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

There are not many major female writers in American Literature, and piece of writing, traditionally, has always been viewed as a masculine activity. It is indeed very interesting, and even ironic, that the first author published in the newly established Puritan society on the American soil, Anne Bradstreet, was a female. Indeed, Bradstreets poems are fill 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 patriarchy that she lived in and her identity as a female.Bradstreets poems are focused on the simple pleasures found in the realities of the present. She rejoices in the presence of nature 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 e mbraces this, but at the same time questions the views towards females. Women in Puritan society played a subordinate persona 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 ...