Stenke, Katarina ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4006-3826 (2026) Chapter 11. “Suspend the Sigh, dear Sir”: Politics of voice and address in two elegies by Phillis Wheatley Peters. In: McCaskill, Barbara, Narain, Mona and Robbins, Sarah Ruffing, (eds.) The Lives, Writings, and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. (In Press)

PDF (Author's Accepted Chapter) 51732 STENKE_Chapter_11_Suspend _The_Sigh_Dear_Sir_(AAM)_2025.pdf - Accepted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (261kB) | Request a copy

Abstract

This chapter illumines the politics of voice in Boston poet Phillis Wheatley’s neoclassical elegies in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) and from among her uncollected works. As the first African-born woman to publish a poetry collection in English, Wheatley’s oeuvre has long been of interest to scholars of Early American and eighteenth-century British literary history, and her fiercely eloquent yet politic protests against the injustices of chattel slavery are key texts in the African-American canon. Although the rhetoric and politics of Wheatley’s elegies have been compellingly analysed by scholars including Gregory Rigby, Isani Mukhtar Ali and, more recently, Andrea Haslanger and Antonio T. Bly, scholarship on Wheatley has yet to connect these insights to the gender-ambiguous rhetoric of lament that allowed eighteenth-century English-speaking Protestant women to use neoclassical elegy as a vehicle for political debate. This chapter argues that, as deployed by Wheatley, neoclassical elegiac rhetoric produces a critical deconstruction of eighteenth-century feminine lyric voice as paradoxically disenfranchised yet authoritative and, thus, complicit with Atlantic world social hierarchies and inequalities. Focusing on two linked elegies from the early 1770s, the chapter shows how, adopting a gender-ambiguous elegiac voice derived from classical and neoclassical sources, Wheatley both ventriloquizes and re-codes a set of “antique” metrical patterns, rhetorical figures and religio-literary allusions. In this strategy, which I elucidate via the theorization of voice by twentieth-century poet and critic bell hooks, the authority long sought by eighteenth-century female elegists is ironized by being voiced by a woman who, as chattelized, is doubly disenfranchised. Christian death, as occasion, provides the context and alibi for this subversion.

Item Type:	Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Phillis Wheatley Peters, Early Black Atlantic, elegy, women's poetry, devotional verse, voice, address, eighteenth-century poetry
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics P Language and Literature > PS American literature
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences Faculty of Education, Health & Human Sciences > School of Human Sciences (HUM)
Last Modified:	25 Nov 2025 15:21
URI:	https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/51732

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads