The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers

Wendy Martin, Sharone Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317698555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

The Routledge Introduction to American Women Writers considers the important literary, historical, cultural, and intellectual contexts of American women authors from the seventeenth century to the present and provides readers with an analysis of current literary trends and debates in women's literature. This accessible and engaging guide covers a variety of essential topics, such as:

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• the transatlantic and transnational origins of American women's literary traditions
• the colonial period and the Puritans
• the early national period and the rhetoric of independence
• the nineteenth century and the Civil War
• the twentieth century, including modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Civil Rights era
• trends in twenty-first century American women's writing
• feminism, gender and sexuality, regionalism, domesticity, ethnicity, and multiculturalism.

The volume examines the ways in which women writers from diverse racial, social, and cultural backgrounds have shaped American literary traditions, giving particular attention to the ways writers worked inside, outside, and around the strictures of their cultural and historical moments to create space for women's voices and experiences as a vital part of American life. Addressing key contemporary and theoretical debates, this comprehensive overview presents a highly readable narrative of the development of literature by American women and offers a crucial range of perspectives on American literary history.

1 ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

Women in British North America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315779133-1

When eighteen-year-old poet Anne Bradstreet boarded the Arbella in April of 1630, she left nearly everything she knew behind her on the shore: a home filled with cultured friends, ample food, the best books, and all the comforts of wealth afforded her as the daughter and wife of genteel and high-ranking managers on the estate of the Earl of Lincoln. Ahead of her lay the blue-black expanses of the Atlantic Ocean, her home for the next three months, and then what? She had no way of knowing.

Bradstreet sailed with several family members, including her husband, Simon Bradstreet, and her father, Thomas Dudley. Along with John Winthrop and other colonial investors, they had founded the New England Company (later renamed the Massachusetts Bay Company) and recruited several hundred of their fellow dissatisfied Puritans to join them in settling the New England shores, believing at the other end of their voyage they would find the makings of a Promised Land for true believers. But Anne Bradstreet’s devotion was less to a religious cause than to her father, the man who facilitated her education in history, literature, philosophy, and languages, and to her husband, her love for whom was the source of her most enduring poetry. Simultaneously part of and outside this cultural movement, Bradstreet was on a ship bound for a world about which she could have known almost nothing. No drawings or paintings of Bradstreet survive, so we do not know what she looked like; we have only her clear, slanting handwriting to show us the lines and life of a Puritan woman in seventeenth-century New England.

Many of us think of the Puritans when imagining early American colonial history: brave people in buckled shoes crossing storm-tossed seas in the quest for religious freedom. We picture their arrival on the rocky shores of a New World, a vast and empty wilderness peopled by a handful of peaceful, generous Native Americans who were largely content to remain in the background of the more important story being told. The narrative of the Puritans in New England has taken a powerful hold in the American imagination, largely due to the Puritans’ fusion of sacred and secular history and their conviction that they were establishing a New Jerusalem blessed by God to be an example and inspiration to the world (Bercovitch Puritan x). While some of the religious elements have faded since the Mayflower first crossed the Atlantic, this belief in the American project as exceptional remains, and the Puritans still loom large in Americans’ conceptions of themselves and their national origins, and in the writing of many American women. For this reason, it’s important to understand the origins of this view—but it’s just as important to acknowledge how much this view of the colonial period misrepresents and excludes.

North America was not quite what the Puritan settlers were led to believe it would be. For more than a century, European imperial powers—including France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England—had been attempting to lure colonists across the Atlantic with reports of plenteous lands, unpopulated except for some primitive, heathen people with a childlike simplicity who saw Europeans as gods or powerful sorcerers because of their weaponry and apparent ability to fell their enemies with disease.¹ But North America was frequently a deadly place for Europeans in the early seventeenth century. The hot, humid summers of the mid-Atlantic region killed as many people as the fierce winters of the Northeast, food was often hard to come by, and the labor required to carve out even the loosest approximations of European civilization was backbreaking. What’s more, the land was far from empty or free for the taking. Native North Americans numbered in the millions, thousands of distinct groups with unique languages, traditions, and cultural practices who had inhabited every region of the continent for millennia (Thornton 69). These Native cultures were sophisticated and well-established, and many had experience with European explorers and traders; European goods had made their way through long-established Native trading networks, reaching much farther than Europeans themselves had explored, prior to full-scale settlement of North America (Kicza 38).

European colonists came to North America for various reasons. The majority of the colonies were founded by commercial charter or imperial edict, based on promises of gold, agricultural riches, slaves, land, and empire; even on the Mayflower, the majority sailed in search of economic opportunity.² But European settlers were also inspired by imperial rivalries born of religious, economic, and political concerns. The tensions between Protestant and Catholic powers that led to the Thirty Years’ War across most of continental Europe naturally spilled into North America, and colonial fervor was fed by Protestant and Catholic empires’ desires to save this new world, its resources, and its inhabitants from each other (Pestana 72–3; Lepore 9). The Algonquian-speaking woman known as Pocahontas, who converted to Christianity, married an English man, took an English name, and traveled Europe in the attire of a perfect English gentlewoman, served as a useful representative of the “transformative power of English money and religion” (K. Brown 43), inspiring investors and potential colonists alike as a symbol in the European struggle for world dominance.

Pocahontas and John Smith, the Mayflower Pilgrims celebrating the first Thanksgiving, and the quest for religious freedom all make appearances in the texts we frequently study from early American literature. Notably, these texts are all in English, written by English explorers and settlers. Despite the polyglot diversity of the early colonial period, English literature by English settlers has historically received the most attention from scholars of American literary history. Only in the last half-century has the canon expanded to include Spanish, French, and Dutch writers, and the inclusion of Native American texts, complicated as that is, has been more recent still.³ But when it comes to women writing in the early colonial period, the range is still fairly narrow: of the handful of women writers from the seventeenth century discovered thus far, almost all are Puritans, which shifts any discussion of women writers in the early colonial period toward New England almost as a matter of course. One obvious reason is that the English came to dominate the part of North America that would become the United States, and thus English colonists’ perspectives and cultural productions have dominated the narrative of how American literature came to be. While scholars have made significant efforts in the last fifty years to expand our understanding of early American literature outside this narrow scope, there is still much work to be done.⁴

The Puritan narrative is both powerful and seductive in the way it fuses a religious sense of covenant and promise with commercial and imperial enterprise. Convinced they were leaving behind the corruption and religious tyranny of the Old World and making something new and sacred, the Puritans laid the foundation for an American national identity based on the denial of the heterogeneity of its origins and a profound sense of the rightness of their endeavor; they are the first “rebel-icons” in the “heroic lineage of dissent” that features so prominently in American cultural mythologies (Bercovitch Jeremiad xvii). The power of this narrative in the American imagination has far outlasted the Puritans themselves; its pervasiveness suggests another reason scholars have spent so much energy on the Puritans, but they were in fact only one of many groups with a stake in colonial ventures.

Beyond the Puritans’ cultural legacy, there are practical reasons studies of early American women writers have tended to focus on white women in the Northeast. New England boasted the first printing press in the U.S. colonies, set up in 1638 by Elizabeth Harris Glover at the newly established Harvard College (Hudak 9–19), as well as the first volume of poetry by any colonist, from Bradstreet, printed in London, in 1650.⁵ Demographically, there were more and wealthier white women in New England than in other mainland colonies, where most white women were servants, and they had higher rates of literacy than other colonial regions because Puritan women were generally encouraged to read the Bible, keep spiritual journals, and prepare testimonies as required for church membership (Innes 156) in what little leisure time they might have. On the other hand, even if Native American or African women had the education or leisure time for literary endeavors, their cultures had no alphabetic literacy. Most slave owners prevented enslaved Africans from learning to read or write because literacy was thought to precipitate rebellion, and while some Native American women were encouraged to attend missionary schools, many considered writing as the tool “through which their identity was most forcefully erased” (Wyss 123). Thus, whether by lack of opportunity, choice, or other circumstances, writing was not a primary form of cultural expression for Native American and African women in the seventeenth century.⁶

The kinds of texts scholars look at have also tended to limit the range of studied literature by women in the early colonial period to Puritans. In this volume we focus largely on circulated and printed texts written in English, but writing was not the primary form of cultural expression for most women in this period. While outside of Puritan communities only the wealthiest colonial women would have had the resources to produce written texts, Carla Mulford notes women of “all relevant races and classes” participated in oral and visual cultural practices, including storytelling, painting and home decor, and quilt- and clothing-making—all significant forms of “symbolic expression” potentially rendered invisible as cultural work in a discussion that only addresses writing (“Writing” 114). Although these cultural productions are outside the scope of this book, it’s important to acknowledge that the small number of written texts by women is no indication of the volume of women’s cultural expression; similarly, though we talk primarily about New England women writers because they wrote the majority of the available texts, we recognize they represent only a fragment of women’s experience in the early colonial period.

Although there were only a handful of women writing in the seventeenth century, between them they generated what would become the major modes of written expression for a much wider variety of colonial women over the next hundred years. Kirstin Wilcox identifies three broad and overlapping categories for early American women’s writing: “poetry, life-writing, and testimony” (56). In the early colonial period, these categories appeared as the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, the spiritual autobiographies and writings of Sarah Symmes Fiske, Bathsheba Bowers, and others, and the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson. These women engaged with literary, spiritual, and intellectual traditions in texts that reached beyond colonial boundaries to the wider world. Bradstreet’s poetry engaged her male contemporaries in debates about philosophy, medicine, history, and gender and provided frank, vulnerable explorations of the difficulties and joys of her domestic life in New England, but always made a case for feminine subjectivity. And while it might be difficult for twenty-first century readers to think of the spiritual autobiographies and religious tracts written by Fiske and Bowers as radical or feminist texts, their religious practice and “religious sensibilities” gave them a sense of specifically female worth and authority (Schweitzer “Body” 406). Finally, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative engages intimately with issues of Native–settler relations, gender, and faith, offering a critique of the patriarchal religious and social structure and more nuanced portraits of Native Americans than most of her peers. The work of these women writers is integral to the intellectual and cultural fabric of the seventeenth century, and their writing places them at the genesis of the tradition of dissent, protest, and reform that would shape the American cultural and political landscape.

Anne Bradstreet, poetry, and colonial life

Anne Dudley Bradstreet was born in 1612 in Northampton, England, to parents of considerable means and position. She was steeped in Puritanism from birth—taught to examine her thoughts and actions to detect sinfulness, repent, and present herself to God with a clean conscience (Works 4)—but her father also gave her a deep appreciation for learning and the arts. She read widely in poetry, history, philosophy, and science, as well as Puritan staple texts such as the Geneva Bible and Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes. Her father also taught her French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and encouraged her to write poetry. Bradstreet’s education was highly unusual for the women of her time, but it was consistent with earlier Elizabethan traditions that placed value on women’s intelligence.⁷

At age sixteen, Anne married Simon Bradstreet, and when she was eighteen, they emigrated to New England with a group of family and friends. They would relocate several times in their first fifteen years in New England; each relocation brought them closer to the shifting frontiers of English settlement and likely threatened Bradstreet’s health, already weakened by childhood illnesses, the difficulties of colonial life, and the births of six children between 1633 and 1645 (two more children would follow in 1648 and 1652). Simon was often called away from home by his political responsibilities, leaving Anne to care for their household and eight children. His success meant the Bradstreets were more well-off than many of their fellow colonists, and Anne had indentured English, Native American, and possibly enslaved African servants to help care for their large home and family.⁸ Undoubtedly, their comfortable financial situation and the help of servants helped make Anne’s poetry possible.

Bradstreet’s career as a poet is all the more unusual because of the closely intertwined religious and social structures that governed the behavior of New England Puritan women. Christianity in the Puritan colonies was a dissenting form of Protestantism that rejected the hierarchical structure of the Church of England in favor of the decentralized religious authority of the church congregation.⁹ They believed in a “radically unmediated” relationship between the individual and God (Fitzpatrick 6), in which God could make individual believers more like Christ as each individual carefully examined and repented of their sinful thoughts and actions. Like John Calvin, they believed God had separated people into the saved, or “elect,” and the damned, but New England Puritans took election even farther, believing they were responsible for establishing God’s true church to usher in the Second Coming of Christ (Bercovitch Puritan xiii). To be successful in their sacred task, they had to create a cohesive Christian community that valued the physical, social, and spiritual needs of the group over the needs of any individual (Fitzpatrick 4). If each individual was faithful to God and to the community, God would bless and protect them, but hardship and struggle were signs of God’s displeasure, requiring individual and community soul-searching.

Religious and social relationships in the English colonies were structured around a patriarchal social system under which male heads of household controlled labor, property, and sexual access to the women of their households, while women were expected to be quiet, respectful, and obedient to first fathers and then husbands. To this, Puritans added the expectation of Christian modesty, appropriately subdued dress, and chastity (K. Brown 32). In England and in the colonies, a woman was all but invisible outside the home, with no legal records or public presence unsanctioned by a husband or father—and she was supposed to be content to be that way. Women who stepped outside their prescribed roles were called into court to account for their unruliness and tried for scolding their husbands and neighbors, sexual immorality, including premarital sex and adultery, and witchcraft (K. Brown 30). In New England, women were prosecuted for membership in radical sects such as the Quakers, who encouraged women’s public speaking and interpretation of scripture—activities seen as a threat to both state and church authority (K. Brown 141–3). In this way, religious dissent was translated as a failure to adhere to proper gender roles; feminizing dissent as merely the work of uncontrollable women was a way of containing it and shoring up the existing order.

The consequences of unruly womanhood were well known to Bradstreet: her husband was one of the magistrates that evicted Anne Hutchinson from the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1638 for preaching and questioning Puritan doctrine, and Bradstreet’s own sister, Sarah Keayne, was subject to public censure and disinheritance after returning from a visit to England in 1647 with “a bad case of unfettered self-expression” (Schweitzer “Body” 406). Thus, it is not surprising that Bradstreet’s poetry is occupied with questions of gender and a woman’s proper place in the world, full of defensive maneuvers designed to protect her reputation as a modest Christian gentlewoman whose activities are sanctioned by the appropriate men, and to carefully circumvent the many restrictions on female speech.

Based on the span of her publication and revision history, we know poetry was a personal and intellectual practice that spanned Bradstreet’s adult life. Her first volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America, by a Gentlewoman of those Parts, was published in London in 1650. The subjects of the poems were largely historical and philosophical, addressing topics in medicine, philosophy, nature, ancient history, and contemporary British political and social events; they also included elegies to Queen Elizabeth, Sidney, and du Bartas. It sold well and was praised by Cotton Mather and other eminent Puritans (Martin Triptych 28–9). Bradstreet would continue to write new poetry and revise her earlier poems until her death in 1672, but her work was not published again in her lifetime. In 1678, a second edition of The Tenth Muse was published with revised versions of the poems from the first edition as well as several previously unpublished works, including epitaphs to her mother and father, personal poems to her husband and children, and the longer “Contemplations,” exploring questions of religious faith. Although Bradstreet never intended their publication, these personal poems are some of Bradstreet’s most frequently read today. While Bradstreet was regarded mainly as a historical curiosity for nearly three hundred years, in the late twentieth century feminist scholars brought attention to the artistry and literary merit of her work, and she is now widely acknowledged as a poet of great intellectual accomplishment and emotional force.

During her lifetime and since, many groups have wanted to claim Bradstreet as one of their own: a submissive Puritan daughter, wife, and mother, a symbol of the cultural sophistication of New England, and a covert feminist operative in a deeply patriarchal culture, among other things. But Bradstreet was more complex than any one label allows. She was invested in the social structures that dictated filial and wifely obedience, but her probing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Across the Atlantic: Women in British North America
• 2 Rhetoric and revolution: The women writers of the new republic
• 3 Sentimental poets and scribbling women: The writers of the early nineteenth century
• 4 From True Woman to New Woman: Redefining womanhood at the turn of the century
• 5 Clashes with modernity: Women writers between the world wars
• 6 Literatures of witness: Women writers after 1945
• Coda: The literatures of the twenty-first century
• Works cited
• Index