Wilderness in Anne Bradstreet's Poetry

            The two different voices we hear in Anne Bradstreet’s poetry – that of Anne, the emotional and questioning woman, and that of Mistress Bradstreet, the proper Puritan wife and mother – create an interesting tension between individuality and conformity.  Although at first glance this doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the concept of wilderness, I think that it actually does.  In my last blog posting I explored the idea of wilderness as a personal condition of being alone and friendless, cut off from the social and material support of one’s community.  Fear of this kind of wilderness can be a compelling reason to conform to the social norms of that community, so as not to be cast out from its safety and security.  This was much more the case in Anne Bradstreet’s time than in ours (at least for American culture in general). 

            I think this is probably one of the main reasons why Mistress Bradstreet’s poetic voice seemed to overrule Anne’s most of the time.  For example, in her poem “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment,” Anne’s voice speaks passionately throughout most of the poem of her intense longing for her absent husband:  “I, like the Earth this season, mourn in black, My Sun is gone so far in’s zodiac, Whom whilst I ‘joyed, nor storms, nor frost I felt, His warmth such frigid colds did cause to melt” (7-10).  But Mistress Bradstreet’s voice speaks in the last few lines of the poem, paraphrasing a Scriptural description of marriage:  “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, I here, thou there, yet both but one” (25-26).  A similar sequence of poetic voices occurs in the poems “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and a Half Old” and “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10^th, 1666.” 

            I think this pressure to conform is also evident in her poems “The Prologue” and “The Author to Her Book.”  Because it was highly uncommon in Anne Bradstreet’s time for a woman to be so erudite and articulate, she found it necessary to display the modesty required of a Puritan woman by criticizing and discounting her own literary work:  “If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays; This mean and unrefined ore of mine Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine” (“The Prologue” 45-48).  In “The Author to Her Book,” Anne characterizes her poems as “Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain” (1) and cleverly uses a sewing metaphor (women’s work!) to lament, “In better dress to trim thee was my mind, But nought save homespun cloth i’ th’ house I find” (17-18).