Walt Whitman and Gender - Quotes and Knowledge

Question 1

Holly Furneaux on the gender boundaries in Victorian writing:

Answer 1

Victorian writing ‘complicated gender boundaries, showing the proximity, rather than the opposition, of masculinity and femininity.’

Question 2

William Acton on women’s sexual desires

Answer 2

‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind.’

Question 3

What did Michel Foucault term the tendency to see Victorian sexuality as suppressed or stifled?

Answer 3

‘Repressive hypothesis’.

Question 4

How does Matthew Sweet joke about common contemporary ideas of Victorian sexuality?

Answer 4

We imagine ‘straightlaced patriarchs making their wives and children miserable […], whaleboned women shrouding the piano legs for decency’s sake.’

Question 5

David S. Reynolds on Walt Whitman’s opinions on sexual vices

Answer 5

‘prostitution, like pornography, signalled larger problems in relations between the sexes.’

Question 6

David S. Reynolds on Whitman’s willingness to speak about taboo topics

Answer 6

‘Determinedly avoiding both reticence and obscenity, Whitman in his poetry brought to all kinds of love a fresh, passionate intensity.’

Question 7

Walt Whitman quote from “Starting from Paumanok”

Answer 7

‘I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other, / And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I am determine’d to tell you with courageous clear / voice to prove you illustrious.’

Question 8

Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s two cents on Whitman’s poetry

Answer 8

‘Crude’ and ‘indecent’

Question 9

Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s opinions on the sexual content in Whitman’s poetry

Answer 9

His poetry contained ‘a nauseating quality’, a ‘sheer animal longing of sex for sex’. Often commented on Whitman’s ‘unmanly manhood’ and ‘priapism’.

Question 10

Whitman quote on temporal precedence of women in “Unfolded Out of the Folds”.

Answer 10

‘A man is a great thing upon the earth and through eternity, but every of the greatness of man is unfolded out of a woman.’

Question 11

What was “Unfolded Out of the Folds” originally titled?

Answer 11

“Poem of Women”

Question 12

What kinds of ‘unfolding’ imagery are there in Whitman’s “Unfolded Out of the Folds”?

Answer 12

‘unfolding’ of foetus, the mother’s vulval ‘folds’, the brain ‘folds’ of mother and child

Question 13

Harold Aspiz on a central theme in “Unfolded Out of the Folds”

Answer 13

‘Accepting the phrenological linkage of creativity with maternal sexuality, the poem celebrates the mother’s “perfect body” and sexual stamina’.

Question 14

How did phrenologists believe cognitive attributes were transmitted from mother to child in the Victorian period?

Answer 14

The attributes of the unborn child were encoded, “folded up” and concentrated in the parents’ brains.

Question 15

Walt Whitman quotes on gender equality in ‘Song of Myself’

Answer 15

“I am the poet of the woman the same as the man, / And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man”

Question 16

How might much of Walt Whitman’s poetic style be described?

Answer 16

Anaphoric

Question 16

Walt Whitman’s feminist exhortation of America in his poem “America”?

Answer 16

“centre of equal daughters, equal sons.”

Question 17

Anne Gilchrist on Walt Whitman’s vision for democracy.

Answer 17

‘Who but he could put at last the right meaning to that word “democracy”, which has been made to bear such a burthen of incongruous notions?’

Question 18

Whitman’s presentation of male sexuality in “Spontaneous Me”?

Answer 18

‘(Know once for all, avow’d on purpose, wherever are men like me, are our lusty lurking masculine poems)’

Question 19

How does Whitman describe his body in section 24 of “Song of Myself”?

Answer 19

‘turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.’

Question 20

Which cluster in Leaves of Grass is particularly homoerotic, with a view to demonstrating societal benefits?

Answer 20

The ‘Calamus’ cluster

Question 21

Walt Whitman on the societal benefit of homosexual relationships in “For You O Democracy”

Answer 21

‘I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks, / By the love of comrades, / By the manly love of comrades.’

Question 22

Walt Whitman on the societal benefit of homosexual relationships in “I hear it was charged against me”

Answer 22

‘I will establish in the Mannahatta and in every city … The institution of the dear love of comrades.’

Question 23

Which feminist figure was Walt Whitman good friends with?

Answer 23

Abby Price, a founding member of the women’s rights movement

Question 24

Walt Women’s passage on gender equality in Democratic Vistas

Answer 24

‘The idea of the women of America … develop’d, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men - greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical attribute.’

Question 25

Walt Whitman’s willingness to speak on sexual matters as demonstrated in “Song of Myself”

Answer 25

‘I do not press my fingers across my mouth, / I keep as delicate around the bowels as around the head and hear, / Copulation is no more rank to me than death is.’

Question 26

In which poems does Whitman contemplate prostitutes?

Answer 26

“To a Common Prostitute” and “The City Dead-House”

Question 27

In which poems does Whitman present female sexuality?

Answer 27

“Unfolded Out of the Folds”, “Song of Myself”, “The Sleepers”.

Question 28

What did Whitman put on the cover of his first edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’?

Answer 28

A daguerreotype

Question 29

Who was Walt Whitman’s first serious biographer?

Answer 29

John Burroughs

Question 30

What did John Burroughs believe to be the crowning achievement of a Whitmanesque society?

Answer 30

The equality of men and women:

‘The more democratic we become, the more we are prepared for Whitman … the more the woman becomes the mate and equal of the man, the more social equality prevails.’

Question 31

The democratic importance Walt Whitman imbues sex with in “A Woman Waits for Me”

Answer 31

“Through you I drain the pent up rivers of myself, / In you I wrap a thousand onward years, / On you I graft the grafts of the best beloved of me and America”.