LITERARY SUBVERSIONS: the ENLIGHTENMENT SUBJECT in WHEATLEY and MELVILLE a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of San Francisco Stat

LITERARY SUBVERSIONS: THE ENLIGHTENMENT SUBJECT IN WHEATLEY AND MELVILLE A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for 3C, the Degree Master of English In Literature by Joseph David Watkins San Francisco, California Spring 2016 Copyright by Joseph David Watkins 2016 THESIS Joseph David Watkins San Francisco, California 2016 In order to meet the requirements of the degree Master of English in Literature, this thesis discusses how the works of Phillis Wheatley and Herman Melville subvert Enlightenment tropes used in early American economic and political rhetoric to justify, naturalize, and perpetuate instrumentalization. Through analyzing how these subversions operate in relation to the tropes they deconstruct, the thesis advances a radically democratic aesthetic practice based on the production of polysemy and the wild proliferation of modalities of sameness and difference. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee Date CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read the thesis by Joseph David Watkins, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of English in Literature: English at San Francisco State University. Geoffrey Green, Ph.D. Professor of Literature Sarita Cannon, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Literature TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction...............................................................................................................1 Chapter 1: Dark Brilliance and Sun Blindness...................................................... 13 Chapter 2: Usury; Excess Value and 111 Use......................................................... 44 Conclusion.................................................................................................................73 Works Cited 77 Literary Subversions: the Enlightenment Subject in Wheatley and Melville Official language smitheryed to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege is a suit of armor polished to shocking glitter, a husk from which the knight departed long ago. (Morrison “Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture”) ...truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses, coins which have their obverse effaced and are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal. (217 Nietzsche On Truth and Morality in the Ultramoral Sense qtd. in Derrida “White Mythology”) But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. (3 Thomas Paine Common Sense) Given that we construct the present according to how we narrativize the past, reinterpreting the past can allow us to reinterpret the present. Because literature necessarily involves a community to invest it with meaning, reinterpreting the American literary past also creates the possibility of reimagining the American present. I hope to reinterpret some of the stories and metaphors by which we have historically crafted our identities as Americans. I am examining the tabula rasa used as a metaphor for the condition of humanity and illumination used as a metaphor for perfect knowledge, or rationality, as they appear in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley and the narrative fiction of 2 Herman Melville. Both authors subvert the use of these two tropes in the construction of the Enlightenment subject and its attendant social practices. The metaphor of the tabula rasa structurally contradicts itself: how can a slate wiped clean of figures have a figure for itself? As a marking that erases itself as such, it relies on the transparency of language to its users. The figure cannot appear as the site of a historically specific cultural inscription, which it is, for it would then no longer be either itself or pure of circumstance. Its form requires its erasure. The trope of the sun as divine illumination naturalizes this erasure, eliding culturally informed inscription, by which the Enlightenment subject interprets sight, with sight itself (250 Derrida White Mythologies). Because sensory perception occurs even without a social system of inscription to explain it, materiality itself can threaten the cooperation of the two metaphors. Similarly, because alternative forms of subjectification are not naturalized by the Enlightenment subject, their saliently analogous involvement in historical and material circumstance also threatens to alienate the Enlightenment subject from its transcendental pretenses. Consequently, both material specificity and alternative forms of valuation appear as excess in a worldview composed according to the collusion of the trope of the sun as divine illumination and the tabula rasa. By manipulating these “excesses” inherent to the two Enlightenment tropes, Herman Melville and Phillis Wheatley subvert the aesthetics of valuation through which 3 Americans, fictional or otherwise, have been recognized as valuable or in excess of value. Their subversions challenge instrumentalizing language’s ironically simultaneous erasure and promulgation of both sameness and historical specificity; in other words, the subversions challenge the impulse of the wealthy to naturalize their position as a shared right and this task’s consequent obfuscation of the historically specific conditions leading to, and betraying the fragility of, their privilege. Instrumentalizing human life and naturalizing privilege via the erasure of historical specificity go hand-in-hand in American history because justifications for economically motivated exploitation in a nation with serious pretenses to democracy must not appear arbitrary; besides, if privilege doesn’t appear coextensive with right, the pride of position would appear ludicrous. Because such subversions challenge abstract formulations that are commonly complicit in the construction of American identity, they have been historically met in the works of both authors with strong and persistent denial. These subversions interest me as a reader because I have found that instrumentalization opposes my ability to create art, because I am radically democratic and polysemy works in favor of radical democracy, and because my experience of the beautiful belongs to an economy that similarly favors polysemic proliferation, what I would call the wild, as opposed to the domesticated, aspects of artistic production. In order to discuss these ideas at length without repeatedly explaining the theoretical framework in which they make sense, I will now explain some of the more 4 prominent or rhetorically idiomatic terms that I use. By “domestication” I mean the species of highly formalized, institutional, classist and racist subjectification that occurs within America according to interpretations of the Enlightenment subject. By “instrumentalization” I mean the totalization of those subjects for economic gain at the expense of other forms of value, a process that necessarily restricts freedom by limiting human potential to ideological, and, by extension, aesthetic, poverty. By “wilderness” I mean to indicate the potential for change just beyond, or in excess of, the domestic. I don’t mean formlessness, irreverence, a lack of control, or that domesticity is unnatural. Because literary domestication appears to me in accord with my linguistic model, I will also use the word “presence” to indicate the spectral wilderness both presented and obscured by Enlightenment modes of domestication. Presence is the word I use to stand in for unmediated being. I need to use this term because it is my counterpoint to the tabula rasa and the trope of divine illumination. Presence is that which is present and therefore absent from “re-” presentation; in other words, that which is in excess of media. In this case, words used to instrumentalize humanity are the media which re- present presence. By “excess” I mean to indicate that which is outside these figures and their attendant uses in establishing value. Because we are examining how Enlightenment rhetoric is used to naturalize oppressive instrumentalization for financial gain, the presence of that which exceeds economic purposes is the excess by which Enlightenment rhetoric can be subverted. This discontinuity between presence and instrumentalizing 5 representation marks the arena in which I hope to show Wheatley and Melville subversively maneuvering-the trick here is that though presence can never actually appear within the arena, it constantly works at its edges, eroding the discursive arrangements which naturalize domestication at the expense of the wild. There are, however, significant differences between Wheatley and Melville’s subversions. Because white colonials justified slavery according to the denial of African humanity, in the first chapter we will examine how Wheatley exploits tropes generally deriving from Enlightenment models of man and used in the service of metaphysical justifications for slavery. When she exploits these tropes, she does so by breaking from the rhetorical tradition of the Enlightenment in order to meaningfully subvert its sense of boundless mastery, the pretense of rationality and a common justification for slavery, by showing how the originary moment that it identifies as illumination, and naturalizes as sight, is actually an inherited linguistic mode of explication. This is the aforementioned naturalization: the metaphor of the tabula rasa and its attendant sense of absolute mastery largely dictates

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