Black and Unmarked: Phillis Wheatley, Mercy Otis Warren, and the Limits of Strategic Anonymity

Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.

--Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" (1971)

If you visit The Washington Post web site, you may discover a trace of an unspoken rule governing black and white women "performance critics" during the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century in the United States. This rule affected women reviewers and drama critics as well as women writing within the broader category of performance criticism, commenting on cultural performances of various kinds. ¹ At the Post site, you may find a listing for Lloyd Rose, a theatre critic with a column in the Style section, and you may stumble onto a notice of Donna Britt, a performance critic who writes of everyday concerns for the Metro section. Only Britt's name is accompanied by a photograph. She is embodied, marked for the reader as an African American woman writer. Lloyd Rose, in contrast, remains unmarked, invisible to readers, behind a name that functions as a contemporary male pseudonym. For three years running, my undergraduate students, assigned the task of comparing and contrasting the work of these two critics on the first day of my history-of-women-critics course, have immediately spoken of the African American context of Britt's work, while they have almost uniformly assumed that Lloyd Rose was a European American male, because of the seeming gender designation of her given name, Lloyd, and because of the continuing cultural misapprehension that unless otherwise noted, the writer is white and male. ²

These students unknowingly participated in a centuries-long chain of "surrogation," acting as substitutes for early American readers of women's writings on cultural and theatrical performances. Joseph Roach uses the term "surrogates" to describe how new bodies are substituted for old ones within ongoing cultural performances: "into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure . . . survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates." ³ Like the patriots who read Mercy Otis Warren's anonymous theatrical satire, The Adulateur, in the Massachusetts Spy newspaper in 1772, my students thought they were reading the work of a white male writer. ⁴ However, the Post assured my students that the black woman critic they encountered was, "in fact," both black and a woman, because of the framing devices foregrounding her racialized and gendered identity. For them, as for the readers of Phillis Wheatley's Poems in 1773, the black woman writer bore the burden of visibility alone. ⁵ Lloyd Rose can disappear, like hundreds of white women critics before her, while the Post capitalizes not only on her invisible authority but also on the seemingly visible identity of her black counterpart, Donna Britt. ⁶ Significantly, it is Rose's column that has immediate economic repercussions for the theatre. ⁷

While white women cultural critics have often entered political discourse and the theatrical and literary marketplace by choosing strategic anonymity and aligning themselves with what Lauren Berlant calls the "abstract 'person'" of the (implicitly white male) bodiless citizen, black women critics have traditionally not been allowed to claim that abstracted body on or for their own. ⁸ White women can ostensibly align with the "whiteness" and black men with the "maleness" of this abstract "person," trying to position themselves as the supposed universal, but for black women such strategies prove problematic as a means of gaining access to power.

By exhuming the work of black and white women performance critics such as Wheatley and Warren and their contemporaries, we can discern patterns in the ways in which women have gained access to the public sphere, how...