Michel Foucault: The Death Of The Poet

In this thesis, queer theory, as conceived by leading scholar Michel Foucault, will serve as the starting point in uncovering the extent in which Whitman’s at the time most scorned poetry employed either outright queer imagery or otherwise latent queer code in order to convey his message of free love as opposed to contempt, an issue most gay men had to face in the nineteenth century (men only, seeing that romantic affairs between women were disregarded as innocuous and platonic). The basis of this theory lies in Foucault’s assumption that “sexuality is not a natural feature or fact of human life but a constructed category of experience which has historical, social and cultural, rather than biological, origins” (Spargo 12). Over the centuries, …show more content…
This postmodernist idea was argued in Roland Barthes’ essay “The Death of the Author”, which he explains as follows: “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, the writing begins” (Barthes 142). He adds to this that “the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ – the mastery of the narrative code – may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (142). What Barthes suggests here is that the author or the poet merely creates the art he desires to present to his reader, but that the reader can never exactly know how the text was intended to be read. He cannot know what the author was thinking when he wrote his poem, and it certainly is not certain whether or not the author is supposed to be the same person as the narrator. This claim will be supported in this thesis, even though that Walt Whitman’s own experiences and sexuality cannot and should not be fully ignored, especially considering the controversy of his poetry in his day and age. It is not for nought that Whitman is considered one of the greatest nineteenth-century advocates for freedom of sexuality, which is exactly what is applauded in his poetry. It is true that Whitman’s poems are predominantly written in the first person singular and that they are filled with a plethora of autobiographical elements (amongst which the speaker’s admiration for the male body and his preference for rough men working the fields (Price 138)), suggesting that the “I” could truly be Whitman himself. However, what