Fighting Over Phillis Wheatley's Face: Race, Gender, and Imagery in Antebellum America

As tensions flared between abolitionists and slaveholders in the mid-nineteenth century, Phillis Wheatley’s portrait became a battleground on which the fight for racial justice was waged. Black abolitionists insisted Wheatley’s “intellectual countenance” not only disclosed the eminence of her mind, but also demonstrated the broader possibility for African American improvement. White ethnologists, however, argued Wheatley’s features were more “Caucasian” than “Negro.” As a result, they presented her as an individual incapable of representing her race. This paper examines the conflicts over Phillis Wheatley’s countenance. It contends that physiognomy—or the science of reading faces—was one of the primary tools antebellum Americans used to understand the racial and gender hierarchies that defined their world. Although physiognomy became a widespread technology of character detection in nineteenth-century America, historians have largely neglected its cultural impact. Yet in order to understand why visual representation mattered so much to abolitionists—and to the white artists and scientists they criticized—we have to recover the physiognomical worldview of the past. By analyzing nineteenth-century readings of Wheatley’s portrait, this paper reveals the centrality of facial analysis to the struggle for racial justice. It also demonstrates how black writers defined intellect in gendered ways, crafting a vision of black “intelligence” that only uncomfortably encompassed women like Wheatley. Ultimately, this paper bridges the gaps between gender history, art history, the history of science, and the history of the body. In doing so, it reimagines both the rise of white ethnology and the black response to scientific racism.