Whitman’s Procreative Men and Women
Sep 14th, 2009 by garyrichards
As frustrated as I grow as a non-procreator while reading “Children of Adam” and its “Singing the song of procreation” (248), I’m trying to keep in mind nineteenth-century contexts of reproduction. Whitman would have been surrounded by what we in the twenty-first century would likely deem “excessive” procreation. In part to combat high infant mortality and to guarantee a cheap work force, families of the day, judging from my own Protestant one, would have almost always had not only multiple children but usually four or more and sometimes as many as twenty, especially if two marriages were involved. This picture features Rachel Emily (Beeman) White (1845-1936), my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandmother, circa 1907 with five of her daughters.
She was the mother of fifteen children born between 1865 and 1889, all single births. She herself was one of eight Beeman siblings born between 1840 and 1857, and her husband, Jim White, was one of (at least) eight White siblings born between 1838 and 1858. Their son Madison Marvin White (1880-1955), one of the fifteen children, married Ellen Stroder (1881-1915), who was one of ten children born between 1865 and 1883, which meant that my maternal grandmother, born in 1906, had sixty (!) first cousins and around two hundred second cousins. For all my irritation with Whitman, here he seems in part to be reflecting the cultural preoccupation with precreation, validating it and the accompanying sexual interactions, and reminding me of my own biases.
Seeing as how my grandparents just finished a whirlwind weekend visit, this ancestry thing is fresh on my mind. My mere 8 first cousins makes me feel pretty insignificant compared to Rachel White (imagine the family birthdays parties!).
More on-topic, it would be interesting to see how the birth rate varied, depending on the part of the country. The North-South difference intrigues me; since the north was more industrialized, I would guess that the birthrate there would be lower? I wonder what the ancestries of those with northern roots would look like.
My personal American roots only extend back as far as the early twentieth century, as all my great-greats arrived around then (either from Germany or Canada).
Interesting how that historical context adds greater heft and clarity to Whitman’s infinitely open, and consequently rather abstract, embrace of “mothers and the mothers of mothers, …children and the begetters of children” (33). His phrasing always seemed to encompass many generations through one generation’s relative relationship to the rest, but this image reminds us of how much flesh and bone he meant to spread his arms across.
Thanks, both Sams, for responding. I always fret that these images may be too tangential to be productive to discussion, but perhaps they’re useful after all. S-words Sam, you elegantly phrase how this image and others may provide a reminder of the very embodiment in which Whitman is so invested.
Tallersam Sam, I suspect geography was certainly a factor in differentiating procreative patterns, but some upper-middle-class Northern families would have kept up the high patterns of reproduction as a means of establishing that they had the economic power to support all those persons. But class and religion may have had as much to do with variations as region. Recall, say, Willa Cather’s Catholic Midwest and its families’ large numbers or Anzia Yezierska’s turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrant families of New York City and their large numbers. These repressentations are fictional yet rooted in historical accuracy.