America

“America” reimagines America itself as a “herself.” America becomes an enthroned mother, a kind of queen at once regal yet loving, gentle yet powerful, intimate yet “towering” (Line 5). As “Mother” (Whitman capitalizes the word), America suggests not only compassion and care for the present generation but also a protective sense of the promise of future generations as well. For Whitman, who used cultural stereotypes about both parent roles throughout Leaves of Grass, mothers represent both enduring strength (Mother America is enthroned and “towering”) and unconditional love whereas fathers are associated more with inflexible authority and stoic endurance. Mothers, because of their intimate role in gestation and childbirth, exist perforce in two tenses simultaneously, as much a part of the present as they are essential to the nurturing promise of tomorrow. In this, the mother symbol reveals Whitman’s argument about the resiliency of America. America as mother thus becomes a symbol of both community and futurity.

Whitman, in using the terms “equal daughters” and “equal sons” in the poem’s opening line, represents America’s new confidence in the concept of inclusivity. More than a century before psychologists and sex therapists would begin to dispute the dual model of gender identification as simplistic and reductive, that genitalia does not define gender, Whitman uses the male/female