The passage from Leaves of Grass of the “29th Bather” speaks of 28 young men bathing by the shore with a voyeur amongst them. When I first read the passage, I felt that Walt Whitman was the actual voyeur by the way that he described the entire scene, as if he were looking through the window. I believe, in reading this passage, that he is the woman admiring the men, but to disguise his homosexuality he disguises his view in the form of a woman. As the passage proceeds, the word “she” becomes absent half way through the text. The line, “twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.” I think refers to his disguised homoesexual tendencies over the first twenty-eight years of his life before he began to write Leaves of Grass. The line, “Where are you off to lady? for I see you,” I think refers to him acknowledging the homosexual part of himself. The next line, “You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room”. It is as though he will not allow his homosexual tendencies freedeom until the next line where he joins the men, “Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them”. The rest of the passage is filled with erotic references of men as, “little streams pass’d over their bodies”, “young men glissen’d with wet”, “bending arch” and the most provacative line, “they do not think whom they souse with spray”.
There are many points of view on the use of the number twenty-eight and the symbology of the female figure. One of these opinions is that of the author Vivian Pollack who writes in The Erotic Whitman that the female figure represents Walt Whitman’s younger sister to “whom he was deeply devoted” (114). In associating it to his sister, she speaks of her, Hannah Whitman Heyde, birthday being on the 28th of the month, her being 28 years of age at her time of marriage, and the 28 day menstrual cycle of women, or the lunar calendar. Hannah Whitman Heyde was unhappy in her marriage and Pollack suggests that, “the healing touch he attributed to his ‘unseen hand’ in section II of ‘Song of Myself’ was partly inspired by his desire to free his sister of the false body of her married life”.
There are others who support my thoughts that Whitman was expressing discretely his homosexual desires. As discussed in “Sex Objects: art and the dialects of desire” by Jennifer Doyle, she touches upon Gavin Butt’s work “Between you and me: Queer Disclosures in the American Art World” and his be;ief that this “segment has become a touchstone in gay literary studies, in part because it contains some of the most explicit homoerotic writing in Whitman’s poetry”. In conjunction with this, Hilton Als sees this “she” presence as “a conduit for homosexual expression and desire”. Although I see Pollack’s idea as both valid and interesting, surrounding actual numbers, I side with the other authors who see “she” as Whitman’s disguised homosexuality.