An American Triptych

Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich

Wendy Martin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780807841129, 9780807815731
• eBook ISBN: 9781469616957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich share nationality, gender, and an aesthetic tradition, but each expresses these experiences in the context of her own historical moment. Puritanism imposed stringent demands on Bradstreet, romanticism both inspired and restricted Dickinson, and feminism challenged as well as liberated Rich. Nevertheless, each poet succeeded in forming a personal vision that counters traditional male poetics. Their poetry celebrates daily life, demonstrates their commitment to nurturance rather than dominance, shows their resistance to the control of both their earthly and heavenly fathers, and affirms their experience in a world that has often denied women a voice.

Wendy Martin recreates the textures of these women’s lives, showing how they parallel the shifts in the status of American women from private companion to participant in a wider public life. The three portraits examine in detail the life and work of the Puritan wife of a colonial magistrate, the white-robed, reclusive New England seer, and the modern feminist and lesbian activist. Their poetry, Martin argues, tells us much about the evolution of feminist and patriarchal perspectives, from Bradstreet’s resigned acceptance of traditional religion, to Dickinson’s private rebellion, to Rich’s public criticism of traditional masculine culture. Together, these portraits compose the panels of an American triptych.

Beyond the dramatic contrasts between the Puritan and feminist vision, Martin finds striking parallels in form. An ideal of a new world, whether it be the city on the hill or a supportive community of women, inspires both. Like the commonwealth of saints, this concept of a female collectivity, which all three poets embrace, is a profoundly political phenomenon based on a pattern of protest and reform that is deeply rooted in American life. Martin suggests that, through their belief in regeneration and renewal, Bradstreet Dickinson, and Rich are part of a larger political as well as literary tradition. An American Triptych both enhances our understanding of the poets' work as part of the web of American experience and suggests the outlines of an American female poetic.

Part One: Anne Bradstreet

“As weary pilgrim”

As weary pilgrim, now at rest,

Hugs with delight his silent nest

His wasted limbes, now lye full soft

That myrie steps, have troden oft

Blesses himself, to think upon

his dangers past, and travailes done

The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, 42

Introduction

When Anne Bradstreet (1612–72) dedicated her “Meditations Divine and Morall” to her son, Simon, on March 20, 1664, she told him that because this material was deeply personal, it contained no references to the work of other writers: these reflections, she confided to the fourth of her eight children, contain “nothing but myne owne.” This is a declaration of strength by a seasoned writer who felt less dependent on literary and religious authorities to buttress her ideas or substantiate her perceptions than she had in her youth. In contrast to her earliest poetry, which closely followed male poetic models, Bradstreet’s later work was rooted in her actual experience as a wife, as a mother, and as a woman in seventeenth-century New England.

Much of the material in the first edition of The Tenth Muse, published in 1650 when Bradstreet was thirty-eight, was formulaic and divorced from her personal observations and feelings. The often wooden lines and forced rhymes of her early poems reveal Bradstreet’s grim determination to prove that she could write in the lofty style of the established male poets, but her deeper emotions are obviously not engaged in the project. After the publication of her first volume, Bradstreet gained confidence in her own responses as a source and subject for her poetry, and as she began to write of her desire for artistic achievement, her love for her family and temporal life, as well as her ambivalence about the religious issues of faith, grace, and salvation, her poetry became more finely honed and emotionally powerful.

As a child, Bradstreet was bedridden with rheumatic fever; as an adolescent she almost died from smallpox. As a young woman she endured a three-month ocean crossing from England to the New World, the dangers of starvation, disease, and Indian attacks, and the hazards of eight pregnancies and deliveries. As a mature woman, she mourned the deaths of her parents and would live to grieve deeply over the untimely loss of three grandchildren and a beloved daughter-in-law. Bradstreet left the comforts of an aristocratic manor house in the English countryside to accompany her father and husband to the Massachusetts Bay Colony where they hoped to better their estates as well as find religious freedom. Once in New England, she uprooted her household several times to move to increasingly more distant, uncivilized, and dangerous outposts so that her father and husband could increase their property as well as their political power in the colony.

Although she played the role of a dedicated Puritan and a dutiful daughter and wife, Bradstreet often expressed ambivalence about the male authorities in her life, including God, her father and husband, and the literary critics and authors whose models she initially copied. On one hand, she very much wanted their approval and, on the other, she was angered by their denial of the value of her experience and abilities. In her dedication of The Tenth Muse to her father Thomas Dudley, Bradstreet assumes the persona of the obedient daughter: “From her that to your self, more duty owes / Then water in the boundless Ocean flows,” and she describes her work as “lowly,” “meanly clad,” “poor,” and “ragged” in contrast to the soaring strength of her male mentors.¹ In the “Prologue” to the volume, Bradstreet persists in her strategy of self-deprecation, describing her muse as “foolish, broken, blemished” in her effort to conceal her ambition. In dramatic contrast to her declarations of weakness is Bradstreet’s eulogy honoring the “Happy Memory” of Queen Elizabeth, the only poem in The Tenth Muse that contains no apologies. Here she expresses her unqualified admiration for the queen as an exemplar of female prowess:

Who was so good, so just, so learn’d so wise

From all the Kings on earth she won the prize.

Nor say I more then duly is her due,

Millions will testifie that this is true.

She hath wip’d off th’ aspersion of her Sex,

That women wisdome lack to play the Rex

(Works, 358–59)

These assertive lines claim for Elizabeth what Bradstreet dared not claim for herself—power, judgment, wisdom, achievement. Certainly it was less stressful and less dangerous to make this bold declaration praising female abilities in a historical context than it would have been for Bradstreet to publicly proclaim the worth of her own work. Although Bradstreet was an educated woman, a child of one colonial governor and the wife of another, this privileged status alone could not protect her against the scorn and persecution visited upon women who stepped beyond their deferential role in Puritan society. Only by careful execution of her prescribed responsibilities could she escape the fate of Anne Hutchinson and her own sister Sarah Keayne who had both been excommunicated from the church and ostracized by the community for speaking their minds in public. Certainly Bradstreet’s life and work illuminate the conflict that American women writers have traditionally experienced between a need for intellectual and emotional autonomy and a desire for recognition and acceptance from male authorities.

The second edition of The Tenth Muse published posthumously in Boston in 1678 contains several superbly crafted poems that provide a sense of Bradstreet’s potential achievement had she not felt constrained to adopt a dutiful and deferential stance. These love poems, elegies, and meditations are considerably more candid about her spiritual crises, her deep attachment to her family, and her love of mortal life than was her earlier work; perhaps her father’s death in 1653 as well as the publication of her work in 1650 gave her the psychological freedom necessary to express herself more openly. The more honestly she wrote of her emotional and religious tensions and her desire for recognition and her love of life on earth, the more accomplished her poetry became, and the imitative and often strained poems of the first edition were superseded by the expertly crafted lines of the second edition.

Puritans accepted doubt and confusion about faith and conversion as part of the arduous process of weaning the affections from earthly attachments, but Anne Bradstreet’s resolute efforts to be worthy of God’s grace intensified her uncertainty about the promise of eternal life. Her mixed emotions are articulated in “Contemplations,” published in the second edition of The Tenth Muse, which most critics consider to be her best poem:

Then higher on the glistering Sun I gaz’d,

Whose beams was shaded by the leavie Tree,

The more I look’d, the more I grew amaz’d,

And softly said, what glory’s like to thee?

Soul of this world, this Universes Eye,

No wonder, some made thee a Deity:

Had I not better Known, (alas) the same had I.

(Works, 371)

Bradstreet’s faith is paradoxically achieved by immersing herself in the beauty and strength of nature, and her hope for heaven is an expression of a desire to live forever—a prolongation of earthly joy rather than a renunciation of life’s pleasures. Male critics such as Robert Richardson, William Irvin, and Robert Daly interpret this poem as a document of Bradstreet’s moral triumph over earthly attachments,² while Bradstreet’s recent biographers, Elizabeth Wade White and Ann Stanford, observe that she was often distressed by the conflicting demands of poetry and religious faith.³

Near the end of her life, weakened by chronic illness and saddened by the deaths of her loved ones and the destruction of her home, her library, unpublished manuscripts, and most of her household effects by fire, Anne Bradstreet finally appeared to take genuine comfort in the promise of an afterlife. Nevertheless, her penultimate poem, an elegy for her month-old grandson written three years before her own death, reveals deep reservations about the wisdom of God’s decisions:

With dreadful awe before him let’s be mute,

Such was his will, but why, let’s not dispute,

With humble hearts and mouths put in the dust,

Let’s say he’s merciful as well as just.

(Works, 406)

Bradstreet’s forced resignation barely conceals her anguished rage about a death that seems to be arbitrary and unfair. Unlike some of her male contemporaries—John Winthrop, Samuel Sewall, and Thomas Shepard—who accepted the deaths of their family members as afflictions intended to correct their own sins, Anne Bradstreet’s response was not so self-centered. For example, when his son dies at four months, Thomas Shepard does not grieve for the infant but laments the fact that his sinfulness caused “the Lord to strike at innocent children for my own sake.” And even his wife’s death is subsumed by his devouring conscience: “[H]e took away my dear, precious, meek and loving wife in childbed. … this affliction was very heavy to me, for in it the Lord seemed to withdraw his tender care for me and mine which he graciously manifested by my dear wife.”⁴ In contrast to Shepard’s egocentric conviction that God has singled him out for punishment, Bradstreet is shocked by the apparently wanton demonstration of divine power. These polarized responses of mastery and nurturance mirror the masculine and feminine patterns prescribed by their society.

Anne Bradstreet ultimately represented her life as a pilgrimage toward heaven, but her work reveals that it was actually a journey from artistic ambition to resolute piety. In spite of her intensely religious society, much of Bradstreet’s work is occupied with secular concerns; in spite of the dangers of public assertion by a woman, she longed for recognition; and in spite of her concerted efforts to be devout, she was finally unable to fully accept the Puritan God. Although Bradstreet never renounced her religious faith, she observed that if it were not for the unfortunate fact of dissolution and decay, she would not seek salvation, “for were earthly comforts permanent, who would look for heavenly?” (Works, 69).

Chapter One: “I found a new world”

When Anne Dudley Bradstreet arrived in the New World after a three-month journey aboard the Arbella, which with the Talbot, the Ambrose, and the Jewell had sailed from England in April 1630, she admitted that her “heart rose” against the Puritan mission. She was eighteen and unhappy about being forced to leave her comfortable life in the mansion of the earl of Lincolnshire where her father, Thomas Dudley, had been steward of the earl’s estate and her husband, Simon Bradstreet, had been her father’s assistant. Life at Theophilus Lincoln’s manor in Sempringham had been gracious and stimulating, and Anne Bradstreet reluctantly left the amenities of this aristocratic household to face the dangers of an unknown land.¹ The three-month voyage across the Atlantic was arduous, and the Charlestown records describe the suffering of the newly arrived colonists:

Many people arrived sick of the scurvy, which also increased after their arrival, for want of houses, and by reason of wet lodging in their cottages, etc. Other distempers also prevailed; and although [the] people were generally very loving and pitiful, yet the sickness did so prevail, that the whole were not able to tend the sick, as they should be tended; upon which many perished and died, and were buried about the Town Hill.²

The grievances that brought the Puritan expedition to New England were not Anne Bradstreet’s but belonged to the two men she loved. Whatever degree of pride or self-preservation Bradstreet possessed caused her to rebel against her part in the destiny of the Pu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Anne Bradstreet
• Part Two: Emily Dickinson
• Part Three: Adrienne Rich
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments