Early Indigenous Literatures

Wheatley Title Page Annotation 3

However, immediately after Wheatley’s insertion of authorship in the paratexts, she is objectified as her owner’s property, and the paratext states that she is a “Negro servant to Mr. John Wheatley.” Here, Wheatley’s race and servitude are included, although she may not have wanted to be defined solely as a servant. Weyler adds that Wheatley’s lack of self-definition was a common occurrence, writing, “Usually, a combination of venues brought Wheatley’s poetry to the public eye, but all, to an extent, traded explicitly on Wheatley’s personal agency, or lack thereof, that ism, on who she was- a young woman, an African, a slave, an evangelical, a prodigy, a patriot, a Bostonian. These identities are made clear in the paratextual materials that inevitable accompany her poetry.”[1] The example presented here, and Weyler’s broader awareness on countless of Wheatley’s paratexts, both demonstrate the challenges of a writer of color incorporating their own short biography within the paratexts.

In this paratext, John Wheatley’s residence is noted, specifically by the words “of Boston, New England.” Yet, we are unaware if this is also where Wheatley is from and what her origin is. Locating where our authors are from and sharing their stories are another critical component of their authorship and biography, but this addition is not permitted to Wheatley in the paratexual materials.
 
[1] Karen Weyler, Empowering Words: Outsiders and Authorship in Early America, (2013), 39.

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