the poem, write a page (or less, if you can do it thoroughly and concisely) explaining how this emblem of American society speaks to the underlying tensions in the relationship between the individual and collective whole, while at the same time rejoicing in it. Some questions to consider: Is such tension inevitable, valuable? What are some of the deeper issues that this tension might point to? Why would Whitman choose to include marginalized and degraded groups/peoples in a poem of celebration, particularly of the self? How does Whitman align himself which such groups? Is he sincere, convincing, successful? One line of tension in “Song of Myself” seems to be a result of the ongoing attempt to reconcile the self with the collective whole. Whitman wants to convince the reader, and, perhaps more importantly, himself that this reconciliation is not only possible but, what is more, inevitable. He begins the poem with the claim that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Whitman’s charge then is to qualify, articulate, and render this claim through an ongoing interaction between the “I” of the poem and the vast swath of humanity that inhabits the same landscape as that “I.” Indeed it seems a central preoccupation of the poem to disrupt or dissolve the seemingly clear binary boundaries of self/other and thereby, through this disruption, creates an “I” that is a result of absorption and amalgamation in which “one and all tend inward… and I [“I”] tend outward…”(36). In other words, the poem seeks to articulate the inevitable tendency toward //network [1] // that results in sympathetic communication.

One of the characters through which Whitman renders this relationship is the fugitive slave. Whitman introduces the runaway slave as an outsider, as one “limpsey and weak,” (30) who is different than the poet who is “solid and sound.”(40) But Whitman does not allow the slave to remain an outsider, nor to remain weak. Rather, Whitman takes the runaway into his home: “He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, I had him sit next me at the table.”(31) In taking the fugitive slave in, “putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles,” and giving him a room that entered from his own, Whitman engages physically with his philosophical preoccupation of sympathetic [2] assimilation. The former slave leaves not limpsey and weak as he arrived, but closer to solid and sound. Further, by harboring the fugitive, Whitman has, perhaps unknowingly, taken part in the Underground Railroad, which operated as a vast interconnected (if unconsciously so) system united in a single purpose.

Because the fugitive slave suggests an allusion to the Underground Railroad, which was in “operation” from 1780 to 1862, he functions as a vital character, both literally and metaphorically, through which Whitman can engage in the amalgamation of the self with the collective whole. Just as the Underground Railroad operated by a vast network of interdependent relationships, which, in working both independently and in unity, created a collective entity, Whitman too creates a collective entity by rendering characters that are simultaneously independent and, by their interdependent relationship to each other, unified.

Of course this unification could not be accomplished if Whitman excluded marginalized and destitute characters. In fact his absorption into their collective seems well accomplished in his chronicling of the characters that make up that society. In his chronicling Whitman acknowledges the machinist, the lunatic, the half-breed, the opium eater, the floormen, the deckhands, the one-year wife, the conductor, the prostitute, the coon-seekers, just to name a few. In this sequence he also nods to the President, though he leaves out other aristocrats. Absent too, from the sequence extending from the runaway slave on page 30 to the old husband on page 36, are writers, gentleman, poets, and artists, just to name a few. And Whitman admits in his essay on //Leaves of Grass// that he “would leave a select soiree of elegant people any time to go with tumultuous men”(135). In fact he tells us in this same essay that “the effects he produces in his poems are no effects of artists or the arts, but effects of the original eye or arm, or the actual atmosphere, or tree, or bird.”(135-36). In other words, in order to establish an encompassing sense of the self, in order to create the “I” in which every atom belonging to it belongs as good to everything else, the poet had to react against a societal norm that did not embrace that notion. Though if this reaction against the “artificial teaching of a fine writer or speaker”(136) partially undermines his stated purpose he does not let it come between him and his embrace of marginalized and destitute characters. Notes on Assignment:

I enjoyed working on this assignment and found I did indeed discover a few new things about //Leaves of Grass//, which I will get to presently. First off, though, I liked that you had “us” search for cultural events rather than artifacts. Of course artifacts will be part of any historical event, and in some cases, say in archeological studies, one may have to deduce events through artifacts, but I think for the purposes of this assignment the events worked well. If the assignment were intended to invoke suspicion concerning the canonical interpretation of those events, then of course we would need artifacts to support our inquiries. But such was not the case.

I also thought the fugitive slave proved a central character to Whitman’s interaction with and absorption of marginalized characters, which lead to a study of not so much a cultural object within the poem but the potential subjectification of that object. I think the interplay between object and subject is another interesting line of tension throughout the poem.

I working on your assignment I came to realize, perhaps unfortunately, that Whitman was not able to absorb society as a whole, though he was able to embrace a previously neglected aspect of it. As it turns out //Leaves of Grass// is in part a reaction, and in being reactionary one cannot help but exclude (from embrace) to some extent those that reaction is reacting against.

[1] Grass itself, a central metaphor that runs throughout the poem, grows and flourishes in the same way. That is, grass grows through interdependent networks rather than trough individual propagation, though that this network must begin with a single blade is not to be ignored. In other words, the I that begins the network is inextricably bound to the “I” that composes the system or network of the whole. [2] I refer to sympathy in the most physical sense of the word, which suggests sympathy signifies “the correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational motion to one another through some medium.” (Webster’s New International Dictionary). I would argue that //Leaves of Grass// is an ongoing metaphor that renders sympathetic communication in a medium otherwise incapable literal vibrational interaction.