Perhaps the best way to conceive of cultural criticism—certainly a diverse and flourishing critical approach—is as an examination of culture under capitalism. As this perhaps suggests, cultural criticism was originally an outgrowth of Marxist criticism. It is important that we establish what “culture” means to cultural critics. Often, the term “culture” is used in reference to what cultural critics recognize as the socially-established “high” culture, which, in the Western world, has traditionally been comprised of such things as opera, orchestral music, canonical literature, ballet, etc. When cultural critics refer to “culture” they refer to something much less narrow (and much less socioeconomically restrictive). “For cultural critics,” Lois Tyson says, “culture is a process, not a product; it is a lived experience, not a fixed definition” (296). Further, Tyson reminds us that a culture is not merely created by individuals, nor does a culture produce those individuals. Instead, culture, according to cultural critics, both shapes and is shaped by the individuals within that culture. Certain theorist, such as Theodor Adorno, have focused particularly on this concept of culture as both influenced by and an influence on individuals. Adorno’s conclusions about culture under capitalism have never been particularly optimistic. “Rigid institutionalization” he says, “transforms modern mass culture into a medium of undreamed of psychological control” (Television and the patterns of mass culture, 495).
This idea of culture as a means of dominance is pursued in depth in a book authored by Adorno and Max Horkheimer, their 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment. To Horkheimer and Adorno, “mass culture” is not a spontaneous production of the masses. Rather, it is a an industry controlled by those who own the means of media production, an industry whose goal, aside from profit, is to maintain and perpetuate the ideologies which allow those in power to thrive. In this way, Horkheimer and Adorno conceive of culture in Marxist terms: it is a way for the ruling class to maintain the status quo, to maintain control and to keep things the way they are. Further, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, cultural productions have lost the possibility of innovation. “Under monopoly capitalism,” they maintain, “all mass culture is identical. . .” (1242). That is, what seems to be innovation, is merely a regurgitated version of what the culture industry knows sells. “[T]here is an agreement--or at least the determination--of all executive authorities,” they continue, “not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves” (1243).
Of course, as theorists such as Sut Jhally have noted, we use media to define our selves and our place within our communities. The media is crucial in shaping our notions of gender, race, sexuality, socioeconomic class, etc. In this way, the modern culture industry is not merely losing its drive for innovation, it is limiting the ways in which individuals conceive of themselves. As a rule, those who control the means media production--books, film, television, and the like--are unlikely to produce anything which does not maintain their dominance. In this way, the ideologies the come through in mass media, are largely the ideologies of those who control the media. Surely this has a profound effect on our approach to literature. It both casts a shadow of doubt on the authenticity of media, and offers an opportunity to resist such domination. Here, we will examine the ways in which one novel--Percival Everett’s Erasure,--acts both as a critique of the kind of culture industry described by Horkheimer and Adorno, and as an attempt at resistance to such a cultural system, a system in which identities are bought, sold and prescribed through the mainstream media, a culture in which authentic identities are erased and replaced by identities fully constructed by the ideologies of those who control the media.
Percival Everett’s Erasure is, undoubtedly, a novel very much concerned with identity from the first page to the last. I do not believe it is at all a stretch to say that it is a preoccupation with identity that undergirds and animates the entire story the novel’s narrator, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, has to tell us. “My name is Thelonious Ellison. And I am a writer of fiction,” he tells us sentences into the novel (1). It is instantly clear that Monk has no intention of merely allowing his character to unfold as his story does. Nor is his first concern with letting the reader know what his story is. His primary concern, here and all elsewhere, is with who he is. As we will see, he is very much concerned—for good reason—with maintaining a complex, individual identity. He is immediately unsatisfied with such a brief, simple description of who he is as the one above. He continues, telling us he is also “a son, a brother, a fisherman, an art lover, a woodworker” (1). It is not until the second paragraph that Monk reveals what he seems to view as the most problematic component of his identity. “I have brown skin,” he says, “curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves, and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race” (1). It is very important to note here that Monk does not necessarily say that he is black. On his list of things he is—writer, brother, fisherman—“black” does not appear. He admits only that society tells him he is black. This work of society telling an individual who they are (and who they should be) is certainly something to which we will have much cause to return as we proceed.
Monk, upon disclosing that he is what society calls black, feels that the reader will inevitably assume certain things about him—those things that society tells us are associated with being black. Monk tells us that he is not good at basketball (there goes that stereotype), what kind of music he listens to (no rap), that he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, that he is good at math, and that he can’t dance. Further, he explains that he did not grow up in the rural south or the inner city, and that he comes from a family of fairly wealthy doctors. Of course all of this stands in opposition to what society and the mainstream media call “black.” At this point, it becomes clear that this is no angst-filled coming-of-age story in which he narrator discovers who he is. Indeed, as will become clear, Monk’s struggle with identity is not solely, or even primarily, internal. His is an external struggle to maintain his complicated, individual identity within a culture that tells him not only that he is black, but what it means to be black.
“The line is, you’re not black enough,” Monk’s agent, Yul, tells Monk when his new novel is rejected for the seventeenth time. Monk is the author of dense, postmodern retellings of ancient Greek texts. At conferences he delivers verbose presentations on such theoreticians as Roland Barthes. We get no sense that Monk is resentful of black society (at least no more than he is of non-black society) nor ashamed of being black himself, but we do certainly sense that being black is not a major concern of his in his writing. As one reviewer comments: “one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ The Persians has to do with the African American experience” (2). Of course Monk is likewise lost to understand what his work has to do with the African American experience. When he enters a Borders bookstore he is “irate” at finding his books in the African American Studies section. “I found a section called African American studies,” he tells us, “and there . . . were four of my books including my Persians of which the only thing ostensibly African American was my jacket photograph” (28). Clearly this illustrates the kind of resistance American readers feel toward works of this nature by an African American man. Since African American’s began publishing in America around the late 18th century, capturing and exploring the “African American experience” has been an important part of African American literature. The writers who first come to mind when one mentions “African American literature”— Wheatley, Morrison, Hughes, Wright, Ellison, Hurston, Walker, and of course, others—have traditionally been concerned with the experience of being black in a white society. I certainly do not intend to argue the validity or importance of such a concern in African American writing. What is important to note here is that, given such a tradition in African American letters, a writer like Monk, who does not write about the African American experience, is met with confusion, as in the case of the reviewer above, or with hostility, as in the case of Hockney Hoover, who asks Yul “who wants to read this shit?” (42). That is, readers expect black writers to write about being black (and as we will see, they expect “being black” to appear a certain way).
Of course, given such reader expectations, writers who meet those expectations are inevitably more commercially successful and profitable for publishers. In discussing the unpublishability of his most recent novel with Yul, Monk asks, “What, do I have to have my characters comb their afros and be called niggers for these people?” (43). Yul is, presumably, not an artist himself. He is an agent, of course, a business man. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he responds. At this point in their conversation, Yul refers to a current book by Juanita Mae Jenkins, a best-seller called We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. Jenkin’s novel is written in a very “black” vernacular and concerns a young girl who is a prostitute, her drug addict mother, and her basketball-playing brother. As one reviewer notes, “the real strength of the work is its haunting verisimilitude” (39-40). The book is wildly successful, at least in a commercial sense. The paper back rights alone go for five hundred thousand, Yul tells monk, and the movie rights go for three million, Monk’s sister says. The nation loves this book. Monk, though, definitely does not. “She’s a hack,” he tells Yul. He continues: “She’s not even a hack. A hack can actually write a little bit” (43). “Yeah, it’s shit. I know that,” Yul agrees, “but it sells. This is a business, Thelonious.” Monk, as the novel continues, becomes ever more aware of the nature of such a business.
After being rejected so many times, and being told repeatedly that his writing “isn’t black enough,” Monk writes a novel, under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, in which he adopts an authorial personae similar to that of Juanita Mae Jenkins, the kind of personae American consumers have come to expect and celebrate from a black writer. The novel, titled initially My Pafology, and later changed simply to Fuck, is written as a parody, a veritable middle finger to the publishing industry. Monk certainly does not expect the novel to be met with such incredible enthusiasm in academic and popular circles alike. It is an instant success, achieving a notoriety surpassing that of the novel Monk so despises: Juanita Mae Jenkins’ We’s Lives In Da Ghetto. Monk receives quite a substantial advance from Random House for the novel and an even greater sum from the studio that buys the film rights to the novel.
Here it will be instructive to turn our attention to an aspect of Everett’s novel we have heretofore not discussed. The novel is surely quite non-traditional structurally. Of course the novel in the form of a journal has been done many times, but Everett’s (or perhaps Monk’s) insertion of episodes that seem, at least initially, unrelated to the rest of the story is not only innovative, but incredibly revealing. Often these insertions take the form of a presumably fictitious (and of Monk’s invention) dialogue between two people, usually artists. I will not here attempt a discussion of all the work these insertions do in the novel. For our present purposes I will focus on one such dialogue.
Immediately preceding the scene in the novel in which we meet Wiley Morgenstein, the film executive buying the film rights to My Pafology, the following brief dialogue appears:
D.W. Griffith: I like your book very much.
Richard Wright: Thank you. (193)
Richard Wright, of course, is a black American author who—unlike monk, at least at the beginning of the novel—is usually considered to focus, in his fiction, on the black experience. D.W. Griffith was also concerned with African American’s in his work, though we can assume, I think, that Wright would perhaps have more to say to Griffith than “Thank you.” Griffith, a pioneer of early American film, is best known for his 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, in which “blacks are portrayed,” according to Sut Jhally, “as irresponsible drunken buffoons, and as out of control, lust-filled rapists of white women” (Dreamworlds). The film has been infamous since its release for its overt support of white supremacy and the Klu Klux Klan, and, as Jhally is right to point out, its terribly inaccurate depiction of African Americans. Nevertheless, the film was a major success, and Griffith, a white man, got rich off of selling the white public an image of African Americans that was compatible with the hegemonic ideologies of the time. In this way, the joke above (and I think we can consider it a joke) is on Wright, not Griffith.
It is important that this dialogue comes right before Wiley Morgenstein—the film producer buying the rights to Monk’s parody/ novel My Pafology—appears poolside, smoking a cigar and contemplating the commercial value of the novel. Morgenstein says to the man with him, “they go to movies now, these people. There’s an itch and I plan to scratch it” (193). Of course the question arises of who “these people” are. The answer seems simple enough: the same people who bought Griffith’s film, the same people who buy We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and, whether he likes it or not, the same people who buy Monk’s (or Leigh’s) novel. This dialogue between Griffith and Wright is a window, I think, into one of the main (if not the main) concerns of the novel. Interpreted this way, it also seems to invite a comparison between Griffith’s film and the two novels within Erasure: We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, and My Pafology. Surely Monk would agree that The Birth of a Nation is very racist. He also seems to think that books like Jenkins’, and even his own book, if taken seriously, are racist. Films such as Griffiths, and novels like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto and My Pafology, Monk seems to think, do not actually portray the “reality” of the black experience—“Have you ever known anybody who talks like they do in that book?” Monk asks his almost-lover Marilyn when he sees Jenkins’ novel on her nightstand. Rather, Monk seems to think these works (regardless of the race of their ostensible author) merely regurgitate and perpetuate the racist ideologies of the dominant consumer class in America for the financial benefit of the publishers and movie producers.
In his film Dreamworlds, Sut Jhally undertakes an intelligent and illuminating analysis of music videos, focusing mainly on the effect of music videos on our cultures conception of femininity and masculinity. “[W]hile black men in mainstream rap and hip-hop videos are largely presented as violent, savage, criminal, and drunken folk, interested in molesting and insulting any female that happens to be around,” Jhally says, “we have to remember that these representations do not reflect the reality of African American masculinity, but how someone has chosen to represent it at this point in history.” Jhally, at this point, connects the current way in which mainstream media portrays African Americans to a long tradition of similar portrayal, beginning, on video, at least, with D.W. Griffith. “[J]ust as it was a powerful white man who created and controlled these images [i.e. those in Griffith’s Film] as an argument for white supremacy,” Jhally continues, “we have to focus our attention on these contemporary images of a threatening and out of control black masculinity on the role played by the largely white men who control our current media empires. We have to ask, what function do the racist and sexist images in hip-hop and rap perform for the corporations who control our media culture?” Of course the relation of this quote to Monk’s experience in Erasure is obvious. Jhally focuses almost entirely on music videos in his study, but his insights are relevant to other forms of media as well. Like in music videos, much of the contemporary literature about African Americans does not present a “real” depiction of the African American experience. Instead, novels such as Juanita Mae Jenkins’ present a particularly narrow image of African American life. Though, as Wiley Morgenstein has surely noticed, this image of African American life is the image that sells. In this way, it is not African American’s themselves who decide how best to portray their own experience, but those who control the mainstream media. Even though African American’s are the author’s of texts concerning African American experience, the distribution of such texts has historically been—and remains today—dependant on the predominantly white controllers of American mainstream media. This is not to argue that all white people are not concerned with fairly portraying African American’s and their culture, but it would be naïve for us to ignore the fact that some white men have, and continue, to portray African American’s unfairly for profit.
I do not wish to analogize Jhally’s argument concerning the mainstream media’s depiction of women with my own argument concerning the mainstream media’s depiction of African Americans too explicitly. Though it would be obtuse to suggest too strong of a link between the story of women in American and that of African American’s, some parallels can be found. Jhally argues that girls and women in America are constantly presented with a very specific way of viewing femininity. “This way of understanding themselves and their bodies,” Jhally says, “traps them inside a sexual imaginary not of their own making, where they are presented only as sexual beings whose main function is to be pleasing to men.” That is, women in contemporary America much too often do not discover or create their own identities, but, tragically, adopt the identity constructed by the (mostly male) controllers of mainstream media. This concept is very present in Everett’s Erasure, though with respect to African Americans. As the novel illustrates, this system of media-created identity is a self-perpetuating one. Since the mainstream media fixes in societies mind what it means to be “black,” a black artist like Monk is forced to buy into this image of blackness if they wish to succeed. Of course their adoption of such an identity adds only to the normalization of that very identity “not of their own making.” The result of all of this, with Monk at the end of the novel as our perfect example, is the “erasure” of authentic identity, and the adoption of a commodified, culturally produced and largely artificial identity which serves to justify and perpetuate the very forces which work to exploit that identity.
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Silence and the South in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel plagued by silence. Its narrator, Huck, is victim to a terror which is never explicitly revealed. Throughout the novel, he is split between a world of boyish delight and freedom—in which the days “slid[e] along so quiet and smooth and lovely” (118)—and a world of dread, characterized by a vague awareness of something that “can’t make itself understood” and that causes Huck to reflect that he “most wished [he] was dead” (13). Huck’s is a dread that is never named, though, as we will see, the cause of his own cognitive dissonance seems to be rooted in another doubleness: that of the South. Twain’s South is simultaneously presented as a pastoral world, free from the trappings of the more fully industrialized North, and as a world of inescapable cruelty, greed, and hypocrisy. Huck’s fractured, almost schizophrenic state of mind is the result of inhabiting a fractured, two-faced, American South. In this way, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel about something that is never overtly mentioned, but that is always present in the background, like the “wind . . . trying to whisper something” (13). Surely one of those things “whispering” in the background throughout the novel is the institution of slavery, and its seeming incompatibility with another very important institution in the South: Christianity.
Neither Huck nor any other character in the novel is a blatant critic of either of these two institutions (even Jim, the runaway slave, doesn’t seem entirely convinced that he ought not to have a dollar amount assigned to his life). This lack of overt criticism of Southern life and culture on the part of the novel’s characters is only appropriate, though, and seems to reflect a long tradition of silence in the American South, and in America more generally. Luckily, Twain is not so hesitant as his characters. Huck may not be fully conscious of it, but throughout the novel, he has a habit of presenting the reader with episodes or situations that are rife with irony, and of revealing, if unwittingly, some possible sources of his unnamed dread.
Let’s consider one very instructive example: Huck’s description of Tom Sawyer’s Uncle Silas, who believes that Huck is his own nephew Tom. “He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see,” Huck says, “But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too” (218-19). Huck continues, informing us that Silas has, on his plantation, a church which he “built . . . himself and at his own expense.” Further, Huck comments on the commonality of such a practice, noting that “[t]here was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.” Huck presents Uncle Silas as simply a “preacher-farmer,” and in doing so, necessarily presents him as a slave-owner-preacher. This is not the first episode Huck offers the reader in which slavery and religion are juxtaposed. We ought to recall an instance in Chapter I in which Huck tells us that the widow Douglas “fetched the niggers in and had prayers” (13). Immediately after she does this, Huck “tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use.” Indeed, it seems to be an awareness (if only an unconscious awareness) of the incompatibility of slavery and religion that depresses Huck so.
Huck pegging Silas as “the innocentest, best old soul” he has ever seen is howlingly ironic. He may be innocent enough to not suspect Huck as an imposter, but certainly not so innocent as to have no part in the enslavement of a race of people, a practice surely incompatible with the Christian ethics he preaches. Huck’s claim that Silas built his church by himself and “at his own expense” is equally ironic. Just as we can be sure that Silas the farmer does considerably less farming than his slaves, we can assume that Silas the preacher had much less to do with the actual building of his church than did his slaves.
Huck’s final note that there are “plenty other farmer-preachers like that . . . down South” is an important one, as it rather explicitly extends the passage beyond a mere description of one plantation owner and into a statement about the American South more generally. Undoubtedly, the institutions of Christianity and slavery have been immensely important in the history of the South; it is perhaps impossible to imagine the course of American history without them. And like the first Europeans who came to the Americas, the inhabitants of Twain’s South (Huck included) are reluctant, perhaps even unable, to articulate the disparity between Christianity and slavery. Both are inescapable realities of the South, yet they are entirely at odds. They are inseparable yet irreconcilable. Huck’s split state of mind may represent an awareness of this Southern dilemma, but even he, at the end of the novel, does nothing but run away.
Neither Huck nor any other character in the novel is a blatant critic of either of these two institutions (even Jim, the runaway slave, doesn’t seem entirely convinced that he ought not to have a dollar amount assigned to his life). This lack of overt criticism of Southern life and culture on the part of the novel’s characters is only appropriate, though, and seems to reflect a long tradition of silence in the American South, and in America more generally. Luckily, Twain is not so hesitant as his characters. Huck may not be fully conscious of it, but throughout the novel, he has a habit of presenting the reader with episodes or situations that are rife with irony, and of revealing, if unwittingly, some possible sources of his unnamed dread.
Let’s consider one very instructive example: Huck’s description of Tom Sawyer’s Uncle Silas, who believes that Huck is his own nephew Tom. “He was the innocentest, best old soul I ever see,” Huck says, “But it warn’t surprising; because he warn’t only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too” (218-19). Huck continues, informing us that Silas has, on his plantation, a church which he “built . . . himself and at his own expense.” Further, Huck comments on the commonality of such a practice, noting that “[t]here was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.” Huck presents Uncle Silas as simply a “preacher-farmer,” and in doing so, necessarily presents him as a slave-owner-preacher. This is not the first episode Huck offers the reader in which slavery and religion are juxtaposed. We ought to recall an instance in Chapter I in which Huck tells us that the widow Douglas “fetched the niggers in and had prayers” (13). Immediately after she does this, Huck “tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use.” Indeed, it seems to be an awareness (if only an unconscious awareness) of the incompatibility of slavery and religion that depresses Huck so.
Huck pegging Silas as “the innocentest, best old soul” he has ever seen is howlingly ironic. He may be innocent enough to not suspect Huck as an imposter, but certainly not so innocent as to have no part in the enslavement of a race of people, a practice surely incompatible with the Christian ethics he preaches. Huck’s claim that Silas built his church by himself and “at his own expense” is equally ironic. Just as we can be sure that Silas the farmer does considerably less farming than his slaves, we can assume that Silas the preacher had much less to do with the actual building of his church than did his slaves.
Huck’s final note that there are “plenty other farmer-preachers like that . . . down South” is an important one, as it rather explicitly extends the passage beyond a mere description of one plantation owner and into a statement about the American South more generally. Undoubtedly, the institutions of Christianity and slavery have been immensely important in the history of the South; it is perhaps impossible to imagine the course of American history without them. And like the first Europeans who came to the Americas, the inhabitants of Twain’s South (Huck included) are reluctant, perhaps even unable, to articulate the disparity between Christianity and slavery. Both are inescapable realities of the South, yet they are entirely at odds. They are inseparable yet irreconcilable. Huck’s split state of mind may represent an awareness of this Southern dilemma, but even he, at the end of the novel, does nothing but run away.
The Rights of Man and American Revolutionary Literature
Any attempt to understand the literature of a certain time and place by identifying a single “spirit of the times” is naïve and inevitably misleading. It is this type of oversimplification that gives rise, at least in part, to the rather strict system of genrefication that has come to organize the texts we read. Of course the processes of genrefication and generalization serve to help us make sense of a seemingly endless pool of literature, and decide what even qualifies as literature. Making sense of literature by generalizing and simplifying, however, often blinds a reader to the complex interaction of personal and cultural ideologies that help shape any given text. To develop this in a more concrete way, let’s consider the literature produced in American during what may be called the revolutionary era. Even a cursory glance at some of the literature of this time seems to reveal the general “spirit of the times”: a preoccupation with the natural rights of man, a heightened concern with the institution of slavery. Indeed, the “spirit of the times” seems summed up by the very act that formally began the era we are here concerned with: America’s declaration of independence from Britain. Yet any attempt to understand the literature of this period as unified by the spirit of independence serves to obscure as much as to instruct. Although, as we will see, certain themes and concerns seem central to a great deal of the literature of the American revolutionary era, merely recognizing these themes and concerns will only get us so far in our attempt to understand the literature produced during this era. Once we recognize these themes, we must examine the ways in which they are used within a given text, and what the various ways in which common themes are employed reveal about the cultural context in which the texts were produced. Here I aim to examine the literature of the American revolutionary era not through generalization (though of course some generalization is perhaps inevitable) but through complication. I will consider four writers—Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Phillis Wheatley, and Philip Freneau. As we will see, the writing of all of these authors is animated by a concern with the rights of man and a consciousness of the injustices of slavery. These authors, though, seem to employ these concerns in different ways; it will be instructive to identify and examine such differences.
Let’s begin with two works that we can consider together because of various thematic and strategic similarities: Paine’s Common Sense and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it is difficult to miss the influence the former seems to have had on the latter. Both texts follow a similar structure: each is, basically, a list of the negative aspects of Britain’s “long and violent abuse of power” over the American colonies, culminating in a call for separation from Britain (Paine, 630). In a sense, Jefferson’s work can be viewed, perhaps, as a response to Paine’s: Common Sense calls for independence; the Declaration, of course, declares such independence. “A government of our own is our natural right,” Paine says (636). Perhaps today this seems a completely noncontroversial assertion, but in 1776, this would have been a fairly radical thought in much of the world. Although Paine seems to feel this claim is a given, it stands in direct opposition to a much older ideology of the western world: the “natural” right of a king to rule. Indeed, a model of power such as the Great Chain of Being suggests that man does not have a natural right to his own government. Instead, he is placed in a hierarchy, situated above women and all other creatures, but clearly below the king and God. In asserting man’s right to a government of his own, Paine turns the older western concept of “the universal order of things” on its side, so to speak (636). That is, he seems to argue in favor of a horizontal power structure. One man’s subjugations to another, Paine seems to say, is unnatural.
Of course the presence of such ideas is unmistakable in the Declaration, in which Jefferson appeals to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God”—perhaps the same laws of nature to which Paine refers (652). “We hold these truths to be self evident:” Jefferson memorably writes, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” etc. (652). It is important that Jefferson establishes these natural rights of man early in the Declaration, as the remainder of the text is basically a catalog of the ways in which Britain has violated these rights of man. As such charges accrue, the rhetoric intensifies, culminating in one final charge against the King (though this charge would be removed before the publication of the Declaration). “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson says, “violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere” (655). Of course, Jefferson here refers to Britain’s practice of enslaving Africans. Clearly, this is intended to be the climax of Jefferson’s argument, though the fact of its eventual deletion and Jefferson’s own involvement with (and apparent support for) the institution of slavery should tip us off to the strategic purpose of this passage. Surely, indicting the king for starting and continuing the practice of slavery in the Americas is intended to operate metaphorically. After all, the Declaration does not produce a call for abolition, but for freedom from British rule. When Jefferson reminds the reader of the king’s injustices toward “the persons of a distant people,” he also refers to the white colonists. This indictment seems to act as a warning to the people of the American colonies. Since the king has enslaved the people of one country—Africa—he is more than capable of enslaving that of another: America (though of course not a country yet).
Though both Paine and Jefferson seem very adamant about the injustices of depriving any individual of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” their ideologies of natural rights and independence are inextricable from the pervading cultural ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy. Though they seem to call for independence, their patriarchal and euro-centric worldviews dictate that they are simply calling for independence of the white man from other white men. The question of the “equality” of such others as the woman or the African would not even be popularly addressed for quite some time, let alone answered.
Perhaps it seems only inevitable that the themes of natural rights and slavery would appear in the writing of Phillis Wheatley—a black woman and former slave—but, as we have seen, the ways in which these themes are dealt with are almost never as simple as we might expect. For a case in point, let’s consider Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” These deceptively straightforward eight lines contain a surprising depth of meaning. “’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,” Wheatley begins. Taken literally, the beginning of this poem presents a surprising view of slavery from the point of view of an African slave. The speaker seems to have completely sold out to the white supremacist and Christian ideologies that served to perpetuate the institution of slavery. To call being made a slave “mercy” seems cowardly on the part of the speaker, and simply false. But a more careful reading of the poem reveals a contrary view. “Some view our sable race with scornful eye” she continues, “’Their color is a diabolic die.’ / Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refined, and join the angelic train” (5-8). A very surface reading of these lines seems to support our initial feeling that the speaker is merely buying into the ideologies of her captor. A more careful reading, however, reveals this poem as quite radical. First, we should consider the speaker’s word choice. She calls her race the “sable race.” This is a curious and instructive detail that seems to suggest a purpose contrary to merely aligning oneself with the dominant ideologies of the white man. Sable, though it refers to black, has a positive connotation, and suggests a celebration of the blackness it refers to. The two final lines of the poem are particularly instructive. By employing the imperative “remember,” the speaker adopts a superior, commanding tone, a very bold tone for a slave to adopt indeed. Further, by associating Negroes with Cain, the speaker seems to remind the reader (presumably the white reader, since most blacks were not readers at all) that blacks are children of Adam and Eve, too, and thus protected by God. Also, the structure of the second to last line is ambiguous. Is she reminding Christians that Negroes “May be refined?” Or is she claiming that both Christians and Negroes may be refined? Either way, the poem culminates on a note of equality. Though the Negro has the inferior position in life, both have the opportunity in the afterlife to “join the angelic train.”
Though Wheatley’s poetry seems to lack the passion and frankness of latter African American writers, such as Langston Hughes or Malcolm X, she can certainly be viewed as a seed of a long and important tradition of African American literature, and her strategy adopted in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reveals a lot about the culture in which it was produce. Firstly, we can assume that any poem that more frankly condemned the institution of white supremacy over blacks probably would not have been published in the first place. The very necessity of Wheatley’s subtlety reveals how extremely powerful and pervasive the ideologies that perpetuated slavery were. Furthermore, the instances of shame and self-hate in the poem (no matter how sarcastic or ironic) reveal the way in which personal ideologies are filtered through cultural ideologies. Even though we can read Wheatley’s poetry as condemning the ideologies that have served to perpetuate slavery, these very ideologies permeate and animate the author’s writing.
Philip Freneau’s hatred of slavery is apparent in his poem “To Sir Toby.” “If there exists a hell—the case is clear—,” he begins, “Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here” (1-2). Indeed, the body of the poem is simple enough. Freneau compares the condition of Sir Toby’s slaves in Jamaica to that of hell itself. It certainly seems, then, that Freneau’s poem is a genuine condemnation of the practice of slavery. What is curious to note though, is that Freneau writes about a British plantation in Jamaica, even though he had ample contact with Slavery in the states. When we consider some events of his life, we perhaps suspect Freneau of being more anti-British than anti-slavery. Like Jefferson, Freneau largely ignores the issue of America’s involvement in the slave trade. That these writers seem so passionate about the injustices of slavery without acknowledging such injustice in their own back yard, so to speak, certainly gives us cause to consider some ulterior purpose in choosing as a subject the institution of slavery. As we have seen, Jefferson employed the issue of slavery in a metaphorical sense, deflecting any “blame” for slavery from America and onto the British. Similarly, Freneau seems to be using the issue of slavery as a means of condemning the British. When we consider the fact that Freneau was, in 1780, captured by a British ship and treated cruelly (as recounted in his poem “The British Prison Ship”) we suspect that anti-British sentiments have, for Freneau, primacy over anti-slavery sentiments. This is not to accuse Freneau of total insincerity. Rather, it is to reveal the complex way in which the issue of slavery animates his poetry.
As the foregoing illustrates, the writing of the American revolutionary era cannot, and should not, be understood as merely unified by a concern for independence and the rights of man. Like all literature, the texts we have considered were not produced within a vacuum. Rather, they were produced within a specific cultural context, and a careful consideration of the texts bespeaks the complex ways in which various ideologies are filtered through one another as a text is produced. Of course, certain topics are bound to appear in the literature of an era, but it is the multiplicity of ways in which these topics are dealt with that allows us to understand the cultural context in which the literature was produced.
Let’s begin with two works that we can consider together because of various thematic and strategic similarities: Paine’s Common Sense and Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Indeed, it is difficult to miss the influence the former seems to have had on the latter. Both texts follow a similar structure: each is, basically, a list of the negative aspects of Britain’s “long and violent abuse of power” over the American colonies, culminating in a call for separation from Britain (Paine, 630). In a sense, Jefferson’s work can be viewed, perhaps, as a response to Paine’s: Common Sense calls for independence; the Declaration, of course, declares such independence. “A government of our own is our natural right,” Paine says (636). Perhaps today this seems a completely noncontroversial assertion, but in 1776, this would have been a fairly radical thought in much of the world. Although Paine seems to feel this claim is a given, it stands in direct opposition to a much older ideology of the western world: the “natural” right of a king to rule. Indeed, a model of power such as the Great Chain of Being suggests that man does not have a natural right to his own government. Instead, he is placed in a hierarchy, situated above women and all other creatures, but clearly below the king and God. In asserting man’s right to a government of his own, Paine turns the older western concept of “the universal order of things” on its side, so to speak (636). That is, he seems to argue in favor of a horizontal power structure. One man’s subjugations to another, Paine seems to say, is unnatural.
Of course the presence of such ideas is unmistakable in the Declaration, in which Jefferson appeals to the “laws of nature and of nature’s God”—perhaps the same laws of nature to which Paine refers (652). “We hold these truths to be self evident:” Jefferson memorably writes, “that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” etc. (652). It is important that Jefferson establishes these natural rights of man early in the Declaration, as the remainder of the text is basically a catalog of the ways in which Britain has violated these rights of man. As such charges accrue, the rhetoric intensifies, culminating in one final charge against the King (though this charge would be removed before the publication of the Declaration). “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself,” Jefferson says, “violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere” (655). Of course, Jefferson here refers to Britain’s practice of enslaving Africans. Clearly, this is intended to be the climax of Jefferson’s argument, though the fact of its eventual deletion and Jefferson’s own involvement with (and apparent support for) the institution of slavery should tip us off to the strategic purpose of this passage. Surely, indicting the king for starting and continuing the practice of slavery in the Americas is intended to operate metaphorically. After all, the Declaration does not produce a call for abolition, but for freedom from British rule. When Jefferson reminds the reader of the king’s injustices toward “the persons of a distant people,” he also refers to the white colonists. This indictment seems to act as a warning to the people of the American colonies. Since the king has enslaved the people of one country—Africa—he is more than capable of enslaving that of another: America (though of course not a country yet).
Though both Paine and Jefferson seem very adamant about the injustices of depriving any individual of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” their ideologies of natural rights and independence are inextricable from the pervading cultural ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy. Though they seem to call for independence, their patriarchal and euro-centric worldviews dictate that they are simply calling for independence of the white man from other white men. The question of the “equality” of such others as the woman or the African would not even be popularly addressed for quite some time, let alone answered.
Perhaps it seems only inevitable that the themes of natural rights and slavery would appear in the writing of Phillis Wheatley—a black woman and former slave—but, as we have seen, the ways in which these themes are dealt with are almost never as simple as we might expect. For a case in point, let’s consider Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought From Africa to America.” These deceptively straightforward eight lines contain a surprising depth of meaning. “’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,” Wheatley begins. Taken literally, the beginning of this poem presents a surprising view of slavery from the point of view of an African slave. The speaker seems to have completely sold out to the white supremacist and Christian ideologies that served to perpetuate the institution of slavery. To call being made a slave “mercy” seems cowardly on the part of the speaker, and simply false. But a more careful reading of the poem reveals a contrary view. “Some view our sable race with scornful eye” she continues, “’Their color is a diabolic die.’ / Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, / May be refined, and join the angelic train” (5-8). A very surface reading of these lines seems to support our initial feeling that the speaker is merely buying into the ideologies of her captor. A more careful reading, however, reveals this poem as quite radical. First, we should consider the speaker’s word choice. She calls her race the “sable race.” This is a curious and instructive detail that seems to suggest a purpose contrary to merely aligning oneself with the dominant ideologies of the white man. Sable, though it refers to black, has a positive connotation, and suggests a celebration of the blackness it refers to. The two final lines of the poem are particularly instructive. By employing the imperative “remember,” the speaker adopts a superior, commanding tone, a very bold tone for a slave to adopt indeed. Further, by associating Negroes with Cain, the speaker seems to remind the reader (presumably the white reader, since most blacks were not readers at all) that blacks are children of Adam and Eve, too, and thus protected by God. Also, the structure of the second to last line is ambiguous. Is she reminding Christians that Negroes “May be refined?” Or is she claiming that both Christians and Negroes may be refined? Either way, the poem culminates on a note of equality. Though the Negro has the inferior position in life, both have the opportunity in the afterlife to “join the angelic train.”
Though Wheatley’s poetry seems to lack the passion and frankness of latter African American writers, such as Langston Hughes or Malcolm X, she can certainly be viewed as a seed of a long and important tradition of African American literature, and her strategy adopted in “On Being Brought from Africa to America” reveals a lot about the culture in which it was produce. Firstly, we can assume that any poem that more frankly condemned the institution of white supremacy over blacks probably would not have been published in the first place. The very necessity of Wheatley’s subtlety reveals how extremely powerful and pervasive the ideologies that perpetuated slavery were. Furthermore, the instances of shame and self-hate in the poem (no matter how sarcastic or ironic) reveal the way in which personal ideologies are filtered through cultural ideologies. Even though we can read Wheatley’s poetry as condemning the ideologies that have served to perpetuate slavery, these very ideologies permeate and animate the author’s writing.
Philip Freneau’s hatred of slavery is apparent in his poem “To Sir Toby.” “If there exists a hell—the case is clear—,” he begins, “Sir Toby’s slaves enjoy that portion here” (1-2). Indeed, the body of the poem is simple enough. Freneau compares the condition of Sir Toby’s slaves in Jamaica to that of hell itself. It certainly seems, then, that Freneau’s poem is a genuine condemnation of the practice of slavery. What is curious to note though, is that Freneau writes about a British plantation in Jamaica, even though he had ample contact with Slavery in the states. When we consider some events of his life, we perhaps suspect Freneau of being more anti-British than anti-slavery. Like Jefferson, Freneau largely ignores the issue of America’s involvement in the slave trade. That these writers seem so passionate about the injustices of slavery without acknowledging such injustice in their own back yard, so to speak, certainly gives us cause to consider some ulterior purpose in choosing as a subject the institution of slavery. As we have seen, Jefferson employed the issue of slavery in a metaphorical sense, deflecting any “blame” for slavery from America and onto the British. Similarly, Freneau seems to be using the issue of slavery as a means of condemning the British. When we consider the fact that Freneau was, in 1780, captured by a British ship and treated cruelly (as recounted in his poem “The British Prison Ship”) we suspect that anti-British sentiments have, for Freneau, primacy over anti-slavery sentiments. This is not to accuse Freneau of total insincerity. Rather, it is to reveal the complex way in which the issue of slavery animates his poetry.
As the foregoing illustrates, the writing of the American revolutionary era cannot, and should not, be understood as merely unified by a concern for independence and the rights of man. Like all literature, the texts we have considered were not produced within a vacuum. Rather, they were produced within a specific cultural context, and a careful consideration of the texts bespeaks the complex ways in which various ideologies are filtered through one another as a text is produced. Of course, certain topics are bound to appear in the literature of an era, but it is the multiplicity of ways in which these topics are dealt with that allows us to understand the cultural context in which the literature was produced.
No name poems #1, 2, and 3
1
Nothing has changed.
The dogs a little fatter,
Is all.
2
In the patch of soil
Below the catalpa,
There's a broken terracotta pot
Buried in snow.
3
At the top of the stairs,
I left directions for you to
Find your way to the bottom;
It's really simple
All you do
Is just keep going
And don't stop until you're there.
Nothing has changed.
The dogs a little fatter,
Is all.
2
In the patch of soil
Below the catalpa,
There's a broken terracotta pot
Buried in snow.
3
At the top of the stairs,
I left directions for you to
Find your way to the bottom;
It's really simple
All you do
Is just keep going
And don't stop until you're there.
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