Daneen Wardrop’s article, “Civil War Nursing Narratives: Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, and Eroticism,” provides a lense focused on the style and tone of Whitman’s Civil war narratives, and pays close attention to the ways he consistently conveys themes of “democracy, the typical American, motherhood, and the eroticism that forms between nurse and patient,”(Wardrop, 1). Wardrop, in her article, offers a “cultural assessment” of Whitman’s memoranda within the context of previous memoirs such as Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, Georgeanna Woolsey’s Three Weeks at Gettysburg; the anonymous 1864 Notes ofHos-pital Life, Sarah Emma Edmonds Nurse and Spy in the Union Army, Elvira Powers’ Hospital Pencillings, Anna Morris Holstein’s Three Years in Field Hospitals of the Army of the Potomac, Sophronia Bucklin’s In Hospital and Camp, and Jane Stuart Woolsey’s Hospital Days. Wardrop suggests that, considering the likelihood of Whitman’s being exposed to these nursing narratives predominantly written by women, Whitman’s nursing narrative exhibited similarities in tone, style and thematic representations of the culture of nursing during that time. In this summary of Wardrop’s essay, I hope to convey the author’s own argument that Whitman’s nursing narratives are rooted in eroticism because of the sensual magnetism that occurs in the hospital setting where bodies are the main focus- and how this concept may be connected to a more modern account of such themes.
An interesting dimension in this article is the notion that before the civil war, nursing was a predominantly male profession, where women would only tend to the sick or injured in their own home. Wardrop questions, “Why would Whitman choose a profession that mostly females pursue?” and relies on statistics and outside research to inform the discussion of the rise in female nursing. According to records, when the sick and wounded outnumbered the medical professionals and hospital beds, “anyone who could apply a lint bandage was accepted as a nurse,” going on to list the inclusion of , “undesirable soldiers, convalescents, invalids, prisoners, those too young or old for military service, relatives, and recruited females,”(Wardrop, 30). With this rise of female nursing, the popularity of the nursing narrative made its way into the literature of the period, Whitman being one of the contributors.
At this point in her essay, Wardrop asks a second question, “Why would Whitman align himself with a primarily female genre to write Memoranda?” This alignment is not so surprising, Wardrop notes, given that Whitman had “from the beginning of his writing career been intensely interested in and aligned with women as thinkers and writers,” (Wardrop, 31). Citing multiple instances of Whitman’s adoration of women nurses in Memoranda, Wardrop goes on to describe how, in his Civil War work, Whitman “usually finds the accounts offemale nurses’ duties moving, especially as those duties intersect with his ideas of unity, motherhood, and erotic magnetism as a healing force,” (Wardrop, 32). Acknowledging the importance of eroticism in nursing narratives, Wardrop pays close attention to the “moments of sensual intensity,” which she says believes “form the center of early nursing narratives, from which the rest of the text borrows energy, (Wardrop, 32). It is undeniably impossible to separate a focus on the body, on the senses and on the feeble-ness of life in a hospital setting, and perhaps even more impossible during the destruction of the Civil War. Wardrop’s examination of Whitman’s narrative emphasises the fact that Whitman was not the only writer to feel such sensual magnetism that occurs while nursing a failing body back to health.
The main reason this article is so compelling is that, when positioned next to Sharon Olds poem, “Nurse Whitman” this relationship between nurse and patient is more easily understood, and less shocking to the reader. told Through a female’s perspective, but with many of the Walt Whitman-esque themes of eroticism that Wardrop also found in earlier nursing narratives, the speaker observes lines of white bodies in cots, she bathes their various parts, and she leans over them, “with pointed breasts heavy as plummets with fresh sperm milk,” (Olds, lines 16-7). Contrary to Wardrop’s exploration of nursing narratives that came before Whitman’s, Olds’ speaker is directly speaking to Walt as if to satirically call him out on being inappropriate about his patients. Without understanding the larger context of this romantic medical phenomena, Olds’ poem, Whitman’s Civil war work, and many other nursing narratives are at risk of being misunderstood, or overlooked as overly sexual portrayals of the nurse-patient relationship.
Wardrop, Daneen. “Civil War Nursing Narratives: Whitman’s Memoranda During the War and Eroticism.” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 23 (Summer 2005), 26-47. https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1782
Sharon Olds, “Nurse Whitman“
I quite enjoyed your look into Whitman’s perspective on what makes the nurse-patient relationship sensual, as well as well as making more sense out of Sharon Old’s “Nurse Whitman”. I think that in situations exactly like this one, this is where context matters. Personally, it has made sense to me that Whitman would imagine this to be a sensual relationship (as he talks about sex all the time), but to think of it in terms of Whitman’s idealized version of a woman as a caring, healing, protective mother-type seems to fit better. That is to say, Whitman isn’t bringing in sensuality for the sake of it.
I love the idea of “sensual intensity” that Waldrop notes is a key device in nursing narratives around the time of the Civil War. Her argument about how Whitman would be naturally drawn to this genre–precisely because of the way it was “feminized” is also fascinating. I like how you use this article summary as a way to illuminate Olds’s “Nurse Whitman”–a poem that can seem uncomfortably sexualized. That said, Olds’s poem remains distinct and complex, even with this explanation (there are elements of power, gender, and sexualization that perhaps even go beyond the “sensual intensity” we find in Whitman or these other narratives). Thanks for sharing this!