Phillis Wheatly

The poetry of Phyllis Wheatley was very amusing. Not that I mean to oppugn her beautiful poems, all of which are masterpieces, but reading her work after finishing the exhausting tales of Douglas and Equiano, I felt a bit like some of her eloquent lines were maybe a little…forced. I entered into her section already with the knowledge that despite the many prohibitions a slave would have faced, one could still achieve sophisticated, even scholarly English speech and that a person forced into slavery might be able to be shockingly positive. But Wheatley’s enthusiasm in regard to her own personal enslavement felt like a stretch. From the first line, “Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land” I didn’t buy it. Wheatley’s poems seem so contrived to me that they both failed in serving their intended purposes and impeded my enjoyment.
The first poem, On being brought from Africa to America had two supposed functions, I believe. The first is to prove to wary white people that black people can be faithful and refined. The second function is to comfort slaves oppressed by white slave-owners through the insistence that black people too can be faithful and refined, and therefore, fit in.
The first of these goals was not met, in my opinion, because: many slaves during the first few hundred years in America converted and I don’t believe the majority of white people respected them much more because of it.
The second goal, to appeal to slaves feeling lost, isn’t even probable because:
-how many slaves could even read at the time?
-Slaves were just as much forced into Christianity as they were forced into slavery. In the case of black people, religion just looks like another form of oppression.
Finally, I take the last four lines of On being brought from Africa to America to mean: “there are some people who hate blacks, and think blacks are diabolic. But as a consolation, they are wrong because blacks too can be saved (which I know because it happened to me…)”. Really when broken down, it doesn’t feel very comforting. If the same people who force blacks to convert also think their color makes them diabolical, how is the fact that a black person can convert going to make a difference, Wheatley? Also, she is basing all of this information on her own experience. She was brought to America, taught to believe Christianity and therefore is refined.
This brings me to my main problem with the poem, which is that Wheatley equates refinement with Christianity; only through Conversion can one be appropriate to participate in a respectful society. If refinement and Christianity are the same, the majority of slaves would have been “refined” because they would have already faced conversion. Her belief here doesn’t account then for how many slaves dealt with abuse despite being Christians. But if slaves hadn’t been dealing with such abuse, there would be no need for the poem, with respect to soothing blacks or whites. If Wheatley was writing from her own self-attained conviction, however, which she had investigated and come with on her own without the persuasion of the master’s world-views, there might have been a more powerful message to match the strong language.
I don’t believe that a person would have held the Christianity=Refinement=Acceptance-belief unless it was impressed upon her. I think that Wheatley’s masters, though probably well-intentioned, influenced her so much that her work isn’t interesting on a creative level. I imagine that had she not been heavily influenced by her masters, and written from a more natural standpoint, her poetry would have been much more interesting. Then again, if she had not been trained, her work wouldn’t have been as marketable to those who could read. No educated (i.e. white upper-class male) would have wanted to read the terrible truth about being forced away from family to be a servant. The educated people were the same people responsible for arranging society the way it was; they would want to see people thriving their way. Instead this poem is interesting on a more sociological level. I look to these works to experience an assimilated slave’s endeavor to participate in the Americanized Anglican-inspired tradition of the ancient art form of poetry.
Still, the lesson, which is still a valuable one for this time in history, is that a person, torn from her home and brought to a country to face horrible discrimination (both racial and gender), can still show incredible potential in one of the highest forms of art. This lesson and the inherent beauty of her phrasing, does make her work very satisfying to read today.