Mistress Bradstreet
Copyright © 2005 by Charlotte Gordon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Warner Faith
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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www.hachettebookgroupusa.com
First eBook Edition: March 2005
ISBN: 978-0-316-02868-4
Contents
Chapter Two: Lilies and Thorns
Chapter Four: A Man of Exemplary Discretion and Fidelity
Chapter Five: God Is Leaving England
Chapter Seven: Our Appointed Time
Chapter Nine: New World, New Manners
Chapter Eleven: Enemies Within
Chapter Thirteen: Such Things as Belong to Women
Chapter Fourteen: Old England and New
Chapter Fifteen: Now Sister, Pray Proceed
Chapter Sixteen: Foolish, Broken, Blemished Muse
Chapter Seventeen: The Tenth Muse
Chapter Eighteen: Farewell Dear Child
Epilogue: A Voice in the Wilderness
ALSO BY CHARLOTTE GORDON
Two Girls on a Raft
When The Grateful Dead Came to St. Louis
To all those whose stories have gone untold
and to
Julie Miles Gordon
I AM SOMEONE WHO BECAME OBSESSED,
passionately so, with a woman who lived nearly four hundred years ago, a woman who lived right down the street from me. Sometimes I wonder if our subjects choose us or if we choose them.
In 1991 I was twenty-eight years old and terrified because I had just gotten my first real teaching job. I had moved to Ipswich, Massachusetts, a small New England village a few miles from the sea. Now I had to get high school students excited about poetry and, at the same time, teach them something about American history and literature. It happened that Anne Bradstreet was the first author on the course syllabus. I did not know much about her, aside from the fact that she was the “first” American poet and always appeared on a few pages in the first chapter of American-literature anthologies. In my mind her only claim to recognition was good timing. None of my English teachers had ever mentioned her, and the cursory introduction in my old college textbook was no help. The editor said she wrote in “laboring and tedious couplets.” Poor Bradstreet!
But then one of those coincidences happened that change your life. The day before my first class, while I was on my daily run, I noticed a plaque mounted on a stone. It was partially obscured by a large bush, and this made it seem all the more mysterious. Curious, I trotted up the path and read, “Near this spot was the house of Simon Bradstreet, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, 1679-1686 and 1689-1692. His wife, Ann [
sic
], daughter of Governor Dudley, was the first American poetess. They lived in Ipswich, 1635-44.” Suddenly I wanted to know more about my long-dead neighbor. What was she doing in Ipswich? What was she doing in America in 1635? I had thought only the Pilgrims were here then.
I raced home and studied her poems with sharpened attention. The next day in class I read aloud some of my favorite lines. About being a woman, from “The Prologue”: “I am obnoxious / to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits.” About loss, from “Upon the Burning of Our House”: “Here stood my trunk, and there that chest, / There lay that store I counted best. / My pleasant things in ashes lie.” About love, from “To My Dear and Loving Husband”: “If ever two were one, then surely we. / If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; / If ever wife was happy in a man, / Compare with me ye women if you can.” To my amazement, my students liked them. One even asked if we could spend more time on her.
Years have passed since that discovery, and I have read Bradstreet with class after class of students. They have been thrilled by her passion and slang, her formality and humor; and because of their eagerness to know more about her, I soon found myself wondering why she had not been part of my own education in American literature. Nestled right next to her poems in her collected works, there is an astonishingly powerful autobiography, as well as religious meditations, and some reflections in prose. Anne articulates important ideas about what it means to be an American, a mother, and a person of faith during bleak and despairing times. Her writing is unabashedly honest and offers sudden brave glimpses into her struggles and her private ideas.
At the very least she should have turned up as a prominent early-American woman pioneer. She sailed to New England in 1630 at age eighteen, hiked through the first-growth forests with pines as huge as California redwoods, bore eight children in the wilderness, and published the first book of poems from the New World. Yet when I looked her up in the library, few people had written about her. To date there have been only two biographies, the most recent of which was published in 1974, and only one book-length critical study. Lately, it seems, she has become a favorite of literary scholars, perhaps because the immediacy of her voice speaks to contemporary readers. But whatever the reason for this scholarly interest, in general, most people have barely heard of her. Was it really possible that such a likable poet, who lived life on such a magnificent scale, had been so neglected? After all, she had been a celebrity in her own lifetime and had left a substantial body of work, as much as any of our other major writers.
I embarked on a pilgrimage to find Anne. I’ve read countless journals and letters from the time, as well as many books on topics such as seventeenth-century gardening, baking, shipping, economics, weaving, child rearing, courtship practices, theology, and legal codes. As a result, this book has become as much a quest for a lost country as it is for her.
It is difficult to reconstruct the past. In fact, really, it is impossible. There is little physical evidence remaining. Even her house is gone, like most of the dwellings of the early settlers, burned, torn down, crumbled to ash. On their bones, our houses crowd together, huge, windowed, balconied. Cars roar by on the old paths, now paved. I live less than twenty miles from where Anne used to live, but often she feels as far away as the moon.
But one December night I had one of those moments in which she felt close enough to touch. The snow was falling fast—more than a foot that afternoon, and more was piling up. The drifts were as high as the roof of my car. The wind was boiling in off the ocean, and the house shook with each gust of heavy air. This was a real storm, the kind that makes you glad you don’t live in one of the houses on the shore. The sea was gray and smoky, like a cauldron, breaking over the little stone walls of the summer houses.
After supper my family’s lights flickered ominously and then went out. At first the darkness was like an unexpected intermission. We were not cold yet and wouldn’t be for several more hours. Simply, it was dark, dark, dark. We fumbled for flashlights, candles, matches, and once we had found these things, the muted tones of the house, the deep shadows, seemed romantic, as though we were having an extended candlelit dinner. But the wind continued to bang against the walls, the windows rattled, and the inconveniences began. There was no hot water to give my son his nightly bath, no light to read to him by. I couldn’t find his stuffed dog. Once he was tucked in, it was too dark to read my own book, and too cold and noisy. Before long my son was out of bed, crying. The wind would not stop and he could not go to sleep. “It’s too loud, Mommy,” he complained. “It’s cold.” And it
was
cold, unrelentingly so.
I climbed into bed next to my son, and as we lay there shivering, I knew that this, of course, was how winter was for Anne, but worse. Her house had thinner walls. No foam insulation or storm windows, just panels of wood with clay daubed between the cracks. She and her husband were rich, so they could afford to light a few candles if they chose to, but still they had to use them sparingly. Largely they depended on messy, unreliable lamps fashioned out of pine resin and tar. Their fire would have gone out in such a storm unless they stayed up all night to tend it, and the house would have gotten colder and colder. If I found one night like this almost impossible to bear, how did she find the strength and inspiration not only to survive the wilderness but to stand firm in her faith, and to write? How did she not despair?
THERE IS A JEWISH TRADITION
of
midrash,
which is when the rabbis attempted “to fill in the gaps” of some of the more mystifying biblical stories, such as those of Job or Jonah and the whale, and in many ways that is what these pages have become. By retelling some of the history, the details, and the facts of her time, I have attempted to resurrect Anne and her home in early America. But I have also tried to piece together something more—what it felt like to be one of the first Europeans in America and what Anne, a gently bred, highly educated woman, might have thought, done, and experienced as she struggled through the ordeal of emigration and settling a new country. What was it like to live in a time before electric lights and high heels, before microwaves, blue jeans, and pollution, when the fastest thing around was a seagull or a galloping horse?
Of course, Anne had no idea that she lived “before” anything in particular, any more than we think that the twenty-first century is a time “before.” To us it is always now, modern times. We are the latest thing. So thought Anne, once upon a time. She believed that she was the most modern of the moderns.
Still, the limitations of what we can know, no matter how obsessed we are, have, inevitably, become clear to me. She walks ahead of me and I don’t get to see her face. Was her hair brown or pale? Was she slim? Did she get heavier as she bore her children? Or was she petite, like a bird? What did her voice sound like? Did she argue with her husband? Did she like to cook? Was she as ambitious as I think she was? Would she have approved of my writing about her? But the closer I have drawn, the more she has receded, her figure diminishing, no matter how I strain to catch up. Those shores of early America are irretrievable, as is Anne. I have tried to revive her here, but some of the most important things are bound to be left unknown.
Slender in build,
A narrow, almond-eyed shade,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
she drifts up from the gaping gold,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
to the crown of the Now.
—PAUL CELAN,
from “In Front of a Candle”
Arrival
A
FTER SEVENTY-SEVEN DAYS AT SEA
, one Captain Milbourne steered his ship, the
Arbella
—packed with more than three hundred hungry, exhausted souls—into Salem Harbor, shooting off the ship’s cannon in elation. It was early in the morning of June 12, 1630, a date that would prove to be more fateful to America than the more-famous 1492, but if either the captain or his hapless passengers had expected any kind of fanfare from the New World itself, they were to be disappointed. Far from offering herself up for casual and easy delectation, America hunched like a dark animal, sleeping and black, offering no clues about her contours, let alone the miracles reported by the rumor mill of the 1620s: inland seas, dragons, Indians adorned in golden necklaces, fields sown with diamonds, and bears as tall as windmills.
To the bedraggled individuals who clung to the rails of this huge flagship, once a battleship in the Mediterranean wars against Turkish pirates and now the first vessel of its kind to have successfully limped across the ocean from England, it must have seemed cruel that they would have to wait until dawn before they could glimpse this world that still swam just out of their reach. Most of the passengers, however, were pious individuals and bowed their heads in acquiescence to the Lord’s will. But the few rebellious souls, and there were some notable firebrands onboard the
Arbella,
could not help but find themselves feeling more discontented than ever.
One in particular, a young woman of about eighteen years, could not subdue her resentment. She wished that the new land would never appear before her eyes, that she had never been ripped away from her beloved England, even that she had perished in the waters they had just crossed rather than face what would come next. Not that she admitted her fears to any of the other passengers pacing on the deck that morning. Anne Dudley Bradstreet was the daughter of Deputy Governor Thomas Dudley, the second in command of the expedition, and was too acutely aware of her responsibilities to show her feelings of resentment.