Re-membering America: Phyllis Wheatley's intertextual epic

The matter of recognition is of crucial importance in Wheatley's poetry - but ample evidence in her body of work demonstrates that her call to be recognized as a mature poet and as an American subject (regardless of her race or sex) has not been sufficiently answered. For Shields, her more private poems - "To Maecenas," "On Imagination," "An Elegy on Leaving ---- -----," and "On Recollection," in particular - articulate her subversive message through her classicism. For Richards, her appropriation of Christian discourses in her more public poems, including her elegies, demonstrates her wish to assimilate into the Colonial American mainstream. Though O'Neale recognizes the subversive potential in Wheatley's use of Christian figures of discourse, the commentary on Wheatley has divided both the poet and her 1773 volume, leaving the reader with a private, classical, subversive poet, on the one hand, and a public, Christian, assimilationist writer, on the other - two vastly different "Wheatleys" constructed within the same volume with competing agendas. Although Wheatley adopts distinctly different voices in her Poems On Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, containing these voices within the categories of "assimilationist" or "rebel" does not form a complete picture of the poet. To the contrary, her self-referential refiguring of both European and African American subject positions in her poetry suggests an attempt to reconstruct narratives which place her at the margins of culture, left with the choice of either assimilation into the mainstream or rebellion against it.

The recognition of Wheatley's claim to artistic maturity and to "American-ness" depends on the recognition of the development and detournement of epic themes and motifs in Poems On Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, and in other texts, as she develops a distinctly American epic intertextually within the body of her work.(1) Though Wheatley did not attempt to create a neo-classical epic patterned after the Iliad or the Aeneid, or a Christian epic along the lines of Dante's Commedia or Milton's Paradise Lost, she nevertheless declares, in "To Maecenas," that she aspires to the same level of greatness as these authors, writing, "O could I rival . . . Virgil's page / Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage" (Wheatley 10) - two references to Virgil (Oxford Classical Dictionary 936) - while in "A Hymn to the Morning" she invokes Calliope, the muse of epic poetry (Wheatley 56). Though one may read these invocations as ornament, a careful reading of Wheatley's works reveals that these calls echo across her entire work, transgressing the borderlines that divide each poem in her 1773 volume, and this volume from the remainder of her work. These calls announce pleas for transgression, a needed violation of the autonomy of the laws of genre which require other author(itie)s to authorize her work. Wheatley assumes a paradoxical task: to write an epic (the most legitimate and inviolable of genres) of illegitimacy and transgression.

Such a reading is not, at least according to Western standards, a reading of an "epic" at all. In "Epic and Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin identifies three "constitutive features" of the epic as a genre:

(1) a national epic past - in Goethe's and Schiller's terminology the "absolute past" - serves as the subject for the epic; (2) national tradition (not personal experience and the free thought that grows out of it) serves as the source for the epic; (3) an absolute epic distance separates the epic world from contemporary reality, that is, from the time in which the singer (the author and his audience) lives. (Bakhtin 13)

Under these conditions, the epic must lie "always already" in the cultural center. To figure a text as an epic is to presuppose a cultural essence which "demands" narration - a divinely sanctioned historico-cultural telos that prescribes the legitimacy and the destiny of epic heroes and the cultural elite from which they come. Additionally, the elevation of a subject to the status of epic hero creates a standard to measure others against, figuring a blueprint for an essential and divinely sanctioned social order.

What, for Wheatley, was to provide an "absolute past" which might serve as a foundation for narrating the experience of African Americans? Neither Wheatley nor other African Americans could define themselves as American subjects within the epics of their native Africa, while the epics of white Colonial America (from Beowulf to Paradise Lost to Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana) did not address the importance of African heritage, the experience as slaves in America, or the necessity of emancipation. The "otherness" of African Americans was absolute. They remained at the margins of Colonial culture, without a cultural identity or a voice to express it. The rupture caused by their abduction and subsequent enslavement left African Americans with a cultural past which could not address the culture of their present, and a present culture which denied the legitimacy of the culture of their past. Wheatley could not write an African American epic while respecting the conventions that Bakhtin enumerates. The absolute past, the absolute distance which it creates, and a national tradition were denied to Colonial African Americans. Denying the essence and the center to Wheatley left her with borderlines, the spaces in which ruptures occur.