Abstract

This essay examines Walt Whitman’s distinctive use of postscripts, a genre that virtually no critical work has focused on at length. Despite and because of their relatively subordinate and surreptitious position within their respective texts, postscripts–along with similarly “subterranean” paratextual genres such as footnotes–harbor unique rhetorical and generic affordances. I argue that Whitman and a variety of other nineteenth-century authors who would today be read as queer often turned to these seemingly minor and marginal spaces in order to express, conceal, and interrogate aspects of their sexual identities. For instance, postscripts afforded their authors an air of nonchalance and spontaneity that made it possible to smuggle in material that might otherwise fall outside the norms of nineteenth-century correspondence. Further, the addition of postscripts and other surrounding materials created a kind of prolonging or dilating effect, whereby writer and reader could linger over the sensuous materiality of the letter’s “body,” as a kind of stand-in for the beloved’s body. Finally, the unusually intimate and immediate space of the postscript provided an important stage for performances of “closetedness” and “coming out”–even if such performances were at times only legible to queer audiences. In emphasizing the rhetorical and aesthetic work performed by paratextuality, I follow the lead of recent scholarship in media studies, where critics have shown how paratexts can function as literally “marginal” spaces in which to present, perform, and protect marginalized or otherwise silenced identities. The essay’s first section situates Whitman's “philosophy of correspondence” both within and against the literary and sexual norms of “the postal age,” demonstrating along the way how postscripts by Melville, Poe, Lincoln, and Dickinson similarly challenged normative epistolary conventions. The second section analyzes Whitman's postscripts in depth, considering correspondence he exchanged with Anne Gilchrist, John Addington Symonds, and a variety of the poet’s young lovers. Engaging in detailed discussion of Whitman's poetry and recent Whitman scholarship throughout, the essay ultimately argues for the distinctive role that postscripts play within nineteenth-century archives in general and Whiman’s queer archive in particular.

Keywords: postscripts, queer, paratexts, letters, correspondence

How to Cite:

Joseph, N., (2025) “Postscripts from Whitman: On the Queer Affordances of Paratexts”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 42(3/4), 132-160. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0737-0679.33913