Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature: From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison

By Geneva Cobb Moore and Andrew Billingsley

An in-depth examination of Black women's experiences as portrayed in literature throughout American history

Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries.

Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial-era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern efforts of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-created the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority.

Moore grounds her account in studies of Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform.

In these nine writers' construction of feminine images—real and symbolic—Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond.

A foreword is offer by Andrew Billingsley, a pioneering sociologist and a leading scholar in African American studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9781611177497

Geneva Cobb Moore

Geneva Cobb Moore is a professor of English, women’s and gender studies, and race and ethnic studies at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. She is a former Fulbright scholar at the University of Ghana in West Africa and received grants and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has published articles on Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and other writers.An adviser to Gale’s Literature of Autobiographical Narrative, Moore has been a reviewer for Auto/Biography Studies.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

I remember telling my two sons, Kenny and Christopher, years ago that it would take about four years for me to complete this study. That was approximately twenty years ago. Since that time they have gone on to finish middle school, high school, college, and for Kenny, graduate school in Washington, D.C., and for Chris, to begin graduate school in California. Life happens while we are planning what we wish we could do, or what we wish we could accomplish in a set period of time, over which we sometimes have little control.

Nevertheless, this study has been completed with the encouragement and assistance of mentors and colleagues in Wisconsin and around the country, and in Africa, where I was a Fulbright Scholar from 1997 to 1998. The following are the names of individuals to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for reading and commenting on sections of the manuscript or the entire manuscript: George Adams, Richard Allen, Brian Altano, Robert Burrows, Kari Dako and A. Denkabe (University of Ghana), Joanne Glasgow, Jessie Grearson, Suzanne Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Holly Hassel, Fred Hobson, Joe and Rebecca Hogan, Cynthia Huff, Linda Hutcheon, Julian Mason, John Knapp, Elena Levy-Navarro, Beth Lueck, Margaret Musgrove, Andrea Musher, Andrea Nye, Margo Peters, former dean Howard Ross, Geoffrey Saddock, Joan Schwarz, and Julie Smith. Special thanks to Mark Clinger, for his inspiration as I was writing chapter 7, and to the late Peter Gillette, Barbara Beaver, and Carolyn Wedin Sylvander. To Andrew Billingsley, who read the manuscript in Africa and who wrote the foreword, I am much indebted, as I am to the generous and gracious historian Eric Foner, who read and commented on an earlier draft of the manuscript. The late historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his seminar Literature and Society, gave birth to the idea of this work. The two editors who provided me with considerable support are John Easterly, formerly executive editor at Louisiana State University Press, and Jim Denton, acquisitions editor at the University of South Carolina Press. To my benevolent, meticulous, but anonymous reviewers, I hope you can identify many of your fine recommendations in Maternal Metaphors.

"Archetypal Symbolism in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy" was first published in the Southern Literary Journal 33. © 2000 by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu.

"A Demonic Parody: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy" was first published in the Southern Literary Journal 44. © 2011 by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu.

"A Freudian Reading of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" was first published in the Southern Literary Journal 38. © 2005 by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu.

"When Meanings Meet: The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké" has been reprinted partially from Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries. © 1996 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Zora Neale Hurston as Local Colorist was first published in the Southern Literary Journal 26. © 1994 by the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu.

Introduction

Signs of Regeneration in African American Women’s Literature

Ralph Ellison has stated, "Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds. If we examine the beginning of the Colonies, the application of this view is not, in its economic connotations at least, too far-fetched or too difficult to see. For then the Negro’s body [emphasis added] was exploited as amorally as the soil and climate." Identity politics is thus the real subject of this study: the history shaping and making of events, identities, and national outcomes and the intellectual-as-artist wrestling that power away from history and reshaping events, identities, and national outcomes. In identity-theory scholarship, scholars aver that individuals can exert control over the perception of their own identities and who they wish to be, based presumably on natural gifts, opportunities, and will power.¹

Over a long, historical period of time from the colonial epoch and slavery to the Civil War and Reconstruction, the emergence and reemergence of racial strictures led to the caste barrier of a rigid Jim Crow system in 1892, firmly establishing the foundation of America’s Herrenvolk democracy, against which modern, black women authors write just as their literary predecessors had written against slavery and the early subjugation of African Americans. The sociologist Pierre L. van den Berghe defines Herrenvolk forms of democracy as those that exist in a "parliamentary regime in which the exercise of power and suffrage is restricted defacto, and often de jure, to the dominant group. In a Herrenvolk democracy, which emerges as an ideological contradiction" between a country’s professed love of democracy and its practice of discrimination, the privilege of democracy is restricted to a valued and superior caste over its known inferior and cultural Other.² Although Pierre van den Berghe developed the theory of a Herrenvolk democracy, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, in his study of black/white relations in the 1940s, enunciated the skewed but philosophical rationalization of the coexistence of democracy and racism. The partial exclusion of the Negro from American democracy, Myrdal posits, can be attributed to his alleged inferiority, which justifies the need for race prejudice as a defense on the part of the Americans against their own national Creed, against their own most cherished ideals of liberty.³ Having a subordinate status, African Americans under slavery and in a Herrenvolk democracy of rationalized inequities after slavery faced an impermeable racial caste system, illustrated in the literature of nine women writers from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison.

Divided into two parts, Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature provides a literary history of the black experience from the colonial and (pre)revolutionary era to postmodernity. Part 1, Slavery and Abolitionism, Freedom and Jim Crow America, traces the origin and development of the black female writer’s appropriation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power within the rigidly proscribed public sphere of slavery and segregation, the liberal romanticism of the abolitionist era, and the spirited movement of the Harlem Renaissance. Part 2, A Conflation of History, Past and Present, analyzes their continuing quest for liberation, though inner directed, and the contemporary novelist’s adoption too of feminine/maternal tropes, providing an overview of the West Indian and African American bond in a lengthy, historical critique of dominating systems of power.

Rewriting history and rejecting the master narrative on race and identity, these nine women writers reveal a desire to challenge the convention of their times, singly and collectively. Many studies on African American women writers have focused primarily on theory and on a select group of writers whose literary achievements do not necessarily represent a long and sustaining narrative chronology of American history. With the exception of the late Barbara Christian’s pathbreaking book Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 and Hazel Carby’s important study Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), which covers several centuries, and several other works cited throughout my text, few studies have been written on African American women writers as creating an uninterrupted narrative on history, race, identity, and literature. Maternal Metaphors attempts to join a select list of scholarship on black women’s literature as history, representing the black experience while covering perhaps a greater period of time from Wheatley’s autobiographical poem in 1768 to Morrison‘s novel Home (2012) and closing with a look at Morrison’s 2015 novel, God Help the Child.

The thesis of my study can be summarized thusly: black women writers from Wheatley to Morrison have created feminine and maternal metaphors of powers to unhinge oppressive forces against blacks and women and others, and to assert women’s innovative powers of authority. These writers often adopt the feminine and maternal body as a trope of justice and freedom and an emblem of women’s creativity in opposition to patriarchy and hegemony. Generally, women’s feminine and maternal nature of regeneration helps to explain these writers’ persistent reliance on strong maternal images and characters that have a liberating political function because of the uniqueness of African American history. Mother Africa, Mother Country, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, and the Great Mother archetypal tale of Demeter and Persephone are all maternal metaphors and narratives that attest to the veneration and privilege of the maternal body and the ideal of symbolic and literal motherhood. In Africa, for example, the Earth and the River Niger are considered goddesses because they are sources of life, perhaps one explanation among many of Phillis Wheatley’s overwhelming emphases on goddesses in select poems. Moreover, in their valorization of femininity, ancient artists from the Neolithic period illustrate through their cave drawings the ideas of women as mothers/goddesses. These paintings express too the emotional and psychological bonding of mothers and their children, of mothers and their communities.⁴

From the amniotic sacs in their wombs that shelter and nurture the fetuses to the mammary glands of their breasts that dispense milk and nourish the babies, mothers have a literal life-and-death power over their children. In the modern era, however, feminists often argue that Western culture with its entrenched patriarchy is matricidal. Pre-Oedipal societies venerated mothers, but post-Oedipal cultures from the age of Sophocles to Freud have challenged their real or symbolic maternal powers. Whereas in ancient and matrilineal societies mothers were the fonts of life, in patrilineal cultures mothers give birth to their children and relinquish them to a society, which then renders them powerless in determining their children’s life courses.⁵ In Freudian mythos separation from mothers, especially for boys, became a crucial marker of male autonomy and identity in patriarchal society. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese argues that in compensation for the loss of the mothers’ power, the ideology of motherhood that would rapidly develop into a full-blown ideology of bourgeois domesticity appeared to offer an ideal solution to the problem of women’s place in the brave new world of individualism.⁶ The relation between mother and child changed, diminishing the mother’s influence. If Western culture was matricidal for white women, offered a compensatory mommy-track of bourgeois domesticity, what was it then for physically enslaved, sexually abused, spatially segregated black women, who, as Toni Morrison’s narrator remarks in Beloved, often were denied the natural emotion of desire?⁷ As if responding to this question, Alice Walker writes that the answer, like the question, is cruel enough to stop the blood.⁸ Because of their experience of slavery and segregation and their double oppressions as blacks and women (and triple oppressions as foreigners in Paule Marshall’s fiction), transgressive female characters in black women’s literature frequently discover the social impetus for radical activism to reform society.

Through their characters, black women writers rewrite the role of black women and challenge the political/national body of rules (from slavery to segregation) used to govern women and minorities’ subordinate behavior. In Philosophy and the Maternal Body, Michelle Boulous Walker logically asks whether this transgressive maternal space [for all women] can be useful for any feminist analysis given that, according to [Elizabeth] Grosz, it ultimately rests upon, and stands in for, a phallic paternal phantasy. We need to ask whether this space has anything to do with women and their voices.⁹ The transgressive maternal and feminine space in black women’s literature has a special function in creating a change throughout the scheme of things, political and social. To speak more directly to Michelle Boulous Walker’s question, in Alice Walker’s novels, for example, the phallic maternal-imaginary exists not as a replacement for male authority but rather in a pointed and militant opposition to women’s real or symbolic castration. Before Boulous Walker even asked the question, however, Helene Cixous had very early radicalized the maternal space and generative power of the feminine body in the recovery of women’s voices and humanity.

Like Ralph Ellison in the opening quotation, Cixous articulates the delicate operation that women, or in this case African Americans, must perform on themselves in taking back their bodies and reshaping their lives, their images, and their identities. Cixous avers, Woman must write her body, écriture féminine, through which she must also inscribe the endless vertigo of a history loosed like an arrow from all of men’s history, from bibliococapitalist society.¹⁰ Ellison’s and Cixous’s theories, respectively, on the auctioned, enslaved, lynched, and segregated black body-in-crisis as constituting a long, dramatic narrative of American history and the feminine/maternal body as being a weapon of spiritual renewal and rebirth for women comprise the new constellations between body, history, language and politics.¹¹ That is, as an instrument of feminine power, the maternal trope can be used in a revision of history through women writers’ adoption of visionary language, asserting the relation of self and community and triumphing over their political disenfranchisement: their voicelessness.

In this study two identical features of black women’s literature across time and place illustrate the dramatic history of Ellison’s black body-in-crisis motif and Cixous’s écriture féminine thematic, or the artist-as-mother, procreating and nurturing life through her real or artistic textual and poetic body. With the exception of Nella Larsen’s fiction (Quicksand and Passing) and several of Toni Morrison’s novels (most notably The Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, Jazz, Love, and A Mercy), few of the writers’ texts examined in this book have autobiographical selves or major fictive characters who remain bodies-in-crises. Noticeably, these writers and/or their characters are invariably changed, reborn, regenerated—radically transformed into something other than what they were intended to be in Cixous’s bibliococapitalist society, where subordinate selves are consumed by a market economy.

Black women writers are, then, authors of subversive feminine texts and transgressive maternal spaces. They recast the black female body from a state of trauma to a site of regeneration, from an experience of slavery to an encounter with freedom, from a Herrenvolk democracy of Jim Crow and second-class citizenship to an expansive and aesthetic realm of beauty. As writers of subversive texts, challenging the status quo and re-creating images of women and blacks, these women writers assume a maternal function, as do the major female characters in Wheatley’s poems, Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Charlotte Forten Grimké’s Civil War journals, and the (post)modern novels of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. "A feminine text cannot not [emphasis added] be more than subversive,"¹² Cixous writes, using double negatives to stress emphatically the willed purposefulness of the female writers’ reinscription of identity in political spaces previously denied to them and their heroines.

Throughout this study I use the terms feminine and maternal in the broadest possible sense—expressing an all-encompassing image of these writers’ adoption of various maternal metaphors: 1) of maternal ethics in fostering caregiving in the community; 2) of the feminine/maternal body as a self-generating site of (re)production; and 3) of the maternal ideal and maternal imprinting as suggestive of women’s roles in mothering, teaching, and performing the grunt domestic work of radical social reform. In each chapter the feminine/maternal figure, real or imaginary, emerges as the obverse of women’s marginal status in society and invariably signifies the author’s reinvented autobiographical self or female characters giving, protecting, and restoring life to others in a national and global setting, claiming the world as their territory, as pronounced dramatically in Alice Walker’s bold work.

The maternal impetus toward regeneration for these women writers, as noted in their autobiographical works, or for their characters, as seen in their novels, sets these writers apart from others with what Patricia Meyer Spacks speaks of in another context as a symbolic as well as literal significance.¹³ I am not, however, using these terms feminine and maternal to assign to these women writers or their heroines the strict biological determinism of their sex and gender. I hope that it will be clear that with their distinct voices and their wide use of feminine and maternal powers of creativity they limit neither themselves nor their characters to the biology of their bodies. Writers from Wheatley to Forten Grimké and even Marshall, Walker, and Morrison (who have been accused of reverse sexism) represent their male subjects as also being capable of having the transformational impulse of their female subjects. Clearly, the capacity of providing and fostering care in the community is not limited by gender: in these texts caring men can mother too. But the male lacks the profound fecundity of the female body, its life-giving properties, and therefore the dominant maternal metaphors and images of regeneration in these women’s literature are distinctively feminine.

Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women’s Literature includes seven chapters followed by an afterword. Drawing upon the various theories of feminists from Carol Gilligan and Patricia Hill Collins to Luce Irigaray and Julie Kristeva, psychoanalysts from Freud to Lacan and Jung, and social scientists from Stephen Jay Gould to Michel Foucault and W. E. B. Du Bois, along with others, I examine the maternal iconography and counterhegemonic narratives of black women writers. Across their periods, genres, and literary influences, ranging from colonialism to postmodernism, these writers were all on the cutting edge of history, reforming their societies and capturing the national character of America’s identity politics as well as the related history of the Caribbean experience, in the case of the Diaspora writer Paule Marshall.

Maternal Metaphors offers a sweeping though not complete historicization of slavery—and freedom¹⁴ and the "Herrenvolk democracy of the United States past the advent of World War II,¹⁵ the time that van den Berghe limits it to but which the texts examined here show lasted much longer. The Jim Crow system of racial segregation crystallizes the theory of van den Berghe and Myrdal and what they had to say about American democracy, its practice or lack thereof for Negroes, a racial designation used before the era of the civil rights movement and the 1960s and cited throughout this study when appropriate. The ambitiousness of this literary project on America’s Herrenvolk democracy, written over a period of fifteen years, is related in part to my study of the subject Literature and Society in a postgraduate seminar taught in 1989 by the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. We examined the influence of the events of history and society on the writing of literature, which offers insight into lessons on the inherent struggle between the individual and social forces, appearing beyond her or his control. Moreover, female students in my American Minority Women Writers" course often express a desire to place women’s literature in its historical context, examining the connection between the writers’ literary subjects and the forces against which they wrote, especially if demoralizing to themselves or their artistic vision of a more humane society. We learn that the study of literature, set apart from the sociopolitical dynamics that fostered its appearance, can frequently result in a failure to appreciate the writers’ accomplishments in capturing the ethos of the age and contributing to our knowledge of the ascending and progressive nature of history based on the evolution of social thought and values.

The writers included in Maternal Metaphors were selected primarily because of their historical significance but also due to their popularity with students. Phillis Wheatley was a northern slave and harbinger of African American literature; Harriet Jacobs was a southern slave and provider of insight into the sexualization of plantation slavery; and Charlotte Forten was a free, wealthy Negro, less examined in literary studies but equally as important as her feted contemporaries, Harriet Jacobs and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. The cosmopolitan and local-color writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston, were producers of a literature of aesthetics, providing a counternarrative to the antiblack aesthetics of Jim Crow America. Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison are an admired triad of contemporary writers who offer differing yet poignant perspectives on the civil rights movement and history in general, past and present. Singly and collectively these writers provide an unremitting gaze into American history, describing its racial past as a prologue to its racial present and providing too an understanding of America’s long, complex racial narrative: its failure and its promise.

Part One

Slavery and Abolitionism, Freedom and Jim Crow America

The works of the six writers discussed here contain a microscopic history of slavery, abolitionism, and black emancipation and then the rise of Jim Crow strictures, which sought to limit the newly acquired freedom of African Americans. Their genres are easily recognizable: Wheatley’s religious poetry; Jacobs’s slave narrative; Forten Grimké’s Civil War journals; and Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s early twentieth-century novels. Across their selection of literary genres, these authors provided the visible conditions of their times, which they experienced and/or confronted and described in their work. Based on the variety of their art forms, a set of critical and theoretical assessments is used to elucidate the uniqueness of their style, content, and meaning.

As Roman imperialism laid the foundations of modern civilization, and led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, so in Africa today we are repaying the debt, and bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilization…. We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonize, to trade, and to govern.¹

As the opening quotation on empire and racial arrogance reveals, the image of Africa as the dark and vast unknown has a long and tortured history from the advent of the African slave trade in the fifteenth century to these postmodern times. In examining the iconography of Phillis Wheatley’s seminaked body, marketed on Boston’s slave auction block in 1761, we see her enslaved physical body as a pejorative symbol of the Dark Continent of Africa, pronounced in the rationalization of slavery and the construction of racial grids. Yet, Wheatley’s body can also be interpreted as a metaphor of women’s transformational power, for in coming to write, she gave new birth to herself and founded African American literature. As an artist, Wheatley represents the feminine-maternal capacity to regenerate life, although women as mothers have identities that go beyond that which are gendered and biologically determined. In her study Philosophy and the Maternal Body, Michelle Boulous Walker, like Helene Cixous before her, relates women’s bodily power to their creative potential in opposition to the (in)stability of the father’s universe.² Samples of Wheatley’s poetry reveal from this perspective her appropriation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in that she often demonstrates a gender-specific, nurturing, and transformational impulse in selected works, whether her autobiographical poem, political and religious poems, or elegies. Rebirth and regeneration are major motifs in her poetry, of which, as slave-turnedpoet, she is the archetypal model.

Critics such as Robert Reid-Pharr who argue for the disestablishment of Wheatley as the harbinger of African American literature misread her significance as the first African American writer who established the precedence of black authors rewriting the body and human suffering via tropes of healing and recovery. Reid-Pharr posits, incorrectly, that because Wheatley was purchased and reared by the white Boston merchant John Wheatley and his wife, Susannah, she manifested traits of an ‘unfinished’ literary training and an ‘unfinished’ racial identity. In an attempt to buttress his argument for a new assessment of Wheatley, he states that she lacked a black subjectivity and black singularity. Wheatley, according to his reading, was no Frederick Douglass, who distinguished masters from slaves in the Hegelian sense of the individual striving with the wisdom of historical consciousness and progress. This is why I have pointed to Wheatley’s interracial domestication in my efforts to disestablish her status as the original author of a noble Black American literary tradition, Reid-Pharr writes. Wheatley’s seminal autobiographical poem On Being Brought from Africa to America, 1768 demonstrates, he continues, that her work does little to establish black specificity because she celebrates her enslavement.³

Yet this autobiographical poem serves as an example of how several Wheatley scholars, including Reid-Pharr, have misinterpreted her double-voiced poem on Christian hypocrisy, which she parodies. In coming to write, Wheatley not only was the first significantly published and celebrated black intellectual artist to re-create herself from a degraded slave to a famous author, but she also was the most cherished who reinvigorated the abolitionist movement. By the time of Frederick Douglass’s emergence from slavery in 1838 to the publication of his first slave narrative in 1845, the abolitionist movement in America and London was well under way, having been advanced by Wheatley as early as 1773. From her autobiographical poem to her later poems and letters, Wheatley emerges as a moral and social reformer of her rigid colonial world. In her poetry she constructs the sociopolitics of civic mothering, caring and nurturing others and fostering a sense of community, beyond the circumscribed boundaries of race, gender, religion, science, and politics.

While drawing upon maternal metaphors of regeneration, Wheatley anticipated the principal tenets of maternal and feminist ethics that contemporary feminists from Carol Gilligan to Patricia Hill Collins attribute to women in their overarching maternal roles.⁴ White and black feminists such as Gilligan and Hill have defined concepts of a feminist morality in terms of the self in relation to others in the community that the precocious Wheatley, as poet, clearly embraces. In her pathbreaking book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Gilligan interprets white, middle-class women’s definitions of themselves in terms of their relationship and connection with others, unlike their male peers who view autonomy and individualism as important self-defining values. Feminists such as Collins agree that women’s maternal ethics of fostering care and building relationships symbolize a distinctly feminine characteristic and code of behavior. However, Collins posits that given the unique history of black men and women as enslaved individuals, black maternal and feminist ethics encompass a broader political and social agenda in reforming society in reference to the lives of black Americans. Their survival of slavery was a blow to the established order where their bodies had been given the marginal status of only an economic interest in the marketplace, as Ralph Ellison suggests in the introduction to this work.

On the threshold of a defining moment in history, Wheatley is one of the major precursors of the questing artist in society, advocating freedom and social and political justice on a much larger scale than Gilligan suggests about white women in particular. Wheatley is the first, African American female writer to combine the domestic politics of maternal and feminist ethics on a prominent level, for she wrote poetry that addresses the needs of individuals as well as the redressing of the entire national and global order vis-à-vis religion, science, peace, war, and later, slavery. For example, in her University of Cambridge (now Harvard University) poem, written before 1773, she refers to herself as an Ethiop, synonymous with the whole of Africa. She uses her ethnic identity to admonish white college students to make the most of their privileges and opportunities, the luxuries of which are missing in Africa. Wheatley cites her hybrid status (as an African pariah and American Evangelical Christian) to contrast the indigenous but limited world of Africa to the unlimited realm of science in the West, thereby crossing and yet building a bridge across continents and disciplines. While the African scholar Adeleke Adeeko classifies this and other poems (in which Wheatley refers to her ethnic identity) as the poet’s African poems of a New World, Christian, subaltern voice, imitating her masters and mentors and denigrating Africa,⁵ Vincent Carretta posits that her exposure to Christianity, and to literacy, soon made her known to fellow believers,⁶ nationally and internationally.

Wheatley appropriates her religion as a primary subject, giving her the authority and power⁷ to speak to others, democratizing the hierarchy of race and class for the African outsider. In the Cambridge poem science and religion are morally juxtaposed as two determining forces of history. But the logic of science should not supplant, she implies, the importance of faith and religion. She explains, Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space, / And mark the systems of revolving worlds / Still more, ye sons of science you receive / The blissful news by messengers from heav’n, / How Jesus’ blood for your redemption flows.⁸ Although the Cambridge poem does not specifically address the issue of race, Wheatley, the Ethiop, uses race and religion as yardsticks to check the inevitable proliferation of science against the students’ cultivation of an inner spirituality. With her antithetical positioning of race, religion, and science, Wheatley, the self-deprecating and untutored African, appears to analyze subtly the inequality of race and opportunity while lauding the triumph of faith, a socially leveling force for her in an enslaving society.

Another illustration of her offering an olive branch of peace in this time after conflict and war is seen in one of her last poems, where she examines political power but applies feminine metaphors of positive social change to human advancement. Wheatley’s poem Liberty and Peace, published in 1784, the year of her death, celebrates the achievement of the American Revolution. In this poem she uses gender-specific language to describe the human virtues of peace and freedom, which she characteristically feminizes. She writes,

Lo! Freedom comes …

"She moves divinely fair,

Olive and Laurel bind her golden Hair.

She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends,

And every Grace her sovereign Step attends;

For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer,

In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.⁹

Justice and freedom, peace and nonaggression are intricately connected to a feminine psyche, but war and aggression (Navies, fraternal Arms, and savage Troops) are firmly linked to a masculine imaginary. She feminizes the word Columbia and is believed to be the first to describe America as Columbia, ‘the goddess of freedom’: The Sword resign’d, resume the friendly Part! / For Gailia’s power espous’d Columbia’s Cause. The goddess of freedom functions as a metaphor of tranquillity after the chaos of war. Considering her violent abduction from Africa, her transition from a state of innate freedom to one of colonial enslavement, done at the will of an avaricious African and European patriarchy, Wheatley’s poetic inscription of feminine powers appears to register her distrust of dominating, imperial authorities. Historically the black female body, as with the example of Wheatley’s youthful appearance at auction, has been a site of the configuration of black women’s identity as indistinguishable from commodified objects, made visible in black women’s socially ascribed roles as slaves, servants, and sexed bodies. Appreciably, Wheatley is the first to rewrite the history of race and gender subordination to international acclaim and social change, transcending her inauspicious beginnings.

The Origin of Phillis Wheatley: The Quintessential Slave Heroine

According to Julian Mason’s introduction to Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, on July 11, 1761, an enslaved and frail African female arrived at Boston’s Feather Wharf¹⁰ perhaps wearing only a ragged piece of cloth tied around her tiny waist. Kidnapped from her family in West Africa, probably by Africans, shipped on the slave ship Phillis to America, and sold to the prosperous and religious Boston merchant John Wheatley, the puny slave would later become known as a famous poet whose writings were cited by abolitionists to attack the institution of slavery. However, her inauspicious naming and identity (after the slave ship Phillis) were symbolically inscribed on her seminude body. Her body was displayed as a capitalist tool and product of the African slave trade and European expansionism, and she was forced to stand at auction, perhaps under the typical advertisement of the day: A Parcel of Likely Negroes Just Imported from West Africa. The public, partial nakedness of Wheatley’s developing body becomes a symbol of inscription, for on her body was written her foreignness, a politically and socially constructed identity, based on her color, gender, and culture.

The historian Winthrop Jordan has noted, The Negro’s color attained [its] greatest significance not as a scientific problem, but as a social fact. Englishmen found blackness in human beings a peculiar and important point of difference.¹¹ Within the cultural context of difference and foreignness, black peoples’ color became an issue of debate over its origin, its cause, and its significance, particularly at a propitious time in history with the growth of imperialism and the slave trade. Slavery was seen by many as a necessary evil in the development of European capitalism, but the stigma of color mitigated this evil in the era of colonialism. Africans or Negroes became subjects for a special kind of obedience and subordination to Englishmen who were energetically on the make, Jordan remarks, and sought to possess for themselves and their children one of the most bountiful dominions of the earth¹²: land as property. The early pejorative association of blackness with heathenism and difference was one that ascribed to blacks a certain identity, emblazoned on enslaved bodies of which Wheatley’s becomes the prototype. She is perhaps the first clear model we have of an object-turned-subject with a conscious awareness that by writing she was giving birth to a new self, as seen in one of her epistles.

Wheatley’s Seminaked Body: A Symbol of the Dark Continent

Wheatley’s body was indeed a symbol of Africa and social death. As an illustration of this idea, we must consider the following occurrences: 1) the establishment of scientific racism in the eighteenth-century; 2) the John Hancock committee’s affidavit on Wheatley’s poetry; 3) John Wheatley’s separate statement about his slave’s uniqueness; and 4) Wheatley’s writing of a short, autobiographical poem, On Being Brought from Africa to America—described as one of the most reviled poems in the African American literary canon.¹³ The first of these, scientific racism, contributed to the overarching perception of blackness as a state of negation, a notion delineated in Carolus Linnaeus’s book Systema naturae (1758), in which the Swedish botanist, who invented the term Homo sapiens, divided the human race into four categories. These classifications were based on skin color, temperament, physical stance, and geographical region, hence Native Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Native Americans were defined as red, choleric, upright; Europeans as white, sanguine, muscular; Asians as pale-yellow, melancholy, stiff; and Africans as niger, phlegmatic, laxus, with capricious behavior.¹⁴ Although Linnaeus did not design his scientific grid of taxonomy in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition,¹⁵ Stephen Jay Gould explains, he nonetheless established a perception of race that clearly favored the sanguine European over others, especially the capricious African.

Perceptions of race as outlined in a grid form and as projected on Wheatley’s diminutive body-in-crisis on a slave auction block helped to fix her body in the racist gaze of the dominating culture, leading to the undoing of her body as a human body. Hers was not a valued human body, except for reasons of economic exploitation. Empirical scientists such as Gould, social scientists from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, and the feminist Luce Irigaray have theorized the disjunctive discourse on race and taxonomy and gender. To various degrees they describe the resulting fragmentation of identities, springing from an enduring low ranking of the cultural Other, ideas useful in a rereading of Wheatley. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould argues that Linnaeus is not truly responsible for the scientific establishment of racist thought in the eighteenth century, although he influenced it. Gould reserves this infamous distinction, ironically, for J. F. Blumenbach, the German naturalist who did rank humans by their putative worth in a hierarchical ranking of the five categories of humans, including the Malay, with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. Blumenbach certainly thought that his switch from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme—the basis for his fateful geometric shift … from cartography to hierarchy—arose only from his improved understanding of nature’s factuality,¹⁶ says Gould. The irony of Blumenbach’s fateful hierarchy is that he did not believe in the concept of black inferiority, having affirmed the perfectibility of the mental faculties and the talents of the Negro, citing the example of Phillis Wheatley of Boston, who is justly famous.¹⁷ Blumenbach kept a copy of Wheatley’s 1773 book of poems in his library. Still, Gould cites Blumenbach, not Linnaeus, as fixing the attitudes on racial worth, although Blumenbach was the least racist, most egalitarian … of all Enlightenment writers on the subject of human diversity.¹⁸

Blumenbach and the racial grids that he and Linnaeus established confounded for Foucault the problem of life in the eighteenth century, a fact that Wheatley’s harshest critics, Reid-Pharr and Adeeko included, seem to ignore. In his analysis of the age and its development of the systematic ranking of human bodies, Foucault interprets the period as a grid of denominations. He singles out Linnaeus, who initially distinguished the parts of natural bodies with his eyes, describes them appropriately according to their number, form, position, and proportion and he names them. Natural history and naturalists such as Linnaeus, Foucault posits, are concerned only with the structure of the visible world and its denomination according to characters. Not with life.¹⁹ Wheatley’s poem to students at the University of Cambridge, written when she was only a teenager, says as much about the unfair dominance of science in the inflexible ordering of the universe, as Foucault would later theorize in his critique of dominating systems of power in that century. On a subliminal level, Wheatley could have been taking aim at the scientific structure of valuation that relegated her life to the social bottom. Therefore, her emphasis on religion gave her a voice beyond the subaltern and a higher social ranking in the community she was building.

While the human body can be defined as a mass of tissues, organs, and flesh, Linnaeus’s and Blumenbach’s critical moves to identify and rank specific kinds of bodies, giving them a certain significance or insignificance within a grid, communicate an infinite number of meanings, not solely scientific but rather perceptual. Naming and identifying bodies to be accepted as the very things that are described can become, according to Lacan, a pact, by which two subjects simultaneously come to an agreement over the objects being named, and the power of naming objects structures the perception itself.²⁰ That is, the perception becomes as great as the subjects-as-objects being named and defined. Hence the innocence of color per se is compromised by the various perceptions of color as rooted in something other than the purity of hue. In the novel Moby-Dick, for example, Herman Melville establishes the perceptual differentiation of color in his manipulation of the reversal of color discrimination. Melville creates a white, albino whale whose personified and malevolent whiteness psychologically reverses the trope of blackness as terror. But on Boston’s Feather Wharf, the enslaved and unnamed black child was a symbol of a geographical location, an emblem of the sacrificial black body-in-crisis, marketed for the common good of a capitalist Western culture. With Linnaeus’s grid (rather than Blumenbach’s, which came later) of Africa and Africans etched in the minds of society, the prodigy did not represent a youthful self with potential but a pagan people, fixed in a perceived identity.

As racial symbol, Wheatley could not go beyond this essentialist copy of race and identity. Theoretically, in the pairing of her quasi-nude body with the rhetoric of her distorted image, Wheatley in the civilized New World represented the nakedness of Africa. Nowhere is the association of Africa with barbarism more explicitly demonstrated than in the statement of a prominent, all-white male committee in Boston. Their affidavit on Wheatley’s poetry was requested—no evidence exists of her meeting with them in public as Henry Louis Gates and Paul Gilroy logically assume²¹—when she decided to write poetry and become a published poet in London, not Boston, where publishers refused her book of poems for publication. Her London publisher and her benevolent mistress, Susannah Wheatley, solicited a group of distinguished men in Boston to authenticate her poetry for a racist society that needed proof of her talent. Even as they authenticated her writings, however, these men denigrated her African body in a Cartesian mind/body separation that ironically objectified and celebrated Wheatley’s mind while perceptually connecting her body to the perceived pagan body of Africa:

To the Publick. As it has been repeatedly suggested to the Publisher, by Persons, who have seen the Manuscript, that Numbers would be ready to suspect they were not really the Writings of PHILLIS, he has procured the following Attestation, from the most respectable Characters in Boston, that none might have the least Ground for disputing their Original. We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the POEMS specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by PHILLIS, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, [emphasis added] and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.²²

Among the eighteen distinguished men signing the statement were John Wheatley, the master; John Hancock, the famous signer of the Declaration of Independence; and Thomas Hutchinson, governor of the Massachusetts colony. As documented evidence, the affidavit represents the power of a white, dominant and masculine authority to bring to public consciousness the work of an African writer, with their stamp of approval of Wheatley’s reconfiguration of identity, beyond her doubly colonized body as African and New England patriot.

Although the affidavit anticipates the racist suspicions that Wheatley’s literacy as a slave would undoubtedly raise, no less a prominent figure than Thomas Jefferson questioned her authenticity as a poet. In Notes from Virginia, Jefferson asserts that Wheatley’s poems were beneath the dignity of criticism because "among the black is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic]; but it could not produce a poet."²³ According to Jean Fagan Yellin, Jefferson’s Notes embodies both an assertion of human liberty, and a classic statement of the racism which has prevented its realization in America.²⁴ Indeed, Paul Finkelman’s Slavery and the Founders goes beyond hinting that Jefferson, ironically, was the most racist of the founding fathers. Unlike the others, especially Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, the Declaration of Independence author was blind to the talents, skills, or intellectual abilities of blacks,²⁵ including those who labored freely for his comfort on his Monticello estate. In Jefferson’s misspelling of Phillis Wheatley’s name and his questioning of her authorship of poems (published under her name), he negates her identity twice while engaging in conflicting criticism: he mocks her poems while suggesting that she is not really their author. Jefferson’s criticism is consistent with the image of Wheatley and Africa as pronounced in the Hancock committee’s statement, but with one critical difference.

When Jefferson remarks that Religion has produced Phillis Wheatley, he ascribes to her a bodily transformation of identity but implies that only the West and its culture could have effected these changes, a proslavery argument for the civilizing of Africans. Unlike Jefferson, the Hancock committee describes Wheatley as intellectually gifted, but like Jefferson, they make a distinction between her mind and her body inscribed as an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa. In the mind/body split of Cartesian dualism, Jefferson acknowledges only the metaphysics of Wheatley’s bodily metamorphosis from pagan body to religious body, while the Hancock committee recognizes her mind but describes her physical body as they perceived her native African continent: barbaric. When the Hancock committee described Wheatley as a barbarian, she had been living in the colonies for over a decade and considered herself an acculturated American, as we see in the famous George Whitefield elegy when she addresses the countess and tells her that "we Americans [emphasis added] revere / Thy name." Although she could not have become a citizen because of her race, she had become, biculturally, an American hybrid, as many Europeans did in immigrating to the colonies, where they secured their freedom and became citizens. That Wheatley was denied the status of even a cultural hybrid (except in her espousal of religion) reveals Jefferson’s and the Hancock committee’s refusals to see her as anything other than a foreign body in the national body politic. Several centuries later and in a postmodern America with its first African American president, Barack Obama, one sees this same kind of public denial of a black person’s national-body citizenship by President Obama’s right-wing birther critics, revealing the long arm of American history and identity politics, poignantly examined in Jacqueline Jones’s study, A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America (2013).

In both eighteenth-century cases, with Jefferson and the Hancock committee, Wheatley’s mind and body are not reconciled in a whole, reciprocal relationship: the mind communicating to the body that acts as a vehicle or channel through which thoughts are processed and acted out in bodily language, gestures, and signs. Since Wheatley’s mind and body are treated separately in both instances, it is clear that for Jefferson and the Hancock committee, Wheatley remained a fragmented body, a perception of a symbol, an embodiment of Africa, the dark unknown and unknowable continent. In her century Wheatley was placed in the unenviable position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the little-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as Irigaray remarks in another context on female subjugation. Irigaray goes on to comment that within her marginal positionality, the splintered woman (such as Wheatley here) can recover only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.²⁶

If we view Wheatley’s adoption of the double-voiced discourse in earlier and later selected poems and letters, then her psychic recovery from slavery and racial essentialism is related to her ability to manipulate language and voice subversively in a hostile, alienating society that saw her as unwhole. The Wheatley scholar Paula Bennett says as much when she writes, Wheatley’s manipulation of Western rhetorical and cultural conventions in the interests of her own poetic agency is nowhere more evident than in her handling of the elegy, or formal mourning poem.²⁷ However, even before the writing of elegies such as the Whitefield poem, Wheatley showed an uncanny manipulation of language in one of her first poems. Just as she adroitly creates feminine images of the goddess of freedom and disrupts the traditionally putative low ranking of women, thought to be weak and emotional rather than strong and rational, Wheatley also controls language and voice in On Being Brought from Africa to America. In this poem she subtly, or in Irigaray’s word, secretly, attacks the hypocritical religious and slaveholding society in which she lives. But in her private correspondence, for example, her 1774 letter to Samson Occom, the Native American missionary, Wheatley was free to be less secretive. Speaking in a single voice, she describes Africa as a land of chaos but argues that Christians who enslave Africans to save them from paganism manifested a strange Absurdity of their Conduct because God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom in every human Breast.²⁸ Her diction of every human Breast is an all-encompassing yet incarnate maternal and life-supporting metaphor. It resounds with ideas of human essence and a healthful liberal egalitarianism, dominating Enlightenment discourse.

One other document pertains to Wheatley as an emblem of the Dark Continent. Her slave master, John Wheatley, submitted an official statement in support of Wheatley’s 1773 publication of poems, which, perhaps unwittingly, reveals the falseness of the cultural assumptions of the West about Wheatley’s place of origin but which she both refutes and mimics, perhaps showing her own confusion. John Wheatley writes, Without any Assistance from School-Education, and by only what she was taught in the family, she, in sixteen Months’ Time from her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any, [even] the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings.²⁹ By identifying Wheatley as a Stranger to the West, its language, and its culture, John Wheatley submits to, yet simultaneously challenges, the West’s racist conceptualization of Wheatley and Africa as the barbaric cultural Other, but he also reinscribes her identity as prodigy.

Wheatley’s ability to learn several different languages from English to Latin to Greek and to read the Bible and English and Greek literature with considerable facility contradicts Jefferson’s claim that religion alone had produced Phillis Wheatley. Her education, Vincent Carretta explains, resembled that of highly educated white men and was superior to that of most white women, of whom only about half of the population was sufficiently literate.³⁰ The Wheatley scholar Lucy Hayden identifies and traces Wheatley’s classical allusions to Greek and Roman mythology in twenty-six of her first published thirty-nine poems,³¹ with one of her earliest poems, On Messrs Hussey and Coffin (1767), containing several classical allusions and stressing the origin of her maternal metaphors of power. Yet even here, in a poem about men in Cape Cod who narrowly escaped a disaster while at sea, we can see Wheatley’s signature invention of a feminine trope of positive maternal intervention in the men’s rescue from danger. This particular trope of powerful women [as goddesses] in powerful roles, as Gerda Lerner reminds us in The Creation of Patriarchy, is at odds with the lifelong dependency of women on fathers and husbands [that] became so firmly established in law and custom as to be considered ‘natural’ and god-given.³² In working against the fortification of that which was considered natural in the social dynamics of identity politics, Wheatley exuded a clearly defined, albeit subtle and subversive personal politics. That is, she epitomized and transcended the accepted discourse of the age, perhaps best summarized by the literary giant of the conservative neoclassical period, Alexander Pope, who paternalistically writes in his famous Essay on Man, WHATEVER IS, IS RIGHT.³³

In Wheatley’s On Messrs Hussey and Coffin poem, she strikes a conciliatory tone and asks the weary men, Did Fear and Danger so perplex your Mind / As made you fearful of the Whistling Wind? / Was it not Boreas knit his angry Brow / Did haughty Eolus with Contempt look down / With Aspect windy, and a study’d Frown? Had the soft gliding Streams of Grace been near / Some favourite Hope their fainting hearts to cheer. In this poem the Greek gods of the wind, Eolus and Boreas, have a violent, rupturing presence, endangering the men’s lives while they are in rough waters. Having the power to delay Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, Eolus, the keeper of the winds, reveals his terrible force in Homer’s The Odyssey, the epic to which Wheatley most likely alludes in her treatment of the winds. The poem’s image of the feminine and soft Grace, representing the three graces Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thaleia in Greek mythology, is one that projects maternal powers of compassion, leading to the protection of the men, had the goddess been near. We see, then, how the presence/absence of gods and goddesses can change the direction of this poem with Wheatley inflecting here a uniquely life-altering feminine imaginary in one of her early poems of comfort. These traits are associated with women, acting maternally. Given her rupturing experience in the New World, one can ask how Wheatley came to this kind of artistic temperament at