Sunday, February 15, 2009

Anne Bradstreet's Intentions

Anne Bradstreet’s The Prologue seems like an attempt to say “yeah I’m a woman writing, isn’t this silly?” She is writing like a person in an occupied territory knowing that she must praise the enemy and fall in line with their beliefs in order to get what she wants. If she had started off with an attack on the popular belief system, that woman are inferior to men, she would have had a much harder time. There is a difference between someone saying this is too good to be written by a woman and not being given the chance to write at all. People don’t like things that go against their socially constructed belief systems so her efforts to belittle her work are an attempt to sneak past. She calls her poetry “lowly lines” as if to say don’t worry about this meaningless work (Line 45). The Prologue strikes me as a sneak attack because her following poems ask for equality and recognition. Bradstreet uses Queen Elizabeth to illustrate strong women who can perform just as well, and in some cases better, than men. She does still begin the poem by admitting to her inferiority, “To sing of wars…for my mean pen are too superior things”. If Bradstreet had intended for her work to be published I could believe that she was trying to appease the masses long enough to have her voice heard. However, she didn’t want to release her work, her brother had it secretly published in England and although she received attention she had nothing else published. If she had truly wanted women to be looked at in a higher regard, she would have used that power. It is easier to write about how you feel when you are writing for yourself. Would she have changed the poems if she knew who would be reading them?

1 comment:

  1. I read Anne Bradstreet’s Prologue a slightly different way. The footnote at the bottom of the page says that the Prologue may have been written for “Quaternions”, one of Bradstreet’s epic poems. With this in mind I do not feel that Bradstreet is submitting to her male audience in order to become accepted. I feel Bradstreet is merely following the guidelines for writing epic poem. Bradstreet is not adapting a sarcastic tone saying that a woman writing is silly; rather, Bradstreet is being modest with a sincere tone. In stanza two Bradstreet claims to recognize great poetry, she makes reference to Bartas, but in that same stanza she also recognizes she is not a great poet, which I feel is quite the contrary. A poet could have the largest ego in the world, but that same other would follow the same conventions. Claiming humility is common practice in epic poems, which is what Bradstreet is doing.

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