The sea did threat the heavens, the heavens the earth,
All looked like a chaos or new birth:
Fire broiled Earth, and scorched Earth it choked.
Both by their darings, Water so provoked
That roaring in it came . . .11
Although Anne allowed for the possibility of the creation of a new order from the clash between these sisters, she focused most of her energy on describing a bone-rattling apocalypse that was meant to chill her readers into repenting their battles, reestablishing the harmony that they were supposed to enjoy and thereby forestalling the wrath of God and the blight of His judgment.
Ultimately, Anne’s elements attempt to resolve their quarrel through rational debate, suggesting that if even women, generally considered the weak-minded sex, could rely on reason to quiet their problems, then so could the Puritan leaders in both England and New England. Otherwise England would be destroyed.
To flesh out each character’s argument, Anne had to study fiercely. She would have to master the physics, chemistry, and practical applications of each element to make the debate compelling and informative. She was fortunate to live in Ipswich, with its many good private libraries. Dedicated as she was to running her household smoothly, she still threw herself into her research, knowing that she would have to squeeze her hours of scholarship into her already full days.
Ironically, the restrictions Anne faced as a female writer seemed to work in her favor. Because she drew upon the material she knew best, the experience of women, and of women in families, her work had an earthy quality lacking in the sermons and poems of her male counterparts. In addition, the potential criticism that she faced as a female writer pressed her into creating more finely wrought and imaginative work than was required of her male contemporaries. Men were not subject to the limitations she had to circumvent and could simply write diatribes, pamphlets, and sermons, whereas the inventiveness that poetry demanded suited Anne and served her well.
Still, Anne could never escape the problems she faced as a woman writer. In the introductory poem (which she addressed to her father), she worried that no one would believe she had written these poems herself. She was especially concerned that people would think she had copied her words from Du Bartas:
[I] . . . feared you’ld judge Du Bartas was my friend,
I honour him, but dare not wear his wealth;
My goods are true (though poor), I love no stealth,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I shall not need mine innocence to clear,
These ragged lines will do’t when they appear.12
The fact that she worried about such accusations was an indication of the uniqueness of her achievement. This was an ambitious project for any poet, let alone a woman. Anne knew that it would be impossible for many of her contemporaries to explain the power and intelligence of her work except by charging her with plagiarism. Here was a new use of feminine self-deprecation. Her “poor” lines would attest to the authenticity of her work.
Yet Anne’s “sisters” exploded the idea that women were always the dulcet, obedient individuals they were supposed to be. It was as though her characters embodied her own hidden ambitions, to which she could never confess. In the world of poetry, her “elements” could be as pushy, smart, and aggressive as they wanted; each sister shoved the others to the side in order to demonstrate her own importance. Nowhere did Anne paint a picture of the pious, demure Puritan lady Dorothy had raised her to be. Her women shouted, raged, and insulted each other as bawdily as any man.
But “The Four Elements” was not simply a free-for-all, since Anne also made sure to apply her copious research. Earth gave a brief overview of the geography of Greece; Fire spoke of the great towns she had razed to the ground, from Troy to Zion; Water outlined her services to the ancient Egyptians; and Air explained that she occupied “every vaccuum,” a radical scientific concept for the era (though ultimately it would be proven untrue). Each of these learned ladies tried to outdo the other in the scope of her knowledge. No one had ever heard of such a thing—a tribe of debating bluestockings—although it is tempting to wonder if this is how Anne, Patience, Mercy, and Sarah argued among themselves.
By the time she was done composing this poem, these women were Anne’s intimates. She had steeped herself in their “qualities” and imagined who they would be if they were really alive. She had read late into the night, holding lines of verse in her mind during the day and writing the new sections of the poem down only after the children slept. Samuel, Dorothy, Sarah, Simon, and Hannah must have quickly become accustomed to their mother’s distracted looks, her habit of tuning out their demands while she worked, and her way of listening, it seemed, to voices no one else could hear.
So while she stood at the huge fireplace, tending each of the little fires—the embers that allowed a corn pudding to simmer slowly in its kettle, the low flame in the back that baked the bread for the week, and the roar near the front that roasted the chicken they would eat that day for dinner, Anne might have heard the orange tongues declare,
Ye cooks, your kitchen implements I frame
Your spits, pots, jacks, what else I need not name
Your daily food I wholesome make, I warm
Your shrinking limbs, which winter’s cold doth harm.13
On the hot summer days when it seemed miraculous that the river had not completely dried up, the trickle that splashed over the pebbles on the riverbed seemed to gurgle, “If I withhold, what art thou? Dead dry lump, / Thou bear’st no grass nor plant not tree, nor stump.” While Earth declared defiantly, “I come not short of you, / In wealth and use I do surpass you all.” Even the gentle Air itself seemed to sigh, “I am the breath of every living soul. / Mortals, what one of you that loves not me / Abundantly more than my sisters three?”14 How could Anne ignore the quarrel that was going on all around her, even if it was, so to speak, a civil war of her own invention? After all, the scholars said that whenever the powers of darkness disrupted the harmony of the elements, the result was invariably natural disasters of all kinds, as well as a mirroring chaos in the microcosm of the human world.
She could not stop, then, with Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. According to Aristotle, whom Anne read in translation, the human being was a miniature version of the universe itself. Man, too, was a mixture of four elements, known as “humors”—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm.
Although all four humors were present in each individual, one humor was believed to dominate according to a person’s overall health and personality type. Blood, which was in charge of distributing the humors throughout the body, was supposed to bestow a generous temperament on those who were “sanguine” in nature. Choler, which governed the heart and gave the body the necessary “heat” to function, was responsible for a martial spirit. Melancholy, which was in charge of the bones, liver, stomach, and spleen, tended to make one sad but also wise. And Phlegm, which was responsible for the governance of the brain, gave one an intellectual bent, since it was in charge of reason, imagination, and memory.
According to contemporary science, if the four elements battled with each other, the four humors would reflect this dissension and human beings would have to contend with illness, disaster, and plague. To Anne there was clear evidence of the universe’s lack of harmony, from the civil war in England to the death of the best and the holiest, such as the Lady Arbella all those years ago. Even the Hutchinson debacle was an example of how the finest individual could be toppled by the brutal forces of the devil.15
Again, Anne translated this academic idea—that dissension among the elements would produce chaos in each human being—into what she knew best. Air, Fire, Water, and Earth would become pregnant and produce daughters, the four humors, who would vie for primacy in a companion piece to “The Four Elements.” Each humor shared many of the qualities of her “mother element.” Happily, this new poem, appropriately titled “Of the Four Humors,” also required mo
re research, an activity Anne seemed to thrive on. Now she would have to read all she could find on human anatomy, medicine, and the actual workings of the humors—which organs they were associated with and what powers they governed in the body.
Once she mastered the science she needed, she poured her knowledge into shaping the quarreling cousins in their own battle for preeminence. When Phlegm asserts her primacy as the seat of the senses, her description of the miracle of human eyesight reveals that Anne had read the foremost expert on anatomy, Dr. Helkiah Crooke, and was as up-to-date on the science of sight as was possible:16
The optic nerve, coats, humours all are mine,
The wat’ry, glassy, and the crystaline;
O mixture strange! O colour colourless,
Thy perfect temperament who can express?
He was no fool who thought the soul lay there,
Whence her affections, passions speak so clear.17
When Phlegm goes on to describe the mechanics of the spine and ligaments, she gloats over her attributes, giving her recital far more verve than the textbook versions of anatomy that Anne had studied so copiously. Like a playwright, Anne transformed the inert knowledge of the specialists into lively monologues her readers could follow.
Anne’s politics were not far beneath the surface of “Of the Four Humors.” The most warlike of all the sisters, Choler appears rash, foolish, and overly aggressive. She also declares that her martial humor is dominant in males: “Yet man for Choler is the proper seat: / I in his heart erect my regal throne, / where monarch like I play and sway alone.”18 Choler’s pride and machismo do not speak well of the swaggering men she governs. Anne could not resist this dig against the pointless bellicosity of males, and of Charles in particular.
Anne drove this point home by making the last, most “yielding,” and feminine of the cousins, Phlegm, the one who is able to stop the violence in her family. Anne was well versed in the scriptural tenet that the last shall be first and the weak shall be made strong. She based much of her life as an intellectual woman on this premise. Thus it is Phlegm who unites her cousins and then the four mother elements too.
Let’s now be friends; it’s time our spite were spent,
Lest we too late this rashness do repent,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Let Sanguine with her hot hand Choler hold,
To take her moist my moisture will be bold:
My cold, cold Melancholy’s hand shall clasp;
Her dry, dry Choler’s other hand shall grasp.
Two hot, two moist, two cold, two dry here be,
A golden ring, the posy UNITY.
Nor jars nor scoffs, let none hereafter see,
But all admire our perfect amity;
Nor be discerned, here’s water, earth, air, fire,
But here’s a compact body, whole entire.19
Phlegm’s vision of harmony was Anne’s own. Each humor accepted the fact that she needed the others to make a whole that was greater than the warring parts. In this time of civil war, when Parliamentary forces were battling the king’s army and when no one knew which side would win, there was nothing Anne yearned for more than this kind of “UNITY.”
Although her vision was essentially a cooperative one, Anne acknowledged that it could come about only after fierce competition, revealing her hope that the bloodshed and warfare in England would cease. Of course, Anne also had a subsidiary hope: that men might learn to bend an ear to women and that what they heard might change the course of history.
As the civil war showed no sign of letting up, many of Anne’s friends and neighbors continued to be torn about where their duties lay. Leaders of New England, such as Winthrop, began to receive letters begging them to come back and lend support to the Puritan cause against Charles. One old friend of Winthrop’s who sat in Parliament lamented, “Now we see and feele how much we are weakened by the loss of those that are gone from us, who should have stood in the gap, and have wrought and wrasled mightily in this great business.”20
It was hard to resist such pleas for help, but most prominent New England Puritans were not particularly eager to jump into the fray, as they were worried about the direction of their coreligionists back in England. Old World Puritans agreed that royalist principles must be dismantled but were less clear about what to put in their place. Increasingly, they seemed to be leaning toward the Bay colony’s biggest bugaboos. Either they wanted to cling to Presbyterianism, where a synod of elders had control over the administration of all the churches—a hateful idea to New England Puritans, who felt that each church should be self-governing—or they sought complete freedom to form the kinds of churches they wanted regardless of whether they adhered to the laws of the “true religion.” To the colonists, this libertarian approach would result in a ghastly proliferation of dissenters, from Anabaptists to Familists to Quakers, all of whom were anathema to the stern folk in Massachusetts.
Winthrop and Dudley therefore deemed it important to remain in New England and safeguard their system of church governance. But a divide was emerging between Old and New World Puritans. Without continuity, could American Puritans still think of themselves as English? Were they the true English Puritans, while the Old World folk had simply lost their way?
This last was the conclusion of most of Anne’s family and friends. Any other idea was too threatening to consider. Suddenly Anne’s poems from this period, “A Dialogue,” “The Four Elements,” and “Of the Four Humors” seemed to speak to the moment. Anne was now writing as a serious-minded, learned poet and a social critic. Already her poetic accomplishments were impressive, although no one seems to have realized that one day her work would garner the attention of the English-speaking world.
Chapter Sixteen
Foolish, Broken, Blemished Muse
The subject large, my mind and body weak
With many more discouragements did speak.
— ANNE BRADSTREET,“The Four Monarchies”
ANNE KNEW THAT HER DAYS IN IPSWICH were numbered when Simon announced his dream of moving his family from the relative ease of the settled town and plunging them deeper into the wilderness. Like his father-in-law, Simon felt impelled to conquer the wilderness in the name of Puritanism. It was against the creed of his religion to sit back and rest on his laurels; a pious man or woman must continually strive to please God, no matter the challenge. Anne agreed with her husband, but it was still awful to consider yet another wrenching move.
She had little choice in the matter, however. Over time, Simon must have reminded Anne more and more of her father, with that same relentless drive to succeed, selfless dedication to the colony’s success, devotion to Puritanism, and slightly quixotic idealism. Of course, Simon was far more genial and relaxed than Dudley had ever been. But as he grew into a civic leader in his own right, he modeled himself after the father-in-law he revered.
By the end of 1643, Simon had completed most of his work for the colony and could devote himself to building his estate. His work as a mediator among the strong-minded New Havenites, the rigid Plymouth Pilgrims, and his own colony’s leaders had helped him grow in confidence.
Now, just like his father-in-law, Simon was dissatisfied with his current situation and believed he could establish a true utopia, this time in Cochichawicke, a fertile territory fifteen miles west of Ipswich, bounded to the north by the Merrimack River and “two miles eastward to Rowley.”1 In 1634 John Winthrop Jr. had bought this land from an Indian sachem for six pounds and a coat, and Simon had been hoping to make this move ever since he had heard of the virgin territory.
The dream of yet another new settlement was a family affair. John Woodbridge, the husband of Anne’s sister Mercy, was among those who had originally raised the idea in 1638, when he and others sought from the General Court the right to “begin a plantation.”2 For years Woodbridge had cherished the dream of being the minister of a new Puritan settlement. This seemed the perfect opportunity, but there was one stum
bling block. When he was a young man, Woodbridge had fled England before he could be ordained. Dudley, who was eager to have a clergyman in the family, urged the young man to “perfec[t] your former studies” so that he could assume the pulpit in the new territory.3 Woodbridge went to Harvard to complete his preparation, and when at last the happy day came—in 1645 he was anointed as a Puritan minister—Dudley immediately saw to it that he was appointed to head the church of the new settlement. That same year Chochichawicke was renamed Andover, a comforting improvement from the English point of view, and a meetinghouse was constructed for Woodbridge to preach in.
Now that Mercy’s husband had attained his dream position, he was eager to move at once. Simon, who seemed to have been waiting for his brother-in-law’s ordination before he made his move, agreed. And so Anne and Mercy knew that it would soon be time to say good-bye to their homes in the thriving town of Ipswich and to their sister Patience. Although none of the women left any record of complaint about being separated, it must have been difficult to face their leave-taking.
Fortunately for Anne, Simon had the good sense to build his new home before transplanting his large family. He had erected a sawmill on the Cochichawicke Brook the year before, and since it was the only one within miles, money and goods began to pour into the Bradstreets’ already overflowing coffers. Simon and Anne had arrived in the New World as one of the colony’s wealthiest families, and by the 1640s Simon’s real estate investments, as well as his sale of livestock and agricultural produce, had made them even richer.
With Anne and the children safely installed in their old home in Ipswich, Simon did not have to rush the building of this new house, nor did he have to cut costs, since he could get his logs sliced into boards at his own mill. It was a luxurious opportunity, and Simon made the most of it, hiring carpenters and lavishing money on paneling, doors, imported windows, and perhaps even a gable or two. Within a year or so, his workmen had created a splendid homestead situated on twenty acres of land, the finest location and the most beautiful English structure in Andover.
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