Roundtable by Joellen Delucia
Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable)
DOI: 10.32655/srej.2021.2.2.11
Cite: Delucia, Joellen. 2021. “Enlightenment in The Age of Phillis—The Age of Phillis (Roundtable),” Studies in Religion and the Enlightenment 2 (2): 35-38.
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During one of the earliest conversations in our reading group, we spent time considering the title of Jeffers’s collection, The Age of Phillis. For our group primarily comprising teachers and scholars of eighteenth-century British and American literature, the title instantly evoked the names of classes we had both taken and later taught: “The Age of Reason,” “The Age of Enlightenment,” “The Augustan Age,” and “The Age of Johnson.” Of course, these standard frameworks were designed to mark a range of different shifts in the history of aesthetics and the history of ideas. “The Age of Enlightenment” or “The Age of Reason” often traces a movement from a theistic worldview toward what David Hume famously called “the science of man”; “The Augustan Age” tracks a revival of ancient Greece and Rome as aesthetic models for an increasingly commercial and democratic eighteenth century; and “The Age of Johnson,” using Samuel Johnson as a model, charts the rise of the professional author. The Age of Phillis disrupts these standard narratives and invites scholars and teachers to rethink how the study of the eighteenth century is structured. What does the eighteenth century look like when we center the experience of Phillis Wheatley Peters instead of Enlightenment philosophy, neoclassical poetics, or Samuel Johnson? What happens if instead of teaching Wheatley Peters as the conclusion of a unit on, say, Enlightenment rights discourse that begins with Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft, we instead start with her?
When we encountered a group of poems in the middle of the collection organized under the heading “Book: Enlightenment,” we began to sketch out some rough answers. This section itself is exemplary of how Jeffers’s collection as a whole invites teachers and students to remix and rethink not just the Wheatley Peters archive but the archive of Enlightenment. Indebted, as she acknowledges in her notes to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Trial of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers,1 Jeffers begins with two epigraphs, the first from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and the second from Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764-65): 1) “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately [sic], but it could not produce a poet” ; 2) “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling”.2 Beginning with Jefferson and Kant’s racist assessments of the aesthetic capacities of both Wheatley Peters and Africans, Jeffers explores in this section how the systemic racism built into Enlightenment philosophy diminished Wheatley Peters’s art. This set of poems on Enlightenment also raises new questions about the “paradox of Enlightenment,” making an important contribution to twenty-first-century conversations about the tensions within Enlightenment philosophy and Enlightenment aesthetics exemplified in works such as Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Cutlure of Taste (2011), Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (2003), Karen O’Brien’s Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2009), and J. G. A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion (1999–2015).3
The six poems within “Book: Enlightenment” contrast the brutal abstractions encouraged by Enlightenment systems with the lived experiences of Anton Wilhelm Amo and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, in addition to Wheatley Peters. The first poem in the collection is written in the voice of Amo, the German-African philosopher, who taught at the Universities of Halle and Jena (places still associated with Kant and German idealism) but later in life returned to West Africa. In the poem, Jeffers speculates that Amo’s return was, at least in part, because his “colleagues” refused to confront the philosophical import of the physical world, which the Amo of Jeffers’s poem describes as “a query of material and skin” (61). Amo’s poem is followed by “Illustration: Petrus Camper’s Measurement of the Skull of a Negro Male.” This poem is written in the voice of Camper and inspired by, as Jeffers notes, Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “The Venus Hottentot,” which puts the voice of George Cuvier, the doctor who dissected and then cast the body of Saartjie Baartmann, in dialogue with Baartmann’s own voice, which is absent from the archive. Like Cuvier’s treatment of Baartmann, Camper’s callous probing and classification of a Black man’s skull, “illustrates” (to borrow from the poem’s title) the unfeeling nature of scientific inquiry during the Enlightenment. Jeffers turns Kant’s assessment of Africans in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime on its head and makes the reader doubt the humanity and capacity for feeling of the European philosophers and scientists responsible for creating the taxonomies and classification systems that structure Enlightenment thought.
Written in the voice of Kant, the next poem entitled “The Beautiful and the Sublime” sets the philosopher’s famously inflexible routine alongside the rigid racial hierarchies that emerged from Enlightenment science and philosophy:
first the keen whites
[I rise]
then the mean yellows
[I bathe and dress]
then the savage reds
[I break my fast]
then the trifling blacks
[I take my sweet walk]
the lowly apes at the last
[lonely contemplation]
first the keen whites
[I rise]
When contrasted with his desire to generate universal systems, such as the aesthetic hierarchy he sets forth in the treatise Jeffers quotes in the epigraph, Kant’s existence in Könisberg registers as dangerously particular and insular. His solitary routine and limited lived experience contrasts sharply with the deleterious and universal racial classification systems developed by Kant in his work on aesthetics and, perhaps most famously, Carl Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735). Jeffers’s critique of Kant drives home the irrationality inherent in systems created by provincial white European thinkers to structure “objective” or abstract understandings of a global world. Jeffers returns readers to Kant’s work on aesthetics, reminding us that his aesthetic theory not only gendered the beautiful and sublime but also, like Montesquieu and David Hume before him, used national characters that he knew very little, if anything, about to determine the capacity of individuals to feel and create. His work sorts out those European nations who are drawn to the sublime (German, English, Spanish) from those who prefer the beautiful (French, Italian) and then uses these assumptions to assess the capacities of people in the Americas, Asia, and Africa. For example, in the same passage of Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime that Jeffers cites in her epigraph, Kant refers to Hume’s assertion that “among the hundreds of thousands of Africans who have been transported elsewhere . . . not a single one has ever been found who has accomplished something great in art or science,” and concludes that race and geography determine one’s “capacities of mind.”4 Ultimately, Kant’s conclusion emerges as a “ridiculous” and “trifling” racist assessment issued by someone who knew very little about the world outside Könisberg.5
The next two poems shift to Enlightenment law and Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her uncle William Murray, Lord Mansfield, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, who famously ruled in both the Somerset and Zong cases. The unnamed speaker in the first poem, “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Free Mulatto, and Her White Cousin, The Lady Elizabeth Murray, Great-Nieces of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench,” reacts to the 1779 portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and her cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray, asking readers to “forget [h]istory. She’s a teenager” (60). The speaker appeals to readers and asks them to see the joy and beauty that has captivated viewers of this portrait outside the oppressive structures of Enlightenment, pleading with readers to “Let her be. / Please.” (67). The subsequent poem, “Three Cases Decided By William Murray,” ” places Lord Mansfield, Dido Belle Elizabeth Lindsay’s uncle, in history and in Enlightenment, juxtaposing three cases: the real Somerset and Zong cases for which he wrote decisions and an imagined interior conflict between the private and public Lord Mansfield. The three contrasting voices in the poem (plaintiff, defendant, and judge) reveal the self-interest and emotions that are often channeled through abstract notions of justice. The first section is written in the voice of the Somerset defendant Charles Stewart, a Scottish merchant who purchased James Somerset in Virginia and then transported him to England. Somerset escaped, claiming his freedom on British soil; then Stewart captured and imprisoned Somerset, claiming him as property purchased in Virginia. The speaker in the next section is the plaintiff in the Zong case, Gregson, one of the Liverpool enslavers who sued to be recompensed by the group’s insurance company for the Africans they had thrown overboard during their forced migration. Historians and other scholars have long wondered how Lord Mansfield’s recorded affection for his niece may or may not have impacted his ruling in these cases. Instead of answering this question, Jeffers in the final section of this poem depicts the contradictions Mansfield must have lived with, giving us the fictional trial of “The Public Lord Mansfield v. The Private William Murray, 1787.” Acting as both the defendant and plaintiff, Mansfield leaves behind debates about common and positive law, appealing to natural law: “Dido has become my child. / . . . . Let me protect / my kindred if you will cover / your own. / Natural law will stay: / morality and bones” (70). Mansfield’s refusal to reconcile his public and private selves and his appeal to natural law points to inconsistencies within the Enlightenment legal system, the failure of abstract Enlightenment ideas and principles, and the system’s inability to account for material reality and lived experience.
Jeffers returns to Thomas Jefferson in the final poem of “Book: Enlightenment.” In “Found Poem: Racism,” Jeffers rearranges Jefferson’s racist account of the differences signified by white and black skin color in his Notes on the State of Virginia. She breaks a group of lines at “beauty,” “difference,” and “colour” emphasizing the connection between racist Enlightenment aesthetic hierarchies and his assessments of Phillis Wheatley Peters and her work. Jeffers’s rearrangement of Jefferson’s essay into verse also transforms his essay from an Enlightenment treatise into an aesthetic object to be assessed by readers as he assessed and then dismissed Wheatley Peters and her poetry. Instead of an object of beauty or feeling, Jefferson’s essay emerges as a testament to his failure to feel as well as his inability to apprehend beauty and acknowledge Wheatley Peter’s contributions to the poetry and thought of his era. As a group, the poems in “Book: Enlightenment” testify to the way in which we still live with the consequences of the Enlightenment’s systemization of law, nature, and aesthetics. By using these poems in our classrooms and in our scholarship, we can make sure our interlocutors better understand the history of these enduring Enlightenment frameworks as not just generators of rights and equality but also as part of the architecture of systemic racism. I hope that reading Jeffers will inspire teachers and scholars to retire the familiar frameworks that have structured study of the eighteenth century and embrace a new “Age of Phillis.”
ENDNOTES
[1] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Civitas Books, 2003).
[2] Honorée, Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2020), 59. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
[3] Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015).
[4] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, eds. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 58-59.
[5] Ibid, 58.
