| The dissertation asserts that Bradstreet's work is best understood when we divide her career into two halves, pre- and post-1650. In the former she poses as the Renaissance poet/rhetor, pleasing a wide audience through displays of traditional humane learning; in the latter she emerges as a sincere Puritan artist, edifying a much narrower audience by demonstrating evidences of a biblically-based spiritual knowledge in her life. In The Tenth Muse (1650) Bradstreet frequently poses as the humble suppliant and inadequate apprentice (exhibiting the traits of "affected modesty"); she exhibits a skillful use of the three modes of rhetorical discourse--forensic, deliberative, epideictic; and she focuses on several popular themes of Renaissance humanism: humane learning, worldly honor, relentless fate, and immortality through fame. When viewed as a Renaissance poet/rhetor, Bradstreet in The Tenth Muse emerges as the confident manipulator of numerous rhetorical poses and devices common to seventeenth-century poetry.;In her later work, Bradstreet demonstrates Puritan humility, not affected modesty; avowed sincerity, not clever artificiality; holiness, not honor; faith, not fame. She forsakes the rhetorical, modes and "wittie" style of The Tenth Muse for the artistic forms and "plaine" style common to Puritan poetry of the seventeenth century. In these later works Bradstreet presents herself as the quintessential Puritan heroine: enduring affliction for a season, enjoying assurance in her faith, and through her art offering her family and community her life as a worthy model of Christian experience.;Despite critical assessments to the contrary, Anne Bradstreet never "rebels" against her Puritan faith. She is not a doubting, anxiety-ridden New Englander, nor is she a heretic. The difference between her early and late poetry is the result of her use of two different poetic means (the traditions of Renaissance and Puritan aesthetics), the contrasting bodies of knowledge peculiar to each poetic tradition (human and divine), and the primary ends of these two aesthetics (pleasure and edification). |
