"My body / not to either state inclined": Early American Women Challenge Feminist Criticism

First, a hearty thanks to Mary Carruth for editing this wonderful volume of essays, setting up this roundtable, and formulating the questions that have set our minds at work. I want to second Marion's argument that feminist scholarship in the field of early American literature has been delayed because of a pervasive "Founders' Chic" and the hagiographic tenor of early American literary history, which colors the work of the inheritors of Perry Miller as well as the Bercovitch dissenters.

There are other reasons for this lag as well. First, in its early incarnation, feminist criticism was committed to the recovery of texts by women and the analysis of gender oppression, which focused mostly on women as its casualties. There is, as we know, a dearth of women writers in this period, though I emphasize the word "writers"; certainly, women from European and indigenous backgrounds participated widely in nonscribal forms of culture. Now, by contrast, feminist approaches have expanded to encompass gender analysis more broadly defined—including the study of masculinity, racial and ethnic identity, class status, and sexuality. But in 1991, for example, when I published The Work of Self-Representation, a study of the politics of "redeemed subjectivity" in the lyric poetry of colonial New England, I was criticized by feminists for focusing in that book on poetry by male writers and not on Anne Bradstreet's poetry. Because earlier I had published a long article about Bradstreet's use of a masculine poetic voice, I chose to devote a chapter to the cultural uses to which the early male-dominated and patriarchal Puritan hegemony put Bradstreet as a figure of cultural capital—their "gynesis," in the theoretical parlance of the day from Alice Jardine's cogent study of that concept. In that earlier critical climate, however, feminist scholarship on male writers and masculinity tended to be dismissed or invisible.

Another factor that delayed feminist scholarship on the early period is the issue of what feminist scholars are looking at in this era. The object of scholarly study in this period is different from what we might examine in the eighteenth century and certainly in the nineteenth century. In many cases, colonial European women and slave women used the Bible as a source of what they would consider feminism or female empowerment, and as an argument for their worth, authority, and position as speakers and writers. Native women looked to their specific tribal beliefs and traditions. Contemporary feminists often find such sources problematic when judged by the standards of modern notions of feminism, liberation, power, and equality. But if we are to excavate, understand, and honor the cultural work of women in our early history, we need to embrace religious documents and religious sensibilities as sources of authority for women writers and female empowerment.

The question of feminist approaches to early American and colonial literature is further complicated by the fact that women's cultural work of the time was not necessarily written or written and published solo, and sometimes took the form of nontraditional literature. Thus, it is crucial to consider the conditions of composition and publication for these early women and expand our notion of "literature" and "literacy." For example, I argue in The Work of Self-Representation that Bradstreet's first collection of poetry was taken to London by her brother-in-law and published by the authorization of the males in her family circle as a form of spin control for the early Massachusetts Bay Colony. Thanks to that firebrand Anne Hutchinson, who in the late 1630s nearly toppled the precarious colonial power structure, and Bradstreet's younger sister Sarah Keayne, who returned in 1647 from a sojourn in England with a bad case of unfettered self-expression, unfavorable reports about the fledgling plantation began reaching the mother country. It was important for colonial leaders, including Bradstreet's father, Thomas Dudley, who served as deputy governor of the colony, to emphasize the stable and metropolitan character of colonial culture, and recoup his family's honor. He could accomplish both by offering Bradstreet as proof that...