In
The Work of Self-Representation Ivy Schweitzer examines
early American poetry through the critical lens of gender. Her
concern is not the inclusion of female writers into the canon;
rather, she analyzes how the metaphors of "woman" and "feminine"
function in Puritan religious and literary discourse to represent
both the "otherness" of spiritual experience and the ways in which
race and class function to keep the "other" in marginalized
positions.
Schwetizer argues that gender was for seventeenth-century new
England -- and still is today -- a basic and most politically
charged metaphor for the differences that shape identity and
determine cultural position. To glimpse the struggle between gender
ideology and experience, Schweitzer provides close readings of the
poetry of four New Englanders writing between the Great Migration
and the first wave of the Great Awakening: John Fiske, Edward
Taylor, Anne Bradstreet, and Roger Williams.
Schweitzer focuses exclusively on lyric poetry, she says, because a
first-person speaker wrestling with the intricacies of individual
consciousness provides fruitful ground for exploring the politics
of voice and identity and especially problems of authority,
intertextuality, and positionality. Fiske and Taylor define the
orthodox tradition, and Bradstreet and Williams in different ways
challenge it. Her treatment of the familiar poetry of Bradstreet
and Taylor is solidly grounded in historical and literary
scholarship yet suggestive of the new insights gained from a gender
analysis, while discussions of Fiske and Williams bring their
little-known lyric work to light.
Taken together, these poets' texts illustrate the cultural
construction of a troubled masculinity and an idealized, effaced
femininity implicit in the Puritan notion of redeemed subjectivity,
and constitute a profoundly disturbing and resilient part of our
Puritan legacy.