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05 - Speaking (Un)freely: Phillis Wheatley and/at the Limits of Classicism
The first epeisodion (ll.147-273) of Euripides' Andromache, is an extended verbal ᾰ̓γών ("contest") between Hermione, the Spartan daughter of Helen and Menelaus and Neoptolemus' wife, and Andromache, the widow of Hector and Neoptolemus' concubine. Therein, the free Hermione taunts the enslaved Andromache by arguing that she, having come into the house of her husband "with a large dowry" (πολλοῖς σὺν ἕδνοις, l. 153), had the right "to speak freely" (ἐλευθεροστομεῖν, l. 153). A fascinating verb - formed from the yoking of the adjective ἐλεύθερος ("free") to the noun στόμᾰ ("mouth") - Andromache, as an enslaved woman (δούλη), did not have such a privilege, and, responding to Hermione's claims, she notes that her status restrains her from speaking - despite the truth of her words - lest she incur harm (ll. 186-187). This juxtaposition of freedom/ἐλευθεροστομῐ́ᾱ ("free speech") and enslavement/inhibition of direct, genuine speech (cf. Ph. 391-2 and Ion 674-5) recalls the ancient rhetorical idea of πᾰρρησῐ́ᾱ ("outspokenness").
A fundamental part of Athenian democracy, parrhêsia was the right of citizens within the public and private spheres to say nearly anything (Wallace 2004: 222-3). The Foucauldian conception of this term hinges its performance on the parrhesiastic individual being free and making no use of rhetoric in their speech - they speak everything candidly and accept the risks that they may experience for their words (Foucault 1983: 19-20). However, this rather narrow conception gives little to no room for alternative ways of engaging in parrhêsia that those who don't have the protection of citizenship and freedom could do so.
This paper re-presents the classicism of Phillis Wheatley (c. 1754 - 1783) through the lenses of ἐλευθεροστομῐ́ᾱ and πᾰρρησῐ́ᾱ. Provided with an overview of the historical reception of Phillis Wheatley's relationship to the classical world, one sees that it has been a particularly fraught area of debate. Her earliest critics derided her as an imitatrix ales and her poetry as little more than well-polished mimicry of the established conventions that governed Anglophone neoclassicism. Such debates revealed the anxiety of a white establishment seeking to preserve Classics' ideological liberality for themselves alone, withholding its vaunted ideals of democratic humanism and freedom they clung to from the enslaved and otherwise unfree. For, if Wheatley's artistry was genuine, then she could be there equal as a ‘legitimate' cultural insider, and thus could share in their ἐλευθεροστομῐ́ᾱ and πᾰρρησῐ́ᾱ. Through an analysis of these concepts and their respective limitations, I examine how Phillis Wheatley's poem "To Maecenas" exemplifies her command of the intellectual world of antiquity, and how she uses it to encompass her personhood and her desire to be free and to speak freely by, at once, adhering to and destabilizing established conventions, signifying her own unique positionality as an individual existing at the intersection of various traditions, nascent and not. And, in analyzing the vicissitudes of Wheatley's life after her manumission, I raise the specter of limits to classical reception, incorporating Audre Lorde's essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1984) and Charles Martindale's reception theory (1993) to make sense of Wheatley's fate.
Presenters
Alex-Jaden Peart, University of Pittsburgh
SCS-20
