Whitman’s Sympathies

• Published date: 01 September 2016
• Date: 01 September 2016
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912916656824
• Author: Jane Bennett
• Subject Matter: Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)

656824PRQXXX10.1177/1065912916656824Political Research QuarterlyBennett
research-article2016
Mini-Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture)
Political Research Quarterly
2016, Vol. 69(3) 607 –620
Whitman’s Sympathies
© 2016 University of Utah
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DOI: 10.1177/1065912916656824
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Jane Bennett1
Abstract
This essay explores five figures of “sympathy” at work in Walt Whitman’s writings, with a focus on Leaves of Grass.
Of particular note is the way Whitman presents sympathy as not only a moral sentiment but also a more-than-human
natural force that draws bodies together. Sympathy was a key term in the lexicon of nineteenth-century American
political debates, and we find in Whitman and others elements of a non-modern sense of sympathy as a vital or physical
force operating below, through, and beyond human bodies.
Keywords
Walt Whitman, sympathy, public affects, moral sentiment, Leaves of Grass
Moral Sentiment and Natural Force
plays the dominant role in producing the sympathetic
sentiment. Taking little notice of material transmissions
Sympathy was an important term in the political lexicon of
or infusions between bodies, Smith’s primary concern
nineteenth-century America. Regularly invoked in debates
was to mark the subjective or self-enclosed character of
about abolitionism, the dignity of the white working man,
sympathy. Sympathy is, he says, but our own “concep-
and the inhumanity of the death penalty, sympathy for the
tion” of the sensations of another, an “idea” generated by
suffering of others was thought to have the power to dis-
one’s “imagination” and capable of generating only a
rupt prejudices, heal antagonisms, and render explicit the
“weak” facsimile of the pain of another:
common ground between groups separated by differences
in appearance, manners, circumstance, or fortune.1 “And
Though our brother is upon the rack, . . . our senses will
the stream of sympathy still rolls on,” writes William
never inform us of what he suffers. They never . . . can carry
Lloyd Garrison (1852, 131–32) in 1836, “its impetus is
us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only
increasing; and it must ere long sweep away the pollutions
that we can form any conception of what are his sensations
of slavery.”2 Embedded within a Christian discourse of
. . . By the imagination we . . . enter as it were into his body
universal brotherhood, sympathy tended to appear as a
and . . . form some idea of his sensations, and even feel
moral sentiment, that is to say, as the cultivated variety of
something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether
Rousseauian pitié or that “first and simplest operations of
unlike them. (Smith [1759] 1976, 9, emphasis added)4
the human soul” which “hurries us without reflection to
the assistance of those we see in distress.”3 But though
Although the atmosphere of this scene surely must have
sympathy qua moral sentiment was more deliberate and
included influences from the outside, for example, the
less spontaneous than pitié, it nevertheless retained a sense
colors, groans, and odors leaking from our brother’s tor-
that its bearers were natural bodies susceptible to affective
tured body, Smith barely acknowledges these provoca-
infusion. Alongside the moralized and inter-personal
teurs. Instead, he highlights a nearly endogenous space of
notion of sympathy as moral sentiment, there also per-
human “imagination.” On this model of sympathy, the
sisted, as Garrison’s invocation of a “stream” that “rolls
atmosphere appears not as a field of forces infusing them-
on” may suggest, an older notion of sympathy as a kind of
selves into porous bodies, but as a void that can only be
vital force operating upon bodies from without. And it is
bridged imaginatively: only by a detour through the inte-
sympathy as an outside, more-than-human, force that is
rior of oneself can one “enter into”—and then only “as it
my focus in this essay.
Scholars often trace the nineteenth-century reformer’s
1Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA
notion of sympathy to Adam Smith’s ([1759] 1976) The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, which had been reprinted
Corresponding Author:
Jane Bennett, Department of Political Science, Johns Hopkins
three times in northern American cities by 1822 (De Jong
University, 3400 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
2013, 1). For Smith, the imagination of the sympathizer
Email: janebennett@jhu.edu

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Political Research Quarterly 69(3)
were” (a phrase to which I shall return)—the affects per-
philosophy notion of Sympathy, which Michel Foucault
taining to the other.
(1970) famously described as part of the episteme of “the
In contrast, nineteenth-century invocations of prose of the world.” The historian Seth Lobis, in The
Mesmerism or animal magnetism, or the “spirtuo-sexual
Virtue of Sympathy, describes this as the figure of a more-
magnetism” of O. S. Fowler, a phrenologist with whom
than-human or natural force of “mobility, communica-
Walt Whitman associated, marked the externality of sym-
tion, and exchange.” Lobis (2015, 4, 312) shows how a
pathetic currents of connection.5 So did “neuromimesis”
sense of the everyday presence of this Sympathy—as a
and “nervous mimicry,” terms used by Sir James Paget in
mimetic tendency at large among bodies continuously
1875 to name that form of involuntary behavior in which
affecting and being affected by each other and by atmo-
a healthy person takes on the symptoms of an organic
spheres—persisted even as sympathy was, via Smith and
disease after having viewed or read about them. Athena
others,9 coming to be understood as having the more
Vrettos describes how neuromimesis was used to explain
restricted locus of a moral sentiment within human

the audience reaction to a Sarah Bernhardt performance
individuals.10 Like Lobis, I want to mark the persistence
of La dame aux camélias in 1881. As Bernhardt, playing
of this “broadly spatial” kind of Sympathy, a protean nat-
the part of a woman dying of consumption, coughs dra-
ural force existing alongside those of magnetism, mime-
matically, “‘an epidemic of coughing filled the audito-
sis, gravity, and repulsion or antipathy. In what follows, I
rium, and during several minutes, no one was able to hear
explore the way Whitman creatively discloses this
the words of the great actress’ . . . Incidents like the
Sympathy in his poetry and prose.
Bernhardt performance seemed to reveal a fundamental
permeability not only between body and mind but also
Five Shapes of Sympathy
between self and other.” Neuromimesis, “though in many
senses a disease of the imagination,” was not understood
Whitman experiments poetically with a variety of
as merely a “psychic phenomenon,” for “its ability to
shapes11 of sympathy, a force that expresses “on many
shift into the realm of the ‘real’—to produce palpable
frequencies simultaneously—erotic, psychic, political
effects on the body—qualified it for medical attention”
(Klatt 2008, 323). Whitman’s interest in sympathy—as
(Vrettos 1995, 81–83).6
figure of speech and as natural force—is connected to
Walt Whitman, I will argue, draws not only from the
his broader effort to induce in his readers an affective
Smithian tradition of sympathy but also from this more
comportment conducive to the democratic culture he
vitalist one, which is more alert to sympathy’s capacity to
idealized.12 He seems to be pursuing an alchemy
imprint or act upon the flesh.7 Whitman was not alone in
(physical, psychological, literary) through which pub-
this. The narrator of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, for
lic hostility, anxiety, and vulnerability (connected to
example, describes an affective transfer of “heat” between
slavery, civil war, and their persistent aftermaths)
himself and the scarlet letter as he places it on his breast:
could be transformed into a mood of egalitarian sym-
pathy. What emerges in Whitman, I will suggest, is an
It seemed to me,—the reader may smile, but must not doubt
enchanting picture of a mimetic and infectious onto-
my work,—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a
logical process, a multi-layered (onto)Sympathy oper-
sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, a sensation
ating with different speeds, degrees of specificity, and
of burning heat; as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-
sites of expression.
hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the
Before I attend in detail to the texts in which each
floor.
shape of Sympathy appears, let me summarize each
briefly. Sympathy 1 is the familiar figure of the moral
Elizabeth Barnes (1997, 7) cites this passage as an exam-
sentiment of pity, but now given a more decidedly somatic
ple of “fleshly sympathy,” but given the participation of
inflection, such that Christian pity becomes a current of
the red cloth in the sympathetic circuit, it could also be
contagious pain. In another shape, Sympathy 4, the affec-
described as a textile or material sympathy. My point here
tive hallmark will be more pleasurable than painful.
is that a sense of sympathy as material force persisted
There it appears as a current of erotic attraction between
alongside its interiorization and moralization as bodies, as “mad filaments, ungovernable shoots,”13 or a
“sentiment.”8
“screaming electric”:
Through awkward, cloudy notions such as...