Mistress Bradstreet

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by Charlotte Gordon


  Even Cotton could not stand by her now. Puritans believed that God no longer communicated directly to His flock. The age of revelation was over. Hutchinson had uttered shocking words that proved she was in the grip of the devil. The court hastily sentenced exile, eager to separate themselves from this sinner as quickly as possible. Winthrop rejoiced that it was from “her own mouth” that her guilt was determined.30 Even Hutchinson’s supporters were aghast at her declaration that she was a prophet and had experienced miracles on the scale of the biblical patriarchs.

  At this point, most of Hutchinson’s followers fell away, although some of the most loyal adherents struggled to defend her for a few more months. Her civil trial was at an end, although she still had to face a church trial the following March. When she presented herself at these proceedings, she seemed a broken woman. Pregnant, ill, and exhausted, she publicly recanted, but the ministers still voted to excommunicate her. An apologetic, weakened Hutchinson was still a dangerous woman. They did not want her near their congregants.

  After this rather anticlimactic finale, all resistance to the court’s edict appeared to die. The Boston church returned to the fold of the other New England congregations, and Boston residents even seemed to make peace with their neighbor and governor, Winthrop, who was glad that they no longer regarded him as “their greatest enem[y].” He wrote, “The Lord brought about the hearts of all the people to love and esteem [Him and their pastor] more than ever before, and the church was saved from ruin beyond all expectation.”31

  That spring the magistrates forced Hutchinson, her husband, and her children out of the Bay colony and into the wilds of the unknown territories. The Hutchinsons found refuge in Rhode Island and later moved on to New York. For all the settlers, including Anne and her neighbors in Ipswich, it seemed that quiet might now return to Massachusetts Bay. They had cleansed the colony. Even the formidable John Cotton was reprimanded for his role in supporting Anne Hutchinson, and he hastily distanced himself from the former superstar. The Hutchinson trial had made it clear that in order to survive in Massachusetts Bay, you had to abide by the rules. There was no room for renegades.32

  Chapter Fourteen

  Old England and New

  HUTCHINSON’S METEORIC CRASH rang a warning bell to all ambitious women in New England. You had to toe the theological line if you wanted to survive, and you could not stray from your prescribed role as a female in Puritan society. If a woman dared to write verse, therefore, she would have to compose lines that would not compromise her station in life. She would have to assume the role of an obedient wife and daughter, not a preacher, and certainly not a prophet.

  It was a dangerous business, then, that Anne had embarked on in the midnight hours. Although she would never condone Hutchinson’s actions, she would never condemn them either. Whether for good or evil, Hutchinson was an example of the kind of power an intelligent female could wield.

  During the turmoil of this period, Anne wrote her second poem, “An Elegy upon That Honorable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney,” a work obsessed with the idea of women and power. There was an avalanche of ambition behind this poem. The great English poet had been dead for almost two generations and held little claim on the consciousness of those who were not literary aspirants. But to Anne, Sidney was an important avenue toward being considered a poet herself. She knew that the most famous poet of the last generation, Edmund Spenser, had elegized Sidney and thereby claimed the mantle of the greatest living English poet for himself. In the same way, Keats would immortalize Homer, Shelley would immortalize Milton, and Eliot would link himself to the Metaphysicals. One day Anne herself would be claimed by the great American poet John Berryman as his stepping-stone to greatness in his 1951 poem “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.”

  If you were a male aspirant to the laurels of poetic fame, you wrote elegies to the dead poets you admired as a way of asserting your own literary identity. As far as Sidney was concerned, Anne had perhaps more right than any other living writer to invoke the legacy of her predecessor, since Dudley had always told her she was related to the celebrated Sidney by blood.

  With her “Elegy,” therefore, Anne claimed the right to be considered the next great English poet, although for Anne to aspire to any kind of poetic fame was a profoundly ambitious dream. The English reading public loved poetry. From Shakespeare to Herrick, from Quarles to Milton, they devoured new books of verse as though they were starving for meter and rhyme, regarding the best collections as page-turners as well as instructive examples in beauty and faith. Poets were important people and writing poetry was regarded as a supremely impressive vocation, but, of course, it was a vocation reserved entirely for men. Hutchinson had demonstrated the trouble women could get into if they trespassed into male territory, and so, whether or not Anne made a conscious decision to distance herself from Hutchinson’s boldness, she took an entirely different approach from the older woman; she masked her ambition behind twenty-two lines of apparent self-denunciation.

  She imagined that the nine classical Muses of art and literature who lived on Mount Parnassus, according to Greek mythology “took from me the scribbling pen I had . . . And drave me from Parnassus in a rage.”1 In Anne’s version of the Muses, the famous damsels of inspiration do not have it in them to help another woman and are infuriated by the female poet’s presumption.

  But Anne counters this apparent blow to her skill by asking the reader to “wonder not if I no better sped.”2 On first reading, she seems to mean we should not be surprised that her efforts were not very successful. But according to Puritan theology, it was only logical that the Muses would kick a Christian poet off the Greek mountain. As a Puritan poet, Anne believed she was destined to travel another sort of path with a different source of inspiration, the Holy Ghost, or the Muse of the Christian God.

  That she was anxious about the idea of venturing into the male literary world was still evident three years later when she would write a poem on another one of her literary heroes, Du Bartas, who had dazzled her back in Sempringham. Again she considered the theme of female inadequacy compared with the prowess of men, asking the same implicit question: Was it possible for a woman writer to achieve any kind of excellence?

  At first it seems that she has acquiesced in this poem and is asserting that only men can be great poets. Never, Anne writes, could she aspire to such heights as Du Bartas, the pinnacle of piety, learning, and skill. She bemoans her “faltering tongue”; her muse is “a child” who “finds too soon his want of eloquence”; she is “weak brained,” “sightless,” and “mute.” If only, she laments, she could have his “pen” (and, earthy woman that she was, she would have enjoyed the play on the word penis). It is not until the final line of the poem that she makes her own claim for “Fame.” Flawed though she is, it is she who will resuscitate the male writer from death with her words. She ends the poem with the proud statement, “He is revived.”3 By whom? By Anne Bradstreet, of course.

  For Anne the problem of poetic greatness and lineage was far more complicated than for her male counterparts: Where could a woman fit into the tidy line of male inheritance? Two years later, in 1643, Anne would at last offer her answer by turning to her father’s great heroine, Elizabeth I, the warrior queen.

  Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?

  Or had they some, but with our Queen, is’t gone?

  Nay masculines, you have thus taxed us long,

  But she though dead, will vindicate our wrong.

  Let such as say our sex is void of reason,

  Know tis a slander now but once was treason.4

  Anne was becoming bolder. She had dropped the self-deprecation of the two earlier tributes and, with the Hutchinson debacle still in recent memory, declared that Elizabeth was not just equal to male rulers but was in fact the “pattern of kings.” “Was ever people better ruled than hers?” she demanded. “Did ever wealth in England more abound?” Anne was proud that Elizabeth was a fighting queen, one who ha
d “wracked,” “sacked,” and “sunk” the Spanish Armada. She had put on armor and commanded the troops at Tilbury like an “Amazon.”5

  To Anne, a woman, not a man, was an example of the glory of England, so it was not surprising that she painted Elizabeth as a kind of messianic symbol. If a woman could rule over men, if the weak could triumph over the strong, then anything, Anne implied, was possible. But sadly, this wondrous “Phoenix” was gone; never would the queen return until “the heaven’s great revolution.” Anne ended the poem with a fantastic vision of “many worlds,” where the fabulous could become true: Elizabeth would be resurrected; her “living virtues [would] speak”; and, amazingly, she would shine as an example for men to follow.6 It would be a glorious reversal of Anne’s real-world hierarchy, where men were the perennial leaders and women the inevitable, eternal followers.

  Given the dangers, politically speaking, of a woman’s being so outspoken, these were especially inflammatory words. Not that Anne meant to retroactively support the Hutchinson “revolution” that had almost taken place. But the raft of misogynist complaints that had been unleashed in response to the Hutchinson crisis must have troubled her. She knew better, however, than to declare her ideas out loud. Only under the cover of night, while the town slept, did she venture to assert her own frank arguments.

  These writing times were few and far between, as Anne was often too exhausted to stay up after the children were asleep. If it was hard for anyone to find time alone in colonial New England, it was doubly hard for a young mother; by the time she had written the poem to Elizabeth, Anne had borne five children. To embark on a journey as a writer was such an implausible undertaking that even she must have sometimes wondered why she spent her energy this way.

  But each of her early poems was not only an attempt to sort through the difficulties she experienced as a woman writer but also her response to the hardship of her life. When it began to leak out that she was composing poetry in the dead of night, she reported the whispers of those who believed that she was overstepping her place, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits.”7

  Buoyed by the education she had received as a child as well as by her father’s belief in her poetic vocation, she felt she could best serve the colony through her literary efforts. She also seemed to understand that to survive her life in the wilderness, she had to focus on her intellectual well-being as well as the exigencies of daily life. She had more success than her contemporary in walking this thin line. Anne would be praised for maintaining “her exact diligence in her place,” while Hutchinson would be pilloried for generations for her various trespasses.8

  In fact, ironically, Mistress Hutchinson’s downfall ushered in the most fertile decade of Anne Bradstreet’s life—fertile in every sense of the word. From 1638 to 1648, Anne wrote more than six thousand lines of poetry, more than almost any other English writer on either side of the Atlantic composed in an entire lifetime. For most of this time, she was either pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or nursing an infant, establishing herself as a woman blessed by God, the highest commendation a New England Puritan mother could receive.9 Once Anne had settled into the rhythm of bearing children, babies seemed to stimulate her work.

  Perhaps this was because Anne had found reliable servants to help her take care of the house and to tend the little ones, but it was also probably no accident that these two kinds of creative activities went hand in hand for her. Rather than viewing children as an obstacle to a productive working life, Puritan parents saw each child as an asset to the family’s blessings and wealth. The more hands, the lighter the labor; the more healthy Puritan children who came of age in America, the greater the chances of longevity for the English colony, and so it was everyone’s responsibility to have as many children as possible and to instruct them in the ways of Puritanism. To Anne, each new baby was also an incentive to be a good pious mother, and her poetry became part of her attempt to teach her children the tenets of her religion.

  In 1638, just months after Mrs. Hutchinson’s exile, Anne bore her third baby, a healthy little girl. Poor Mrs. Hutchinson, however, had suffered a catastrophe. Driven out of Boston when she was pregnant and forced to give birth in the wilderness, she had produced a horribly damaged infant, or so rumors claimed. Some people even whispered that Hutchinson’s child was not human but a demon fathered by Satan.

  That Hutchinson had borne such a deformity was a dreadful testimony to her sinful nature, according to the stern beliefs of New Englanders. To them a woman’s womb proved her virtue and piety or demonstrated her hypocrisies. Before her trial, Hutchinson had risen to power in part because she was seen as a virtuous mother. After her guilt was proven, it fit Puritan logic that she would no longer be favored by God. If each child was a physical manifestation of the mother’s spiritual condition, then, as the minister Thomas Weld argued, “See how the wisdome of God fitted this judgement to her [Hutchinson’s] sinne every way, for looke as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.”10

  Anne could take heart, therefore, that just after she had written her first serious poem, the elegy to Sidney, her new baby had arrived without blemishes. This had to mean that her work was not tainted by sin; she was pure of heart. Throughout Anne’s writing life this connection between childbirth and the condition of her soul would be a powerful theme. Any doubts she had about her poetry would be magnified with each pregnancy and countered by each healthy birth. Her community, too, saw each of her healthy babies as a testimony to her godliness, despite what might otherwise be seen as increasingly maverick behavior.

  But although Anne had so far managed to channel her own ambitions to fit inside the Puritan system, she was beginning to fear for her brazen younger sister, Sarah, who seemed tempted to take tentative steps along Hutchinson’s treacherous path. Sarah had always been more rebellious than her sisters, and she appeared to relish some of Hutchinson’s strange ideas, particularly that of modern-day prophesy—that it was still possible for people to hear the voice of the Lord. Anne feared that her beloved Sarah might someday share the fate of this wretched woman. Of the sisters, Sarah was most like Anne—brilliant, emotional, restless, and an original thinker. In fact, Anne had named her new little girl after her middle sister, skipping over Patience, the next oldest, who should have followed, in the family-naming tradition.

  But Sarah was intent on independence and left her parents’ home to marry Major Benjamin Keanye soon after her little namesake was born. It was troubling that Sarah’s new home was in Boston, the place where her fascination with Hutchinson had probably begun. Indeed, it was ironic to all of those who knew the Dudley girls that the steady, compliant Mercy, who had also recently married, would remain close to her parents and sisters in Ipswich, while the problematic Sarah was forty miles away from their supervision. All too soon she would avail herself of her freedom, presenting a kind of dark mirror to her eldest sister of what could happen to a woman who strayed too far from convention.

  Meanwhile, back in Ipswich, under the watchful eye of her family and friends, Anne struggled with her own faith. As she wrote a few years later, “Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism.” Devout as she was, Anne frequently wondered, “How could I know whether there was a God?”11 However, unlike Sarah, Anne had her poetry and her close relationships with Ward, her father, and her husband to help her sort through her complicated feelings. And with three children to raise in the rigors of her religion, she could not afford to give in to her doubts, at least not openly.

  IN 1639, THE YEAR AFTER little Sarah’s birth and the Hutchinson crisis, Dudley was once again elected to the post of deputy governor. He decided, grudgingly, to move closer to Boston to attend to the growing needs of colonial government. In the years since they had arrived in the New World from England, Boston had become a bustling Puritan center, and emigrants continually flowed in, undeterred by reports of th
e Hutchinson debacle. By the early 1640s there would be more than twenty thousand settlers who had busily “planted fifty towns and villages, built thirty or forty churches, and more ministers’ houses, a castle, a college, prisons, forts, cartways . . . many having comfortable houses, gardens, orchards, grounds fenced, corn fields, etc.”12

  For the first time in her life, Anne did not follow her father. Her duty lay with her husband, and Simon did not want to leave Ipswich. Dudley and Dorothy settled in Roxbury, a little village near Boston. Pregnant for the fourth time, with little Sarah only a year old, Anne was truly on her own now. Her quiet mother would be far away during Anne’s next labor, and as the eldest sister, it would be her duty to help guide Mercy and Patience through their own pregnancies and births.

  Whether she was being stoic or was exhilarated to have this new freedom, Anne never seems to have complained about her parents’ departure. But she could not stay silent when it came to her husband’s absences, and used her skills as a poet to express her frustration and her love in deeply personal verse that she never intended to publish.

  Simon had been appointed by his father-in-law and Winthrop to help oversee the creation of what the Puritans called “the United Colonies of New England”—a group of settlements that would include Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, the Connecticut valley, and Plymouth. Given the firm opinions of all involved, particularly the New Havenites (led by the stern Thomas Hooker, the Bradstreets’ old New Towne minister), Simon was kept very busy with negotiations. Although Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams would have been shocked to hear it, there were those in the west who saw Winthrop and Dudley’s government as being too tolerant of different points of view and so resisted connecting their fates to Massachusetts.

 

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