Advertising the Domestic: Anne Bradstreet's Sentimental Poetics

Abstract

In 1650, New England Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet published her first book of poetry, Tenth Muse, under mysterious circumstances. Accord ing to her, verses had been taken and published without her knowledge or consent, and resulting volume embarrassed her. She calls it, in The Author to Her Book, ill-formed and in need of revision (1). In 1678, six years after her death, a second edition appeared with thirteen additional poems. These new verses turned revised edition, titled Several Poems, from political, theological, and historical themes to lyrics about home. With publication of such poems, Bradstreet raised putatively private experiences to level of public consciousness and, in process, reimagined public community through a domestic lens. This move, I argue, meant that poet achieved many of same goals__in many of same ways__as did nineteenth-century authors of sentimental fiction.(1) Reading Bradstreet's poetry as sentimental opens it to new insights and expands our understanding of American literary history. To describe her works as sentimental (or even proto-sentimental) is, of course, anachronistic;(2) yet in doing so, I build on recent scholarship that traces history of to seventeenth century. Laura Stevens, for example, argues that English missionary writings, beginning with those of Puritans, anticipated many of ideas and gestures that would constitute culture of sensibility (6), and Matthew Brown focuses on the sentimental portrait of Amerindians in his chapter on Eliot Tracts, a series of pamphlets about Puritan missionary activities published between 1643 and 1671 (188). Michelle Burnham, following Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, ties Mary Rowlandson's Puritan captivity narrative of 1682 to rise of sentimentalism, while Norman Fiering's history of moral philosophy argues more generally for inner affinity between and Puritan religious (5). In adding to work of these scholars, I do not wish to conflate Puritan poetry with sentimental novels but rather to illuminate further anticipatlions] and affinit[ies]. Burnham, for example, links Rowlandson to not through an overt staging of critique but by putting material for such critical positions into (26). Likewise, Fiering pursues his work by searching seventeenth-century moral thought for evidence of inchoate sentimentalism (5). In much same way, I find in Bradstreet's Several Poems evidence of inchoate sentimentalism: circulation of sentimental material that would take new form and gain greater cultural power in coming centuries.(3) Like many women writers in nineteenth century, Bradstreet used print to publicize supposedly private experiences of a woman. Moreover, her poetic scenes shaped public arena in which they appeared: Rather than allow state to oversee and govern domestic, she used domestic to comment on status of state. Her poetry thus offers an early example of a woman strategically employing publicly sanctioned private roles to engage in cultural politics. Such activities emerge most clearly if we approach her work as proto-sentimental, one possible opening in development of a long sentimental tradition. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIVES In seventeenth century, terms public and private did a great deal of ideological work, distinguishing levels of visibility, vocations, spaces, and gender roles. variety of meanings and sanctions attached to them can be illustrated through a brief examination of writings of influential English Puritans William Perkins and William Ames, divines who were read widely by American Puritans throughout seventeenth century. Perkins wrote most important preaching manual used by Puritan ministers (Gordis 15-16), and he was still known by Jonathan Edwards in eighteenth century as [t] he famous Mr. …