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Laura Major
Anne Bradstreet
The Religious Poet as Mother
This paper examines how the axis o f creativity, motherhood and religion play
themselves out in thepoegr ofAnne Bradstreet (2612-2672), a Puritan American
poet and mother ofeight.Her work is so compellingfor it resists her reduction, despite
the attempts of critics, t o either the category ofpious Puritan or of earlyfeminist. In Bradstreet's construction of motherhood, religious duty and beliefon one hand, and the urge t o creativity on the other, intersect and interact in interesting and often poignant ways. Thispaper examines examplesjom Bradstreet'spersona(poetry in order to demonstrate how thispoetry exposes bothpiety and quiet rebellion. Interest- ingly, the source of this rebellion in the poems that deal with the question of motherhood was an intense devotion t o her earthly roles of mother andpoet. Ishow that Bradstreet struggled with the Puritan view ofmortality chieJy in connection to her role as mother. Ialso show how, by use of the childbirth metaphorfor creativity, Bradstreet'spoeticmerging ofhe act ofwritingpoetry with the ad of raising children allowed her create art within the restrictive and patriarchal religious context of Puritanism.
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was a Puritan, poet, woman, wife, and mother.
Yet critical discussions of Bradstreet's work have rarely taken these multiple markers of identity into account. Rather, critics have framed their arguments as if one has to choose whether religion or gender is the primary force in Bradstreet's poetry. Some passionately argue that Bradstreet was a pious Puritan while others paint her as an early feminist.' Although evidence for both positions certainly exists, to reduce Bradstreet to either one of these caregories is to simplify a complex religious woman poet living in specific personal, cultural, religious, and historical circumstances. Indeed, because ample evidence for both positions exists, it seems likely that neither position is completely
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accurate on its own. Therefore, I shall not make an argument for Bradstreet as
a pious Puritan or an early feminist, but rather shall examine the way in which Bradstreet's construction of her experience of motherhood reveals sometimes conflicting facets of her roles as mother, poet, and Puritan. Anne Dudleywas born in 1612 in England where she enjoyed a privileged upbringing and agenerous education. In 1630, alreadymarried, Anne Bradstreet arrived with her family on the Arbella in Massachusetts Bay. Here, and later in other New England colonies, the Bradstreet and Dudley families established themselves as mainstays ofthe Puritan community. Anne Bradstreet gave birth to and raised eight children, while writing poetry and prose. In 1650 her first book of poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published, most likely without Bradstreet's knowledge. Bradstreet thus unwittingly be- came the first American poet to publish poetry. One of the clearest ways to demonstrate Bradstreet's conception of the inextricability of her roles of mother, Puritan, and poet is by looking at Bradstreet's use of the childbirth metaphor. Ivy Schweitzer (1991) compel- lingly argues that metaphors of female experience such as marriage, childbirth and mothering were commonly used by Puritan men in sermons to describe spiritual processes, while actual women and their lived bodily experiences were marginalized (27). Childbirth as a Puritan metaphor has nothing to do with the actual bodily experience.O n the contrary, says Schweitzer, "the spiritualization of feminine imagery had the effect of erasing the earthly and fleshy femaleness
from it" (27). Childbirth, rebirth, or "sonship," (28) as a metaphor for the
Puritan conversion narrative describes a marital process through which the spouse of Christ is adopted into the Divine family, to be nurtured by the autogenic, omnipotent father (27-28). W i l e Christ becomes a "womb-
substitute" (29) for the regenerate soul, the actual woman's womb is devalued
as flesh, or as the vehicle through which one falls into original sin. Bradstreet's use of the birth metaphor is different from that doctrinal rebirth metaphor in which the earthly mother is absent. In a confessionalletter "ToMy Dear Children" (Baym etal., 1989: 118-121) she describes the physical and spiritual pains of becoming and being a mother:
It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was
a great grief to me and cost me many prayers and tears before I
obtained one and after him gave me many more of whom I now take
the care, that as I have brought you into the world, and with great
pains, weakness, cares, and fears brought you to this, I now travail
in birth again of you till Christ be formed in you. (Baym et al. 1989:
This excerpt reveals Bradstreet's intense longing for children and the awesome physical and spiritual responsibility she experienced when she did become a mother. In the above confession, Bradstreet moves fiom the physical experi-
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Anne Bradstreet
especially since Bradstreet denigrates the issue of her mind. Bradstreet also draws attention to the separation between her written "offspring" and actual children in her addition of the parentheses in the line: "My rambling brat (in print) should mother call." Here the poet seems to feel the need to remind the reader that she is referring to her poems and not to actual children. The "ill-formed offspring" of the first line does not only modestly disclaim her poetry it also subtly refers to the "monstrous births''-as so described by Puritan governor John Winthrop-of religious dissenters Anne Hutchinson and Maly Dyer (qtd. in Reid, 1998: 530). Anne Hutchinson, initiator of the antinomian controversy (1636-38), argued against the Puritan conception of the "elect," claiming that God's grace was given liberally and grasped person- ally. She was tried for heresy and eventually excommunicated. Hutchinson and her ally Dyer both gave birth to malformed children, and these "monsters"were considered the results ofor punishments for their heretical opinions. Indeed the Puritan preachers connected the offspring of Hutchinson and Dyer's mind to the offspring of their body. Winthrop proclaimed after Hutchinson's miscar- riage: "...as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters" (qtd in Schweitzer, 1991: 1954). Critics agree (Lutes, 1997; Reid, 1998; White, 1971) that Bradstreet had to have been aware of the antinomian controversy, the "monstrous births" and the reactions to them.3 Bradstreet was certainly not a dissenter and is not comparing her poems to the heretical opinions and deformed babies of the antinomians; rather she is drawing attention to the vulnerability of women to the "public view" and censure of their ill-formed children and poems. By this subtle connection between the products of the mind and actual offspring of the womb, Bradstreet actually defies the separation between creativity and procreativity. She insists that the progeny comes from her mind and calls her name "in print," yet simultaneously connects the creative offspring to actual babies. Being a mother and a poet become coexisting and somehow allied parts of the poet's identity. As Friedman correctly points out, this is in defiance of history and cultural prescription that places literary creativity in opposition to domesticity (1989: 75). In the next part of the poem a change in the speaker's attitude, marked by 'Yet," becomes apparent:
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.
I stretched thy joints to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou runnest more hobbling than is meet. In better dress to trim thee was my mind.
But nought save home-spun Cloth, in the house I find.
In this array, amongst Vulgars mayest thou roam.
Journal ofthe Associationfor Research on Mothering (^) 1 113
Laura Major
From this point on, Bradstreet's simple 'Yet being mine own" becomes the pervading feeling of the poem. Despite the "defects" and "flaws" of her poems, they belong to her. She created them, she is responsible for them, and she will tend to them despite their faults. This feeling is created by the homely images of a loving mother gentlywashing her children's faces, cleaning their blemishes, helping them walk, and sewing their clothes. Her nurturance does not succeed:
she washes the face "but more defects I saw;" she stretches the joints "to make
thee even feet," but "still thou runnest more hobbling than is meet;" and she aims to "better dress" them, but finds only "home-spun cloth." Indeed, these lines become a statement of motherly duty as well as creative effort. In combining these roles, the poem hints that the hnctions of mother and poet are complementary. What binds the roles is the basic conviction of the poems and the children "being mine own." Whether the womb or the brain yields the offspring, and whether the offspring is less than perfect or not, it is a part of its creator and as such cannot be disowned. The poet thus closes the poem by claiming her poems as her exclusive progeny:
In Critics' hands, beware thou dost not come, And take thy way where yet thou art not known.
If for thy Father asked, say, thou hadst none;
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor, Which caus'd her thus to send thee out of door.
By declaring that her poems have no father, Bradstreet makes several contrary statements at the same time. Alicia Ostriker (1986) calls this strategy-by which women poets simultaneouslydeny and affirm ideas that may be "forbid- den to express, but impossible to repressV(41)-"duplicity." Duplicity, argues Ostriker, allows contradicting meanings to coexist in the poem since "they have equal force within the poet" (40-41). O n one hand, the fatherless poems are illegitimate. Here Bradstreet admits her precarious position: the publication of poetry by a woman was not a legitimate act in the Puritan context. By claiming sole parentage over the poems, though, Bradstreet simultaneously asserts her exclusive ownership and authorship of them. The poems were "snatched from thence by friends" to be "exposed to pub1icview"without the author's knowledge. In reaction, Bradstreet is here reclaiming her authority over the book. However, although Bradstreet does this self-deprecatingly ("thy mother, she alas is poor"), the metaphor of motherhood re-legitimizes her in the context of Puritan society. Motherhood, after all was the legitimizing role for a Puritan woman. Yet paradoxically this metaphor, which connects the offspring of the womb to the offspring of the mind, also subvertsthe traditional separationbetween creativityand procreativity. In "The Author T o Her Book" (Hensley, 1981: 221) the integration of the roles of mother and poet is not smooth; but-through negation and affirmation or, to adopt Ostriker's term, "duplicity"-it is achieved.
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Laura Major
substantial food, yet they are so childishly sottish that they are still hugging and sucking these empty breasts that God is forced to hedge up their way with thorns or lay affliction on their loins that so they might shake hands with the world, before it bid them farewell. (Hensely, 1981: 279)
Although this excerpt shows Bradstreet as wholeheartedly accepting the importance ofweaned affections,many ofher personal poems reveal a poignant struggle between her love of the world and her family and the higher spiritual order that requires a certain renunciation of that love. In "Before The Birth of One ofHer Children" (Hensley, 1981:224) Bradstreet seems so attached to her loved ones, so "unweaned" from her life and earthly connections-"still hugging and sucking these empty breastsy'- that her emphasis lies in the search for immortality rather than in unification with God. Bradstreet moves in the poem from general statements to the intensely personal, addressing her husband with heartfelt love.5The speaker knows that her husband might remarry after her death and bearing this in mind, she considers her children:
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains Look to my little babes, my dear remains And if thou love thyself, or loved'st me,
These 0 protect from step-dame's injury.
She refers to her "little babes" with the greatest affection, conceiving of them as her "dear remains." O n one hand "remains" refer to her corpse, but on the other, to what she has left behind, her legacy. By her use ofthe double meaning oftheword, Bradstreet emphasizesthat her children are apart ofher in the most physical sense. They also become a replacement for her "oblivious grave." Instead of remembering her by revering her dead body, she wants her hus- band-"if thou love thyself, or loved'st me"-to direct his love of her, and of himself (for their children are a part of him too) onto the children. She thus implores her husband to shelter them "from step-dame's injury." The final lines of the poem lead the reader to make a correlation between her children and her poetry:
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse, With some sad sighs honour my absent hearse; And kiss this paper for thy love's dear sake, Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.
Unlike "The Author to Her Book," (Hensley, 1981: 221) no metaphor forges the connection here; rather the reader realizes that her children are not her only remains. As her children should cause their father to remember her, so her
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Anne Bradstreet
poems will also provoke her memory. Like "The Author to the Book," this poem connects the products of the body and the mind, granting them similar value. The poems, like the children, stand in for her body. Because she can no longer physically "lay in thine arms," her husband should hold the poems and "kiss this paper for thy love's sake." Both her poems and her children grant her immortality. Paradoxically, however, the event of birthing children brings her into a painful awareness of her mortality. The pull of her earthly attachment to her children against the vision of a higher spiritual order causes a tension in many of her personal poems. This tension is really what frees Anne Bradstreet's poem from the risk of didactic Puritan verse. The conflict is even more obvious in an elegy to her grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, who died at the age of one and a half. This poem reveals the centrality of the subject of mortalityfor Bradstreet as a poet, a mother and a Puritan. It also shows that with respect to her children and grandchildren she was unable to resolve her concerns. The first three lines ofthe poem demonstrate the poet's difficultyin saying
Farewell dear babe, my hearts too much content, Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of my eye, Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent
This repetition slows the poem down, making the farewell prolonged and painful. The pathos is compounded by the simple descriptions of affection-
"dear babe," "sweet babe," "fair flower"-employed by the poet. The repetition
of "my" in the first two lines also forges the connection that the poet felt to her grandchild. The fourth line of the poem abruptly announces her death: 'Then taken away into Eternity." Because this line is shorter than the three lines precedingit, and because "eternity" does not quite rhyme as it shouldwith"eye," the pain that the meaning of the line conveys is compounded by its form. The poem then returns to three longer, slower, rhyming lines. But as line 4, the middle line of the stanza serves as an abrupt break with lines 1-3, it also
undermines the resolution of lines 5-7, since eternity clearly denotes not only
the eternal heavenly state, but also the child's eternal absence from the world:
Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,
O r sigh thy days so soon were terminate; Since thou are settled in an Everlasting state.
Bradstreet makes her questioning explicit by asking why she should mourn Elizabeth's fate if she knows that the child is in heaven. Yet although this question is meant to dispel her doubts by convincing herselfthat the heavenly life is "everlasting," it also calls attention to the fact that, despite her acceptance of the doctrine, she does indeed "bewaii thy fate."
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Anne Bradstreet
21nher 1988 essay "Bradstreet and the Renaissance," Ivy Schweitzer discusses Bradstreet's use of the "topos of affected humility" in her public poetry (292). She agrees with Eileen Margerum (1982) that the apologies should not be mistaken for Bradstreet's true feelings since "affected modesty" was a common poetic device employed by Rennaissance poets. Schweitzer complicates Margerum's argument, however, by commenting that as a woman, Bradstreet "was defined by injunctions not merely to affect modesty, but to be 'truly' humble and self-effacing in everything she did"(293). In "The Author to the Book," a poem about her poetry, these arguments need to be considered together with the evidence that she dedicated much effort at attempting to improve her work by making corrections to her earlier poems. 3Firstly, Bradstreet's own father and husband presided at Hutchinson's trial; secondly, Bradstreet's sister, Sarah Keayne was involved in the controversy; lastly, the births of Hutchinson and Dyer occurred at the same time as Bradstreet was childbearing, and would have been of interest to her. (Lutes, 1997: 29) 4An example of the Puritan attitude to woman poets can be found in John Winthrop's description of the fate of Anne Yale Hopkins, a Puritan woman who wrote poetry but subsequently went insane: "For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out ofher way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper to men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorablyin the place God had set her" (qtd. in White, 1971: 172-173). Another example can be found in a letter ofThomas Parker written in 1650 to
his sister, who had just published a book: " Your printing of a book beyond the
custom of your sex doth rankly smell" (qtd. in Martin, 1984: 58) 'This is only one of many poems in which the poet's love for her husband is obvious. Other such poems include "To my Dear and Loving Husband (Hensley, 1967: 225), "A Letter to her Husband, Absent upon Public Employ- ment" (Hensley, 1967: 226), "In My Solitary Hours in My Dear Husband's Absencen (Hensley, 1967: 267), and "In Thankful Remembrance for My Dear Husband's Safe Arrival Sept 3,1662" (Hensley, 1967: 270). 6Poemsin which Bradstreet did not discuss her husband or children, such as "A Weary Pilgrim" (Hensley, 1967: 294) and "Meditation" (Hensley, 1967: 253), do come to full terms with mortality and long for the higher spiritual order of heaven.
References
Bayrn, Nina et al. Eds. 1989. The Norton Anthology ofAmerican Literature VoZ. I. New York: Norton. Bradstreet, Anne. 1650. The Tenth Muse. London: Stephen Bowtell. Cowell, Pattie. 1983. "Anne Bradstreet: 'In Criticks Hands."' in Pattie Cowell and Anne Standford, eds. CriticalEssayson Anne Bradstreet. Boston: G. K.
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H d. 270-279.
Daly, Robert. 1978. God's Altar: The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1989. "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse." In Elaine Showalter, ed. Speaking of Gender. New York: Routledge. 73-100. Harnmond, Jeffrey. 1991. "The Puritan Elegaic Ritual: From Sinful Silence to Apostolic Voice." Studies in Puritan American Spiritualiq 2: 77-106. Hensley, Jeannine. 1981. Ed. The Works afAnne Bradstreet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Kopacz, Paula. 1988. "To Finish What's Begun': Anne Bradstreet's Last Words." Early American Literature 23 (2): 175-187. Lutes, Jean Marie. 1997. "Negotiating Theology and Gynecology: Anne Bradstreet's Representation of the Female Body." Signs 22 (2): 302-334. Margerum, Eileen. 1982. "Anne Bradstreet's Public Poetry and the Tradition of Humility." Early American Literature 17 (2): 152-160. Martin, Wendy. 1984. AnAmerican Triptych:Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. 1986. Stealing the Language; The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Reid, Bethany. 1998. '"Unfit for Light': Anne Bradstreet's Monstrous Birth." New England Quarterly 71 (4): 517-42. Schweitzer,Ivy. 1988."AnneBradstreet Wrestles with the Renaissance." Early American Literature 23(3): 291-312.
Schweitzer, Ivy. 1991. The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial
New England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Stanford, Anne. 1983. "Anne Bradstreet: Dogmatist and Rebel." in Pattie Cowell and Anne Standford, eds. Critical Essays on Anne Bradstreet.
Boston: G. K. Hall. 76-88.
White, Elizabeth. 1971. Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse. New York: Oxford University Press.
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