19th Century American Literature

Whitman, Harper, Alcott

American literature in the nineteenth century is necessarily concerned with democracy: by the time of the U.S. Civil War the American democratic experiment was not even a century old, and as a result writers remained extremely sensitive until the end of the century toward questions of whether America was capable of living up to the high ideals that it had set for itself in its founding documents. An examination of some representative nineteenth century American works -- Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Harper's "A Double Standard" and "The Deliverance," and Louisa May Alcott's story "Work" -- will demonstrate that the failings of American democracy were a subject all these writers had in common.

Whitman is commonly thought of as the poet who champions American democracy, but "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" is a poem that contains grave doubts. We note this most obviously as Whitman's long flowing stanzas suddenly dry up into a more terse and uncharacteristic form, which seems to indicate doubt:

What is it, then, between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not -- distance avails not, and place avails not.

I too lived -- Brooklyn, of ample hills, was mine;

I too walked the streets of Manhattan Island, and bathed in the waters around it;

I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,

In the day, among crowds of people, sometimes they came upon me,

In my walks home late at night, or as I lay in my bed, they came upon me. (Whitman 1867)

The poet has been joined with the crowd of commuters who are crossing Brooklyn Ferry to and from work in Manhattan. But by this eleventh stanza, Whitman is suddenly struck with a seeming panic as to whether there is anything coherent about the multitudes: "What is it, then, between us?" He ends up claiming that "distance" and "place" do not matter, although the terseness of the one-line stanza suggests that the answer does not satisfy him, and indeed the next stanza speaks of "curious abrupt questionings" that come to him among "crowds of people." Following this the poet has to return to his own personal history, and more particularly his own body, to try to find something in common with the crowd: by the end of the poem he has attempted to prove that somehow these "solids and fluids" are proof of a universal soul. But what jars most about the poem is its seeming crisis of faith in the meaning of a democratic crowd of individuals, and whether there is any common purpose.

Harper and Alcott in their differing ways also question the meaning of the collective democratic whole in American life, but they do so more specifically from a woman's perspective and, in Harper's case, from a southerner's perspective. Harper writes as a woman in the post-Civil War South: one way of squaring her writer's vocation with the ideological trauma of Reconstruction is by noting that the status of women is analogous to that of the freed slaves. This is jarring in her poem "The Deliverance," where the quasi-feminism seems mawkish amid the Stephen Foster mise-en-scene:

I think that Curnel Johnson said

His side had won the day,

Had not we women radicals

Just got right in the way. (Harper 1872)

There may be plenty of reasons to offer for the South's defeat in the Civil War, but the idea that it was caused by female suffragists seems extremely unlikely. Instead, Harper is attempting to find a place for herself in the attempt to make something coherent of American democracy after Reconstruction: she finds sympathy for ex-slaves in seeing them as analogous to women (who also lacked the vote and labored for no pay). The feminism is more obvious in Harper's poem "A Double Standard" which has an intimate personal setting and would thus seem to be less political: however, the conclusion of "A Double Standard" is willing to invoke divine justice as though it must come for American women as surely as it came for American slaves:

No golden weights can turn the scale

Of justice in His sight;

And what is wrong in woman's life

In man's cannot be right. (Harper 1895)