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Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Bishop: Nature, Culture and Gender in “Contemplations” and “At the Fishhouses”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Robert Boschman
Robert Boschman
Affiliation:
Robert Boschman is a Ph.D. candidate at McMaster University and currently teaches English at the University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
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Extract

Written in and for a patriarchal community that valued its solidarity, Anne Bradstreet's “Contemplations” does not try to render an accurate, realistic portrait of nature in the New World. Rather, it employs what Leo Marx calls “ecological images…displaying the essence of a system of value” and subordinates these images to the reformed Judeo-Christian myth. “Contemplations” argues that God is the source of order, meaning, and history, and that the natural world, whether beneficent or hostile, reflects His omnipotence. But in delineating a predominantly masculine world view, Bradstreet also sets aside her own aspirations as a woman poet. Although the song of the female bird Philomel represents a kind of art that is free of Puritanism's monolithic expectations, Bradstreet's speaker cannot liberate herself to sing with Philomel. Instead, she stifles her own song for a practical poetic craft that serves her struggling community.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , August 1992 , pp. 247 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 42.Google Scholar

2 Marianne Moore is quite arguably one of the great modernists immediately preceding Bishop; it is, however, crucial to my argument to show how Bishop writes against the tradition represented by these male poets. “At the Fishhouses” certainly constitutes a departure from the more detached perspective on nature and culture offered, say, by Wallace Stevens in “Anecdote of the Jar” or part two of “The Auroras of Autumn.”

3 The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (1979Google Scholar; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1989), 64–67. All further references to “At the Fishhouses” are taken from this edition.

4 I am indebted to Guy Rotella's suggestive reading of “At the Fishhouses.” Rotella, however, goes no further than to demonstrate that the poem – in terms of a religious tradition – is ambiguously mystical and that it “recalls” an older order of “religious and transcendental poems” (223). By linking “At the Fishhouses” to Anne Bradstreet's “Contemplations,” and by drawing on “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” as an especially important link between the two, I am attempting to clarify just how we can read Bishop's poem in terms of a religious poem like “Contemplations.” To be sure, Rotella's reading of “At the Fishhouses” invites just this kind of analysis. Rotella, Guy, Reading and Writing Nature: The Poetry of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 220–23.Google Scholar

5 Wesleyan University Press, 1990.Google Scholar

6 “The Gift Outright,” The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Lathem, Edward Connery (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 348.Google Scholar The rest of the poem confirms the sense of the first line, i.e., “She was ours / In Massachusetts, in Virginia, / But we were England's, still colonials….”

7 Taken from the preface to Magnalia Christi Americana, ed. Murdock, Kenneth B. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 50.Google Scholar

8 See The Harvard University Hymn Book (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964)Google Scholar, No. 190 for Frederick H. Hedge's 1852 translation. “Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott” conveniently follows Hedge's version in the hymnal.

9 See Bradley, Ian, The Penguin Book of Hymns (London: Penguin, 1989), 5–8Google Scholar; and Haeussler, Armin, The Story of Our Hymns: The Handbook to the Hymnal of the Evangelical and Reformed Church (St. Louis: Eden Publishing House, 1952), 312–16.Google Scholar

10 Haeussler states: “The historian Leopold von Ranke speaks of this hymn as ‘the production of the moment in which Luther, engaged in a conflict with a world of foes, sought strength in the consciousness that he was defending a divine cause which could never perish.’ ‘Living dangerously’ was not a mere catch-phrase for Luther; he knew what it meant at first hand” (312). In this respect, “Ein' feste Burg” would certainly have been attractive to the people of Bradstreet's community.

11 Carroll, Peter N., Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 87–88, 111–12.Google Scholar

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20 Ibid., 3.

21 See Canup's chapter two, “The Disafforestation of the Mind.”

22 “The Introduction,” xii–xiii & xvi–xvii.

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24 Merrill, James, Recitative, ed. McClatchy, J. D. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), 9.Google Scholar Merrill writes: “I was talking about Elizabeth Bishop and wondering what sets her apart from the male giants – Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens – who seem in their life's work to transcend human dimensions: somehow wondering whether the light that philosophy casts made a greater shadow on the wall behind them. I kept clinging to the idea of Elizabeth with her sanity and levelheadedness and quirkiness of mind.”

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32 Ibid., 76.

33 “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” 483.Google Scholar

34 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Johnson, Thomas H. (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), 506–07.Google Scholar

35 Originally published in 1963, “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry” has just been re-published in a collection of essays by Bly entitled American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (New York: Harper & Row, 1991).Google Scholar

36 The poem arguably distinguishes between the Baptist and Lutheran traditions in the “total immersion” section. Admittedly, I am passing over this distinction as my interest here is to read “At the Fishhouses” in the context of early American Puritanism.

37 Bly, , 21–22.Google Scholar

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39 Cecilia Tichi discusses John Winthrop's distinction between “carnal naturalism and cultivated civility”: “Puritan planters [justified] approbation of New World lands on the basis of aboriginal failure to improve it…Failure to make a civilizing impress upon the land they claimed would cancel their self-defined, biblically interpreted rights to those lands.” See New World, New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 9, 11.Google Scholar

40 Rotella, , 223.Google Scholar