Phillis Wheatley, melancholy muse

New England Quarterly-A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters

Volumn 77, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 224-251

  Franke, Astrid ^a  

^a GOETHE UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

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EID: 60950626428     PISSN: 00284866     EISSN: 19372213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773).
2. Betsy Erkkila, "Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution," in A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 229.
3. David Grimsted, "Anglo-American Racism and Phillis Wheatleys sable Veil,' 'Length'ned Chain,' and 'Knitted Heart,'" in Women in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Peter J. Albert and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), pp. 396-97.
4. Walt Nott, "From 'Uncultivated Barbarian' to 'Poetical Genius': The Public Presence of Phillis Wheatley," MELUS 18 (1993): 23.
5. See Boyd Stanley Schlentler, Queen of the Methodists: The Countess of Huntingdon and the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Faith and Society (Durham: Durham Academic Press, 1997).
6. For a new but somewhat celebratory biography, see Faith Cooks Selina Countess of Huntingdon: Her Pivotal Role in the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Awakening (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2001).
7. For the conceptualization of melancholy in the eighteenth century, see Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxls Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), p. 236.
8. The letter, from Richard Cary to the Countess, praises Wheatley for her "Humility, modesty and Spirituall mindedness." It is quoted by Julian D. Mason in his edition of The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 186, n.1. I will be using this volume when quoting Wheatleys poems and henceforth will cite page numbers in the text.
9. For a discussion of melancholy and genius, see Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 217-54.
10. A concise discussion of this notion of genius, its sources in neoplatonic philosophy, and its representations in eighteenth-century literature and art can be found in Bemhard Buschendorfs Goethes mythische Denkform: Zur Ikonographie der 'Wahlverwandtschaften' (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), pp. 202-14.
11. See also Schings, Melancholie und Aufklärung, pp. 246-69.
12. Emory Elliott, Revolutionary Writers: Literature and Authority in the New Republic, 1725-1810 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 23.
13. On the Puritan funeral elegy, see John Drapers The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (London: Frank Cass, 1967), chaps. 3 and 6;
14. Robert Hensons "Form and Content of the Puritan Funeral Elegy," American Literature 32 (1960): 11-27;
15. Harold Jantzs The First Century of New England Verse (New York: Russel, 1962);
16. Ivy Schweitzers The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);
17. and most recently, Jeffery A. Hammonds The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
18. For examples, see Drapers The Funeral Elegy, pp. 304-5.
19. Wheatleys work with the elegy has been discussed by Gregory Rigsby, in "Form and Content in Phillis Wheatleys Elegies," CLA Journal 19 (1975): 284-87.
20. The genres representation of the speaker has been described by Schweitzer, in The Work of Self-Representation, p. 37.
21. Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William Eerdmans, 1991).
22. See, e.g., Paula Bennetts "Phillis Wheatleys Vocation and the Paradox of the 'Afric Muse,'" PMLA 113 (1998): 70.
23. Mediating between the dead and the living is an activity common to many cultures, among them those of Africa. In a rather vague formulation, Bennett draws a causal connection between "quasi-shamanistic" West-African religious practices and Wheatleys poetic practice in the funeral elegies, though she admits that this connection "is not immediately obvious" ("Wheatleys Vocation," p. 74, n. 8). This apparent desire to find African elements in Wheatleys poetry should have been tempered by its obvious display of Wheatleys mastery of New England cultural practices.
24. Julie Ellison, "The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility," in Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Woman Writers, 1776-1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefher (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 249.
25. Ellison, "Politics of Fancy," p. 249.
26. Peter Coviello, "Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America," Early American Literature 37 (2002): 446.
27. Phillip M. Richards, "Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization," American Quarterly 44 (1992): 170.
28. See also Kenneth Silvermans A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), pp. 82-87,
29. and Jay Fliegelmans Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 96-101.
30. Ellison diagnoses a slightly different conflict in these lines, namely "between Wheatleys need to depict her own authentic suffering and thus to justify her empathy with New Englands cause, on the one hand, and on the other, her desire to acknowledge the fortunate teleology of her enslavement and conversion, the conditions for her public voice" ("Politics of Fancy," p. 249).
31. See Richards, "Phillis Wheatley and Literary Americanization," p. 187: "The example of Wheatley suggests that integrationist and separatist impulses might simply be different moments in the complex process of black Americanization. From the very beginning, this was a culture that required black Americans to recognize their socially constructed difference from the American consensus in order to attempt to write themselves into that consensus."
32. Henry L. Gates, "In Her Own Write," foreword to The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. x;
33. "Phillis Wheatley on Trial," New Yorker, 20 January 2003;
34. and, most recently, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. Americas First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
35. André Jolles, Einfache Fonnen: Legende, Sage, Mythe, Rätsel, Spruch, Kasus, Memorabile, Märchen, Witz (1930; Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1968), pp. 134-35,
36. here translated by Balz Engler, in Poetry and Community (Tübingen: Stauffenburg-Verlag, 1990). P. 80.
37. Shields calls it a "particularly polished and sophisticated poem" ("Notes" to his edition of Wheatleys Collected Works, p. 276).
38. For an account of Wheatleys marketing strategies, see Christopher Felkers "'The Tongues of the Learned Are Insufficient': Phillis Wheatley, Publishing Objectives, and Personal Liberty," in Texts and Textuality: Textual Instability, Theory, and Interpretation, ed. Philip Cohen (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 81-119.
39. See also Kirstin Wilcox, "The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley," American Literature 71 (1999): 1-29.
40. Terrence Collins, "Phillis Wheatley: The Dark Side of the Poetry," Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. William H. Robinson (1975; Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), p. 150.
41. Bennett, "Wheatleys Vocation," p. 67.
42. Bennett also suggests that Wheatley is making a distinction between a "more enlightened" Roman slavery and American slavery. Marsha Watson points to the creation of an African "father" in her "A Classic Case: Phillis Wheatley and Her Poetry," Early American Literature 31 (1996): 118.
43. Erkkila claims that Wheatley puts herself into "a specifically African tradition" ("Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution," p. 232).
44. John C. Shields has noted that the "younger poet seems to have arranged her volume by using Byless as a model" (Thillis Wheatley and Mather Byles: A Study in Literary Relationship," CLA Journal 23 [1980]: p. 377).
45. He has also suggested that "it is most likely that the figure of Mæcenas is here a conflation of both Byles and Pope" (Wheatleys Collected Works, p. 277).
46. Mather Byles, Poems on Several Occasions, ed. Lennart Carlson (1744; New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), p. 25.
47. Cynthia J. Smith, "To Mæcenas': Phillis Wheatleys Invocation of an Idealized Reader," Black American Literature Forum 23 (1989): 586.
48. As, for instance, "And here I'll sit, and sigh my hot loves folly, / And lean t' affect an holy melancholy," in the poem "Farewell to the Vanities of the World," written by Sir Walter Raleigh or Sir Henry Wotton (Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler; or, The Contemplative Mans Recreation [1653; London: Elliot Stock, 1876], p. 245).
49. Another poem inciting this controversy is "On Imagination," which also displays the contrast between a fiery "flight of fancy" and a return to a somber mood. Here, too, the inability to continue is linked to melancholy, which may, in turn, have a "real" rather than symbolic cause: "Winter" and the "northern tempest" that chill and dampen poetic fire connote seasons and elements that correspond again to the speakers melancholy mood, but knowing that the poet has been brought from Africa to New England, one may also see here a literal reference to the cold climate of the north. Once her mood is attributed to slavery, "Winter," of course, may be read as a trope for New England or even "white northern oppression" (Erkkila, "Phillis Wheatley and the Black American Revolution," p. 237).
50. Ellison rejects an unequivocal reading of "Winter" as solely a powerful, oppressive force ("The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility," p. 247);
51. A summary can also be found in Watanabe-O'Kellys Melancholic und die melancholische Landschaft, pp. 15-16.
52. The phrase is, of course, Du Boiss, from The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois did write on Phillis Wheatley in "Phillis Wheatley and African American Culture," reprinted in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 328-42.
53. Byles likes the idea of sharing laurels so much that he uses it again in "To an Ingenious Young Gentleman, on His Dedicating a Poem to the Author." Here, the passage reads "To crown your Friend, your gen'rous Hand allows / A Branch of Bays from your o'ershaded Brows; / Unfading Wreaths, around my Temples spread, / By you unmiss'd, adorn my joyful Head" (Poems, p. 50).
54. This has already been observed by Lucy K. Hayden, "Classical Tidings from the Afric Muse: Phillis Wheatleys Use of Greek and Roman Mythology," CLA Journal 35 (1992): 434.
55. Smith, "'To Mæcenas,'" p. 583.
56. Byles, Poems, p. 90. Wheatleys Poems on Various Subjects also contains a poem to a painter.
57. Appearing anonymously in the New England Weekly Journal, Byles frequently wrote poems and essays praising himself, such as "To an Ingenious Young Gentleman on His Dedicating a Poem to the Author" or "Added by a Friend, upon Reading the Foregoing," where he embodies gentleman, author, and friend. Shields calls Byles a notorious "incorrigible prankster and a biting wit. fond of perpetrating such hoaxes" ("Wheatley and Byles," p. 385).
58. Carlson, introduction to Byless Poems, pp. xii-xiii.
59. Shields, "Wheatley and Byles," p. 388.
60. and Mason, The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, p. 194.
61. Elliott, Revolutionary Writers, p. 31.