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Anne Bradstreet's Feminist Analysis

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Anne Bradstreet (1612 – 1672) has been a long-lasting leading figure in the American literature who embodied a myriad of identities; she was a Puritan, poet, feminist, woman, wife, and mother. Bradstreet’s poetry was a presence of an erudite voice that animadverted the patriarchal constraints on women in the seventeenth century. In a society where women were deprived of their voices, Bradstreet tried to search for their identities. When the new settlers came to America, they struggled considerably in defining their identities. However, the women’s struggles were twice than of these new settlers; because they wanted to ascertain their identities in a new environment, and in a masculine society. Thus, Bradstreet employed maneuvering, ironic, and sarcastic verses in her poems to assuage the troubles of women, and to emancipate them. One of these poems is The Prologue. In this poem, Bradstreet manifested her feminist voice and approach in an unprecedented intellectual way. It would be pragmatic to elicit first what’s intended by the title of the poem. The word ‘prologue’ means a separate introductory or preface to a kind of a literary work. Thus, it can be said that Bradstreet’s poem is a prologue to the feminist movement, a prologue to the new life in America, a prologue to the American poetry, or a prologue to the search of identity. So, the term ‘prologue’ is a broad one, and it would be egregious to limit it to a certain topic. The poem tackles a diverse of identities.
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