Anne Bradstreet’s Ecological Thought

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Notes

1. ¹References to Bradstreet’s work are based on The Works of Anne Bradstreet (ed. Jeannine Hensley). For comparisons to the 1650 edition of The Tenth Muse, I have referenced the facsimile reproductions edited and introduced by Josephine K. Piercy (1965).

2. ²“If tried by an exact standard of aesthetics,” wrote James Anderson in 1862, “her poetry … will reveal many blemishes. Its poetical merits are unequal. It is often prosaic, deficient in melody of versification. … It will not be difficult to find in her poems passages of bad taste and of sheer doggerel, should a reader examine them for such an ungallant purpose” (23). “Pretentious and imitative,” Samuel Eliot Morrison claimed in 1930, “… The Tenth Muse is not attractive. No one of its long poems … would be read by any one save a literary historian” (50–51). And in An American Triptych (1984), Wendy Martin, citing “[t]he often wooden lines and forced rhymes of her early poems,” argued that “the material in the first edition of The Tenth Muse … was formulaic and divorced from her personal observations and feelings” (15).

3. ³Although Rich ostensibly uses “later poems” as a chronological distinction, her use of the phrase also serves to designate an even smaller subset of poems that adhere to particular aesthetic criteria. For example, Rich critiques Bradstreet’s “early work” as “remarkably impersonal” (xiv), but she accords a strikingly similar designation— “curiously impersonal”—to Bradstreet’s poems on illness. These poems—definitively written after 1650 and first published in 1678—are chronologically “later,” yet are not considered representative of Bradstreet’s “genuine, delicate minor poems” (xviii).

4. ⁴By detaching the ecological from the aesthetic, an ecocritical approach is able to consider the ecological potential of Bradstreet’s poetry without a corresponding evaluation of her religious sincerity. An ecological reading is aware of Bradstreet’s struggles with belief—but reading Bradstreet’s ecological thought is not, in the final analysis, dependent on whether Bradstreet is a “good” Puritan or a “bad” Puritan.

5. ⁵See Cheryll Glotfelty’s “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996), particularly “Survey of Ecocriticism in America” and “The Future of Ecocriticism” (xxii–xxv), and Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), particularly “What Is An Environmental Text?” (6–14), as two now-canonical examples.

6. ⁶In his “Editor’s Note” to the Spring 2013 issue of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Scott Slovic writes that “[o]ne of the abiding ecocritical impulses during the past decade and a half has been the effort to move ‘beyond nature writing’” (215). Slovic’s reference here is to Beyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, edited by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (2001). Their essay “Introduction: Why Go Beyond Nature Writing, and Where To?” and, in particular, their claim that “ecocriticism offers a critical perspective that can enliven any literary and theoretical field” is representative of an important transitional moment for the discipline (3–4). In the same collection, Michael P. Branch’s essay “Before Nature Writing: Discourses of Colonial American Natural History” specifically addresses the relationship between ecocriticism and early American literature, arguing convincingly that “our restricted generic definition of nature writing … has discouraged us from considering colonial writing about nature” (92). For more recent examples, see Lawrence Buell’s The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (2005), in which he critiques his own emphasis on nature writing in The Environmental Imagination (22–26), and especially the recent work of Timothy Morton. In addition to critiquing “conventional ecocriticism” as “heavily thematic,” Morton’s Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) argues explicitly—as the title makes clear— both that “the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” and that “[e]cocriticism is too enmeshed in the ideology that churns out stereotypical ideas of nature to be of any use. Indeed, ecocriticism is barely distinguishable from the nature writing that is its object” (1–2, 13).

7. ⁷My reading here owes a debt to Anne Hildebrand’s argument in her 1973 essay “Anne Bradstreet’s Quaternions and ‘Contemplations’” that “differences between [the texts] have been overstressed” and her suggestion that “in fact there are similarities in theme, material, and method … which indicate that Anne Bradstreet is dealing with a central problem with two different approaches” (137). Although our respective conclusions are quite different regarding Bradstreet’s relation to the world, her insistence on looking past aesthetic differences in placing the quaternions within Bradstreet’s larger body of work remains a persuasive argument for me.

8. ⁸Critics have occasionally argued that the “Philomel,” or nightingale, in line 179 of “Contemplations” signals the Englishness of these woods. I am, however, inclined to see Bradstreet’s use of “Philomel” as indicative of what William Cronon calls the “fuzzy nomenclature” of colonial New England, “the natural tendency for colonists to apply European names to American species which only superficially resembled their counterparts across the ocean” (8–9). Inasmuch as Bradstreet is describing actual places or experiences in “Contemplations,” she is describing seventeenth-century Massachusetts. (See also Gatta 45.)

9. ⁹“Atlantic salmon would be the best bet, I think” (Gatta 47).

10. ¹⁰Morton’s argument here shouldn’t be read as an endorsement of speciesism but as a broader rethinking of ontological categories: “In an age of ecology without Nature, we would treat many more beings as people while deconstructing our ideas about what counts as people” (Ecological Thought 8).

11. ¹¹In Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett argues for the ecological value of such anthropomorphism: “… an anthropomorphic element in perception can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances—sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure. … A touch of anthropomorphism, then, can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations” (99).

12. ¹²Readers who insist on a rigid distinction between the Tenth Muse Bradstreet and the Bradstreet of “Contemplations” and “Upon the Burning of Our House” neglect the fact that throughout their critically-favored post-1650 period of her life, Bradstreet returned often to the Tenth Muse poems, particularly to the quaternions. As a result of this oversight, the content of these revisions, as well as the significance of Bradstreet’s continuing interest in her Tenth Muse poems, are often glossed over in critical studies of Bradstreet’s work; Adrienne Rich, for example, simply dismisses Bradstreet’s Tenth Muse revisions as “of little aesthetic interest” (xvii).

13. ¹³See also Louisa Hall’s discussion of Bradstreet’s “broken style” in “The Influence of Anne Bradstreet’s Innovative Errors,” particularly pages 5–6. Here, Hall considers Bradstreet’s “willingness to use error to express herself” as a “stylistic choice,” arguing that “Bradstreet’s breaks were not accidental, but rather served to express the tension inherent in moments of psychic strain. In so doing, Bradstreet adapted her voice to the pressures of her life, proving herself not only an adept but an inventive poet.”

14. ¹⁴Compare these lines from “The Four Elements” to the closing lines of Bradstreet’s “Prologue”—“This mean and unrefined ore of mine/Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine (ll. 49-50)—in which Bradstreet’s poetry itself initiates transmutation.