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.
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.
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.
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.
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 compress 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 crossing Brooklyn Ferry to and from work in Manhattan. But by this eleventh stanza, Whitman is suddenly struck with what seems like panic over 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. Indeed, the next stanza speaks of "curious abrupt questionings" that come to him among "crowds of people." Following this, the poet must 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. What jars most about the poem, however, 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 reconciling her writer's vocation with the ideological trauma of Reconstruction is by noting that the status of women is analogous to that of freed slaves. This is striking in her poem "The Deliverance," where the quasi-feminism seems mawkish amid a Stephen Foster-like mise-en-scène:
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 many 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 effort to make something coherent of American democracy after Reconstruction: she finds sympathy for ex-slaves by seeing their condition as analogous to that of women, who also lacked the vote and labored for no pay. The feminism is more explicit in Harper's poem "A Double Standard," which has an intimate personal setting and would therefore seem to be less political. Nevertheless, the conclusion of "A Double Standard" invokes 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
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.
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