Impossible Witnesses by Dwight McBride

Author:Dwight McBride [McBride, Dwight]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780814764169
Google: tvOgBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2002-02-01T04:24:06+00:00

4. APPROPRIATING THE WORD

Phillis Wheatley, Religious Rhetoric, and the Poetics of Liberation

Remember, Christians, Negros black as Cain, May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.

—Phillis Wheatley

While I was thus employed by my master, I was often a witness to cruelties of every kind, which were exercised on my unhappy fellowslaves.

—Olaudah Equiano

This chapter is an investigation of the function and circulation of religious rhetoric in the poetry and letters of Phillis Wheatley. It is particularly concerned with the rhetorical strategies that she employed to bear witness to slavery in the late eighteenth century (the earliest context for institutional abolitionism). Through her oppositional discourse on Christianity, she anticipated the moral arguments of pro-slavers, especially in her characterizations of the Christian God. A close examination of specific testimonial moments1 in her writings demonstrates that while Wheatley knows and rehearses Enlightenment discourses on natural rights quite fluently, her resistance to slavery is coded in her figurative, poetic language.

Much of the critical response to the work of Phillis Wheatley has ignored its literary substance. The record of Wheatley criticism, from her contemporaries to the present, reads more like a sociological graph of changing racial attitudes than like a critical history. We can only imagine that, had Wheatley been able to anticipate the lack of literary substance in the debate the academy and literati would wage around her work or the seeming lack of compassion, appreciation, and understanding that later critics would have for her sociohistorical context and its inevitable impact on her public writings, she might have risked even more than she did or, in the worst possible case, aborted her ostensibly impossible task all together.

To take but a few examples: Seymour Gross in 1966 described her work with “this Negro poetess so well fits the Uncle Tom syndrome …”2 Earlier, in 1939, J. Saunders Redding charged that “it is this negative, bloodless, unracial quality in Phillis Wheat-ley that makes her seem superficial, especially to members of her own race.”3 By the mid-1970s, so much of this pernicious and painfully ahistorical criticism had been written that by way of summation of these critics in his book Phillis Wheatley in the Black American Beginnings, William Robinson wrote, “Most condemnatory are some modern Blacks who dismiss Phillis out of hand as ‘an early Boston Aunt Jemima,’ ‘a colonial handkerchief head,’ ‘utterly irrelevant to the identification and liberation of the Black man.’”4

Some more recent critical voices have done much to expand the idea of the significance of Wheatley’s historical context on her literary work.5 The work of these scholars is to be lauded since, as the critical-historical record of Wheatley has borne out, it is scarcely possible to analyze her work fruitfully in a purely formalist critique, without attention to context. And of course, any attention to context in the work of Phillis Wheatley necessitates an engagement with the circumstances of the work’s production. What remains, it seems, is for critics actually to read Wheatley’s poetry with this attention to history in mind. In general, the criticism on Wheatley

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