Mistress Bradstreet (28 page)

To Anne, a woman, not a man, was an example of the glory of England, so it was not surprising that she painted Elizabeth as a kind of messianic symbol. If a woman could rule over men, if the weak could triumph over the strong, then anything, Anne implied, was possible. But sadly, this wondrous “Phoenix” was gone; never would the queen return until “the heaven’s great revolution.” Anne ended the poem with a fantastic vision of “many worlds,” where the fabulous could become true: Elizabeth would be resurrected; her “living virtues [would] speak”; and, amazingly, she would shine as an example for men to follow.
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It would be a glorious reversal of Anne’s real-world hierarchy, where men were the perennial leaders and women the inevitable, eternal followers.

Given the dangers, politically speaking, of a woman’s being so outspoken, these were especially inflammatory words. Not that Anne meant to retroactively support the Hutchinson “revolution” that had almost taken place. But the raft of misogynist complaints that had been unleashed in response to the Hutchinson crisis must have troubled her. She knew better, however, than to declare her ideas out loud. Only under the cover of night, while the town slept, did she venture to assert her own frank arguments.

These writing times were few and far between, as Anne was often too exhausted to stay up after the children were asleep. If it was hard for anyone to find time alone in colonial New England, it was doubly hard for a young mother; by the time she had written the poem to Elizabeth, Anne had borne five children. To embark on a journey as a writer was such an implausible undertaking that even she must have sometimes wondered why she spent her energy this way.

But each of her early poems was not only an attempt to sort through the difficulties she experienced as a woman writer but also her response to the hardship of her life. When it began to leak out that she was composing poetry in the dead of night, she reported the whispers of those who believed that she was overstepping her place, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits.”
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Buoyed by the education she had received as a child as well as by her father’s belief in her poetic vocation, she felt she could best serve the colony through her literary efforts. She also seemed to understand that to survive her life in the wilderness, she had to focus on her intellectual well-being as well as the exigencies of daily life. She had more success than her contemporary in walking this thin line. Anne would be praised for maintaining “her exact diligence in her place,” while Hutchinson would be pilloried for generations for her various trespasses.
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In fact, ironically, Mistress Hutchinson’s downfall ushered in the most fertile decade of Anne Bradstreet’s life—fertile in every sense of the word. From 1638 to 1648, Anne wrote more than six thousand lines of poetry, more than almost any other English writer on either side of the Atlantic composed in an entire lifetime. For most of this time, she was either pregnant, recovering from childbirth, or nursing an infant, establishing herself as a woman blessed by God, the highest commendation a New England Puritan mother could receive.
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Once Anne had settled into the rhythm of bearing children, babies seemed to stimulate her work.

Perhaps this was because Anne had found reliable servants to help her take care of the house and to tend the little ones, but it was also probably no accident that these two kinds of creative activities went hand in hand for her. Rather than viewing children as an obstacle to a productive working life, Puritan parents saw each child as an asset to the family’s blessings and wealth. The more hands, the lighter the labor; the more healthy Puritan children who came of age in America, the greater the chances of longevity for the English colony, and so it was everyone’s responsibility to have as many children as possible and to instruct them in the ways of Puritanism. To Anne, each new baby was also an incentive to be a good pious mother, and her poetry became part of her attempt to teach her children the tenets of her religion.

In 1638, just months after Mrs. Hutchinson’s exile, Anne bore her third baby, a healthy little girl. Poor Mrs. Hutchinson, however, had suffered a catastrophe. Driven out of Boston when she was pregnant and forced to give birth in the wilderness, she had produced a horribly damaged infant, or so rumors claimed. Some people even whispered that Hutchinson’s child was not human but a demon fathered by Satan.

That Hutchinson had borne such a deformity was a dreadful testimony to her sinful nature, according to the stern beliefs of New Englanders. To them a woman’s womb proved her virtue and piety or demonstrated her hypocrisies. Before her trial, Hutchinson had risen to power in part because she was seen as a virtuous mother. After her guilt was proven, it fit Puritan logic that she would no longer be favored by God. If each child was a physical manifestation of the mother’s spiritual condition, then, as the minister Thomas Weld argued, “See how the wisdome of God fitted this judgement to her [Hutchinson’s] sinne every way, for looke as she had vented misshapen opinions, so she must bring forth deformed monsters.”
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Anne could take heart, therefore, that just after she had written her first serious poem, the elegy to Sidney, her new baby had arrived without blemishes. This had to mean that her work was not tainted by sin; she was pure of heart. Throughout Anne’s writing life this connection between childbirth and the condition of her soul would be a powerful theme. Any doubts she had about her poetry would be magnified with each pregnancy and countered by each healthy birth. Her community, too, saw each of her healthy babies as a testimony to her godliness, despite what might otherwise be seen as increasingly maverick behavior.

But although Anne had so far managed to channel her own ambitions to fit inside the Puritan system, she was beginning to fear for her brazen younger sister, Sarah, who seemed tempted to take tentative steps along Hutchinson’s treacherous path. Sarah had always been more rebellious than her sisters, and she appeared to relish some of Hutchinson’s strange ideas, particularly that of modern-day prophesy—that it was still possible for people to hear the voice of the Lord. Anne feared that her beloved Sarah might someday share the fate of this wretched woman. Of the sisters, Sarah was most like Anne—brilliant, emotional, restless, and an original thinker. In fact, Anne had named her new little girl after her middle sister, skipping over Patience, the next oldest, who should have followed, in the family-naming tradition.

But Sarah was intent on independence and left her parents’ home to marry Major Benjamin Keanye soon after her little namesake was born. It was troubling that Sarah’s new home was in Boston, the place where her fascination with Hutchinson had probably begun. Indeed, it was ironic to all of those who knew the Dudley girls that the steady, compliant Mercy, who had also recently married, would remain close to her parents and sisters in Ipswich, while the problematic Sarah was forty miles away from their supervision. All too soon she would avail herself of her freedom, presenting a kind of dark mirror to her eldest sister of what could happen to a woman who strayed too far from convention.

Meanwhile, back in Ipswich, under the watchful eye of her family and friends, Anne struggled with her own faith. As she wrote a few years later, “Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the Scriptures, many times by atheism.” Devout as she was, Anne frequently wondered, “How could I know whether there was a God?”
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However, unlike Sarah, Anne had her poetry and her close relationships with Ward, her father, and her husband to help her sort through her complicated feelings. And with three children to raise in the rigors of her religion, she could not afford to give in to her doubts, at least not openly.

IN
1639,
THE YEAR AFTER
little Sarah’s birth and the Hutchinson crisis, Dudley was once again elected to the post of deputy governor. He decided, grudgingly, to move closer to Boston to attend to the growing needs of colonial government. In the years since they had arrived in the New World from England, Boston had become a bustling Puritan center, and emigrants continually flowed in, undeterred by reports of the Hutchinson debacle. By the early 1640s there would be more than twenty thousand settlers who had busily “planted fifty towns and villages, built thirty or forty churches, and more ministers’ houses, a castle, a college, prisons, forts, cartways . . . many having comfortable houses, gardens, orchards, grounds fenced, corn fields, etc.”
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For the first time in her life, Anne did not follow her father. Her duty lay with her husband, and Simon did not want to leave Ipswich. Dudley and Dorothy settled in Roxbury, a little village near Boston. Pregnant for the fourth time, with little Sarah only a year old, Anne was truly on her own now. Her quiet mother would be far away during Anne’s next labor, and as the eldest sister, it would be her duty to help guide Mercy and Patience through their own pregnancies and births.

Whether she was being stoic or was exhilarated to have this new freedom, Anne never seems to have complained about her parents’ departure. But she could not stay silent when it came to her husband’s absences, and used her skills as a poet to express her frustration and her love in deeply personal verse that she never intended to publish.

Simon had been appointed by his father-in-law and Winthrop to help oversee the creation of what the Puritans called “the United Colonies of New England”—a group of settlements that would include Massachusetts Bay, New Haven, the Connecticut valley, and Plymouth. Given the firm opinions of all involved, particularly the New Havenites (led by the stern Thomas Hooker, the Bradstreets’ old New Towne minister), Simon was kept very busy with negotiations. Although Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams would have been shocked to hear it, there were those in the west who saw Winthrop and Dudley’s government as being too tolerant of different points of view and so resisted connecting their fates to Massachusetts.

Simon was well suited to this mission, but this meant that he was rarely in Ipswich. Pioneer life was already difficult for Anne to bear, and Simon’s absence made it more so. She expressed her longing for him in verse that revealed potent sexual imagery. Urgently, she needed him to come “burn / Within . . . my glowing breast, / The welcome house of him my dearest guest.”
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When her new baby son was born in 1640, she named him Simon, as though she wanted to keep some part of her husband nearby at all times. Because their religion supported and encouraged sexual passion between husband and wife, Anne did not have to hold back her feelings. Instead, she framed her eroticism with a directness that is still startling to read today.

Using images from the natural world, she compared herself not only to the earth itself but also to a deer, a turtledove, and even “the loving mullet, that true fish” that would rather die than live without her mate. She needed Simon physically and declared:

Return my dear, my joy, my only love,

Unto thy hind, thy mullet, and thy dove,

Who neither joys in pasture, house, nor streams,

The substance gone . . .
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Without Simon’s body, or “substance,” Anne was miserable.

Simon raced home whenever it was possible for him to escape his work, but no matter how hard he tried, he was never in Ipswich enough for his passionate wife. Suffering as she did, Anne did not at first realize that there was a positive aspect of her husband’s time away. But each month he was gone, she was forced to develop her confidence and her competencies. As the single head of a frontier household, she had many duties to perform, since Simon’s tasks became hers, and so Anne gradually grew extremely capable in many areas. She oversaw the family’s business transactions, kept careful records of their finances, made decisions about the family’s property, including the buying and selling of livestock, and disciplined the staff of sometimes unruly male laborers.

By necessity, Anne had evolved into what has been called a “deputy husband,” a wife who legally, politically, and economically acted for her spouse, signing his name if she needed to, and even speaking as his representative in sessions of the local court if “he” had to testify in a local crime or debate (although this last was a rare occurrence).
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Fortunately, Anne’s “trespass” into male territory was culturally and legally sanctioned. Because husbands were often away for extended periods, everyone agreed that it was a pious wife’s duty to assume her husband’s chores.

The side effects of this transfer of responsibilities could be permanent. Women in Anne’s position often grew markedly independent and had no compunction about joining in public debate. Those women whose husbands died and who were therefore rendered permanent “deputy husbands” sometimes chose to preserve their status as widows (if they were wealthy enough) in order to maintain their clout as representatives of the estate, a position far more powerful than that of a mere wife.
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Gradually Anne became one of the leading settlers in Ipswich in her own right. Accustomed as she was to debating with strong-minded men like her father, Anne filled her new “husbandly” responsibilities with skill, while her flourishing household met with the approbation of her neighbors. It helped, of course, that she had the enthusiastic blessing of the town’s minister, Ward.

During these years, the late 1630s to the early 1640s, the leaders of the colony believed that it was particularly important that the devout in New England maintain their piety in the face of temptation, as ominous changes were afoot. Of course, Puritans had always regarded their king with suspicion. Charles was married, after all, to a French Catholic, and his bishops had actively persecuted their favorite ministers. To dissenters like Anne, Charles was a restless, spendthrift young man. They had little sympathy for his dreams of glory, were unimpressed with his good looks and high fashion, and saw his bloodthirstiness as self-aggrandizing and foolish. Irritatingly, he refused to listen to the wisdom of the Puritans in the House of Commons and instead attempted to get what he wanted with charming overtures and bonhomie, and then when this did not work, with bristling threats.