Anne Brandstreet and Female Identity Essay -- Anne Brandstreet Poems P

There are non many study charrish writers in American Literature, and writing, traditionally, has always been viewed as a virile activity. It is therefore very interesting, and even ironic, that the first author published in the newly established prude society on the American soil, Anne Bradstreet, was a female. Indeed, Bradstreets poems are filled with female presence. However, I also sense that Bradstreets feminism is held in check by her Puritan values, and there is a conflict created throughout her writing between this society of Puritan patriarchate that she lived in and her identity as a female.Bradstreets poems are rivet on the simple pleasures found in the realities of the present. She rejoices in the presence of reputation that she sees surrounding her in Contemplations, rather than that in the pleasure of Jesus and her Puritan religion (like Phyllis Wheatley does). Part of the reality for Bradstreet is living as a female in a male-dominated society. Bradstreet embraces this, but at the same time questions the views towards females. Women in Puritan society played a subordinate role in a traditional patriarchal family structure, and were relatively restricted in their opportunities. They were not generally viewed as equals to men, and in The Prologue, Bradstreet questions her role, and thus a womans role, in writing poetry. At the end of the prologue Bradstreet writes, Let Greeks be Greeks, and woman what they are Men have precedency and ...