SOURCE: "Subjection and Prophecy in Phillis Wheatley's Verse Paraphrases of Scripture," College Literature, No. 22-23, October, 1995, pp. 122-30.

[In the following essay, Scheick examines scriptural references in Wheatley's poetry, and claims that she employs these elements in an "appropriated ministerial voice" in order to emphasize the immorality of slavery.]

The critical response to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1754-1784) often registers disappointment or surprise. Some critics have complained that this African-American slave's verse is insecure (Collins 78), imitative (Richmond, Bid the Vassal 54-66), and incapacitated (Burke 33, 38)—at its worst the "product of a White mind" (Jamison 414-15) and "the barter of [the poet's] soul" (Richmond, "On 'The Barter'" 127). Others, in contrast, have applauded Wheatley's critique of Anglo-American discourse (Kendrick 222-23), her acknowledgment of her African heritage, and her verification of selfhood (Baker 39-41). Some have observed critiques of slavery in her use of classical tradition and irony (Shields), especially in her elegies (Levernier, "Style"). And some have specifically discerned various languages of escape in her poetry, each extracted from the traditions of Western culture (Davis; Erkkila; O'Neale). In her poems on religion, death and art, several critics have argued, Wheatley attained a certain freedom. Especially noteworthy is a mode of liberation occasionally evident in her use of "double meaning and ambiguity," both designed for "the close reader of [her] poems" (Matson 119).

Wheatley's use of ambiguity, it is reasonable to suspect, was partially influenced by her exposure to Enlightenment thinking on human rights and abolitionist theory. This exposure came primarily from the pulpit. Insofar as we know, Wheatley attended the New South Congregational Church, where her enslavers worshipped. By 1771, she had become an active member of the Old South Congregational Church in Boston. At that time the clergy, including those with whom Wheatley had contact (Levernier, "Phillis" 23), integrated religious and political concerns in their sermons (Weber 5-13). Also from the pulpit, as well as from her reading and her discussions with others, Wheatley became familiar with select standard eighteenth-century Protestant commentaries on Scripture and, as well, with approved secular applications of biblical passages. Doubtless Wheatley was very attentive to these exegeses, for the King James version of the Bible was among a handful of her favorite books.

Scripture, in fact, profoundly influenced her writings (Wheatley 15-16). Sometimes the Bible provided her with a means of undercutting colonial assumptions about race (O'Neale 145). Wheatley's dual exposure to theological and secular applications of-loly Writ accounts for the compatibility of her religious and her political writings (Akers 403-04; Burroughs 61-62). This double exposure encouraged her to relate evangelical Protestantism to both Revolutionary patriotism and romance neoclassicism. These combinations in her writings, Phillip M. Richards's investigations indicate, occupy a liminal space of transformed social position where Wheatley rewrites marginality, exults in spiritual equality, and urges her audience to rethink inherited ideologies.

Wheatley's mingling of evangelicalism and patriotism occasionally included her resistance to slavery. Such a moment occurs in "On the Death of General Wooster" (1777), a Revolutionary-War poem written four years after the poet's manumission. In this elegy, Wheatley forthrightly asks: how can citizens of the emergent American nation expect their freedom to prevail against tyranny "While yet (O deed ungenerous!) they disgrace / And hold in bondage Afric's blameless race?" (171). The sentiment expressed in this poem is also present, albeit much less explicitly, in such earlier verse as "To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth" (1773). This poem elliptically associates "wanton Tyranny," which "enslave[s] the [colonial] land," with the "tyrannic" kidnapping experienced by the poet as a child, an experience which fostered her "love of Freedom" (83). Wheatley's attitude toward slavery did not change in the interval between these two poems. What changed was her social status, her emancipation from bondage. In the Wooster elegy she feels free to speak overtly against slavery, in contrast to her covert approach to the subject in her earlier verse. Throughout her career, Wheatley believed that slavery does not "find / Divine acceptance with th' Almighty mind" (171).

In several of her early verses, moreover, Wheatley specifically turns to Scripture to suggest the deity's aversion to slavery. In "On Being Brought from Africa to America," for instance, the direct celebration of her personal delight in Christianity includes a restrained, if resistant, "second voice" subtly speaking through two allusions to Isaiah. As presented by Wheatley's appropriated ministerial voice, these allusions rebuke Christian slave owners (Scheick 137).

This other voice, similarly embedding its unconventional messages in explicit expressions of compliance or gratitude, is evident elsewhere in Wheatley's poetry (McKay and Scheick 73). The establishment of such an alternative voice from within conventional tropes and figures is a feature of resistance literature (Slemon 31). In semiotic terms, this technique may be said to exhibit logonomic conflict—that is, a dialogic encounter between authorized and unauthorized interpretations that implicitly disturbs the status quo (Hodge and Kress 3-12). The detection of logonomic conflict in Wheatley's verse, particularly the emergence of a resistant second voice in contexts in which she makes use of Scripture, enables a better appreciation of both her politics and her artistry. As we will see, Wheatley's deliberate application of biblical matter in her verse often registers undergroundobservations about slavery, observations that she evidently believes are supported by the Bible.

Two special cases in point are "Goliath of Garth" (a paraphrase of I Samuel 17), which was announced in the 1772 proposal for Wheatley's book, and the even more ambitious "Isaiah LXIII. 1-8," which was not listed in the proposal. These two verse paraphrases, both included in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), may initially appear to be unlikely places to observe Wheatley's management of logonomic conflict. Critics, in fact, have shown very little interest in them. Both, however, are nuanced works worth a second look. Both poems evidence an artistic performance barely glimpsed by most readers of Wheatley's poetry.

"Goliath [onl Garth," a recent reader has observed, suggests that Wheatley identifies with David as a servant of humble origin and as a lyricist from a distant land (Foster 41). We might speculate further that the emphasis on David's ruddy complexion in the chapter (I Samuel 17:42) paraphrased by Wheatley, and in the preceding chapter (I Samuel 16:12), may have also encouraged her to identify with the psalmist. Ruddiness, a reddish facial coloration signifying health, is not attributed to any other historical figure in Scripture. As a woman of color in predominantly white Boston, Wheatley may have found the biblical David appealing as a poet of divine favor whose distinctive skin pigmentation made him, as it were, a minority figure among his people.

If we accept the reasonable proposition that Wheatley identified with David, then we should ask why she focused on this, rather than some other, scriptural passage concerning the psalmist. In response to this query, it is pertinent to note that the biblical text featured in her poem records David's emergence from obscurity. Possibly, then, he seemed a type for Wheatley's own anticipated movement from private life to public view. Nevertheless, we still must reckon with the role of combat in this particular biblical text. An emphasis on combat may seem unexpected, perhaps inappropriate, in the work of a poet frequently understood to be adaptive, sometimes even submissive, in reaction to her colonial cultural environment.

Still more surprising is the fact that the militaristic feature of this scriptural passage is enhanced by Wheatley. Just as she invents an angel for the scene (Robinson, Phillis Wheatley 100), she also embellishes the details of both David's encounter with Goliath and Saul's rout of the Philistines. Whereas, for instance, Scripture reports that David's "stone sunk into his [Goliath's] forehead" (I Samuel 17:49), Wheatley imagines that the stone "pierc'd the skull, and shatter'd all the brain" (65). Whereas Scripture reports that "the men of Israel and of Judah arose, and shouted, and pursued the Philistines … the wounded of [whom] fell down by the way" (I Samuel 17:52), Wheatley envisions "scenes of slaughter" and "seas of blood": "There Saul thy thousands grasp'd th' impurpled sand / In pangs of death" (66). Wheatley's intensified dramatization stresses combat as the means of victory over the Philistines and as the means of David's emergence from obscure servitude in Saul's court.

Servitude is indeed a central issue in the Samuel passage. As Goliath indicates, if he is slain the Philistines will become the victor's "servants"; if he prevails, however, the vanquished will "serve" the Philistines (I Samuel 17:9). Following this scriptural emphasis, Wheatley's paraphrase likewise specifies the outcome of the confrontation as "Perpetual service from the vanquish'd land" (61). Thinking about Wheatley's heightening of the scene of combat in her paraphrase, some might detect a displacement of her anger toward those who have enslaved her race, perhaps even a fantasy of retribution vicariously and safely experienced through a dramatic reenactment of her scriptural hero's remarkable feat.

Whatever the viability of such a reading in psychological terms, another interpretation is encouraged by standard eighteenth-century scriptural commentaries on this episode in David's life. While biblical commentaries denominationally vary on certain contentious theological and liturgical matters (such as the Lord's Supper), they commonly agree on such undisputed biblical episodes as the passages from Samuel and Isaiah paraphrased by Wheatley. Matthew Henry's Presbyterian commentaries, popular among clergy and laity alike, are typical in this regard. Henry's commentaries were so highly regarded during the eighteenth century that they were prevalent in numerous households (Greenslade 3:493) and were long-lasting in their influence (Frerichs 4). Such official interpretations of Scripture were primarily disseminated from the pulpit, which was likely the main source of Wheatley's knowledge about the two passages she paraphrased.

Concerning the Samuel passage treated by Wheatley, Henry specifies that the future king of the Israelites did not need a sword because he came, in David's own words, "in the name of the Lord," who "saveth not with [the] sword" (I Samuel 17:45, 47). David's seemingly insignificant sling and stone prevailed, even to the extent of eventually reducing the Philistines to vassalage (2 Samuel 8), because his enemy had been cut by its own sword (Henry 2:378). In other words, the defiant Philistines had defeated themselves.

Commentaries such as Henry's likewise at this point cite another scriptural text, David's prophecy concerning the adversaries of his people: "they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves: all that see them shall flee away. / And all men shall fear, and shall declare the work of God" (Psalms 64:8-9). Concerning this passage, Henry typically correlates tongueshaped swords and sword-shaped tongues. In both I Samuel 17 and Wheatley's paraphrase of it, Goliath's pride combines his verbal defiance and his physical prowess. In turn, swordless David's retort, expressing the sword-like word of God, is objectified in his flung "pebble" (65).

In short, words are weapons. Ministers likely emphasized thispoint, together with a specific application: that for those like David, who come swordless but in the name of God, the chief implement of victory is their adversaries' own language turned against them (Henry 2:378). This interpretation underlies Wheatley's enhanced depiction of the military victory of David, her surrogate in a verse paraphrase concerning the issue of servitude. Wheatley's performance in the paraphrase suggests that sometimes her double-edged language, inspired by Scripture, cuts in two directions.

One direction of her poem is authorized: its meditation on an Old-Testament type who adumbrates Christ's and the Christian church's victory over all Philistine-like forces. The other intimated direction of her poem is unauthorized: its meditation on a biblical hero as a surrogate for a slave poet who wishes to emerge likewise from personal servitude and to witness the release of her people from bondage. This sense, to be sure, is only implied, a nuance in Wheatley's paraphrase. But the internal concern with slavery in the biblical episode, read in light of the poet's insistence elsewhere (as we saw) that slavery defies providential intention, urges our sensitivity to such possible ambiguity in her paraphrase. Like David according to ordinary commentaries on the Goliath episode, the poet apparently allows the familiar and comforting swordlike language of Scripture to reverse-cut, to condemn by "their own tongue," those Philistine-like Christians who enslave others.

This implied inversion is Wheatley's equivalent to David's retort to Goliath. While seeming to do little more than paraphrase and reinforce her Christian peers' traditional understanding of David, Wheatley's re-presentation of the Samuel passage also potentially suggests that Christian slavers are like the God-defying Philistines. With ruddy David (the Christic type) as her model, Wheatley comes swordless but armed with the swordlike Word of God conveyed through the small stone that is her poem. Her poem subtly re-enacts the David and Goliath episode, as prevalently understood in her time, to suggest that Philistine-like enslavers disguised as Christians "shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves." The implied two-edged ambiguity of Wheatley's paraphrase converts the encounter of David and Goliath into a likely site of logonomic conflict, a place of friction between official and unlicensed applications of scriptural authority.

Wheatley's Isaiah paraphrase likewise converts a standard comforting scriptural interpretation of her day into an indictment of certain Christians. In fact, Isaiah 63:1-8 shares several features with I Samuel 17. Both concern military incidents. In the Isaiah passage, which is a prophetic vision, a solitary warrior approaches Israel after a bloody encounter in Edom. This warrior threatens to "tread" on and "trample" all of the enemies of his people, and promises mercy only to those who are faithful to the Lord. Like solitary David in his encounter with Goliath, this envisioned savior in the Isaiah passage is identified by ruddiness, albeit in this instance his coloration is the result of the "blood" of the Edomites "sprinkled" upon him and his "red apparel." A previous defeat of the Edomites, it is worth noting, was the particular occasion of David's attainment of reputation (2 Samuel 8:13-14), a detail recalled by Isaiah. Both passages, linked in reference to David, are generally understood by Christians to foreshadow the New-Testament victory of Christ (Henry 2:378, 4:338).

To appreciate Wheatley's version of Isaiah 63, it is important to consider the context of the prophet's prediction. Recalling David's victory, Isaiah prophesies the appearance of a later, similar savior, a prognostication intended to give heart to his people during their Babylonian captivity. Just as David's encounter with Goliath in the Samuel passage curtailed his servitude to Saul and prevented the enslavement of his people by the Philistines. Isaiah's vision foretells the coming of a David-like figure who will release the Israelites from their captivity. Henry's representative commentary on this prophecy, in fact, directs the reader to a line from one of David's verses, "the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion" (Psalms 126:1), and then speaks of a day fixed for divine vengeance that must be awaited patiently (Henry 4:340). Isaiah's promise concerning "man's release" (75), as Wheatley phrases it, doubtless appealed to the poet as a slave as well as a Christian.

This point in the third stanza of her poem actually demarcates the end of Wheatley's paraphrase. What follows in the remaining three stanzas is not based on verses 1-8 or, for that matter, on the subsequent verses in Isaiah 63. Similar to her management of the Samuel paraphrase, Wheatley now presents a dramatized scene of the savior's liberating battle against Goliath-like "haughty foes": "Beneath his feet the prostrate troops were spread, / And round him lay the dying and the dead" (75). Perhaps the imagery here was prompted by David's standing upon the fallen body of Goliath (1 Samuel 17:51; Wheatley 65) or by Psalm 18:38: "I have wounded them that they were not able to rise: they are fallen under my feet." Whatever the source, if any, Wheatley's presentation of combat here is similar to that in her Samuel paraphrase, but significantly her description in the later verse departs altogether from the text of Isaiah 63:1-8.

The embellished combat scene in Wheatley's Samuel verse, as we saw, conforms to the generic conventions of biblical paraphrase and at the same time intimates an unauthorized application of the official interpretation of this biblical episode. The unexpected combat scene in Wheatley's Isaiah paraphrase, again centered on the issue of bondage, likewise appears to be a site of logonomic conflict, another two-edged verbal sword. In terms of authorized meaning, the combat scene envisions "man's release," the spiritual emancipation of Christians as foreshadowed by the end of the Babylonian Captivity. Unauthorized is a latent secular implication in this scene, the hint that Christians who enslave are like the doomed Babylonians. Again Wheatley's manner suggests a reversal: in the Isaiah paraphrase, as in the Samuel paraphrase, Christians whoenslave are not aligned with God's chosen people but with those who defy divine providence.

This combination of sanctioned spiritual and interpolated temporal readings seems to inform the final stanza of the Isaiah paraphrase:

Against thy Zion though her foes may rage,
And all their cunning, all their strength engage,
Yet she serenely on thy bosom lies,
Smiles at their arts, all their force defies.
(76)

The bosom image derives from Isaiah 40:11 and perhaps reflects the prophet's later forecast of Zion's comfort (Isaiah 51:3). A reversal of present circumstances is also indicated by defies, the final word in the poem. In both 1 Samuel 17 and its paraphrase, the word defy and its variants are specifically associated with Goliath. The paraphrase of Isaiah 63:1-8 ends by suggesting that the pious defiance of those enbosomed by God inverts the impious defiance of their Goliathlike adversaries.

Wheatley's reference to cunning is also pertinent. It likely alludes to Ephesians 4:14: "That we henceforth be no more children … carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive." Possibly, too, the mention of cunning recalls the chief trait of Esau (Genesis 25:27), the man who sold his birthright and who was reputed to be the ancestor of the routed Edomites mentioned at the start of Wheatley's paraphrase (Hastings 203).

"Cunning," however, has another biblical analog. In Exodus this word describes the artistic communication of divine inspiration in "all manner of work, of the engraver, and of the cunning workman" (35:35; cf. 36:8). This sense of special skill and knowledge is not the meaning of the word "cunning" as applied to Zion's foes, who are impiously devious. But if the Isaiah paraphrase (like the Samuel paraphrase) hints at reversals, including the Davidic refunding of defiance in response to Goliath-like forces, then we might reasonably entertain the possibility that Wheatley saw her artistic cunning as a pious antidote for the perverse cunning of those who use Scripture to justify the bondage of her race. Possibly she saw her cunning as divinely sanctioned, scripturally influenced or inspired. She apparently believed that her use of Holy Writ was doubly authorized by select commentaries and the ministerial practice of mingling religion and politics, two sources she encountered in the pew, discussion groups, and books. And from her point of view, this higher cunning would legitimate her pious use of deceptive appearance, her devious use of apparently conventional paraphrase, to implicate Christian slavers as latter-day Philistines and Babylonians. Wheatley would thereby redeem the "arts," invert the stratagems of deception referred to in the last line of her poem, by means of a cunning artsubserviently adhering to scriptural exegesis yet also "defiantly" inferring an unorthodox temporal application.

Both paraphrases suggest a connection between divine justice and social justice, specifically spiritual redemption and secular freedom. In forging this connection Wheatley manages her biblically-influenced art as a verbal double-edged sword. She prophetically reminds her readers that the tongue of God's enemies—including Philistine-like and Babylonian-like Christians who enslave—will fatally "fall upon themselves." The clergy of her day put the Bible to political use, but their practice did not license the laity, much less a slave, to make free with Scripture, the paradigmatic double-edged sword. In a significant sense, then, Wheatley arrogates ministerial privilege when she extrapolates an innovative secular message, even if only an intimated admonition, from the scriptural texts prompting her two paraphrases.

This is the piously "defiant" and "cunning" Wheatley who deserves more appreciation as a social critic and as an artist. The double-voicing evident in such works as her verse paraphrases of the Bible is a version of what W. E. B. DuBois would more than a century later identify as African-American "double-consciousness: … two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder" (15). Embedded within Wheatley's surface compliance with authorized biblical and poetic traditions, is a second voice. By being second, this voice may in a sense remain in bondage to the more dominant voice of authority, but it does indeed speak. Empowered by the swordlike Word of God and encroaching upon ministerial privilege, this swordless voice announces an unconventional message in a manner that crosses gender and social boundaries. To hear this restrained, if subtly defiant voice, is to enrich our appreciation of Wheatley's art.

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