Anne Bradstreet's “personal” protestant poetics

Abstract

Bradstreet's adaptation in her works of a well-known and highly politicized Protestant aesthetics based on ut pictura poesis, most commonly identified in the visual arts, accounts for her treatment of historical subjects in her supposedly “public” elegies and poems and of her domestic life in the “personal” poems and prose works. In all of these works, but especially in her later posthumously published ones, her depiction of herself as a writing woman, her “simple” poetics, and her persistent focus on the transient aspects of human existence suggest an ideologically chosen enclosure in a domestic economy subsequent generations refine and redefine as a “woman's place.” But, Bradstreet's negation of self and subject, the negation of self as subject, is instead the referent for interpretation, for another reader's construction of a text to be read