Public and Private, In Writing
Public and Private, In Writing
Walt Whitman’s romantic poems are most usually written to romanticize nature and the heavenly practices of growing grass. This excerpt from “Calamus” however is a an escape into nature for some much needed sensual privacy. Whitman comes here not to reflect on the seclusion of nature, but on the necessarily secluded idea of romance amongst humans. This seems to be the overwhelming consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual” suggests a pre-Freudian social context through which we can examine the sensual writing of this period. Whitman’s poem was published, of course, tucked away in a volume of asexual and subvertively sexual poetry. Most of the other intimate documents are private journals and letters, not meant for the public eye by any means. The idea of text in this textbook also plays very well with the reader’s imagination, following intimate same-sex writing with a letter from a woman to her soldier lover where she suggests an abortion and professes her undying love. In this letter, the love is a by the way, a contextual and obvious thing that is totally contextualized by sex. In the same-sex writing, the desire is at once platonic and sexual, extremely sensual and emotionally entwined. It is professed more sincerely, and rings more true, than the love in the soldier’s letter.
The interjection of sciencia sexualis in this otherwise ars erotica chapter on love and intimacy in the nineteenth-century America is a jarring medical account of Alice Mitchell’s criminal trial. Unlike the tender and subtle yearnings of married women for one another, this case elaborates on the Mitchell family history of insanity, particularly of the puerperal kind, and links Alice’s desire for a woman with her obsessive jealousy and her criminal murder activity. The condition of what we now know as homosexuality is, according to the writer, inseperable from the woman’s exhibiting male characteristics, torturing small animals, and committing homicide. The sexuality and the mental condition of Alice’s lover is never examined, and is hardly mentioned. In her death, Freda Ward is returned to the social norm, and because she is a victim of murder, she is absolved of any suspicion of voluntary involvement with her lover.
In this context, Smith-Rosenberg’s idea of contextualization reads a bit naiive. She claims that whether or not close female friends like Alice and Freda, criminality aside, were actually engaged in sexual activity is irrelevant. What is socially acceptable is the close private bond between women, within the confines of which, they can communicate, support, desire, love, pleasure, and write to one another as they see fit. As long as the relationship is seen as a close friendship, even the women’s husband’s won’t mind but write off their romance as the dramatization of friendship. The problem for me, and for Alice, is that whatever kind of sexuality is involved must take place behind closed doors and is not allowed into the public sphere under threat of diagnosis. Freda appeared to be perfectly satisfied with her relationship with Alice until Alice arranged to dress as a man and have them married. This escaping of the private self into the public world, for women, is unacceptable in the nineteenth century.
Tags: homosexuality, perversion, women
