Early Modern Women:
An Interdisciplinary Journal
Vol. 10, No. 1 • Fall 2015
Anne Bradstreet’s “dear remains”:
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
1
Stephanie Pietros
T
wo prevailing tendencies mark the scholarship on the colonial writer Anne
Bradstreet: first, one that deems the poet the founder of a nascent American
literary tradition; and second, one that claims her as part of a feminist tradition in writing, whether American or British. These tendencies have resulted in
obscuring the continuities between Bradstreet’s early “public” British writing
and her later “private” American writing, while emphasizing the latter and giving
short shrift to Bradstreet’s place in British literary history. The work of Adrienne
Rich and other second-wave feminists, which advanced this influential reading
of Bradstreet’s work, crucially considered the seventeenth-century poet worthy
of study.2 I build upon their work as well as that of recent critics who have
sought to question the influential binaries that Rich established,3 by examining
Many people nurtured this project during its long gestation, but I would like to thank
especially Eve Keller, Kirk Quinsland, and Patricia Tarantello.
2
Rich claims that the early poems published in The Tenth Muse focus on “public” topics
and are imitative of the British tradition, while the later poems focus on more personal, feminine,
and domestic topics and are more original, hence American. “Anne Bradstreet and Her Poetry,” The
Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Jeannine Hensley (1967; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2010), ix–xxii, at xv.
3
Alice Henton has recently argued that Bradstreet uses the trope of the poem-as-child
throughout her work to “simultaneously [destabilize] accepted gender assumptions and [seed]
the poetic landscape with feminine symbols” (304). Yet like Rich, she seeks to claim Bradstreet as
forebear to a new American tradition. “‘Once Masculines . . . Now Feminines Awhile’: Gendered
Imagery and the Significance of Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse,” New England Quarterly 75.2
( June 2012): 302–25. Abram Van Engen complicates the binaries of public and private, early and
late, that Rich laid out by demonstrating the public importance of private, domestic topics. He
argues that Bradstreet uses her private, socially-sanctioned roles of mother and wife in her work
1
48
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
49
the images of children, both actual and metaphorical, that appear throughout
Bradstreet’s oeuvre. Rather than finding this seemingly feminine subject matter
and language as the means by which the colonial female poet carved out a space
for her acceptable participation in a male-dominated literary sphere,4 I situate
Bradstreet’s poetry and prose about children within the tradition of early modern
British poets who used such language to meditate on their poetic legacy. For her
part, Bradstreet explores the paradoxically imitative and autonomous nature of
children and the particular challenges that nature poses to poetic legacy, especially
for the female poet. In focusing on Bradstreet’s place within early modern British
traditions, I not only honor Bradstreet’s own self-representation but also seek to
challenge the disciplinary boundaries of the academy that may unintentionally
obscure continuities between national traditions.
My analysis rests on two assumptions: first, that despite the prevalence
of infant mortality, children were considered in the early modern period to be
the means of providing long-lasting and perpetual legacy;5 and second, that
poetry was also understood as another source of this legacy. The construction of
poetry as legacy manifests itself in a number of ways in early modern poetry — for
as a way to justify her entry into the public sphere. “Advertising the Domestic: Anne Bradstreet’s
Sentimental Poetics,” Legacy 28.1 (2011): 47­–68, at 47–48. Robert Hilliker explicitly challenges
Rich’s assessment by asserting that Bradstreet uses domestic tropes throughout her oeuvre, not just
in the later verse, to address political concerns, although in claiming her as part of a larger tradition
of colonial writers, Hilliker separates her from English literary traditions. “Engendering Identity:
The Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l’Incarnation,” Early
American Literature 42.3 (2007): 435­–70, at 437.
4
See Laura Major, “Anne Bradstreet: The Religious Poet as Mother,” Journal of the
Association for Research on Mothering 7.1 (2005): 110–20; and Bethany Reid, “‘Unfit for Light’:
Anne Bradstreet’s Monstrous Birth,” New England Quarterly 71.4 (1998): 517–42.
5
Such a legacy had implications for both the family and the state, which were fundamentally
linked at this time. Early modern political theorists argued that patriarchal authority and divine
right absolutism were both grounded in the family, and that the political and the paternal were
analogous. For some theorists the paternal and the political were even more than analogous, since
legitimate paternity was a vital component to ensuring the proper lines of patrilineal succession, and
political right was considered to derive from paternal right. See Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism
in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in
Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For a revision of Schochet’s account
of Harvey, see Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in
Early Modern England (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), chapter 4. According to
Mary E. Fissell, the discourse of reproduction similarly links the family, and in particular women
and their reproductive bodies, to the state. Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early
Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
50 EMWJ Vol. 10, No. 1 • Fall 2015
Stephanie Pietros
example, through the Horatian trope of the poem as monument.6 The trope of
the poem-as-child, in which the language of generation is used to articulate the
writing process and describe the product of that process, is a means by which
writers identified problems and tested solutions to challenges to poetic legacy.7
While this metaphor dates back to Plato and Aristotle, it flourished in the early
modern period, according to some, because of male writers’ preoccupations with
paternity, succession, and primogeniture.8 Bradstreet’s use of children, both actual
and metaphorical, to consider poetic legacy suggests that this language did not
only appeal to male writers. Moreover, since children were a tenuous source of
legacy at best, the popularity of this trope suggests that it was an apt means to
discuss challenges associated with poetry as legacy.
In the often-anthologized “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet deplores
the publication of the first edition of her poetry, The Tenth Muse (1650), seemingly corroborating her brother-in-law John Woodbridge’s claim in his prefatory
materials that he published the work without her knowledge and against her
wishes.9 “Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,” she laments, “Who after
birth did’st by my side remain, / Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then
true, / Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view.”10 While for many years scholars
took seriously Bradstreet’s claim of her lack of control, it now seems clear that
she had some degree of agency in her work’s publication. In fact, Patricia Pender
has recently argued that the humility tropes in the prefatory poems to The Tenth
6
For more on the construction of poetry as legacy, see Kate Narveson, “The Ars Longa
Trope in a Sublunary World,” Renaissance Tropologies: The Cultural Imagination of Early Modern
England, ed. Jeanne Shami (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 255–80; and Aaron
Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124.1 (2009): 92–106. Maggie Kilgour
reads Ovid’s view of art at the end of the Metaphormoses as one in which art itself is the means
of transcending change. “‘Thy Perfect Image Viewing’: Poetic Creation and Ovid’s Narcissus in
Paradise Lost,” Studies in Philology 102.3 (2005): 307–39, at 316–17.
7
In addition to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and its imitations, as noted below, the
reproductive metaphor appears in Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” in which he calls his son “his
best piece of poetry” (l. 10). The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (New York: Penguin, 1996),
48. The trope also appears throughout Shakespeare’s Sonnets to articulate a kind of collaborative
authorship between the poet and the fair young man through imitation of the young man’s beauty.
See Sonnets 15, 37, 38, 83, and 84.
8
Tom MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity in Renaissance England: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Donne and Jonson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
9
See The Tenth Muse (London: Stephen Boswell, 1650), A4v–A5v and Several Poems
(Boston: John Foster, 1678), a4v–a5v.
10
Bradstreet, Several Poems, P6v, p. 236.
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
51
Muse manipulate the conventions of the reluctant author and paradoxically suggest Bradstreet’s collusion in the publication of her work.11 Moreover, there is
evidence that the poet revised the poems of The Tenth Muse for Several Poems,
ultimately published posthumously in 1678, even as she wrote the celebrated
domestic poems that form the basis for her modern reputation.12
Bradstreet’s strategic, rhetorical deployment of this modesty topos not only
constitutes a form of subtle self-fashioning, but it also establishes a paradox in the
relationship between the poet–mother and her poem–child. The poem–child is
autonomous, as it has been taken from its mother by those unwise friends, yet at
the same time it replicates her faults, as its ill-formed nature results from the feebleness of the parent’s own brain. Once the poem–child goes out into the world,
it reflects negatively on its mother, Bradstreet claims, but its autonomy ensures
that she has little control over this negative legacy. Her attempts to improve the
verse, designed to enhance her legacy, are ultimately unsuccessful. In an attempt to
prevent it from adversely affecting her reputation, she sends the child out of doors
again with the instruction to tell people that its mother is poor, presumably to
excuse those faults that still exist. Notably, though, this time she assumes responsibility for sending it out herself, in contrast to its supposedly being “snacht” from
her as before.
The poem-as-child metaphor in “The Author to Her Book” enables
Bradstreet to articulate a challenge to the nature of her poem’s legacy that mirrors one of biological legacy. Both form part of the author’s reputation even
when they are no longer under her control. Bradstreet’s self-presentation in this
poem attempts to mitigate potential negative consequences of her poem–child’s
11
Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 154. Kimberly Latta has argued that Bradstreet’s humility tropes, and
in particular her deference to her father, should not be viewed as inflected by gender but rather
by the conventional formulae of Christian humility in Puritan culture that applied to both men
and women. “‘Such Is My Bond’: Maternity and Economy in Anne Bradstreet’s Writing,” Inventing
Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1650–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash
(Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 57–85.
12
See Henton, “‘Once Masculines,” 312–13. “The Author to Her Book” appears just before
a break in Several Poems which reads “Several other Poems made by the Author upon / Diverse
Occasions, were found among her Papers / after her Death, which she never meant should / come
to publick view.” Thus, we can assume that Bradstreet revised for publication the poems preceding
the break, even though the edition itself was not published until after her death. Bradstreet, Several
Poems, P7, p. 237.
52 EMWJ Vol. 10, No. 1 • Fall 2015
Stephanie Pietros
autonomy by explaining that she attempted to fix some of the poem’s faults and
by assuming a posture of humility. Extending Ivy Schweitzer’s influential reading, which claims that “The Author to Her Book” represents a crucial moment in
Bradstreet’s self-representation, as she gives the common trope “an unusual twist
by representing her child as having no father, though it had several poetic fathers
(the dedication casts Thomas Dudley as her model and muse) and more than
enough paternal and avuncular sponsors,”13 I suggest that her representation of
the child as fatherless supports Bradstreet’s larger attempt to control its role in
formulating her reputation.
We certainly may find in the poem reflections of Bradstreet’s gender; for
example, the manner in which she treats the poem–child might be regarded as
maternal, though early modern male poets like Edmund Spenser used similar
language to discuss their work’s publication.14 However, I would like to draw
upon the method of those critics who have read Bradstreet as belonging to a
British tradition15 by placing the use of the poem-as-child trope in conversation with its use in the famous and often-imitated opening sonnet to Sir Philip
13
Ivy Schweitzer, The Work of Self-Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 170.
14
In Spenser’s “To His Book,” which prefaces The Shepheardes Calendar, he humbly
instructs the book to tell anyone who might ask that its parentage is “vnkent” (2) and that it was
“base begot with blame” (14). The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (New York: Penguin
Classics, 2000).
15
Tamara Harvey’s study of modesty demonstrates how Bradstreet engages with both
early modern medical discourse and the querelle des femmes tradition in order to challenge the
Aristotelian belief that women are cooler than and therefore inferior to men. See Figuring Modesty
in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Numerous
other continuities to the British tradition have been found in Bradstreet’s work. Michael Ditmore
has placed Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” in the context of Renaissance secular wisdom poetry
in “Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet’s
‘Contemplations,’” Early American Literature 42.1 (2007): 31–72. Lee Oser finds traces of the
forest from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in “Almost a Golden World: Sidney, Spenser, and Puritan
Conflict in Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,’” Renascence 52.3 (2000): 186–202. Avery R. Fischer
suggests that Bradstreet refers to Milton’s Eve in “Bradstreet’s ON MY DEAR GRANDCHILD
SIMON BRADSTREET and BEFORE THE BIRTH OF ONE OF HER CHILDREN,”
Explicator 59.1 (2000): 11–14. Several important studies place Bradstreet’s work in the context of
British women writers. Gillian Wright focuses on “The Four Monarchies” as a rewriting of an earlier
work by Sir Walter Raleigh. Producing Women’s Poetry, 1600–1730: Text and Paratext, Manuscript
and Print (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chapter 2. Catharine Gray and Susan
Wiseman both place Bradstreet in the context of Sidney. See Women Writers and Public Debate in
17th-Century Britain (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) chapter 4; and Conspiracy and Virtue:
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
53
Sidney’s sequence, Astrophil and Stella.16 As Wendy Wall has shown, both male
and female writers used references to gender in order to negotiate the “stigma of
print.”17 While Sidney’s sequence was not published in his lifetime, he registers
throughout his concern with the cheapening of Petrarchan language through its
popularity.18 As Susan Stanford Friedman has argued, gender differences exist,
especially in the reader’s perception of the trope based on the biological sex of the
writer.19 Nonetheless, like Bradstreet, Sidney, a distant kinsman, uses the trope to
highlight his struggles in producing poetry that not only best memorializes the
beloved, but that in turn provides him with the best legacy possible.
When writing of his efforts to convey his struggle to Stella, Astrophil
details the process by which he studied the “inventions fine” of other poets: “Oft
turning others leaves, to see if thence would flow / Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sun-burnd brain.”20 Study, however, is unsuccessful for Astrophil,
and results in the loss of poetic invention. It is only when “great with childe to
speak, and helpless in [his] throwes” that Astrophil’s Muse instructs him to
“looke in [his] heart, and write,” enabling him to produce the sequence that follows (ll. 12, 14). Astrophil uses the metaphor of poem-as-child to articulate an
inward turn, away from the work of others, privileging invention over imitation
and thereby engaging a poetic debate dating back to Plato and Aristotle.21 His
concern with the proper mode of poetic production is not simply academic, for
despite his claims elsewhere in the sequence that he does not seek fame through
his verse,22 the quality of the poet’s literary progeny determines the nature of the
legacy it will provide him.
Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), chapter 5.
16
Samuel Daniel, Delia, Sonnet 2; Edmund Spenser Amoretti Sonnet 2; and Henry
Constable, Diana Sonnet 1. John Brett Mischo, “‘Great with Child to Speake’: Male Childbirth and
the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 24 (1998): 53–73, at 53.
17
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
18
See Sonnets 15, 28, and 74.
19
Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference
in Literary Discourse,” Feminist Studies 13.1 (1987): 49–82.
20
Astrophil and Stella in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), ll. 6–8.
21
See also Sonnets 28 and 37.
22
See Sonnet 90.
54 EMWJ Vol. 10, No. 1 • Fall 2015
Stephanie Pietros
Bradstreet herself makes the case for her place within a British, Sidneian
poetic tradition in her elegy to her distant kinsman:
In all records, thy Name I ever see
Put with an Epithet of dignity;
Which shewes, thy worth was great, thine honour such,
The love thy Country ought thee, was as much.
Let then none dis-allow of these my straines,
Which have the self-same blood yet in my veines.23
In the version of this poem revised for Several Poems, Bradstreet changes “selfsame” to “English,” revealing that she considers her relationship to Sidney to
be one based on national rather than familial ties.24 Placing Bradstreet in this
Sidneian tradition as well as traditions of women’s writing broadens the scope of
recent studies on the poem-as-child metaphor that consider exclusively the work
of male poets; such studies find the trope to reflect on the male writing subject
and on the cultural reasons why the language of human reproduction would have
appealed to such writers.25 Writing about children, while possibly inflected by
the writer’s gender, provided a means for writers to consider the challenges that
writing posed as legacy just as it challenges our disciplinary divisions based on
national tradition and gender.
Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse, N8v, p. 192.
See Jim Egan on the change from “self-same” in The Tenth Muse to “English” in Several
Poems. Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American Literature (Columbus: Ohio
State University Press, 2011), 32­–39.
25
See MacFaul, Poetry and Paternity. Stephen Guy-Bray claims that the reproductive
metaphor may be deemed queer because it represents the production of poetry as a non-teleological
pleasure. Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2009). According to Douglas Brooks, the development of printing accounts for the
revitalization of the ancient trope. Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2005). Elizabeth Harvey links the male adoption of female subject positions in the
reproductive metaphor to the historical moment in which medical authority was being wrested
from female midwives. Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts
(London: Routledge, 1992). Katharine Eisaman Maus argues that the appeal of the female body
to male poets is its hiddenness, though it is also problematic because penetrable. Inwardness and
Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 182–209, at 193.
23
24
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
55
Imitation and Autonomy in the Early Verse
The quaternions, published in The Tenth Muse, are among those early poems
that Rich and other earlier feminist critics regarded as “masculine” and imitative of British poetic models, in contrast to the later poems in which Bradstreet
addressed her husband and children. Recent critics, however, have demonstrated
the continuities between Bradstreet’s early and late poetry in the feminist symbols
and concerns evident throughout.26 Following these readings, I will suggest that
the quaternions, like her later poetry such as “The Author to Her Book” and the
prose writing I will consider later in this essay, reflect on the problematic nature
of children as a parent’s legacy. All these works by Bradstreet, then, belong in the
British tradition that evoke children metaphorically to meditate on the nature of
and challenges associated with poetic legacy.
The quaternions consist of four groups of four poems in which Bradstreet
places the four elements (fire, earth, water, and air), the four humors (choler,
blood, melancholy, and phlegm), the four ages of man (childhood, youth, middle
age, and old age), and the four seasons in familial relationships with one another.
The elements are mothers to the female humors, who are mothers to the male
ages. The seasons, though not part of the family tree, each correspond to an element, humor, and age. As in “The Author to Her Book,” the relationship between
parent and child at once foregrounds the child’s autonomy from the parent. It
also highlights its imitation of the parent’s undesirable qualities that render it a
potential threat to the parent’s reputation.
In “Of the foure Humours in Mans constitution,” the humor Choler,
daughter to the element Fire, represents the ultimately unattainable fantasy that
children will perfectly imitate the desirable qualities of their parents. Choler
establishes an intimate, imitative relationship between mother and daughter
when she explains,
My self, and Mother, one as you shal see,
But she in greater, I in lesse degree;
We both once Masculines, the world doth know,
Now Feminines (a while) for love we owe
See Henton, “‘Once Masculines”; and Harvey, Figuring Modesty.
26
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Stephanie Pietros
Unto your Sister-hood, which makes us tender
Our noble selves, in a less Noble Gender. (C3v, p. 22)
In this passage, Choler explains that her mother Fire and she are composed of
the same elemental substance, though to a greater or lesser degree. Earlier both
Fire and Choler took masculine forms; they now assume feminine forms in order
to express unity with the other elements and humors. While the passage clearly
delineates a gendered hierarchy, as the feminine gender is “less Noble,” parent and
child have a naturally close relationship in both their masculine and feminine
forms. The child imitates its parent in terms of both substance and behavior,
fulfilling its role as the parent’s legacy, especially if the child imitates the desirable
qualities of the parent.
Elsewhere in the quaternions, Bradstreet explains that sometimes the child
unfortunately replicates the parent’s undesirable qualities. In “The Four Seasons,”
she asserts that the children born of her brain, the lines of her poem, are impoverished because her own brain is impoverished.27 She laments, “My Subjects bare,
my Brains are bad, / Or better Lines you should have had” (E8v, p. 64). The
word “bare” not only indicates both the poet’s and her poetry’s impoverished,
unadorned state, but it also has the potential to evoke the reproductive metaphor
by punning on the word “barren,” though the two words are not etymologically related. This passage calls attention to the at times undesirable resemblance
between parent and child when the child, in this case a poetic one, imitates the
parent’s negative qualities.
While imitation can thus prove problematic for the legacy that the parent
hopes the child will provide, it is frequently a mere fantasy, for children (poetic
or otherwise) can act autonomously, as does the poem–child in “The Author to
Her Book” once it has been sent out of doors. Youth, son of Blood and grandson
of Air, reflects on this problem in “The Four Ages of Man”:
. . . but youth (is known) alas,
To be as wilde as is the snuffing Asse,
As vain as froth, as vanity can be,
That would see vain man, may look on me:
27
See Branka Arsić, “Brain-ache: Anne Bradstreet on Sensing,” ELH 80.4 (2013): 1009­–43,
on the topic of the brain in Bradstreet’s poetry.
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
57
My gifts abus’d, my education lost,
My woful Parents longing hopes all crost. (D8r, p. 48)
Youth explains that he has acted in opposition to his parents’ hopes and wishes,
wasting both his innate gifts and the education that his parents had presumably
overseen. The self-characterization of his vain and wild behavior contrasts with
the ideal relationship between parent and child described by Choler, indicating
that children do not follow their parents, despite their substantive similarities.
The metaphorical parent–child relationships among the elements, humors, ages,
and seasons in the quaternions provide the means to explore the difficulty that
the child’s autonomy from, yet at the same time, imitation of, the parent poses for
its status as the parent’s legacy.
Among the poems published with the quaternions in The Tenth Muse, “A
Dialogue between Old England and New” similarly uses a parent–child metaphor to articulate the complex relationship between England and its colony; it
also provides the opportunity to consider Bradstreet’s national filiations. The
portrait of Bradstreet as pioneer and founder of a new national tradition has been
an attractive one for many critics and one that persists in the classroom.28 Recent
critics, however, have called attention to her role in transatlantic networks, which
the explicit positioning of New England to Old in “A Dialogue” necessitates.29 In
building on the work of these critics, I insist that we cannot distance writers like
28
See, for example, Elaine Showalter, ed., The Vintage Book of American Women Writers
(New York: Vintage Books, 2011); Nina Baym et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of American
Literature, 8th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011); Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson, eds.,
The Bedford Anthology of American Literature Volume One, 2nd edition (New York: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2014).
29
In Oriental Shadows, Jim Egan argues that British American writers turned to the East
in order to show the capacity for American culture to exceed that of Europe. Consequently,
Bradstreet’s comparison of Sidney to Alexander in her elegy to the great English poet is part of
a larger strategy of linking the American colonists to classical culture. Egan does not consider
Bradstreet’s work exclusively in terms of her gender, for he ultimately is concerned with making
an argument about the nation and a nascent American tradition. Similarly, Andrew Hiscock
argues for placing Bradstreet’s work in the context of the nation, but he too claims that she seeks
to create a space for her textual intervention apart from the Old World, even as she draws upon
those influences in the elegies and “Dialogue.” “‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’: Anne
Bradstreet and her Negotiations with the Old World,” Mighty Europe 1400–1700: Writing an Early
Modern Continent, ed. Andrew Hiscock (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 185­–220.
58 EMWJ Vol. 10, No. 1 • Fall 2015
Stephanie Pietros
Bradstreet too far from the British traditions in which they were educated and
with which they self-identified.
“A Dialogue,” subtitled “concerning their present troubles. Anno 1642,”
begins with New England questioning Old England concerning its troubles.
In response, Old England wonders how the child has not also experienced the
problems that have plagued her parent: “And thou a childe, a Limbe, and dost not
feele / My weakned fainting body now to reele?” (N3r, p. 181). New England’s
response to this question shows her to be knowledgeable about various wars and
conflicts throughout English history, from the Anglo-Saxon invasions and the
Norman Conquest to the Spanish Armada, but still ignorant of the civil war
that must have broken out only recently. Old England, a good Puritan, explains
that the current situation is a result of idolatry, Popishness, and her own lack of
faithfulness (N4r–v, pp. 183­–­­84). Once the mother provides an account of her
troubles, New England claims to suffer the pain associated with these struggles:
Your fearfull sinnes, great cause there’s to lament,
My guilty hands (in part) hold up with you,
A sharer in your punishment’s my due,
But all you say, amounts to this effect,
Not what you feel, but what you do expect.
Pray in plain termes, what is your present grief,
Then let’s join heads, and hands for your relief. (N5r, p. 185)
Old England figures her daughter as part of her own body, “a Limbe,” and this
intimate connection is substantiated by New England’s admission that she shares
in some of Old England’s guilt, requiring that they work together in order to
provide relief.
Despite these claims of closeness between mother and daughter, New
England, physically removed from Old England, is her own entity, which is
emphasized by the phrase “my guilty hands” (my emphasis), despite her mother’s
claim that she is a mere limb. New England concludes the poem by advising her
parent that she “should do wrong, / To weep for that we both have pray’d for long”
and wishfully imagines the religious and political purification that the present
conflict will bring about in England (N6r, p. 187). The child becomes the parent,
instructing Old England on how to respond properly to her predicament. While
she asserts that the two are of one mind, saying they have both prayed long for
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
59
the changes the civil war will bring, she had earlier claimed to be ignorant of the
current political situation. The indictment of such ignorance may, at least in part,
indicate Bradstreet’s identification with British writers of the previous generation
like Sidney, rather than with her contemporaries of the mid-seventeenth century.
“A Dialogue” figures New England as autonomous from, yet intimately
connected to Old England, and all the while a good English subject who knows
her history and wants the best for her country; Bradstreet seems at once to identify with both Old England and New. The parent–child relationship provides a
model for understanding Bradstreet’s relationship to her British literary predecessors, at once continuous with them and unavoidably disconnected due to distance.
While “A Dialogue” makes it clear that Bradstreet understands colonial America
as part of England, it is also clear that New England cannot but forge her own
path, if for no other reason than her physical distance from the mother country.30
Nonetheless, the poet’s contemporary status as a founding mother of American
literature is evident only in retrospect, not as one that Bradstreet’s poetry itself
seeks to claim for her.
Self-Promotion and the Maternal Legacy
Lauded by Rich and the basis for Bradstreet’s contemporary reputation, the
poems added posthumously to Several Poems, as well as prose writing found in
the Andover Manuscript, engage more typically “feminine” subject matter than do
the poems published in The Tenth Muse. These are the poems addressed to her
husband (absent due to public employment) and to her children, as well as poems
written as memorials to her dead grandchildren. While this work may appear to
be quite different from the quaternions and other poems from The Tenth Muse,
I will show that there are important continuities. When considered in light of
the paradox of autonomy and imitation I have discussed, these posthumously
published poems and her prose reveal Bradstreet’s attempt not only to impart
motherly advice from beyond the grave — following the form of the maternal
legacy, a popular genre that sanctioned women’s writing in seventeenth-century
England — but also to shape her future reputation and legacy. Placing these works
30
Louisa Hall has recently argued that Bradstreet’s “errors” are poetically innovative, in
contrast to the notion that her poetry is worthwhile solely because of her status as American
pioneer. See “The Influence of Anne Bradstreet’s Innovative Errors,” Early American Literature 48.1
(2013): 1–27.
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in the context of other maternal legacies uncovers the strategies of self-fashioning
that are inherent, though seldom discussed, in this genre. Moreover, understanding Bradstreet’s use of the genre of the maternal legacy clarifies another important
way in which she consciously placed herself in the British literary tradition.
Wendy Wall notes that legacy-writing was one of the means by which
women were able to circumvent the strictures imposed on their writing and publication.31 Subsequent scholars have further identified the various textual strategies
employed by women writers in order to legitimate their potentially subversive
action. According to Jennifer Heller, the presumed audience of their children, as
well as their motherhood — in particular, the maternal body — gave women the
authority to write.32 Roxanne Harde emphasizes the intellectual over the physical
nature of motherhood, arguing that women were able to gain distance from patriarchy by embracing the socially-sanctioned role of the selfless and pious Christian
mother.33 Sylvia Brown contends that the popularity of the genre — with twentythree editions of Dorothy Leigh’s text published between 1616 and 1674 and
eight editions of Elizabeth Jocelin’s between 1624 and 1684 alone — suggests it
was more complicit with, rather than oppositional to, dominant patriarchal ideologies.34 We may extend this critical conversation by considering how Bradstreet
and others sought to shape their writing itself, as well as the living legacy of
children, in order to secure a desirable posthumous reputation. I will consider
two of Bradstreet’s poems in the context of prose maternal legacies published in
England, as well as her prose writings, for all identify the need for writing due to
imminent maternal death — according to Heller, a key feature of the genre.
“Before the Birth of one of Her Children” and “In reference to Her Children,
23 June, 1656,” two poems added posthumously to Several Poems, demonstrate
the role envisioned by Bradstreet for her textual offspring in guiding her biologi Wall, Imprint of Gender, 283–96.
Jennifer Heller, The Mother’s Legacy in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2011), 43, 50, 195.
33
Roxanne Harde, “‘What Was Your Living Mother’s Mind?’: Motherhood as Intellectual
Enterprise in Mother’s Legacy Books,” Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering 4.2
(2002): 129­–145, at 129–30. Jennifer Heller, “The Legacy and Rhetorics of Maternal Zeal,” ELH
75 (2008): 603–23, also notes the predominance of the image of the pious selfless mother in advice
literature and eulogies.
34
Sylvia Brown, “‘Over Her Dead Body’: Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Mother’s
Legacy,” Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. Viviana Comensoli
and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 3–26, at 7.
31
32
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
61
cal offspring to foster her posthumous reputation as she desired. Writing with
the imminent possibility that she may die in childbirth, Bradstreet addresses her
husband in “Before the Birth,” requesting that her faults be forgotten and her virtues remembered. She asks him to look after both their children and her poems:
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivions grave,
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms:
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These O protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take. (P8, p. 239)
Bradstreet’s admission of her many faults functions less as a posture of humility
and more as a subtle means of shaping memory by suggesting that a true remembrance of her would include only her virtues.
In attempting to shape her image for posterity, Bradstreet explicitly considers what will perpetuate that legacy: her children and poetry. Once he no longer
mourns her death, Bradstreet’s husband is asked to look after her “little babes my
dear remains.” While this line and the instruction to protect the babes from “step
Dames injury” concern her biological children, the reference to “this verse” and
“this paper” suggests that they could equally concern her literary children. Both
sources of legacy are intrinsically connected, especially since Bradstreet’s husband
must read the poem in order to ascertain the injunction to care for their biological
children. She takes a calculated risk in staking the care of her biological legacy on
her poetic legacy. At the same time, it is her poetry that will outlive her children.
Bradstreet’s attempts in “Before the Birth” to shape both biological and
poetic legacies for posterity stem from the challenges that children pose for
legacy that Bradstreet explores in her early poetry — that they are autonomous,
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yet intimately connected to their creators. Because Bradstreet’s children will both
constitute her legacy and have the power to manage her poetic legacy, she must
advise them properly. Her poem “In reference to her Children, 23 June, 1656”
instructs her children in order to shape her posthumous reputation. Addressing
“her eight birds hatcht in one nest” (Q3, p. 245), Bradstreet seeks to craft an image
of the poet that will reach an audience beyond her children and grandchildren:
When each of you shall in your nest
Among your young ones take your rest,
In chirping language, oft them tell,
You had a Dam that lov’d you well,
That did what could be done for young,
And nurst you up till you were strong,
And ’fore she once would let you fly,
She shew’d you joy and misery;
Taught what was good, and what was ill,
What would save life, and what would kill?
Thus gone, amongst you I may live,
And dead, yet speak, and counsel give. (Q4r–v, pp. 247–48)
Bradstreet extends her maternal reach to her grandchildren by instructing her
children to teach the same good lessons she taught them. She further seeks to
preserve a particular image of herself as a model maternal advisor, one who loved
her children well and did everything she could to teach them properly before they
set out on their own. If the poem outlives even Bradstreet’s biological children and
grandchildren, it will, in itself, preserve this carefully crafted image of its writer
for posterity.
The fulfillment of maternal duty is a prominent justification for writing in
the genre of the maternal legacy, but so too, is the attempt to foster the writer’s
posthumous reputation. For example, in one of the earlier published legacies,
Elizabeth Grymeston focuses on the fulfillment of maternal duty as her impetus for breaking the typical restrictions placed on women’s publishing when she
claims that she is “resolued to breake the barren soile of my fruitlesse braine, to
dictate something for thy direction.”35 Dorothy Leigh in her immensely popular
Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea. Meditations. Memoratiues (London, 1604), A3.
35
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
63
Mothers Blessing, while similarly claiming that she is going to “write” her children
the “right way” to heaven,36 explains that she published it because it might not
survive to aid the youngest child if she left it in the care of her oldest (A7r­­­­–v).
Ostensibly, she is only concerned with the text’s survival so it can fulfill its function of maternal duty, for Leigh is willing to “trauaile again in birth, vntill Christ
be formed in you” (11).37 The pun on “write” and “right” elevates Leigh’s writing as
a vehicle for God’s grace, which also has the effect of glorifying the writer herself.
Leigh goes on to explain, “Nature telleth me, that I cannot long bee here
to speake vnto you and this my mind will continue long after me in writing; and
yet not my mind, but I seeke to put you in minde of the words of our Sauiour
Christ” (12). Acknowledging her mortality, Leigh claims that her mind will survive her mortal body through her writing and publishing. Although she declares
that the words she hopes to impress upon her children are Christ’s, this statement
reminds the reader of the published text of its earthly author. Leigh also shows
concern for her text’s role in preserving her legacy when she advises her children:
“you would remember to write a booke vnto your children, of the right and true
way to happinesse, which may remaine with them and theirs for euer” (16). Like
Bradstreet’s “In reference to Her Children,” Leigh’s Mothers Blessing exhorts her
children to write out their own instructions to their children, advice that has the
effect of perpetuating Leigh’s legacy beyond the circulation of her printed book.
Leigh’s explicit concern in the Mothers Blessing with fostering her posthumous reputation is not idiosyncratic. The preface, “The Approbation,” to
Elizabeth Jocelin’s The Mothers Legacie to her vnborne Childe (1624) engages
in an extended consideration of inheritance practices and notes the particular
advantage of leaving behind a textual legacy: “no law prohibiteth any possessor
of morall and spirituall riches, to impart them vnto others, either in life by communicating, or in death by bequeathing . . . or bestowing them.”38 Unlike material
riches, moral and spiritual values have no restrictions on who can bequeath and
receive them. In this passage, the unidentified writer carves out a space for writing as a new form of inheritance, which is available to a greater number of people,
Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing (London, 1616), A2v.
Elizabeth Richardson, A Ladies Legacie to Her Davghters (London, 1645), similarly claims
that the formation of children’s souls is like a second childbirth: “I know you may have many better
instructors then my self, yet can you have no true mother but me, who not only with great paine
brought you into the world, but do not still travel in care for the new birth of your soules” (6).
38
The Mothers Legacie to her vnborne Childe (London, 1624), A3r–v.
36
37
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including women. Moreover, in justifying the work’s publication, the writer claims
that all Christians, not merely Jocelin’s own children, have a right to a share in her
legacy by virtue of its subject matter (A4r­–v). These claims function to establish
a purpose for Jocelin’s legacy that is not merely didactic and an audience that is
not simply familial.
Bradstreet’s “To My dear Children” and other posthumously-discovered
prose writing exhibit a similar desire to foster the writer’s legacy while exploring
challenges to her legacy as seen in the earlier works more commonly regarded in
light of the British tradition. In “To My Dear Children,” she writes so that her
children, when she is gone, will find in her book “What was your living mother’s
mind.”39 Acknowledging that the text will enable her children to remember her,
she writes that this is “the least in my aim in what I now do,” and that her primary goal is for them to “gain some spiritual advantage by my experience”; thus,
she “bequeaths” them the text as an inheritance. Like Leigh and Richardson, she
writes that the process of spiritual edification of her children is like a second
childbirth: “that as I have brought you into the world, and with great pains, weakness, cares, and fears brought you to this, I now travail in birth again of you till
Christ be formed in you” (264). While her stated purpose is the fulfillment of
maternal duty, the production of legacy is not inherently or necessarily maternal.
Moreover, in the case of Bradstreet, we should consider this purpose for her text
as continuous with those established in her poetry, as well as evidence for her
participation in early modern British textual traditions.
Other prose writings discovered in the nineteenth century along with
“To My Dear Children” in the Andover manuscript confirm that purpose and,
moreover, establish the proper source of imitation for the children — Bradstreet
herself. Such a move is inherently self-reflexive and bolsters the legitimation of
authorship that constitutes an integral part of the mother’s legacy. In the prose
meditation,“Sept. 30, 1657,” for example, Bradstreet writes to her children:
Thus, dear children, have ye seen many sicknesses and weaknesses
that I have passed through to the end that if you meet with the like
you may have recourse to the same God who hath heard and delivered
me, and will do the like for you if you trust in Him; and when He shall
deliver you out of distress, forget not to give Him thanks, but to walk
Bradstreet, Works, 5.
39
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
65
more closely with Him than before. This is the desire of your loving
mother. (280)
This passage recalls the poems in which Bradstreet recounts her experience with
sickness, as well as those of potential sadness and spiritual weakness, such as the
poems mourning the loss of children and grandchildren. Additionally, it might
refer to real life situations of trial that Bradstreet’s children witnessed. Her advice,
quite literally, is that the children imitate her so that God will hear and deliver
them, as He did for her.
In “For My Dear Son Simon Bradstreet,” a preface to the prose “Meditations
Divine and Moral,” Bradstreet calls attention to the problems with such an imitation:
Parents perpetuate their lives in their posterity and their manners; in
their imitation children do naturally rather follow the failings than
the virtues of their predecessors, but I am persuaded better things of
you . . . Such as they are I bequeath to you [these meditations]; small
legacies are accepted by true friends, much more by dutiful children.
I have avoided encroaching upon others’ conceptions because I would
leave you nothing but mine own, though in value they fall short in all
of this kind; yet I presume they will be better prized by you for the
author’s sake. (295)
In addition to explicitly figuring the meditations as a legacy, Bradstreet notes that
children may, problematically, imitate their parents’ bad traits rather than their
good ones, a claim that is markedly similar to that in the poetry examined above,
where the poet’s poverty is mirrored in her verse. Although she demurs as to their
merits, the “Meditations,” she claims, function as a means to preserve those traits
of hers that are worthy of imitation — and, implicitly, the version of herself that
she wishes others to remember. The injunction to imitate is inextricably bound
up in the desire to preserve the version of herself that will be constituted in others’ memories.
Later on in the “Meditations” to which “For My Dear Son Simon Bradstreet”
is an introduction, Bradstreet considers the limits of parental influence. In
Meditation 67, she explains that there are “many good parents [who] have had
bad children, and . . . bad parents have had pious children” (313). These situations,
according to Bradstreet, “should make us adore the sovereignty of God, who will
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not be tied to time nor place, nor yet to persons, but takes and chooses, when
and where and whom He pleases” (313). Such a claim seems to contradict that
of Meditation 61, in which Bradstreet uses an agricultural metaphor to describe
the instruction of children: “Some children (like sour land) are of so tough and
morose a disposition that the plough of correction must make long furrows on
their back and the harrow of discipline go often over them before they be fit soil
to sow the seed of morality much less of grace in them” (310). Unlike Meditation
67, however, in which Bradstreet suggests that some children will go astray
despite their parents’ influence, in Meditation 61 she is more optimistic, claiming,
“when by prudent nature they are brought into a fit capacity, let the seed of good
instruction and exhortation be sown in the spring of their youth, and a plentiful
crop may be expected in the harvest of their years” (310).
The acknowledgment of the difficulty a parent may have in determining
her child’s character parallels the concerns examined earlier in this essay, which
articulate the double bind of the child’s autonomy from, yet imitation of its
parent, especially when that imitation is of the parent’s faults, not her virtues.
Considering these texts as a whole reveals continuities within Bradstreet’s oeuvre,
from the quaternions to the posthumously-discovered prose writing. Similarly,
such a consideration complicates our characterization of Bradstreet’s national
filiations, for it shows her later work to be continuous with the earlier work,
more commonly characterized as participating in British literary traditions.
Nonetheless, Bradstreet’s firm placement in the American literary canon is one
that this essay, or others like it, is unlikely to alter, as it is difficult to argue against
her influence on subsequent generations of writers, especially women, who sought
to construct a uniquely American literary tradition. This essay does, however,
bring to the fore Bradstreet’s own self-representation and attempts to shape her
legacy through her consideration of poetic and biological children. By examining
her participation in British traditions of both poetry (the Sidneian tradition)
and prose (the maternal legacy), I point out the continuity in her concern with
shaping the writer’s reputation that marks both these traditions. Bradstreet’s
appropriation by later generations of American writers could be said to reflect the
paradox of autonomy and imitation that she probes in so much of her writing.
Despite the poet’s strenuous attempts to shape her legacy, its autonomy from her,
especially after her death, means that she and her work will inevitably be appropriated by subsequent generations for their own purposes. Looking back instead
of forward, as I have done here, reminds us, however, that by reflecting upon our
Children and the Creation of Poetic Legacy
67
own disciplinary practices, we may refocus our readings of writers like Bradstreet
to acknowledge her place simultaneously in a number of poetic and textual traditions, British and American, male and female — as well as to recognize the connections among those traditions.