Anne Bradstreet's Expectations Of A Puritan

Benjamin Franklin once said that “God helps those who help themselves.” People like Anne Hutchinson, an antinominalist, and Roger Williams – founder of Rhode Island – were banished by puritans because they wanted to separate the church and the state or did not follow the rules of the Puritan leaders. Since the first amendment was added to the Constitution, no one is forced to practice a religion in this modern world. Everyone has different opinions about god and what they believe in; they have their own way of showing. William Bradford, a man with a marvelous spirit and wisdom who dedicated his entire life to God, Anne Bradstreet (first noteworthy American poet), and Jonathan Edwards – last American Puritan defender of New England Calvinism

Anne Bradstreet’s “work reflects the religious and emotional conflicts [that] she experienced as a woman writer and as a Puritan” (Martin). In the poem “The Prologue,” Bradstreet says that “for such despite they cast on female wits./If what I do prove well, it won’t advance;/They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance” (72). She is stating that if a female even writes a paper, it is not going to have a future; the society, especially men, would declare that she supposedly stole a wise men’s writing. Bradstreet lived in the time when men were the only one who had the power to write; writing meant showing the intelligent and women were not meant to have wisdom in that time period. Men were meant to be philosophically intelligent, whereas women neither had the power to perform anything nor had a say in any matter; they could not accomplish anything. Bradstreet compares the power of women’s voice to a young “schoolboy’s tongue” from whom nothing is expected

Heaven gave Bradstreet “the prolongation of earthly joys, rather than a renunciation” of the life that she lived in earth (Martin). As of the poem, Bradstreet loved heaven because it gave her the eternity; the more she looked at the heaven, the more she gotten amused by the creation of it. On the contrary, modern people would believe they are in heaven only because of the pleasures they enjoyed in their life. Bradstreet believes that it “is by His hand alone that guides nature and fate” (78). She knows that people born and die; it is an endless cycle of life created by