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Women’s Studies: An interdisciplinary journal
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Deborah’s Ghost
Zach Hutchins a{ }^{a}
a{ }^{a} Colorado State University, Fort Collins Published online: 04 Apr 2014.
To cite this article: Zach Hutchins (2014) Deborah’s Ghost, Women’s Studies: An interdisciplinary journal, 43:3, 332-345, DOI: 10.1080/ 00497878.2014.884906
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DEBORAH’S GHOST
ZACH HUTCHINS
Colorado State University, Fort Collins
“Awake, awake, Deborah: awake, awake, utter a song.”
-Judges 5:12
On January 19, 1637, when John Wheelwright stood to deliver a fast-day sermon to the congregants of Massachusetts Bay, he urged his listeners to “prepare for a spirituall combate” and then followed this general exhortation with a specific directive to “shew our selves courageous” as “all the men of Israeli, Barak and Deborah and Jael, all must out and fight for Christ” (Wheelwright 158-59). These words would lead to Wheelwright’s banishment for sedition; when John Winthrop wrote an account of the Antinomian controversy, he cited this passage of the sermon as evidence that Wheelwright sought to deepen the colonial divide between advocates of free grace, including John Cotton and Ann Hutchinson, and proponents of a more methodological approach to salvation, such as Thomas Shepard and Thomas Weld (Winthrop 286-87). 1{ }^{1} In a community split by religious difference, Winthrop would have considered any reference to “spirituall combate” incendiary, but Wheelright’s invocation of Deborah as a divinely authorized military leader and female judge of Israel must have been particularly galling for Winthrop, who believed that Hutchinson’s attempts to exercise spiritual leadership had instigated the colony’s decline into dissension. In holding up Deborah and Jael as exemplars and reminding listeners of their roles in leading the covenanted “men of Israeli” to battle, Wheelwright implicitly endorsed the efforts of his sister-in-law, Hutchinson.
As far as we know, Hutchinson herself never called on Deborah as an authorizing precedent in her trial before
- Address correspondence to Zach Hutchins, Colorado State University, 339 Eddy Hall, Campus Delivery 1773, Fort Collins, CO 80523. E-mail: zach.hutchins@colostate.edu
1{ }^{1} For the best synthetic account of this debate, see Winship. ↩︎
Winthrop. Instead, she justified her right to immediate revelation with allusions to masculine figures such as Abraham, Daniel, and Jesus Christ, appropriating “scriptural models,” Michael Ditmore (“Prophetess in her own country”) explains, “generally considered off limits” (375). 2{ }^{2} However, in a biblical dispute about the right of women to speak with religious authority in mixed company, Deborah is conspicuous by her absence; James Byrd’s survey of scriptural citation in colonial sermons suggests that the Judges account of Deborah was one of the five texts most frequently quoted during periods of conflict (170, 73-93). Winthrop informed Hutchinson that “We are your judges, and not you ours,” but Wheelwright’s sermonic tribute to Deborah certainly suggested otherwise (“The Examination” 316).
As a composer of holy song, Deborah would also seem to have been the ideal biblical model for a Puritan poet such as Anne Bradstreet. Bradstreet, like Hutchinson, never mentioned this singularly female judge of Israel by name; however in “A Dialogue Between Old England and New” (1642), Bradstreet does introduce this “prophetess” who “judged Israel” indirectly (Judges 4:4). 3{ }^{3} As the figure of New England speaks to Old England in condemnation of those who refuse to fight on behalf of true religion, she declares,
Blest be thy Preachers, who do chear thee on, O cry: the sword of God, and Gideon:
And shall I not on those wi[s]h Mero’s curse,
That help thee not with prayers, arms, and purse. (Works 147) 4{ }^{4}
- 2{ }^{2} This preference for masculine role models anticipates the rhetoric of female Quaker preachers, who Phyllis Mack notes likewise preferred comparisons to male prophets (141).
3{ }^{3} Judges 4:4. While some today may find the term “prophetess” demeaning or belittling, I use it in this article because there is no simple English substitute; the Hebrew word used here is not the same as that used to describe male mouthpieces for divinity, hence the decision by King James Version translators to differentiate between prophet and prophetess.
4{ }^{4} Citations of Bradstreet’s poetry are from The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet. However, because this edition of Bradstreet’s poems does not include line numbers, all references to Bradstreet will cite page numbers. After consulting a 1650 edition of Bradstreet’s poems, I have changed the word “with” in the line above to “wish”; despite the care of McElrath and Robb, I believe that this particular word has-understandably-been mistranscribed due to a worn-out typeface that exaggerated the similarity of the long ss to the lower case tt in seventeenth-century publishing (The Tenth Muse 188). ↩︎
In these four lines Bradstreet alludes to the same pantheon of biblical judges celebrated by Wheelwright, but only Gideon’s name is mentioned; the names of Deborah and Jael-now associated, thanks to Wheelwright, with the banished Hutchinson-have disappeared. Instead, we can infer Deborah’s presence in the poem via a reference to the curse of Meroz, a biblical city whose inhabitants (like those New England chastises here) refused to aid Deborah in her campaign against the Canaanites: “Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof; because they came not to the help of the Lord” (Judges 5:23). Because of Wheelwright’s sermon and Hutchinson’s trial just five years earlier, the figure of Deborah had become inflammatory enough that Bradstreet buried her tribute to the female judge in a circuitous chain of biblical allusion. As Timothy Sweet argues, “feminine subjectivity . . . appears only as an absence” in many of Bradstreet’s public poems; Bradstreet never mentions Deborah’s name, but the ghost of the prophetess lurks in “A Dialogue” (165).
The figure of Deborah similarly haunts Bradstreet’s elegy “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth, of Most Happy Memory,” a poem written in 1643, the year when Hutchinson-undoubtedly the most charismatic woman Bradstreet had ever known personally-died. As in the earlier “Dialogue,” a single, tenuous line evokes Deborah’s presence, as it “bleating stands before thy [Elizabeth’s] royall Herse” (Works 155). The timid and tremulous bleating of Deborah’s ghost in this line also re-presents the voices of Jael and Bathsheba, forceful and powerful women with whom Bradstreet identifies in the poem. This line, with its religious implications and biblical resonances, seems oddly out of place in an elegy that compares Elizabeth to women from classical history and thus epitomizes the enduring puzzle of Bradstreet’s poetry-a persistent tension between public, apparently secular, poems that openly challenge gendered stereotypes and private, devotional poems that generally seem to re-inscribe Puritan orthodoxy; Bradstreet was, Robert Boschman argues, “caught between personal and communal claims and values” (32). 5{ }^{5} Abram Van Engen suggests that this division is to be
- 5{ }^{5} Scholars who emphasize Bradstreet’s orthodoxy include Daly and Hammond; the more recent trend in Bradstreet scholarship has accentuated her rebellion against Puritan doctrine and culture; see Harvey, Oser, and Ditmore’s “Bliss Lost, Wisdom Gained: Contemplating Emblems and Enigmas in Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations.’” ↩︎
expected, because “[a]ccording to Puritan ideological norms . . . private and public were distinct categories that could be defined and kept apart,” and he, with others, has praised Bradstreet for successfully negotiating this binary (50). 6{ }^{6} But the muted voices of the biblical women haunting Bradstreet’s elegy for Elizabeth highlight the strain Bradstreet felt in keeping those spheres separate-divesting public poems that challenge gender hierarchies of religious content while withholding comments on gender from poems that affirm Puritan orthodoxies. Deborah’s ghost attests to the price of Bradstreet’s poetic success.
Moreover, the elegy “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth” openly rejects sexist prejudice; Elizabeth’s accomplishment, Nancy Wright explains, “disproves derogatory ideas about women” (257). Frankly acknowledging “th’ aspersion of her Sex,/That women wisdom lack to play the Rex,” Bradstreet unconditionally rejects notions of a feminine inferiority (Works 156). But the female figures to which Bradstreet compares this Protestant Queen, whose religious identity distinguished her from contemporary monarchs as much as her sex, are drawn exclusively from classical antiquity: Minerva, Semiramis, Tomris, Dido, Cleopatra, and Zenobia. Only Bradstreet’s reference to Elizabeth as “our dread Virago” might subtly hint at a Christian identity (Works 156). The word virago became a synonym for Amazon in the Renaissance, but as Rosemary Guruswamy first noted with respect to Bradstreet’s poem, virago is also the Latin word Jerome used to describe Eve in her prelapsarian state; virago is an expansion of the Latin for man, vir, just as the English woman builds on man (108). 7{ }^{7} Bradstreet also refers to Elizabeth as a phoenix (Works 156)-the bird, John Hill reminds us, widely deployed as a type of Christ in the seventeenth century (611-13). But beyond these hypothetical classical allusions to Christ and Eve, the author of that “aspersion” on the female sex, Bradstreet’s elegy represents Elizabeth as a pagan ruler wholly divorced from the Christian context in which she won victories for the Protestant cause over Catholic foes from Spain, Portugal,
- 6{ }^{6} On Bradstreet’s navigation of the public/private binary, see also Hall and Schweitzer. Alice Henton stresses the “female voice” of Bradstreet’s public, predominantly secular poems in The Tenth Muse (309).
7{ }^{7} Beyond any potential biblical resonances, Bradstreet certainly thought of the title virago as an appropriate honorific for pagan queens; she applied it to Sisigambis (Works 96) and Cleopatra (Works 135, 476) in “The Foure Monarchies.” ↩︎
and Ireland. This curious effacement of Elizabeth’s identity as a Christian and specifically Protestant queen might easily have been remedied by tying her to biblical heroines like Deborah or Jael, but Bradstreet deliberately elides these logical comparisons from the poem.
A single line from the elegy’s proem suggests the intentionality of Bradstreet’s biblical omissions. After a brief celebration of Elizabeth’s accomplishments, Bradstreet notes:
That men account it no impiety,
To say, thou wert a fleshly Deity:
Thousands bring off’rings (though out of date)
Thy world of honours to accumulate,
'Mongst hundred Hecatombs of roaring Verse,
Mine bleating stands before thy royall Herse. (Works 155)
These lines explain the guiding principles of Bradstreet’s prosody, presenting her poem as the product of two paired binaries. The first set of contrasting ideals is manifest in the rhymed pair Verse/Herse, which frames the poem in terms of gender; here Verse plays on the Latin for man, vir, positioning Bradstreet’s elegy-Herse or hers-in opposition to the poetic tributes of Elizabeth’s male admirers, the virs or “men” who have already composed elegiac “off’rings.” The masculine verse of these elegists is linked to pagan sacrifice and set in opposition to a feminine poetics allied with Christian typology. The verse of men, Bradstreet suggests, is a “roaring” akin to that produced by the oxen sacrificed on Greek and Roman altars to pagan gods, the “hecatombs” that Homer describes in his Iliad. Bradstreet’s poem on the other hand-the memorial Herse preserving memories of Elizabeth’s deeds-is characterized as a young lamb “bleating” before Elizabeth’s funeral procession. Set in opposition to offerings burned before pagan gods, this lamb connotes an alternative Judeo-Christian history of sacrifice and ties Bradstreet’s feminine poetics to a biblical tradition of sacred song. In other words, Bradstreet self-identifies as a female Christian poet in the proem of her elegy for Elizabeth and then deliberately abandons that posture in the balance of the poem, “speaking,” Ivy Schweitzer argues, “as a masculine subject” (293). This sublimation of self in the masculine, pagan poetics that dominate her tribute to Elizabeth thus represents a choice that illuminates Bradstreet’s sense of the conflict between personal identity and public performance.
The modest, biblical Bradstreet disappears from view in lines that follow, a disappearance explained by the scriptural echoes associated with her lamb. Jesus Christ, that “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” is the most obvious referent for Bradstreet’s “bleating”; she, like most Christians, believed that Jesus’s voluntary death on the cross was an antitype of the paschal lamb sacrificed annually by ancient Israelites (Revelation 13:8). But other scriptural representations of lambs seem equally, or even more appropriate source texts for Bradstreet’s selfidentification with a yearling sheep.
For example, as a stand-in for Bradstreet’s feminine poetics, the lamb from which this bleating emerges is, crucially, female-a ewe lamb. And even before The New England Primer began teaching children the rhyme “Uriah’s beauteous Wife/Made David seek his Life” as an aide to help young readers recognize the letter uu, every Puritan child knew the story of David, Bathsheba, and the ewe lamb (Figure 1). In the Bible, when King David sees Bathsheba bathing, he sends for and sleeps with her, then effectively murders Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to prevent recriminations. The prophet Nathan responds by confronting David with a parable:
There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: but the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man that was come unto him; but took the poor man’s lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. (2 Samuel 12:1-4)
When the king hears Nathan’s story, he erupts in outrage, demanding that the rich man be brought to justice. Of course, Nathan reveals that David is the rich man and Bathsheba the ewe lamb he has stolen from Uriah. For a Puritan poet like Bradstreet, to invoke the image of a ewe lamb bleating before royalty is, necessarily, to recall the dilemma of Bathsheba summoned to King David’s bed.
Formal exegeses of this passage from the Bible invariably focus on the sins of David, but Bradstreet re-writes Nathan’s parable in a single line of her elegy, re-centering the story around
FIGURE 1 The New England Primer. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
an interrogation of Bathsheba’s agency. While Nathan equates David’s adultery with the theft and murder of a poor man’s yearling sheep, Bradstreet’s self-identification as a bleating ewe lamb reminds the reader that Bathsheba, the lamb of Nathan’s parable, hardly died. Indeed, Bathsheba lived long enough to ensure that Solomon, her son by David, would inherit the throne. Bathsheba’s problem, Bradstreet reminds readers, is not death but an imbalance of social power that muted her voice; when King David “sent messengers, and took her,” the roaring of Judah’s lion drowned out the bleating of a lamb (2 Samuel 11:4). 8{ }^{8} In
- 8{ }^{8} David and his royal descendants in the Israelite house of Judah are commonly identified with lions in the Bible, at least in part because of a prophecy in the book of Genesis: “Judah is a lion’s whelp” (49:9). In the context of Bradstreet’s poem, David’s actions also recall the proverb, “As a roaring lion … so is a wicked ruler over the poor people” (Proverbs 28:15). ↩︎
the absence of male family members, what could this woman defined by her relationship to men, “this Bath-sheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah,” do (2 Samuel 11:3)? Bathsheba is not killed but rather coerced into a conspiracy of silence, a fate that Bradstreet-ensconced in a similarly patriarchal culture that identified her as the daughter of Thomas Dudley and wife of Simon Bradstreet long before it recognized her as a poetempathetically takes upon herself. When Bradstreet acknowledges herself the inheritor of a feminine, Christian poetics and then abandons that aesthetic before the roaring conventions of masculine, pagan verse, she reenacts the silencing of Bathsheba. Thus, Bradstreet’s elegy for Elizabeth both celebrates the accomplishments of a female monarch and mourns the constriction of choice endured by women living in a culture of masculine privilege and testosterone-induced roaring. Indeed, the absence of open references to Bathsheba and other biblical comparisons for Elizabeth attests to Bradstreet’s own poetic constriction, her inability to frame arguments for gender equality in the explicitly religious context of a feminine Christian poetics; she, like Bathsheba, endures the imposition of masculine expectations in relative silence.
Although Bradstreet eventually abjures “bleating” for a feminized version of the “roaring Verse” produced by male Renaissance poets, she remained confident that the dead Elizabeth-to whom she addresses the proem-would have understood and approved of her subtle tribute to Bathsheba. Bradstreet reasons that
Thou never didst, nor canst thou now disdaine,
T’ accept the tribute of a loyall Braine;
Thy clemency did yerst esteeme as much
The acclamations of the poore, as rich;
Which makes me deeme, my rudeness is no wrong. (Works 155)
Here Bradstreet emphasizes the specifically feminine quality of her bleating by characterizing the elegy as “tribute of a loyall Braine,” associating her verse with an organ gendered female by Renaissance medical practitioners. And as Tamara Harvey demonstrates, Bradstreet’s conception of the “Braine” was shaped by the medical theories of Helkiah Crooke, who characterized that
feminine organ as “‘a Iudge’ overseeing the ‘wel gouerned Citty or Common-wealth’ of the body” (23; see also 12-14). Unlike King David in Nathan’s parable of the ewe lamb, Queen Elizabeth esteems rich and poor, men and women equally; Bradstreet insists that Elizabeth would sympathize with her elaboration of Bathsheba’s plight even as she hints that this bleating “tribute of a loyall Braine” represents another famous Old Testament woman: Deborah, judge of Israel.
By synecdochally characterizing herself as a brain-the female judge of a larger body-paying tribute to a national heroine, Bradstreet positions herself as Deborah to Elizabeth’s Jael. After the Israelites crossed the river Jordan, they labored twenty years in bondage to the Canaanites, and Deborah, speaking with the authority of God, commanded the Israelites to rebel against their overlords. When the Israelite host prevailed in battle, the Canaanite captain, Sisera, escaped “to the tent of Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite,” and Jael sealed the victory in gruesome fashion: she “took a nail of the tent, and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground” (Judges 4:4, 17, 21). Notwithstanding Deborah’s position of responsibility and her oversight of Israelite war efforts, the biblical narrative privileges Jael’s heroics as the dramatic pivot around which the conflict turns. In celebration of this national triumph and Jael’s exploits, Deborah composes a lengthy song of praise; the Bible emphasizes Deborah’s poetic prowess more than her role in the actual battle. In the proem, before her shift to a masculine and pagan verse, Bradstreet suggests that she will sing of Elizabeth’s exploits in the same manner that Deborah poetically commemorated Jael’s victory over Sisera.
For a few fleeting lines of Bradstreet’s elegy, Elizabeth is both Jael-the poem’s militarized heroine-and Deborah, leader of God’s chosen people. Likewise, Bradstreet is both Deborahdivinely inspired poet-and the humblest of subjects, a bleating lamb. In the Bible, during the course of her triumphal song, Deborah rhetorically asks herself, “Why abodest thou among the sheepfolds, to hear the bleatings of the flocks?” (Judges 5:16). Bradstreet’s own bleating elegy, seemingly lost in the roaring of pagan and masculine verses, re-poses this question to Elizabetha modern Deborah-even as it provides the answer: humility, mercy, and a commitment to proto-egalitarian principles prompt
Elizabeth to accept Bradstreet’s bleating offering. Elizabeth’s humility prevents “disdaine,” and her “clemency” is extended to both poor and rich alike. These qualities, that make Elizabeth and, implicitly, Deborah successful leaders, are also those with which Bradstreet endows Flegme in her poem on the four humors, as Carrie Blackstock first noted (232-33). But Flegme’s emergence as a symbol of feminine leadership occurs in an entirely secular context, just as Bradstreet’s elegy for Elizabeth privileges secular achievements comparable to the victories of pagan queens; neither of these public poems makes explicitly biblical arguments for gender equity. By divorcing her most forceful claims for the advancement of women from the devout and explicitly scriptural rhetoric of poems such as “Contemplations” and her paraphrase of David’s lamentation for Jonathan, Bradstreet veiled the voices and accomplishments of Deborah, Jael, and Bathsheba lest Winthrop redirect the pointed reminder he offered to Hutchinson: “We are your judges and not you ours.” Bradstreet abandoned the sacred, feminine tradition of Deborah to preserve her place in the larger community.
While extant records fail to note Bradstreet’s presence or absence at Hutchinson’s trial, both her husband and father joined Winthrop in presiding over the proceedings, and Simon Bradstreet’s exchange with Hutchinson hints at yet another interpretive possibility for his wife’s “bleating.” The court transcript records a question asked by Simon Bradstreet after Ann Hutchinson had explained her practice of holding a regular meeting to discuss religious matters with other women:
Mr. Bradstreet. I would ask this question of Mrs. Hutchinson, whether you do think this is lawful? For then this will follow that all other women that do not are in a sin.
Mrs. H. I conceive this is a free will offering.
Bradst. If it be a free will offering you ought to forbear it because it gives offence.
Mrs. H. Sir, in regard of myself I could, but for others I do not yet see light but shall further consider of it.
Bradst. I am not against all women’s meetings but do think them to be lawful. (“The Examination” 317)
This semi-obscure passage of the transcript is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is one of the only instances in which
Hutchinson appears to accept or value counsel received from her male accusers. Second, Simon Bradstreet is the only one of Hutchinson’s accusers who seems to concede the lawfulness of her actions and to endorse the intellectual pursuits of women. This uniquely sympathetic and respectful exchange may suggest prior positive social interactions between the two families, and between Anne Bradstreet and Ann Hutchinson. Simon’s defense of women’s meetings may also suggest that his wife attended similar gatherings, that Simon sought to vindicate her behavior as much as Hutchinson’s. But more importantly, in this context, Simon’s opinion-that Hutchinson ought to voluntarily forgo the meetings or “free will offering” of her time, lest she give offensealso frames Hutchinson’s meetings in biblical terms echoed by Bradstreet’s bleating tribute to Elizabeth.
When Hutchinson describes her meetings as “a free will offering,” presenting these gatherings in the sacrificial rhetoric of the Old Testament, Simon Bradstreet suggests that her obedience to social norms constraining the speech of women is more important than her metaphorical burnt offering. Simon elevates obedience above sacrifice. Simon’s advice to Hutchinson, that she cease offering the figurative sacrifice of time that a weekly women’s meeting constituted and instead obey her elders, recalls the biblical prophet Samuel’s chastisement of Saul. 9{ }^{9} When Samuel provides divine authorization for Saul’s war against the Amalekites, he insists that God demands the slaughter of all Amalekite people and animals: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” However, Saul disobeys, and as Samuel approaches the camp he hears the bleating of Amalekite lambs which Saul has preserved alive. Samuel asks, “What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears,” and Saul explains that he has “spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the Lord thy God.” Samuel’s rebuke anticipates the substance of Simon’s counsel to Hutchinson: "Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings
- 9{ }^{9} Simon’s concern that Hutchinson might give offense is specifically reminiscent of Romans 14:21-“It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak”-but the larger sentiment is certainly that of Samuel speaking to Saul. ↩︎
and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than to sacrifice." As a consequence of his disobedience, Samuel decrees, “The Lord hath rent the kingdom of Israel from Saul” (1 Samuel 15:3, 14-15, 22, 28). The lesson of Samuel, reiterated by Simon to Hutchinson, is that obedience always trumps sacrifice; even well-intended voluntary offerings, whether Saul’s lambs or Hutchinson’s meetings, may be rejected by a God whose singular concern is obedience.
Within this larger historical and biblical context, Bradstreet’s representation of poetic burnt offerings and her bleatings before a former monarch signify the rebellion of Saul; the subsequent silencing of her bleating, feminine poetry suggests a voluntary, if reluctant, prioritization of obedience to the presiding church elders of Massachusetts Bay. In other words, Bradstreet first invokes Deborah’s ghost to acknowledge the traumatic plight of women like Bathsheba, raped and coerced into silence by patriarchal power structures, then exorcises that ghost, becoming complicit in the perpetuation of a theology and culture that conflated effeminacy with subordination. Ironically, then, Bradstreet’s poem in celebration of the unmarried, “virgin” queen’s autonomy might be re-cast as verse ratifying her husband’s judgment of Hutchinson and Samuel’s judgment of Saul: obedience before sacrifice. That Bradstreet could compress such a range of biblical resonances into a single pregnant line-a single word-speaks to her skill as a poet, a skill that modern readers no longer intimately familiar with the Bible have yet to fully appreciate. That Bradstreet had to compress these potentially subversive musings into a single word speaks to the psychological price exacted by her faith and the demands of writing verse for her transatlantic readers.
If, as I have suggested, Bradstreet voluntarily set aside her own will and the sacred feminine poetics that she self-identifies with in the proem to adopt the will and verse forms of cultural fathers and a Heavenly Father, she did so in self-conscious imitation of the Lamb, Jesus Christ, who “was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Bradstreet’s silenced bleating, and the silencing of Bathsheba that it recalls, thus encapsulates the central figure and the inescapable paradox of Christianity: Jesus Christ and his promise that "Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall
lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it" (Luke 17:33). Hutchinson, who sought to save her life and standing in the community, was silenced by exile, death, and, her former neighbors believed, damnation; Bradstreet, who voluntarily surrendered one register of her expansive poetic range, preserved her life as well as her standing in the community and, presumably, in heaven. Perverse as such an application of scripture might seem to modern perspectives, it reflects the faith of a woman and a culture that accepted obedience to God as the highest possible good, the summum bonum of life. As I have argued elsewhere, this is a conclusion that Bradstreet revisited in “The Vanity of All Worldly Things”; Deborah’s ghost would continue to haunt her (Hutchins 51).
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