David Greven
Riven by competing and equally pressing social and cultural demands, headed for the cataclysm of war within their own nation and then forced to endure its ill‐coordinated aftermath, made to make sense of race relations in a culture of overwhelming racism whether or not they espoused or resisted this racism, nineteenth‐century Americans lived in a turbulent era that made the human body its battleground. Scientific racism made corporeal flesh and pigmentation outward signs of a deep racial essence; women strove for suffrage as the “cult of true womanhood” insisted that women were sexless and best suited to their natural domain, the domestic sphere, a view upheld by pseudoscientific theories of the day; men struggled to be, at once, ruthless warriors in the arena of market capitalism and gentle, nurturing paterfamiliases; the intersexed became freakish spectacles, sometimes literally. Regulating the sexual body while cordoning off sexual intercourse as an act strictly delimited to the perpetuation of the species, the health and sexual reformers of the era disseminated a consistent program of bodily and sexual continence. The reformers promulgated the fantasy that sex and the body not only should, but could, be so regulated. And slavery, with its endlessly contentious debates on both sides of the question, loomed over all, making all questions about American progress, morality, and the possibilities of change questions about slavery. The body spoke the language of these incommensurate conflicts and demands, an incoherent somatic tongue. Controlling the body and its sexual aspects became a means of controlling the body politic, of establishing and maintaining a seeming coherence.
While engagement with these discursive agendas took many forms, it is the literature of the period that concerns us here. This chapter chiefly explores the interactions between imaginative literature and health and sex reform writings, the cross‐fertilizing and mutually alienating efforts of each to address, if never to relieve, the pressures of a corporeal nation. The first section focuses on the reformers Sylvester Graham, Mary Gove Nichols, and John Todd and the obstetrician Augustus Kinsley Gardner. The following section considers Harriet Prescott Spofford’s work, specifically her tale, “Circumstance,” and its depiction of female authorship in the context of the violated female body. The final section focuses on Walt Whitman and intersections among queer, feminist, and bodily themes.
Reformers such as Sylvester Graham, his disciple Mary Gove Nichols (a prominent advocate, with her husband, for free love), and John Todd wrote actively and were actively read in the antebellum period. Todd’s The Student’s Manual (1835) was a global bestseller; as he notes in the preface to the 1854 edition, “In the Old World I know not how many editions, nor in how many languages it has been printed, sometimes with, and sometimes without, the author’s name (Todd 1861: 3). These reformers focused on the strict maintenance of physical health – continence – an absolute control over the body and specifically its sexual dimensions. Graham, a Presbyterian minister, often couched his invectives against bodily excess in religious, moralistic terms. For Graham, as for many other thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, onanism, or masturbation, was a particularly dangerous as well as immoral practice, which inevitably led to “a blighted body – and a ruined soul!” as he warns in his 1833 A Lecture to Young Men (Graham 1974: 58). Graham and Nichols and other reformers also warned that masturbation inevitably led to sexual activity with members of one’s own sex, who would engage in “unnatural commerce with each other!” (Graham 1974: 43).1 John Todd’s ominous description of masturbation could only be written in Latin (Todd 1861: 147–149). He then warned young men to avoid the temptation of scandalous writers such as Byron. Would the “knowledge thus obtained” by reading Byron “be worth the agony of the fire, and the scars which would remain through life? It is breathing the air which comes up from a heated furnace […] There are many bright spots in such writings,” but to find them one must go through “volumes of Egyptian darkness” (150).
In his 1976 book The Horrors of the Half‐Known Life, G.J. Barker‐Benfield persuasively argued that a “spermatic economy,” the belief that the loss of sperm was a grievous harm to the body, drove the cultural campaign against masturbation (Barker‐Benfield 2000: 175–189). In the antebellum period, dominated by such models as Jacksonian frontier masculinity, the aggressive marketplace capitalist, the ruthless self‐made man, the idea of a loss of virility in males was particularly problematic. But reformers also focused on the grievous harm practices such as onanism did to girls and young women; no one was safe from these dangers; moreover, no one was sexually innocent. Nichols argued that girls learned the solitary vice from their intimates (Nichols 1839: 9; 1842: 222–223). Graham painted the entire public school system as a den of iniquity because this vice and the ones it led to were rife within these unsupervised, wanton enclaves. “It is enough to make a parent’s heart recoil with horror, when he contemplates the danger to which his child is exposed, on becoming a member of a public school!” (Graham 1974: 42). The chief difficulty in solving this national crisis, as the reformers saw it, was that the discussion of sexual matters, repressed in polite society, caused so much anxiety that to discuss these matters at all was to take a great risk. Nevertheless, the reformers persevered: their tracts were widely read, their lectures well attended.
Perhaps the most surprising aspect of the reformers’ campaigns against sexual excess was their critique of two cultural myths of long‐standing provenance: that men were naturally amorous and in constant need of sexual release; and that marital sexuality was a God‐approved and naturally beneficial good. Because marital sexuality was seen as a means to reproduction and the continuation of the family, it was the privileged form of sexual experience. Nevertheless, reformers questioned even this sacred tie and act.
Graham lectured young men that marriage did not safeguard against sexual excess and the debility it caused. “The mere fact that a man is married to one woman, and is perfectly continent to her, will by no means prevent the evils that flow from sexual excess” (Graham 1974: 34). He cautioned against accepting the belief that sexual excess was an inherent aspect of maleness, asserting: “Nothing can be more erroneous, than the plea which many young men set up, that this propensity was implanted in them by nature; and therefore, it is right and proper that they should indulge in it, to all extent, consistent with matrimonial rights” (35). Articulating the belief that semen must be conserved, Graham warned, “There is a common error of opinion among young men,” and not among them alone, “that health requires an emission of semen. […] All this is wrong, – entirely, dangerously wrong!” (38). It was not the case, he countered, that male sexual fluids need be discharged. Abstinence was the only answer for single, unmarried men, and very cautious, infrequent, and strictly procreative sex for the married. Looming over everything was the threat of “self‐pollution,” onanism being “the worst form of venereal indulgence” (39).
Indeed, Graham defended the biblical figure who lent the practice its name from being charged with this crime.
The view which has been taken of the conduct of Onan, according to the scripture account, Gen. xxxviii, is that Onan’s wasting his seed on the ground […] [was the reason why] the Lord slew him. But this is altogether a mistake. The gist of his crime, which incurred the displeasure and infliction of the Lord, was his refusing to raise up seed to his deceased brother, according to the requirement of the divine law. The act of Onan, therefore, was in no respect of such a character, as to justify the use of his name, to designate the far more obscene, and grossly sensual and unnatural act of self‐pollution.
(Graham 1974: 40)
I would argue that the biblical story of Onan contained a welter of anxieties that spoke to antebellum audiences. Onan’s refusal to impregnate his dead brother’s wife, whose child conceived from this act would then be his brother’s child, not Onan’s, resonates with the kind of internecine tensions and conflicts that characterize male–male relations in the period and that achieve an apotheosis in the American Civil War between North and South, often called a war between brothers.
The literature of the period teems with male competitive aggressions, which are complemented by demands to join in with male group identity. Homosocial male group identity, far from opposed to marketplace aggressions, was bolstered by them; the real foe was the singular, isolate individual who refused to conform to either. Many males of nineteenth‐century American fictions, as I have argued, are in flight from both male group identity and from heterosexual desire, each experienced as onerous demands on individual integrity. Isolate males resisted these oddly linked demands, intensified by the competing and incommensurate social pressures put on men that we have thus far outlined – hence the figure that I call the “inviolate male,” solitary and closed off, determined to avoid the company of other men or heterosexual relations, as represented by figures such as Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820); James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, as he appears in The Pathfinder (1840); and the title characters of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and Billy Budd, Sailor (Greven 2005). Inviolate individualism was largely though not exclusively a male strategy for negotiating the maze‐like and menacing social order. A portrait of inviolate womanhood can be found in works as distinct as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Augusta Jane Evans’s 1864 Confederate bestseller Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice. These novels promote the image of a fiercely solitary woman whose isolation frees her from the social order’s demands and encroachments. At the same time, Evans’s novel ends with the possibility of a lesbian relationship, an Old South version of a Boston marriage, between two equally staunch women.
Reformers like Graham and Todd focused on males (though the former also discussed femininity, particularly the ways in which young women were menaced by rapacious male sexual appetites), while Nichols tended to address the concerns of her female audience. One prominent nineteenth‐century figure, Augustus Kinsley Gardner, an American obstetrician who frequently wrote about midwifery and gynecology, focused, it might be said, on the idea of woman, and the impact of this idea on both the woman and her husband.
Gardner was known personally by authors such as Herman Melville, who met him at one of the dinners hosted by Melville’s publisher Evert Duyckinck. Melville’s biographer Laurie Robertson‐Lorant notes that Gardner, a “gynophobic” gynecologist, promulgated the spermatic economy theory, advising husbands that it would make them produce hardier offspring. In the view of Gardner and others, “good women had no sexual urges, and for a man to feel lust, even for his wife, was dangerous” (Robertson‐Lorant 1996: 190). Gardner studied medicine in Paris and used prostitutes as his subjects, studying venereal disease through examinations of their bodies. He wrote an autobiographical account of his Paris days, Old Wine in New Bottles (1848), and gave a copy to Melville. Robertson‐Lorant rightly notes that this Paris log has “prurient undertones, but we have no record of what Melville thought of it.” In his later book Conjugal Sins (1870), our focus here, “Gardner treated sexuality as an aberration, warning readers that frequent intercourse even between legally married couples can be just as harmful as masturbation, nymphomania, bestiality, and sodomy. He opposed all forms of birth control” and, like the reformers we have discussed, advocated for strict sexual continence (Robertson‐Lorant 1996: 190–191). Like the work of other influential reformers, Gardner’s books were popular, influential, and printed many times across the decades.
Before turning to Gardner’s work, it is important to be aware of just what was at stake in maintaining the image of female sexual purity, an ideal that had profound implications for women’s sexual identity. As Natasha Kirsten Kraus observes of the cult of true womanhood that dominated Victorian America,
During the antebellum era, the True Woman was popularly conceived as a specifically raced and classed reputable Woman: white and of the middling or upper class. Nonetheless, this understanding of womanhood maintained a powerful sway even over those excluded from its definitional matrix, particularly in their attempts to stake a claim to social legitimacy and the political, economic, and cultural agency it afforded. For instance, Hazel Carby (1987: 6) documents how African American women used slave narratives and fiction to recharacterize both their lives and conceptions of True Womanhood. […] The explicitness of the rhetoric of True Womanhood shocks us today. […] To truly be a woman, one had to display certain qualities of character and, at the same time, embody certain delimited racial and socioeconomic positions.
(Kraus 2008: 26–27)
The reputable woman was a sexless woman who naturally fulfilled her crucial but publicly invisible role as angel of the house. Many scholars have rightly critiqued the long‐standing gendered “separate spheres” model as definitive of nineteenth‐century gender roles, chiefly by arguing that men, associated with the public world of commerce and industry, were also invested in the private, domestic, female realm. Nevertheless, this critique has also had the unfortunate effect of diminishing and distorting just how binding, widespread, and injurious the strict gender codes of nineteenth‐century America were. The separate spheres model certainly holds true in terms of socialization – the sexes were kept largely estranged from one another before marriage. Moreover, people were expected to conform to and inhabit a group gender identity, assimilated into homosocial, same‐gender collectives. Gender essence was the rule of the day, with beliefs that men were naturally aggressive, competitive, and sexually rapacious, while women were naturally warm, nurturing, domestic, and sexless.
So, to return to Garner, his bestselling medical books were reflective not just of his own misogyny but also that of the larger culture. And his account of marital sexuality as besieged by the forces of sexual excess similarly sprang from ambient cultural anxieties. Gardner begins his argument in Conjugal Sins, a tellingly titled work, by critiquing modern‐day society: “The refinements of modern life – the listless and enervated condition of the modern woman – the pampered ease which riches and fashion and ‘the latest improvements’ have brought in their train – the corrupt air of crowded cities – the neglect of healthy occupation – the change from the active housekeeper of our forefather’s pattern” have all brought about “the vacuity of mind and flabbiness of muscle of the ornamental women of the present epoch” (Gardner 1870: 17).
Lacking in mental and physical strength, these women demonstrate their inadequacy by “sedulously” seeking “to diminish the number of their offspring” (Gardner 1870: 18). In Gardner’s view, the disorders afflicting modern women can be traced back to their attempt to control their reproductive lives, efforts to “avoid propagation” that produce results “ten thousand‐fold more disastrous” than the childbearing and childrearing that supposedly leave women “worn out” (31). Indeed, the greatest health risks of the age, in Gardner’s view, “are the methods which have for their aim, the prevention of having children” (35). “Ornamental” femininity leads to inattentive mothering. Young girls confronting puberty receive no maternal counseling about menstruation, leaving them “surprised, if not much alarmed, by its fearful appearance” (Gardner 1870: 22). Gardner bemoans the “Parties and balls, theaters and public amusements,” the “stimulations” leaving young women enervated; he extols a previous time when life was “more quiet and sedate” (23).
Gardner contends, consistently, that the languorous refinements of the modern era leave women bored, listless, idle, and artificial. He compares his era’s women to the “Roman women” drawn to “the spectacles where men were devoured by ferocious beasts”; modern‐day women similarly attend “bull‐fights and capital executions” (Gardner 1870: 72). American society does not endure this scourge alone: France is besieged by “a veritable plague” of women’s “‘unbridled luxury,’” as Gardner quotes one commentator (72). Indulging in the Hellenism that writers of his age such as Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe frequently employed, Gardner writes,
The sensuous intemperance is sufficiently to be reprobated when its aliment is drawn from vigor of physical energy, the heightened imagination, the mind pampered by the ordinary stimulation of the aesthetic as delineated in marble, spread out on the glowing canvas, where the great artist Guido portrays Io, with rapturous eye upturned, as if to meet half way the king of the gods.
(72–73)
I have not been able to corroborate Gardner’s reference to a painting of Io by Guido Reni. More likely, Gardner refers to the famous painting Jupiter and Io (c. 1530) by the artist Antonio Allegri da Correggio, a figure of the Italian late Renaissance. In Correggio’s rendering, Io provocatively looks upward, as if scanning the heavens for her godly lover, who for his part clasps her body with a smoky paw. For Gardner, Io’s wanton eye metonymizes his corrupt, sensual era in which women would rather pursue immoral, decadent pleasures than rear the families whose numbers they have carefully and drastically diminished. Her sexually appetitive gaze evokes the “lubricious writings of the day, whose foul impurity is too often gilded by genius,” and the “cheap charms of the modern meretricious stage” (74). High and low forms of art and entertainment degrade an already degraded cultural atmosphere figured by the birth‐control‐using woman and her pornographic sexual agency.
Gardner regards contraceptives and prophylactics as emblematic of his era’s saddening and coarsening attitudes. Attributing this quote to the celebrated French writer and conversationalist Madame de Staël, he calls these methods “cobwebs for protection, and bulwarks against love” (Gardner 1870: 109). Gardner also registers his disgust at the disordered sexuality that his age produces, even – especially – within heterosexual marriage. He grimaces at “the perpetual adoration of the fetish” of men being encouraged to have sexual intercourse with their wives during menstruation (143).
Hawthorne’s 1844 tale “Rappaccini’s Daughter” evokes tableaux similar to that in Gardner’s work. Gardner describes – and to his credit debunks – mythologies of the poisonous nature of the menstruating woman: “Authors have maintained, entirely unsupported by facts […] that women, at the time of this flow, have the power to kill by their touch a young vine; that they render a tree sterile; that they turn sauces; sour wine and milk; rust iron and steel; that they cause pregnant woman to abort […] make dogs mad and even fowls” (Gardner 1870: 144–145). Hawthorne crafts a tale in which a woman, created by her evil scientist father as an invincible monster, shares the poisonous blood that flows through the deadly plants in the family garden. Instead of killing young vines, she shares the fatal power of the vines in her midst, able, like them, to kill with a touch. Hawthorne, in my view, critiques male phobias about female sexuality that take the shape of fantasies of fatal women; Gardner ostensibly offers a similar critique, but in the end reinforces these phobic attitudes. The woman’s natural shame leads her to sequester herself during menstruation; she knows that she must maintain a vigilant separation from all others, her husband especially; the husband who wishes his menstruating wife to engage in conjugal relations violates her natural modesty, instinctive repugnance at her own body, and, we can say, internalized misogyny (147–148).
Gardner’s work sums up the nineteenth century’s deeply conflicted attitudes toward female sexuality, the rigid and also desperate attempt to maintain a cultural belief in women’s passionlessness.2 One of the most vexed intersections between these fears of female sexual agency and other phobic preoccupations of the period involved race. As Sara N. Roth observes, using Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” as exemplary, fears of miscegenation, or amalgamation, informed representation in the period. Artists like Edward W. Clay in his Practical Amalgamation prints of the 1830s depicted abolitionist women as provocatively soliciting African American males for sexual contact. Clay’s work, in an era informed by Sylvester Graham’s exhortations to males to keep sexual desire at bay, “also belied a sublimated desire among middle‐class white men to express their own sexuality in an unguarded and forceful manner. As at other times in American history, black men became the vehicle on which white men projected their own fears and desires as they wrestled not only with a changing racial situation but with shifting and conflicting notions of what a man should be.” With excruciating predictability, these male fears fed into the social necessity of controlling and delimiting female sexual agency. “If left to their own devices, white women might join black men in helping overturn the social order” (Roth 2014: 70–71). Increasingly in antebellum society, anti‐abolitionist writers depicted white women as sexually complicit in interracial sexual scenarios. “Whether they imagined white women as helpless victims in need of white male protection or as disloyal amalgamationists lusting after black men, authors of the 1830s and early 1840s advocated a society where white men would remain in control of both white women and black men” (73). Such attitudes and strategies endured well into the Reconstruction era, marked by public displays of white racism such as the well‐attended spectacles of African American men being lynched in the South. The justification for these lynchings was frequently based in fears of miscegenation and charges that black males had raped or in some other way sexually violated white women.
While African people bore the brunt of nineteenth‐century American society’s racial insanity, Africans were also far from alone in being understood through pernicious and expedient racial archetypes. James Fenimore Cooper’s famous novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales and set during the Seven Years’ War, provides a telling example of phobic racial imagery involving Native Americans and endangered white femininity. Magua, the Huron villain, and his men surprise and attack the heroes in hiding: Natty Bumppo, the white man who lives among his adoptive Mohican family; the English colonist and soldier Duncan Heyward; the less‐than‐competent psalmist David; and the daughters of the English Lieutenant Colonel Munro, the mixed‐race Cora and her younger half‐sister, the pale blonde Alice. Cooper depicts this violent assault and all at stake in it as a tableau of violated female sexual and racial purity:
The young soldier made a desperate, but fruitless, effort to spring to the side of Alice, when he saw the dark hand of a savage twisted in the rich tresses, which were flowing in volumes over her shoulders, while a knife was passed around the head from which they fell, as if to denote the horrid manner in which it was about to be robbed of its beautiful ornament. But his hands were bound; and at the first movement he made, he felt the grasp of the powerful Indian who directed the band, pressing his shoulder like a vise. Immediately conscious how unavailing any struggle against such an overwhelming force must prove, he submitted to his fate, encouraging his gentle companions by a few low and tender assurances, that the natives seldom failed to threaten more than they performed.
(Cooper 1983: 92)
Heyward portrays the Indians as boastful cowards to mollify the frightened women, but his assurances fail to soften the terrifying threat of “the dark hand of a savage” invading the “rich tresses” of the innocent heroine Alice. She is more innocent than her sister, Cora, whose mixed‐race identity (her West Indian mother was part “Negro”) makes her a likelier match for Magua, who lusts after her. When Cora first lays startled eyes on Magua, duplicitously serving as a loyal guide to the Munro daughters as they make their way with Heyward to Fort William Henry, where their father is stationed, her “rich blood” charges her lovely complexion so intensely that it seems “ready to burst its bounds” (19). She looks at the Huron with “an indescribable look of pity, admiration, and horror” (19), as Cooper indelibly describes it. Cora is an extremely sympathetic, intelligent, and appealing figure. And she consistently spurns and rebukes Magua for his behavior. Nevertheless, Cooper depicts her as strangely and inextricably entangled with Magua, a complicity that leads to both of their deaths by novel’s end. As Roth observes, the heroine’s strange complicity with the savage male, especially if she feels “pity” for him, recurs in southern anti‐abolitionist writings, but not only there, as the northerner Cooper’s work evinces. I want to turn now to a work that provocatively engages with these tensions and those within the larger nineteenth‐century American construction of female sexuality while also introducing concerns about female intellectual and artistic agency.
Harriet Prescott Spofford’s “Circumstance,” a short story published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1860, can be read as a response to the sentimental genre as embodied by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.3 The enormous outpouring of emotional responses to Stowe’s work, as Marianne Noble (2000) has shown, was informed by empathetic identification with the suffering of the bodies, usually of beautiful black male bodies, on display in the novel. This empathy for the slave, which Noble calls “sentimental wounding,” was both an uncertain and unpredictable political response and tied up with a pleasurable masochism.
Set in the Maine woods, “Circumstance” begins with the unnamed female protagonist traveling back home after she has spent the day as a caretaker to an ailing friend. As she makes her way home, the heroine is intercepted by an “Indian Devil,” or a black panther. A mythic and allegorical beast endowed with supernatural powers, the Indian Devil swoops down on the heroine and magically transports her high up to the bough of a tree, on which he keeps her pinned. There, she waits for him to devour – ravish – her. Scheherazade‐like, the heroine keeps the panther from killing her by telling him endless stories. Notably, these narratives take the form of song. As if communicating with his wife through extrasensory perception, her husband ventures out into the woods, their infant baby in tow, and climactically rescues the woman just when she is out of breath as well as musical inspiration. The husband is himself an interesting figure, as nameless as his wife, holding the shotgun he shoots the Devil with in one hand, the infant in the other. The restored family make their way back home, only to discover that an Indian raid has left their settlement in smoking ruins.
Reinvigorating the cliché that music tames the savage breast and/or beast, the tale depicts the woman’s act of singing as a defense against the ravishments of the beast. The rape metaphor could not be more palpable here: the Indian Devil’s rough tongue “scores” the woman’s cheek, “savage caresses that hurt like wounds” (Spofford 1989: 90). Spofford’s tale refracts numerous genres associated with women’s writing: the sentimental novel, romance, sensational fiction, and, especially, the seduction novel. Most vividly, it reanimates the gothic elements in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, concentrated in the final third of the novel. The protagonist Tom – a gentle and pious slave sold by his Kentucky master, Mr. Shelby, to a slave trader who in turn sells him to the decadent but basically goodhearted New Orleans aristocrat Augustine St. Clare – enters hell on earth once St. Clare dies and Tom is bought by the brutal plantation owner Simon Legree, whose sadism knows no bounds. The final section of the novel teems with supernatural images (ghosts, witches, the uncanny, entwining curls of female hair, from both Little Eva, St. Clare’s angelic blonde daughter who befriends Tom before she dies, and Legree’s mother) and with scenes of barbaric torture and violence, alternately suggested and explicit. Spofford’s tale, written when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was at the height of its cultural influence, reconsiders the problematic relationship that Stowe’s novel established between white femininity and the racial other.
Along with a provocative treatment of intersections between gender and race, “Circumstance” echoes Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its interest in the transformative power of music. Uncle Tom’s Cabin foregrounds the trope of salvational singing, exemplified by the Methodist hymn about “spirits bright […] robed in spotless white” that Tom and Little Eva sing together while sitting on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain (Stowe 2008: 282). Spofford’s text allegorizes the experience of female reading through its central preoccupation with woman’s voice and song. Through her heroine’s musical performance, Spofford transforms the natural setting into an architectural space, a theater specifically, in which the heroine not only takes center stage but is made to perform for a dubious as well as fascinatingly unpredictable audience member. “She had no comfort or consolation in this season, such as sustained the Christian martyrs in the amphitheatre” (Spofford 1989: 93).4 Though she does reconnect with her faith in this paragraph, Spofford seems more interested in sustaining the idea that the heroine, unlike characters in Stowe, has no religious ecstasy to fall back on.
If this tale is the portrait of the artist as a panther‐possessed woman, the panther’s wavering approbation of the woman’s musical gifts allegorizes the woman artist’s relationship to the literary marketplace and specifically to the occasionally impressed and supportive but more often skeptical and unresponsive male mentor. It is fascinating, then, to consider that Thomas Wentworth Higginson, famous for being Emily Dickinson’s mentor and artistic confidant, was also Spofford’s. Brenda Wineapple has reexamined the relationship between Dickinson and Higginson, making the case that it was a fruitful artistic collaboration. “Of women poets they both admired Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Bronte, but Higginson was also promoting the verse of Harriet Spofford” (Wineapple 2008: 112). Dickinson had a vivid and complicated response to Spofford’s work. “I read Miss Prescott’s ‘Circumstance,’ but it followed me in the Dark – so I avoided her,” Dickinson wrote to Higginson on 25 April 1862. And she wrote to her beloved sister‐in‐law, Susan Gilbert Dickinson, “Sue, it is the only thing I ever read in my life that I didn’t think I could have imagined myself,” adding, in contradistinction to her letter to Higginson, “send me everything she writes” (quoted in Fetterley 1985: 264).
Higginson emerges as the triangulated man, caught between two passionate female artists. If the “half‐human,” as he is often called, Indian Devil is read as a critic and/or mentor, gendered male, it follows that we see the tale as a representation of the female artist as entrapped and endangered, deeply but also not limitlessly resourceful. In terms of this last point, the story ends with the woman’s nearly last gasp, the exhaustion of her poetic/musical inspiration. Phallic gunfire – the man’s song, the music of patriarchy – replaces or substitutes for the woman’s wide‐ranging, inventive voice. Through free indirect discourse, the heroine fantasizes about her husband’s rescue of her. When he does appear and kills the Indian Devil, he rescues her but also ends her song, silencing her artistic voice. The silencing of the woman also occurs in a tale by an author often considered to be anti‐woman, Ambrose Bierce’s “The Boarded Window,” which was first published in the San Francisco Examiner on 12 April 1891. (Bierce made some revisions before including it in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians [1892].) When the wife of a man named Murlock dies, he wraps up and prepares her body for burial, leaving it on a table at night. The Murlocks live in the Ohio wilderness; Murlock’s wife is unnamed. Murlock falls asleep and wakes up to a noisy scuffle. In the cinematic burst of light from his fired gun, Murlock can see that the intruder in his home is a panther, attempting to drag his wife’s body to the window that will eventually be boarded up. Murlock faints, it is implied, for he experiences a “darkness blacker than before, and silence.” The next morning, Murlock examines his wife’s body: her throat has been “dreadfully lacerated”; the “ribbon with which he had bound the wrists was broken”; the hands are clenched tightly. And Bierce saves the most chilling detail for last: “Between the teeth was a fragment of the animal’s ear” (Bierce 1946: 172).
In his famous ironic compendium The Devil’s Dictionary, originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book in 1906, Bierce gives this definition for the term “woman”:
An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication. […] The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe. […] The popular name (wolf‐man) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movements, especially the American variety (Felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.
(Bierce 1946: 388)
In the 1860s Bierce had gone on record in support of women’s suffrage, but his views apparently underwent a misogynistic shift during the following decades. “The Boarded Window” seems redolent of this misogyny in its figuration of woman, even dead woman, when pushed to the test, as capable of a fearsome animalistic violence that matches a predatory animal’s.
The major tension that Spofford explores is that between the woman as agent, independent of her family, relying on her resourcefulness and her art work, and the woman whose life belongs elsewhere and to her husband and child. Her song for the Indian Devil transforms, once her husband and child are in proximity to her, into maternal song. It is precisely the moment in which the family is restored that the heroine loses her voice.
Spofford’s work intersects with a classic female gothic. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been read as an allegory of pregnancy, birth, and mothering, and female ambivalence in the face of these experiences. Howard L. Malchow argues that Frankenstein’s Creature in Shelley’s novel, newly born, beheld, and rejected by his creator, is a giant, monstrous image of the phallus, noting that “because of his great strength and his unpredictable moods, his alternate plaintive persuasiveness and fiery rage, [he] is suffused with a kind of dangerous male sexuality” (Malchow 1996: 25). He further argues that the Creature is a figure of racial dread and racist fantasy. The racial panic that courses through nineteenth‐century American writing informs Spofford’s story, especially its phobic denouement. The Indian Devil‐panther evokes images of the animalistic racial other who ravishes the white woman. But the real Indian Devils turn out to be those who raze the settlement.
Spofford, however, suggests that the woman who accesses her own agency by individuating herself from her role as wife and mother and the Indian Devil, the droll, half‐human beast, share a similar “outcast” status that positions them as allies – collaborators – in a larger patriarchal social system. The father‐husband’s appearance, his patriarchal and phallic status symbolized by his gun, reassimilates the mother and her voice into the Symbolic order, containing the agency of both. In the Lacanian scenario, the maternal voice, associated with the pre‐oedipal realm before language, is a lost object that cannot be assimilated into the Symbolic order, the Father’s domain of language and law. The heroine’s song, then, threatens to breach the boundaries of the Symbolic order with its autonomous power. As Kaja Silverman, parsing Jacques Lacan’s work The Four Fundamental Concepts, elaborates, the maternal voice as “lost object” is included
in the category of the “object (a).” That category, which also includes the feces, the mother’s breast, and the mother’s gaze, designates those objects which are first to be distinguished from the subject’s own self, and whose “otherness” is never very strongly marked. Because the object (a) is “a small part of the self which detaches itself from the subject while still remaining his, still retained,” its loss assumes the proportions of an amputation. Once gone, it comes to represent what alone can make good the subject’s lack.
(Silverman 1988: 85)
Both relinquished to the pre‐oedipal realm and an object of fundamental significance, the maternal voice seems to belong to the subject – which psychoanalytic theory historically privileges as male – rather than to the mother. Spofford illuminates the significance and the costs of female self‐possession, the difficulties of having and keeping an authentic voice in patriarchy.
The last line of “Circumstance” lifts from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, about, among other things, the first human couple Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden: “For the rest, – the world was all before them, where to choose” (Spofford 1989: 96). Just as Paradise Lost – more complexly, to be sure, than a summary permits – contains Eve’s rogue and problematic agency, chastening her and making her a fit, non‐transgressive partner to Adam by the end, “Circumstance” corrects its heroine’s transgressions, her independence and her performing voice, making her a properly constrained female subject. The woman who sings for her life is re‐assimilated into the family and into the origin myth of sexual difference and woman’s role as the second sex.
With this conservativism in Spofford’s approach acknowledged, I want to suggest that if the author capitulates to the True Womanhood ideology of her era, she also, at least in part, inverts the myth and the function of the monstrous‐feminine archetype of the Victorian era, “the mermaids, serpent‐women, and lamias who proliferate in the Victorian imagination” and evoke the Medusa myth (Auerbach 1982: 9). In “Circumstance,” it is the woman who must confront an overpowering version of the monstrous‐masculine in animal form, she whose body assumes the “marble” stony form of one of Medusa’s victims. Spofford creates in her unnamed heroine a protagonist who exhibits the masculine agency to venture out into the woods alone, even leaving her child behind, in order to tend to an ailing friend. Reflective of its ambivalence, the narrative both softens and underscores her decision to leave her child behind by having her husband surmise that she would not have done so lightly. Spofford reimagines the scene of the male’s transfixed encounter with Medusa – whose terrifying visual appearance turns him into stone – as the woman’s transfixed and trapped powerlessness beneath not only the gaze but the body and the ears of a male‐identified beast, the “Indian Devil” or black panther, one both readily charmed and easily bored.
In the previous section, we considered the valences between gothic American authors such as Hawthorne and male medical establishment authors such as Augustus K. Gardner. Like Hawthorne, Spofford imagines a female body in a natural setting contaminated – “scored” – by the non‐human. And, along with Hawthorne, she explores a rape allegory in order to critique her era’s gender roles. Spofford wrote in a cultural moment when commentators such as Gardner were critiquing the listlessness and idleness of ornamental women who willingly forego their duties as mothers and wives. Unlike Gardner, fascinated by fantasies of women luxuriating in their indolence, Spofford seeks to articulate something of the woman artist’s paralytic condition in a culture that demands her unceasing labor – her song – with little or no promise of recognition. Women’s bodies were reified as maternal and child‐birthing female bodies, reproduction privileged as the site of women’s social contribution. Spofford dizzyingly incorporates these images into her grotesque and parodic tableau, imagining a woman whose agency emerges precisely from her entrapment, whose patriarchal rescue cuts off her artistic expression, whose unruly desires give birth to a beast.
Nineteenth‐century concepts of gender and sexuality were frequently located within a somatic metaphor. I want to turn now to a different dimension of this metaphor by thinking of the great poet of the body, Walt Whitman, and his queer as well as feminist explorations of the sexual body. Considering Whitman allows us to extend our analysis to the decades after the Civil War.
One of the frequent points of contention in debates over nineteenth‐century sexual history, particularly the question of whether or not we can locate something like a homosexual subjectivity in pre‐Civil War texts, is the question of how to differentiate homosocial from homoerotic desire. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, scholars have frequently argued that nothing like a modern homosexual subjectivity existed before the end of the nineteenth century. As I have argued, I believe that too much emphasis has been placed on the discursive and terminological emergence of new sexual categories. I argue that antebellum texts often convey awareness of both homosexual activity and desire, and that the moments in which such articulations are possible typically occur within scenes of a larger conflict within and disruption of normative gender roles. While these are much‐debated issues that continue to demand analysis, my focus here is on the nineteenth century’s struggles to articulate sexual experience in print, given the pervasive decorum that stifled any direct expression of the subject (Greven 2014: 45–50).
In “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” which first appeared as the introduction to November Boughs (1888) and was collected in the 1891–1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes,
From another point of view “Leaves of Grass” is avowedly the song of Sex and Amativeness, and even Animality – though meanings that do not usually go along with those words are behind all, and will duly emerge; and all are sought to be lifted into a different light and atmosphere. Of this feature, intentionally palpable in a few lines, I shall only say the espousing principle of those lines so gives breath of life to my whole scheme that the bulk of the pieces might as well have been left unwritten were those lines omitted. Difficult as it will be, it has become, in my opinion, imperative to achieve a shifted attitude from superior men and women towards the thought and fact of sexuality, as an element in character, personality, the emotions, and a theme in literature. I am not going to argue the question by itself; it does not stand by itself. The vitality of it is altogether in its relations, bearings, significance – like the clef of a symphony. At last analogy the lines I allude to, and the spirit in which they are spoken, permeate all “Leaves of Grass,” and the work must stand or fall with them, as the human body and soul must remain as an entirety.
(Whitman 1982: 669)
Whitman confirms that the “thought and fact of sexuality” is a key theme throughout his great, evolving poem.
In his brilliant study Disseminating Whitman, Michael Moon discusses Whitman’s declaration regarding sexuality that “I am not going to argue the question by itself; it does not stand by itself.” Moon writes,
In the intervening century since these words were written, countless attempts have been made “to argue the question [of sexuality] by itself,” with generally unsatisfactory results […] For Whitman – anticipating, as it were, Foucault’s critique of the “repressive hypothesis” – simply taking a position counter to dominant discourse on sexuality or literature and stating that position would be not to go far enough, because a crucial aspect of what he places under negotiation and in revision is the notion current in his culture that the range of both of these two fields is properly highly circumscribed, and that they bear little significant relation to each other.
(Moon 1991: 8)
I concur with Moon that Whitman exudes an awareness of the ways in which sexuality and the discursive workings of culture intermesh. I do not, however, believe that Whitman evinces a Foucauldian view of sexuality in his work. His Leaves of Grass in its myriad forms received, as Moon is well aware, a great deal of criticism for being insalubrious and even immoral. Whitman, in other words, was confronted by even as he confronted Victorian repressiveness, and his frequently altered and reconceived versions of his great poem bear evidence of his difficulties over his work’s reception in this environment. Moon emphasizes that sexuality for Whitman did not “stand by itself,” but in so doing he deemphasizes that what Whitman advocates is that a changed attitude to sexuality is vitally needed – a changed attitude that would mean a new openness to the varieties of the erotic.
In my view, Whitman was arguing that his work could not be reduced to meditations on or preoccupations with sex and sexuality. Rather, his efforts to liberate sexual desires and the body were intermeshed with many other equally resonant themes in his work – democracy, prejudice, brotherhood, relations between the sexes, class warfare, empathy, cruelty and violence, and the idea of “America.” To say that sexuality in Whitman – as indeed, in life – is caught up in other factors and forces is not to say that sexuality lacks an explosive power all of its own that demands recognition and consideration. Indeed, by the end of his study, Moon returns to this sense of Whitman’s thinking.
Whitman’s longest poem, untitled in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855 and later entitled “Song of Myself,” contains a remarkable section that brings to urgent life his career‐long goals to give voice to sexuality’s significance. The speaker observes a scene that foregrounds the intersection between heterosexual female and queer desire:
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.
(Whitman 1982: 36)
These first three lines are a dreamlike evocation of a mundane scene: some guys splashing around in the water. The somber, iterative tone, however, imbues the lines with a haunting sadness. Whitman imparts depths of experience and feeling through his diction, such as the use of the verb “bathe” – the men aren’t swimming, diving, or carousing, but bathing, a much more sensually personal and intimate activity, one that is not a sport. The iterative precision of “twenty‐eight” imposes numerical order but also a note of bacchanalian excess. Adding to the sense of archetype, “Twenty‐eight” also gives the scene a preordained quality, as if aligned with a specific plan, or as if it were always already there. The friendliness and the loneliness of these bathers, a puzzling fusion of affects, exemplify the attitude of ambivalence here.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
The “She” who suddenly appears seems to come out of nowhere. The expository details about her are telling. “She” is a palpably solitary figure, especially in contrast to all of those bathers. Her ownership of the “fine house” imbues her with authority – an authority reinforced by her phallic position by the window in opposition to that of the supine bathers. When juxtaposed against the “fine house,” the solitary female figure embodies lonely wealth.
The next line confirms this impression: “She hides handsome and richly drest …” “Handsome” echoes with hints of wealth, station, carriage; taken along with “richly drest,” a kind of opulent suffocation is suggested. And she “hides handsome,” implying that she is a steady, persistent observer, one adept at remaining unnoticed. Somberly and daringly rendered, this is a portrait of the female voyeur. The poem figures voyeurism as a form of active loneliness. Her furtive yet mesmerized attraction to the swimmers, her arousal, must be kept hidden – and yet it is observed by the speaker. Writing in the 1850s, Whitman’s depiction of a woman’s sexual longings is striking, even radical. As Whitman declares later in “Song of Myself,” “I am the poet of the woman the same as the man” (Whitman 1982: 46). His swift shift to the richly dressed woman’s presence signifies his equal interest in her:
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
These lines are bracing in their immediacy. Which of the young men does she like best, with so many to choose from? The sheer abundance of the choice before her implies possibility and plenitude. It also confirms for us the sense that she watches with sexual arousal. The homeliest of them she finds beautiful – the “Ah” carries a whiff of the wistful, adding to the overall melancholic tone. The bathing men are both tangibly fleshy and inaccessibly distant. Arousal transforms into the pangs of loss and regret:
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
At this point, the figural “I” manifests itself. Like her, it is not incorporated into the antic male scene below. Yet it is also not linked with the lady; she is as much a visual subject undergoing scrutiny as the twenty‐eight bathers. The question posed regarding the lady’s destination – “Where are you off to, lady?” – treats her like an apparition; it transforms her into a ghost. It renders her flesh spirit through an act of overpowering interpretation. The speaker has already rendered her an astral projection of desires before she has made any discernible “move” – or we might even say that the speaker foists his own desires upon her ramrod form. We only understand her as a desiring subject through the poet’s interpretive interventions.
There’s something vaguely confrontational about the “for,” which serves as the speaker‐subject’s emphasis: for I see you – you may be adept at hiding, but not from my godlike view. He pins her down, precisely what her handsome hiding strategy means to elude. But in this constrained position, the lady’s furtive mission is curiously liberated. “Where are you off to?” asks the speaker, knowing full well. Without a tinge of doubt, he commandingly announces, “You splash in the water there,” even if you never leave, even if you resolutely stand “stock still”; he punctures the lady’s veneer of immobility. Yet he does so neither to denude nor humiliate but to understand and empathize with her.
Richard Dellamora writes of Whitman as an intertextual influence on the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. These homosexual poets both write of loss and love in achingly physicalized ways; both are poets of the wounded flesh. Of this section of Leaves of Grass, Dellamora finds that
Whitman’s poem is remarkable not only for its candor but for its observation of the situation of middle‐class women, denied identity as subjects of desire. The poem registers the isolation of the self imparted by differences of class and gender. The female observer‐participant, however, functions secondarily as a mask of Whitman’s desire. He reads in her mind what he experiences for himself: “Which of the young men does she like the best? / Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.” In this way, the poet himself is observer‐participant, framing the action.
(Dellamora 1990: 44–45)
Dellamora illuminates the restrictions imposed by both class and gender. The daring act of deviant sexual kinship on display here between the female voyeur and the male speaker – a kinship based on shared transgressive looking and an erotic delight in the swimming men – alleviates the ache of solitary and stifled desire. Neither the speaker nor the woman is a part of this scene of arousal and longing, but they are united in their voyeuristic desire, if only in the speaker’s imagination:
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty‐ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair
Little streams passed all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also passed over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
For a suspended moment, the awesome solitude of the watching woman transforms into awesome omnipresence: she descends upon the scene on the extended wings of her desire. The bathers do not see her, “but she saw them and loved them.” Whitman emphasizes that her voyeurism is an expression not only of longing but also the desire to love.
This attitude seems just as relevant to the speaker. He, too, floats down among the bathers, dancing, laughing, loving them, linked to the astrally projected woman. Along with the lady, the speaker relishes the drenched beards of the men, the gush of water from their “long” hair, the “little streams” passing “all over their bodies.” And here the crucial line emerges: “An unseen hand also passed over their bodies, / It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.” At least two hands pass tremblingly over these inviting bodies, their imagined fleshiness in mournful contrast to their intangibility.
These male bodies floating so nonchalantly in the water, some have suggested, are the gendered years of the woman’s life (if we take “Twenty‐eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome” as a statement inclusive and illustrative of the lady). The bathers’ lack of desire or ability to see her may be seen as male indifference to woman’s presence and need. While the men are palpably fleshy men, they are also symbols of eros itself, indifferent and inaccessible. Whitman creates a scene of ghostly, atemporal, flickering sexuality. And in this hovering and unquenchable desire, the speaker joins with the gazing woman.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell 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.
This stanza conveys the complex circumnavigation of desire and distance charted by the poem.5 We move to the immediate and eternal present tense. The astral projections of woman and speaker inextricably fuse with the participants of the mythic scene in the water. The bathers exist to be seen, admired, cherished, and loved. They are there and not there, objects of fantasy.
Whitman explores both same‐sex and female sexual desire with astonishing clarity, directness, and openness.
As with Spofford’s work, Whitman’s writings provide alternatives to the nineteenth century’s repressive control of form and content, especially when it came to sexual matters. As commentators like Gardner were railing against female agency, Spofford and Whitman were imagining the implications and the possibilities of such agency. They, too, located their inquiry within the body, but the body freed from its social and even corporeal limitations, even though effectively imprisoned. None of the authors considered in this essay tell the whole story of sex and the body in the nineteenth century, either alone or together, but they do illuminate just how contested the meanings attached to both sex and the body were for the era.
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 12 (THE LITERATURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM); CHAPTER 18 (DISABILITY AND LITERATURE).