Phillis Wheatley's Ghosts: The Racial Melancholy of New England Protestants

Abstract

This essay corrects the inattention of Wheatley scholarship to the contexts of gender, both racially—and regionally—inflected, in which she lived and worked, in order to reread Wheatley's family elegies and to revise and extend Anne Anlin Cheng's model of "racial melancholy." Northern "family slavery" differed from Southern slavery in its anti-reproductivity: where Southern slavery valued fecundity in enslaved women, the shared living quarters and different functions of Northern slavery relative to its economy led to a valorization of female sterility, as is evident above all in newspaper ads of the day seeking sale of fecund women and giving away unwanted slave children. Missing Wheatley's sexuality is of a piece with missing her slavery; both reflect the persistent effacement of the gendered particularities of northern slavery and of the complex ways that Protestantism was enlisted both to defend and to challenge chattel slavery in New England. This perspective sharpens our sense both of Wheatley's typicality and atypicality as alate eighteenth-century female New England bondswoman, and it illuminates her poetry.