Angela Dawn Lowe and Dr. George B. Handley, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature
According to Eric Sundquist, “the actual Civil War has been concealed under layers of comforting legends and nostalgic sentiments” and has been inaccurately portrayed as “a panorama of colorful uniforms, heroic deeds, noble purposes, and sword-and-roses courtships” (45). Walt Whitman and Winslow Homer willfully and purposefully contributed to this idealized picture of the Civil War. Typifying all soldiers as heroes, Christ figures who willingly gave their lives for the freedom of their people, Whitman overlooked the many soldiers who joined the army for money, who deserted after only weeks of training, and who feared death and missed home. Homer also deliberately misrepresented the Civil War when he painted the Union army as victorious against Confederate troops at a time when the Union army suffered serious loses.
Idealizing war, glorifying the death of soldiers, and omitting gruesome details and disheartening facts from their depictions, Whitman and Homer worked to comfort the American people during a time of great despair. Their idealized depictions of the Civil War facilitated a nation-wide healing process. Divided regionally by its different ideals, the nation fought a war of ideology. Where the North advocated the preservation and maintenance of the “Union of the republic,” the South favored an ideology steeped in the tradition of “local and state sovereignty” (Erkkila 202). America needed a new ideology, one that would provide the Nation with a single identity, and Whitman and Homer were two men who willfully contributed to its creation.
With funding from the ORCA grant, I was able to travel to Washington DC to research the personal papers of both Walt Whitman and Winslow Homer. The Library of Congress, which houses forty of Whitman’s original Civil War notebooks as well as numerous poetry and prose manuscripts, printed matter, and correspondence, was a most valuable asset. Whitman’s Civil War notebooks were especially valuable, containing drafts of his early poetry and journal-like entries documenting his experiences with soldiers, his observations on war, death, battlefields, and the Civil War hospitals. The Archives of American Art, containing Homer’s biographical documents, correspondence, notebooks, artwork, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters, also provided some important primary source material for my project. As an intern at the Archives, I was given a rare opportunity to personally search the collections and make copies of documents for my own files.
As I searched the Library of Congress’s collections on Walt Whitman and the Archives of American Art’s collections on Winslow Homer, I came to better comprehend Whitman and Homer’s thoughts about the peculiar crisis of the Civil War. As I examined Whitman’s notebooks and Homer’s letters, I began to understand why they idealized the Civil War in their art. As a hospital volunteer, Whitman worked to heal the wounds of soldiers and, as a poet, he attempted to heal the wounds of his divided nation. Through his poetry, Whitman endeavored to create an ideology that would facilitate union. Homer, likewise, worked closely with war soldiers as he traveled with the army camps, creating drawings for Harper’s Weekly magazine.
Whitman and Homer were aware of the power of representation and they knew that in order to tap into that power, they needed to involve the reader in the creation of their art. Allowing the reader or viewer to fill in the “gaps” in their art, Whitman and Homer assign responsibility to their readers and viewers. Providing for multiple interpretations, Whitman and Homer allow their conceptions of the Civil War to be configured by the American public. In one of his Civil War notebooks, Whitman explains: “. . . the reader . . . must be alive, must himself or herself, construct indeed the history, the poem, . . . the essay, the political or metaphysical essay (Feinburg 12). Some readers and viewers needed a gentle voice to teach them about the horrors of war while others simply needed to forget. Where most needed comfort, many needed to be inspired to live virtuous, productive lives. In order for Whitman’s poetry and Homer’s art to heal the nation, readers and viewers needed to fill in the gaps in such a way that their individual needs would be met.
Biliography
- Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
- Feinferg, Charles E. Ed. Charles E. Feinberg Collection of Walt Whitman. Library of Congress, Washington DC
- Sundquist, Eric J. American Realism: New Essays by Eric J. Sundquist. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.