Chapter 9 - Walt Whitman’s Leaves

Summary

While scholars have long noted that the “Children of Adam” cluster – and its depiction of women’s sexual desires – was the main cause of controversy over Leaves, that information has yet to open out to a revision of the history of women’s sexuality and Whitman’s position in that history. Building on feminist readings of Whitman, this chapter asks what it is about Whitman’s verse that provoked such specific outrage about women readers, women’s bodies, and sexual desire, all of which together led Whitman to be the epitome of “offenses against purity.” If the queerness of the “Calamus” cluster was so hard to see because its poems treated the unspeakable, there was already in place a “speakable” (and thus policeable) heterosexual identity already coalescing around white women, a discursive consolidation we can trace through the outrage over Whitman’s “Children of Adam” poems.