Walt Whitman and new biographical criticism

College Literature, Winter 2003 by Knoper, Randall

But the organization almost hides what is especially compelling here, and what seems to me to offer the invitation to use biographical criticism of Whitman in a fresh way-Whitman's attitudes about ethnic identity, especially as they intersect with ideas about class and religion. Krieg, of course, cannot write about Whitman and the Irish and totally avoid critical generalizations about Whitman's conceptions of ethnicity. The most basic one, she notes, is that Whitman, like so many other non-Irish Americans of the time, thought of the Irish in highly stereotypical ways, based on conceptions of "blood," "stock," and national character. So, for Whitman, Irish character, at least in its "higher samples" (ix), was noble, tenacious, loyal, humorous, courageous, warm, combative, fiery, frank, virile, emotional, and so on. More particularly, Krieg suggests on several occasions a kind of narrative arc in Whitman's attitudes about the Irish. It begins with his nativist denunciations of the Irish in the 1840s; moves through his poetic identifications with immigrants, the Irish included, in the 1850s; and ends with the belief, strong at least by 1871, that even the Catholic Irish could absorb the principles and practices of democracy and could learn to become independent and free. What one notices immediately in this story, however, is the way it is crossed, and therefore complicated, by questions of class and religion. The generally anti-labor-union Whitman was antagonistic toward Irish labor organizers in the early 1840s ("coarse, blustering rowdies" [33]), but felt a quick liking for working-class Irish "b'hoys" and their rough male subculture of fire companies, stage drivers, and Irish policemen. Contradictory attitudes about the significance of class, as it shapes an idea of poor Irish immigrants, surface here (entangled with the kind of ambivalences about masculinity that Pollak could help us with). Even more troublesome, in 1842 Whitman denounced Irish Catholics who wanted state funds for parochial schools ("filthy wretches" [40]), and he supported anti-Catholic violence perpetrated by Irish Protestants; in 1871 he sided warmly with the Irishmen of the New York Police Department (including the brother of his close friend Peter Doyle) as they beat up members of"the Irish lower orders (catholic)" who were protesting Protestant Irish parades in memory of the Battle of Boyne (33). Ethnicity, religion, and class interweave in their famliarly vexing and inextricable mix, combining in the multiple ways that generate contradictions in attitude.

Even though Krieg tries to clarify the matter by noting that Whitman was persistently anti-Catholic, because he believed that Catholicism was incompatible with American democracy, the remark about the "lower orders," and his preference for the "higher samples" of Irishmen reconnects religion to class and disturbs any such sense of easy coherence in Whitman's views. He recoils from labor organizers but likes working-class b'hoys. He shuns "lower-order" Catholics because of their subservience to the church, but he generally admires the Irish as revolutionaries and rebels against European tyranny. He supports radical-abolitionist Irish friends, but he also endorses the proslavery Irish of the Democratic Party who embrace slavery as a way to protect Irish workers from wage competition-and to distinguish them from blacks. The multiplicities within Irish America also fan out, their own conflicts along lines of racial attitudes, class, and religion resonating with the contradictions in Whitman's views of the Irish. Krieg's wealth of detail preserves the complexities in the meanings the Irish held for Whitman. But an ungrasped opportunity emerges from this material to say something about the relations among ethnicity, class, race, and religion, to use Whitman's conceptions as an occasion to think through the multiple meanings of Irishness; that is, to use Whitman's life as a focus for understanding a complicated cultural issue.