When tackling both of Whitman’s poems, I have to say Children of Adam: “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers” rubbed me the wrong way. I am not exactly sure if it is because I am reading it too much from a modern perspective, but the lines “Be not ashamed women, your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest” (254) really did not sit well with me. I do not know if I would go far as to describe childbirth as a “privilege” necessarily, but the implication (at least to me) is very sexist. It comes off as something around the lines of ‘…it is a privilege for women to be able to bear man’s children’ and not that women should be seen as a separate entity from men.

I am not sure how I feel about the content Justine Murison goes over in the Whitman, Women, and Privacy chapter. To describe the “imagined women readers in [previous] reviews” as the “…emergence of women’s heterosexual identity” (39) almost appalls me considering how Whitman sexualizes them so much in poems like the Children of Adam: “From Pent-Up Aching Rivers” (“Limitless limpid jets of hot love and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice” [253]). I am not sure what this says about the beginning development of women’s heterosexuality (feel free to comment on this subject) and whether or not it would be considered applicable. I suppose it does considering there are critics such as Murison who argue so. When I think of the identification women define with heterosexuality, I do not think of Whitman’s idea of birth being a privilege or that they are always tied to men.

I know Murison is arguing that because of Whitman’s conceivably grotesque views of women, other critics and authors have taken notice and therefore began standing up for women due to those descriptions. At the same time, it grosses me out to think that it had to take a poet of all things to really get the message out that sexualizing women in this way is not okay. I suppose Whitman was one of the first to begin setting an example of what not to do when it comes to sexualizing women.

Laura Roman’s February 18th Work

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