Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Phillis Wheatley and Zitkala-Sa
Wheatley and Zitkala-Sa, two important American women writers, represent very different literary (or "story-ing") traditions and were writing over two-hundred years apart. Interestingly, the autobiographical essays of Zitkala-Sa's that you read were composed by Zitkala-Sa when she was living in Boston, the same city in which Wheatley wrote her poems. I won't try here to make too many connections between the two women. That I scheduled on the same day was more accidental than it was purposeful. But, we certainly can learn a lot by comparing the lives of the two women, the rhetorical tactics they each use, the ways in which each claims the space of the page as an owned domain (which brings up many issues related to their rights as individual in their respective eras -- neither qualified as an American citizen in the years during which the texts you read were written), and the important legacy of each of these woman writers for her own ethnic (and religious) home culture and for Americans more generally. Both wrote with the intention of educating a broad swath of Americans about a culture and a people "average" Americans actually knew very little about despite, because of hegemonic power dynamics, they often pronounced knowing a great deal about.
We spoke most about Wheatley in class. One of the most straight-forward questions we considered in class was why Wheatley wrote poetry. We thought up three possible answers, which are on our whiteboard note. The first is that she had her own involuntary bubbling-up of emotion that needed expressing, and her chosen form of expression was the poetic form. We've seen many women this term whose artistic ambitions are suppressed (such as in the case of Edna Pontellier, though she does seek to give them an opportunity to flourish once she moved in to the "pigeon house"). The suppression of these ambitions, and the reality that many women weren't supposed to pursue artistic passion, caused a great deal of frustration, put simply, for women for most of the centuries of American history. Certainly, Phillis might have been doubly oppressed, as she was not her own master or mistress (as she was a slave) and she lived in an era when women artists were certainly a curiosity rather that subjects of deep respect of the public or emulation for other women and girls. So, she might have simply put pen to paper and composed poetry because she couldn't help it. A second reason we discussed was that she was certainly encouraged to write by her master, Wheatley, who was amazed and proud of Phillis's capacity for learning. So, Wheatley's encouragement is another reason why Phillis wrote. In an "activist" sense, we might say a third reason why Phillis wrote poetry was to prove the humanity of African peoples; many who study Wheatley's work consider this an important objective of Wheatley's artistic life. So, this desire to prove "humanity," as we discussed in class, can work on two planes, the spiritual plane and the physical plane. Spiritually, she beseeched Christians to understand that African slaves "were human too," bluntly, and thus, that there should and must exist a spiritual kinship between Christian peoples of all kinds, African slaves who are also Christians (like Phillis), and white Americans who profess Christianity among themselves and instruct/demand their slaves to emulate a Christian moral code. On the physical plane, Phillis argued that bodily, slaves were "people too" and were not dissimilar from the white Americans who enslaved them. Physically, they could both write intelligently (as she demonstrates), work, celebrate, and suffer.
There are so many issues about Wheatley that we discussed and I cannot tease them all out here -- take a look at the whiteboard notes to jog your memory about what we discussed.
As for Zitkala-Sa, we only discussed her autobiographical essays briefly. Stemming from a student's question about Zitkala-Sa's name, which she gave herself and made known, as she says, across the globe, we came to see Zitkala-Sa as an important early-twentieth-century Native America leader and a women's rights activist whose work is significant across cultures. She portrays her younger self as a budding activist, as she describes her autonomous thinking, her willful nature, her "spirited" youthful activity, and her defiance of senseless reprimands and instructions. While she is forthright and willful, she also presents herself as a young person with a deep respect for her traditional Native ways, which she portrays as superior to the ways of the white schoolmasters and mistresses at White's Manual Institution. In her remembrance of her childhood days in South Dakota, she goes to significant lengths to reveal her mother as a woman who respected her young daughter and expected her, trusted her, to make adult decisions regarding many different things, from treatment of elders, to the creation of original beadwork designs, to the critically important decision of whether or not to leave her mother to attend boarding school. Her mother allows her young daughter to make all of these decision herself and reap the rewards or endure the painful consequences.
As a result of being raised to be independent-minded, Zitkala-Sa immediately encounters difficulties with the strict nature of the boarding school even though, within a few years, she distinguishes herself as among the most excellent students, particularly in oratory (suggesting that she came to terms with the authoritative rule-driven routine in the school). But, in the autobiographical essays you read, we see a young Gertrude (her given name) struggling in the boarding school context, missing her mother, and wondering about the harsh treatment the young Native children in the school receive and the dissonance between the words in the Christian bible and the action of those who supposedly embraced these Christian principles.
So, reflect on the poems of Wheatley as, quite possibly, resistance texts, and on Zitkala-Sa's essays as obviously so.
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