Death and Resilient Love: Bradstreet, Adams, and Wheatley

The works of Bradstreet, Adams and Wheatley in a sense distill the hardness of colonial life, though each having come from various degrees of perceived privilege at the time. Each had a unique existence in the life of the prevailing culture, though the subject and intended audience of the writing of each tends to put into focus the narrative of the times but addressed to an intimate. In reading all three, it was quite evident that the personal struggles for first survival, followed by recognition from their inner circle, combining these two into a commentary on the larger world. Wheatley speaking of her experience as a house slave, herself a revolutionary and first lady, and Bradstreet speaking to being a new immigrant settler. Out of these three writers Adams is the only one who had been born in the colonies, the other two were brought.

In the work of Bradstreet she writes often about infant mortality, which in the modern Western mind seems depressing and antiquated. Though to the mind of a woman of that time and even to this day in many parts of the world pregnancy and childbirth is a life threatening undertaking, with many children passing in their first months of life. Bradstreet addresses the loss of two of her grandchildren in the poems In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665, Being a Year and Half Old and On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet Who Died on 16 November, 1669, being but a Month, and One Day Old. In her poem entitled Before the Birth of One of Her Children, Bradstreet laments about the anxiety she feels and the fear she has of losing this child or her own life, it is best illustrated in the final line of the poem, “These O protect from stepdame's injury. And if cha...

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...ut they can no more, While Death reigns tyrant o'er this mortal shore.”

Each one of these writers is a reflection naturally of their times but what causes their work to continue to resonate is the absolutely honest way the hardships of womanhood and colonial life inform our national demeanor. All three in their writing are trying to cope with the conditions in front of them, the perils of being a woman of their times. The heartbreak of watching their children and grandchildren die in front of them, starvation, the loss of livelihood and the ever evolving definition of having a homeland. For all three women death was a constant companion, as was God and a sense of duty to their ventures in their new lands, mostly though I see a deep kind of resilient love in their bodies of work. It is that resilient love and optimism that makes American writing, American writing.