From "Uncultivated Barbarian" to "Poetical Genius": The Public Presence of Phillis Wheatley

Abstract

The first edition of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) included an attestation that volume was work of its purported author. To PUBLICK was signed by Massachusetts's royal governor Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor Andrew Oliver, and sixteen other Bay Colony notables, including John Hancock and John Wheatley, Master. The signatories assured volume's readers that Poems on Various Subjects was indeed written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few years since, brought an from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under Disadvantage of serving as a Slave a Family this Town (Wheatley 48). When Wheatley landed Boston upon her return from England September 1773, Boston Gazette, newspaper of revolutionary Massachusetts, hailed young slave woman as the extraordinary (Boston 2). The two poles of public identity represented by To PUBLICK and Gazette notice--uncultivated and Poetical Genius--suggest possibilities open to Wheatley eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture. However, two identities also make it apparent that between arriving America first time from Africa on board slaver and re-arriving from London on board London Packet, shortly before appearance of her book colonies, Wheatley's public presence had undergone a significant transformation. Construed as an uncultivated Barbarian, Wheatley was just another slave among thousands, and therefore hardly worth notice. Yet recognized as a Poetical Genius, Wheatley's comings and goings became worthy of public report. In a very real sense, upon her re-arrival America, Wheatley had begun to exist. We simply dismiss Wheatley's authorial metamorphosis as natural result of interconnected racial and intellectual presumptions of Anglo-American culture. However, seen from a more critical perspective, Wheatley's symbolic transformation eyes of contemporary white Anglo-American culture from Barbarian to Genius suggests her successful crafting of a public persona, her subsequent participation public discourse of her time, and, most important, her acquisition of a power such public participation entailed. In part due to aesthetics of eighteenth-century public discourse which her poetry participated, Wheatley's place American literature has been problematic. In Phillis Wheatley and New England Clergy, James A. Levernier notes peculiar literary destiny of young slave woman who authored Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral: in contrast to most major American writers, scholarship on Wheatley has tended to emphasize less what she than what she accomplished (21). For example, Merle A. Richmond's assessment of effect of slavery upon Wheatley's literary sensibility would seem to grow out of this might have tradition: What emerges most starkly from her poetry is near surgical, 1obotomy-like excision of a human personality with warmth and blood and self-assertiveness that is grounded an awareness of one's self and relationship of this self to contemporary society (65). However, as Levernier notes, a number of scholars since come to understand impressive achievement Wheatley's poetry actually represents, and work of 'William H. Robinson, Jr., John C. Shields, Mukhtar Ali Isani, and Sondra O'Neale, among others (21), we can trace a greater appreciation of intricacies and implications of Wheatley's poetic practice. As study of Wheatley's work has continued, critics come to recognize significance of Wheatley's discursive strategies, particularly as deployed within her cultural context, as key to understanding her literary contribution. Russell J. Reising sees Wheatley employing an intricate rhetorical negotiation that rendered her verse virtually unreadable for a public with certain racial, political, theological, and cultural assumptions and at same time eminently readable. …