Any analysis of Phillis Wheatley's poetry must first reconcile the problems presented by her styl(us), for the central problem that Wheatley herself had to address was that of how to make an inscription that would not leave a clearly visible trace, one that would not clearly mark (and reveal) both the poet and her poetic agenda in a single stroke. Yet the mature poet must possess a signature styl(us) that both authorizes and authenticates his or her discourse, a means by which the imprint of authorial presence may be left in the work. However, in the discursive environment that was Wheatley's Boston, it was not within the purview of a female slave to authorize or authenticate her own discourse, at least not in the traditional manner. Hence the testimonial by the "most respectable characters in Boston" that prefaces Wheatley's 1773 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral which encloses Wheatley's words within the quotation marks of their authority, thus placing the stylus of authorization in the hands of Wheatley's white "masters." Presumably, the "most respectable characters in Boston" correctly read the trace of Wheatley's stylus (both in her texts and her oral examination) and judged it authentic. This verdict did not grant Wheatley the power of self-authorization and authentication, however. To the contrary, the judgment of a white panel of experts could only give her what small measure of authority her masters (both legal and intellectual) wished to parcel out. She was not accorded the status of peer; rather, she was still a slave to her masters' discourse of authenticity as she was to John Wheatley in body. Indeed, if there were only a single trace to be found in her work, it could not be otherwise. A single trace would enable a single authoritative reading, always placing her within the grasp of a master. Her problem, therefore, was how to form a styl(us) that would always leave at least two traces, one of the two constantly masking itself under the name of the other. What was needed was a styl(us) that, rather than inscribing a single mark of authorial presence, would instead create a double mark revealing the pairing of the "author" and the unauthorized "other" in a manner that called into question the definitional validity of both categories, thus producing a simulacrum of authenticity that would collapse from the force of what lay under its own name.

A reading of Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, then, must consider the possibility of at least two traces of authorial presence in her work: the legitimated voice of the slave who had dutifully enslaved herself to the discourse of hermasters and the illegitimate one of the woman who refused the imprint of the subject position that white discourse constructed for her, choosing instead to carve out her own space for self-naming by writing inside the spaces between the bonds of the dominant discursive structure. For in any structure, the semes/seams of bonding are never as strong as they would appear because the boundaries and lines of demarcation forming the infrastructure are spaces from which the bonds of construction may equally be strengthened or weakened. For Wheatley, operating within the seams/semes of the dominant discourse offered the opportunity to mount an oppositional critique while at the same time eluding detection by her would-be authenticators. Writing itself within this space "under the name" of white authority, Wheatley's "illegitimate," self-authenticating voice(s) constructs both a critique of slavery and racial prejudice and a national myth for a nascent America.

Though Wheatley's reuse of biblical and classical motifs to construct narratives of freedom and racial equality has been noted by Sondra O'Neale, John Shields, Houston Baker, Cynthia Smith, and others, while her possible African influences and her construction of a national myth have received attention from Shields ("Phillis Wheatley's Use of Classicism" 97), these studies have not considered the relationship between Wheatley's reappropriation of discursive tropes; as well, their rhetorical function as masks of difference has not been investigated in depth, nor has the relationship between Wheatley's masking and her concept of "Americanness." Without an exploration of how the discourses of the Christian, the classical, and the pan-African were recycled by Wheatley as a means of masking and miming poetic voices in order to subvert dominant constructions of authority and identity, the full traces of her styl(us) cannot be read, traces that reveal the creation of what was for Wheatley a distinctly American national myth.

The critical reconstruction of Wheatley's styl(us) should properly start with a recognition of those aspects of her poetry that are arguably African with special attention given to how she constructs and employs various authoritative voices and how the poet(s) created by these voices address their audiences. For Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral is above all else a public performance by its author(s), a fact underscored by the title's final word: morality is a public construction that places the "personal" act within a social context, always seeking to order the part in harmony (or hegemony) with the whole, thus placing the moralizing poet in the position of public speaker. Though Phillip M. Richards has noted Wheatley's use of the moral (and political) discourses appropriate to the public sphere in the late eighteenth century and specifically her "appropriation of the political languages of civic humanism, Puritanism, and liberalism" (164), his contention is that the poet adopted these discourses as modes of assimilation into the dominant white culture, leaving them relatively unchanged in the process. In presenting this argument, Richards apparently places in Wheatley's mind a very specific and very European concept of repetition and of mimesis, that of repetition and re-semblance as duplications, "lesser" copies of an authentic original, for if it was, as Richards claims, Wheatley's intention to assimilate, to assert sameness through the repetition of white discursive figures, then her conceptions of repetition and of miming must have followed European convention. If Wheatley's conception of repetition were entirely influenced by traditional Western thought, then Richards is correct. However, if it can be demonstrated that Wheatley had been influenced by other constructions of repetition and mimesis, constructions that emphasized repetition as difference, then the imprints left by Wheatley's mimetic voices might be of a different mark entirely: signifying similarity may not have been her goal. Rather, she may have been signifyin(g) (to use Henry Louis Gates's term [44]) a critical difference.

It is entirely possible that Wheatley did have knowledge of two different though complementary constructs of repetition and miming, one of which came from her native Africa, the other from her classical studies. Once synthesized by Wheatley, the two discourses of masking and miming would create the mold in which her styl(us) was wrought, and it is along the paths of Esu-Elegbara and "polymetis" (cunning, masking, and resourceful) Odysseus that her readers must follow in order to read what lies under the name of "slavish imitation" in her work.

The year of Wheatley's birth is usually stated as 1753, making her approximately seven or eight years old at the time of her purchase by John and Susanna Wheatley on July 11, 1761. Though the only recollection of her life in Africa that she wished to share with her white captors was that she had seen her mother pouring water out daily "before the sun at his rising" (Shields, "Phillis Wheatley" 473), it is doubtful that a child of Wheatley's prodigious intelligence would have forgotten nearly everything about the first seven years of her life. Though we can only speculate about what Wheatley actually remembered about her early childhood, her having spent one third of her life in Africa at the time of her volume's publication suggests that it is worthwhile to investigate the possible African aspects of her styl(us): namely the use of coincidental as opposed to subordinate rhyme, the appropriation of voices by the poet as modes of signification, the use of the lyric and the panegyric, and the positioning of the poet-signifier as mime, as manifested by the Signifying Monkey and by the pan-African figure of Esu-Elegbara.

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates has identified coincident rhyme, where the rhyming words occupy the same parts of speech; these coincident rhymes are of particular importance to the Signifyin' Monkey poems as a result of their calling attention to the paradigmatic aspects of the narrative and of their role in calling attention to the "dependence of the signified on the signifier" (Easthope, qtd. in Gates 63). Forty-two percent of therhymes in Wheatley's 1773 volume are coincidental, with the rate running as high as seventy-one percent in "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c." Though Wheatley has often been marked as an imitator of Alexander Pope, few of Pope's rhymes are coincidental. The difference suggests that Wheatley was troping upon Pope rather than imitating him, a move that would place her work closer to the influence of African and African-derived poetic traditions than Anglo-Saxon ones.

John Shields has noted that the prevalence of panegyrics and lyrics in the Wheatley canon firmly mark her work as showing the influence of African poetic traditions, stating that within this tradition, the composition and performance of political praise poems lay at "the very center of one's responsibility as poet" (Shields, "Phillis Wheatley" 476). Though not all of Wheatley's poems refer to political figures or events, her works are properly seen as political in that they are meant for the edifying consumption of a polis and that they represent Wheatley's forays into public discourse as she assumes the very African role of poet as the moral and political voice of the community. Her assumption of this role is evident in "To Maecenas" when she writes "I'll snatch a laurel from thy honour'd head/While you indulgent smile upon the deed" (Wheatley 12). The laurel here is not only a sign of her maturity as a poet, as Shields claims (Shields, American Aeneas 213), as the resonance of "laurel" cannot help but invoke "laureate," thus suggesting that here Wheatley is staking claim to be the poetic (which in this circumstance includes both the moral and the political) voice and consciousness not only of a community but of an entire nation. In styling herself as poet laureate Wheatley is staking a claim to discursive dominance, declaring that her constructions of identity, community, and artistic authority are, far from being marginal, properly those of mainstream culture. Contrary to Richards's position, Wheatley does not make here a step towards assimilation. Rather, the poet has declared that the nascent American culture regard her as the center towards which it must gravitate.

Indeed, the reference to Virgil in line 23, "O could I rival thine and Virgil's page," suggests that Wheatley is assuming the mask of the creator of an American epic, wishing to occupy the position of a second Virgil for the "new born Rome" that she would invoke in her later "Liberty and Peace." Though she may have assumed this mask, it was not one that she chose to show her reader first. The poetic persona appears as placing itself before the discursive "master" Maecenas in order to receive his blessing and authorization for the work that is to follow. The recognition of the patron would appear to be a traditional, nonsubversive move with which to announce a collection of poetry, and Wheatley adopts the position of the gratefully authorized, who writes under the name of her "superiors." But it is this space "under the name" that problematizes this apparently supplicating gesture. For each maskhas two faces, the one to be revealed at the convenience of the wearer and the face that lies under the name of the other, maintaining the other's dominance only through its own silence. It is this empowering silence that Wheatley breaks when she announces her own author(ity). Additionally, the reference to Maecenas creates other problems for the reader who would regard Wheatley's gesture as one-dimensional. The historical Maecenas was an unusually liminal figure, a man who was by turns a diplomat, soldier, and poet in a politically volatile period in Roman history (Oxford Classical Dictionary 527-28). To maintain his position and power in Roman society while having to juggle his various public personas, the historical Maecenas had to be an expert in the art of re-presenting his rhetorical selves to his audiences; and it was re-presentation, miming a role or styling a mask, that had to be used by Maecenas, for to give away his "true" identify of intentions would have been unwise, as it would have exposed his position. Additionally, the ability to dissemble and mask one's self would be of no small benefit to the diplomat. Though the historical Maecenas may not have been the equal poet of his proteges Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, whatever he lacked in the ability to compose written texts was more than made up for by his ability to textualize and re-present himself, a skill that is certainly suggested by Seneca's appraisal of his work: "the style is the man." It is this play of the styl(us) that Wheatley recognizes and praises in the poem, as she styles herself laureate.

By assuming Maecenas's author(ity), Wheatley thus engages in the process of troping on the Roman master tropster, as well as upon the audience that believes her to be placing herself under another's authority by using the name of the "other" to serve as the vehicle for her own self-authenticating discourse. This action places her clearly within Gates's paradigm of African-American signification, as she appears to be signifying simultaneously on both the historical Maecenas and the relationship of patron/master and performer/slave. This performance on/in the discourse of author(ity) begins with her praising of the historical Maecenas in lines 43-47,

Thy virtues, great Maecenas! shall be sung
In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung:
While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread.
I'll snatch a laurel from thine honor'd head,
While you indulgent smile upon the deed
(Wheatley 11-12),

which places the poem in the thematic realm of the panegyric, following H. Rap Brown's claim that "Signifying allowed you a choice—you could either make a cat feel good or bad. If you had just destroyed someone [verbally] or if they were just down already, signifying could help make them over" (qtd. in Gates 73). In this regard, Wheatley signifies on Maecenas's facility at self-textualization (which can be read as signification, for to wear a mask in order to produce a desired effect on an audience is also to signify on the mask and the audience at once), holding him up as an exemplar of Protean liminality.

At the same time, however, she signifies on her white audience who believe that she has just written a poem in praise of their authority, for the invocation of Maecenas as patron could only have been regarded by her white audience as a recognition of a higher, European authority and source for her discourse. Using the trope of the invocation of the master/patron as a means for praising the ability to re-present one's self for political ends (as was the case with the historical Maecenas), though always under the cover of a mask, Wheatley mounted a critique of the white discourses that posited her as the inferior "other" and declared her works to be those of "slavish" imitation. Maecenas's virtues—his mastery of tropes and masks—are praised, as is the source from which they come, the "him" in line 44. Shields has read this "him" as Wheatley's God, and there is little fault to find with this conclusion. However, it should, be noted that this "him" has not been capitalized, suggesting that this is indeed Wheatley's god, a God that has been signified upon. This (re)vision of Wheatley becomes more evident when one considers that the god of Wheatley is the source of the virtues of the "pagan" Maecenas, suggesting that the arts of dissimulation, masking, and signification are properly the qualities of the divine entity. If this is indeed the case, it would appear that Wheatley's Christianity has been reformed, Africanized, and classicized, for if the divine word (the virtues that Maecenas appropriates) is one of signification, full of double meanings and political undertones, then this is definitely not the word of the Christian God, the word of truth and of original, inviolable meaning. Rather, it would appear that the first invocation of a divine entity in Wheatley's volume, one that sets the frame for the following ones, invokes a "god" whose character reflects the synthesis of God, Esu-Elegbara, and Metis.¹

The acts of signification that occur in Wheatley's poetry are directed towards the paradigmatic constructions of genre and poetic subjectivity that were available to Wheatley as resources to be troped upon. For as the process of signification on Maecenas illustrates, signification on a subject frequently entails signification on the discursive construct of that subject as it relates to the discursive construction of the culture as a whole. Thus the panegyric and the use of the signifying persona are intertwined: signification is always done "under the name" of another. Even Wheatley's lyrics, as the readings of her "Hymn to the Morning" and "Hymn to the Evening" in this essay will show, involve troping upon received constructs and figures of discourse, thus placing them within the frame of signification as well.

It should be noted that the African influence on Wheatley's stylistics manifests itself primarily through the paradigmatic aspects of her poems, rather than on the purely formal level. Though there are numerous and significant formal differences between her verses and those of her alleged model for "imitation," Alexander Pope, such as her frequency of coincident rhyme and her use of vastly different rhythms,² Wheatley's revisionary tropes frequently present themselves without formal flourish or, more appropriately, without what was marked as formal innovation in the eyes of eighteenth-century aestheticians. However, a stylistic difference (and distance) is created by the act of troping itself though to the eyes of the reader the mark of the author's stylus lies under that of the mark that has been appropriated. Wheatley asserts her stylistic difference through a play of language that calls attention to linguistic structures as places of free play and substitution, while at the same time seeking to mask this play of difference under the name of the repetition of the same. This exercise resembles that of Gates's signifying monkey as well as that of Esu-Elegbara, where stylistics become a function of paradigmatic displacement and re-figuring along the vertical axis of the narrative (Gates 48, 53).

An example of this process occurs in Wheatley's "A Hymn to the Morning" and "A Hymn to the Evening." At first glance, the two poems would seem to affirm Wheatley's "standardized" Christian piety through her praise of the light of God, an act that, through its paradigmatic elevation of God/Light/White/European over that of pagan deity/night/dark/African would seem to confirm Wheatley's rejection of her African. past and acceptance of dominant discourses. Certainly, if the poems are read in isolation from the treatment of dark-and-light imagery and the refiguring of the Christian God into Wheatley's god, the poems do not appear to invert the traditional light-dark binary in any manner. However, if the reader places Wheatley's work at the crossing point of Gates's chiasmic model for signification, which situates Black English along the paradigmatic-vertical axis of the narrative and Standard English along the syntagmatic-horizontal axis, the opportunity presents itself for the reading of these two poems in light of the paradigmatic substitutions that occur elsewhere in the collection. The God into god revision has already been noted. In addition to this refiguring, Wheatley undertakes a similar revision of traditional dark-light imagery:

Shields has indicated the significance that "On Imagination" plays in her thought as it forms the foundations for her construction of the sublime and for the construction of an autonomous, creative self ("Phillis Wheatley's Struggle"). Though the poem features references to "the monarch of the day," "pure streams of light," and to Aurora's rise, while it includes no apparent dark or night imagery, it may be concluded that Wheatley has linked her imagination with traditional light imagery. This conclusion would be strengthened by the correlation between the incidence of Wheatley's sun figures and her memory of her mother pouring out water "to the sun at his rising," as pointed out by Shields, thus linking the light of her imagination to the performance of African solar-worshipping rituals. However, her sublime is developedintertextually within the body of three poems, with "Thoughts on the Works of Providence" and "On Recollection" operating in concert with "On Imagination." In Wheatley's construction of the sublime, it is in the nighttime of the imagination in which the self is fully realized, as she writes in "Thoughts On the Works of Providence," where during the night "ideas range/giddy and unbounded o'er the plains" (Wheatley 47). In "On Recollection," meanwhile, the imaginative remembrances of Mneme (presumably a shortened form of Mnemosyne) occur at night and pour

the ample treasure from her secret stores;
Swift from above she wings her silent flight
Through Phoebe's realms, fair regent of the night;
And in her pomp of images display'd,
To the high raptur'd poet gives her aid,
Through the unbounded regions of the mind,
Diffusing light celestial and refin'd.
(Wheatley 62)

Memory and the imagination are linked here with Phoebe, the moon goddess who was mother to Leto and thus grandmother to the sun god Phoebus Apollo,³ the son/sun that is preceded (and thus dependent upon) the night/mother. The "light celestial and refin'd" is the product of the imaginative-recollective Phoebe, thus raising the possibility that the often mentioned "light" of Wheatley's imagination is not the literal light of day, the "natural" and "original" light of the Christian God and of European culture, but the light that is produced within the confines of Phillis Wheatley's mind. If this is the case, then her light becomes a denaturalized one, a re-semblance of the light constructed by white discourses. Thus her light functions as a product/child of the producing dark "mother" night, with the result yielding an overturning of the traditional light-dark binarh with the dark half now functioning as the more "enlightening" and nurturing of the two.

With regard to this paradigmatic restructuring of dark and light, Wheatley's morning and evening would appear to occupy the line of demarcation between the two as the dawn and the sunset mark the moments of transition from day to night, thus making them the most liminal moments in a day. In "An Hymn to the Morning," the first of the two poems to appear, it is at the moment of greatest liminality, when the day has not yet clearly ascended and a gently shifting balance of dark and light appears, that the poet can come closest to fulfilling her objective of praising Aurora's beauty. The poem's second stanza celebrates the coming of the dawn and its first moments while the poet's anticipation and pleasure rises in a parallel course with that of the sun. In the third stanza the poet's rapture reaches its height, as the muses fan the pleasing fire of the day, and all the pleasures of the light rise to theirapex. At this point Wheatley first suggests the presence of an impending force that will negate her pleasure, the "pleasing fire" of line 14, a fire that may certainly comfort and please but that, as it grows in size and intensity, may prove to become harmful as well. As the fire of the sun and the day come to a climax, the poet must look away as she feels "his [Phoebus's and, by extension, God's] fervid beams too strong / and scarce begun, concludes th' abortive song" (Wheatley 57). As in "On Imagination," the pleasure of her performance reaches its height at the precise moment it becomes negated by a vast, incomprehensible power, thus placing her experience in the realm of what Kant would define over twenty yeas later as the sublime.

Wheatley's sublime as developed in the space of her poems prefigures Kant's almost perfectly. The Kantian sublime was that sensation produced by the action of the imagination in concert with the reason, where the pleasure taken by the imagination in the study of an object reached its peak as the reason forced the recognition that the object was too vast to be truly comprehended by the observer, thus leading to the negation of sensibility, or subjective pleasure, as the "mind has been incited to abandon sensibility, and employ itself upon ideas involving a higher finality" (Kant 203). The object itself is not sublime; rather, the sublime is that feeling that is produced in response to a particular representation of an object in the mind (Kant 203). As a result "it is the disposition of soul evoked by a particular representation engaging the attention of the reflective judgement, and not the Object, that is to be called sublime" (Kant 207). The "attention of the reflective judgement" that is to be called sublime is the recognized oscillation between status as subject (who can attempt to comprehend the object in question) and as object (who has failed to comprehend the "object" and in recognizing its vastness realizes that he or she is in some way objectified by it), the "alternating repulsion and attraction" (Kant 215) that the subject undergoes with regard to the object that produces the sublime feeling. Wheatley's reaction with regards to her two representations of the sun—that in her mind and that on her page—is in accord with Kant's outline. As the poem arrives at its abrupt end, the negation of her subjectivity is paradoxically also her moment of highest self-awareness and pleasure, as it presumably should be for her reader.

Though the sublime represents for Wheatley the highest form of pleasure, it is also a potentially devastating pleasure. For Friederich Hölderlin, whose poetic career would follow Wheatley's by twenty years, the recognition of the limits of language and their ultimately negating force led to "madness" and the abyss, but for Wheatley, whose art was bonded to a passion for democratic freedom as strongly as was his, this negation did not carry the same weight. Granted, there is a vast difference between cultures and characters here, but the point deserves investigation. For how could Wheatley's poetic aspiration not be crushed by a recognition of the force held by greater powers, not only those powers in the conceptual realm, but those political and social powers of colonial Boston as well? The answer would appear to lie in the unique nature of Wheatley's thought, for where Hölderlin's thought became cyclical and openended only after his "retreat" (to use Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe's term) (223), Wheatley's was structured in this manner from the start. The return and restoration after the moment of negation is illustrated by "An Hymn to the Evening," the companion piece of "An Hymn to the Morning."

Wheatley's confrontation with the abyss passes as the sun begins to descend from its zenith. The poetic persona becomes lost in praise just as it was during the rise of the morning, as here Wheatley lauds the "majestic grandeur" of the setting sun and the "beauteous dies" it produces in the sky at the moment of the return to liminality, brought on by the sunset itself. Unlike the previous poem, "A Hymn To the Evening' does not make any use of I or my. Here Wheatley's voice(s) praise "him who gives the light / And draws the sable curtains of the night" (Wheatley 58). Wheatley's rising passion and her subsequent effort to capture the power of the sun in her poem, to make the Word of God her word, does not end in abysmal failure when she is forced to look away from the light. Rather, she is able to recoup as the sun passes its zenith and to prepare for a new rise of pleasure as the sun begins the arc of its eventual return. The possibility for this recuperation is created by the restructuring of the Sun-Moon dialectic and her transcription of God into god, two conditions that enable Wheatley's poetic path to become cyclical as opposed to linear, making the confrontation of the sublime an apex of a curve and not the end of a line.

Though Wheatley has assigned different qualities to the dark/night and the light/day, it does not follow that she has in some manner separated the two, making each an autonomous entity with the creative "dark" placed above the limiting "light." To the contrary, they remain in a cyclical, complementary relationship with each other, one that produces in the minds of Wheatley's voices a sublime synthesis whose value is greater than that of the sum of its parts. The creative/regenerative dark is the space in which signification takes place and that enables the rhetorical and intellectual construction of new selves, but as the closing lines of "On Imagination" would suggest, the light created by the recollective imagination ultimately calls attention to its own artificiality and thus to its inadequacy as a world unto itself:

But I reluctant leave the pleasing views
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay
(Wheatley 68)

Earlier in the poem, "Winter frowns to Fancy's raptured eyes" (Wheatley 66): presumably Wheatley's narrative for the reason's distrust of the works of the fancy and by proxy the imagination because of their lack of "scientific" empirical validity. Thus, in the closing lines of the poem the poet's own reason dictates that she must cease her sublime flight of the imagination and return to the empirical world. In this respect, the "rising fires" and "light" of the imagination function in the same capacity as the "pleasing fire" of the sun in "An Hymn to the Morning." The moment of highest pleasure is also the moment of negation, the moment in which the subject who enjoys the pleasures of the imagination becomes the object of a higher power: the forces of the external world, whether conceived as the abstract power of reason coupled with empirical "fact" or as the power of God manifested in the forces of Nature.

As a result, the light marks the boundary between the self/subject and the other/object, and the confrontation of this line of demarcation calls attention to the somewhat arbitrary nature of these categories. However, the confrontation of the boundary is for Wheatley not an end, but rather a call for a repetition of the previous process. However, there is no subjective, sublime pleasure without the prior division between subject and object and the subsequent reversal of the two. The effort to transcribe and interpret the divine trace must always end in a sublime failure. Neither the light nor the dark can stand as complete spaces for the mind; rather, their reciprocal and cyclical relation as spaces for experience must be engaged so that the individual can at once grasp the full extent of her or his subjectivity through the imagination and place that subjectivity within the larger context offered by the confrontation with the light and the subsequent recognition that the light and dark are mutually dependent on each other for definition. The flight into the sublime and its eventual end are thus journeys into the space of difference, confrontations with a boundary that can reintegrate the concept of selfhood.

If nature and the works of God are incomprehensible and not sublime in and of themselves, it is the representation of God—Wheatley's god—that is sublime. Precisely this play of representation provides regenerative spiritual space for her and also suggests another African connection. The word of Esu-Elegbara, quite unlike the Word of God, is a space of free play and substitution, a space of double meanings and of the indeterminacy of interpretation, and above all a space without closure (Gates 21). Wheatley positions her poetic voices as translators, intermediaries who read, interpret, and transcribe the unreadable traces of the divine into the (apparently) easily comprehensible traces of the poet. The traces of the divine are, like the sun's rays at the end of "An Hymn to the Morning," something that cannot be taken in fully by any subject, and thus the moment of sublime pleasure becomes a moment of aporia. Only the infinite, all-knowing God can take unlimited, complete pleasure in his works or read/comprehend the inscriptions of his styl(us) because their scope places them beyond the understanding of finite human minds. As the divine trace is incomprehensible/unreadable to the mortal mind, the function of the poet, then, is to restore meaning and bring some resemblance of the divine trace to an audience. Wheatley's voices offer these transcriptions, but they are presented without the possibility of a "final" reading, for, like Esu, Wheatley writes to preserve the cycle of interpretation, not close it off. Indeed, the hermeneutic process cannot be closed because Wheatley is transcribing/translating the Word into her word, a process that would seem to question the validity of "canonical" interpretations of scripture and of the divine inscription. If God is unknowable, the most that a mortal transcriber can do is to signify on the traces of divine inspiration, creating a sublime representation that celebrates the cyclical process of reading and rereading the divine mark.

This cycle of reinterpretation is the process of which Wheatley writes in "An Hymn to the Evening." As the sun begins its descent, Wheatley's pleasure begins to rise once again in anticipation of the coming night, and as the sunset approaches

Through all the heav'ns what beauteous dies are spread!
But the west glories in the deepest red:
So may our breasts with ev'ry virtue glow
The living temples of our God below!

Fill'd with the praise of him who gives the light,
And draws the sable curtains of the night
Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind
At morn to awake more heav'nly, more refin'd,
So shall the labours of the day begin
More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.
(Wheatley 58-59)

Wheatley's poetic persona celebrates the spiritual renewal that comes from observing the moment in which the boundary between light and dark is exposed, when the cycle returns to the point of greatest liminality, the moment when its presence as an open text reveals itself most fully, and when the subject can enter the cycle of interpretation at its most accessible point (and thus the subject can write/textualize/become anew an agent of interpretation). The awakened subject of the next morning is possibly the subject who has renewed his or her capacity for self-textualization (after spending several hours in the "night" of their dreaming fancy and/or imagination), suggesting that for Wheatley "holiness" or 'piousness" was not so much a matter of accepting church dogma and cultural hegemony but one of constant textualization of both God and the self since the textualization of self can be achieved only after the experience of the sublime. At this point, one of the double traces of Wheatley's styl(us) makesits appearance—her re-figured Christianity is not a process of dogmatic self-denial in the same mold as her Puritan antecedents in New England, but that of an Africanized celebration of the self (and of the god represented by the self's imagination) as textual, constantly writeable and rewriteable figures.

At the moment when Wheatley celebrates her rhetorical/poetic selves, the classical strands of her work show themselves most clearly, for at this point the poet often uses the discourses of Christianity and classicism together to praise her own protean ability to create and discard masks, when she celebrates her power to write herself. But not only the ability to textualize and retextualize herself empowers her in this instance, for her power to create a self in writing that can never be authoritatively read by another: that the power to name is always in her hands is of the most value here. By assuming the power to name herself and denying that power to another, she rejects the discursive fetters of her "masters" and assumes mastery under her own name. This process suggests that one employed later by the Signifying Monkey though there is a crucial difference between Wheatley's use of dissimulation to "trope a dope" and that of the Signifying Monkey in the Monkey poems. For the Monkey uses the tricks of mediation and dissimulation (in that he is presenting himself as the teller of the truth) so that the Lion will be physically humbled and humiliated by the Elephant, as the Monkey lacks the final, physical wherewithal to exercise power (power as the ability to establish a hierarchy, to establish domination) over the Lion. The Monkey, in the end, is forced back up into the trees by the Lion, demonstrating that although the Monkey's power of mediation and textualization can be empowering, it can also be quite powerless in the face of "superior" forces.

Wheatley, on the other hand, would seem to be interested in how she can be allowed full subjectivity in the discursive environment of colonial Boston and how she can exercise power in the public sphere. Though she, like the Signifying Monkey, signifies upon her target in the name of a higher power—her God/god—her overall vision does not place her in a position of inferiority relative to her "masters." Instead, her program seems to be one of creating a vision of an American culture that will restore not only her, but other African Americans to their rightful positions within the public sphere. She positions herself as the "Lion's" equal, and not as its inferior in any way. She clearly regards herself and other slaves as at a disadvantage as her 1774 letter to Samson Occum shows,

God grant deliverance in his own way and Time, and get him honor upon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their Fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and actions are so diametrically opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine.

(Wheatley 177)

She did not regard this "disadvantage" as a matter of nature (i.e., that Africans were in some way inferior to Europeans or that it was God's will that they be enslaved) but as a matter of human discursive construction. This understanding would seem to place the problems of slavery and racial inequality within the realm of nomoi, to use the Greek term. Like the Sophists who would use the concept of nomos to justify a critique of the aristocratic order in fifth-century BC Greece,⁴ Wheatley would trope upon and exploit the rhetorical structures of African and European "difference" to voice a subtle critique of slavery and racial prejudice. Though God could take care of the problems of slavery and racism in "his way and time," it would appear that Wheatley had taken it upon herself to hasten the resolution of the matter through the means available to her. Additionally, though she placed her hope in the eventual granting of God's deliverance, the secular and discursive nature of the problem led to a classicized "solution" on her part. The troping of Esu would be synthesized with the guiles of Metis.

Where the tricks and tropes of the Signifying Monkey/Esu Elegbara ultimately revealed any weaknesses of their user, the dissimulating and dissembling strategies of metis performed the opposite function, allowing a "weaker" party to overcome a stronger opponent. The disguises, traps, and feints of metis were never used outside of a conflict situation; rather, it could only exist when there was an opposition between weaker and stronger. In Wheatley's case, such a strategy would appear attractive for the marginalized writer who sought to critique the dominant culture's rationale for her "illegitimacy" but who could not publish without the approval of that same culture's elite. For a young woman who was constantly reminded of her own "alleged" inferiority, an episode such as Odysseus's trick of performing under the name of "No one" to gain victory over the cyclops may have provided a metaphor for her own struggle. Thus an investigation into the field of metis, with an eye towards how such strategies present themselves in Wheatley's works, may be of no small value. In Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant have concluded that, although metis manifested itself in a limitless, multiple range of contexts and proved to be the power that resists, doubles, and subverts the forces of difference and definition, four general observations can be made about its "nature."

First, there is a difference between using strength and using metis: "strength" is the dominant discourse's definition of the possession of legitimated power, in whatever form that power may take. The user of metis creates "illegitimate" power from within the semes binding the rhetorical constructions that define "legitimate" power. According to Detienne and Vernant,

Certain aspects of metis tend to associate it with the disloyal trick, the perfidious lie, treachery—all of which [by the standards of "legitimate" Greek culture] are the despised weapons of women and cowards. But others make it seem more precious than strength. It is, in a sense, the absolute weapon … whatever the circumstances, whatever the conditions of the conflict.

(13)

Second, metis operates in a temporally shifting, ambiguous field. The user of metis "displays at the same time a greater grip of the present where nothing escapes him, more awareness of the future, several aspects of which he has already manipulated, and a richer experience accumulated from the past" (Detienne and Vernant 14). History and time are discursive constructions to be manipulated by the user of metis; time is measured according to the progression of the manipulator's plan, a plan that uses various traps and ruses to foil the opponent. It is through the trap and the ruse that the future can be predetermined. The user of metis can construct the infallible trap that will necessarily lead the opponent in the direction the user of metis wishes this opponent to take. Additionally, the user of metis has an extensive body of knowledge of tricks, traps, and perhaps most importantly a knowledge of what the opponent believes to be empirically verifiable "fact," information that can be transcribed, doubled back on the opponent to fool and trap him or her with his or her own bait.

Additionally, metis is not singular and unified, but multiple and diverse (Detienne and Vernant 18). Metis can never appear or be utilized in any singular form,

because its field of application is a world of movement, of multiplicity and of ambiguity. It bears on fluid situations which are constantly changing and which at every moment combine contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other. In order to seize the fleeting kairos, metis has to make itself even swifter than the latter. In order to dominate a changing situation, full of contrasts, it must become more supple, even more shifting, more polymorphic than the flow of time: it must adapt itself constantly to events as they succeed each other and be pliable enough to accommodate the unexpected so as to implement the plan in mind more successfully.

(Detienne and Vernant 20)

Metis must be elusive in the sense that it must elude categorization or stasis. It can never be identifiable or stable, and the user of it can never let him or herself be named, for if this naming happens she or he will lose her or his primary power, that of being able to name herself or himself on his or her own terms.

Finally, metis is the power of dissimulation, cunning and duplicity. The user of metis always masks his or her true goal, duping the opponent, constantly assuming disguises that destabilize the relation between "appearance" and "reality," each producing a ruse that "beguiles the adversary into error and leaves him as bemused by his defeat as by the spells of a magician" (Detienne and Vernant 21). This doubling is not false, and the action is neither a cheat nor a lie. It is a circumvention of strength, a subversion of the dominant constructions of the true and the just, the transgression of old boundaries and the production of new ones.

Though Detienne and Vemant cite Odysseus and the Sophists as paradigmatic figures of metis, there is no evidence that Wheatley had read the works of Homer or the Sophists in the original Greek. However, she was familiar with Homer in translation (and had purchased Pope's translation in 1773 with money she had received from the Earl of Dartmouth in London); and translations of Plato, which may have included the Gorgias and other texts were available to her in Boston, suggesting that she may well have absorbed the figures of dissimulation and trickery of the sort presented by Odysseus and castigated by Socrates. Though the possible influence of metis on her development as a poet is a matter of speculation, her style presents numerous and consistent traces of metic plays of force and disguise, the most evident being the appropriation of the voice(s) of others in her poems as illustrated in "On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield, 1770." In this poem, Wheatley assumes three separate masks as she eulogizes Whitefield, asserts the equality of African Americans, and celebrates the possibility of an American nation that will allow this equality to be realized in the public sphere.

Her masks do not appear in succession: she appears to wear two and three at once in some instances. As the poem opens, Wheatley assumes the nonthreatening posture of the eulogist for the evangelist and minister as she hails him "happy saint, on thine immortal throne/possest of glory, life, and bliss unknown" (Wheatley 22). Nothing in these lines suggests that the author is doing anything other than praising the Christian virtues of her minister/master: the slave acknowledging the spiritual quality of her European "superior" who remade her in his image. In these lines Wheatley sets her trap: Esu and Odysseus cross paths here, so that signification becomes a means of disguise enabling Wheatley to enter the space under the name of "convert." For in the remainder of the first stanza, the poet praises not Christian virtues but rhetorical prowess, the Reverend Whitefield's ability to intoxicate his audience with his performance. Wheatley celebrates the master artificer's facility with language:

We hear no more the music of thy tongue,
Thy wonted auditories cease to throng.
Thy sermons in unequall'd accents flow'd,
And ev'ry bosom with devotion glow'd;
Thou didst in strains of eloquence refin'd
Inflame the heart, and captivate the mind.
Unhappy we the setting sun deplore,
So glorious once, but ah! it shines no more.
(Wheatley 22)

What has made Whitefield worthy of praise is not so much his piety as his poetry. The lines suggest that the sermons on the divine have produced the same sublime effect in the minds of his listeners that Wheatley's encounter with the divine Sun had in hers in "An Hymn to the Morning." In each case, sublimity is created by the relation between the speaker's words and the unrepresentable subject of the performance with the intermediary/transcriber lying at the chiasmic point of representation, suggesting that the resonances of her praise for the minister/intoxicator Whitefield continue to praise the poet/intoxicator Wheatley, for they both appear as performers capable of eliciting sublime responses. Indeed, the positions of poet and minister begin to dissolve into each other, as it is both Wheatley and Whitefield who perform various representations on divine themes. She becomes the "other" who lies under the name of Whitefield throughout the entire poem, as her written, mutable self is inscribed by her styl(us). It would appear that Wheatley's early feint disguises from the reader the slave poet using the elegy as a vehicle for self-praise as well as for praising the "primary" subject of the work. As Socrates states in the Gorgias, the word/pharmakon is a powerful drug, and Wheatley shows herself to be a very capable pharmacist.

The second mask that Wheatley uses appears in the second stanza, where she transforms the English-born Whitefield (and, by proxy, the "other self in the poem, the African-born Wheatley) into an American patriot whose spiritual/artistic mission becomes highly politicized. The move is suggested by the coundrum in line 17, where the cries of the evangelist are said to have "pierced the bosom of thy native skies" (Wheatley 22). Whitefield was English, but there is no distinction made by the poet about whether the "native" skies are those of England or North America, making it possible that in this instance "native" could refer to American. This transformation of nationality is completed in line 21, where Whitefield is said to have "longed to see America excel" (Wheatley 23). That "America" carries the emphasis of italicization is curious, to say the least, for it would appear that the "Great Awakener" Whitefield wished for Americans and America to rise in an act of spiritual and national self-realization. "American" is a clearly secular, nationalistic term, connoting national and not spiritual identity. That the evagelist would have wished for his colonial subjects to be born again as Americans suggests that Wheatley has post-scribed Whitefield's religious crusade into a political one as well, making him the voice of spiritual-secular revolution, making him an "American" patriot while his African-born "other" is pre-scribed into the same role through the same process. Presumably, the poet-minister Wheatley is to assume Whitefield's role now that he is gone, a movement that the poem seems to enact.

This stanza reveals not only a metic mask, but a metic sense of time and action as well. It would appear that Wheatley has sensed that the time is ripe for the voicing of nationalist sentiments, something she no doubt shared with many contemporaries who favored independence. But what makes this instance unique is that Wheatley has seized upon an apparently unrelated event—the death of Whitefield—and used this event as a mediation figure for voicing her nationalist sympathies under a careful cloaking, hence revealing her as having grasped the "fleeting kairos," that sense of watchful opportunism that Detienne and Vemant note. Additionally, the equating of American nationhood with divine will (in that the spreading of an American consciousness in addition to that of a reborn Christian one are both made the work of Whitefield/Wheatley) implies that the realization of God's works in North America would include that of founding a new nation. Wheatley's linking of poet, evangelist, and patriot then essentially pre-scribes the foundation of an American state. Her feint, her cloaking/bonding (for what lies "under the name" is, in this instance, bonded to it) of a secular political telos with a spiritual one, identifies her as possessing the awareness of the manipulated future that Detienne and Vernant note as characteristic of metis. By writing her god onto her side, she has attempted to make the future the end game of her/Whitefield's reconstructed past. The claim to status as an epic poet for what she will later call her "new born Rome" is further developed in this move.

The poem's next stanza appears entirely in quotation marks, without any direct narrative introduction by the poet. Although the second stanza's final lines refer to his oratorical skill, presenting the image of a throng "that on his lips with list'ning pleasure hung," there is no direct announcement of Whitefield, no certification that what is to follow is an actual quotation from the "master's" speech. To the contrary, these words are without the markings of authenticity, without accreditation, their quotation marks serving to announce them as the already said, but unowned, object of public domain, free for appropriation. Though a trace of authentication makes its appearance in line 32, when the words "he said" appear, the "sermon" is already half finished at this point while the words themselves remain within the quotation marks that frame the entire line. Thus the recognition of Whitefield's author(ity) does not preface the "sermon," nor does it take place outside of the quotation marks, which both affirm and deny author(ity) in equal measure. They are in appearance the words of Whitefield, but they are contextualized by (and are in "fact") Wheatley's words, thus thrusting upon the reader another conundrum/aporia, as the marks of authority become instead the marks of contestation. What apparently represents an excerpt from one of the evangelist's sermons is in fact the sermon of the master and his "other" at once. Neither wholly Whitefield's nor Wheatley's, but rather the representation of Wheatley's assumption of the speech and position of her "other," the stanza becomes a play upon authorship that finalizes thesynthesis of the positions of evangelist and poet, equating the authority of one with the other. By troping upon both the "authority" of Whitefield as master of his own discourse and on her audience's recognition of this authority, Wheatley has signified on both at once, and her third mask becomes that of the Janus-faced Whitefield/Wheatley, as she exploits the line of difference that creates the "otherness" that names/marks/styluses possess.

But unlike the Signifying Monkey, she is no "empty" signifier, her act of metis/signification figures as a play for the possession of real power by a citizen in a future America, just as the impartial savior (and divine instigator of a future revolution) sends the call for spiritual/secular rebirth to both "Africans" and those of European descent. The third stanza concludes

"Take him my dear Americans," he said,
"Be your complaints on his kind bosom laid:
"Take him ye Africans, he longs for you,
"Impartial Savior is his title due:

"Wash'd in the fountain of redeeming blood,
"You shall be sons, and kings, and priests to God."
(Wheatley 23)

The apparent separation of "Americans" from "Africans" in the conclusion of the sermon would seem to indicate that Wheatley has not granted "Americanness" to herself and others of African origin and descent. If the two categories are to be considered as separate, primary (as regards the "origin" of the African and American peoples), and autonomous, this reading would then be correct. However, it is entirely possible that in Wheatley's reconstructed "America," the condition of "Americanness" was acquired through discourse, not through birth-right. If Whitefield, an Englishman by birth, can be discursively metamorphosed into the voice of evangelizing "Americanness," then to be an American is clearly not just a matter of the geographical location of one's birth. Like Whitefield's process of becoming American through sermonizing and Wheatley's own appropriation of American status (by virtue of her double "shadowing" of Whitefield and of her later decision to write of the "New Born Rome" from the perspective of a member of its polis), to be an American is to participate in the public discourse of "Americanness," a process in which (hypothetically) anyone can participate. "Africanness" then is a matter of perspective: if one of African birth or descent does not enter into the discursive matrix of Wheatley's "America," both present and future, then that subject will remain "African." However, if the subject enters into the Wheatley matrix (which includes as one of its three primary parts a reconstructed Christianity as disseminated by Wheatley's rewritten Whitefield), then "Americanness" can be achieved.

This point is made more forcefully in a 1770 variant of the poem, where those of African descent are told

Take him ye Africans, he longs for you,
Impartial Savior is his title due.
If you will walk in Grace's heavenly Road,
He'll make you free, and Kings, and Priests to God.
(Wheatley 210)

Her appropriation of "Americanness" is not a call to abandon African traditions and roots in favor of assimilation into a European derived mainstream, however. Wheatley's having written herself into the public sphere by way of a volume of poetry that demonstrates considerable African influence both in form and style suggests that rather than integrating herself into a fixed center by becoming a mime of a European, she has instead made an effort to bring the mainstream to her by "miming" (signifying, masking, troping) its discourses. The American becomes Africanized as it is recollected, and vice versa.

Indeed, the process of recollection—of the continual rebirth and of rewriting of the self—takes shape as the crossing point for each Wheatley chiasmus. African into American, God into god, poet into prophet-evangelist—all of these metamorphoses (and this list is not by any means comprehensive of the discursive transformations and reconstructions that appear within the body of Wheatley's oeuvre) are realized only after the moment of revision and reformation. Such a process of change can only occur after one has circled back and returned over a previous path, only after one has gained a "second sight": a process of reintroduction that becomes at once a reversal and a rebirth, a tactic that Detienne and Vernant cite as another example of metis (300). It is here that Wheatley's most intriguing chiasmus takes shape: that of the crossing of classical and African discourses, as Esu and Metis cross paths at a common point, that of the re-presentation of a previous figure/face. But perhaps chiasmus is not the proper term in this instance, for though the intersection of discourses takes place, the paths that follow are not simply lines that follow in one direction of force from the crossing point. Perhaps axis would be more appropriate because the routes that progress from this crossing repeatedly turn back upon themselves, tracing and retracing previous paths. The movements that take place around this axis are perhaps best demonstrated by Wheatley's "On Recollection." This poem functions not only as the pivot upon which the text of Poems On Various Subjects, Religious and Moral starts its cycle of repetition and revision, transforming a "closed," linear collection of poems into a self-reflexively cyclical one,⁵ but as the center around which the text of "Phillis Wheatley" begins to (r)evolve, creating a polymorphous "writeable self capable of resisting any effort to limit its protean powers.

The first line of the poem, "Mneme begin," presents the reader with an apparent aporia, from which it would seem that nothing could logically follow. The reader mindful of the allusion⁶ cannot but be taken aback, for it would seem that memory should properly follow and not lead. For traditional (i.e., Platonic) aesthetics dictates that it is not the function of recollection to announce or create, for duplication and resemblance are always after the fact, far behind the heralds of "original" creation and semblance. In The Republic the recollected, like the mimed, is the double, the supplemental less-than-real that is always already "inferior" to its model, lacking the authority and authenticity of the "original" (Plato 393a, 396a, 396e). Wheatley however invokes Mneme, recollection, mimesis as the authenticating force behind her text, the invocation of the muse serving the same function as the invocation of the patron, that of a provisional appropriation of the master's authority that will "substantiate" what is to follow. This claim to authority extends beyond the bounds of the immediate poetic text, given the peculiar circumstances of Phillis Wheatley: the female slave is invoking Mneme to validate her poetic miming, her simulation of the "masters'" position. Thus, the "other" side of Platonic mimesis—the illegitimate plays of imitation that can lead to the inappropriate education and dishonorable conduct of men and women (Plato 639-41)—takes precedence over the "legitimated" construction that Plato has deemed appropriate for his republic. Wheatley is "acting" (miming) out of her station, subverting the "just" discursive order of colonial society, using mimesis to destabilize the status quo that legitimate poets and mimes would wish to maintain.

This invocation, along with the rhetorical and literal pause between the close of the poem's first sentence and the opening of the next sentence (the four-space gap in the text represents the only use of page space to enforce a caesura in mid line in the entire body of Wheatley's work) serves as a challenge to Platonic mimesis and thus to the critical commentaries that had followed on the subject up to Wheatley's own moment. As the Derridean hymen between semblance and resemblance is crossed, Wheatley's copy asserts its authority over that of the "original," thus calling the status of both terms into question. The forced caesura that follows "Mneme begin" becomes the space of both the original presence and repetitive absence of author(ity), a vacant, unclaimed, unmarked area of liminality and difference into which Wheatley moves and creates her site of origin both for her art and her position as artist. It is also a space into which traditional, Platonic constructions of authority and art erode, their infrastructures undermined by the differences with which they were constructed. In addition, it is the place into which the poet moves to assume her mask, for "Mneme begin" is the call not only for memory to start "her" narrative, but for Wheatley as well. Her performance under the name of Mneme finalizes the paradigmatic restructuring of repetition, as the creative and the recollective are merged.

After she has reclaimed and reconstructed the status of the copy (and of writing, the "other" of speech which functions as her mode for becoming and being), the remainder of the stanza follows:

Inspire, ye sacred nine
Your ventr'ous Afric in her great design.
Mneme, immortal pow'r, I trace thy spring:
Assist my strains, while I thy glories sing:
The acts of long departed years, by thee
Recover'd, in due order ranged we see:
Thy pow'r the long forgotten calls from the night,
That sweetly plays before the fancy's sight.
(Wheatley 62)

After calling on the muses, Wheatley states that her "ventr'ous" performance reflects a "great design." The paradigmatic rupture brought about by the first sentence is opened further as she calls the muses' (and the reader's) attention to an artistic structure larger than that of the poem itself (a work of merely fifty lines): namely, the two vertical (paradigmatic) narratives that are played out within the space of the entire volume, those of the writing of America and of the writing of Phillis Wheatley. The claim echoes those made in "To Maecenas," "On The Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770," and "To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for North America, & etc" for the presence of an American myth being developed in the volume, and of the claims to self-authentication and renewal that are made in "On Imagination" and elsewhere. Given that there is no "clearly" (i.e., linearly) developed national myth in her works and that there appears to be no recognizable linear order for the poems in the volume, it would follow that any claim to the greatness of the design and the subject matter of the narrative must lie along the paradigmatic axis of her narrative(s), suggesting a grand narrative that is to take shape only after the entire volume has been reread (and thus remembered) intertextually. As a result, this claim functions as a call to the reader to reevaluate both the volume and the woman as woven texts after the moment of recollection, making the interpretation of the poem central to the reading of the poet and of the collection as a whole.

The claim to greatness is furthered (albeit surreptitiously) in the lines praising Mneme's "glories," and "spring." The glories of memory, which "sweetly play before the fancy's sight," are nothing other than Wheatley's verses themselves. Recollection is praised as the highest form of narrative, for in lines 22-23, it is said to be "Sweeter than music to the ravish'd ear / Sweeter than Maro's entertaining strains" (Wheatley 63). She thus places her works above those of Virgil (again suggesting the development of a national epic that will be the equal of the Aeneid) and of other more "original" poets. Her hymn becomes a hymn to her work as a whole as well as to herself (and herselves) as master artificer and rememberer who can capture the beauty of Mneme's works.

In the poem's third stanza, Wheatley continues her praise of the power of recollected narratives, of those artists that can createthem, and of those audiences that can appreciate such works and their creators. The revisioning process enables one to appreciate the sublime feeling generated by the reception of a representational work: for in memory, the "original" (i.e., external, memory-making experience/agent) is lost because what remains is the cognitive reproduction/representation of a previous mental construction. Indeed, it would appear that the act of recollection— the measuring of the knowable, affirmative pleasure of the copy against the unknowable, negative pleasure of the "original" (which, lying outside of the mind of the subject, cannot possibly be comprehended in full, in contrast to the mental "reflection" of this external and ultimately unknowable force, object, or agent)—enables the subject to experience a sublime feeling. Though this valorization of repetition would seem to lie outside of the Kantian construction, the negating difference/distance that lies between the knowable "copy" and the presumed "original" is one of the crucial parts of the Wheatley sublime. One of the "ideas involving a higher finality" is the notion of difference itself, a notion that would make the poetry of tropes and of reproduction the most fitting medium for eliciting sublime feelings in an audience, as the self-reflexivity of the trope calls attention to the difference that lies between it and its alleged "source."

The power of memory can also function in a punishing capacity, laying bare the sins and injustices committed by those who "[s]corn her warnings and despise her grace" (Wheatley 63), for

By her unveil'd each horrid crime appears,
Her awful hand a cup of wormwood bears.
Days, years mispent, O what a hell of woe!
Hers the worst tortures that our souls can know.
(Wheatley 63)

In these lines memory and moral conscience are entwined in a manner that links the aesthetic judgment of the recollecting poet with the moral judgment of the Evangelical minister, for it appears that Wheatley is not only addressing herself in these lines, but also her (white) audience, who had inflicted on her no small amount of misery. (Wheatley could certainly remember this misery well; having experienced her abduction and the middle passage, she was clearly familiar with the "worst tortures that our souls can know.") Thus, these lines place the white audience in the position of sinner to be saved by a voice (the poet herself), which could capture the spiritually healing power of Mneme. Additionally, the weight of Wheatley's own memories coupled with that of her own moral conscience provides her with the wisdom to counsel and evangelize herself and her audience. The distance between reborn and recollected becomes very small indeed, and the joining of poet and Evangelist occurs once again. Though Wheatley fashions herself as counsel to her audience, she does not position herself as beyond reproach. Following Christianand Evangelical conventions, she acknowledges her own sins and frailties, stating

Now eighteen years their destin'd course have run,
In fast succession round the central sun.
How did the follies of that period pass
Unnotic'd, but behold them writ in brass!
In Recollection see them fresh return,
And sure 'tis mine to be asham'd, and mourn.
(Wheatley 62-63)

This confession not only reveals her to be of the same human and Christian community as her audience, but also works as a call for the reader to evaluate honestly his or her own follies and shameful acts, not the least of which may have been the enslavement of Africans. Wheatley has given life to a rewritten, reborn self who has been forgiven of past sins and who now walks the path of righteousness. The appeal to the reader to undergo a similar process of confession and rebirth offers her or him the opportunity to follow Wheatley's example. Only after one has gone through this process, can she or he develop the "virtue" outlined in the following stanza, wherein virtue is assigned the role of editor of memories and guide for future experiences. Her virtue is gained only after one has learned from both the blessing and punishing sides of memory because virtue can be learned only as a result of the formation of a moral conscience dependent on memory. The function, of the remembering poet then is not only to "save" the audience but to provide constant guidance for it as well, continuing in this capacity after the evangelical moment has passed. Wheatley again uses the confessional voice when she instructs her audience to position Memory-Virtue-Wheatley as "guide [to] my future days / And mine to pay the tribute of my praise" (Wheatley 64).

Wheatley further strengthens her claim to the position of evangelist-moralist for a future American culture in the poem's closing stanza, which reads

Of Recollection such the pow'r enthron'd
In ev'ry breast, and thus her pow'r is own'd.
The wretch, who dar'd the vengeance of the skies,
At last awakes in horror and surprize,
By her alarm'd he sees impending fate,
He howls in anguish and repents too late.
But O! what peace, what joys are hers t'impart
To ev'ry holy, ev'ry upright heart!
Thrice blessed the man, who in her sacred shrine,
Feels himself shelter'd from the wrath divine!
(Wheatley 64)

The redemptive power of recollection is immanent in everyindividual though it takes the evangelical voice of the poet to bring it out. Those who either ignore the poet's healing, virtuous call or neglect to heed it will be left in the plight of the anguished soul in lines 43-46. The similarity between Wheatley's imagery and that of evangelical ministers as regards the fate of sinners in the face of Judgment Day cannot be missed here though she repeats this figure with a crucial difference. The link has previously been made between Mneme-Wheatley and evangelist-moralist, albeit here Wheatley invokes the authority of a wrathful God endowed with the powers of memory, justice, and vengeance. Thus Wheatley's sense of morality and justice and her construction of the position of the poet as the communicator of the moral and the just to her audience receive divine sanction, making a transgression of Wheatley's code equal to a transgression of God's. The repercussions of these constructions with regards to slavery cannot be missed. Earlier the poet has made reference to the injustices of "the worst tortures our souls can know," a possible allusion to the ills inflicted upon slaves in the colonies. The resonances of this remark carry across from (and cyclically to) "On Being Brought From Africa to America" and "To the University of Cambridge, in New England," in particular, and thence to the entire body of her work in general as antislavery and antiracist statements. For her audience to ignore her call for African-American equality and freedom is to incur divine wrath and eternal damnation. Clearly, the traces left by her "other" styl(us) reveal the echo (the representation or half presentation) of a voice that demands to be heard.

It is an echo and not the original utterance that is heard because her call sounds itself under that of her "other," creating a dialogic signal that can be willfully misread. This misreading, however, equally empowers and enslaves the poet, as the plays of her styl(us), like those of Esu and Metis, always already cut with a double edge. The two sides of the trope enable her to voice a counter-hegemonic "heckling" of the hailing sent by the dominant discourse that would enslave her both physically and intellectually while at the same time subjecting her resembled hailing to the unpredictable forces of interpretation that she herself has attempted to exploit. Neither Esu nor Metis are exclusively benevolent patrons, and once Wheatley has written herself and her America into their space, into the boundary between conflicting plays of force, she has relinquished any claim to finality, as the double edge of her styl(us) cannot allow a single inscription to be left behind. This is not to say that Wheatley's revolutionary attempt was pre-scribed to end equivocally and apolitically. Rather, the undecidability into which Wheatley writes herself and by turn her revised America is a space of freedom and equality. By substituting the free play of African-American difference for the strict order of European definition, she has created a written space of heterogeneity out of a previously hegemonic order, a vision of a future America in which there can be racial difference without racial opposition and oppression. For her, nonclosure was a condition that enabled a process of unlimited becoming and gaveone the power to name one's self. Finality would have been counterproductive, for if one assumes a "final" shape, that final shape can be identified and "named" by another, thus allowing that other to possess one in name. This process was exactly that through which Wheatley had become a slave, the discursive and physical property of another. If she could not, as a result of her own efforts, eliminate the latter condition, it was certainly within her power to write her way out of the former. Only by refusing to "finish" her written self could she maintain her autonomy; thus obtains the paradox that she could only escape the label of "African" by writing herself into the space of Esu (and Metis) and becoming more African in the process.

Wheatley's revision of "Mobe in Distress for her Children slain by Apollo, from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book VI. and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson" illustrates this point. Wheatley has made three crucial changes in the Ovidian narrative—her opening invocation to the muse, her inclusion of the two speeches of defiance by Niobe in lines 165-190, and most importantly, her apparent refusal to end the poem—which elevate the stature of Niobe and which in turn suggest that Wheatley has used the story of the Greek queen punished by Latona for her pride in her ability to bear children as a metaphor for her own struggle.⁷ The possible double function of her invocation to the muse(s) as authenticators of her poetic refigurings has already been discussed with reference to "On Recollection," and it would appear that the same process occurs in this poem's first stanza, where Wheatley writes

Apollo's wrath to man the dreadful spring
Of ills innum'rous, tuneful goddess, sing!
Thou who did'st first th' ideal pencil give,
And taught the painter in his works to live,
Inspire with the glowing energy of thought,
What Wilson painted, and what Ovid wrote.
Muse! lend thy aid, nor let me sue in vain,
Tho' last and meanest of the rhyming train!
O guide my pen in lofty strains to show
The Phrygian queen, all beautiful in woe.
(Wheatley 101)

Her "muse" in this instance may arguably be Mneme, as in "On Recollection." Not only is Mneme the "original" muse, but as the poem is clearly marked in both the tide and the opening stanza as a revision, the invocation of the same figure is entirely appropriate. This invocation carries with it the previous juxtaposition of Mneme to Wheatley though in this instance the figure of Niobe is added to the construction. When Wheatley asks that her muse-self authenticate her plea so that she does not "sue in vain," the phrase certainly carries back to the presentation of Mobe's plight in Ovid's previous narrative, in which she isdepicted as "suing in vain" against the judgment of Latona and the punishing actions of Apollo. Thus the possibility arises that Mneme-Wheatley wishes to authenticate not only her own suit but that of Niobe as well while establishing a parallel between Niobe's pride in her children and that of Wheatley in her poetry. If the equation of Niobe with Wheatley is indeed made, then the presentation of Niobe "all beautiful in her woe" and in her struggle against the gods becomes tantamount to a presentation of Wheatley "all beautiful" in her struggle against the discourses of white author(ity), making the poem a more radical revision than would at first appear.

The heroic elevation of the rewritten Niobe-Wheatley is strengthened by the long passage in which Mobe is shown voicing her will to resist the gods in lines 165-90. The two speeches presented in this passage do not occur in Ovid's text, where Niobe is presented more as a figure for blame than as a heroine worthy of imitation (Ovid 133-43). Wheatley's Niobe, like Byron's Manfred, has the will and the gumption to question the authority of the gods, as she suggested by her "indignant" cry:

"Why is such privilege to them [the gods] allow'd?
"Why thus insulted by the Delian god?
"Dwells there such mischief in the pow'rs above?
"Why sleeps the vengeance of immortal Jove?"
(Wheatley 111)

Presumably, Niobe feels that the killing of her children by Apollo should rightly be avenged by Jupiter-Jove, a move that places Niobe above the god Apollo. As the slaying of her children continues, she does not lose her belief in her own authority or her will to resist the onslaught of the gods, as she attempts to persuade Latona to bring Apollo's killing to a halt:

"Be sated cruel Goddess! with my woe;
"If I've offended, let these streaming eyes,
"And let this sev'nfold funeral suffice:
"Ah! take this wretched life you deign'd to save.
"With them I too am carried to the grave.
"Rejoice triumphant, my victorious foe.
"But show the cause from whence your triumphs
 flow?
"Tho I unhappy mourn these children slain,
"Yet greater numbers to my lot remain."
(Wheatley 111)

Though Niobe recognizes the gods' power and their victory over her, she still insists on negotiating a "suitable" compromise with Latona, suggesting that she believes herself to be Latona's equal in some regard because compromise and negotiation can only occur between two parties who share some common ground. Indeed, thehubristic conclusion of her speech suggests that she regards herself as Latona's better because her surviving offspring remain as testaments to her (pro)creative capacity and because those slain may be eventually replaced. It would appear that what makes Mobe "more beautiful in her woe" is precisely this insistence to place herself on some equal footing with the gods though she is no match for their power and is doomed to fail. Her will to resist and to maintain her conception of her dignity is the foundation of her heroism in this construction. This heroism is, in turn, never vanquished in Wheatley's revision, in which Niobe is left alive at the end of "Wheatley's" poem. Ovid's original text ends Niobe's life as she is turned to stone by Latona before proceeding to concern itself with a related narrative. Wheatley, on the other hand, closes "her" poem with lines 211-12: Niobe is still very much alive though "In vain she begs, the Fates her suit deny / In her embrace she sees her daughter die" (Wheatley 112). Though her "suit" (that of saving her children) has been lost, her "other" suit (that of her struggle for self-authorization against the gods) is not lost at this point because she is still alive and has not been shown as having lost the will to resist. Rather, she still possesses the ability to rewrite herself in spite of the gods.

The next stanza is marked with an asterisk, which notes that "This Verse to the End of the Work is of another Hand" (Wheatley 112). Whether another "finished" what was taken to be an unfinished work or whether Wheatley has planted this note as a deliberate, ruse, the disputed quality of the final stanza leads the reader to "end" the poem at line 212, at a point of nonclosure, where the "finality" of the original has been called into question. Niobe's (and by turn, Wheatley's) suit to maintain the power to rewrite herself in the face of apparently superior forces is left unsettled, a condition that still allows them to create and exercise power. Though Niobe's ultimate defeat has been pre-scribed by Ovid, in 1773 Wheatley's fate was still undecided with the possibility of "American" freedom for her and other slaves still ahead (the Constitution and its three-fifths compromise would not be ratified until 1789, five years after Wheatley's death). Thus, the sustained cycle of textualization, revision, and retextualization preserves what freedom she has written for herself while forecasting an "America" in which racial equality will be realized through the recognition of difference.

For Phillis Wheatley, the "problems" created by plays of mimesis and by the always already doubled edge of the styl(us) presented a solution to her own dilemma, offering paths by which she could trope on established constructions of authority and racial difference in order to voice a counter hegemonic conception of what an "America" could be. As she "snatched the laurel," the double traces left by her styl(us) reveal, as they hide, a vision of an American culture through the eyes of a woman who would have been its laureate, a vision that is as compelling at this historical moment as it was at her own: that of an "America" wherein difference and heterogeneity function not as forces of opposition and division but as forces that create a decentered but none theless unified whole. Unless due attention is given to the self-reflexive and possibly intentional plays of representation in her work, neither her consummate rhetorical skill nor her importance to the study of American culture can be recognized fully, for the particular relation of the poet to mediation and repetition that is brought about by the plays of her styl(us) remains quite unlike anything produced in all of early American poetry.

Notes

¹ Metis is the titaness and first wife of Zeus, figure for the Greek category of knowledge that bears her name. Like the titaness, the user of metis is one who uses the powers of polymorphism, feint, deception, cunning, and resourcefulness to overcome an opponent whose strength would appear to be greater then her or his own. Odysseus is the paradigmatic human figure for this form of intelligence, while other figures include Nestor, Menelaus, and Clytemnestra.

² Shields has noted that, although Wheatley writes in heroic couplets that rigorously obey the ten-syllable-per-line rule for the form, her rhythms do not follow English poetic conventions. Rather than having four primary stresses per line, with one medial stress promoted to the rank of a full one, Wheatley's lines frequently have as few as two primary stresses with three "elevated" medial ones. Shields has identified this pattern as following the traditions of African oral poetry, claiming that "[i]t may be said that she writes in English but that she still hears and reproduces the rhythms repeated countless times by poets of her African homeland" (Shields, Phillis Wheatley's Poetics of Liberation 72).

³ In the Oxford Classical Dictionary, Phoebe is listed as a titaness, daughter of Heaven and Earth and mother to Leto. Her name is also used, however, to indicate her granddaughter Artemis/Diana. In a classical handbook immensely popular throughout the eighteenth century, William King's Heathen Gods and Heroes, however, the only reference made to Phoebe is as mother to Latona (Leto) in the section dealing with the lineage of Phoebus Apollo. King's book was probably in several Boston libraries during the period in which Wheatley was writing, and it is highly possible that she was acquainted with the story of the lineage of Apollo. Under these circumstances, it is possible that Wheatley has "reversed" sun and moon imagery in her work with the moon now having "created" or pre-faced the Sun, thus giving the dark Moon the powers of regeneration and agency usually assigned to the light (white) of the sun. Though the possible influence of her mother's Sun worshipping is worthy of consideration with regards to the use of the sun/son figures in Wheatley's work, the power assigned to Phoebe in this instance suggests that a reevaluation of Wheatley's use of sun/son tropes is in order. It is indeed possible that Wheatley has troped upon this Western figure as she has with others. Thus it is possible that her Sun references could refer to the product of the Moon of her own creativity and poetic voices (which change and re-figure themselves as the moon does in its phases) as well, the Moon functioning as the creative "other," which always lies under the surface, or under the name of the Sun, creating and engendering the Sun's light through its "absence," its definitional power as other.

⁴ The antithesis between nomos and physis reflected two differing world views in fifth-century BC Greece. Those on the side of nomos believed that customs and laws, far from being part of the natural order of things, were discursive constructions that reflected the interests of secular powers and not the wills of the gods. As such, they could and should be changed if it could be shown that such action would be in the best interests of the community. See W. K. C. Guthrie.

⁵ Though Shields has made a claim for "On Imagination" lying in the textual center of the volume in "Phillis Wheatley's Struggle for Freedom," it should be noted that "On Recollection" begins on page 62 of the 124-page text: the exact middle point of the volume. Additionally, though Shields claims that the role of her thought in "On Imagination" is to provide the foundation for her construction of the sublime and thus her conceptions of self-authentication and intellectual freedom, this poem is itself prefaced by "On Recollection," suggesting that Wheatley's imagination is linked with and enabled by the process of recollection and resemblance. In this circumstance, it would appear that the creative faculty is still one more of troping and revising (marking miming as original and not as copy) available constructs than it is of somehow creating "new" ones.

⁶ See William Robinson (273). As with the case of Phoebe, there seems to be some variation here regarding the use of "Mneme." It may be, as Robinson suggests, a shortened form of Mnemosyne. However, an alternative myth for the muses exists that names three, rather than nine, Mneme, Aede, and Melete: that is, Memory, Singing and Meditation, the daughters of Caelus (not Jupiter) and Mnemosyne. This alternative history is cited in King (159), so it is entirely possible that Wheatley may be referring to both Mnemosyne and her daughter Mneme at once.

⁷ John Shields has articulated this view in his lectures at Illinois State University.

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