Engendering Identity: The Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l'Incarnation

Abstract

Engendering IdentityThe Discourse of Familial Education in Anne Bradstreet and Marie de l'Incarnation Robert Hilliker (bio) Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth did'st by my side remain,Till snatcht from thence by friends, less wise then trueWho thee abroad, expos'd to publick view,Made thee in raggs, halting to th'press to trudg,Where errors were not lessened (all may judg) —Anne Bradstreet, "An Author to her Book" (1678) In her American Triptych, Wendy Martin epitomizes the traditional feminist criticism of Anne Bradstreet's poetry when she identifies "An Author to her Book" as the moment when Bradstreet begins to "view her daily experience as a valid subject for her art" (67). Martin's judgment reinforces a division, posited much earlier by Adrienne Rich, between Bradstreet's early, purportedly masculine and derivative, verse and her later, more successful, domestic poetry. This division, since supported by numerous critics, draws its rhetorical strength from an equation of the vitality of Bradstreet's later, domestic poems with their putative originality and authenticity, what Rich calls her "personal history [of] marriage, childbearing, [and] death" (xii–xiv). While critics such as Philip Round and Ivy Schweitzer have more recently reclaimed the political and even polemical significance of Bradstreet's poetry, they have largely reaffirmed this divide.1 As Tamara Harvey suggests, Round and Schweitzer find "double-voiced displays of poetic, personal, or female power" in the earlier poems, and thus still see in them in a kind of literary cross-dressing—the female poet ironically winking at us from behind a false beard and mustache, as it were (5). Further, both Schweitzer and Round deemphasize Bradstreet's own role in the production of her poetry, representing it as something appropriated [End Page 435] from her by her male Puritan interlocutors, especially her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge. The combined effect of these critical moves is to position Bradstreet as an isolated phenomenon—the lone woman poet on the American frontier—rather than part of a transatlantic community of European authors, both male and female, whose work engages the complex issues raised by the European colonization of the Americas.2 Foremost among these issues is the problem of how to maintain European identities in a "New World," and the concomitant fear of what Cotton Mather would call "Criolian Degeneracy" and "Indianization" (A Way to Prosperity 34; Decennium Luctuosum 211). By insisting that we see Bradstreet as a rara avis, both the traditional and the revisionist criticism obscure how her creative and provocative melding of religious, political, and domestic discourses responds to the challenge of creating a coherent transatlantic identity by producing a potent vision of the relationship between colony and metropole as one between a parent and child rather than male and female lovers. It is, I suggest, only by reading Bradstreet's poetry alongside that of contemporary authors, both male and female, on both sides of the Atlantic, that we can properly understand its broader significance.3 Such a reading will allow us to see how Bradstreet links sexual and cultural reproduction, thereby cementing the family as the primary locus of identity development—at an individual and a communal level—and, more particularly, smoothing over potential dissonances between her (Puritan) religious identity and her (English) national identity. It will also allow us to see how Bradstreet both responds to and anticipates contemporary educational discourse, particularly writing about women's education, but relocates education itself, placing it in a familial rather than an institutional setting. While critics such as Harvey and Patricia Pender have demonstrated how Bradstreet's work fits within a larger body of English language writing by men and women on both sides of the Atlantic, however, I want to highlight Bradstreet's place in an international discursive shift fueled by the developing European understanding of the colonization of the Americas. In order to do this, I will examine her work alongside that of Marie de l'Incarnation, a French nun who established the first educational mission for women (both native and European) in New France.4 De l'Incarnation's writings, like Bradstreet's, bear witness to an ongoing shift in the...