The Personal Public Sphere of Whitman's 1840s Journalism

Abstract

Before Walt Whitman became the self-celebrating poet of Leaves of Grass, he was a professional journalist. This paper examines the journalism Whitman produced from 1840 to 1842 in the context of an emerging celebrity culture, and it considers celebrity's effects on the public sphere. It traces the penny press's personal style of journalism to both its artisan-republican politics and the formation of celebrity culture, in which celebrities assume status parallel to that of traditional representatives of authority. As editor of the Aurora, Whitman adopts the first-person, polemical style of the penny press and singles out prominent people for criticism. In other pieces, he presents himself as the ever-observant flâneur. As editor and as flâneur, he is a participant in and observer of the life of his community, and he assumes unassailable interpretive power. But he also regards his readers as fellow participants-observers who make judgments about the public figures he reports on. The tension between these positions is never resolved: Whitman's dialogic addresses to readers aim to extend the public sphere of critical debate even as Whitman holds steadfastly to his own social and political authority. Encouraging and modeling readers' negotiations over the meaning of public figures, he extends the features of celebrity culture to the public at large. His early journalism shows how and why it is so difficult to reconcile political and social community in the era of mass culture, and it highlights the complexities of the coexistence of celebrity and critical discourse in the personal public sphere.