BY MARTINA JURICKOVA

It is more than obvious that the world’s literary tradition is predominantly male-occupied, what has been induced by the age-long belief in men superiority and their sole and unconditional right to study and later to work in order to supply the family and ensure it economically. The position and role of women in the society was being underestimated. They were considered to be less able than men, therefore they were not allowed to be educated and work in such manner as men. This phenomenon is observable in all fields of life, comprising even literature, during the vast of the history of humankind, from its earliest stages, through medieval age until the last centuries of the second millennium. However, there appeared to be some bright exceptions, especially in better socially developed countries, like Sappho in the Ancient Greece.

Some of those women, who exceeded their female contemporaries and infringed the traditional conventions, were Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson; two extraordinary women regarded as the most significant and remarkable female poets of America’s history. They both did something, what almost no other women of their ages dared to do without risk of exposing herself to public derision for behaving “unwomanly”; they started to write poems. But even though that nowadays they are both placed on the pedestal of literature and share the same fame, there can hardly be found two other more distinct representatives of the same art within the same country. In the following paragraphs there will be discussed some of the major differences between these two writers and their work.

1. Religion

Anne Bradstreet, who was according to Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury “the first major woman poet in the English language”, was born in England and came to America with her family among the first British immigrants in 1630 on boat Arbella led by John Winthrop, a famous religious reformer and protagonist of the idea of New England as the “City upon a Hill”. Her father became a governor of the newly founded settlement, so Anne had a better education than the rest of girls in her age. The whole society on the new continent was trying to live in consonance with the puritan image of New Jerusalem. Consequently, Anne’s life and even writing was influenced by Puritanism, which aimed to direct the attention of people to their souls, purity of heart, vanity of material world. All those ideas Anne reflected in her works. In her collection called Contemplations and in her poem The Flesh and the Spirit she meditates the importance and value of material things as artefacts of the Flesh which symbolizes the animal desires of human bodies. In opposition to this she puts higher ideals, things above the Earth and faith which are represented as the Spirit. Inspired by the puritan ideology, the only thing worth living for was God who should be loved by the whole heart. She even recalled the vision of the above mentioned New Jerusalem, which in the Holly Bible featured the Heaven’s Kingdom to enlarge the ambition for God as the greatest good.

Evidently, the religion had a substantial influence on Anne Bradstreet and her perception of God was very conventional. But Emily Dickinson’s attitude was of different matter. May it have been caused by different social background she came from. Emily was born exactly 200 years after Bradstreet’s coming into America. By that time the Puritanism was just a historical issue; the society was slowly giving up the strict religious rules and demands and it was starting to change. While Anne Bradstreet saw God as her Hope, who should have been given the biggest love, Emily Dickinson doubted about his might and questioned his relationship with humankind in her poems. Although the rest of her family was religious and did attend the Sunday masses, she did not. This could have been considered as some kind of revolt against the church and society. On this topic she said: “I am one of the lingering bad ones”

However, she did not give up her belief in God absolutely. She was trying to find her own way to him through praying and she dedicated several of her poems to this problem. For example, in her poem At least to pray is left she describes how she is looking for God everywhere, but she just cannot find where he is. This is a straight allusion to the Matthew’s Gospel, where it is stated that those who are looking for something, will be finally given it. And since she is not given, what she is looking for, she is doubtful about the real power and intentions of God. At the end of the poem she provides a question directed to Jesus: “Hast thou no arm for me?” Then her only chance to be helped is to pray, even when the result is uncertain.

2. Relationships

Speaking about the conventions, even Anne Bradstreet did not follow them at all. Being a puritan woman she should have been completely devoted to God by her whole heart, mind and soul. However in her poems dedicated to her husband it is observable that she did not always put God on the first place in her life. She loved her husband much more than was acceptable in that time, and moreover she did not fear to express it through her writing. Just to mention some of her love poems, she wrote To My Dear and Loving Husband and A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment. From these poems some readers may perceive that her love towards him was nearly obsessive and she was very dependent on him. She qualifies her love to him as the ideal of marital love and gives it as an example to others: “Compare with me, ye women, if you can.” Especially, the first mentioned poem is description of her love and functions as model of one. In conclusion it can be said that relationships, and particularly that one with her husband, were of great importance to Anne Bradsteet and she appreciated them.

In contrast to her stands Emily Dickinson who was known for her retiringness and avoidance of contact with people outside her family. “She did not leave the Homestead unless it was absolutely necessary and as early as 1867, she began to talk to visitors from the other side of a door rather than speaking to them face to face.” Presumably she was extremely shy, but it had not always been so. As a girl she used to lead a normal life of contemporary youth, but we can only surmise what the cause of her vivid change was. One of the theories claims that it might have been caused by disappointment of people, what can be understood even as problems in love. Despise of the fact that she had various courtships and received several proposals, she never agreed to marry anyone.

But after the author’s death, among her personal properties there was found a great number of rather passionate letters which suggest her thinking about a marriage with an old family friend Otis P. Lord. Very likely this would have led to a successful end, but unfortunately, Mr. Lord suddenly died. Emily transformed her grief into a poem I cannot live with you, where she talks about her separation from her love. The following lines manifest her objective view of his death as the only reason destroying their happiness.

“I could not die with you,

For one must wait

To shut the other’s gaze down, …

… So we must keep apart,

You there, I here,

With just the door ajar”

The more Emily avoided the outer world and unfamiliar people, the more she became dependent on her family and closest relatives, with whom she maintained a very plenteous correspondence often provided with special poems. According to Ruland “Emily Dickinson so shunned public disclosure that most of her verses imply a total inwardness, a refusal to share in the collective utterance of the world.” Thus “Dickinson’s poetry reflects her loneliness and the speakers of her poems generally live in a state of want, but her poems are also marked by the intimate recollection of inspirational moments which are decidedly life-giving and suggest the possibility of happiness.” Considering her family relationships, it was something she and Anne Bradstreet had in common, because for them both it was a source of the greatest happiness and joy.

3. Writing style and publication

The last thing to mention about the differences between Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson, but surely not the least important, is their attitude to their own works and their publication. Since Anne Bradstreet lived in 17th century puritan society, as a woman she was not allowed to write publicly and make herself known for poetry. Because of this “her works were kept private though, as it was frowned upon for women to pursue intellectual enlightenment, let alone create and air their views and opinions.” As it was formerly mentioned, she was writing mostly only for her husband and did not desire to publish her poems in any magazine. However, when her brother-in-law found out her writings, he secretly took their copies to England and published them without Anne’s acknowledgement. The anonymous publication was named The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts and it made Anne Bradstreet “the first female poet ever published in both England and the New World.” 

Although written by a woman, this publication received many good, partially because of her writing style, which was rather conventional. Following examples of her favourite writers, Anne’s poems were written in regular patterns, typically having ABAB rhyme scheme and constant number of syllables. But in spite of the big success of the book, she was not satisfied with her work and she revealed her feelings about it in a poem called The Author to her Book where by words: “I cast thee by as one unfit for light” she expressed her disapproval of the publishing.

Contrariwise, Emily Dickinson’s view of being publicly known was different. She said that if she was to be famous for her poetry, she would be. However, her problem was that her poetry was a little unconventional, even though she lived in an advanced age, when working women with artistic inclination were no longer anything harmful to the society. Her writing style was rather experimental and until nowadays “no single familiar artistic convention seems to match the slanted truth of her verse”. She used lot of pauses, unfinished ideas and used to put capital letter to words which she considered to be of special importance for her. In her poems she used mostly ABCB rhyme scheme and “the influence of church music on her poems is apparent in her use of the common meter on which many hymns are based.” Consequently no publisher wanted to risk the publishing of her own collection, so she had to keep them private. Similarly as Anne Bradstreet, even Emily Dickinson was writing mostly for her family and relatives.

Her specific style can be, according to A. Pokrivčák, perceived as a conflict between living and expression, between the implicit sense and the explicit form, between the guessed transcendental world and its furtiveness before the perceptive human consciousness, between the life and death. Examining the topics she dealt with in her poems it can be said that they were various, from the ordinary pleasures and troubles of everyday life, through love and religion up to social issues. In his book Pokrivčák continues that Dickinson’s work is a solely subjective attempt for interpretation of living – in its incongruity, anxiety, but in its uniqueness and beauty too – the enjoyment of simple things from nature. He states that her poetry connects the imaginative and intellectual potentials of being and presents it as a phenomenon, which human captures metaphorically, emotively, sensually, thoughtfully, and conceptually and abstractly.15 And Richard Ruland supports it with statement: “her poetry was a metaphysical and moral secret which might never have been fathomed”

And for Anne Bradstreet was also an educated woman, she discussed similar themes in her poetry, but in a different style and with different intentions. Her power is in her precise and emotive description of her utmost feelings, being always capable of the Puritan ideals. About her Ruland says: “her love is marital, her landscape plain but brightly seen, her meditations troubled but ultimately pious, her awareness of nature acute but also respectful of the Maker of it.”

In conclusion, Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson can be both considered to be slightly rebellious for being women of word. Their lives were often full of various struggles which they had to cope with and which were a great source of inspiration for their writing. The most inspiring for them both were their families and relationships and in no smaller degree the religion, too. Anne Bradstreet as a representative of Puritanism was rather conventional in the understanding of form of her poetry, whereas Emily Dickinson’s writing style was revolutionary and until now it can be marked as irresistible of any specific world artistic movement. Considering this, Dickinson’s poetry is unique, typical only for her. But even Bradstreet’s work has much to provide the reader with, and they are both really remarkable personages of American poetry and literature as such.

Sources:

Bradstreet, Anne poetry collection, online available at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poets/bradstreet-anne

Dickinson, Emily poetry collection, online available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12242/12242-h/12242-h.htm

Pokrivčák, Anton. 2005. Americká imaginácia. Nitra : UKF Nitra, 2005. ISBN 80-8050-887-9.

Ruland, Richard a Bradbury, Malcolm. 1992. From Puritanism to Postmodernism. New York : Penguin Books, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83592-7.

Winthrop, John. 1838. The Model of Christian Charity. Boston, 1838

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bradstreet

http://annebradstreet.com/anne_bradstreet_bio_002.htm 

http//emilydickinsonmuseum.org

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/155

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_dickinson