Gender, Genre, and Subjectivity in Anne Bradstreet's Early Elegies

Author(s): Timothy Sweet

Source: Early American Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1988), pp. 152-174
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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Early American Literature

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 GENDER, GENRE, AND
SUBJECTIVITY IN ANNE
BRADSTREET'S EARLY ELEGIES

TIMOTHY SWEET

George Mason University

Virginia Woolf
resulting from adescribes graphically
woman poet's unauthorized thein the
position illsixeffects on art and self
teenth century: "whatever she had written would have been twisted and
deformed, issuing from a strained and morbid imagination" (52). It is
tempting to propose such a psychologistic study of Anne Bradstreet,
since some of her early poems appear to be curiously "deformed," possi
bly for the kinds of reasons that Woolf suggests. Bradstreet's poetic ca
reer would, according to such a study, appear to be a clear case of "the
anxiety of authorship," as described by Gilbert and Gubar in The Mad
woman in the Attic. Suffering from the anxiety of authorship, a woman
writer feels overwhelmed by and excluded from the essentially male tra
dition of authorship and must, if she is to write at all, search for a female
precursor, a poetic mother who can authorize a rebellion against patriar
chal authority. Gilbert and Gubar in fact claim that since Bradstreet has
no female precursor,1 she is necessarily forced into a position of literary
subservience in which the only possible authorial stance is a "pose of
modesty [that] has its ill effects, both on the poet's self-definition and on
her art" (61-62).2 The male-dominated literary culture of the nineteenth
century allowed a woman to play only certain roles, which "drastically
conflict[ed] with her own sense of her self?that is, of her subjectivity,
her autonomy, her creativity" (48).
The issues raised by Gilbert and Gubar are important in the seven
teenth century as well (and have been central to Bradstreet criticism3),
but in order to investigate the ways in which Anne Bradstreet "experi
ences her own identity" (48) as a poet, a different model is needed?one
that is not derived from the Bloomian (i.e., post-Romantic and Freudian)
paradigm. To describe literary history as most importantly a series of
relations between "selves" (either as struggles with the father or as coop
erative and empowering relationships between mother and daughter4)

152

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 153

is to minimize the role of the literary formations that produce those

"selves." Closer attention to the ways in which a particular configuration
of the writing subject is produced within a particular discourse will re
veal that gender is always a function of genre, but that the relations
between subjectivity and discourse vary historically.
Bradstreet's early elegies on Queen Elizabeth, Sir Philip Sidney, and
Guillaume Du Bartas are especially interesting in this light because they
expose some of the ways in which genre constructs the gender attributed
to a poet. These poems thematize the power relations inherent in the
dominant discourse, which specifies the "author" as a masculine subject.
In this discourse, the poet announces "his" presence in a poem by means
of an invocation of a muse. The conventional relationship between poet
and muse is complex.5 But common to most variations in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries is the specification of gender: a feminine sub
ject conventionally does not occupy the position of "poet." Bradstreet's
early poetry deconstructs the authority of this convention, demonstrat
ing, in a way that the "major" poetry that produces a masculine subject
does not, how a "self" is constrained by having a "gender" attributed to
it.
The "deformations" that Woolf might have read in Bradstreet's poetry
present themselves as products of a "foolish, broken, blemish'd muse"
("The Prologue"), often appearing to have a specifically feminine cause
?for example, when a mother-poet addresses her work as the "ill
form'd offspring of my feeble brain" ("The Author to Her Book"). Gil
bert and Gubar treat such gestures as evidence that "female artists feel
trapped and sickened both by suffocating alternatives and by the culture
that created them" (64). But they may also be examined as necessary and
even empowering strategies that authorize Bradstreet to use a discourse
that uses "the feminine" only as an object. Read in this way, deforma
tions appear as strategies of re-formation, which make visible (even if
they cannot immediately alter) the discursive strategy that allows male
poets, writing in the dominant discourse, to produce a masculine sub
jectivity.
The question that needs to be asked is, "What is an author?" That is,
what textual strategies are deployed in a particular discourse in order to
produce the figure of an "author"? The question has been posed in a
general way by Michel Foucault, who identifies the emergence of the
author as "a privileged moment of individualization in the history of
ideas, knowledge, and literature" (115).6 Foucault's work also suggests,
however, that this "moment of individualization" will take different
forms in different discourses; thus, one must identify the particular set of
discursive strategies that creates "the author" within a particular dis

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 154 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

course. For a reading of Bradstreet, Foucault's question can be specifi

cally reformulated as follows: what discursive strategies were deployed
in the constitution of a "poet" in the seventeenth century? By what
means is subjectivity produced in the discourses in question?
Before addressing Bradstreet's poetry, I would like briefly to explore
these questions on a theoretical level. First, I will suggest the implications
of the questions for the project of literary history and will describe in
general terms the way in which discourse can be said to "produce subjec
tivity." I will then consider the problems posed for the "feminine sub
ject" by the discourse of seventeenth-century elegiac poetry?particularly
by the conventional invocation of the muse?in order to describe Brad
street's relation to this discourse.
At issue is the way we choose to write the literary history of seven
teenth-century America. Some combination of narratives of the "self," as
told by Woolf or Bloom or Gilbert and Gubar, will not provide an ade
quate history (even in the case of male poets) because, I will argue, the
definition of self assumed by these critics is precisely what needs to be
examined. It is not at all clear that the early Puritans suffered from the
anxiety of influence or authorship. Only after the age of Milton are such
paradigms appropriate. Bloom and Goldberg, among others, have ar
gued that Milton is the first author writing in English who is concerned
with establishing himself?that is, with writing himself into literary his
tory.7 Milton thus becomes the site of an important rupture in the En
glish literary tradition, an historical limit for the paradigm of influence
(and for the Freudian psychology to which the paradigm appeals). Ac
cording to Bloom, "Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the
flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic conscious
ness" (n).
To recover this time "before the flood" will be to rethink subjectivity
in terms of the historicity of the subject and the production of subjectiv
ity in discourse, along lines suggested by the work of Foucault. A subject,
as described in The Archaeology of Knowledge, may be incidentally the
origin or cause of a spoken or written sentence, but is fundamentally an
agent positioned by a statement that he or she produces, according to the
rules of the discourse in which that statement appears (see especially 92
96). The subject emerges by means of the production of discourse. A
statement produced by a subject appears not as a result or trace of
something else (such as "thought" or "emotion"), but rather as simply a
text that needs to be described, as it functions to situate a subject within
a particular discourse, and thus within the cultural "order of things"
supported by that discourse (120-23).
In initiating a Foucauldian "archaeology" of early American litera

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 155

ture, Clark reads the devotional poetry of Edward Taylor as a set of

"discursive gesture[s]":8
From this perspective, texts do not appear as expressions of faith,
doubt, rapture, or grief. . . . They are discursive strategies that consti
tute the individual as author or speaker. ... (124)

Clark argues that language in Taylor's poetry does not function referen
tially, to name a state of being that the poet feels and then articulates.
Rather, the devotional "speech act" situates the poet "within a network
of relations or order of experience that extends beyond language to in
clude . . . the state of grace itself" (127). In other words, language does
not function expressively ("forced out") in Taylor's discourse. And this
conception of language applies to other Puritan discourses as well, as
Delamotte's recent analysis of the rhetoric of John Cotton's sermons
suggests. Cotton taught his congregation that truth consisted not in mov
ing outside the text, from sign to referent, but rather in staying within
the tropes of scripture; thus, his sermons "made the rich symbolic lan
guage of the Bible available to [his congregation], in fact, as a 'mode of
experience'" (51). In the paradigm Foucault proposes, language is not
something that "emerges from" the subject. On the contrary, subjectivity
itself is produced by means of, and only within, discourse. Text is the
mode of experience; language produces a state of mind or spirit that
remains within language. Cotton's sermons and Taylor's poems operate
differently in some ways, but they share the crucial presupposition that
subjectivity is a product of discourse. A study of Bradstreet's text as a
"mode of experience" implies a critical re-vision: any claim that she was
working toward a poetry of "expression"9 will need to be reassessed as
potentially anachronistic.
In Renaissance elegiac discourse, the subjectivity of the poet is pro
duced?the poet enters the poem?as two oppositional relations are set
up, one between the poet and the object of the elegy and another between
poet and muse. In the poetry of this kind that Bradstreet knew,10 "the
feminine" could only be constructed in the sites of muse and object
(although the "object" could also be masculine), but these sites cannot
be occupied by the speaking subject. Subjectivity is reserved for the poet.
From within a theory of the subject that argues for the discursive nature
of subjectivity, it may at first be tempting to see the existence of the muse
as evidence that the subject of poetry is split and to claim that subjectiv
ity is in fact produced in the two distinct sites of poet and muse. It may
seem that elegiac discourse, and epic discourse as well, attributes subjec
tivity to the muses. The gods and demigods that inhabit this discourse
appear to have minds that can grieve. In Spenser's elegy on Sir Philip

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 156 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

Sidney, "Astrophel" (a poem cited in Bradstreet's elegy on Sidney), as in

many other elegies, the demigods are called on to furnish the poet with a
voice:

Come forth ye Nymphs come forth, forsake your watry

bowres,
Forsake your mossy caues, and help me to lament. (347)

But the subjectivity of the muses is feigned in a particularly revealing

way.11 To name a muse or nymph is to cite a reification of femininity in
discourse. The figure of the muse is a repository of certain "ideal" femi
nine traits: beauty, grace, pity, harmony with nature, and so on. But
these traits are evidence of the way that the discourse specifies gender.
The attributes of gender are not "natural," but are rather the result of
the cultural transformation of sex (i.e., biological material) into gender.
This transformation involves the reification or objectification of "the
feminine" and its representation in discourse in the figure of the muse.
Although the muse inspires, she is finally powerless. The poet often
rails against the pagan deities because they have failed to protect the
shepherd. In Milton's "Lycidas," for example, the swain comes to realize
that not even "the muse herself that Orpheus bore" could have pre
vented the death of Lycidas. A recent reading of "Lycidas" explores the
dynamics of power surrounding Milton's muse:

The image of the feminine as represented in the Muse implies infinite

love without infinite power. The feminine is divine but not omnipo
tent, a source of security which is found finally vulnerable despite be
ing the origin of Orpheus' lyrical enchantment of the natural world.
(Davies 188)

The gesture of invocation, a first step in the production of the subjectiv

ity of the poet, does not constitute the muse as a subject, but instead
defines an object. The muse appears as a feminine "presence" that is not
really a presence but is rather a site where "the feminine" is displayed.
The subject of the discourse is specified by the act of invocation, which
establishes the separation of poet-subject from muse-object and thus
reifies "the feminine."
That the muse is a reification of femininity becomes most apparent,
perhaps, when the figure of the muse and the object of the poem collapse
into one another, as in parts of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella (which
Bradstreet had read critically, according to the reference in her elegy on
Sidney). In this variation on the convention, the poet turns away or is
turned away from Parnassus, but finds that if

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 157

You seeke to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame,

Stella behold, and then begin to endite, (sonnet 15, 172)

The ease with which Stella can substitute for the muse is wholly con
ventional but significant nonetheless because it confirms the status of
woman as object. The discourse displays evidence of the almost total
conflation of sex and gender. Perhaps Stella has a voice, although we do
not hear it; we know she has a body, but it is the "body" of a muse (just
as the conceptual object "Fame" is represented as the body of a woman).
"My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella's kisse" (sonnet 74, 204); thus
the poet identifies the object of his desire with his muse. (The prescrip
tion operates similarly in Spenser's Amoretti, where in the first sonnet
the poet appeals to "Helicon, whence she [the poet's beloved] derived
is.") The muse may withhold poetic inspiration; in a similar way, the
objectified woman may withhold sexual favors?inconstancy being a
perhaps less "ideal," but no less reified aspect of "the feminine." In this
discourse, the subjectivity of the poet is produced through discursive
representations of the acts of perceiving, identifying, and desiring the
object. A poet comes into existence by deploying discursive strategies
that define and control an "other."
A theory of the subject such as I have been elaborating surfaces the
difficulties that Anne Bradstreet faces in negotiating the production of
subjectivity in the discourses of public poetry available to her. The three
public elegies are particularly interesting because they necessarily engage
with the problematic of "the muse"?although not in the same way as
Sidney's love sonnets?and thus thematize the reification of gender in a
way that poems of similar genres written by men do not. Bradstreet thus
demonstrates how she and her readers are positioned with respect to
certain discourses of poetry. These poems enable her readers to "read"
the discourse itself. A reader of Bradstreet discovers the potentially sub
versive function of a minor poetry that exposes the gender-based power
relations of the major poetry.1* In each of the three early public elegies,
the figure of the poet?and thus the production of poetry?is dissociated
from the convention of the muses in some way. Rather than ignoring the
convention altogether (they are hardly original in this sense), these po
ems cite the convention in order to display how it participates in the
reification of gender. Thus, they expose certain effects of power pro
duced by the major poetry of the seventeenth century, which refuses to
acknowledge the politics behind its assumption that the writing subject is
necessarily masculine.
Facing a genre that writes the feminine only as object, Bradstreet exer
cises certain discursive strategies that may be called "strategies of re

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158 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

formation": local modifications of a discourse that permit the formation

of the experience of subjectivity in a previously unproductive discourse
and that expose, momentarily, the power relations inherent in that dis
course. These strategies are necessary because a woman, bound by the
gender system, will experience de-subjectification within discourse that
clearly identifies "the subject" with masculinity. Bradstreet wants to
write, but not from within the gender system that proscribes feminine
subjectivity. In this sense she is trying to displace the category of writing
subject, in moves that look much like those of classic deconstruction.
These moves expose the political consequences of a discursive construct,
in this case the parallel hierarchical oppositions of masculine/feminine
and subject/object.13
The problematic of subjectivity and gender is initially displayed in the
elegy on Sidney, the earliest of the three public elegies. As Anne Stanford
points out, the model for this poem was Joshua Sylvester's elegy on
Sidney ("Anne Bradstreet's Portrait of Sidney" 97). But Bradstreet's elegy
is most interesting for the ways in which it deviates from the conven
tional structure of invocation, classical tribute, Christian meditation,
and consolation, which Sylvester had so closely followed (2: 282-84).
Bradstreet seems to refuse the prescribed gesture of invocation by elevat
ing Sidney above the muses, for example:

Thy Logick from Euterpe won the Crown,

More worth was thine, then Clio could set down. (149)

But the muses in turn refuse such treatment and assert their authority
near the end of the poem. At this point the poem reflects on the produc
tion of poetic discourse by feigning an interruption in its own produc
tion. The "I" of the poem "muses" on the possibility of being fully
constituted as a subject of this discourse?first with reference to the
object created by the discourse (Sidney the poet):

Fain would I show, how thou fame's path didst tread,

But now into such Lab'rinths am I led
With endless turnes, the way I find not out,
For to persist, my muse is more in doubt:
Calls me ambitious fool that durst aspire,
Enough for me to look, and so admire. (151)
The object of the poem is metonymically the very genre in which subjec
tivity is being produced: Sidney is the author of poems that represent the
discursive formation. Following Sidney along fame's path?that is, trac
ing his appearance as political and poetic subject ("Armes, and Arts")?
the poet loses her place in the maze of discourse. There is no clear

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 159

position for the subject to occupy. At such a juncture, a masculine poet

would receive the aid of a muse, which would restore him to a produc
tive position, enabling him to finish the poem. Bradstreet's muse, how
ever, dictates silence. As a site of the reification of the feminine in dis
course, the muse prescribes the position of the feminine (non)subject: do
not produce discourse, for to do so would be to produce your own
subjectivity. This much could perhaps be written off as a conventional
gesture of humility which, in the elegy, is just one more means by which
the poet is constituted?a mere diversion14 (which would raise the ques
tion of what kind of subjectivity is produced by a gesture of self-depreca
tion). But the interruption continues and becomes the focus of the poem;
thus, while discourse is still being produced, gestures of hyperbolic praise
required by the genre disappear. The poem is approaching the bound
aries of the discourse.
The discourse of Sidney seems at this point foreign to the poet, whose
pen?the instrument of literary production?writes unguided in an im
age of production without subjectivity:

Goodwill, did make my head-long pen to run,

Like unwise Phaeton his ill guided sonne,

So proudly foolish I, with Phaeton strive,

Fame's flaming chariot for to drive. (151)

When Sidney had confronted the issue of fame in Astrophel and Stella,
he had simply placed himself in a strong alignment with classical dis
course by objectifying Stella in the body of a muse. But in Bradstreet's
poem classical allusions, which evoke the world of the muses, demon
strate the way subjectivity conventionally is constituted only as mascu
line. A representation of the muses cannot coexist with a subject identi
fied as feminine. The muses themselves are puzzled (for even if they are
favorably disposed toward female poets, a reader will recall that they had
seen very few since Sappho,15 and thus are probably uncertain about
their relations with Bradstreet). They deny the poet's subjectivity by tak
ing away the instrument used in the production of discourse:

That this contempt it did the more perplex,

In being done by one of their own Sex;
They took from me the scribbling pen I had,
I to be eas'd of such a task was glad.
For to revenge his wrong, themselves ingage
And drave me from Parnassus in a rage. (152)

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i6o Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988
The muses?the reification of the feminine in this discursive formation?
will not permit a feminine subject to play the role of poet (with all
the privileges that entails, such as access to the inspiring waters of Hip
pocrene).
But the muses' prohibition becomes a demonstration of the reification
of gender, once it is clear that a poetic subject has been produced, in spite
of the discursive prohibitions voiced by the muses. It is simply not a
subject to which the attributes of a gender clearly apply. Or, more pre
cisely, it is a subject caught up in a confusion over sex and gender. A
muse literally "has" a gender (at least in the way that I am using the
term)?in fact it has nothing else, being only a representation of objecti
fied femininity in discourse. But a muse cannot have a sex, because it is
not a biological being (so Milton mused about the angels). Here is the
root of the problem: because sex and gender are represented on the same
level in the figure of the muse, the two are conflated. The converse is true
as well: sex and gender are conflated also when a masculine poet pro
duces himself as a subject in relation to a muse. When Bradstreet pro
duces herself (it is difficult to escape the pronoun system) as a subject of
such a discourse, the resulting poem tropes the conflation of sex and
gender that the masculine poetics refuses to voice.
The discourse is re-formed, but only through a self-reflexive strategy
that takes the poem away from its object and into an exploration of the
discourse itself and its pre-scription of subjectivity. Some critics have
found this excursion to be artistically unfortunate; thus it is with a sigh
of relief that they report Bradstreet's revisions for the posthumous 1678
edition, which removed (among other things) the lines about Phaeton
and the chariot.16 The force of the poem remains nevertheless. In the
concluding lines, the muses still determine the production of subjectivity
by controlling the production of discourse:17

Errata through their leave threw me my pen,

For to conclude my poem two lines they daigne
Which writ, she bad return't to them again. (152)

"Femininity" is represented in the poem as being the worst enemy of a

woman poet; the convention of the muses is demonstrated to be the
means by which the discourse controls access to itself. "Errata" occu
pies an interesting position here, for the name is clearly a corruption
of "Erato," the muse of erotic poetry, who inspired (among others) As
trophel and Stella. Thus the name simultaneously identifies a discourse
and distances the present production from that discourse, while invali
dating the convention (what authority can the muse of error have?).
"Errata" also signifies the fly-leaf on which printer's mistakes are cor

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies i6i

rected, thus indicating that Bradstreet, even when she revised the poem
realized that the possibility of truly error-free production lies somewhere
outside the literary object as it is normally constructed. If "Errata"
Bradstreet's muse, the resulting literary production is on the margins
the dominant discourse?but is also a correction of it. The revised po
is not as extravagant as the original, yet it maintains the original strategy
of representing an interruption in the production of discourse. A ne
couplet appears, summarizing the position of the subject with respect
the discourse:

Then wonder not if I no better sped,

Since I the muses thus have injured. (493)

To injure the muse, in this context, is to deconstruct the reification of the

feminine as it is represented discursively in the figure of the muse.
The elegy on Du Bartas examines the effects of two potential disto
tions of the conventional dyad of (masculine) poet and (feminine) mu
The subject first tries out the position of muse herself and then creat
her own muse, a male child. This poem does not display the form
"incoherence" of the elegy on Sidney, because in some sense there is le
at stake. Unlike Sidney, the figure of Du Bartas does not represent th
discursive formation in which subjectivity is being produced. Bradstr
knew Du Bartas as the author of a Christian epic rather than as a wri
of elegies. His Devine Weekes and Workes (Sylvester 1: 17-262) in fac
places God in the position of muse. Bradstreet does not confront th
implications of such a strategy, but instead excludes herself from t
discourse of Du Bartas with the lines

Thy Sacred works are not for imitation,

But monuments for future admiration; (154)

thus maintaining the generic structure of her elegy more or less inta
But of course this does not eliminate from elegiac discourse the probl
of the muse. Nor does it eliminate the general question of the deplo
ment of gender-based power in discourse. As a reading subject, the po
finds herself subjugated by Du Bartas' epic, which has the power
"Lead[] millions chained by eyes, by ears, by tongues" (154). The effe
of power operated by discourse are represented early in the poem?i
another image of physical domination:

My ravisht eyes, and heart, with faltering tongue,

In humble wise have vow'd their service long. (152-53)

Du Bartas' poetry is clearly aligned with male power, a power that see
ingly cannot be deployed by a feminine subject.

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i6z Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

Given these power relations, Bradstreet first explores the prescribed

site of the appearance of the feminine (the muse), by displaying her
subjugation as reading subject and consequently representing herself as
muse-object:
My dazled sight of late, review'd thy lines,
Where Art, and more then Art in Nature shines;
Reflection from their beaming altitude,
Did thaw my frozen hearts ingratitude;
Which Rayes, darting upon some richer ground,
Had caused flowers and fruits, soone to abound;
But barren I, my Daysey here doe bring,
A homely flower in this my latter spring. (153)

The transformation from reading subject to writing subject cannot be

effected without going through the detour of the muse?a strategy that
might function as an affirmation of male discursive power, but for the
refusal of the subject to be objectified. The potential intercourse between
Du Bartas and this muse is shown to be unproductive; no "flowers and
fruits" of poetry will come from such a relation. A subject cannot occupy
the position of the object-muse, so a gesture of humility, and a represen
tation of the sterility of the conventionally fertile relation between poet
and muse, become strategies by means of which subjectivity is produced
in the site of poet (where gender is normally specified, but by conven
tions that?as we have seen in the elegy on Sidney?are open to local
modification).
But such a constitution of the subject would simply return the poet to
the problematic conventional relation between poet and muse, if not for
the striking re-formation that appears next:

My Muse unto a Childe, I fitly may compare,

Who sees the riches of some famous Fay re;
He feeds his eyes, but understanding lacks,
To comprehend the worth of all those knacks. (153)

Bradstreet deconstructs the convention by reducing her muse to the level

that the muses had previously prescribed for her in the elegy on Sidney.
The child is permitted to look, but not to speak; thus he inhibits the
production of discourse:

[He] findes too soone his want of Eloquence,

The silly Pratler speaks no word of sence;
And seeing utterance fayle his great desires,
Sits down in silence, deeply he admires. (153)

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 163
Several strategies are being deployed in this substitution of muses. First,
by changing the gender of the muse but at the same time identifying him
as a prattling child, Bradstreet has preserved and yet reversed the con
ventional opposition of genders in the poet/muse dyad while demonstrat
ing the absurdity of the convention. Readers could hardly admit that
this muse dwells on Parnassus. Second, where normally the poet gains a
voice through a represented relation with the muse-object, here voice
lessness?the inability to produce subjectivity through discourse?is lo
cated specifically in the muse, thus freeing the site of "poet" for
unconstrained, unaided production (the elegy continues for fifty lines
plus an epitaph). Finally, that the muse is a child adds some tension to
the assumption that the fertility of the intercourse between poet and
muse depends on the possibility of a sexual relationship between poet
and muse. Bradstreet had played on the assumption earlier in the poem,
but it becomes even clearer here that both the gender and the sexuality of
the muse are always only represented, never "natural." The reification of
gender is neither affirmed nor denied in this citation of the convention;
instead, it is exposed and deconstructed through a reversal that gives
voice to the voiceless gender.
The elegy on Queen Elizabeth involves a different sort of reversal:
conventions of Sidney and Spenser are written with a feminine inflection.
In the opening invocation of The Faerie Queene, Spenser had placed
Elizabeth in the position of muse. Before that, Sidney had pursued a
logical consequence of the objectification of the feminine by conflating
the object of the poem with the muse. If there is a muse in Bradstreet's
poem, it can only be Elizabeth because the poet immediately dissociates
herself from the conventional muses:

Her personall perfections, who would tell,

Must dip his pen i'th' Heliconian Well;
Which I may not, my pride doth but aspire
To read what others write, and then admire. (157)

The dissociation is given added force by the opposition of the "I" of the
poem to the masculine pronoun "his" (the unmarked gender in this
discourse). Femininity appears to be inscribed in all three possible posi
tions: poet, muse, and object.
But if the muses always hover about elegiac discourse, in this poem
Elizabeth is never overtly identified as a muse. Although she could be
said to inspire the poem as object, she seems not to be an example of
objectified femininity. Rather, she is represented as a speaking subject
who brings into the poem new, reconstructed discursive relations. The
couplet "But can you Doctors now this point dispute,/She's argument

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 i?4 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

enough to make you mute" (156) metaphorically explores a discourse in

which a feminine subjectivity has not only been successfully constituted
but is in fact fully present. By virtue of her unusual position of power,
Elizabeth can be represented as discourse in the act of being produced, in
the form of a self-sufficient argument.
Such a discourse remains elusive, however, and there is a sense in
which, since Elizabeth's death, the possibilities have become more re
stricted:

Let such, as say our sex is void of reason

Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason. (157)

When occupied by a feminine subject, the position of the monarch as a

locus of power had temporarily altered the relations between juridical
and quotidian discourses. Thus any argument that women are "void of
reason" was placed not only in the discourse of gossip ("slander"), but
also in a more powerful juridical discourse. But, as Walker points out,

the reign of Elizabeth, which opened up opportunities for women in

both education and publishing, was a mere moment in history. . . .
[A]fter the Queen's death, there was an ominous murmur around and
about, and the distinct sound of doors closing once again in the faces
of hopeful women. (255)
With the death of Elizabeth, the locus of power transferred to James I,
a masculine subject, and what was once inappropriate to juridical dis
course became inappropriate only to the discourse of gossip, where
power is more widely dispersed. In "social" discourse generally, proscrip
tions against this sort of slander compete with the gender system which
constructs a "woman" who is, popularly, "void of reason"?an argu
ment to which Elizabeth can no longer provide a living counter-example.
This sense of nostalgia for the authorizing power of a female monarch
pervades the poem, culminating in a final strategy in which Bradstreet
enlists millennialist theology in a re-formation of Arthurian romance:

No more shall rise or set such glorious Sun

Untill the heavens great revolution:
If then new things, their old form must retain,
Eliza shall rule Albian once again. (158)
Elizabeth, and all the power she makes possible, replaces Arthur as the
once and future monarch of England. But nostalgia is usually for a time
that never was, so we need to ask what difference Elizabeth finally made.
As the embodiment of the law, she served as a demonstration that the
feminine gender was not "naturally" excluded from positions of power.

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 165
But she did not abolish the reification of gender, and thus she always
spoke?in her own poetry, for example?partly from within the place
left open to her by the gender system. The source of her power was, after
all, the patriarchal theocratic system. Bradstreet may have found the
example of Elizabeth empowering?a figure waiting to be read as a liv
ing deconstruction of the gender system?but she could not after all
occupy Elizabeth's privileged position. A text prescribing the education
of women shows that in 1620, things remained much as they had always
been: ". . . instead of reading Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia let them read
the grounds of huswifery. I like not a female po?tesse at any hand"
(Thomas Powell, Art of Thriving, quoted in Walker 255-56).
WTien the figure of the poet is aligned by gender with the power of
Elizabeth, the production of subjectivity in poetic discourse is not prob
lematic for Bradstreet. There are no difficulties with the reified feminin
ity represented by the muses. It might be said that Bradstreet does tempo
rarily identify a female precursor in Elizabeth, who authorizes a rebellion
against patriarchal authority, according to the model proposed by Gil
bert and Gubar. Still, it does not seem to be a question of "anxiety," but
rather, of the discursive determinants of subjectivity. To recover evidence
of anxiety?or any other raw emotion?from these poems would require
a way to separate a component of personal expression from the hyper
bole which is in fact a constitutive feature of the discourse of the public
elegy. What can be recovered instead are the ways in which Bradstreet
manipulates the subject-object relation to expose the way the gender
system controls the written subject.
Bradstreet's early elegies show that in seventeenth-century elegiac po
etry, a feminine subjectivity cannot be said to appear, or if it does it
"appears" only as an "absence." The feminine is only objectified, in the
figure of the object-muse. This does not necessarily imply that a woman
can be only a non-subject (witness the exceptional case of Elizabeth), but
it does raise an important question for any Foucauldian theory: if there is
only discourse, how can there be change? Specifically, how can a "femi
nine" subjectivity appear in a discourse that makes no provision for it?18
One answer, for Bradstreet, is that poetic discourse speaks only of the
writing subject, the author-poet?and yet there are also reading subjects,
whose genders are culturally defined not only by elegiac poetry, but by
other (religious and quotidian) discourses where the "feminine subject"
has a place (e.g., Puritans of either sex with sufficient education wrote
devotional poems and prose meditations). But more important for Brad
street the poet is the realization that if femininity is reified in poetic (or
any other) discourse, so is masculinity. In this sense, "the poet" is also an
object, constructed by the discourse that "he" produces. It is not that

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166 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

Bradstreet attempts to produce a specifically feminine subjectivity in po

etic discourse. Rather, she shows how subjectivity can be detached from
gender, and how even the male poet is always objectified even as "he"
produces "his" own subjectivity. She deconstructs the gender system by
exposing how it is constructed and how the discourse has perpetuated
itself by maintaining a system in which masculine gender is ordinarily a
constitutive component of subjectivity. The three elegies, then, can be
read as immanent critiques of the gender system as it (dis)appears in
poetry. They acknowledge the power of, and seem to participate in, the
gender system?and yet they play feminine off of masculine in the sites of
poet and muse, demonstrating that while gender is often restrictive for
subjects categorized as "feminine," it is only a contingent feature of
subjectivity.
Bradstreet's contemporary readers did not recognize the extent of her
demystificatory enterprise (perhaps she was not quite aware of her own
accomplishments in this vein), or were not, in any case, willing to ac
knowledge it. One of the more telling signs of the position of "the femi
nine" in the public poetry of the time is the very title of The Tenth Muse.
The great honor done Bradstreet by John Woodbridge (who presumably
chose the title when he arranged for publication) can be seen from our
perspective as a simple adherence to the rules of a discourse that had not
yet permitted a feminine subject to occupy the position of poet. If, on the
basis of the reading proposed here, the title seems ironic, it probably did
not appear so at the time, when women could be represented only as
muses and as objects?products of discourse who yet could not produce
discourse. Thus the ability of women to produce their own subjectivity in
public poetry was officially denied, and Bradstreet was assigned to the
category of puzzling, but ultimately harmless anomaly, in accordance
with Woodbridge 's preface:

I doubt not but the Reader will quickly find more then I can say, and
that the worst effect of his reading will be his unbelief, which will
make him question, whether it be a womans Work, and aske, Is it
possible? (Bradstreet 526)

Some of the commendatory verses that preface the volume share this
rhetoric of puzzlement, while one sarcastically dismissive poem places
female poets completely outside the domain of useful production: "But
stay a while, they seldome rise till ten a clock" (Bradstreet 529). Most of
these poems proclaim the worth of the volume while simultaneously
pointing out how odd it is that a woman could have produced it. And
most also cite the convention of the muses, for example:

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 167
And if the Nine vouchsafe the tenth a place,
I think they rightly may yeeld you that grace. (528)

Even though such references may well have been inspired by the title of
the volume, they identify the existing discursive practice that collapses
sex into the gender: there is no place on earth for a poet who is a
woman, so the figure of the (female) poet must be placed in the mythical
realm. If these poems can be taken as evidence of the early reception of
the volume, it is clear that most of Bradstreet's readers did not recognize
the nature of her critique.
Of all the poetry Bradstreet wrote after the appearance of The Tenth
Muse, only "The Author to Her Book" seems to be concerned explicitly
with the gender of the poetic subject?not because the discourses of
public poetry no longer required re-formation in order to permit the
female poet the ability to produce her own subjectivity, but rather (as I
will argue below) because after The Tenth Muse, Bradstreet wrote pri
marily in other, less problematic discourses. In this light "The Author to
Her Book" can be read as a summation of the project of re-formation in
the early poetry, and also, perhaps, as a comment on the difficulty of the
project. The position of this poem in public discourse is clear because it
is so closely aligned with Spenser's "To His Booke." Spenser represents
his poet as the metaphorical father of his poetry:

Goe little booke: thy selfe present

As child whose parent is unkent

But if that any aske thy name,

Say thou wert base begot with blame. (2)
Bradstreet's "The Author to Her Book" also represents the poet as par
ent and reiterates Spenser's concern with genealogy, but most of her
poem is devoted to images of deformation. Such images, absent from
Spenser's poem, remind the reader of how the elegies in The Tenth Muse
modified the discourse they inherited:

Thou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain

... in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg). (177)
But at the same time this poem suggests that no amount of revision could
re-form The Tenth Muse; and while the poet places the blame on herself,
we have seen that it is the discourse itself that would prohibit a fully
successful re-formation:

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i68 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988
. . . affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I wash'd thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
I stretcht thy joynts to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobling than is meet.
(178, emphasis added)

Of all Bradstreet's poems, "The Author to Her Book" is the most self
reflexively concerned with deformation and re-formation; and like other
apparently "deformed" poems, it displays the gender-specific relations
of subject to discourse such that we can "read" those relations not only
in the poem itself, but also in the discourse that determines it. While
Spenser's poem produces a masculine subject?a "shepheards swain"?
who has engendered a book of poetry (upon the muse, according to the
present but unthematized convention), Bradstreet's poem represents the
poet as a mother who gives birth. Thus the conventional sexual relation
ship between poet and muse is re-formed in a way that seems to continue
the deconstructive project of the public elegies: "If for thy Father askt,
say, thou hadst none" (178). Spenser's poem is the product of a father
poet ("unkent," but very much an active presence) and a mother muse
(not represented, but implied by the discourse). Since the discourse
makes no provision for a reversal of that relationship, Bradstreet's
mother-poet must be represented explicitly as sole progenitor. There can
be no denying that the poet is represented as having a sex. As such, she
cannot escape the requirements of the gender assigned to the mother: she
has sole care of her child-poem, fashions for it a suit of homespun cloth,
and is generally represented as fulfilling her domestic role. This poem
displays the problem but despairs of a solution and indicates the future
direction of Bradstreet's poetry.
Most of her later poems are written from within a discourse of domes
ticity and display an acceptance of the "woman's place." They have been
valued highly (certainly more highly than the early elegies) by feminist
and traditional critics alike. According to Adrienne Rich's assessment in
1966, only certain poems written after the publication of The Tenth
Muse "rescue Anne Bradstreet from the Women's Archives and place her
conclusively in literature ...[:] poems in response to the simple events in
a woman's life" ("The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet" 29). But Rich later
recanted, saying that her earlier reading had privileged a "masculine
view of history and literature" (preface to "Tensions" 21). And it is true
that the marriage poems and others such as the verses on the burning of

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 169
her house have been widely anthologized and discussed?generally from
a patriarchal perspective on the canon. While these poems are good of
their kind, they are comfortable and unproblematic in terms of their
acceptance of the gender system (one might say "readable," as Barthes
uses the term in SIZ).
Perhaps a discovery of the power of discourse to resist change (to resist
the exercise of certain kinds of power) was Bradstreet's reason for aban
doning the genre of the public elegy. In any case, with the exception of
"The Author to Her Book," all of Bradstreet's later poems are written
within discourses in which the constitution of a feminine subjectivity is
unproblematic. The necessity of a woman to produce herself as the sub
ject of everyday social discourse was perhaps an overwhelming con
straint for Bradstreet as her domestic duties gained stronger influence
over her literary ambition; an accurate description of the situation might
be White's chapter title, "Family Life and Literary Development" (Anne
Bradstreet 156-98). Where the early elegies demonstrate that subjectiv
ity could in some cases be detached from the gender assigned to the poet,
the domestic poems merely reproduce the ideology of social discourse,
which reifies gender.
In the later elegies and epitaphs, written on members of her family
rather than on public figures, the writing subject is produced within a
social discourse that determines the relations between subject and object:
daughter and father, grandmother and grandchild, etc. Most of these
elegies were not intended for publication, and here in particular the
position of the writing subject is never an issue, since the title of each
poem identifies the figure of the poet as a relative in mourning. The
classically inspired discourse of public poetry is erased in favor of a
purely Christian system that has no place for such creatures as muses.
In all the later domestic poems (a genre readily separable from the
private elegies, although determined ultimately by similar discursive
practices), the constitution of a feminine subject is legitimated by social
norms. WTiile these domestic poems occasionally incorporate devices
from a discourse we would now identify as "metaphysical poetry" (e.g.,
the extended pun on "hart" and "deere" in one of the "Letter[s] to her
Husband"), in general these poems remain within the bounds of a dis
course of domesticity (and outside classical discourse). Here the position
of the feminine subject is unproblematic because wholly specified. The
represented figure of the poet is absent from these poems, because the
writing subject is constructed by the roles of wife, mother, and home
maker, rather than by the role of poet. The position of "poet" in the
public sense is not available in this discourse (a fact of which Bradstreet

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 170 Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

was probably aware, since she never intended any of the domestic poems
to be published as Poetry19). The positions of wife and mother, on the
other hand, existed ready-made.
Different discourses specify different ways of reading and different
positions for the critic as reading subject. To read the early public poems
in the same terms as the later private ones is to see failure (e.g., lack of
"genuine expression") where there was real achievement. The produc
tion of subjectivity could be accomplished in the early poetry only by
means of strategies that appear ungainly when judged by the inapplica
ble standard of the domestic poetry. When the constitution of a feminine
subject is unproblematic, as in Bradstreet's domestic poetry, no strain is
put on the dominant discursive conventions. Thus the domestic poetry
does not expose the gender-based power relations of the discourse that
determines it; rather, it merely reproduces the existing ideology (the gen
der system), without questioning the "order of things" created and sup
ported by discourse. Since these later poems display no traces of any
problematic attempts to re-form a discursive practice, it has been too
easy to apply to Bradstreet's career a romantic fiction of a struggle for
and progress toward a "personal voice." The story I have proposed may
make it look as if instead she surrendered or retreated into less hostile
terrain.

NOTES

i. As Walker phrases it, "we are in the presence of a genealogical oddi

we have none" (254).
2. Even so, several critics have found a strain of rebellion in the early p
Walker, White ("The Tenth Muse?A Tercentenary Appraisal" 63), Stanfo
street: Dogmatist and Rebel" 76-80), and Martin (19, 26-29). All these
early poetry as a sign of personal (as opposed to literary) rebellion. Thus W
the violence represented in the "Four Monarchies" is a reaction to the c
narrow Puritan code of life (Anne Bradstreet 237-38); while Martin s
relentlessness with which Bradstreet produced couplet after couplet of the
an attempt to divert her rage against society to some useful purpose (27).
3. In addition to White ("Tercentenary Appraisal") and Martin, see R
4. Bloom provides the clearest paradigm of "struggle," while Erkkila
Bloom and Gilbert and Gubar, proposing that in returning to their poetic
poets experience a release from anxiety. However, it is not clear how E
could apply to Bradstreet, who has no mother-poet. Morison, a sort
Bradstreet criticism, characterizes Bradstreet's career as a struggle aga
(331).
5. For an interesting but brief survey that concentrates on the epic tradition, from
Homer through the eighteenth-century mock-heroic, see Schindler (1-9). I have used the

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 171

masculine pronoun to refer to "the poet" here because the discourse in question pre-scribes
the gender of the poet, by means of the poet/muse dyad. For a more complete discussion of
this point, see note 15 below.
6. Foucault's question needs to be clarified, because in part it addresses the recent
theoretical debate about the status of the general category of "author." According to some
participants in this debate, there never was an "author" (Foucault cites Derrida's Of
Grammatology and Barthes's "The Death of the Author")?not even during the height of
bourgeois individualism in the nineteenth century?and literary study needs a new method
ology that takes account of this fact. I would like provisionally to reserve the category of
"author" as a useful one and to concentrate on the ways in which what counts as an author
varies historically.
7. Bloom implicitly argues this throughout The Anxiety of Influence, while Goldberg
claims it explicitly (2). The consequence of such an argument, as Quilligan points out, is
that it makes Milton into the first Romantic, rather than the last Renaissance poet (22-23).
Self-consciousness, in the sense relevant to the present argument, is not inscribed in Renais
sance discourses (in English) as it is in Romantic discourses.
8. Clark refers to The Order of Things, but the more political emphasis of the reading I
offer requires a slight shift of the theoretical frame, from the ontological to the ethical.
Thus, The Archaeology of Knowledge proves to be the most useful of Foucault's texts.
9. Both feminist and traditional critics have thus characterized her poetic career. Requa
describes a shift from a stilted and imitative public voice to a more humble and "genuine"
private voice; Rich finds in the later domestic poetry a voice that is "direct and touching"
("The Tensions of Anne Bradstreet" 31); and Laughlin argues that Bradstreet progressed
from a poet of abstractions to a "romantic lyricist" (1). White surveys the criticism that
views Bradstreet's "Contemplations" as a pr?figuration of Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Shelley, and Keats (Anne Bradstreet 336-37). Perhaps these critics (more numerous than
one might suspect, including some who wrote after White's biography appeared) want to
see Romantic tendencies in this poem in order to validate the assumption that Bradstreet
was moving from an inexpressive, imitative style and toward a personal, expressive style,
which she finally achieved in the later poems. I will argue on the contrary that the early
poems succeed because they are imitative in very nearly the sense that Requa identifies: the
project of the early poetry is to expose and locally modify existing discourses, rather than
to create original expressions of emotion.
10. Particularly relevant here is her familiarity with texts of Sidney, Spenser, Michael
Drayton, and Joshua Sylvester (White, Anne Bradstreet 61-70, 145-48). While the con
vention of the muse is a constitutive feature of the elegy in the Renaissance, the most
important examples for Bradstreet are found in Spenser and Sidney, because we have solid
evidence that she read these poets closely.
11. The gesture of invocation may function as an alibi that enables the poet to claim
control over the object of the poem without taking full responsibility. Such a function
would no doubt derive from the primitive traditions of invocation as magic identified by
Schindler (6-8).
12. In a recently translated book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari argue for such a
political definition of "minor literature." Writers who "live in a language that is not their
own" (19) must engage in a process of deterritorialization in which every statement neces
sarily has political significance. Bradstreet's position, as a woman attempting to use a
discourse that has no use for her, is in many respects analogous to Kafka's position as a
Jew, living in Prague, writing in the authorized literary language of German. Both Brad
street and Kafka are caught in a political double-bind that "turns their literature into
something impossible?the impossibility of not writing [and] ... the impossibility of writ

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172. Early American Literature, Volume 23, 1988

ing otherwise" (16); it must be said that Deleuze and Guattari seem uninterested in the
feminist implications of their theory.
13. "Deconstruction," in this sense, is a method of potential political significance. In
Marxism and Deconstruction, Ryan points out that the political aspects of Derrida's work
have too often been ignored in this country, in favor of those aspects that serve only to
aestheticize language and thus to perpetuate the ideology of the old New Criticism. As
Ryan practices it, deconstruction is more like the d?mystification of language, whereby the
power structures that stabilize and are stabilized by a discourse can be exposed.
14. See Margerum (156), who also cautions that pre-Romantic poets ought not be held
responsible for meaning what they say (152).
15. As it is written, the intercourse between poet and muse is always partly or potentially
sexual. My claim that in this discourse the poet/muse dyad is conventionally set up as
exclusively masculine/feminine should not be taken as a denial of the general potential for
poetic inspiration in same-sex relationships. Certainly Shakespeare's "better angel," the
youth of the sonnets, furnishes a roughly contemporaneous example of such a relation
ship?to say nothing of Whitman and later poets. But the early examples that come to
mind are all male-male relationships. Male homoeroticism, even if officially proscribed,
had always had covert validation in classical literature. Female-female relationships are
simply not written in any poetic discourse available to Bradstreet, whose public elegies and
"The Author to her Book" in fact criticize the authority of any quasi-sexual relationship as
an adequate metaphor for the production of poetry. Rich examines the destructive effects
of the power that discourse has to grant or deny legitimacy to women's love for women?
whether or not that love is sexual. In "It Is the Lesbian in Us . . ." she argues that "what
ever is unnamed ... will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable" (199). Such a
proscription is, according to Foucault, one possible operation of discursive practices in
general: "the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge [i.e., the
subject of the text]." Thus, "each discursive practice implies a play of prescriptions that
designates its exclusions and choices" ("History of Systems of Thought" 199). While fe
male-female relationships are often creative and fruitful (Erkkila), these relationships are
not inscribed in the poetic discourses of the seventeenth century. More research is needed in
order to characterize the representation of female-female relationships in the oral discourse
of the community of women in which Bradstreet lived. That these kinds of relationships are
not represented in the poetic conventions I am discussing is a further effect of the political
power of discourse.
16. See, for example, White (Anne Bradstreet 149) and Requa (153), although Stanford,
in the only study devoted exclusively to this poem, emphasizes instead the revisions that
bear on Bradstreet's claim of kinship with Sidney and offers no judgment on the poem's
artistic merit.
17. Whatever Bradstreet's "final intentions" may have been, I have chosen to read the
text of the 1650 edition because my argument centers on Bradstreet's initial attempt to
enter a discourse.
18. Discussions with John Mowitt have helped me to formulate these questions and to
clarify some of the other theoretical issues raised in this essay.
19. It is perhaps worth clarifying here that the "intention" to publish is categorically
different from an author's "intention" to mean something (in the sense of an illocutionary
act).

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 Bradstreet's Early Elegies 173

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Bradstreet, Anne. The Complete Works. Ed. Joseph R. McElra
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Clark, Michael. "The Subject of the Text in Early American L
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Davies, Stevie. The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman
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Delamotte, Eugenia. "John Cotton and the Rhetoric of Grace.
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Lit
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Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M
New York: Pantheon, 1982.
_"The History of Systems of Thought." Language, Counte
Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithac
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