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What is Walker's attitude towards the poet Phyllis Wheatley?
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Alice Walker views Phyllis Wheatley with sympathy, considering her a tragic figure who was "pathetic" and "misunderstood." Walker contrasts Wheatley with Virginia Woolf, highlighting Wheatley's lack of freedom as a slave compared to Woolf's privileged background. Walker critiques Wheatley's poetry as influenced by white supremacy, suggesting that Wheatley's true legacy may lie in her biological and cultural heritage, possibly inherited from a creative mother in Africa.
Alice Walker introduces Phillis Wheatley with the epithets "pathetic" and "misunderstood." She contrasts her with one of the other major subjects of her essay, Virginia Woolf. Woolf was an educated, privileged white Englishwoman. She grew up amongst the Bloomsbury intelligentsia. Woolf claimed that a woman needed money and a room of her own to write. In response to Woolf's lofty conditions, Walker indignantly asks what we should think about Phillis Wheatley as a writer. She was a slave who owned "not even herself."
Walker clearly feels the greatest sympathy for Wheatley and treats her accordingly. The sympathy is sometimes very close to pity. It veers to pity especially when considering Wheatley's short, tragic life and the lack of understanding that surrounds much of her work. It is hardly surprising, Walker points out, that the goddesses in Wheatley's poetry are classical figures with golden hair. Wheatley learned archetypes from classical...
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literature, like Woolf. Unlike Woolf, she lived in service of a woman with those archetypal qualities.
Walker wants to salvage something more from Phillis Wheatley's life than her poems. Wheatley's poetry is compromised due to her indoctrination into white supremacy. Walker imagines that Wheatley's mother, back in Africa, was also a creative artist, either a painter, a weaver, a singer, or a storyteller. Walker seeks to emphasize Wheatley's biological legacy by looking to the past. However, this tendency emphasizes the fact that Walker sees Wheatley primarily as a tragic figure, broken by a hard life, "pathetic" and "misunderstood."
The poetry and prose of women whose lives were replete with emotional distress and, occasionally, physical hardship was a mystery to Alice Walker. Focusing on the observations of Virginia Woolf, whose suicide certainly illuminated the depths of her emotional distress, Walker examines the writings of women whose origins and lives were considerably less comfortable than that of Woolf. Unsurprisingly given her own experiences and heritage, Walker applies and contrasts Woolf’s observations to the writings of black female slaves and their offspring. Among those was Phillis Wheatley, named for the slave ship on which she was transported, after being kidnapped at the age of seven, and for the white family that bought her and, recognizing her gift for poetry, encouraged her writing. While her own life, at least until “freedom” in a still repressive and racist society weakened her, was not as bad as that of other slaves, it was obviously characterized by the enduring emotional trauma associated with her kidnapping and treatment as an item to be exploited. In examining Wheatley’s poetry, Walker emphasizes the influences of concepts alien to the latter’s native culture, including the notion of racial superiority. In In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, Walker zeroes in on the following passage from one of Wheatley’s poems:
“The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds her golden hair.
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber'd charms and recent graces rise.”
Walker notes the reference to a “goddess” with “golden hair” bound by olive and laurel. The significance of this passage to Walker is clear: Wheatley had been inculcated from early childhood with the notion of white superiority. Christianity, of course, was not native to Africa; it came with missionaries, colonizers and traders from Europe. The suggestion that, by being transported from Africa to North America, she was being liberated from paganism and sin and blessed with Western/white spiritual indoctrination. The following poem illuminates the depth of that indoctrination:
“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too . . .”
What Virginia Woolf referred to as “contrary instincts,” are analyzed by Walker with respect to Wheatley. The suffering Wheatley endured, especially after her husband’s imprisonment for debt, and the deaths of two infants, with the third one sickly (and who die soon after Wheatley’s death at the age of 31), stood in stark contrast to the material comfort that Woolf suggested was essential for the creative process to blossom – in effect, one’s own room with a locking door and the financial wherewithal to be left alone. What, Walker asks, would Woolf have thought of Wheatley and other black women who endured deprivations Woolf could hardly imagine, yet created on a level equal to the Caucasian Woolf. That answer, Walker suggests, is in the relationship between mothers and daughters, and in the enduring bonds that relationship forges. In titling her work “In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, Walker is implying that the answer lies in those bonds and in the heritage passed on from parent to child. As she writes at the end of her essay,
“Perhaps Phillis Wheatley's mother was also an artist. Perhaps in more than Phillis Wheatley's biological life is her mother's signature made clear.”