“A woman’s body at auction,
She too is not only herself, she is the teeming mother of mothers,
She is the bearer of them that shall grow and be mates to the mothers.
Have you ever loved the body of a woman?
Have you ever loved the body of a man?
Do you not see that these are exactly the same to all in all nations and times all over the earth?”
This passage really stood out to me in Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric” because it seems to subvert the ideas that women and men are so different and so separate. Especially at the time that that this is written, I feel like there was even a bigger stigma between men and women that there is now. Specifically, when it comes to the human body. There is definitely a larger stigma when it comes to women’s bodies. Many stereotypes exist, too; they are expected to dress in a certain way, cover up a certain part, never reveal too much, etc. But when it comes to men, the same type of expectations do not hold. However, in this Whitman poem, he asks “Have you ever loved the body of a woman?/Have you ever loved the body of a man?” By asking this question in the same exact manner with the same sentence structure, it seems he wants to break down those barriers. He even puts “woman” first, perhaps to forefront how “sacred” they really are. I really love the way the last three questions of that section asks the reader to explore questions like, “how different are we from each other, really?”
Great reflection on Whitman’s equalizing tendencies–how he honors the female along with the male, and how even his parallel sentence structures do some of the work of this equalizing. I don’t think the post is quote up to 250 words–make sure you ensure future posts are. Also, you can use the “quote” box on the composition tool bard to embed quotes more effectively (and you can use a soft return or shift-return to avoid extra spaces between lines if you don’t want them there).