Thomas morton

• He writes The New English Canaan.

• He is an Anglican > these “religions” cannot be tolerated by Puritans. They did not tolerate dissent (whatever different from them).

• Bradford writes about Morton as if he were the devil.

• We can compare what Bradford said and what Morton has to say about the same place and realize how different their visions are.

• Drinking was forbidden (temperance movement > com la llei seca). It had become a political issue. Morton is described as an alcoholic, vicious person (this makes the other people stop respecting him).

• In the episode of the May Pale (Palo de Maig UN PAAAALOOOO UN PAAAAAAAAALO), Morton lets his men dancing with Indian women, even having sex relation with them. This is the worst of the worst for Bradford > sex, corruption, alcohol, party (Bradford is like a beata amargà).

• He says the opposed vision from Bradford: “the more I looked, the more I liked it.”

• Morton is a competition to Bradford > they are not opposed only by religion, but for economical interests too > the both of them wanted to trade with the Americans.

Anne bradstreet

• She is a puritan educated in England who writes poetry.

• She is highly knowledgeable. When she arrives to the colony, she feels terrible: “my heart tends”.

• She is married with a man she loves (strange fact in those years).

• She did not want to publish, because she would have become a public woman and public woman means prostitute. Her brother-in-law publishes her poems without her consent.

• As a high society-woman, she should not want to be published and then become public (es fa la remolona, com a que no vol, encara que en realitat sí) > authorship.

• She is a woman writing at a time when they are not supposed to be writing.

• Pen name are usually used by women writers, but American literature does not use pen names > they write as women.

• She comes in the 2^nd wave of Puritans. She arrives in 1613 with John Winthrop.

• She writes about her love towards her husband > Puritan housewife devoted with her husband and with her family (love as a congregation with God).

• She is published without her permission and in the 2^nd edition she tries to “authorship” her work.

• You write or read too much > you will become mad (general thought, especially for women) > they wanted people to be illiterate, to manipulate them easier (just as nowadays).

• She writes about daily life > the first woman who writes about American women’s daily life> pregnancy, love to her husband, children…

• She writes in plane style > it is direct and its main aim is the adoration of love weaned affections > they cannot feel love to things we find on Earth.

• The personal (house, children, husband…) can become political > she defends women writers > she was not working class.

• High class women can only leave home if they get married. Poor women have to leave home to work.

Page 100: To the burn of her house.

She thinks (as all the Puritans) that it is a good thing to have her house burnt > suffering is good (for God). God bless you (although terrible things happening to you).

• The more you suffer, the more God is with you (the more he loves you).

The style of Puritan writing (al dossier):

1. Protestant: against ornamentation, reverence for the Bible.

2. Purposiveness: purpose to Puritan writing:

• To transform a mysterious God (mysterious because he is separated from the world).

• To make him more relevant to the universe.

• To glorify God.

3. Puritan writing reflected the character and scope of the reading public, which was literate and well-grounded in religion.

The first poem, The author to her book was written to a second edition in order to justify her authorship. She had to streak a balance in her community between her authorship and her role as a mother, and she achieved it. That poem has three different parts:

1. In the first she justifies the creation of the poem;

2. She looks to her poems already collected in a book (she tries to rewrite them in a better way, but she realizes it's impossible). Her book isn't perfect, but people like it, so she's proud of her work.

Before the birth of one of her children isn't written for her children. In the 17th century in the colony she knew that if she gets pregnant she might die. So she is writing a kind of last letter or will to her husband, and he must read it just in case she dies. She's not concern about her children in that poem. She is talking about love and about the irrevocable death. She also knows that if she dies, her husband will marry another woman (as it was normal inside the puritan society). The step-mother wouldn0t love Anne's children, because she will have her own children. So Bradstreet is advising her husband what to do. At the end she asks him to remember her through her poems.

As we can observe in her poems, she really loved her husband (on the opposite of what used to happen in her times).We can observe it in the third poem: To my dear and loving husband. There's a lot of poetry about impossible love, but not about the husband. To write her poem she got inspiration from The Song of Songs (the Book of Salomon). She considered her husband the perfect husband, and she the luckiest wife. Her love will go on after death.

She wrote in plain style: the main objective is the adoration of God (weaned afflictions: they could not express absolute love for things in Earth).

-Writing supposed an opportunity for introspection (the family Bible, which wasn't published).

- In page 86 she wrote about the problems of being a writing woman. The poem is her personal protest to those people who thought women should remain at home doing the housework (her domestic sphere became the inspiration for literature and poetry). And at the same time she reviewed politics.

She was not working class because she was the daughter and wife of governors. For intellectual Spanish women who wanted to write, convents were the unique option. However, Bradstreet was free of the terrible experiences of the women of her time.

In reference to her children she talked about the "nest syndrome" that many mothers feel when their children leave home. She was justifying herself as a good mother, a sacrificial one. The second part of the poem explains what they did about the boys, she led them fly alone, but aristocratic women in the colony couldn't leave home alone, they needed a mate. They stayed at home looking after their parents, the nephews... In the 3rd part she's worried about the real world. In the 4th part she's afraid of being forgotten after her sacrifice. Her poetry is a way to remember her, a way of talking to her children after death.

In these poems Simon (her husband) doesn't appear, and that' very strange because she was deeply in love with him. She was trying to say that motherhood and the children are completely hers. It's a kind of opposition against the patriarchy in the colony. It's a beautiful poem about mother's love, which is limitless.

Page 100, Here follows some verses upon the burning of our house this poem has a silly, vulgar inspiration. Everything which happened was a symbol of God's Will. That fact was a test for being part of the elect. She saw the invisible (God) through the visible (the burning of her house to ashes). In that time there were no psychologists, but the Bible, so she had two options: get depressed or, as a puritan, turn that terrible deal into positive experience. In the 1st part she's repeating the puritan theory that she couldn't do anything against God's Will. In the 2nd part she's remembering everything she had lost, but she realized that it was too much material ("adieu, adieu all's vanity). Here rhetorical questions appear: do you love artificial things? But her discourse sounds so artificial. She finishes with puritan words: "my hope and treasure lies above".