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

There are not many â€Å"major† female writers in American Literature, and writing, traditionally, has always been viewed as a masculine activity. It is therefore 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, Bradstreet's poems are filled with female presence. However, I also sense that Bradstreet’s 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.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Bradstreet’s 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 â€Å"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 â€Å"The Prologue†, Bradstreet questions her role, and thus a woman’s role, in writing poetry. At the end of the prologue Bradstreet writes, â€Å"Let Greeks be Greeks, and woman what they are; Men have precedency and ...