Population and Portraiture

Portraiture is an unlikely but illuminating way into the topic of population in nineteenth-century American literature. Democratic portraits (those proposing to represent an image of the person compatible with democratic... [ view full abstract ]

Portraiture is an unlikely but illuminating way into the topic of population in nineteenth-century American literature. Democratic portraits (those proposing to represent an image of the person compatible with democratic equality) particularly highlight a central stress point in nineteenth-century imaginations of population—and twenty-first century critical interests. The tension adheres around two seemingly incompatible American ideals: people are unique and people are equal. The incompatibility arises because the distinction needed for the recognizability and dignity of an individual self as some particular self comes with markers (most obviously race, gender, class, and age) that sort and stratify the person into rungs of social and cultural hierarchy. On the other hand, the equality of selves in a distributed population is an indispensable claim for democracy, despite embodied human difference. This paper examines the problem of portraiture through the lens of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," which figures the American citizen-self as a blade of grass, a political being grounded in natural order, asking how can selves constituted by such contradictory imperatives, distinction and equality, become the components of an orderly, governable population.