Risk Culture: Performance and Danger in Early America

4. Alien Terrors: Phillis Wheatley’s Feminine Sublime The Silence of John Marrant

—chapter 4— Alien Terrors Nowhere, as Paul Gilroy has argued, are the pressures of modernity so pronounced as in the literature of the black Atlantic. Black writers commemorating the upheavals and betrayals of the Age of Revolution were themselves beset by contradiction, their idealism shadowed by despair. One might look to their texts, then, to focus the tensions of displacement and authority that I have associated with the term risk culture. In this chapter, I will explore how the work of Phillis Wheatley and John Marrant—slave and minister to slaves—helped to shape that culture by wielding the chastened power of Calvinist rhetoric. Both writers have recently been claimed as evidence for black resilience, the forebears of a great tradition of subversive power. Yet they also contribute to an equally powerful strain of modernist dread that cannot imagine assertiveness without failure. Extending the language of trauma central to the Salem ordeal, Wheatley and Marrant both turn to the sublime to capture their ambivalence. They stand at the con›uence of two great traditions—performative rhetoric that uses the Word to redeem the fallen world and a rhetoric of trauma that challenges faith. That contest often plays out literally in their writing, through bodily metaphors of loss and redemption that capture the sensation of social and spiritual peril. Theirs is an art haunted by weakness and failure, even as they seek a refuge from failure in faith. This betweenness is not an accident of birth or disposition. It is characteristic of the structure of feeling shared by all the writers I survey. Wheatley’s Poems on Various 94   Subjects and Marrant’s Journal give spiritual weight to the ruptures shaping Western lives. Phillis Wheatley’s Feminine Sublime Of all Phillis Wheatley’s contemporaries, none conveys the horrors of slavery to such devastating effect as fellow expatriate J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letter 9 of Letters From an American Farmer, Farmer James allows his encounter with a caged slave, tortured and left to die for killing his overseer, to shatter his perception of the world. The once benign nature that James celebrated on his Pennsylvania farm now seems an alien presence threatening all humanity. “View the arctic and antarctic regions,” he exclaims, “those huge voids where nothing lives, regions of eternal snow where winter in all his horrors has established his throne.”1 Such hostile regions are no more nurturing than “the poisonous soil of the equator . . . teeming with horrid monsters”; the “sandy continent, scorched perhaps by the fatal approach of some ancient comet”; or the varied regions wracked by “convulsive storms” that threaten the globe with “dissolution” (175–76). The slave’s martyrdom has not only shaken James’s serene con‹dence but also challenged his faith in God’s providence. Could it be that “[t]he same sublime hand” that so carefully ordered the world could also “abandon mankind” to the accumulated miseries of natural disasters and its own “frantic rage” (173)? For James, the wounded body of the slave has transformed the world into a spectacle of terror and awe. Nowhere in Wheatley’s writing is there a passage of such intensity—an absence that has, on occasion, exposed her to censure. But James’s passion reveals something more about his attitude, his abuse of a power from which Wheatley is immune. For James, the caged slave is a vehicle for what Saidiya Hartman calls “performing blackness,” the means by which abused slaves enable the “wholesome pleasures” of “white ›ights of fantasy.” Scenes of abject suffering, Hartman argues, con‹rm the onlookers’ humanity .2 James’s horri‹ed glimpse of cruelty becomes, on this reading, a kind of cultural sublime, exposing the terrors and pleasures of his own authority and dramatizing the limits of a misery that reveals, in his ability to survey the globe, the magni‹cent power of the mind. But although Wheatley has no desire to perform in this manner, her poetry is also preoccupied with problems of trauma and power. In what might stand as a rejoinder to James’s horror, Wheatley, in “Niobe in Distress for Her Chilalien terrors 95 dren Slain by Apollo,” captures the bracing terror of an encounter with sublime vengeance.3 Niobe’s pride ensures not merely martyrdom but the reiterated slaughter of her children, and it is that sinking, helpless dread that Wheatley captures in the poem. With relentless precision, inspired in part...