The Satanic Whitman: woman, nature and the magic of four.(Walt Whitman)

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Had the Romantics lived in the twentieth-century and maintained their Romantic sensibility, they might have been Jungians, which is to say, there are a considerable number of parallels between Jungian theory and Romantic aesthetics. According to Jung the aim of all psychoanalytic work is to help the analysand become conscious of his or her entire Self, which includes conscious as well as disowned, unconscious elements. In Jungian theory when ego (conscious awareness) confronts and assimilates shadow (unconsciousness), the result is a revitalization and expansion of Self. Romantics longed for this expanded Self in their frequent transcendent yearnings, concerned as they were with the aspects of being denied by Enlightenment. I have discussed this urge to reject Enlightenment modes of ideation and being in favor of a more subversive, mystical orientation in several recent articles and a book, Mystical Discourse as Ideological Resistance in Wordsworth and Whitman. Romanticism entailed the reappropriation of marginalized, subjugated modes of being. All historical periods and artistic schools, according to Morris Philipson, "were tendencies of art which brought to the surface that unconscious element of which the contemporary atmosphere had most need" (in Snider, 2). Psychologically speaking, then, Romanticism was to Enlightenment what the Renaissance was to the Dark Ages--its repressed other, its shadow. Romanticism provided late eighteenth- and nineteenth century aesthetic consciousness with what it lacked--a chance to engage its other self and assimilate repressed energies into a new mode of aesthetic creation.

Not all Romantics were created alike, however. As I have argued in two recent articles on Poe and Hawthorne, some writers merely confronted the shadow but were unable to assimilate these "dark" energies. Morse Peckham called such writers "negative" Romantics (15), because they were unable to see, like the positive Romantics, "a divine or at least spiritual force at work in the universe" (Alsen 6). As I suggest in more psychological language, they were negative Romantics because they were aware of marginalized psychic energies but unable to make room for these in consciousness. Other writers such as Coleridge, as I argue in "'O happy living things': Healing Serpent Power in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner," confronted the shadow and partially came to terms with its "darkness."

The supreme example of a Romantic author who does assimilate into consciousness previously subjugated, unconscious contents, is Walt Whitman. Richard Maurice Bucke, the poet's literary executor and good friend, believed Whitman was the best representative example (above even Jesus, Buddha, and others) of what he called "cosmic consciousness," someone in whom there is total awareness of "the life and order of the universe" (Bucke 3). Whitman seemed to inspire such "Whitmaniacs," as they have been called, perhaps because he (or at least his poetic persona) seemed to have infinite space in his consciousness for the totality of the human experience. Unlike so many other Transcendentalists, he even had room in his cosmic plan for evil, a point I will discuss at length in this essay. This enlargement of consciousness, as Whitman depicts it in Leaves of Grass, is of particular interest to the Jungian theorist because it smacks of individuation, the lifelong urge toward wholeness in which a person becomes aware of him/herself as a unique individual intimately connected to the cosmos. Whitman thus declares in "One's-Self I Sing" that he will chant the song of "a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse" (1-2). Individuation is the process by which one confronts the shadow and deals with it not by elimination and/or doubling but by making room for its energies in consciousness.

I am not the first Jungian theorist to recognize parallels between Whitman's poetic persona and Jung's concept of individuation. In a chapter from Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Lorelei Cederstrom gives an informative overview of the types of connections a reader can make between the poet and Jung. Cederstrom articulates many insights regarding the development of Whitman's persona, which is by no means constant in Leaves but develops along the dialectical lines of encounter and assimilation, much like a person moving in the direction of individuation (V.K. Chari offers a similar argument but couched in different language in Whitman in the Light of Vedantic Mysticism). "Although this pattern is straightforward," Cederstrom claims, "whitman describes a painful struggle at each stage of development; growth is based on confrontation between the oppositions in human nature" (82). Her short discussion is focused on chronicling these pivotal, painful encounters with the "other," which, as she argues, the persona ultimately acknowledges and assimilates, making room for them in his ever-expanding consciousness. In "The Mind's Return" Ray Benoit comparatively discusses Whitman, Teilhard de Chardin, and Jung in terms of a futuristic state of spiritual, psychological, and social progression. Benoit sees in Whitman's verse what Jung called the mysterium coniunctionis--"the Self in which light and shadow, logos and eros, the masculine trinitarian symbol and the fourth feminine principle--respectively, the ideal of spirituality and the materialistic earth-bound passion--form a syzygial unity-in-duality" (27).

In this essay I would like to add to Benoit's "sygyzial unity-in-duality" (a syzygy, according to Jung, consists of two opposite elements in polarity) and Cederstrom's dialectic of encounter and assimilation in a further discussion of the connections between Jung and Whitman. I will focus specifically on the poem "Chanting the Square Deific," reading it in terms of what Jung called the quaternity archetype and the symbolism of the number four. I will also make connections to other poems in Leaves to demonstrate the centrality of the "missing fourth"--the Satanic and feminine principles--in Whitman's verse.

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