Intimacy and Puritan Frameworks: Resistant/Resonant Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet’s Poetry
Nicholas M. Barone
Anne Bradstreet’s “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” and “Another [Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment]” function as reflections of Puritan notions of kinship and intimate familial relationships, filtered through the subjectivity of a woman. Superficially, these poems explicate the nature of intimate love and the survival of this bond even when separated from her husband. However, when the works are put in conversation, they resonate to form disparate parts of a larger Puritan aesthetic–one of deep introspection, loyalty to husband, patriarchy, and of detailed examination of the various trappings of the natural world. However, this resonance is not without nuance. Conflicting, overlapping subjectivities are embedded in the poems, as evidenced by specific word choices, imageries, and poetic structures.
Through the microcosmic exploration of intimate absence from one’s marital partner, Bradstreet explores a distinct subjectivity that is both Puritan and female. Simultaneously, she embodies and complicates Puritan notions of piety, self-evaluation, and human relationships. Through specific word choice, imageries, and poetic forms, Anne Bradstreet’s “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” and “Another [Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment]” simultaneously resist and embody aspects of Puritanism, through the deconstruction of absence in an intimate romantic relationship.
The first lines of “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” elucidate and establish Anne Bradstreet’s positional subjectivity as both a Puritan and a woman. The first lines read, “My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more, / My joy, my magazine of earthly store” (Bradstreet 1-2). For Bradstreet, amalgamating her selfhood with that of her absent husband’s functions as a struggle towards subjective continuity. The words “My head” suggest a linearization of her feelings for her husband through her mind. This serves as a uniquely Puritan example of hyper-focused attention of one’s surroundings and emotional interior. Through this temporal awareness, Bradstreet embodies certain aspects of the Puritan aesthetic in terms of liminal representation and devotion to husband.
Subsequently, “heart” and “eyes” evoke similar sentiments of interpreting and sorting out spiritual phenomena through emotionality and visual representation while “My life” connotes a total surrender of self and individuality to account for such immense passion. “Nay, more” immediately negates and qualifies this surrender of her temporal being through the suggestion that she lacks the vocabulary to elucidate the strength of their union. This subjective interruption serves as a microcosm for the contradictions and unsteady subjectivities which are being positioned through the lens of reflecting on the absence of her husband. Specifically, for a Puritan woman, this “more” could be interpreted as religious unity, a joining of souls that underscores how deeply and purely this relationship runs. This shift of focus from the temporal to the potentially spiritual resonates with Puritan notions of concerning oneself with the world to come.
However, the relationship between Bradstreet and Puritan lexicons becomes further muddled. The line immediately following reads, “If two be one, as surely thou and I” (3). Under a patriarchal context, such devotion suggests a deliberate submission to a male figure. However, Bradstreet does not necessarily sacrifice agency; she ends this line with “I,” (re)centering the poem’s implications around herself. In addition, the phrase “two be one” structurally positions her and her husband on relatively equal footing–neither halves of the whole are explicitly or implicitly placed over the other. When remembering that the act of writing for a woman in a highly repressive and patriarchal Puritan society is inherently subversive, this line simultaneously resists Puritan notions of absolute devotion and service to one’s husband. This further complicates the implicit surrender of her selfhood to the cohesive whole her and her husband form, underscoring the fraught relationship between Bradstreet and several tangible aspects of Puritan structures.
Her treatment of her relationship with her husband also manifests itself in “Another [Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment].” The nature of oneness or cohesion threads itself throughout this work as well, though is not explicitly mentioned until the last six lines. The poem reads, “Together at one tree, oh let us browse, / And like two turtles roost within one house / And like the mullets in one river glide, / Let’s still remain but one, till death divide” (Bradstreet 29-32). Nature imagery imbues this more ethereal work. Words like “mullets,” “turtles,” and “river” intimately relates Bradstreet’s subjective experience through the natural world around her, filtering both her consciousness and her longing through the act of personifying nature. This functions as a universal signifier of the strength of their bond while also establishing a certain degree of poetic continuity between this work and the first “Letter.”
Personification of animals specifically forms part of this larger conflation of natural imageries with the relationship between Bradstreet and her absent husband. The first four lines of “Another [Letter]” read, “As loving hind that (hartless) wants her deer, / Scuds through the woods and fern with hark’ning ear, / Perplext, in every bush and nook doth pry, / Her dearest deer, might answer ear or eye” (1-4). The use of the word “hind” specifically genders the speaker as female, establishing her subjectivity as a woman from the very first line of the poem. The phrase “Every bush and nook” underscores the totality of her desperation or longing, a suggestion of a subjective anxiety that is being delineated. While the pun of “deer” and “dear” evokes tangible, romantic images that reflect her own longing and adoration for her husband, such wordplay functions as a microcosm for the codification of her subjectivities.
The uncertainty of her own subjectivity textually manifests itself through projecting her identity onto an animal, a Puritan linearization of (re)creating the world through observations and relative metaphors. The words “hark’ning ear” evoke Puritan sentiments of hyper-vigilance and watchfulness over the temporal world. However, wordplay and personification simultaneously function as facets of Bradstreet’s complicated relationship with her Puritan subjectivity. On the textual level, the word “perplext” both establishes her sense of longing and confusion as a byproduct of absence and the muddled, contradictory nature of her own Puritan and female consciousness. The conflation of herself, her husband, and their relationship through imageries of nature and personification serves as a microcosm for larger subjective conflicts that are being explicated and rearranged within the poem itself.
Apart from the titles, the word choices and poetic forms of both “A Letter” and “Another [Letter]” are in nearly direct conversation with one another. Specifically, the phrase “Let’s still remain as one” embeds the second poem with a certain degree of intertextuality. The word “still,” though potentially a reference to time lapsed since her husband’s absence, suggests a direct line of textual continuity between the two works. The phrase communicates almost directly with the final two lines of the first. Those lines read, “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, / I here, thou there, yet both but one” (25-26). The repetition of “flesh” and “bone” similarly emphasizes the oneness of Bradstreet and her husband’s temporal existences. In terms of dichotomies of subordination versus equality, this repetition coupled with the words “here” and “there” do not establish or make reference to any potential gendered hierarchies within their relationship, similar to the first few of lines of the first poem. Resonances exist between the relatively equal footings Bradstreet textually imbues both herself and her husband in each poem–a disruption or undermining of Puritan expectations of a wife and woman.
However, the potential for relative equality in the eyes of Bradstreet is intrinsically complicated by the line “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone.” Though repetition of the words “flesh” and “bone” could further suggest equality before such “oneness,” the use of the word “thy” in relation to “flesh” and “bone” evokes biblical sentiments of woman being borne of man. In Genesis, Eve’s existence is contingent upon Adam’s, with the section reading, “And Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man’” (King James Bible, Genesis 2:23). Bradstreet and her husband form part of a cohesive whole, but Bradstreet’s “flesh” and “bone[s]” are borne of or crafted from those of her husband, as evidenced by “thy.”
The final lines of this poem function to recreate or redefine Bradstreet’s own womanhood, an explicit reference to her own identity and its relationship to the world around her. Subsequently, Bradstreet’s evocation of woman being “taken out of Man” retreats back into the confines of Puritan frameworks. This forms a structural opposition to previously established sentiments of relative equality before the “oneness” of their marriage and spiritual union. This artistic and rhetorical oscillation serves as a significant indicator of Bradstreet’s own tenuous relationships with Puritan aesthetics and social expectations. It is important to note that the biblical grounding of this line in the first poem is one of the only explicitly and overtly religious or pious trappings of either work.
Poetry for Bradstreet, in an era where the act of writing was an inherent subversion to patriarchal standards of subservience, piety, and service to one’s husband or to God, functioned as an outlet for exploring the nuances and complications of her own subjectivity. While her husband (and his absence) and the nature of their marriage are integral parts of this process, Bradstreet’s intimate narrative modes and specific word choice implicitly delineate the grander subjective contradictions she is grappling with. Such contradictions reveal and explore the tense and multilayered relationship between Anne Bradstreet’s poems and the grander lexicon of Puritanism in which she is confined.
Nicholas Barone ’19, a sophomore from northern New Jersey, is pursuing an English and History double major. His academic interests include twentieth-century American literatures, critical theory, creative writing (poetry), Native American Studies, British imperial history, and American political history. Outside the classroom, Nicholas has served as the Opinions Editor of The Miscellany News, the Archives Co-Editor of The Vassar Review, and the President of Lathrop House. After graduation, he plans on pursuing a PhD in American Studies/History or an MFA in Poetry.
Works Cited
Bradstreet, Anne. “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public
Employment.” Hensley, Jeannine, ed. The Works of Anne
Bradstreet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Print.
Bradstreet, Anne. “Another [A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon
Public Employment].” Hensley, Jeannine, ed. The Works of
Anne Bradstreet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Print.
The Bible. King James Version. Bible Hub. Web. Accessed 03 Oct.
2016.