"Hinting" and "Reminding": The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass

Abstract

Contemporary criticism on the body and sexuality in Leaves of Grass finds Whitman's central political investments in the ways he represents his male speaker's erotic subjectivity in relation to the sensual bodies of primarily male readers. In the more stringently gay identitarian version of these readings, the historical author of the Leaves is identified with the speaking and self-representing persona of the lyric, and Whitman's poetry is constructed as a species of gay confessional. 2 These energetic and politically passionate readings unfortunately often extend the old enterprise by which empirically oriented critics have traditionally tried to sound the truth of Whitman's sexuality through literary interpretation, sometimes with the seeming (and sometimes explicit) purpose of heterosexualizing or de-eroticizing it. 3 Gay identitarian readings of Whitman's verse typically do one of two things. They either treat Leaves of Grass as a repository of data to be read back into the biography as a way to compensate for the maddening lack of reliable evidence of the author's actual activities; or, they take what biographical data they can find—"evidence" shrewdly crafted by Whitman himself—and read it back into the poetry by way of producing gay readings of Whitman's often highly ambiguous erotic verse. 4 These two critical strategies, often practiced in tandem, exhibit the slippage endemic to criticism on sexuality in Whitman between talking about Whitman the historical author's sexuality; talking about the sexual content of his poetry; and talking about the sexuality of "Walt," the speaker of Leaves of Grass. Gay identitarian examples of this tradition tend on the one hand to apply anachronistically the signifier "homosexual" to Whitman and his poetry, in reference to a period well prior to the emergence of the [End Page 1047] distinctive complex of attitudes, identifications, and activities that the term came to name. 5 They also tend to produce ahistorical treatments of antebellum cultural concepts such as the male love and friendship tradition, phrenological "adhesiveness," and such emergent gay-signifying terms as "gay" and "queer," while making entirely undocumented claims about Whitman's actual erotic practices. 6 Not only does work of this sort homogenize all of the different text genres Whitman engaged, in all of their rhetorical particularity; it also reveals a fair amount of theoretical naiveté about what constitutes evidence of a life in the first place. 7

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