Love’s Untold Stories: Anne Bradstreet and the Legacy of the Puritan Family

This article is the second in a series of responses to Episode 2.4 of the Genealogies of Modernity podcast.

For ten years I have taught an American literature to 1865 survey course, and teaching Puritan literature to undergraduates always presents a unique challenge. The archaic, dense language and religious and historical context differs vastly from ours; numerous students struggle when they first encounter it. While listening to the recent Genealogies of Modernity podcast, I thought of two recent student class evaluations. The first one says, "Good class! I still don't like the Puritans." The second, from fall 2022, says this: "Not many people can make Puritan sermons interesting, but Dr. D'Amico is the exception." I was reminded of these end-of-semester comments, especially the second one, because of what Ryan McDermott articulates in this podcast about the aim of critical genealogy. He states that "it scrutinizes the truth of noble origin stories; it often finds that a favorable myth has been laid over a more complicated and troubling past. It invites us to see the past without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, to see moments as they appeared in the moment—chaotic, uncertain, not destined to one particular future, open to many possible futures."

This pairing of comments—one “not liking” the Puritans and the other finding them “interesting”—indicates two ways of reading the past. The first student speaks to an ahistorical measuring of history and the people who shaped and lived in it. The primary function of reading historical literature should not be determined by whether we “like” the people we’re reading, especially if we judge them by whatever contemporary value sets we bring to the texts. Rather, like the second student who finds the Puritans “interesting,” I argue that we ought to hold back our judgment and engage with a given historical moment on its own terms.

George Henry Boughton, Pilgrims Going to Church (1867)

It is because I believe in this spirit of both reading historical literature and reading literature historically that my students react as they do to my pedagogy. I ask them to meet the Puritans where they are, without preconceived notions, if possible. If they do have preconceived notions (which comes part and parcel from being human), I ask that they recognize their preconceived notions as an effect of living in the present and not an effect of their unmediated access to transcendent truth. I liken Puritans landing at Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown to astronauts who land on the moon for the first time: they don't know what's going to happen to them. They are uncertain. We might have stories of their past already in our heads, but the Puritans do not know their own futures. They are living in their present moment, reading their own writing. Their lives, as McDermott points out, are "chaotic” and “uncertain." I ask that my students read their literature and respond to it as they would to any other person telling their story. Because of the charged rhetoric surrounding early US literature, and because the class begins with Indigenous oral traditions as "our origin point" for the course, this task isn't always easy.

In the class, we talk extensively about Puritan families—not through the lens of John Smith or De La Warre, but through Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson. We talk about how these women interpreted John Winthrop's appeal for a communitarian lifestyle in his famous 1630 "Model of Christian Charity" sermon, a text in which we apply the methods of critical genealogy. We discuss the key arguments and tropes of Winthrop’s speech and how politicians throughout US history, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, have adapted his speech for their particular aims. Winthrop's speech promotes the concept of a robust communal bond among the settlers, where they would work collectively and support one another in their endeavor to create a morally upright society. He urged the settlers to prioritize the common good over individual interests and exhibit compassion, charity, and unity within their community.

Let us briefly consider this vision of Puritan family life through the lens of Anne Bradstreet, who is usually believed to have been present during the delivery of Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity." Bradstreet, a woman who extensively wrote about her family life, is often considered the first notable American poet. Anne was born in England to a well-off Puritan family. She was married to Simon Bradstreet, who later became a prominent colonial leader and served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By all accounts, Anne and Simon had a close and affectionate marriage. They had eight children, and Anne often wrote about her deep love for her husband and the joys and challenges of motherhood. She expressed self-doubt about her work and the conflict between her roles as a devout Puritan and a writer. Because of this vulnerability, her writing usually resonates well with my students. In her letters to her children in particular, we glimpse a mother caring about her children's future and being honest about her spiritual self, sins, and struggles.

Portrait of Anne Bradstreet by Edmund H. Garrett

If we are to do critical genealogy, we ought to look at the whole scope. My efforts to include Anne Bradstreet's complicated voice in discussions of Puritan families is intended to warn against painting too broad a brushstroke either way—to warn against the sense that all Puritan families were somehow the same. Bradstreet is a unique individual and uniquely situated in history. She and her family are irreducible to any particular metaphor or paradigm of the family. Instead of seeing family only in units of sovereignty (though this is one helpful approach), we should likewise see individuals in their contingent circumstances and positionalities. Like us today, Puritans were genealogists: crafting family, biblical, and community genealogies.

Perhaps one goal as readers should be to reconstruct their genealogies: the way they understood themselves and how they might be situated in history. In this way, we tie them to where they are rather than to our noble or ignoble origins. To claim that presentism must be totally avoided, though, is another fallacy. Recently, a student told me that she used Bradstreet's love poem to her husband as part of her wedding ceremony. Bradstreet writes: "If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee." This student was not cosplaying Jamestown with her family; she read Bradstreet's poem in our class and found a valuable description of love. If we are to engage in creative genealogies, I wonder if finding moments of beauty, of transcendent values, even in historically complex situations, might help our task.

We might remember that Puritan women did question the status quo and had a measure of public voice: "Nay Masculines, you have thus taxt us long," Bradstreet writes of the accomplishments of Queen Elizabeth. We might never live in a perfect union or a city upon a hill, but we ought not forget that those in the past are not only metaphors for how we view the family as a structure today, they were people whose lives can provide some vision for our own. This is the complex genealogy of the family I propose: a vision of the family that finds what was best in those times and acknowledges and borrows from it; a vision that sees the worst in those times and acknowledges it and impugns it; and, finally—the frame this essay focuses on most—a vision of the family that is inclusive, while not forgetting that families are complicated and people are complex, regardless of their historical situations, including our own.

LuElla D'Amico is an Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of the Incarnate Word.