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Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature
From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison
Geneva Cobb Moore
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Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature
From Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison
Geneva Cobb Moore
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About This Book
An in-depth examination of Black women's experiences as portrayed in literature throughout American history
Geneva Cobb Moore deftly combines literature, history, criticism, and theory in Maternal Metaphors of Power in African American Women's Literature by offering insight into the historical black experience from slavery to freedom as depicted in the literature of nine female writers across several centuries.
Moore traces black women writers' creation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in literature from the colonial-era work of Phillis Wheatley to the postmodern efforts of Paule Marshall, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Through their characters Moore shows how these writers re-created the identity of black women and challenge existing rules shaping their subordinate status and behavior. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and other social science theory, Moore examines the maternal iconography and counter-hegemonic narratives by which these writers responded to oppressive conventions of race, gender, and authority.
Moore grounds her account in studies of Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. All these authors, she contends, wrote against invisibility and powerlessness by developing and cultivating a personal voice and an individual story of vulnerability, nurturing capacity, and agency that confounded prevailing notions of race and gender and called into question moral reform.
In these nine writers' construction of feminine images—real and symbolic—Moore finds a shared sense of the historically significant role of black women in the liberation struggle during slavery, the Jim Crow period, and beyond.
A foreword is offer by Andrew Billingsley, a pioneering sociologist and a leading scholar in African American studies.
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LittératurePart One
Slavery and Abolitionism, Freedom and Jim Crow America
The works of the six writers discussed here contain a microscopic history of slavery, abolitionism, and black emancipation and then the rise of Jim Crow strictures, which sought to limit the newly acquired freedom of African Americans. Their genres are easily recognizable: Wheatley’s religious poetry; Jacobs’s slave narrative; Forten Grimké’s Civil War journals; and Fauset’s, Larsen’s, and Hurston’s early twentieth-century novels. Across their selection of literary genres, these authors provided the visible conditions of their times, which they experienced and/or confronted and described in their work. Based on the variety of their art forms, a set of critical and theoretical assessments is used to elucidate the uniqueness of their style, content, and meaning.
1 | Phillis Wheatley’s Seminaked Body as Symbol and Metaphor |
As Roman imperialism laid the foundations of modern civilization, and led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, so in Africa today we are repaying the debt, and bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilization…. We hold these countries because it is the genius of our race to colonize, to trade, and to govern.1
As the opening quotation on empire and racial arrogance reveals, the image of Africa as the dark and vast unknown has a long and tortured history from the advent of the African slave trade in the fifteenth century to these postmodern times. In examining the iconography of Phillis Wheatley’s seminaked body, marketed on Boston’s slave auction block in 1761, we see her enslaved physical body as a pejorative symbol of the Dark Continent of Africa, pronounced in the rationalization of slavery and the construction of racial grids. Yet, Wheatley’s body can also be interpreted as a metaphor of women’s transformational power, for in coming to write, she gave new birth to herself and founded African American literature. As an artist, Wheatley represents the feminine-maternal capacity to regenerate life, although women as mothers have identities that go beyond that which are gendered and biologically determined. In her study Philosophy and the Maternal Body, Michelle Boulous Walker, like Helene Cixous before her, relates women’s bodily power to their creative potential in opposition to the (in)stability of the father’s universe.2 Samples of Wheatley’s poetry reveal from this perspective her appropriation of feminine and maternal metaphors of power in that she often demonstrates a gender-specific, nurturing, and transformational impulse in selected works, whether her autobiographical poem, political and religious poems, or elegies. Rebirth and regeneration are major motifs in her poetry, of which, as slave-turnedpoet, she is the archetypal model.
Critics such as Robert Reid-Pharr who argue for the disestablishment of Wheatley as the harbinger of African American literature misread her significance as the first African American writer who established the precedence of black authors rewriting the body and human suffering via tropes of healing and recovery. Reid-Pharr posits, incorrectly, that because Wheatley was purchased and reared by the white Boston merchant John Wheatley and his wife, Susannah, she manifested “traits of an ‘unfinished’ literary training” and “an ‘unfinished’ racial identity.” In an attempt to buttress his argument for a new assessment of Wheatley, he states that she lacked a “black subjectivity” and “black singularity.” Wheatley, according to his reading, was “no Frederick Douglass,” who distinguished masters from slaves in the Hegelian sense of the individual striving with the wisdom of historical consciousness and progress. “This is why I have pointed to Wheatley’s interracial domestication in my efforts to disestablish her status as the original author of a noble Black American literary tradition,” Reid-Pharr writes. Wheatley’s seminal autobiographical poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America, 1768” demonstrates, he continues, that her “work does little to establish black specificity” because “she celebrates her enslavement.”3
Yet this autobiographical poem serves as an example of how several Wheatley scholars, including Reid-Pharr, have misinterpreted her double-voiced poem on Christian hypocrisy, which she parodies. In coming to write, Wheatley not only was the first significantly published and celebrated black intellectual artist to re-create herself from a degraded slave to a famous author, but she also was the most cherished who reinvigorated the abolitionist movement. By the time of Frederick Douglass’s emergence from slavery in 1838 to the publication of his first slave narrative in 1845, the abolitionist movement in America and London was well under way, having been advanced by Wheatley as early as 1773. From her autobiographical poem to her later poems and letters, Wheatley emerges as a moral and social reformer of her rigid colonial world. In her poetry she constructs the sociopolitics of civic mothering, caring and nurturing others and fostering a sense of community, beyond the circumscribed boundaries of race, gender, religion, science, and politics.
While drawing upon maternal metaphors of regeneration, Wheatley anticipated the principal tenets of maternal and feminist ethics that contemporary feminists from Carol Gilligan to Patricia Hill Collins attribute to women in their overarching maternal roles.4 White and black feminists such as Gilligan and Hill have defined concepts of a feminist morality in terms of the self in relation to others in the community that the precocious Wheatley, as poet, clearly embraces. In her pathbreaking book In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Gilligan interprets white, middle-class women’s definitions of themselves in terms of their relationship and connection with others, unlike their male peers who view autonomy and individualism as important self-defining values. Feminists such as Collins agree that women’s maternal ethics of fostering care and building relationships symbolize a distinctly feminine characteristic and code of behavior. However, Collins posits that given the unique history of black men and women as enslaved individuals, black maternal and feminist ethics encompass a broader political and social agenda in reforming society in reference to the lives of black Americans. Their survival of slavery was a blow to the established order where their bodies had been given the marginal status of only an economic interest in the marketplace, as Ralph Ellison suggests in the introduction to this work.
On the threshold of a defining moment in history, Wheatley is one of the major precursors of the questing artist in society, advocating freedom and social and political justice on a much larger scale than Gilligan suggests about white women in particular. Wheatley is the first, African American female writer to combine the domestic politics of maternal and feminist ethics on a prominent level, for she wrote poetry that addresses the needs of individuals as well as the redressing of the entire national and global order vis-à-vis religion, science, peace, war, and later, slavery. For example, in her University of Cambridge (now Harvard University) poem, written before 1773, she refers to herself as an “Ethiop,” synonymous with the whole of Africa. She uses her ethnic identity to admonish white college students to make the most of their privileges and opportunities, the luxuries of which are missing in Africa. Wheatley cites her hybrid status (as an African pariah and American Evangelical Christian) to contrast the indigenous but limited world of Africa to the unlimited realm of science in the West, thereby crossing and yet building a bridge across continents and disciplines. While the African scholar Adeleke Adeeko classifies this and other poems (in which Wheatley refers to her ethnic identity) as the poet’s “African poems” of a “New World, Christian, subaltern voice,” imitating her “masters and mentors” and denigrating Africa,5 Vincent Carretta posits that her “exposure to Christianity, and to literacy, soon made her known to fellow believers,”6 nationally and internationally.
Wheatley appropriates her religion “as a primary subject,” giving her the “authority and power”7 to speak to others, democratizing the hierarchy of race and class for the African outsider. In the Cambridge poem science and religion are morally juxtaposed as two determining forces of history. But the logic of science should not supplant, she implies, the importance of faith and religion. She explains, “Students, to you ’tis giv’n to scan the heights / Above, to traverse the ethereal space, / And mark the systems of revolving worlds / Still more, ye sons of science you receive / The blissful news by messengers from heav’n, / How Jesus’ blood for your redemption flows.”8 Although the Cambridge poem does not specifically address the issue of race, Wheatley, the Ethiop, uses race and religion as yardsticks to check the inevitable proliferation of science against the students’ cultivation of an inner spirituality. With her antithetical positioning of race, religion, and science, Wheatley, the self-deprecating and “untutored” African, appears to analyze subtly the inequality of race and opportunity while lauding the triumph of faith, a socially leveling force for her in an enslaving society.
Another illustration of her offering an olive branch of peace in this time after conflict and war is seen in one of her last poems, where she examines political power but applies feminine metaphors of positive social change to human advancement. Wheatley’s poem “Liberty and Peace,” published in 1784, the year of her death, celebrates the achievement of the American Revolution. In this poem she uses gender-specific language to describe the human virtues of peace and freedom, which she characteristically feminizes. She writes,
Lo! Freedom comes …
“She moves divinely fair,
“Olive and Laurel bind her golden Hair.”
She, the bright Progeny of Heaven, descends,
And every Grace her sovereign Step attends;
For now kind Heaven, indulgent to our Prayer,
In smiling Peace resolves the Din of War.9
Justice and freedom, peace and nonaggression are intricately connected to a feminine psyche, but war and aggression (“Navies,” “fraternal Arms,” and “savage Troops”) are firmly linked to a masculine imaginary. She feminizes the word “Columbia” and is believed to be the first to describe America as “Columbia, ‘the goddess of freedom’”: “The Sword resign’d, resume the friendly Part! / For Gailia’s power espous’d Columbia’s Cause.” The goddess of freedom functions as a metaphor of tranquillity after the chaos of war. Considering her violent abduction from Africa, her transition from a state of innate freedom to one of colonial enslavement, done at the will of an avaricious African and European patriarchy, Wheatley’s poetic inscription of feminine powers appears to register her distrust of dominating, imperial authorities. Historically the black female body, as with the example of Wheatley’s youthful appearance at auction, has been a site of the configuration of black women’s identity as indistinguishable from commodified objects, made visible in black women’s socially ascribed roles as slaves, servants, and sexed bodies. Appreciably, Wheatley is the first to rewrite the history of race and gender subordination to international acclaim and social change, transcending her inauspicious beginnings.
The Origin of Phillis Wheatley: The Quintessential Slave Heroine
According to Julian Mason’s introduction to Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, on July 11, 1761, an enslaved and frail African female arrived at Boston’s Feather Wharf10 perhaps wearing only a ragged piece of cloth tied around her tiny waist. Kidnapped from her family in West Africa, probably by Africans, shipped on the slave ship Phillis to America, and sold to the prosperous and religious Boston merchant John Wheatley, the puny slave would later become known as a famous poet whose writings were cited by abolitionists to attack the institution of slavery. However, her inauspicious naming and identity (after the slave ship Phillis) were symbolically inscribed on her seminude body. Her body was displayed as a capitalist tool and product of the African slave trade and European expansionism, and she was forced to stand at auction, perhaps under the typical advertisement of the day: “A Parcel of Likely Negroes Just Imported from West Africa.” The public, partial nakedness of Wheatley’s developing body becomes a symbol of inscription, for on her body was written her foreignness, a politically and socially constructed identity, based on her color, gender, and culture.
The historian Winthrop Jordan has noted, “The Negro’s color attained [its] greatest significance not as a scientific problem, but as a social fact. Englishmen found blackness in human beings a peculiar and important point of difference.”11 Within the cultural context of difference and foreignness, black peoples’ color became an issue of debate over its origin, its cause, and its significance, particularly at a propitious time in history with the growth of imperialism and the slave trade. Slavery was seen by many as a necessary evil in the development of European capitalism, but the stigma of color mitigated this evil in the era of colonialism. Africans or Negroes became “subjects for a special kind of obedience and subordination” to Englishmen who were “energetically on the make,” Jordan remarks, and “sought to possess for themselves and their children one of the most bountiful dominions of the earth”12: land as property. The early pejorative association of blackness with heathenism and difference was one that ascribed to blacks a certain identity, emblazoned on enslaved bodies of which Wheatley’s becomes the prototype. She is perhaps the first clear model we have of an object-turned-subject with a conscious awareness that by writing she was giving birth to a new self, as seen in one of her epistles.
Wheatley’s Seminaked Body: A Symbol of the Dark Continent
Wheatley’s body was indeed a symbol of Africa and social death. As an illustration of this idea, we must consider the following occurrences: 1) the establishment of scientific racism in the eighteenth-century; 2) the John Hancock committee’s affidavit on Wheatley’s poetry; 3) John Wheatley’s separate statement about his slave’s uniqueness; and 4) Wheatley’s writing of a short, autobiographical poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America”—described as one of the most “reviled” poems in the African American literary canon.13 The first of these, scientific racism, contributed to the overarching perception of blackness as a state of negation, a notion delineated in Carolus Linnaeus’s book Systema naturae (1758), in which the Swedish botanist, who invented the term Homo sapiens, divided the human race into four categories. These classifications were based on skin color, temperament, physical stance, and geographical region, hence Native Americans, Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Native Americans were defined as “red, choleric, upright”; Europeans as “white, sanguine, muscular”; Asians as “pale-yellow, melancholy, stiff”; and Africans as “niger, phlegmatic, laxus,” with capricious behavior.14 Although Linnaeus did not design his scientific grid of taxonomy “in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition,”15 Stephen Jay Gould explains, he nonetheless established a perception of race that clearly favored the “sanguine” European over others, especially the “capricious” African.
Perceptions of race as outlined in a grid form and as projected on Wheatley’s diminutive body-in-crisis on a slave auction block helped to fix her body in the racist gaze of the dominating culture, leading to the undoing of her body as a human body. Hers was not a valued human body, except for reasons of economic exploitation. Empirical scientists such as Gould, social scientists from Michel Foucault to Jacques Lacan, and the feminist Luce Irigaray have theorized the disjunctive discourse on race and taxonomy and gender. To various degrees they describe the resulting fragmentation of identities, springing from an enduring low ranking of the cultural Other, ideas useful in a rereading of Wheatley. In The Mismeasure of Man, Gould argues that Linnaeus is not truly responsible for the scientific establishment of racist thought in the eighteenth century, although he influenced it. Gould re...