Anne Bradstreet is a famous poet from the 17th century noted for interweaving the everyday life of a housewife with moral Puritan values. This mix can be seen in her poems “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “Meditations Divine and Moral,” and “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th, 1666. Copied out of a Loose Paper,” in which Bradstreet portrays herself as devoted wife, mother, and Puritan. In her poem “The Author to Her Book,” Bradstreet uses the extended metaphor of the mother and her child but works it onto a more critical level to slyly comment on the state of women writers at the time.
Bradstreet opens the poem by saying her book is a product of her “feeble brain” which upholds the popular Puritan idea that women were not only the weaker sex physically but also mentally, especially when it came to producing original, profound works of creative writing. However, it is hard to believe that Bradstreet really thought of herself as having a feeble brain because it is known that before her family moved to the Americas to escape religious persecution, Bradstreet had “private tutors and was evidently quite early given access to the earl’s extensive library” (Norton, 144). The Anthology also claims that Bradstreet’s family was of “higher rank” than other Massachusetts colonists which would mean that her new home would most likely contain some of the luxuries her old home in England provided her, specifically books and writing materials. I theorize that Bradstreet felt she had to disguise her true self in her writings behind the pretense of the self-deprecating, non-conflict forming woman: she was aware of her audience and what they expected from her. However, this makes it extremely off-putting for us as an audience to read Bradstreet say she has a “feeble brain” when in the title of her book she blatantly refers to herself as “the tenth muse”.
This pretense, however, is most likely what caused her poetry to survive in such a dangerous era for women to write. The Puritans believed that a “good” woman was “submissive and self-abnegating, renouncing what would seem to be egotistical ambitions and desires for intellectual self-advancement or self-fulfillment” (Norton, 145). So when her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, “snatched” (3) her poems and had them published in England, he included the negating foreword saying that the work was “the work of a woman...these poems are but the fruit of some few hours, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments” (Norton 145). So, in other words, “don’t take these poems so seriously, she just happened to jot them down in her free time between washing babies and pleasing her husband and sleeping”. This is obviously untrue because like many other of Bradstreet’s poems, “The Author to Her Book” is written in form, specifically in iambic pentameter with an aabbcc… rhyme scheme, and includes educated decisions about diction and figurative language which shows the audience that she obviously had to think about these poems at least a little bit. Bradstreet even talks about the labors of writing directly in this poem:
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I washed thy face, but more defects saw,
And rubbing off a spot still made a flaw (12 - 14)
These lines could also be interpreted as not just from the point of view of a writer, but a woman writer: Bradstreet knew men would be reading her poetry and she had to make each line “perfect” because one simple “flaw” will cause the entire book to become devalued as the silly work of a silly woman. She uses the metaphor of a mother attempting to scrub her child clean to no avail to show the impossibility of the task. This changes the meaning of lines 9 - 10, “I cast thee by as one unfit for light, / Thy visage was so irksome in my sight,” to mean that Bradstreet didn’t necessarily think her poetry was “unfit for light” but that it was impossible to make it fit for the opinions of the public eye. This idea is supported further in the final lines of the poem:
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
Which caused her thus to send thee out of door. (lines 22 - 24)
Bradstreet uses the metaphor of the mother again, but this time the pretense of a poor mother who has no choice but to send her child out into the world to beg for money, which again supports the popular view of the time that women’s literature was less valuable because it was written with the intentions of acquiring financial support rather than just written in the moment out of passion. However, Bradstreet does give us a bit of her independence in line 22 when she claims that her child had no father; it is a subtle stab at her brother-in-law, who had to help “father” her book into creation. I think these final lines could also be interpreted as Bradstreet’s way of saying that she did in fact have a part in the publication of her novel, and it was not a byproduct of a relationship, but rather the spawn of her mind and her mind alone.
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