Anne Bradstreet - Still Relevant Today

by Lee Conell

I’m not in the habit of thinking about Puritanism, except maybe around Thanksgiving, when we are inundated with images of turkeys and pilgrims. In the past, when I heard the word “Pilgrim” or “Puritan” I imagined a woman with her hair in a tight bun, wearing a stiff dress and a stern look. Then, I read some of the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, and began to see Puritan women as something other than a cardboard cutout you see on a store window (before the Christmas decorations go up, anyway).

Born Anne Dudley in England in 1612, as a child Bradstreet had many tutors, unusual for the time; girls were generally barely educated. Her family was well-off — her father was the steward of the Earl of Lincoln’s estate — and Bradstreet had access to an extensive library. Perhaps because of her access to education, she was able to grow up knowing that women were not witless beings: She herself was proof of that.

At 16, Bradstreet married her father’s assistant, Simon Bradstreet. Two years later, she undertook a voyage to the New World with her husband, her mother, and her father, who was one of the leaders of the venture. Bradstreet was more than a little reluctant to leave the comfortable England for the unknown New World. However, part of her Puritan upbringing meant obeying what the men around her said. Ultimately, Bradstreet accepted her situation. She joined the church in Boston and had eight children.

The men in her life were important people; both her father and her husband served as governors of Massachusetts. Still, Bradstreet clearly had some confidence in her own abilities, leading her to pick up the pen to write poetry. Women were not encouraged to write in Bradstreet’s society. It was assumed that a female writer must be neglecting her household duties if she had the time to compose poetry. But this did not stop Bradstreet from writing, or from viewing herself as anything less than a devout Christian woman.

The first poem I read by Bradstreet, “The Flesh and the Spirit,” certainly concerns her devotion to her religion. The poem is a dialogue between two “sisters,” the world-loving Flesh and the heaven-loving Spirit. Of course, Spirit’s argument about the weakness of Flesh wins out. Such abstractions, which appeared in the first edition of Bradstreet’s poetry The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, are more imitative of other male poets than Bradstreet’s later work would be. As she continued to write, the subject of her poetry increasingly turned to her own life. She began to write love poems for her husband, who was often away in his work, or elegiac poems about the death of her children and grandchildren.

In her later poetry, Bradstreet continued to use the tension between worldliness and higher religious thoughts seen in “The Flesh and the Spirit” However this tension manifested through Bradstreet’s own life struggles, rather than abstract theological beings that might alienate a reader. In “Upon the Burning of Our House” for example, Bradstreet mourns the loss of her beloved material items in a fire — a loss a modern reader can sympathize with — and then quickly reprimands herself, asking “Didst fix thy hope on mouldring dust,/The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? /Raise up thy thoughts above the skye.”

That struggle between material items and something larger (whether that larger thing is God or, in a secular society, personal morality) is one that is still relevant today. What’s more, by writing about her own daily life and thoughts, Bradstreet’s poems are a precursor to confessional poets like Anne Sexton or Sylvia Plath, and to a more personal poetic voice overall. We can look at Bradstreet today and see not just a Puritan, but a struggling human being. After reading her, suddenly, those stiff Pilgrims on the store windows seem more like caricatures than ever. Bradstreet brings a strong female voice to a seemingly distant cultural past.