Icarian exceptions: Race, revision, and American myth

This dissertation examines some American authors of the long nineteenth century that challenged conventional uses of the classics in the discourses of race, slavery, and national "mission." Scholars have recognized the role of classical typology in the formation of American nationalism, but we still lack a comprehensive view of how this typology was reconfigured to counter a national narrative that sanctioned slavery and racial oppression. Mainstream classicism contributed to the elision of the inconvenient truths of American history, most notably the compromise with slavery. The writers in this study recast the classics in a new American mythology that gives a full accounting of the costs of this compromise.;Chapter One shows how Phillis Wheatley uses the classics to extend the revolutionary discourse of freedom from "political slavery" to the cause of the actual American slave. At the same time, Wheatley's skepticism about the success of this endeavor leads her to identify with Icarus, the ill-fated fugitive slave. Chapter Two connects Melville's reading in the classics with his political radicalism. His slavery stories align him with black writers like David Walker and William Wells Brown, who saw the United States as the Roman Empire. Melville depicts the country in a state of imperial collapse; his fictional heroes are fugitives fleeing American slavery as Icarus fled the despotic bondage of Minos. Chapter Three shows how Charles Chesnutt challenges white political supremacy by challenging white cultural supremacy. By revising canonical materials, Chesnutt's black storytellers perform acts of literary "disobedience," which are types of Icarian flight. Chapter Four focuses on Chesnutt's final story, in which he identifies with Aesop. The fabulist Aesop was an Icarian figure (and an African slave) who soared to prominence by speaking truth to power, then fell to his death for the audacity of his speech. In his Aesopian fable for America, Chesnutt draws my study full-circle through a "conjure woman" named Phillis, who recalls Phillis Wheatley and the origins of this revisionary tradition.