Anne Bradstreet

This is my University of Toronto, Toronto School of Theology, Doctoral Dissertation.  I am putting it up for a limited period of time.  It deals with poppular interpretation of ROmans 7 from the Arminian controversy to tyhe year prior to the publication of Werner Georg Kümmel’s pivotal Römer 7 und die Bekehrung des Paulus (1929).

Endorsements:

DONALD W. DAYTON: “The heart of [Huggins’s work]…is given over to a history of the interpretation of Romans 7 over almost 340 years…This central section is an extraordinary achievement and constitutes as careful and detailed a theological analysis of these figures as one will find anywhere, on this or any other topic.”


MARION ANN TAYLOR: “…Huggins goes beyond the bounds of history of interpretation to include the social history of popular religion, the sociology of knowledge and biography.  However, his treatment of exegetical issues and modern critical scholarship also shows that he is able to engage effectively with modern as well as historical and theological issues….Moreover he sensitively judges the merits of the various interpreters and streams of interpretation past and present…He has shown impressive research and analytical skills.  His work is cross disciplinary in many ways.  It shows an expertise in New Testament Studies, with a special concern for the history of the interpretation of texts, in American Church History, and in theology with its keen sensitivity to theological issues relating to the interpretation of biblical texts.  Huggins’ thesis is also very creative…his style of writing effectively draws the reader into the subject matter in an engaging way.  His use of long but fascinating quotations from diaries, journals, sermons, tracts, commentaries and other pertinent materials as well as his ability to paint very life-like portraits of the individuals he is writing about also make his thesis fascinating to read.”

Like many early modern writers, Bradstreet attempted to accommodate the worldly to the spiritual.  The world of finance, agriculture, and genealogy are is both merged and set into conflict with the spirit in her father-poems.  The poems on marriage and motherhood sketch our further conflicts between worldly and heavenly values but reconcile these oppositions by imagining all realms and all distinctions as things transcended in the spirit.  "The Author to Her Book" disrupts this larger spiritual economy in which Bradstreet located all of her work.  The book becomes a child adrift in the world where it has a material value but owes no obligation to its mother, its only parent. Completely dissociated from the contractual bonds that originate in God the Father and that are enforced by the mother, his (re-)production can never ben redeemed and therefore will not maintain a spiritual connection to its origin.  She finally does not cast it aside as blasphemy, but sets it apart as a thing that exists in a universe parallel, if inferior, to the spiritual realm that encompasses all her other offspring.  This poem records the culmination of a secularizing trend within the poet's essentially spiritual thought, for is demonstrates how the domestic, the economic, and the theological--which Bradstreet understood as interrelated locations of the bond between parents and children--where beginning to come apart for her as separate but analogous realms.

This essay examines the curious belatedness of Anne Bradstreet's elegies for Philip Sidney, Guillaume du Bartas, and Elizabeth I in The Tenth Muse (1650). The elegies point toward a broader pattern of "untimeliness" in The Tenth Muse, a result of ongoing tension between two temporal registers: the historical past and the present tense of poetic address. This tension appears as a key theme in "The Four Monarchies," Bradstreet's long verse history, before emerging as a central conflict in the elegies. The untimeliness of these elegies reflects the contradictions of Bradstreet's transatlantic worldmaking, a project trailed throughout by a worrying sense of her own lateness. These poems exhibit a temporal distance that forecloses the recovery of a lost English unity. The Tenth Muse thus asks us to see worldmaking as a problem not just of space but also of time. That challenge lies at the heart of the volume's elegies, which conjure a world of their own through the immediacy of the lyric now—even as they wrestle with the demands of historical occasion.

It has been suggested that there are at least two voices in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry; sometimes these voices are in harmony, sometimes in conflict. One of these voices is the poetic persona or the “poet voice,” who speaks as she ought, in accordance with religious doctrine, public duty, and conventional belief. The other voice is the personal one, the voice of “Anne,” the woman who loves, grieves, fears and feels pride. In her poems and letters, sometimes one side of her seems to win out and sometimes the other; sometimes a reassuring harmony is reached, while other times it is not. In this paper, I will examine Bradstreet’s poems “Prologue”, “The Author to Her Book”, “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and letter “To My Dear Children” to discuss which of her writings seem to suggest one voice or the other and argue that the main reason why she uses her poetic persona is a self-protection mechanism of a rebellious woman poet in a patriarchal Puritan society.
In Puritan society, people were deeply devoted to God and Christianity. This devotion shows off in many literary works of the era. For example, another women writer of the era, Mary Rowlandstone, starts her narrative account “Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration Of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson” as, “The sovereignty and goodness of GOD, together with the faithfulness of his promises displayed, being a narrative of captivity and restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandstone, commanded by her, to all that desires to know the Lord’s doings to, and dealings with her,” and reflects the Puritan belief that everything is the deed of God. God is the sole power that gives both sorrow and relief.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) and Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) were both Christian women writers of American literature. Both Bradstreet’s and O’Connor’s writings contain Christian references and themes. This essay explores the importance of religious expression to many Americans, and how readers cannot fully understand some literature without focusing on the religious elements expressed within it. Since O’Connor’s short stories include many references to sin and Jesus, and the bulk of Bradstreet’s poems are religious in nature, their works show that religious liberty and expression were just as important to Americans during the twentieth century as they were in the seventeenth century, and that they are likely just as important today.

This paper proposes a partial linguistic analysis of Anne Bradstreet's poem. We examine it from the pragmastylistic point of view, not in an interpretative or evaluative fashion, but rather with a view to contributing to a certain level of its interpretation. The linguist's contribution, as we see it, is to start from an evaluation or a specific level of interpretation of the poem or text and work her way through the means in an effort to enhance appreciation and  understanding. The analysis will primarily address the issue of the logomachia between the two sisters and the issue of the substantiality of the Spirit's claims. It will consider the impact of the lexical choices made as constituting the coordinates of the text which determine the response of the reader.

According to a widely accepted interpretation, Bradstreet's poem 'The Flesh and the  Spirit' reflects the clash of feeling and dogma in her poetry (Rosenfeld 1983), or it constitutes the "most definite statement of Christian hope", while at the same time it is "probably her strongest assertion of doubt of the reality of the insubstantial" (Stanford 1974: 85). In earlier work (Kitis and Mehler Language & Style 25, 2; Kitis and Mehler 1994) we argued that this interpretation is sustained and borne out by the discourse of the poem. We offered a linguistic-stylistic analysis of the poem concentrating on the context constructed by the deixis of the discourse. It was also noted there that the use of deictic sui-referential markers generating subject positions is consequential for the same level of interpretation of the poem. However, we did non take up the point in any detail. In this paper, I examine the logomachia between the two sisters, the two sides of a self - the Flesh and the Spirit - through the subject positions generated by the use of deictic self-referential pronouns. A psychoanalytic perspective is adopted.

1. Compare and contrast how John Smith and William Bradford perceived the opposition between wilderness and civilization, focusing on the texts selected in units 1 and 2. See the Activity " Answering comparison and contrast questions " in A Study Guide for American Literature to 1900, pages 21-23. By way of introduction, wilderness and civilisation are the most striking issues that are going to be considered in this paper. Wilderness, is described by Captain Smith in his works as if the native people were barbarians so, those are assumed due to his accounts, that the concept of wilderness for him varies quite considerably from Bradford's view of it.In other words, they had different impressions regarding this matter. Smith's chronicles of how did the natives celebrate their ceremonies and rituals are aimed to make the reader think they were uncivilized people. By contrast, Bradford portrayed them as amiable people after he had been socialising with them, thus William Bradford's perception of civilisation is considerably divergent from Smith's, owing to he even said that some of them spoke English whereas Smith reported them as if they were not equal even depreciating them as human beings. However, both of them pursue the same goal which was colonizing the New World even though they had different concept of colonization. While John Smith wanted to industrialize the New World William Bradford's objective was to have it as the home of his people. William Bradford wanted to build the City of God on earth on account of his beliefs. Not to mention John Smith's intention was to talk into his readers through his chronicles so as to try to make them move to the New World which was more or less Bradford's too even though he also wrote about all the adversities he had to deal with such as the scarcity of provisions and diseases. Despite the fact that they had not the same view regarding the Indians, they both intended to attract new settlers to the new land along their writings where Captain Smith for instance recounted how prosperous New England was and William Bradford related, after all the trouble that all of them had plenty of food and he even mentioned there were a lot of fish which was delivered to every family which is understood as they would not have had any lack of food at all if they had moved there.

From heart-shaped boxes of chocolates, to bouquets of roses and pre-written Hallmark cards, Valentine’s Day today is saturated in commercialism and decadence. It will probably come as no surprise that New England’s seventeenth-century Puritans did not celebrate Valentine’s Day. In fact, under the influence of our modern interpretation of the Puritans, imagining how they might have celebrated Valentine’s Day can be comical.

While it’s easy to laugh at the Puritans for their tight-laced lifestyles and incessant sanctitude, it is also important to note that, generally, the above sentiments simply aren't all that historically accurate. In fact, our modern perception of Puritans as sexless, emotionless, infinitely pious beings was largely a Victorian invention. Perhaps it stems from Victorian ideas of morality and a kinship they saw with the Puritans as a result of that sort of social behavior, but nonetheless, that depiction endured, and has seeped into our modern views.

Looking back, before the Victorians filtered the Puritans through their eyes, you will realize that the Puritans were real people, with real emotions and desires.  Anne Bradstreet’s poetry paints a different picture of romance and desire than the one typically imagined—one that challenges our modern perception of New England in the seventeenth-century.

Poets draw inspiration from countless subjects, whether from life experiences or physical objects around them, and Anne Bradstreet is no exception. While we walk around North Andover in her footsteps, we can’t help but wonder what environmental features we share across time. Trees come up time and time again in Bradstreet’s poems, and they are very present on and around the Merrimack campus as well. Which trees shaded the dirt walkways the Puritans strolled on sunny afternoons and which ones never made it to the saw mill?

We decided to set off on our own sunny afternoon stroll and see which trees that still stand on Merrimack College’s campus would have been around during Anne Bradstreet’s days—trees that may have inspired this great American poet.

(This post originally appeared on the Finding Anne Bradstreet Fellowship's blog and was co-authored by research fellows Isabella Connor & Taylor Galusha)

Professor Sarah Hutton will introduce the two volumes of  David  Norbrook’s Works of Lucy Hutchinson  published to date  (OUP, 2011, 2018), Ruth Connolly will introduce Women Poets of the English Civil War (MUP, 2018) edited by Sarah C.E.Ross and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann.