Abstract
Anne Bradstreet inaugurated American poetry with a disclaimer. In her “Author to Her Book,” she addresses her poetic offspring as a monstrous birth. Her “Prologue” concedes that, as a woman poet, she may be “obnoxious” to the many readers eager to cast “despite … on female wits.” But both poems conduct their self-deprecation with consummate wit. The “Book” emerges as an impelling conceit of writing in the guise of childcare. Bradstreet’s plea in the “Prologue” that she seeks no crown beyond one made of kitchen herbs both demonstrates her classical learning and constructs a counter-image to it: “Give thyme and parsley wreath, I ask no bays.”
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Notes
Modesty is a central term in most discussions of women and women poets, usually in a repressive sense. Thus Cheryl Walker sees modesty as a “denigration of ambition,” The Nightingale’s Burden (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) by which women were “deeply debilitated by their own internalized sense of guilt over their desire for power,” p. 34. Alicia Ostriker sees a retreat into “Female powerless-ness” after the Revolution had succeeded to “override the claims of modesty.” Stealing the Language (Boston: Beacon, 1986), pp. 21, 23, although she also sees a dialectic between “assertion and self-effacement,” p. 3. Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms (New York: Harper and Row, 1976) laments that “women lack that sense of self,” the “Ego” which men writers claim p. 2. Mary Kelley identifies literary domesticity with a deep seated modesty that led women to “demean their literary efforts and themselves by limning them as the humble efforts of humble creatures” p. 295. Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 335. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar consistently use “modesty” to describe female self-effacement, blocking the self-assertion necessary to poetic production. The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 23, 61–63.
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See Mary Beth Norton, “The Paradox of “Woman’s Sphere,” in Women of America: A History, eds. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1974), pp. 139–146. pp. 145–146.
Quoted in Wendy Martin, “Anne Bradstreet’s Poetry: A Astucy in Subversive Piety,” in Shakespeare’s Sisters, eds. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 26.
Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 126–7.
See Joanne Dobson, Dickinson and the Strategies of Reticence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
For this double argument, see Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75:1 (June 1988), 9–39. pp. 16–18.
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Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) importantly proposes care as a feminist moral model.
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© 2010 Shira Wolosky
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Wolosky, S. (2010). Modest Claims. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_1
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