Whitman, Vessels, and Reproduction

This is my February 18th work.

So when I was reading “Pent-Up Rivers,” one line in particular struck me: 

“From the master, the pilot I yield the vessel to, / The general commanding me, commanding all, from him permission taking” (249).

 After going back over it, it seemed like Whitman was describing desire in general – him “yielding” to desire, desire personified as a hard-to-resist general “commanding” him to take action. But it was the word “vessel” that really stuck out when I first read it. In one of my other classes we just read an essay on whiteness (The Matter of Whiteness, Richard Dyer) which laid out some ideas about white femininity and motherhood that were super similar to what Murison was talking about. Specifically, when talking about the ties between religion and whiteness, Dyer said: 

“The model for white women is the Virgin Mary, a pure vessel for reproduction…As the literal bearers of children, and because they are held primarily responsible for  their initial raising, [white] women are  the indispensable means by which the group – the race – is in every sense reproduced” (Dyer, 29). 

Which is similar to Murison talking about Whitman’s “insistence on white women’s reproduction” and his normalizing of white female heterosexual identity (Murison, 49). So Whitman is linking ideas about white female heterosexuality with motherhood in “Pent-Up Rivers”. Since ideas about whiteness and femininity were/are so tied to religion, it would make sense for Whitman to refer to a woman as a vessel or mode for reproduction (and he does….a lot). But it’s interesting that he might also refer to himself as a vessel, and I feel like there are a lot of things that could tie into – maybe ideas about birth and reproduction as not just female phenomena, but part of a shared human experience?