Queerly Lamenting Anne Bradstreet

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Notes

1. ¹See Schweitzer’s The Work of Self-Representation, Henton, and Harvey among others.

2. ²This scholarship is too extensive to review in a brief note. Love provides excellent discussions of multiple strands of recent queer affect theory. In more recent work, see the collection by Gregg and Seigworth, Cvetkovich, and Halberstam among numerous others.

3. ³Gordon also reads “David’s Lamentation” as a political poem, although in a more optimistic vein: “Everyone understood that David was the rightful leader, and Anne’s assumption of his voice equated New England with the new, holier Israel, one that might mourn the passing of the old but represented the hope of the future” (248).

4. ⁴Ferszt acknowledges the possibility of a queer reading of the David and Jonathan material, but argues that Winthrop and Bradstreet alike “would simply have been following classical conventions that paid tribute to a kind of neo-Platonic love between men born out of shared war experience” (141–42).

5. ⁵While Biblical scholarship has been largely skeptical of attempts to claim David and Jonathan as “homosexual” (see Heacock and Zehnder), Stone and Hornsby cite the long history of the relationship as an “iconic text” for gay men in particular who “find in that relationship points of identification” (88).

6. ⁶Interestingly, the more literal translation of simile simili gaudet would be “like takes pleasure in like,” adding a potential inflection of eros to the Latin version that Winthrop avoids in his English translation.

7. ⁷For an important extended reading of Winthrop’s discourse focusing among other things on Winthrop’s Christian adaptation of classical ideals of friendship as a political model, see Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship, chap. 2. Ultimately, she suggests that “[Winthrop’s] paradigm of caritas in the purified commonwealth is not marriage … but a version of homosocial friendship” (96–97). In addition, Van Engen has offered a very different reading of the centrality of sympathy to normative New England Puritan values and communal structure, arguing for a trajectory that “begins in Puritan sympathy [such as the ‘Model’ articulates] and ends in sentimental literature” (“Puritanism” 552); his piece also includes a detailed discussion of Bradstreet’s “A Dialogue Between Old England and New.” Van Engen addresses the issue of feeling in Bradstreet more extensively in “Advertising the Domestic.” Thus, if one is not reading for queer potential, the rhetoric of affinity in Winthrop’s “Model” can work in unexceptionally normative ways. I appreciate Van Engen’s commentary on an earlier version of this article.

8. ⁸While Taylor was, of course, a minister, which would give him a different relation to the church than an ordinary member like Bradstreet, there seems to me no reason we might not imagine her having written poems that evoke a sense of being part of a church community.

9. ⁹I am grateful to Ivy Schweitzer for suggesting this line of argument and the reference to Luxon’s work to me.

10. ¹⁰For a detailed discussion of Bradstreet’s representations of the body, see Lutes.

11. ¹¹For a fuller reading of the Quakers as queer, see my “Border Crossings.”

12. ¹²Intriguingly, these lines were later changed to less literal, visually oriented imagery. In the 1678 version the lines become strikingly less visual and personal: “Sometimes the twofold pox be sore be-mars / With outward marks and inward loathsome scars” (57). The “two-fold pox” is a period reference to syphilis, so the lines have moved away from referring to smallpox at all. It is also noteworthy that in the first version, what is “loathsome” is the disease that disfigures; in the later version the word has been shifted inward, where it seems to refer to marks of sin, a more proper object of disgust than a disease that ruins one’s appearance.

13. ¹³Gordon offers the richest discussion of this period of Bradstreet’s life and its possible psychic dynamics (46–52).

14. ¹⁴Bradstreet also indulges in the lavish expression of loss in an even more explicitly British context in “An Elegy Upon that Honorable and Renowned Knight Sir Philip Sidney,” where she emphasizes her oneness with the elite, Renaissance England Sidney embodied (“which have the self-same blood yet in my veines” [1650 edition]), and where she again evokes a world of male emotion and loyalty, this time through classical rather than Biblical allusions.

15. ¹⁵Other studies in queer affect theory have also taken up the idea of backwardness; Love cites Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings as an important example. See also Halberstam.