That anxiety is significant, and it’s been one factor in my not having returned to this blog since I left the class Tuesday night, energized though I was. (The four classes I’m teaching have also complicated just finding the time to write.) Still, even as this anxiety emerged on Tuesday, it was accompanied by an excitement about pushing myself to do something new (blogging) while exploring Whitman. But I also want to try to focus and personalize this semester and my relationship with Whitman.
To do this, I’ve surveyed what other significant elements I’m currently negotiating. Perhaps one of the most exciting for me–and one that’s also tied to new technologies–is the migration of my significant genealogical work (about thirty years’ worth) to the Internet and Ancestry.com in particular. At present I’m immersed in this project–scanning and posting family photos, drawing on on-line census, birth, and death records, completing genealogical trees, and so forth–much of which includes a focus on the nineteenth century. Therefore, at least in part, I’ve set myself the undertaking to put Whitman and his poetry in dialogue with my own ancestors from the era, a process that has seemed, at least at first, incongruous and perhaps a tad futile. I’m hoping, though, that instructive links will develop.
In particular I’m focusing–in part–on a handful of direct male and female ancestors, most of whom had located to north-central Texas, still largely frontier in 1861, in the 1840s and 50s. I hope to devote a fuller identification of these figures later, but for now I’ll focus on James Madison White, known as “Jim.” Born in 1838 in Georgia, he served as a Confederate soldier, married and fathered fifteen children, and died in 1917. As I’ve been thinking of White alongside Whitman since Tuesday, one element that has emerged is the dramatically different number of representations of these two figures. While Whitman has been well- (some might say excessively) imaged, only four images of White seem to have survived. (The growing participation of genealogists on-line, however, gives hope that new personal photo archives may become available and reveal other images.) For White, three of these images come from his old age in the early twentieth century. Therefore, despite his being a generation younger than Whitman, White seems far more typical of most nineteenth-century Americans. Yes, there were photographic images made, but they tended to be rare. Whitman and his imagistic excesses are far more modern, akin to the explosion of images that, as my collecting of photos has suggested, mark most individuals after the 1920s.
But what of the famous 1855 image of Whitman? When doing my image-inclusive first post in class on Tuesday, I immediately replicated that illustration, asserting it just seemed the “right” thing to do. I’d taught that image in practically every class in which I’d taught a Whitman text, dutifully juxtaposing the image against those of Longfellow and Emerson. But the more I thought about that image of Whitman, especially when I juxtaposed it with this image of Jim White from about 1915
the more I realized how stiltedly staged Whitman seems. Yes, he’s refreshingly casual, but it seems an artfully artless presentation that nevertheless reveals its deliberate performance of democracy. White, on the other hand, with his awkward posing that’s partly casual (the hands behind the back, the everyday clothes) and partly rigid (the direct gaze, the precisely positioned hat), seems more “real.” Moreover, the geriatric’s unshaved face contrasts parallelly to Whitman’s carefully groomed beard. Likewise, for all the daringly open shirt, Whitman’s is immaculately clean, and his pants seem hardly aged or worn and instead prop-like. White’s hat, shirt, and pants seem to have undergone the actual stresses of everyday use. Finally, Whitman’s body is idealized: youthful, healthy, vibrant; White’s is aged, paunchy, decrepit. Whitman may gesture to his genitals with the pocketed hand, but White’s distended stomach seems (although unconsciously) more revelatory of a body that’s all too human. All of this has led me be–at least for the moment–critical of Whitman, a figure whom I’ve usually taught in almost exclusively celebratory fashions. The poet of democracy here strikes me as a “poser” in numerous senses of the word when juxtaposed against one of the perhaps more accurately average “roughs” of nineteenth-century America.
I think you’re onto something about Whitman’s carefully managed casualness. There’s a fascinating article by Ted Genoways (in the book _Leaves of Grass: The Sesquicentennial Essays_, which you can get to on NetLibrary through our library) called “One Goodshaped and Wellhung Man” (a phrase from the 1855 preface–I kid you not) that presents pretty convincing evidence that Whitman actually met with his engraver to have the crotch of the image accentuated in later printings of the book. When it came to pictures, it seems, he left little to chance.
Great post, Gary, and welcome to the project! The subject of Whitman and photography is what first drew me to start doing serious research on Whitman way back in my first year of grad school. There is much to say on the subject, but for now I’ll just note that your point about Whitman’s poses is right on. The “butterfly” photograph is perhaps the best example of that. See the Whitman Archive notes for the full story behind that photo.
I guess that what this brings up for me is the question of authenticity as it relates to posing. Is a pose, or artifice of any kind, necessarily inauthentic because it is consciously constructed? And is an artless pose necessarily more “real” than an artful one?
It seems to me that the wonder of Whitman is that he was able to complicate all of these categories.
[…] that are fragmented and often weighty in their incongruity and dissonance. In fact, after reading Gary Richard’s post that provocatively frames Whitman as a poser in the frontispiece (in the perjorative, rather than […]
Thanks to Brady, Matt, and Jim for responding. I’m still figuring out how to handle approvals and responses, so thanks as well for bearing with me.
I appreciate the welcome, Matt. I think you nicely remind that all images have degrees of posedness and certainly constructedness (even if the one you draw us to–Whitman and the butterfly–goes to an extreme!), and I hope my scare quotes indicated my questioning of the “realness” in the case of White and his photograph. He’s no doubt as posed as Whitman, although perhaps there’s an immediacy or spontaneity that’s missing in Whitman’s. And I do still worry that there’s a disjunct between his performance of “common manness” and the day-to-day lived experiences of common men and women of the era. Perhaps a question for me is how does one capture that embodied experience imagistically, if one ever can? Or is that labor to some extent antithetical to representation?
Brady, I have no idea if my great-great-grandfather enhanced his crotch as well, but his fathering of fifteen children may be an indirect comment. That’s fascinating about Whitman and his potential manipulation of imagery, and it definitely adds to the uneasiness that I unexpectedly felt about this particular image this time around.
I really love this post, Gary, even though I have come to like Whitman’s full-hipped images better than his codpiece image in my ongoing quest for the womanly Whitman. I have a bunch of quick thoughts to throw out: though WW’s representations of the working man, and lord knows of the slave, seem forced and stilted sometimes, still when I think of him next to, say, his near-contemporary Wordsworth’s representation of the same, I can appreciate the “authenticity” of what he tries to do– and of what he was, since despite his (tortured) attempt to pose as one, after all he IS a working man, undereducated, poor, itinerant. The other thing I was thinking about reading this post is a subject that is never far from my mind when I read WW: audience and purpose. Who is the audience for White’s photo and what purpose did it serve for him, his family (vs. for you now)? That seems so different to me than the purpose and (projected enormous) audience of the frontispiece that it complicates a comparison.
I feel suddenly like I’m defending the codpiece image, which actually I’ve never liked much and always found fakey and artificial! I hope you blog more about the sheer number of images, Gary, which also has so many interesting implications for “commonness,” geography, public image, and so on.