At just 13 years old, Phillis Wheatley published her first poem “On Messrs, Hussey and Coffn” in 1767, in the Newport Mercury, a well-known Rhode Island newspaper. Wheatley’s early publication marked the beginnings of African American poetry. She would later go on to write about her experiences as an enslaved woman in New England. Her life and work continue to inspire writers, scholars and creatives today. The name Phillis Wheatley has a complex and direct link to her life in enslavement and the rampant oppressions faced by those forced to inhabit a dual role of both American and African in the eighteenth century. It is for this reason that it may be stated that her given name Phillis Wheatley has become a haunted object, one possessed by the specter of slavery.
To further this assertion, it is essential to define haunting. An integral facet of the study of hauntology is the presence of a “specter” and the fluid relationship of the influence the past has on the present. In his 2021 article, “Derridean Hauntology in Selected Poetry of Maya Angelou and Lucille Clifton,” Naglaa Saad Hassan applies the philosophy of Jaques Derrida to African American poetics. In the article, Hassan defines the ability of a specter to exist both actively in the past and the present. Of this he stated, “A haunting specter occupies a liminal space in temporality because even though it belongs to the past, it begins by coming back.” In this light, Derridean hauntology disrupts the fixed notions of time and linear historicity”. It is in this place of past and present one may unveil the specter. Her name, carried as a legacy through the entirety of African American poetics, cannot be undone from her personal experiences.
Accordingly, to understand the source of haunting, Wheatley’s biographical information must be explored. Phillis Wheatley was captured from Africa at the age of seven and sold into slavery. She was transported upon the ship the “Phillis” in her forced journey to America. Similarly, she was purchased by the Wheatley family. These elements of her history are a source of emergence for the specter of slavery. These features of her history also lay the initial groundwork for her identity as an American: She was named for her purchaser, and the slave ship upon which she was transported. With this, Wheatley was forced to occupy her status as both an enslaved African and an American. It is because this name was thrust upon her that it has become an object, one that may be seen as haunted.
Similarly, she received her education in reading and writing from those who had enslaved her, the Wheatley’s. Eventually, she found fame among European readers, as well as American readers, albeit to a lesser extent, through the publication of her first book of lyric verse. This literary acknowledgment did not spare her, however, the cruelty of life as an enslaved woman in New England. She died at the age of 31 in relative obscurity and poverty, forced into the position of a scullery maid for a family, a type of labor she was unaccustomed to after her enslavement by the Wheatley’s. This is an example of how slavery impacted her life, even after she was freed. The specter, in this way, becomes a communal entity, born from the collective experiences of enslaved individuals in the United States.
The specter within her name then begins to grow to enormity and exists throughout generations and centuries. Her biography lends itself to the analysis of spectral origination. Of the haunting present in Wheatley’s life and work, Hassan stated: “spectrality assumes anonymous unidentified form, in others there are distinct specters primary among whom are those of slavery which tends to haunt African American culture per se. In fact, slavery as a theme, an image and a motif has been at the center of African American poetry ever since its very birth at the hand of Phillis Wheatley towards the end of the eighteenth century.”
Here the haunted object could be anything. It could be anywhere. With this, the continuous effect of slavery moves through time, far out and beyond Wheatley’s initial writing. As mentioned, the specter has had time to grow and expand and become a vapor, spread out and breathed into the lungs of America. With this, it does come to seem clearly possible that something like a name could be inhabited by the specter and therefore that same name could be haunted. In his 1903 work The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois presented a clear picture of the liminal space inhabited by African Americans. The duality of Wheatley’s identity as African and American presents the backdrop upon which the analysis of spectrality becomes possible. Despite Du Boi’s work being written over one hundred years after the passing of Phillis Wheatley, it still relates heavily to her identity, thus cementing the concept that spectrality exists in a nontemporal, anonymous form. Of this liminal identity as African and American, Du Bois wrote that one exists as “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body. Whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” For Wheatley, in her lifetime, she was an African, an American, a poet, a slave and a free woman, all of which represent the multitudes addressed by Du Bois, decades later.
The work of Phillis Wheatley is heavily saturated with personal context. This context is birthed from her experiences as an enslaved woman in early America. The resilience of her poetry and its continued influence on modern poetics are all part of that same thread which allows the rooted specter of slavery to haunt her name in the past and present. Her personal strength and the legacy of her work continue to impact readers globally. Her presence and experience are felt in her words. It is through her name that we know her, and it is that same name which has become a haunted object. •
Works Cited: Du Bois, W. E. B, “From The Souls of Black Folk.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd Edition, Ed. Vincent Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 846.
Hassan, Naglaa Saad. “Derridean Hauntology in Selected Poetry of Maya Angelou and Lucille Clifton.” Maǧallaẗ Kulliyyaẗ Al-Adāb – Ǧāmiʿaẗ Al-Fayūm, 2021, vol.13, pp.1139-1173.
Jackson, Virginia. Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric. Princeton University Press, 2023. Thorn, Jennifer. “Phillis Wheatley and New England Slavery.” The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories, 1st ed., vol. 1, Routledge, 2021, pp. 120–128.
