Walt Whitman and the Prostitutes - Essay Example

In this context, he presents an in-depth analysis of the plot and the language of this creative work. Finally, he concludes his article by determining the place of Whitman in the development of progressive feminist thinking and proves his ideas with some final facts from Whitman’s biography.

Section Titles with Selected Points and Quotations

1. Whitman’s Vision in the Context of His Time

• Describes a general attitude of Whitman on women and prostitutes
• He was a part of a wider movement “between two opposing forces” (37):
  • Calvinism: did not concentrate on physical sinfulness
  • Eroticism: did not concentrate only on the body
• Growing cities and an increasing number of prostitutes in them made Whitman a rare representative of such progressive moderate thinking.

“Whitman's ideal woman was first and always a mother, and most of his concern for the improvement of woman's lot in his America stemmed from his expectation of ‘perfect women’” (36).

“Whitman's insistence on the perfect equality of women with men and his celebration of female sexuality was unusual, but he was far from unique in holding such ideas. Rather, he was part of a wide movement among more advanced thinkers that concentrated on all aspects of physicality, including sexuality” (37).

“Whitman's celebration of women's sexuality, however, was challenged by the increasing visibility of prostitution. Understanding and accepting it as part of the human condition; he never opposed prostitution on moral grounds. On the whole, he viewed the women who engaged in this work compassionately and with a keen sense of their victimization by all facets of society” (37)

1. Influential People in Whitman’s Life

• Krieg explains the life and scientific heritage of Dr. William Sanger and demonstrates Whitman’s celebration of his ideas
• He constantly mentions Michael Foucault as an inventor of the approach that connected attitudes towards the body with power relations
• Whitman’s family history made him think in such a way
  • Example of Nancy Whitman, his sister-in-law, who was a prostitute
  • Example of Jesse Whitman, Walt’s brother, who suffered from a “violent temper and irrationality” (42)

“Whitman applauded Sanger's book in the pages of the Times shortly after its release, adding harsh words to Brooklyn for not providing Dr. Sanger with statistics about prostitution in its precincts” (39).

“Foucault says of the restructuring of medical thought that resulted from the clinical discourse introduced by modern medicine, especially the practice of autopsy” (45).

III. ‘The City Dead-House’ analysis

• Whitman wanted to write a fantasy since no prototypes are found
• Crisis atmosphere is the key element in the poem
  • Details of the interior, that contain “smell of death”
  • Body of dead prostitute
  • Conflict within the main character (the poet)
• Krieg believes that Whitman connects in his poem life and death

"Details that the speaker claims to have blocked out of his concentrated view confirm this merging: the cold stillness, the running water, and the smell of death pertain to both the morgue and the body. In reality, these things and what they represent are far from blocked out; instead, they have clustered together in the speaker's mind, helped by his long association of prostitution with the houses, or brothels, to which he believed it should be confined” (44).

“In "The City Dead-House," the body of the dead prostitute, the gazing poet, and the looming house of the dead form a trinity which, in the poetic structure, creates a space wherein the language of disease and death are situated” (45)

1. Final Remarks

• Krieg again stresses the problem of environment Whitman lived in
• Whitman did not concentrate on the proportion of life and death in our reality but wanted to represent it in his poems
• Whitman wanted to help familiar to him prostitute, Nancy Whitman and left her money.

“Unable to explain the process by which nature transmutes death into life, Whitman was content to remain in awe of a chemistry he could not understand and so trust the process that he could, in the words of "Song of Myself" "loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass" (L 5), confident he was in no danger from what he refers to in ‘This Compost’ as ‘a catching disease’” (49).

Analysis and Evaluation

• The author’s argument is clear and he defended it properly
• Krieg pays too close attention to the circumstances of Whitman’s life rather than his own biography. In this context, there is a huge explanation of Dr. Sanger achievements in contrast to a couple of separate facts of Whitman’s own biography
• Krieg provides an in-depth analysis of a small poem. However, it is not illustrative enough to make judgments about the poet’s life. In other words, the analysis is selective.
• Notwithstanding this, in the chosen framework the overall analysis is reasonable and persuasive.