Essay Undergraduate 938 words

Democracy's Failings in Whitman, Harper, and Alcott

~5 min read 5 sections Literature · Literary Analysis

Abstract

This essay examines how three nineteenth-century American writers — Walt Whitman, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Louisa May Alcott — each expressed doubt about the capacity of American democracy to fulfill its founding ideals. Through close readings of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," Harper's "A Double Standard" and "The Deliverance," and Alcott's "Work," the paper argues that all three writers shared a critical preoccupation with democracy's shortcomings. While Whitman's concern centers on personal identity within the democratic multitude, Harper and Alcott focus more directly on the political exclusion of women, drawing explicit rhetorical parallels between the struggles of women and those of enslaved and formerly enslaved people.

Key Takeaways

Introduction: American Democracy and Its Discontents: Framing democracy's failings across three authors
Whitman's Crisis of Faith in the Democratic Crowd: Whitman's doubt about collective democratic identity
Harper's Feminist Critique in the Post-Civil War South: Harper links women's oppression to slavery after Reconstruction
Alcott and the Rhetoric of Women as Slaves: Alcott parallels women's condition to enslaved people
Conclusion: Shared Doubt, Different Remedies: Contrasting inward versus political democratic remedies

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What makes this paper effective

The essay builds a clear comparative argument across three authors, identifying a shared thematic concern — doubt in American democracy — without forcing artificial similarities.
Close reading of specific poetic passages (especially Whitman's structural shift and Harper's concluding couplet) grounds abstract claims in textual evidence.
The paper moves from the broad (Whitman's philosophical uncertainty about the multitude) to the specific (Harper and Alcott's politically actionable critique), giving the argument a satisfying trajectory.

Key academic technique demonstrated

The paper demonstrates effective comparative literary analysis by identifying a single unifying theme — democratic failure — and then tracing how each author inflects that theme differently according to their subject position (white male poet, Black Southern woman poet, white Northern female novelist). The rhetorical parallel drawn between abolitionist and feminist discourse is particularly well executed, showing how swapping one binary ("black/white") for another ("woman/man") reveals a shared argumentative structure across texts.

Structure breakdown

The essay opens with a historical framing of post-Civil War democratic anxiety before introducing its three primary texts. It then devotes focused paragraphs to each author in turn — Whitman, Harper, Alcott — before converging in a brief synthesis that contrasts Whitman's inward philosophical response with the more explicit political demands of the two women writers. The Works Cited section follows standard citation conventions.

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Essay 938 words

Introduction: American Democracy and Its Discontents

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 set forth in its founding documents. An examination of 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" — demonstrates that the failings of American democracy were a subject all three writers had in common.

4 Sections Hidden · 565 words

Whitman's Crisis of Faith in the Democratic Crowd210 words

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…

Harper's Feminist Critique in the Post-Civil War South165 words

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…

Alcott and the Rhetoric of Women as Slaves130 words

The easy dichotomies in Harper's concluding couplet could have just as easily been written twenty years earlier, replacing "woman" and "man" with "black" and "white" and arguing for abolition. We might very well observe that Louisa May Alcott is willing…

Conclusion: Shared Doubt, Different Remedies60 words

It is, to some extent, the same point as Whitman's — a grave doubt in the American democratic experiment, one that must be remedied. For Whitman, the doubt begins with reconstituting personal identity as part…

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Works Cited

Alcott, Louisa May. "Work: A Story of Experience." 1873. Project Gutenberg, 2003. 29 March 2014. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4770

Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Leaves of Grass. 1867. Electronic Text Center. University Library, 2000. 29 March 2014.

Key Concepts in This Paper

American Democracy Democratic Doubt Women's Suffrage Reconstruction Era Abolitionist Rhetoric Collective Identity Gender Equality Post-Civil War Comparative Literature Political Exclusion