Caught in the maw of an angry god: the reluctant radicalism of Anne Bradstreet

You may know her only as a Puritan poet. She’s so much more.

Nineteenth century depiction of Anne Bradstreet by Edmund H. Garrett. No portrait made during her lifetime exists. Source

My US history classes presented Puritans from the perspective of the male ministers and governors who controlled colonial life. Schoolbooks embodied Puritan women primarily within the setting of the Salem witch trials: fabulists, harpies, madwomen, victims. What mention there was of the first colonial (published) poet, Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), was limited at best. A glancing detail about the poet failed to give texture or color to the colonial narrative, which is incomplete without an understanding of the roles of women and family in settling New England. If the textbooks intended Anne Bradstreet’s inclusion to imply that colonial women enjoyed equal status, they were misleading.

Anne Bradstreet may have been notable to textbook authors because her father and later her husband were governors of the Massachusetts colony, but celebrity by association denies her the singular identity she deserves. It’s telling that Anne had no portrait made of her when she was alive.¹ Her husband Simon’s portrait can be viewed in Salem today. He may have been a governor, but she was his wife as well as New England’s first poet.

She became famous for poems published under her name.² The English celebrated her. She shared her poetry with family and friends and labored to create lines worthy of the poets she admired.

Interestingly, Anne herself wasn’t party to the publication of her book of poetry. Her brother-in-law secretly took a collection of her poems to England and had them published. The collection soon became famous—the English acclaimed her directness as ‘homespun’ and ‘plaine style’ and called it American. Anne learned of her literary achievements when her brother-in-law returned from England. She wrote with humility about her published work, imagining her poems as flawed children whom she was unready to let fly into the world. This was more than performative modesty; it’s possible that she felt violated by her relative’s appropriation of her work and her trust.

Anne’s poetry became increasingly intimate and honest as she matured. Learning her craft as a young woman, she read classical literature and idolized the masters in the field. She adopted the themes she was reading, and much of that work bears the mark of a young artist reaching for mastery. With time, she turned her focus to her family and her inner life. This is when her poetry came alive, opening a portal into the experiences of the colonial women who are otherwise now shadows in history.

This essay is part of a series called “Shut Out, Not Shut Up” on women through the ages who’ve written despite being dismissed because of their sex. They persisted.

Early years

Anne Bradstreet was born in England to a wealthy family. Anne’s father, Thomas Dudley, had been steward to an earl and he encouraged his daughter Anne in her educational interests. She was 16 when he hired as his assistant Simon Bradstreet, who had only recently graduated from university. Anne admitted later in life that she was smitten with Simon when she met him. She contracted smallpox that year, and after a difficult recovery she decided that her illness was divine punishment for impure thoughts. She married Simon, and two years later they moved with her family to New England as part of a Puritan migration.

The Atlantic journey had been only the first of many physical trials. The first year in the colony was especially harsh, and many died from exposure, illness, and insufficient food—she called that first winter “the starving time.” Two hundred settlers returned to England; another two hundred died.

Anne was disappointed in not conceiving a child for several years; she bore her first child after five years of marriage. She became gravely ill during this time, and in recovery she wrote her first poem, “Upon a Fit of Sickness.”

Despite early disappointments, Anne eventually bore eight children. Both her father and her husband became governors of the Massachusetts colony, so it’s reasonable to assume that she lived as comfortably as possible in a young colony. There were limits to the comforts of 17^th C New England, primarily those surrounding healthcare in general and for women. She deserves our respect if only for managing to write extensively while raising eight children (often alone, since her husband traveled frequently), battling a succession of illnesses, and performing an influential role in the colony.

Anne’s relationships to her father and husband

Anne Bradstreet wrote poems after the deaths of her mother and father that serve as eulogies written in couplets—which is to say, they were written for the public. They praise the subject while claiming a special status for them (“His thoughts were more sublime, his actions wise, / Such vanities he justly did despise.”).

Her poem “To Her Father With Some Verses” demonstrates less generosity.

"Most truly honoured, and as truly dear,
If worth in me or ought I do appear,
Who can of right better demand the same
Than may your worthy self from whom it came?
The principal might yield a greater sum,
Yet handled ill, amounts but to this crumb;
My stock’s so small I know not how to pay,
My bond remains in force unto this day;
Yet for part payment take this simple mite,
Where nothing’s to be had, kings loose their right.
Such is my debt I may not say forgive,
But as I can, I’ll pay it while I live;
Such is my bond, none can discharge but I,
Yet paying is not paid until I die."

Her memorial poem to him, while it doesn’t praise him as a loving father, acknowledges him being “Well known and loved, where e’er he lived, by most / Both in his native and in foreign coast.” The memorial poem also nods to the ‘debt’ she owes her father, but “To Her Father” reduces her entire relationship with him to commercial terms. She’s merely an investment he made to turn a profit, to be taken from her life, which she spends in bondage to him. He’s worse than a tyrant, who would write off miserly payments, since he maintains his grip to exact the last meager drop to be wrenched from her. She abases herself in her bondage to him, which she realizes will survive even his life. Her only possibility of salvation is her own death.

That’s one possible interpretation. Her father could reasonably have read it differently: a modest daughter displaying with admirable humility her debt of life to her father, and her enduring devotion to him. This interpretation runs into at least two problems, one religious and one psychological.

Casting her father as the investor expecting a profitable return, and her own life as a coin of little value (“this simple mite”³), conflict with her message in her poem “The Vanity of All Worldly Things.”

"If not in honour, beauty, age, nor treasure,
Not yet in learning, wisdom, youth, nor pleasure,
Where shall I climb, sound, seek, search, or find
That summum bonum which may stay my mind?"

In this and other poems, Anne affirms the Christian poverty gospel (e.g., “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”). A life spent in obtaining riches is cautionary, not praise-worthy. Given her moral understandings, a likelier interpretation of her poem is to render her father as a merchant wringing the very soul of his daughter for profit.

Her lines dedicated to her father also display no warmth, and Anne was a passionate woman. When she writes to her husband and children, we witness her deeply felt emotional life. She wrote many poems to and about her husband, most of them written while she longed for him in his absence. Consider these titles:

To My Dear and Loving Husband
A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment
Another
Another
Upon My Dear and Loving Husband His Going Into England Jan. 16, 1661
In My Solitary Hours in My Dear Husband His Absence
A Thankful Acknowledgement For the Letters I Received From My Husband Out of England
In Thankful Remembrance for My Dear Husband’s Safe Arrival. Sept 3, 1662

Some of the poems are direct entreaties to God to keep her husband safe while at sea, her anxiety and feelings of helplessness understandable but no less moving for it. But some are love letters. Consider these lines:

"Mine being gone, I lead a joyless life,
I have a loving peer, yet seem no wife;
But worst of all, to him can’t steer my course,
I here, he there, alas, both kept by force.
Return my dear, my joy, my only love,
Unto thy hind, thy mullet, and thy dove,
Who neither joys in pasture, house, nor streams,
The substance gone, O me, these are but dreams.
Together at one tree, oh let us browse,
And like two turtles roost within one house,
And like the mullets in one river glide,
Let’s still remain but one, till death divide.
	Thy loving love and dearest dear,
	At home, abroad, and everywhere."
-“Another”

“If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.”
-“To My Dear and Loving Husband”

“I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black,
My Sun is gone so far in’s zodiac,
Whom whilst I ‘joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt,
His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt.
My chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn;
Return, return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn;
In this dead time, alas, what can I more
Than view those fruits which through thy heat I bore?
Which sweet contentment yield me for a space,
True living pictures of their father’s face.”
-“A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment”

Theirs was clearly a passionate marriage, and Anne portrays she and her husband as equals and spiritually inseparable despite their enforced physical distance at times. Here she neither belittles nor restrains herself. She boasts of the joy she experiences with him, and the ‘heat’ that produced their children, stamped with his likeness.

These passionate lines reference classical personification and non-Christian symbology to express sexual and romantic feelings. The poems imploring divine intervention for her husband’s safety speak in the language of her religion’s punitive and fickle God, about which her feelings were exceedingly complex.

Anne’s relationship to her religion

In her 50s, Anne suffered a string of tragedies. In the space of five years, she mourned the deaths of three grandchildren and a daughter-in-law. Her house burned down. She became deathly ill of consumption, a time during which her son Simon described her as ‘wasted’ to ‘skin and bone.’ Anne wrote about these experiences, seemingly to reaffirm her will to survive. Her relationship to her God was central to this effort.

The God of her religion was an interventionist who exacted punishment for human frailty. Each tragedy was a ‘correction’ to align her thoughts with His dictates. He visited smallpox upon her to ensure she corrected her carnal thoughts, having fallen in love. Her ever-curious mind pondered why Puritans would denounce Catholicism: weren’t these just two interpretations of the same thing? She considered atheism more than once. These thoughts too were in need of ‘corrections’ to curb her will and return her to unquestioning devotion to the Puritan God—never mind that each correction involved the death of an innocent child, or the loss of her family’s home, or an illness that brought her to the brink of death.

While many lines attest to her gratitude for God’s healing grace, her poem “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” invokes the fear that arises from both her religion and the inherent risk of childbirth. This is not a poem celebrating the imminent arrival of her child. The poem is heartbreaking in its anxiety, especially moving for anyone who’s experienced pregnancy and childbirth.

It begins:

“All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joys attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.”

The poem imagines her death and the children she will leave behind. She addresses her beloved husband, preparing him for her death. The poem ends:

“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.”

Her writings evoke a divine presence in her life that is unrelentingly cruel.

“Corn, till it have past through the mill and been ground to powder, is not fit for bread. God so deals with his servants: he grinds them with grief and pain till they turn to dust and then they are fit manchet⁴ for his mansion.”

#19, Meditations Divine and Moral

She conceives of a God who takes ‘pleasure’ in her suffering: “It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child;”⁵ “It pleased God to visit me with my old distemper of weakness and fainting, but not in that sore manner sometimes He Hath.”⁶ She also credits God and his pleasure relieving her of misery, once she acknowledges the ‘correction’ she needs to make to live as he wishes.

Her poetry creates a symmetry between her God and her father, in her relationships to them. She lives at their pleasure. She owes them a debt for her existence. They exert power over her, in direct opposition to her marriage, in which she and her husband were peers.

I can surmise that her self-deprecation and self-blame for every misery she sustained originated with her father. What child imagines that smallpox is punishment for emerging sexuality, without the influence of a domineering adult implanting the idea? But I can only imagine, since Anne’s writings don’t explicitly state this. That her suffering emanated from her God, and that she demeaned her self-worth for her father are undeniable.

The other Anne

Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643) arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony four years after Anne Bradstreet and her family. Hutchinson had been born in England to an Anglican family, her father a cleric and schoolteacher who saw to her education. Hutchinson soon became a controversial figure in Massachusetts. She spoke her mind, which often traveled paths uncommon to the local Puritans. She was a midwife in the colonies, and formed a weekly women’s group to discuss her ideas about the sermons being taught in church. The meetings became so popular that she started inviting men.

The powerful men in the community were offended by her lack of orthodoxy and appalled at her denunciations of Puritan clerics. She was charged and convicted by the court and by the church, resulting in her expulsion from both colony and church.

Anne Bradstreet doesn’t directly reference these events or this woman who also thought for herself. Anne was 26 at the time of Hutchinson’s banishment, and she lived to be 60 years old. The fact that Anne writes, during middle age, of God correcting her whenever her thoughts strayed from orthodoxy suggests that Hutchinson’s was a cautionary tale, whether she agreed with Hutchinson or not.

Anne intended her writing to be shared only within her family. She saw her writing as instructional for her children, some pieces explicitly so. I think it’s important that we see her professed devotion to God within this context: outwardly, she must model her religion’s expectations of women. The fact that she interprets the subsequent miseries of her life as God’s punishment to ‘correct’ her mind go beyond acknowledging that we are all sinners. Instead, it is testament to a mind that struggled to align her thoughts with a rigid theocracy, and to protect her children from a harsh life and a rash and angry God.

Anne Bradstreet’s poems have provided the detail of feminine life missing from the history textbooks. Even for the most privileged of women, survival—of oneself and one’s children—was the greatest challenge.

“Twice ten years old not fully told,
   since nature gave me breath,
My race is run, my thread is spun,
   lo, here is fatal death.” 
-Upon a Fit of Sickness, Anno 1632, Aetatis Suae, 19

Women were eager to meet and exchange ideas freely (witness the popularity of Anne Hutchinson’s weekly meetings); they had much on their mind that didn’t find safe harbor with the men in their lives and in the church. Husbands were often away from home, traveling amongst the colonies and to England for business and trade, leaving women behind, lonely and bearing the primary responsibilities of home. Both joys and sorrows were dispensed by an intemperate God. Despite the seeming lack of power coupled with immense burdens, women’s minds were as free as they allowed themselves to venture. With every line of poetry, Anne Bradstreet executed her innate power to think for herself.

Ellie’s Corner

Thunder

We’ve never seen Ellie under this small table in the living room, so when I saw her I knew there must be thunder in the distance. When she sensed the ‘all clear’ she came out of her bunker.

Sometimes the world’s a frightening place. Same, girl.

Thanks for reading,

1. While Puritans disallowed paintings depicting religious subjects, they prized portraiture. For example, Elizabeth Paddy Wensley and the Mason children (see here) had their portraits made in Boston contemporaneous with Anne Bradstreet.

2. At the time, women often published their works anonymously or nearly so. Women weren’t taken seriously as writers. For a woman to publish under her own name indicated either boldness or status, or both.

3. A mite was a Flemish copper coin that held little value, very much like a penny.

4. A manchet is a loaf of the finest quality of bread.

5. From “To My Dear Children”

6. From “Meditations When My Soul Hath Been Refreshed with the Consolations Which the World Knows Not” Entry dated Sept. 30, 1657