"The World Is a Severe Schoolmaster": Phillis Wheatley's Poetry of Domination and Submission

This essay chronicles how Phillis Wheatley's poetry exposes the colonial system of slavery as one of perverse depravity and immoral excess. Building on recent scholarship that has shown how the rise of the Atlantic slave system cannot only be explained through recourse to economic rationales, I argue that Wheatley's poetry turns on and amplifies the libidinal economy of enslavement in the colonial period, in which enslaved people were wielded as visible signs of wealth and power and were used to propel the capricious desires and whims of white elites. In Wheatley's hands, the Puritanical elegy is charged with a libidinal excess that indicts the slave system, the culture it produced, and the people who participated in and abetted it.