Phillis Wheatley: The Melancholy Muse

With these historical methods and backgrounds in mind, I’d like to turn to one historical figure who did an excellent job in connecting her world and experiences with race and that of antiquity together in colonial America. It was on the eve of the American Revolution that Phillis Wheatley emerged onto the literary scene. A black female author who wrote many of her poems incorporating her “classical education, the Congregationalist faith into which she was inducted as a slave, and her earliest memories of Africa,” Wheatley’s success as an author resulted from the local networks in which she was connected. (1) Kidnapped from West Africa and transported to Boston on The Phillis, a slave ship, Wheatley was about eight when she was purchased by John and Susanna Wheatley. It was under Susanna’s supervision that Wheatley learned English along with classical languages. By fifteen, Wheatley wrote and published her own poetry. By nineteen, Wheatley attempted to secure subscriptions from Boston for her volume of poetry but was not able to find ample support. With the backing of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntingdon, Wheatley published her book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, in 1773. Even with the success of her book of poetry, Wheatley’s writing was stymied by the Revolution, as the purchasing patterns of Anglo-Americans and the economic conditions of the colonies changed. These changes, coupled with her poor health, ended Wheatley’s public career, and she died in poverty in 1784. (2)

It was during Wheatley’s lifetime that Greco-Roman antiquity became labeled by its heirs in Europe and North America as “classical,” often bearing association with an elite and high status. (3) This Greco-Roman antiquity, one claimed by the West as a cultural ancestor, transformed into a ‘“symbolic point of shared origins that was crucial in the definition of both the Western ‘self’ and non-Western ‘other.’” (4) The second half of the eighteenth-century was also the period in which Western Civilization became more racialized, justifying the oppression non-Western populations not only because of their supposedly natural and biological criteria, but also their inability to participate fully in the legacy of the West. (5)

Thus, Wheatley not only found herself excluded from asserting her claim on cultural legacies of the West, but as a slave woman was further barred from the classical tradition. Nonetheless, careful attention to her actions suggest Wheatley accomplished something a woman – and perhaps, only an enslaved woman – could have done. She balanced religious, classical, and secular political idioms, effectively forcing the issue of the relationship of slavery and race to the Revolution and American identity. (6) Indeed, Wheatley operated at “the nexus of the politics of slavery, the imperial controversy, and the ambiguous, shifting opportunities and risks that both presented for women.” (7)

The loneliness of Wheatley’s position is palpable. Her work exemplifies the imagined genealogy of Western Civilization, linking her reality with the worlds of antiquity. Yet the racialized features of her physical body marked her as an alien to the West and excluded her from a place within the narrative of the Western Civilization despite her intellectual prowess. (8) Thus, knowing, necessarily, who, what, and where she was – a black female poet in white America – she wrote poems as a means of survival, as a repository for her deepest Christian, spiritual, patriotic, and racial interests. (9) Her realization that she could address both her enslaved experience and her captor’s prejudices through an engagement with the ancient Mediterranean was pivotal, especially coupled with her evangelical piety and engagement with the political. Her political and poetic effectiveness derived not only from her classicism, therefore, but from her Africanism and womanhood, as well. (10)

Phillis’ story offers a glimpse into the type of work and scholarship we ought to produce as scholars interested in ideas of race and classical reception in the colonial period. The following sources are good starting points to begin thinking about her life and poetry, as well as offering different methodologies of how to approach analyzing her life and writing.

Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. 1st ed. Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication. 2011.

Carretta’s biography of Wheatley offers a fine overview of Wheatley’s life at large. More specifically, Carretta works to emphasize Wheatley’s position as an active player in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Carretta further emphasizes the important point that Wheatley developed for herself a transatlantic network that could transcend racial, political, religious, class, and geographical boundaries. These moves to return autonomy to Phillis are important in allowing her writing and thinking to come through in the telling of her life story, versus simply retelling the same stories we have about Wheatley as written by her enslavers. 

Shields, John C., and Eric D. Lamore. New Essays on Phillis Wheatley. 1st ed. 2011.

These collected essays on Wheatley help to contextualize her writing and also offer a more literary approach (versus a historicist approach) into analyzing her writing. Contributors go from considering Wheatley’s references to Virgil’s Aeneid and Georgics as well as her critique of white readers attracted to her adaption of familiar classics to contextualizing her manuscripts to demonstrate how her poetry remains current and even timeless. These essays serve as a starting point on thinking about some of the more specific ways of analyzing aspects of Wheatley’s writing and life while offering themselves important critiques.

Walsh, Megan. The Portrait and the Book Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America. Impressions (Series) (University of Iowa Press). 2017.

Walsh’s book explores book illustration in literary culture in early America by establishing the illustrated book format as central to the nation’s literary culture. Through examining the portrait-collecting habits of early Americans, printer’s efforts to secure American-made illustrations, and engravers’ reproductions of British book illustrations, Walsh shows late eighteenth-century America had a rich visual culture inextricably tied to the printing industry and early literary imagination. Included in the book is a chapter on Wheatley’s frontispiece included in her Poems, one of the few art historical approaches to Wheatley I have come across. Proclaiming Wheatley’s frontispiece as one of the most recognizable in early America’s literary history, Walsh argues the artwork testifies to the networks of print, patronage, and evangelicalism that enabled its production. 

1.  Shields, John C., and Eric D. Lamore. New Essays on Phillis Wheatley. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011, 36.
2.  Walsh, Megan. The Portrait and the Book Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America. Impressions (Series) (University of Iowa Press). 2017, 70.
3. Mac Sweeney, Naoíse. The West: A New History of an Old Idea. 2023, 262.
4. Ibid., 263.
5. Ibid., 264.
6. Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, edited by Barbara B. Oberg, University of Virginia Press, 2019, 148.
7. Ibid.
8. Mac Sweeney, The West: A New History of an Old Idea, 261.
9. Robinson, William Henry. Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings. Critical Studies on Black Life and Culture; 12. New York; London: Garland, 1984, 126.
10. Oberg, Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World, 149.