The Hospital Experience and Healing Writing of Walt Whitman
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This paper examines that Whitman’s hospital experience during the Civil War plays an important role in healing the dismembered nation as well as himself. As his statement “North and South was one vast central hospital” indicates, the hospital scenes full of the sick and wounded become the core of Whitman’s imagination. Above all, the hospital experience suggests “the most profound lesson” of his life. His experience as a volunteer nurse in the hospitals engenders a variety of poetry and prose such as Drum-Taps, Memoranda During the War and Specimen Days. Through these works, Whitman performs the role of a poet-nurse in relation to feminine and maternal attributes. His poem “The Wound-Dresser” is a concrete example. He emphasizes the suitability of middle-aged female nurses because their “magnetic touch of hands” signifies the power of healing for the sick and wound. As his statement “It [nursing] was a religion with me” indicates, Whitman endeavors to write his nursing experiences pursuing “something considerably beyond mere hospital sketches.” Significantly, the word “convulsiveness” which Whitman coined by going through the hospital experience seems to epitomize his psychological pain, namely, trauma. He sharply realizes that writing the “convulsiveness,” which suggests traumatic memories and dreams, can lead toward the individual and collective healing from the recurring painful memories and dreams. It is noteworthy that Whitman’s trauma featuring “absence of verbal narrative” is predominantly encoded in the form of “vivid sensations and images.” This is exemplified in his poetry and prose such as “Old War-Dreams,” “The Artilleryman’s Vision” and the various Civil War sections of Specimen Days. For Whitman, writing the “convulsiveness” awakens the essential meaning of religion within him which engenders the “most fervent views of the true ensemble and extent of the States.”
Abstract
This paper examines that Whitman’s hospital experience during the Civil War plays an important role in healing the dismembered nation as well as himself. As his statement “North and South was one vast central hospital” indicates, the hospital scenes full of the sick and wounded become the core of Whitman’s imagination. Above all, the hospital experience suggests “the most profound lesson” of his life. His experience as a volunteer nurse in the hospitals engenders a variety of poetry and prose such as Drum-Taps, Memoranda During the War and Specimen Days. Through these works, Whitman performs the role of a poet-nurse in relation to feminine and maternal attributes. His poem “The Wound-Dresser” is a concrete example. He emphasizes the suitability of middle-aged female nurses because their “magnetic touch of hands” signifies the power of healing for the sick and wound. As his statement “It [nursing] was a religion with me” indicates, Whitman endeavors to write his nursing experiences pursuing “something considerably beyond mere hospital sketches.” Significantly, the word “convulsiveness” which Whitman coined by going through the hospital experience seems to epitomize his psychological pain, namely, trauma. He sharply realizes that writing the “convulsiveness,” which suggests traumatic memories and dreams, can lead toward the individual and collective healing from the recurring painful memories and dreams. It is noteworthy that Whitman’s trauma featuring “absence of verbal narrative” is predominantly encoded in the form of “vivid sensations and images.” This is exemplified in his poetry and prose such as “Old War-Dreams,” “The Artilleryman’s Vision” and the various Civil War sections of Specimen Days. For Whitman, writing the “convulsiveness” awakens the essential meaning of religion within him which engenders the “most fervent views of the true ensemble and extent of the States.”
참고문헌 (20)
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