Decorum and dignity are not often yoked together in discussions of democracy. Recognizing the dignity of others entails accepting manners, habits, and styles of living that we might find rude, crass, or indecorous in the belief that the dignity that is fundamental human worth lies beneath these, untouched by them. The terms of decorum—etiquette, manners, breeding, respectability, and cultivation—are freighted with ideological assumptions wielded to exclude, disempower, and degrade others; human dignity is not weighed on decorous scales. But we also know that within democracy, conversations about civility, tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion on the grounds of common dignity turn quickly into descriptions of how one ought to behave, listen, speak: recognizing the dignity of other people writes old rules of decorum anew. What’s more, the thought that one should preserve and announce one’s dignity outwardly frequently resolves into the notion that some bearings and habits of life are themselves more dignified, better reflecting and honoring one’s self-worth. No sooner is this said than we are returned to the problem of ideology, of whether those bearings and habits of life that reflect self-worth are not in fact means by those in power exercise control over those without.

The tension can be rethought, if not removed, if the framework is shifted to private and public, with the awareness that the boundaries of private and public spaces are maintained by the silent shibboleths of manners and mannerisms that are judged right or wrong for a particular group. Within a public boundary, setting apart the private “us” from the public “them,” it may be that there are numerous other private spaces, more porous and less guarded, maintained by norms of behavior that signal belonging and understanding. In such cases, often found in byzantine hierarchies, standards of decorum subdivide and proliferate within one another; the smaller the private spaces, the more they jostle against one another, the less the surface area of privacy afforded by each, the more one lives continually a life of decorous displays, rarely finding time and occasion to kick back, loosen the corset, and eructate.

This way of looking at matters is based on Mary Douglas’ cultural theory “grid-group,” classifying social experiences based on the intensity of group boundaries and the density of rules; in my most recent post, on Sarah Kirsch, I suggested that it could be imagined in terms of the intensity of the division of public life and a private group, and the density of separate and bounded private spaces that exist within that private group. The model can help think of the relationship between dignity and decorum in general and in democracies in particular. Dignity is not synonymous with privacy; in the Roman heritage, “dignitas” is a public bearing. Once the word shifts, in tandem with the rise of democracy, to refer to a common humanity, it moves inwards, to what cannot be perceived in behaviors among a shared public space, but that we assume to exist in the private duties, private virtues, and private aspirations of individuals. The Kantian revival of dignity coincides with a movement towards inwardness as a philosophical category.

Respecting the dignity of others entails the thought that they have private lives, private cares beyond the reach of our full knowledge; dignity posits an ultimate privacy within each individual, which in turn depends on strong boundaries.  To respect another’s dignity is to know that they live apart and that they should neither be colonized by nor assimilated into one’s own values. The codes of those barriers between private spaces and public spaces are governed by the standards of judgment that give birth to the progeny of concepts that we unite under the term “decorum.”  The best argument for decorum on this model is that it preserves the private spaces of life and permits engagement in a public realm between individuals who do not belong to one’s group; it can be granted that decorum excludes, while urging that it be an exclusion that does not merely reject, but actively holds individuals together, albeit holding them together at arm’s length.

This matters a great deal for poetry that has political aspirations. Even today, language that is decorous and a register of language suitable for public life among strangers—something urbane, or what Donald Davie refers to in the title of his classic study, Purity of Diction in English Verse—is a resource by which poets can imagine the world to which and from which they speak. This is a vein language that, in its being, summons a public mode of address and a public able to be thus addressed. Dropping out, or breaking free from, a decorous register, can be used by a poet for potent effect, and poems can subject the conventions of decorum to critique.  To Samuel Johnson’s famous objection that Shakespeare betrays the tragic stature of Macbeth when he employs what for Johnson is the ”low” and “common” word “knife,” the answer has been made that this lowering is exactly the point as Macbeth is little better than a butcher of men (see Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages,51-53).  At this moment of the tragedy, it might also be said that Macbeth has failed in his public role; he is not a bloodthirsty tyrant, but a common usurper clinging to a position that is not his.

Among the many reasons to think Walt Whitman great is that his poetry understands that decorum must be reimagined in order to serve what he imagined a democracy should be. The challenge for a poet of egalitarian democracy—a democracy that is run through by an anarchic freedom of individuals and that has no settled borders of exclusion—is that decorum that serves to draw lines between us and them, between the respectable and the masses, has no place. In the democracy of Whitman’s imagination, where the demos is a kosmos, each individual stands apart from all others but also bound to them on equivalent footing; there is no group border, just an endless group, within which the private is made public. (This is the lower left square on Douglas’ group-grid: low group boundaries, low grid of rules). It’s a peculiar social formation, a strange ideal, even though we take it for granted. On her first conception of it in Natural Symbols, where she draws extensively on the work of Basil Bernstein, Douglas calls it a “transitional” stage for individuals in a family, speaking as it were a restricted language that assumed a shared context of understanding, but lacking a clear demarcation of that context. In such a family, Douglas writes, the parent attends to the needs of each child on his or her own basis, rather than adhering to a common schedule or unifying rituals; everyone’s private needs jostle against all of the rest, without sequestration. The situation cannot, she suggests, long persist, though this is a view she modifies in later essays. In literature, she suggests it finds its form in the poetry of Rimbaud and D.H. Lawrence—the latter would have no objection to adding Walt Whitman, whom he admired, to the list.  Nor would Whitman object to this account of democracy: for Whitman, the democratic public is not a shared private space (as in an enclave or cult) or a coagulation of private spaces without clear demarcations of private and public (this is the experience of the fatalist, always living by someone else’s rules; living a life in a privacy in which they do not belong). Instead, Whitman’s democracy is a common public space where private experiences run against one another as private; the recognized privacy of others—or the many privacies of others—constitutes the public good. Put another way, the private is not withheld from the public but is shared with, and essential to, publicness.

Whitman gets this into the poetry; this is poetry he writes. We might think that it would involve an erasure of decorum entirely, but if we take seriously the thought that decorum sets off private spaces, and that a private life fosters the dignity of one’s whole self, most free in its desires and passions, then decorum must have a role to play in his poetry. And it does.

Whitman’s poetry, I think, depends upon his drawing upon and deploying the standards of decorum not to shut off private from public, but to open the private into the public. The private cannot simply be abolished or wished away; instead, it needs to be itself in public. Decorum as it is usually understood is a closed door through which only some may pass; those who do not know the rules for knocking are denied entry. Whitman realized that the door shouldn’t be eliminated; that there can be no true house without a door, but that the door can remain open, to reveal and invite us into what is private. Democracy, for Whitman, is not a society without doors, but a society with endless open doors inviting us to pass into private lives that are not our own, and to experience them as private, respecting the variety of their dignity.

The effect could be found anywhere in Whitman’s vast, ever-expanding (over his lifetime), continuous corpus of poems that finds final blossoming in the death-bed edition of Leaves of Grass. But its most perfect and contained realization is in a poem that appeared in the first edition of 1855, “The Sleepers.” The conceit of the poem, established in its opening lines, is itself an ideal example of the public privacy that Whitman places at the center of democracy:

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet, swiftly and noiselessly stepping and stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of the sleepers.   (ll. 1-3)

The register is elevated, if not lofty. “Stepping with light feet” admits a glance at the poem as a poem, the light feet of Whitman’s free verse on the page. But what begins as a “vision” of the poetic imagination in the first line is jarred by the third line’s “Bending with open eyes,” where “vision” has become something more literal, sight, propelling the question whether the “vision” of the opening line is not likewise merely sight, so that Whitman is saying not that he wanders all night in his imagination but that he wanders all night in the thoughts that his voyeuristic stroll inspires; the decorum is perturbed on the level of behavior. The point is not that the entire poem presents Whitman creeping around sleeping figures all night (of course it does not), but that at this first moment, it suggests such creeping, and it is not difficult to imagine it happening in a shared room of a lodging, with the initial sight of those sleeping inspiring the more far-fetched of the poem’s visionary stretches. The creeping is creepy, but it is not exactly an invasion of private space—instead it exposes to publicity the sleeping form that is both the receptacle of the dreams that are the ultimate refuge of private life and the common human form freed from self-awareness.

In the hands of a lesser poet of that century, the poem would be “the dreamers,” but Whitman calls the figures “the sleepers” to invoke their bodily presence and its vulnerable exposure when sleeping. What feels like a break in decorum in the behavior of the poet, and even the poet’s imagination, does not arise because a barrier is crossed but because sleepers present no barriers to strangers, and Whitman is content to occupy that proximity to them. It is not a social encounter at all; it cannot conform to the standards of manners since one figure is unconscious; and because of this, it is somehow a breach of decorum for Whitman to be there at all. But that is only the starting point for the poem: in an encounter that is freed from social exchange, Whitman writes a poem that exemplifies what the conduct of the imagination in such a circumstance must be: the privacy of the others is made public, visible to the imagination, as is their sleeping form to the sight, and the new decorum that Whitman demands and achieves is one that looks on the publicly exposed private lives of others without guilt, embarrassment, prurience, or even perplexity; the balance of the third line, “bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of the sleepers,” excludes all of these.

And this, for Whitman, is what the imagination of American democracy requires, since we share a democracy with countless others with whom no social exchanges are possible, where the normal standards cannot apply, and because democracy requires that everyone bring their full lives to the project of a public life, what we must do is to imagine the private selves of others without feeling ourselves to be implicated in what we see there, or implicated by seeing there at all—and also without gloating in the satisfaction or smugness that we find nothing shocking at all. We may be shocked (and even recoil somewhat) without being embarrassed:

The soul is always beautiful, it appears more or it appears less, it comes or it lags behind,

It comes from its embowr’d garden and looks pleasantly on itself and encloses the world,

Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting, and perfect and clean the womb cohering,

The head well-grown proportion’d and plumb, and the bowels and joints proportion’d and plumb.

The soul is always beautiful,

The universe is duly in order, every thing is in its place,

What has arrived is in its place and what waits shall be in its place,

The twisted skull waits, the watery or rotten blood waits,

The child of the glutton or venerealee waits long, and the child of the drunkard waits long, and the drunkard himself waits long.

The sleepers that lived or died wait, the far advanced are to go on in their turns, and the far behind are to come on in their turns,

The diverse shall be no less diverse, but they shall flow and unite—they unite now.  (ll. 150-160)

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“Perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting” celebrates eroticism by sanctifying it; propriety is abolished by the higher register of sacred poetry. But none of this pretends that there is no threshold between the sacred and the mundane: Whitman has shifted the threshold, so that the private becomes, as it were, an object of prayer and praise; it is displaced into the holy temple, set apart but accessible to all. The sense of decorum in these lines is perfect and this affords it dignity that affords the sleeping others their dignity in turn. Thom Gunn, writing in the latter half of the twentieth century, remarks of Whitman: “at the basis of the basic revelation—that of an ideally generous democracy—is to be found what may be its source, that point already alluded to at which the public and political intersect with the private and sexual” (Gunn, 19) The intersection is realized by the poem, by its discovery of a resource in the language that grants private experience a fully public existence without shame and embarrassment, but also without any performative flouting  of shame and embarrassment. Reviewing Whitman in 1874, the English critic George Saintsbury, wrote of Whitman’s eroticism in admiring terms:

The exclusion of culture, philosophy, manners, is owing also to this desire to admit nothing but what is open to every human being of ordinary faculty and opportunities. Moreover it is to this that we may fairly trace the prominence in Whitman's writings of the sexual passion, a prominence which has given rise, and probably will yet give rise, to much unphilosophical hubbub. This passion, as the poet has no doubt observed, is almost the only one which is peculiar to man as man, the presence of which denotes virility if not humanity, the absence of which is a sign of abnormal temperament. Hence he elevates it to almost the principal place, and treats of it in a manner somewhat shocking to those who are accustomed to speak of such subjects (we owe the word to Southey) enfarinhadamente. As a matter of fact, however, the treatment, though outspoken, is eminently "clean," to use the poet's own word; there is not a vestige of prurient thought, not a syllable of prurient language. Yet it would be a great mistake to suppose that sexual passion occupies the chief place in Whitman's estimation. There is according to him something above it, something which in any ecstasies he fails not to realize, something which seems more intimately connected in his mind with the welfare of mankind, and the promotion of his ideal republic. This is what he calls "robust American love."

Turning to Southey’s Portuguese, “enfarinhadamente,” Saintsbury guards against what might be a tremor of embarrassment in the midst of otherwise frank praise. When Saintsbury says that the treatment is “eminently ‘clean,’” calling it “the poet’s own word,” he is referring, if not exclusively then centrally, to “perfect and clean the genitals previously jetting.” The cleanness of “treatment” here and elsewhere, and the language of that cleanness, brings us near to the “purity of diction” that Donald Davie prized. The “perfect and clean” language is at one with the “perfect and clean” human body and both are at one with the “perfect and clean” republic, formed of “robust American love.” That is why the vignette about General Washington stands near the center of “The Sleepers;” not situated in any specific dream or sleeper’s consciousness, it emanates from all of them together: “The officers speechless and slow draw near in their turns, | The chief encircles their necks with his arm and kisses them on the cheek, | He kisses the wet cheeks one after another, he shakes hands and bids good-by to the army” (97-99). This is more than camaraderie for Whitman: it is an intimacy that prefigures (and perhaps founds) the spirit of American democracy. In that democracy, for Whitman, private acts and desires possess a dignity that not only can withstand the public gaze, but that both strengthen and are strengthened by public life; they are made purer by it and it by them. The kosmos of the demos depends on accepting each individual within it as a kosmos.

Whitman, in the preface to the 1855 edition, boasts of “American standards,” the standards of his new decorum:

No great literature nor any like style of behavior or oratory or social intercourse or household arrangements or public institutions or the treatment by bosses of employed people, nor executive detail or detail of the army or navy, nor spirit of legislation or courts or police or tuition or architecture or songs or amusements or the costumes of young men, can long elude the jealous and passionate instinct of American standards. Whether or no the sign appears from the mouths of the people, it throbs a live interrogation in every freeman and freewoman’s heart after that which passes by or this built to remain. Is it uniform with my country? Are the disposals without ignominious distinctions? Is it for the evergrowing communes of brothers and lovers, large, well-united, proud beyond the old models, generous beyond all models?

The standards by which a poem is written, to which it holds itself—its very notions of its social, poetic, and political rightness—need to be “generous beyond all models”: it is in generosity that the new decorum is found, and in generosity that dignity is allowed to be privately determined and publicly honored as not one, but many sorts of worth. Without a sense of decorum, dignity is put at risk; but only the decorum that unites private and public makes of dignity a common good as well as mark of individual worth.

--By Owen Boynton
 

Bibliography

Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (Chatto and Windus, 1952)

Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1994)

Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. 3rd Edition (Routledge, 2003)

Kenneth Haynes, English Literature and Ancient Languages (Oxford, 2003)

Thom Gunn, “Forays Against the Republic: Whitman,” Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (Faber and Faber, 1993)

George Saintsbury, “A Review of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,” Academy (10 October, 1874)

Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (Penguin, 2004)