We+Wear+the+Mask

The following was originally published December 8, 2009 at http://eng225cup.blogspot.com/2009/12/we-wear-mask.html F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote "there are no second acts in American lives." There are multiple ways of interpreting that statement, and one way is to see it as a statement on the impermanence of American identity. That is, we constantly shift and re-invent who we are. Somehow that ability came to be built into our national character as something we cultivate and cherish. This is amply demonstrated by the endless supply of celebrities and politicians who screw up, publicly apologize and swear they've changed--and we endlessly believe them. To not believe them would be to not believe the American possibilities for re-invention and personal redemption. (One of the best literary examples of identify re-invention in an American setting is Fitzgerald's own novel, //The Great Gatsby//.)

So what does any of this have to do with Phillis Wheatley's poem "On Being Brought from Africa to America"? Few groups in our history have had to endure re-invention--both forced and self-willed--as African-Americans. Slavery, for example, involved more than economic oppression and forced labor; it also involved attempting to force a slave identity upon the slaves (as Douglass pointed out in his narrative). But as is often the case, slaves, as a culturally marginalized and so culturally powerless group, frequently developed a subversive identity: a surface image to present to those in power, that would hide what was going on beneath the image. The black philosopher and sociologist W.E.B. Dubois called it "double consciousness": the need for African-Americans to be simultaneously aware of their own identities //**and**// how white culture looked at them, and thus be ready to shift identities depending upon the context. As the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar put it, "we wear the mask that grins and lies."



At first reading Wheatley's poem can seem more than a little problematic, at least for contemporary readers who presume to be enlightened. Her identification of Africa as a pagan land (and consequently carrying with it all the pejoratives that come with the word "pagan" to Christian readers), her simile comparing Negros to the blackness of Cain (thus effectively associating both Blacks and the word "black" with sin and outcast), and her use of the word "mercy" to describe being taken from Africa to America have all been reasons for readers to dismiss or ignore Wheatley. And no doubt these perceptions helped make her something of a poetry superstar in her own time, able to rub elbows with the elite of American culture (including people like Jefferson, Franklin and George Washington). Her fame had little to do with appreciation for her aesthetic talents; it had more to do with her role as a poster child for the rightness of the philosophies of the Age of Reason. That this ex-slave could write poetry bore witness to the fundamental possibilities for all humans to succeed, if circumstances allowed it. But likely few if any white readers (and that's who her readers were going to be) thought her revolutionary in her ideas--and that was just fine.

But I don't think Wheatley is that simple, or should be so easily dismissed. First, I think we need to recognize that her point in writing the poem is not to praise her christianization, but to chastise those who would call themselves Christian but behave otherwise. In that way she is in line with John Winthrop, in that she is reminding her readers (again, the majority would be white Christians) how Christians are supposed to behave--not what to believe, but how to behave, how to act on those beliefs. In essence she is calling them to task for politicizing their faith--that is, using their faith to engage in an act of political power. This perhaps reveals a profound level of irony in the poem. As Wheatley says, Negros are perceived as black as Cain; the associations between blackness and sin are embedded in the word "black" itself. Yet it is the Black woman who needs to remind the white Christians just who they are supposed to be.

We might, then, see this poem as a kind of mask. The opening lines are perhaps the mask that grins, the mask that makes the viewer/reader comfortable, the mask that enables her to bring the reader into the poem, where she can then smack them with their own hypocrisy.