SOURCE: "Problematizing American Dissent: The Subject of Phillis Wheatley," in Cohesion and Dissent in America, edited by Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, State University of New York Press, 1994, pp. 193-209

[In the essay that follows, Burke challenges the idea that Wheatley's success as a poet reflects her escape from the oppressive situation of slavery.]

In his History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that our conceptual model of power has not changed very much since the Middle Ages. "At bottom, despite the differences in epoch and objectives," Foucault writes, "the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king."¹ This critique may not at first seem relevant to America, a political entity that originated in a struggle against kings and that defined itself in the apparently very antimonarchical discourse of pluralism, a rhetoric that asserts the "unalienable rights" of all "men." However, if we follow Foucault in identifying monarchy with a particular formulation of power—its conceptualization in juridical terms—the significance of this critique and its implications for political dissent become apparent. Despite the shift to a pluralist model of government, America, it could be argued, continues to conceive of power in a traditional way, shaping its political debate in terms characteristic of juridical monarchy by focusing on problems "of right and violence, law and illegality, freedom and will, and especially the state and sovereignty (even if the latter is questioned insofar as it is personified in a collective being and no longer a sovereign individual)."² Disenfranchised social groups, "the many," thus continue to pit themselves against "the one," though now the "one" is the existing consensus and not the king. Sacvan Bercovitch identifies the particular American variant of this ancient struggle in his description of how this country deals with dissent:

The American way is to turn potential conflict into a quarrel about fusion or fragmentation. It is a fixed match, a debate with a foregone conclusion: you must have your fusion and feed on fragmentation too. And the formula for doing so has become virtually a cultural reflex: you just alternate between harmony-in-diversity and diversity-in-harmony. It amounts to a hermeneutics of laissez-faire: all problems are obviated by the continual flow of the one into the many, and the many into the one.³

What is omitted in this juridical conceptualization of power, whether in its monarchist or pluralist formulation, is the operation of those factors that are not reducible to the representation of law. Relations of power, as Foucault points out, "are not in a position of exteriority with respect to other types of relationships (economic processes, knowledge relationships, sexual relations), but are immanent in the latter, and conversely they are the internal conditions of these differentiations."⁴ This connection with other types of relations is, however, obscured in the monarchical and in the pluralist models that locate power in a superstructural position and that frame the questions of power in terms of rights and prohibitions. As Ellen Rooney points out, in order to work, pluralism must create the fiction of a community in which the participating subjects all have equal rights and are equally vulnerable to persuasion, but it can create this fiction only by ignoring the historical, unaviodable givens that make for the inequality between subjects in power relations; it has to exclude the differences that Wayne Booth, in defending pluralism, calls "irrational forces (your id, your class, your upbringing, your inherited language)."⁵ The rhetoric of pluralism in Bercovitch's words, can thus itself become "an ideological trap,"⁶ a means of avoiding the questions raised by dissent that often originates in the felt disjunction between rhetoric and reality. The problem of the differential relation to power created by material differences—a lived experience for many who are, for example, born poor or black or female—cannot be articulated, much less addressed, in a legalistic model of power that constructs eachperson, no matter of what class, ethnicity, or gender, as an equal subject in discourse.

To make this point more concretely, I will turn here to the subject of Phillis Wheatley, an African-American writer who wrote poetry in this country in the late eighteenth century. I am focusing on Wheatley because as a black woman and a slave, Wheatley is representative of those traditionally excluded from American political discourse on the basis of ethnicity, sex, and class. Her struggle to constitute herself as a political subject is illustrative of the struggle of many such marginalized subjects to gain political recognition in America. As the first black writer to publish a book in the United States, Wheatley, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., points out, has also stood for many years in a synechdochal relation to "black art,"⁷ so that her struggle is also emblematic of the struggle of non-traditional literary subjects to gain inclusion in the hegemonic literary culture. I will argue that in both these domains, the political and the artistic, we can see the same complex operation of an ideology that establishes the subject in discourse as a fiction that makes it difficult to see the position of the historical subject, the workings of an ideology that, as Bercovitch argues, "denies limitation rhetorically, in order to facilitate the continuity of certain rhetorical forms."⁸ In Wheatley, I will suggest, we can see both the potential and the limitation of a particular rhetoric of "equal rights," the success and failure of the concept of America.

What has first to be acknowledged is the Phillis Wheatley American success story, the remarkable degree to which Phillis Wheatley achieved her goal in establishing herself as a subject in American political and cultural discourse. Arriving in this country as a slave, "a poor, naked child" who had "no other covering than a quantity of dirty carpet about her like a fillibeg,"⁹ Wheatley began her career in a state of deprivation that was symbolic as well as material. The captors who had deprived her of her freedom had also deprived her of her family, her community, her name, and her language, so that Wheatley had to reconstruct her identity on every level. Although the conditions under which she labored were very different, her story of identity making, in these respects, is not dissimilar to that of many other emigrants who came to this country. Like these other politically and culturally displaced persons, she set about making an alien culture her own, adopting a strategy of symbolic appropriation in the best tradition of the melting pot.

Wheatley appropriates, first of all, the literary conventions of her time. She uses the heroic couplet popularized by Pope, Dryden, and Johnson as her verse form; the New England funeral elegy as her predominant genre; and the poetics of the mid-eighteenth-century sublime as her aesthetic.¹⁰ More important then her use of traditional forms for her success, however, is her understanding of how the process of poetic legitimation works in the Western European literary tradition. Wheatley accepts, as does, for example, her predecessor Alexander Pope, that the individual writerhas significance strictly in relation to this tradition. To establish a literary identity, to earn the title poet, one had to insert oneself into this tradition, recognizing the tradition, even while asserting one's own right to speak. When, in the first poem of her 1773 volume of poetry, Wheatley discusses her own poetic talents in the context of Homer and Virgil, she implicitly makes this assertion. The fact that she derides her talents in relation to these great classical writers—"But here I sit, and mourn a grov'ling mind / That fain would mount and ride upon the wind"¹¹—should not obscure the fact that she is claiming the Muse. The young African-American writer's self-deprecation here is as conventional as the young Pope's in his "Essay on Criticism," where he similarly defines himself as an unworthy inheritor of the classical tradition, the Muse who "no more attempts to rise / But in low Numbers short Excursions tries."¹² Wheatley's negative comparison of her own talents to that of "the happier Terence," who, as she explains in a note, "was an African by birth," is similarly merely conventional but is even more significant to her process of poetic self-definition. This insertion of a black literary predecessor into the Western tradition is a demand for recognition by the tradition of her own black voice, a right she reemphasizes constantly by identifying her writing persona with her ethnic background; as "an Ethiop" ("To the University of Cambridge …") (16); "Your vent'rous Afric" ("On Recollection") (62); "Afric's muse" ("An Hymn to Humanity") (97).

Wheatley exploits, then, the potential for the emergence of the new inherent in the traditional concept of the poetic tradition, a potential that T. S. Eliot best articulated. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is an excellent elaboration of the kind of literary pluralism that permits a new voice like Wheatley's to emerge. If, as Eliot argues, "the existing order is complete before the new work arrives," this order is nevertheless subject to constant modification. With the introduction of the new, "the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered: and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new."¹³ In literary terms, this process also entails "the continual flow of the one into the many, and the many into the one," a process that allows the "mind of Europe"¹⁴ to remain constant, while permitting new voices to be heard. It is this literary pluralism that Wheatley engages when she defines herself as "Afric's muse" while at the same time conforming to the existing literary tradition. She makes a space for herself, gains admission, as it were, into the canon by engaging the tradition in its own terms, by making its language her own.

Wheatley's ability to comprehend and manipulate traditions and conventions is not, however, confined to the literary realm. She knows her new country's political as well as its poetical ideology, and she engages the former as much as the latter in the process of identity making. It could be said that in one of her earliestpoems, "America," she acknowledges this function of political rhetoric in establishing her rights as a subject: "Thy Power, 0 Liberty, makes strong the weak / And (wond'rous instinct) Ethiopians speak" (134). It was indeed the power of "Liberty," the power of a rhetoric of "America," that gave her a voice, a rhetoric that she uses skillfully to claim her place in the political symbolic structure.

In a letter to the Rev. Samson Occom, the converted Mohegan Indian, a letter printed in the Connecticut Gazette in 1774 and then widely reprinted in other New England papers, Wheatley makes her strongest statement about liberty and the rights of African Americans. Her "Vindication" of the rights of "the Negroes" is based on her notion that religious and civil liberties are "so inseparably united, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one without the other" and also on the notion that the "Love of Freedom" is a divinely implanted "Principle" in all people. Biblical narrative is used to substantiate the claim that the struggle for freedom has a religious dimension. An implicit comparison is made between the bondage of the Israelites and the enslaved black people, so that the present supporters of slavery become "Modern Egyptians" (176-77). Wheatley's conflation here of secular history with divine is a defining characteristic of American political rhetoric. "Of all symbols of identity," Bercovitch writes in his discussion of American symbology, "only America has united nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, secular and redemptive history, the country's past and paradise to be, in a single synthetic ideal."¹⁵ It is this kind of ideal that Wheatley holds up when she writes of the "Love of Freedom," and it is the failure on the part of slaveholders in relation to this ideal that she condemns, "the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite" (177). But it is not only the message but also the voice here that is embedded in the tradition. In the last line of her letter, Wheatley writes, in a tone that is uncharacteristically sharp: "How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine" (177). The professed humility here does not mask the note of condemnation, a condemnation that is reminiscent of what Bercovitch calls "the American jeremiad," the political sermon that both praises the American ideal and often scathingly criticizes the community for its failure to live out the dream.¹⁶ It is again her unerring sense of the tradition that permits Wheatley to claim this rhetorical stance for her own advantage. Just as she cleverly invokes the literary tradition to establish her poetic authority, so here she invokes the ideological tradition to establish her political authority, an authority that allows her to speak forcefully on the issue of racial inequity.¹⁷

This strategy of engaging the rhetoric of "Liberty" and using it against itself is also apparent in a number of her poems, thoughusually applied less overtly than in her letter to Occom. Frequently (and to the dismay of those who look in her work for evidence of opposition to the dominant culture),¹⁸ she, like the Puritan political preachers, praises America as a providentially chosen defender of freedom. This is "the land of freedom's heaven-defended race," she writes in a poem in praise of George Washington (146), while in her poem "Liberty and Peace" she sees the success of the Revolution as a divinely ordained victory for freedom: "LO! Freedom comes. Th'prescient Muse foretold, / All Eyes th'accomplish'd Prophecy behold" (154). But, as in the Occom letter, she often accompanies praise with a reminder of America's failure toward black people. In her poem "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth," in the most self-revelatory passage in her writing, she uses her own experience of oppression to make her point. After celebrating the newly won freedom of "America," which now will no longer suffer "the iron chain, / Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand / Had made, and with it meant t'enslave the land" (74), she turns to her own case to explain her interest in and "love of Freedom":

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch'd from Afric's fancy'd happy seat
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent's breast?
Steel'd was that soul and by no misery mov'd
That from a father seiz'd his babe belov'd:
Such, such my case. And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?
(74)

The criticism of slavery is again evident, though her desire here is clearly to reach the conscience of her readers by moving them rather than by pointing out logical inconsistencies. In an elegy on General David Wooster, a revolutionary leader, her condemnation is, however, more forcefully stated, the use of the dramatic persona (she places the following prayer in the dead general's mouth) allowing her more license to speak openly:

"But how, presumptous shall we hope to find
Divine acceptance with th'Almighty mind—
While yet (O deed Ungenerous!) they disgrace
And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race?
Let Virtue reign—And thou accord our prayers
Be victory our's, and generous freedom theirs."
(149-50)

Again the tone of the preacher is heard in this denunciation, the rhetoric of the Old Testament prophet who denounces his society while at the same time acknowledging his people's special destiny.

Wheatley thus can be placed in a long line of American writers from John Winthrop to Martin Luther King, Jr., who used the rhetoric of the American dream with its central value of "Liberty" to win acceptance by the American people. Like these other interpreters of the American "errand," she plays a role that is both supportive and adversarial, the role of what Michael Walzer calls the "connected critic":

He is not a detached observer, even when he looks at the society he inhabits with a fresh and skeptical eye. He is not an enemy, even when he is fiercely opposed to this or that prevailing practice or institutional arrangement. His criticism does not require detachment or enmity, because he finds a warrant for critical engagement in the idealism, even if it is a hypocritical idealism, of the actually existing moral world.

It is this stance that Wheatley adopts. Her criticism works from within the culture's own controlling metaphors, exploiting the possibilities inherent in American's assumptions and beliefs to create a place for herself within its symbolic structures.

Given her aim to acquire a political and literary identity, it could be said that her strategy worked. Phillis Wheatley made, and is still making, a name for herself. In her own lifetime, her writing won her the notice of the governing elite of her day, both in this country and in Europe, and was no doubt instrumental in forging her own freedom as a political subject (she was manumitted shortly after the publication of her poems in London, probably because of the moral pressure on the Wheatleys from the reviewers of her work).²⁰ As a literary subject, her claim to an equal place within the tradition was also successful. Since her death, her small volume of poetry has been reprinted more than two dozen times, appearing most recently at the head of the Schomburg Library Series of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, where she is given an honorable place as the founder of the black American literary tradition.²¹ As more scholarly attention is paid to her work, her more general literary and historical contribution is also being acknowledge (her originality in the use of the elegy; her significance as a poet of the American Revolution).²² As Wheatley was marginalized because of her ethnicity, gender, and class, her career could be read as a success story that is indicative of the potential for all nontraditional subjects to be heard, a tribute to America's liberal pluralism, with its ability to absorb constantly new subjects, to expand and redefine who "we the people" are, whether in art or politics.

But then there is the problem of Phillis Wheatley, historical subject, a problem that the success story of Phillis Wheatley, rhetorical subject, tends to obscure. The problem is that the real Phillis Wheatley and the black people whose voice she represented continued to experience social and economic deprivation, even while "Afric's Muse" was being privileged and celebrated—a continued material inequity that itself was outside the parameters of Phillis Wheatley's pluralist discourse. It is true, as we have just seen, that Wheatley's writing itself draws attention to the injustices of slavery and even, on one occasion, draws specific attention to the poet's own personal suffering. What her writing could not address, however, was the power structure that determined this writing's production or that occasionally permitted such a critique to take place. As Bruce Erlich points out, "ontological and epistemic-methodological pluralism are themselves abstractions into a specific philosophic vocabulary of preexisting contexts of choice and power—and so is 'communication.'" To overlook these contexts, "the power of the world in which texts and criticism reside," is to feed into the existing structure: to cede "even greater power to the forces that already exist and that remain untouched by gestures of 'dialogue."'²³

To survive, to be heard at all, Phillis Wheatley had to cede this power, though to say this is by no means to subtract from her great achievement in exploiting the system to its fullest potential. Wheatley's reaction to her predicament as an artist in white America may have been similar to James Baldwin's. Speaking of his initial relation to the white tradition. Baldwin recalls his recognition that he would have to use that culture: "I would have to appropriate those white centuries, I would have to make them mine—I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place in this scheme—otherwise I would have no place in any scheme."²⁴ Wheatley too had to accept the scheme, in both its literary and its social manifestations, because there was no other scheme, and, as we have seen, she worked this scheme to say as much as she could. But as we have also seen in the discussion of her writings, it is the similarities between herself and the larger culture (a similar literary understanding, a similar acceptance of the rhetoric of "Liberty") that she had to emphasize if she was to be accepted. What Phillis Wheatley could not address was the difference that her ethnic background, sex, and class made in her ability to express herself freely, a difference that, if elaborated, would have exposed the inequity of the power relations in which she operated.

It is these inequitable power relations, then, that we must readmit if we are to understand the constraints under which Wheatley operated, constraints that the ideology itself sought to exclude with its myth of "the extraordinary negro girl" who produced great art "by her own application, unassisted by others."²⁵ As is evidenced by the many prefatory letters that precede her 1773 volume of poems, Phillis Wheatley exists as a speaking subject only within the boundaries defined by the hegemonic culture. The title page that describes her as "Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston, New England" and John Wheatley's own letter to the publisher both indicate the degree to which she was not her own subject, while the letter of attestation, signed by eighteen of Boston's social and economic elite (including such notables as John Hancock and His Excellency, Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts), indicates the broader social and political context that controlled her. Earlier attempts to solicit subscriptions toa proposed edition of Phillis Wheatley's work had failed because of doubts in the public mind that a black slave, described in the newspaper proposals for printing as one who had been "but a few Years since she came to this Town an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa" (188), could produce anything worthwhile. The letter of attestation by these eighteen notables, "the most respectable Characters in Boston" (7), however, served to secure a publisher and therefore a readership.

The making of a Phillis Wheatley, writer, far from being a radicalizing move, was achieved at the cost of reinscribing the very structure that oppressed her, and this structure continued to oppress her and other black people, even while legitimizing this one African American's right to speak. As William H. Robinson notes, most of the eighteen Boston notables and almost all the identifiable whites mentioned in Wheatley's writing owned one or more black servants or slaves. Even the Countess of Huntington, the English noblewoman who helped Wheatley first get published and to whom Wheatley, consequently, dedicated her volume of poetry, considered slave owning. Writing to those who were administering her estate in Georgia in 1771, the countess asks them to buy a black female slave for her: "I must request that a woman slave be purchased … and that she might be called Selina, after me."²⁶ The fact that the countess seems to have been talked out of this purchase by an abolitionist is beside the point. The cultural climate existed in which it was possible to enslave a "Selina" while at the same time privileging a "Phillis." The site of symbolic inclusion is the site of further real exclusion, and the power to mark the boundaries remains unchallenged.

The following anecdote, which has come down to us from a early biographer of the Wheatley family, further illustrates this anomaly, the anomaly by which the nontraditional subject can, apparently, be constituted both inside and outside the structures of power. Mrs. Wheatley, mindful, because of bad weather, of the health of her protégée, sent another black servant, Prince, to bring the young girl home in a chaise. The nineteenth-century biographer takes up the story:

When the chaise returned, the good lady drew near the window, as it approached the house and exclaimed—"Do but look at the saucy varlet—if he hasn't the impudence to sit upon the same seat with my Phillis!" And poor Prince received a severe reprimand for forgetting the dignity thus kindly though perhaps to him unaccountably, attached to the sable person of "my Phillis."²⁷

Prince, the other black servant, is not allowed to occupy the same position as a Phillis Wheatley, who is, significantly, not her own Phillis Wheatley, but "my Phillis," the creation of her white mistress. This fictional "Phillis" is used to deprive Prince of his place, such that the price of the integrated "one" becomes the creation of a further marginalized "other."

In Phillis Wheatley's own later life, this deprivation of the actual black subject in eighteenth-century America is more fully revealed when the fiction of Mrs. Wheatley's "Phillis" finally disappears. After Mrs. Wheatley died in 1774, Phillis Wheatley, who had been manumitted in late 1773, began her life as an independent black woman. Little is known about the short rest of her life,²⁸ but her extant letters from this time indicate that her life was not easy. Immediately after Mrs. Wheatley's death, she notes that some of those "who seem'd to respect me while under my mistresses patronage … have already put on a reserve" (183). In 1778, she writes to her friend Obour Tanner in a "hasty scrawl" that the events in her life in the past three years have "serv[d] to convince us of the uncertain duration of all things temporal" (185). We know she did not stop writing poetry during this period, but she had little success in getting her work published. For six weeks in 1779, she ran proposals in a Boston newspaper for a second volume of poetry but found no takers. In her last extant letter, dated from that year, she apologizes to Obour for being "silent," mentioning that "a variety of hindrances" had prevented her from writing (187). Without the aid of her powerful friends in the white establishment—Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley, the Countess of Huntington, and the eighteenth-century Boston notables—Phillis Wheatley was indeed silent and silenced. In 1784, at the age of 31, she, and the last of her three children, died, by all accounts in obscurity and poverty.²⁹

To conclude, then, we could say that, despite appearances to the contrary, the inclusion of Phillis Wheatley in the political and literary discourse of America did not substantially improve life for her. It did not empower her as a real subject or effectively improve her material conditions. Wheatley's relation to the dominant culture was one of connectedness but difference, and it was that difference based on a racial, sexual, and class specificity that finally prevented her from participating as an equal subject in American life. June Jordan, the contemporary black poet, commenting on the end of Wheatley's life, points to this difference as the source of the poet's final silence, suggesting that there was no place in America for an independent black woman's art.

I believe that no one would have published the poetry of Black Phillis Wheatley, the grown woman who stayed with her chosen Black man. I believe that the death of Suzannah [sic] Wheatley, coincident with the African poet's twenty-first birthday, signalled, decisively, the end of her status as a child, as a dependent. From there we would hear from an independent Black woman poet in America.

Can you imagine that, in 1775?

Can you imagine that, today?³⁰

As Jordan suggests here, the Wheatley tragedy is not over. If, as I have argued above, we take social and economic equality as a fundamental condition of political equality, then the Wheatley drama, as a drama of exclusion and deprivation, is still being played out today. While a differential relation exists between the social and the economic status of subjects in this society, there is no more chance of hearing from "independent" and equal voices in America in 1992 than in 1773. The gap between the ideology that claims that all subjects have an equal chance of participating in the dialogue of American poetry and/or politics, and the historic reality in which people are socially and economically disadvantaged, still exists. In the educational context, to take but one example, the rhetoric of equal opportunity for all is contradicted by statistical research that reveals a widening gap in the past decade between the proportion of white and black high school graduates who go on to college (a difference of 14 percentage points in 1987 as contrasted with a difference of 5 percentage points in the mid 1970s), a gap that can be attributed to the worsening social and economic situation of minorities during that period.³¹ It is this same discrepancy that accounts for the odd fact that while Toni Morrison is now on the syllabus of many of our literature courses, black students are not, in any representative numbers, present in our classrooms. It is possible that future generations, looking back at this practice of integrating black literary subjects while perpetuating a social system that results in the exclusion of historical black subjects, will accuse us of being as blind as Mrs. Susanna Wheatley, will condemn us, as Phillis Wheatley once condemned her white contemporaries, for "the strange Absurdity of a "Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically opposite."

Finally, it is important to add that in making such a critique of pluralism, I am not undermining the importance of integrating nontraditional subjects into the political and cultural discourse of America, which means continuing to establish the rights of these subjects in law as well as in literary canons and academic curricula. But it is to emphasize that such a rhetorical integration is only part of what needs to be done. If, as Bercovitch argues, "ideology transmutes history into myth so as to enable people to act in history,"³² what we must do to avoid being used by ideology is to reverse this transmutation, and that means continually opening up the space between myth and history, the rhetorical and the material—a space that ideology seeks to obscure. This praxis of ideological deconstruction is not, of course, an escape from ideology or power, but it offers what Foucault calls a "resistance" that is itself both engaged in and different from power. "Where there is power," Foucault says, "there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power." Resistance is rather what he calls the "irreducible opposite" of power, functioning in a mobile and transitory way, "producing cleavages in a society that shift about, fracturing unities and effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves, cutting them up and remolding them, marking off irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds."³³ In marking the "irreducible regions" (differences of ethnicity, gender, and class) in subjects political and literary, we can offer such a resistance. As a result, we will indeed effect what Wayne Booth describes as a "critical killing," destroying the ideological unity, the imaginary harmony, of the pluralistic discourse.³⁴ But in so doing we may also finally kill the king and open the potential for revolutionary change.

Notes

¹ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 88-89.

² Ibid., 89.

³ Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History," Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986): 649.

⁴ Foucault, History of Sexuality, 94.

⁵ Ellen Rooney, "Who's Left Out? A Rose by Any Other Name Is Still Red: Or the Politics of Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12 (Spring 1986): 561-62. The Wayne Booth citation is from his Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 259. For a particularly helpful discussion of the ideology of pluralism and its relation to power, see also Bruce Erlich, "Amphibolies: On the Critical Self-Contradictions of Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 12 (Spring 1986): 521-49. Laurie Finke's article, "The Rhetoric of Marginality: Why I Do Feminist Theory," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5, no. 2 (1986): 251-72, provides a useful discussion of pluralism in the specific context of women's studies.

⁶ Bercovitch, "Problem of Ideology," 649.

⁷ Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Phillis Wheatley and the Nature of the Negro," in Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley, ed. William H. Robinson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), 225.

⁸ Bercovitch, "Problem of Ideology," 636.

⁹ This quotation is drawn from Phillis Wheatley's first biography as cited by William H. Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings (New York: Garland, 1984), 6. Robinson's book provides the best source for biographical information on Wheatley, information that has often been misrepresented (see Robinson's Introduction to his Critical Essays, 2-5, for a discussion of the dating inaccuracies in relation to Wheatley's life).

¹⁰ In Robinson's Critical Essays, see Albertha Sistrunk, "The Influence of Alexander Pope on the Writing Style of Phillis Wheatley," 175-88; Mukhtar Ali Isani, "Phillis Wheatley and the Elegiac Mode," 208-14; and John C. Shields, "Phillis Wheatley and the Sublime," 189-205.

¹¹ Phillis Wheatley, "To Maecenas," in The Collected Works of Phillis Wheatley, ed. John C. Shields, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 11. All references to Wheatley's writing, whether poetry or prose, will be to this edition and will appear in parentheses in the text. This edition will be referred to in the notes as Collected Works.

¹² Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 168.

¹³ T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 5.

¹⁴ Ibid., 6.

¹⁵ Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 176.

¹⁶ See Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, esp. chaps. 1 and 6.

¹⁷ For a similar argument about Wheatley's appropriation of revolutionary rhetoric, see Betsy Erkkila's essay, "Revolutionary Women," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 6, no. 2 (1987): 189-223. Erkkila argues that Wheatley "turns the racial codes of the dominant culture back upon themselves, giving them an ironic inflection. What appears to be repetition is in fact a form of mimesis that mimics and mocks in the act of repeating" (206).

¹⁸ Wheatley has been vehemently attacked by some black critics for not being sufficiently critical of her oppressors. See Robinson, Critical Essays, 8-9, for an account of this criticism. A representative sample of this kind of criticism can be seen in Angelene Jamison's article, "Analysis of Selected Poetry of Phillis Wheatley," which appears in Robinson's volume (128-35). Jamison concludes that "it is a mistake to refer to her [Wheatley] as a Black poet" because "her mind was controlled by them [Whites], her actions were controlled by them, and consequently her pen" (134).

¹⁹ Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 61. Walzer sees this kind of critic as the ideal critic, and he links his (or her) task to the work of priests, teachers, poets, all of whom do "the activity of cultural elaboration and affirmation" (40). He opposes this critic to the overly detached or the overly committed critic, neither of whom, he argues, is as effective (40).

²⁰ See Robinson, Critical Essays, 1, for an account of Phillis Wheatley's contemporary fame. For speculation on the reasons why the Wheatleys granted Phillis her freedom, see Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 39-40.

²¹ See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Foreword: In her Own Write," in Wheatley, Collected Works. Gates notes that Wheatley "launched two traditions at once—the black American literary tradition and the black woman's literary tradition" (X).

²² See Isani's "Phillis Wheatley and the Elegiac Mode," in Robinson's Collected Essays, 208-14, for a discussion of Wheatley's contribution to the elegiac form. For a discussion of Wheatley in the context of the American Revolution, see, in the same volume, Charles W. Akers, "'Our Modern Egyptians': Phillis Wheatley and the Whig Campaign against Slavery in Revolutionary Boston," 159-71, and Betsy Erkkila's essay, "Revolutionary Women." John Shield's article, "Phillis Wheatley's Struggle for Freedom in her Poetry and Prose" (Wheatley, Collected Works, 232-40) also contains a good assessment of her political writing.

²³ Erlich, "Amphibolies," 541.

²⁴ Cited in J. Saunders Redding, "The Negro Writer in American Literature," in Anger and Beyond, ed. Herbert Hill (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 2.

²⁵ This description of the poet appeared in a headnote to an early Wheatley poem, "Farewell to America," which was published in the London Chronicle, 1-3 July 1773, as cited in Robinson, Critical Essays, 25. Robinson speculates that Phillis's "mistress," Mrs. Susanna Wheatley, wrote the headnote.

²⁶ Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 108-10. The Countess of Huntington, Robinson speculates, may have been shown the error of her ways by the American Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, and it may have been as a compensation for her injustice that she became Wheatley's patron.

²⁷ Cited in Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 24.

²⁸ For the uncertain history of Wheatley's life after Susanna Wheatley's death, see Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and her Writings, 47-69. The facts of her existence, as Robinson notes, are obscure, and her early biographers, descendants of the Wheatley family and more mindful of the Wheatley name than concerned for the truth, are not necessarily reliable.

²⁹ Though there are reasons, as Robinson points out (Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 61) to doubt the accuracy of many of the details in the Wheatley family biographer's account of Phillis Wheatley's last years (the charges against John Peters, Phillis's husband, as a ne'er-do-well seem particularly the product of white bias against an enterprising and independent black man), the overall picture does seem to suggest that Wheatley's final years were bleak. Two other contemporary sources corroborate the accountof Wheatley dying in indigence (see Robinson, Phillis Wheatley and Her Writings, 60).

³⁰ June Jordan, On Call (Boston: South End Press, 1985), 96.

³¹ United States, Department of Education, The Condition of Education 1990, vol. 2, Post-secondary Education (Washington: GPO, 1990), 5, 16. This report shows that in 1987, 58 percent of white students went on to college in the October following graduation, as compared to 44 percent of black students, while in 1974, the difference between the groups was at its minimum, with 49 percent of white students and 44 percent of black students going on to college. As a New York Times editorial comments, the decline in federal financial aid and the failure of student benefits to keep up with inflation during the Reagan years are clearly important in explaining this recent difference in black and white participation in higher education, since black students are generally more dependent on such aid (New York Times, 30 April 1990, A10). The median income for blacks in 1987 was 57.1 percent of that for whites, which was lower than in any year in the 1970s. Forty-five percent of black children are poor, compared with 15 percent of white children (Morton M. Kondracke, "The Two Black Americas," New Republic, 6 February 1989, 17-18.

³² Bercovitch, "Problem of Ideology," 636.

³³ Foucault, History of Sexuality, 95-96.

³⁴ Booth, Critical Understanding, 259.