A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx Hardback - 2009

Excerpt

I

A New Literature Springs Up in the New World

From the very beginning, women were creating the new words of the New World. The first women writers in America, Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) and Mary Rowlandson (1637–1711), were born in England and endured the harrowing three-month voyage of storm, seasickness, and starvation across the North Atlantic. In Massachusetts, where they settled, they led lives of extraordinary danger and deprivation. Both married and had children; they thought of themselves primarily as good wives and mothers. Both made the glory of God their justification for writing, but they prefigured themes and concerns that would preoccupy American women writers for the next 150 years and more—Bradstreet, the poet, writing about the intimacies and agonies of domestic life, including pregnancy and maternity, the death of three of her grandchildren, and the destruction of her home by fire; and Rowlandson, writing a narrative of her captivity by Narragansett Indians, and pioneering the great American theme of interracial experience in the encounter with Native American culture.

Both Bradstreet and Rowlandson entered print shielded by the authorization, legitimization, and testimony of men. In Bradstreet’s case, no fewer than eleven men wrote testimonials and poems praising her piety and industry, prefatory materials almost as long as the thirteen poems in the book. In his introductory letter, John Woodbridge, her brother-in-law, stood guarantee that Bradstreet herself had written the poems, that she had not initiated their publication, and that she had neglected no housekeeping chore in their making: “these Poems are the fruit but of some few houres, curtailed from her sleep and other refreshments.” Rowlandson’s narrative too came with “a preface to the reader” signed “Per Amicum” (“By a Friend”), probably the minister Increase Mather, which explained that although the work had been “penned by this Gentlewoman,” she had written it as a “Memorandum of Gods dealing with her,” and it was a “pious scope, which deserves both commendation and imitation.” The author had not sought publication of her narrative out of vanity; rather,

some Friends having obtained a sight of it, could not but be so much affected with the many passages of working providence discovered therein, as to judge it worthy of publick view, and altogether unmeet that such works of God should be hid from present and future Generation: and therefore though this Gentlewoman’s modesty would not thrust it into the Press, yet her gratitude to God, made her not hardly perswadable to let it pass, that God might have his due glory, and others benefit by it as well as her selfe.

Having given a lengthy defense of the virtues of the book, the Friend concluded with the hope that “none will cast any reflection upon this Gentlewoman, on the score of this publication,” and warned that any who did “may be reckoned with the nine Lepers,” symbols of ingratitude. Apparently no one dared come forward to complain about Rowlandson after this endorsement.

We know that New England Puritans in the seventeenth century believed that men were intellectually superior to women, and that God had designed it so. They were notoriously unsympathetic to women who defied God’s plan for the sexes by conspicuous learning or reading, and they could be hostile to women who went outside their sphere by preaching or writing. The most official expression of this hostility was the trial of Anne Hutchinson in 1637. Hutchinson belonged to a dissident sect, but she had also been leading her own discussion groups for women. Tried for “traducing the ministers” and for blasphemy while she was pregnant with her fifteenth child, Hutchinson was excommunicated and forced to leave the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with her husband and children. The entire Hutchinson family, with the exception of one daughter, were killed by Indians in 1643. In 1645, when Ann Yale Hopkins, the wife of Governor Edward Hopkins of Hartford, became insane, John Winthrop blamed her “giving herself wholly to reading and writing,” rather than the hardships of colonial life, for her breakdown. “If she had attended to her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger . . . she had kept her wits.”

Despite these instances, the shared hardships of life in the New World gave women an existential equality with men that allowed Bradstreet and Rowlandson self-expression. Both men and women shared cold and hunger, faced disease and death, and risked captivity and massacre. Almost two hundred members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony died during the first year. Women had to do the hard physical labor of cooking, baking, cleaning, dairying, spinning, weaving, sewing, washing, and ironing. They endured the dangers of childbirth in the wilderness, nursed babies, and often buried them. While in strict religious terms “goodwives” were not supposed to trespass on the masculine sphere of literary expression, in reality there was more flexibility and tolerance. As two of her modern editors observe, “Bradstreet was not censured, disciplined, or in any way ostracized for her art, thought, or personal assertiveness, so far as we know. Rather, she was praised and encouraged; and there are no indications that the males in her life treated her as ‘property.’ If anything, she was treated as at least an intellectual equal.”1


A Poet Crowned with Parsley—Anne Bradstreet

Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) was the first book by a woman living in America, although it was actually published in London and entered in the Stationers’ Register. Bradstreet wrote with both an awareness of her gender, and a sense of rootedness in New England Puritan culture. Adrienne Rich has paid tribute to her achievement and summed up her inspiring example for future American women poets:


Anne Bradstreet happened to be one of the first American women inhabiting a time and place in which heroism was a necessity of life, and men and women were fighting for survival both as individuals and as a community. To find room in that life for any mental activity . . . was an act of great self-assertion and vitality. To have written poems . . . while rearing eight children, lying frequently sick, keeping house at the edge of the wilderness, was to have managed a poet’s range and extension within confines as severe as any American poet has confronted.2


But Bradstreet was much more than a heroic female survivor who courageously managed to compose poetry in her spare time. She was also a strong, original poet whose work can be read today with enjoyment and emotion, a woman who wrote great poems expressing timeless themes of love, loss, doubt, and faith. Despite her strict Puritan beliefs, she had wit and a sense of humor. And while she dutifully imitated the prevailing models of male poetic excellence, from Sir Philip Sidney to the French Protestant poet Guillaume Du Bartas (whose huge unfinished epic of the Creation was among the Puritans’ most revered texts), she also explored some of the most central issues for the development of American women’s writing—how to make domestic topics worthy of serious literature, and how to use strong and memorable language without ceasing to be womanly.

We don’t know all the facts of Anne Bradstreet’s life, but what we do know suggests that growing up in England she began to think of herself as a poet from an early age. While her brother went to Cambridge, she was tutored in Greek, Latin, French, and Hebrew by her father, Thomas Dudley, the steward to the Earl of Lincoln, and had access to the earl’s large library. She had begun to compose her own poems by the time she was sixteen, when she married twenty-five-year-old Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who had assisted her father in his stewardship. The marriage was a love match, and indeed Bradstreet would dedicate to Simon one of the most beautiful poems a woman ever wrote about her husband.

In early April of 1630, the Bradstreets and the Dudleys were among the Puritan members of the New England Company who embarked on a three-month voyage to America on the Arbella, the flagship of a little fleet of four vessels. Another passenger, John Winthrop, who would become the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a famous sermon to the pilgrims aboard, declaring that God was supporting their expedition, and that their settlement would be like “a Citty upon a Hill,” with the “eyes of all people” upon them. But when they arrived in Salem on June 12, 1630, they discovered that disease and starvation had decimated the small Bay Colony, and many among their own numbers died in the first weeks. The Salem settlers had been living in caves, huts, and wigwams, and had not even been able to plant crops. For the next few years the pioneers battled to survive, eating clams, mussels, nuts, and acorns; building shelters; and facing cold, hunger, and illness as well as anxiety and homesickness.

Both Bradstreet’s father and her husband served as governors of the struggling colony. For the difficult first five years of their marriage, Anne was unable to have a child. In her journal she confessed: “It pleased God to keep me a long time without a child, which was a great grief to me, and cost me many prayers and tears before I obtaind one, and after him gave me many more.” She also became ill and was bedridden for several months in 1632 with fever and coughing. When she recovered, she wrote her first poem, “Upon a Fit of Sickness,” thanking God for his mercy in sparing her life. And the following year, she gave birth to her first son, Samuel.

Anne Hutchinson came to New England in 1634, and Bradstreet witnessed the events of her rise and fall. But as Charlotte Gordon points out, “ironically, Mistress Hutchinson’s downfall ushered in the most fertile decade of Anne Bradstreet’s life—fertile in every sense of the word.” Already the mother of a son and a daughter, Bradstreet gave birth to five more children during these years. From 1638 to 1648, she also “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.”3

The poems Bradstreet was writing were intellectual and scholarly, formally influenced by English and European masters. But she was aroused and provoked by the great political events taking place in England in the 1640s, particularly the English Civil War, which led to the execution of Charles I. Five thousand of the six thousand lines of poetry she composed during the decade came from her long poem in heroic couplets, “The Four Monarchies,” in which she chronicled the pre-Christian empires of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, examining the legitimacy of kings and emperors. These were not the standard subjects of pious women’s verse, and in a “Prologue” to her poems, Bradstreet protected herself from criticism by insisting that she was a modest woman who had no intention of competing with male epic poets:

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealths begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things . . .
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

Like English women poets of her time, such as Anne Finch and Anne Killigrew, she emphasized her inferiority and temerity in writing at all, calling her Muse “foolish, broken, blemished.” While men rightly contended for fame and precedence, Bradstreet flatteringly claimed, she was content with her humble domestic niche, and her poems would make those of her male contemporaries look even more impressive:

If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or Parsley wreath, I ask no Bayes.
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

Instead of striving for the bay or laurel wreath, she asked only for a wreath of parsley and thyme, kitchen herbs rather than Parnassian prizes. Bradstreet was the Poet Parsleyate, the woman poet whose domestic work enabled the leisured creativity of men; but her imagery of the humble kitchen of Parnassus would be echoed in many heartfelt cries by the American women writers who came after her.

The humility of these lines, however, was balanced by her request for men to give women poets the space and the chance they deserved:

Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and Women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgment of ours.

In 1649, Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, the Reverend John Woodbridge, who was in England acting as a clerical adviser to the Puritan army, arranged to have her poems published by a bookseller in Popes Head Alley, London, under the title The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, or Severall Poems, compiled with great variety of Wit and Learning, full of delight. As the cover went on to explain, the book included “a complete discourse and description of the Four Elements, Constitutions, Ages of Man, Seasons of the Year” and “an Exact Epitome of the Four Monarchies . . . Also a Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the late troubles, with divers other pleasant and serious Poems.” In his prefatory verse, “To my Dear Sister, the Author of These Poems,” he congratulated her on her achievements:

What you have done, the Sun shall witnesse bear,
That for a womans Worke ’tis very rare;
And if the Nine vouchsafe the Tenth a place,
I think they rightly may yield you that grace.

In England, The Tenth Muse was well received as evidence of the genius of the woman of the New World, and became one of the “most vendible,” or best-selling, books of the period, at the top of the list with Shakespeare and Milton. In New England, it was widely read and esteemed.4

Media reviews

“[A] remarkable book. . . . [Showalter’s] approach . . . is unifying and magnanimous. She brings a perspective to changing literary culture that makes criticism seem not only understandable but also healthy and invigorating, making the work timeless in its ability to weather readers’ changing priorities. . . . A Jury of Her Peers does an enormous service, house a drop-dead reading list and gives the reader a fluid framework for the great (much of it still undiscovered) wealth of writing by women in this country.”
–Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“A breathtaking overview of the intersections of gender and genre in American letters. . . . Showalter’s desire is to move beyond stockpiling the poetry, plays and fiction of American women to a place of thoughtful and active critique. Instead of simply asking, ‘Remember these writers?’ she further queries, ‘And are these writers any good?’ Showalter refuses to be either an unthinking cheerleader or an apolitical critic. . . . With its frank assessments, impressive research and expansive scope, A Jury of Her Peers belongs on the shelf of any reader interested in the development of women’s writing in America.”
–Jennifer Cognard-Black, Ms. Magazine

“By covering the lives and careers of hundreds of American women writers of all backgrounds, this survey is ambitious and galvanizing. . . . the first guide and history ever attempted by one scholar working solo. . . . Showalter’s Baedeker showcases the rise and fall of styles and genres. Lives and careers of superstars . . . are put into high relief. The voices of several hundred other authors . . . sing out in a monumental choral orchestrated by Showalter (A Literature of Their Own), a groundbreaking feminist scholar at Princeton.”
–Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Elaine Showalter’s case for nearly four centuries of American women’s writing unfolds in a narrative as gripping as a favorite novel. Smartly paced and peppered with choice anecdotes and telling excerpts, A Jury of Her Peers shows vast knowledge and keen insight delivered with grace and verve. Readers will delight in the discovery of new writers and fresh encounters with familiar figures as Showalter once again proves to be the leading feminist literary authority of our time.”
–Cecelia Tichi, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Vanderbilt University

“Only Elaine Showalter, our foremost feminist critic, could give us this extraordinary and endlessly intriguing book. It is at once magisterial and delicate, comprehensive and richly detailed, critically acute yet generous. She tells stories of art being made from–and sometimes in spite of–love, marriage, loneliness, housework, politics, motherhood, and hardship. Yet always the writing itself is at the center, as Showalter stakes out the tradition’s common ground and illuminates its most startling and stunning creations.”
–Christine Stansell, author of American Moderns: New York Bohemia and the Creation of a New Century

“A Jury of Her Peers is a work of astonishing vision, breadth, intelligence, and audacity. Elaine Showalter, long recognized as our preeminent feminist scholar-critic, whose prose shimmers with wickedly funny asides, has produced the most ambitious and brilliantly executed book of her career, one that is sure to be required reading for all who have an interest in American literary history.”
–Joyce Carol Oates

“Lucid, lively, and learned, Elaine Showalter’s ambitious portraits of notable and forgotten women writers comprise an incomparable literary collage. An extraordinary achievement.”
–Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, coauthors, The Madwoman in the Attic and coeditors, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women

“It seems incredible that–until now–no history of American women writers should have been available. Professor Showalter has undertaken an immense task and produced a wonderful book, one which deserves to become a literary landmark. Witty, erudite, thoughtful and stylish, A Jury of Her Peers is deeply researched, beautifully structured and compellingly narrated.”
–Miranda Seymour, author of Thrumpton Hall, winner of the 2008 Pen Ackerley Prize for Memoir of the Year

“A masterful achievement.  Thorough yet concise, learned yet lively and entertaining, Elaine Showalter’s literary history gives us brilliant accounts of the lives and works of America’s women writers, many of whom she has recovered from near literary oblivion.  Her passion for her subjects and her always stimulating opinions will engage many readers, from the first provocative paragraphs about the origin of Susan Glaspell’s story, “A Jury of Her Peers,” to the final discussion of Annie Proulx’s antiheroic rodeo stories.  This is a remarkable book, one that deserves to become a classic.”
–Emory Elliot, General Editor, The Columbia Literary History of the United States

“‘Why did this woman disappear from literary history?’ is the central query posed by Elaine Showalter. It’s the question that historians of women’s literature seem condemned to repeat in each generation. The disappearing woman might be Susanna Rowson (America’s first bestselling novelist) or, as inconceivable as it may seem, a hundred years from now the question could be posed about a Nobel Prize winner named Toni Morrison. That’s the point: brilliance, accomplishment, and world-wide fame do not ensure that women’s literary reputations last. As eloquent as it is encyclopedic, A Jury of Her Peers is designed to countermand this pernicious historical pattern and celebrate two-hundred and fifty great writers who also happen to be female.”
–Cathy N. Davidson, co-editor of the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States

“A landmark of discovery, synthesis, and acute judgment, A Jury of Her Peers will stand as the defining account of American women’s writing for many years to come.”
–Eric J. Sundquist, Professor of Literature, University of California Los Angeles

“Out of the many thousands of American women who have published since Anne Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse appeared in 1650, the well-known feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter has selected over 250, crafting a thoughtful and provocative narrative history of women struggling, striving, and arriving in the literary marketplace.  The book follows women through four historical stages of literary professionalism from housebound secrecy up to the present day when, finally, they can write as they please about anything they please.  Adroit summaries mesh with sophisticated assessment to produce a book that is certain to take its place on the shelf of every person interested in American literary history.”

–Nina Baym, General Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature

"Elaine Showalter brings American women writers to life in this immensely readable and illuminating literary history from the Puritans to the present. A rare combination of vivid writing, brilliant analysis and scholarly substance–engaging from beginning to end."

–Wendy Martin, author of An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, and Adrienne Rich and editor of We Are the Stories We Tell