American Literature: Anne Bradstreet - Essay Example

Anne Bradstreet Anne Bradstreet was an influential poet that overcame many obstacles in her lifetime as well as paving the way for future women poets. Born in England, Anne Bradstreet was the second of six children born to Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke. In 1630 she came to America with her father and Simon Bradstreet, her husband, aboard the flagship Arbella. She and her family had left the comfortable life and security of England, (she left behind a comfortable manor house and affluence), where her father was the manager of the estate of the Earl of Lincoln and her husband was attending college, to come face the harsh and dangerous conditions of the New World. Apart from the tough living conditions, Anne Bradstreet led a challenging life, always keeping up with the demands of being the mother of eight children and the wife of a Puritan Governor. She had to uproot her household on numerous occasions and move to even more distant, uncivilized and unknown areas so that her husband and father could increase their properties and gain even more political power in their colony. Even though Anne Bradstreet's father was a very powerful, prominent leader of the Puritan community, he inspired his daughter to become a poet. Thomas Dudley was amazingly encouraging of his Bradstreet's literally appetite and never opposed her desire to either learn or write; she was very educated for a woman of her times. So it is very understandable why she dedicated so much of her best work to him, "her "Quaternions," or poems on groups of four: the four elements, the four humors, the four ages of man, the four seasons of the year, and the four monarchies-the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman" were all him. (Martin 14). This could be the key reason that despite the severe demands of Puritanism, Anne Bradstreet was the first woman poet to have her work published in the New World. Her first publication, "The Tenth Muse Lately sprung up in America, By a Gentlewoman in those parts" was not recognized for best poems and it was published in 1650 by Steven Bowtell. Her brother-in-law, Rev. John Woodbridge had taken a manuscript of her poems to London, in 1647 and had them published without her authorization. Many think the reason he did this was to prove that females could be educated, write and published without coming into direct competition or becoming inferior to men. Bradstreet was caught wholly off-guard and was a little embarrassed too, not by her work itself but simply by the publication of it. It is best explained in her own words: "I cast thee by as one unfit for light, Thy visage was so irksome in my sight; Yet being mine own, at length affection would Thy blemishes amend, if so I could: I washed thy face, but more defects I saw, And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw." (Millier and Parini 4). However by 1666 she was already hopeful of publishing a second edition. No such manuscript exists but the 1678 publication of "Several Poems", "By a Gentlewoman in New England . . . Corrected by the Author and enlarged by an Addition of several other Poems found amongst her Papers after her Death" shows the feminist poet at the height of her literally best. Bradstreet lived in a society where they needed their religious beliefs to survive the rigorous stress of the New World; their concrete faith dictated that God had a plan for everyone was what got them through. While Bradstreet's faith was absolute, there were times when she struggled to keep faith. In her spiritual autobiography addressed to her children, she confesses that on occasion she wondered about the truth of the Scriptures and questioned the existence of God and His plans. "I never saw any miracles to confirm me," she says in her autobiography and adds, "and those which I read of how did [I] know but they were feigned." (Lonsdale 185). She ultimately quelled her fears and subdued her doubts not through theological reasoning but through a poet's spirit. Initially Bradstreet's writings were not religious but after struggling with the antithetical demands of literary ambition and religious dogma, Bradstreet finally managed to combine piety and art by viewing her writing as a chronicle of preparation for eternal union with God. (Martin 34). "That there is a God my reason would soon tell me by the wondrous works that I see, the vast frame of the heaven and the earth, the order of all things, night and day, summer and winter, spring and autumn, the daily providing for this great household upon the earth, the preserving and directing of all to its proper end." (White 186). She enfolded herself in discipline to control her straying thoughts and to channel her energy, which she thought would otherwise lead her astray. It is true that Puritans usually kept diaries and those which didn't perish simply pleaded guilty to parental disobedience and nothing more alarming or predictable. Anne Bradstreet's honesty has to be noted. Her frank admission of her "times of sinkings and droopings" in her spiritual pilgrimage has to be admired. Bradstreet rejected her love of the world as vanity and rejected the satanic lure of carnality; she was deeply influenced by her religious perspective. Puritans were no indifferent to the splendor of this world and Bradstreet was no exception. She was very affected by the beauty of nature and seemed to love her earthly life so much that she dedicated herself to God in the anticipation that the immense joy she felt in this world would be sustained for all eternity twice fold, in heaven. While she was no romantic, her poetry is a reflection of how her belief in heaven was actually a sublime expression for her love on earth. Her poetry also shows how she acknowledges the difference between this temporary fleeting world and that of the heavenly kingdom: "The city where I hope to dwell, There's none on earth can parallel; The stately walls both high and strong, Are made of precious jasper stone; The gates of pearl, both rich and clear, And angels are for porters there; The streets thereof transparent gold, Such as no eye did e'er behold; A crystal river there doth run, Which doth proceed from the Lamb's throne." (White 187). She struggled to accept her mortality and tried her best to prepare for death, heaven and eternity. But it probably wasn't till the end, i.e. the 1650's and 1660's when she grew sick and suffered great losses that she finally learnt to accept God's will, without trying to bargain in any way. She believed that was God's way of chastening her. The Puritan's believed that it was only a broken spirit that would enter heaven because it was only a broken spirit that was humble enough to serve God. So strong was their faith in this belief that food shortages, Indian attacks, disease, and death were perceived as divine chastisement rather than disaster. Even though she was a strict puritan, Bradstreet had considerable liberal feministic views for a woman of her times. She was very instrumental in bringing changes about for the enhancement of women privileges, albeit she was completely unconscious of how. Perhaps this is because she refused to hover over the opposition of males and females, instead she believed that the earthly body had nothing to do with the translation into the spiritual one. To argue for the insignificance of the sex of the natural body, Bradstreet drew on what Nancy E. Wright has called, "the legal fiction" of the king's two bodies. (Wright 256). In her elegy "In honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen ELIZABETH, of most happy memory" (1650), Bradstreet claims "That men account it no impiety,/ To say, thou wert a Teshly Diety." (Keeble 86). She says that even though Elizabeth was a female, her sex did not to hamper the kind of ruler she was and her virtues. So Elizabeth will rise above the earthly body to embrace the heavenly kingdom, women too have the wisdom to be rulers as they too have equal access to a body that knows no sex. She was careful not to describe the heavenly body; she merely contended that it was above the earthly body. What is very interesting to note that despite the controversy this could have bought up in the Puritan 1600's (women were considered inferior to men) it actually went hand in hand with her religion; the Puritan religion said that the earthly form of the body was not to be given any importance, of course besides that she was praising a monarch, someone who had proved to be superior. Bradstreet ensured that this came through in her work. In one simple, swift move she vindicated the female wisdom of its earlier charges of being witless. Her work is said to provide "a model for future generations of women" because of her "insistence on the primacy of personal experience." (Egan 82). She was a forerunner for other woman struggling to enter the completely male dominate poetry writing field, while constantly remaining true to her female form and her Puritan beliefs. None the less she was very aware of the denunciation females who wrote and published their work received. She accepted the struggle to write poetry in a society that was hostile to the imagination and she managed to express the range of her personal expression through it all. When she wrote the Quaternions she had to keep plot a course that would allow her to be a woman writing poetry and illustrating her belief in female values, while still keeping in mind the resistance faced by her gender and taking care not to offend her society greatly. She kept defining natural drawbacks and enforced incapacitates and in doing so relentlessly insinuated that their society's continual suppression of women was the reason for their inferior status. She was the daughter of one colonial governor and the wife of another and she knew she had more freedom than most other women, yet she knew that she wasn't that protected against the scorn that women who crossed their boundaries received. And of course she still attracted a great deal of criticism and she handled all of it with in a straight forward and determined manner, and this is evident in her prologues. What is written in "The Prologue" is probably her most feminist statement directed towards these critics: "I am obnoxious to each carping tongue Who says my hand a needle better fits, A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong, For such despite they cast on female wits: If what I do prove well, it won't advance, They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance." (Lonsdale 196). She makes a stand against the established norms of the female vocation, and by referring to the ancient Greeks later on in "The Prologue" declares that those who have an issue to her writing should also not trust the astuteness, perception and wisdom of the ancient Greeks. Bradstreet suffered from the "anxiety of authorship," i.e. a woman writer feels overwhelmed by and excluded from the essentially male tradition of authorship. (Blackstone 223). Thus in her earlier poems she used to follow her male counterparts very closely and there were often references to them. and there wasn't much of herself in her poems. Testimony of this is given by the material in the "Tenth Muse", where her poetry seems forced and unreal, it didn't express how she felt and so it seemed wooden at best. It appeared that she was following the methods of male poets and trying to prove that she could poetry just as they could. However her later poems lacked such need of support of any kind. She had turned into a seasoned writer, who did not need someone else to substantiate her preferences and her ideas. Her later work was entrenched in her life experiences of being a mother of eight, a Puritan governor's wife and simply a woman living in the New World in the seventeenth. It is for this reason Blackstone (224) says that Bradstreet wasn't just a female poet whose poetry was trivial, undistinguished, and of interest only to other women. She was an American poet who wrote honest pieces which could sometimes even be called sensuous, and whose poetry was a true joy to read. Her poems were literally models of personal experience, such as grief over the death of her parents, her immense love for her husband and children and her joy in nature. While she played the role of a dutiful daughter and wife and a dedicated Puritan, she was in two about her opinions of the male authorities in her life. On one hand she sought their approval; she wanted them to recognize her as more than just a woman but rather as a human being with a qualified intellect. And on the other hand she felt greatly angered at the injustice of their attitudes when they refused to give the acknowledgment she rightly deserved but she tried concealed her desolation at this. The role of a writer and a conventional woman bought her into conflict with herself several times. In the dedication of the "Tenth Muse" to her father she expresses the role of the obedient daughter, "From her that to your self, more duty owes / Then water in the boundless Ocean flows," and then she goes on to describe her work as "lowly," "meanly clad," "poor," and "ragged" in compared to the complicated and demanding work done by her male mentors. This self depreciative technique is meant to conceal her ambitious thoughts and ideas of being thought as equal but a strain of bitterness leaks through. By making herself seem worthless in comparison to them, in contrast to their masculine grandeur and by highlighting and stressing the modesty of her literary accomplishments, she hopes to convince them that she is not straying beyond the sphere assigned to women. In this way, Bradstreet tries to establish her place as a poet in a community of male writers whether it be Sidney, her father, or hostile critics. Anne Bradstreet's determination was one of her key traits as evident. On numerous occasions she mentioned her great desire to finish all her poems, to finish what she began, was always been her intent. No matter how daunting the task my get, for instance after writing the first three sections of the long poem "The Four Monarchies," for example, she grew weary of her work and seemed infinitely restless. Of course this poem could not be finished and many critics are thankful for this. But finishing, in the sense of completing something begun, was important for Anne Bradstreet. "Perseverance, inherited and cultivated, was a strong trait in her character," It was just as important to finish a poem as it was to finish her "errand into the wilderness." (White 231) Yet finishing the poem was only part of the concern, the poem had to be concluded in the most appropriate way, the endings were particularly important as they appeared to be the most revealing part of her poems. Whether literally or religious Bradstreet seems to be embedding herself into the context for a better understanding of the world. Also there had to be the traditional convention of some sort of apology or the doctrine assertations. Because of these conventions and doctrinal assertions, Bradstreet's poetry was for many years regarded primarily for its historical value. (Kopeks 176). In all her poems, these conventions bound her to the combination of her English culturally heritage and her New World theology. Bradstreet was compelled by her thorough grounding in eschatological thinking to feel that any kind of concluding was tantamount to some final evaluation or summing up, some ultimate, transcendent meaning. There was always a distinction between the female and male poets. Although it seems to be the female spirit more capable of putting down soul bearing verses, to be a female poet in the seventeenth century always involved the risk of alienation from the one group into which the Puritans allowed them free entry, the caste of sex -- defined for women in terms of the duties of caring for others. If it is true to some degree that men have also been not accepted from the world of their sex for writing poems, the psychic costs have been considerably less. For men have always had women to turn to; they have always had an established set of literary ancestors and the symbolic support of economically successful men of their own profession. Women, on the other hand, have rarely had men to turn to. Even more important, they have not had an established set of literary ancestors and they have only occasionally been economically self-sufficient. (Walker 174) Anne Bradstreet beat the odds and despite facing many hardships came through triumphant in the end. Works Cited Blackstock, G. Carrie. "Anne Bradstreet and Performativity Self-Cultivation, Self-Deployment," Early American Literature32.3 (1997): 223 Egan, Jim. Authorizing Experience: Refigurations of the Body Politic in Seventeenth-Century New England Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999. Keeble, N.H. The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman. London. Routledge, 1994. Kopacz, Paula. "To Finish What's Begun: Anne Bradstreet's Last Words," Early American Literature23.2 (1988) Lonsdale, Roger. Eighteenth-century Women Poets. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990. Martin, Wendy. An American Triptych Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich .Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1984. Miller, C. Brett, and Jay Parini. The Columbia History of American Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Walker, Cheryl. THE Nightingale's Burden Women Poets and American Culture before 1900. 1st ed. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1982. White, W. Elizabeth. Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Wright, E.Nancy. "Epitaphic Conventions and the Reception of Anne Bradstreet's Public Voice," Early American Literature 31 1996. Stanford, Ann. Anne Bradstreet the Worldly Puritan. New York: B. Franklin, 1974. Read More