New Essays on Phillis Wheatley

Queering Phillis Wheatley

Queering Phillis Wheatley Tom O. McCulley I I first became interested in attempting a queer discussion of Phillis Wheatley after reading her poem, “To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works.” John Shields notes that “[b]oth Mason . . . and Robinson . . . identify ‘S.M.’ as Scipio Moorhead, black slave of the Reverend John Moorhead. Robinson also suggests that the black painter may have executed the engraving of Wheatley’s portrait for the 1773 Poems frontispiece” (Collected Works 295). Having become acquainted with Wheatley’s subversive use of the poetic conventions of her time, I found that a close reading of “S.M.” revealed it to be a “queer” text. This African American “slave girl,” who by all intents and purposes should not even have had a voice, writes about an African American slave man who should also not have had a voice. Using a subversive style that at once co-opted the language of her oppressors, Wheatley raised African American artists’ voices above the work of the white folk who owned them and onto a revolutionary plane. I return to “S.M.” later, but suffice it to say that Wheatley’s concluding lines (27–34) in “S.M.” demonstrate a keen awareness that she will only be able to give voice to her inherent “otherness” outside of the normative expectations of her reading public.1 Wheatley writes, “There [the ‘realms above’ which stand both for ‘heaven’ and ‘freedom’] shall thy tongue in heav’nly murmurs flow, / And there my muse with heav’nly transport glow: / No more to tell of Damon’s tender sighs, / Or rising Aurora’s eyes, / For nobler themes demand a nobler strain, / And purer language on th’ ethereal plain” (115). In other words, once Wheatley and “S.M.” have achieved freedom, either through 192 Tom O. McCulley death or decree, they will be free of the need to couch their separate artistic languages (words for her, painting for him) in discussions of the idealized rustic character (Damon) that their masters would make of them, or in imagistic references to Africa (“Aurora’s eyes”)2 Until then, as Wheatley notes, she must shut her muse down since “the solemn gloom of night / Now seals the fair creation from my sight” (115). II On one level, it is Wheatley’s keen awareness of herself as a body outside of the normative expectations of her society—an awareness clearly visible in “S.M.” and other poems—that opens the doorway for an attempt to read her works in the light of Queer Theory. First, however, it is necessary to establish an idea of Queer Theory that moves beyond the restrictions placed on that term by an interpretation that would limit Queer Theory to lesbian and gay studies, or to the idea of sexuality itself. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Tendencies and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” are widely credited with bringing the ideas behind Queer Theory to the forefront.3 For the purposes of brevity I do not gloss these four works here except to state that their primary scholarly objectives are to move away from the restrictive idea that “queer” can only be situated within the limitations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual , or transgendered body. As Sedgwick writes, “ . . . a lot of the most exciting recent work around ‘queer’ spins the term outward along dimensions that can’t be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all: the ways that race, ethnicity, postcolonial nationality criss-cross with these and other identityconstituting , identity-fracturing discourses . . .” (Tendencies 9). The important idea in Sedgwick’s writing is that Queer Theory, like other acts of performative language, has the ability both to create and destroy its very call to identity . It would appear to be necessary, then, for Queer Theory to be in a state of constant creation/destruction in order for it to achieve meaning outside of the normative expectations placed upon any “theory” within the linguistic confines of literary study. In relation to a queer reading of Phillis Wheatley, Sedgwick’s idea of performativity is especially important. As she states, Queering Phillis Wheatley 193 I want to go further with an argument implicit in Epistemology of the Closet: that both the act of coming out, and closetedness itself, can be taken as dramatizing certain features of linguistic performativity in ways that have broadly applicable implications. Among the striking aspects of...