Phillis Wheatley's Subversive Pastoral

Abstract

MOST READERS OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY'S POETRY have long been aware that she employed pastoral mode in her poems with some frequency. These readers have not recognized, nevertheless, that this poet manipulated pastoral mode in subversive manner. The work of Annabel Patterson instructs us that what people think of Vergil's Eclogues is key to their own cultural assumptions, especially as those are organized by concept of artist/intellectual.1 As brevity of Eclogues made them natural exercise for elementary education in classics, so Patterson observes, entered European consciousness at formative stage.2 Whoever tutored Wheatley in Latin, for of course someone must have, may well have asked her to write pastoral compositions in Latin, as was expected of students in early America's Latin grammar schools. Patterson maintains that Europeans of Renaissance and eighteenth century understood pastoral's dialectical, tensive structure as characterized, on one hand, by idyllic, Theocritean simplicity of shepherds' singing contests and love songs and, on other hand, by Vergil's exploration of realism that embraced the consequences of civil war, problems of landownership and relationship of writers to rulers. These two sides of dialectic formed, in minds of those Europeans who adapted eclogues to their own needs, a metaphorical system by which they could allude to power structures of their own society, describe their own poetics and determine their own cultural stance.3