Engraved Legacies: Bringing Phillis Wheatley's Idle Pose to the Classroom

Abstract:

This essay considers Scipio Moorhead’s 1773 portrait of Phillis Wheatley, Wheatley’s poem “To S.M. A Young African Painter” and the mutual legacy of these two artists. Focusing on the idle pose, I argue that Wheatley explores the relationship between the critic and poet in connection with literary reputation. I draw on theories of idleness (as affect, suspended action) as well as gender, labor, and race in order to argue that Wheatley’s writing reveals her active role in image-making by paradoxically capturing an idle moment, allowing students to contextualize her intellectual labor within the legacy of her authorship.