Colonial Period Essay
Colonial Period Essay: Anne Bradstreet
Andrea Wheeler
ENGL 201-D01 Dr. Robinson
November 15, 2021
Colonial Period Essay
Anne Bradstreet
Anne Bradstreet was a female with a lot of important roles such as a
mother, wife, teacher, and poet, but most of all, her voice played an extraordinary
part in influencing the American people during the Colonial Period. Anne
Bradstreet wrote most of her work speaking about her home life, family, and love.
Anne Dudley Bradstreet grew up in England and was married at the young
age of sixteen to Simon Bradstreet. Just two short years after getting married, at
the age of eighteen, Anne, her husband and her father set out for America. The
three boarded a ship named the Arabella, and headed for the new land, America.
While sailing on the Arabella, Anne was able to listen to sermons written by John
Winthrop. Later, the sermons that were heard while on the ship would become
known as the well-known, “A Models of a Christian Charity.” During this time,
even at her young age, Anne was very well educated. Most of her education was
not formal but had instead come directly from her father. Her father was an estate
manager at the Earl of Lincoln, and this gave Anne access to a large library.
The trip on the Arabella was a tough one, lasting three months. It was a
difficult journey which finally landed in Salem Massachusetts in July of 1630.
Anne and her family moved many times after arriving in America, in hopes of
improving their living conditions. The conditions that Anne and her family lived
in were poor to say the least, which made her skeptical of the new land.
Eventually the family reached Andover in 1645 where they settled for good.
During this time, Anne and her husband became parents to eight children which
Colonial Period Essay
took a great deal of time. Anne was still able to find time to write poetry, where
she expressed her religious and emotional conflicts she was facing as a Puritan
and as a writer. “Throughout her life Bradstreet was concerned with the issues of
sin and redemption, physical and emotional frailty, death and immorality.”
(Garrett, E. H. 2021)
Like most writers of her time, Bradstreet based her life, and therefor her
work on one of the most important political and social concepts within Puritan
theology, which was the covenant. In To my Dear and Loving Husband, which is
one of Bradstreet’s most well-known poems, she describes the covenant of two
people during marriage. “The unity of husband and wife (“If ever two were one,
then surely we…”), the requirement of exclusive devotion (“My love is such that
rivers cannot quench…”) (Stacey, R. 2016) Marriage and the bond between
husband and wife meant a lot to the Puritans. However, they also felt that their
love was not supposed to distract their faithfulness towards God.
In 1650 Dialogue between Old English and New was published in an
edition of The Tenth Muse and it showed the Anne’s concern of the trouble back in
her homeland of England. The problems that were being faced were worrisome to
Anne because Puritans were being forced to leave their country. In this work,
Anne showed her love and compassion for her homeland. In this writing, she was
older, and had several more life experience than she had in some of her earliest
work. Earl on in her writings Anne would speak more from things that she had
learned or heard from her mentors, then when she became older and had more
Colonial Period Essay
experience, she was able to write more from the heart and how she felt in writing
this piece.
Anne Bradstreet certainly made a large impact on the colonial period and
continues to be a large part of American Literature through today. She was a voice
in her time for both her homeland of England as well as the American colonies. She
was well educated and based many of her early work on what she had been taught
from others that she looked up to, like her father and other mentors. However, as
she grew older, she began to speak more from her personal feelings and events
that she had personally experienced. During her time, Anne Bradstreet
accomplished many great things, she was a dedicated wife, mother, teacher, and
poet. Most of all, Anne Bradstreet left her mark on the American Colonies and
American Literature and is still today, one of the most well-known female poets of
her time.
References
Joshua Bartlett (2014) Anne Bradstreet’s Ecological Thought, Women's Studies, 43:3, 290-304,
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2014.884902
In I. Ousby (Ed.) (2000)., Bradstreet, Anne (1612 - 1672). The Cambridge guide to literature in
English (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Credo Reference:
http://ezproxy.liberty.edu/login?
url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/cupliteng/bradstreet_anne_1612_1672/0?
institutionId=5072
Colonial Period Essay
Garrett, E. H. (2021). Poetry Fountation, Poems and Poets. Anne Bradstreet 1612-1672.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-bradstreet
Stacey, R. (2016). The Imaginative Conservative. Anne Bradstreet & the Puritan Influence on
America. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/08/anne-bradstreet-puritan-influence-
america-robert-stacey.html
