Puritanism

Thanksgiving cartoon
Cartoon depicting the first Thanksgiving, 1621 (Philadelphia Inquirer)

 

TEXT:  Bradstreet, The Author to Her Book (1666)

  • 24 lines of heroic couplets (rhyming) in iambic pentameter (five metrical feet, each with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable)
  • Published posthumously (after death) in 1678
  • Originally written while Bradstreet was living in North Andover, Massachusetts, during the same year when the family residence burned down (also the subject of a well known poem).  At that time, she was in her mid-fifties, a mother of eight children with the oldest in his twenties

CONTEXT:  Puritans and Their Covenant

“Puritans were stereotyped by their enemies as dour killjoys, and the exaggeration has endured. It is certainly true that the Puritans’ disdain for excess and opposition to many holidays popular in Europe (including Christmas, which, as Puritans never tired of reminding everyone, the Bible never told anyone to celebrate) lent themselves to caricature. But Puritans understood themselves as advocating a reasonable middle path in a corrupt world. It would never occur to a Puritan, for example, to abstain from alcohol or sex.” —American Yawp, 2: VI

  • 1621 // First “Thanksgiving” in Plymouth
  • 1630 // Arbella, John Winthrop and the “City Upon A Hill”
  • 1638 // Anne Hutchinson banished from Massachusetts Bay
  • 1649 // Charles I beheaded during English Civil War
  • 1675-78 // King Philip’s War
  • 1684 // Massachusetts Bay charter revoked
  • 1692 // Salem Witch trials begin

TWO TERMS TO REMEMBER

  • covenant = Puritan theological doctrine concerning man’s binding agreements for salvation and the debate it created among these Calvinist Protestants  between adherents of the “covenant of grace” versus the “covenant of works”
  • coverture = English common law doctrine which defined married women as dependents of their husbands, like children

SUBTEXT:  Understanding Anne Bradstreet

“we each have to figure out how to create a path to our work.” –Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry, xiii

“I suspect that Bradstreet’s preamble [to “The Author to Her Book”] which is quirky and funny, shows genuine ambivalence about her publication [of The Tenth Muse], which was badly printed and filled with errors.  It’s hard to tell, though, because she was expert at feigned modesty.” –Edward Hirsch, The Heart of American Poetry, 10

“It is not farfetched to suggest that in instructing her manuscript not to go abroad she is also making a statement about American poetry finding its place in the New rather than the Old World.” –Hirsch, 12

“I continue to marvel at the cunning and courageous poetic of this singular Puritan woman, who internalized a harsh religious creed and observed the strict proprieties of her society, and yet opened the pantry door for others to barge in, for the wild, divergent, emerging poetry of the New World.” –Hirsch, 13

Additional Resources

 

METHODS CENTER:  Close Reading