Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage by Vincent Carretta (review)

Vincent Carretta's tract, Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage, has been eagerly anticipated. Taking his subtitle, "Genius in Bondage," from Ignatius Sancho's Letters, his biography ironically calls into serious doubt the ascription "Genius" as applied to his subject. Much of the anticipation, therefore, becomes regrettably dashed.

The principal strength of Carretta's tract is its wealth of new information. Location of her first known poem, an inchoate elegy which was recorded in Jeremy Belknap's diary, is a particularly welcome find. But what catches my attention here is that in addition to his Congregational ministry, Belknap was certainly a classical scholar, as his pastoral elegy on the death of Alexander Cumming, modeled on Vergil's fifth eclogue, ably attests. Hence Belknap's interest in Wheatley establishes yet another connection between this budding poet and classicism—a point not made by Carretta.

Carretta also sharpens the dates and activities embracing Wheatley's adventurous London trip between May and August of 1773. This careful honing of times and events is punctuated with many informative letters, several by Wheatley (wonderful discoveries) and many others by persons who knew her or who knew about her, now made public for the first time. In the center of his treatment of her London adventure, he does not, as I would have hoped, solve the issue of how she came to embellish the title of "Niobe in Distress. . ." with a naming of "the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson," thereby identifying her epyllion as an ekphrasis (a poem about a painting).

I have long suspected she made final revisions on "Niobe in Distress. . ." while actually in London and after viewing one or all three versions of Wilson's Niobe paintings during her travels. But Carretta tells us nothing definite about her interest in Wilson, nor does he pursue the possibility that she may have used some of her time during her trip to make revisions on her 1773 Poems. We do, for example, know that she composed a version of her poem "Ocean," recently recovered by Julian Mason, during the voyage back to Boston. A poet true to her craft, Wheatley appears always to have been writing poems, at least by the time she reached the age of fourteen or so.

Among Carretta's unanticipated faults is a tendency toward sloppy scholarship. For example, in his use of the Greek word for the plural of short epic, "epyllion," he employs the made-up form "epyllions" (104). While it is true Harmon and Holman's A Handbook to Literature gives the plural of epyllion as "epyllions," the OED has only the true Greek form, "epyllia." Not to use the preferred plural spelling suggests an attitude of disrespect on the parts of Harmon, Holman, and Carretta. To make the point more succinctly, I seriously doubt that we are suddenly going to adopt "criterions" for criteria.

A far more serious instance—we may be better advised to label this case an episode—of sloppy scholarship occurs in Carretta's attempt to demonstrate that Wheatley did not know ancient languages. After citing a declaration made recently that Wheatley knew both Latin and Greek, Carretta launches inexplicably into an effort to "prove" she knew neither. When he contends that Wheatley only knew the ancient authors in translations, he joins the ill-informed pair, Carla Mulford and Rosemary F. Guruswamy. Moving from the claim that Wheatley's "writings reveal a familiarity with Classical literature, at least in translation," Carretta then declares, "None of her surviving writings demonstrates a familiarity with Classical sources that could not have been gained from translations or contemporaneous dictionaries of mythology" (40). Where is Carretta's evidence for these sweeping assertions? With his having simply made them, we apparently are expected to accept them on his authority alone. One wonders how experienced Carretta is with the arduous process of making translations from another language, especially an ancient one. In an article published in 1980, I took on...