Jamie G.'s Whitman Blog

Women in Whitman and Edith Wharton

October 7th, 2009

A particular subject that has remained interesting to me since I was introduced to the fact that Edith Wharton wrote down a plan for a Whitman essay is the fascination that she had with him. As can be seen in the Sherry Cenzia article “Women as a Theme in Whitman’s Writing” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, Wharton wasn’t the only woman who reacted strongly to Whitman’s writing and “arrogant” persona: “ Interestingly, a refrain runs through women’s responses to Whitman, at least from the late 1850s to the 1920s. That refrain is the valorization of Whitman’s inscription of the strong ‘I’” (Cenzia 798). Why would this persona put forth by Whitman delight women so much? This may lie in the fact that in the public sphere, women didn’t have a strong sense of self or a definitive identity. Along with this identification with Whitman’s poetic persona, some women embraced and appreciated Whitman’s approach to sexuality and sexual identity, Wharton was among them. It is mainly in Wharton’s approach to her characters’ sexualities that she is most similar to Whitman. However, unlike Whitman, Wharton, in many instances, punishes her characters for their attempts to gain sexual/personal freedom, using the society to push them back into their proper places, such as Charity Royall in Summer.

As Sherry Cenzia states, Whitman is not explicitly a feminist, even though many early feminists cited him as inspiration. Perhaps it is this lack of feminist/gender perspectives within Whitman’s poetry that I find the most difficult in his work. Usually I use this as a means to get into a work I’m not familiar with, but in Whitman’s poems, this isn’t a possibility as much.

Works Cited

Cenzia, Sherry. “Women as a Theme in Whitman’s Writing.” Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. New York, NY: Routledge, 1998. Print.

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