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Anne Bradstreet

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Anne Bradstreet
Essay Exam #1

A) Anne Bradstreet poem “A prologue” she is stating that she is different because she is a woman that writes. Woman were not supposed to write and speak their minds. She states “But simple…my skill”(1), she is saying that her skill is simple compared to his. But you can tell there is a hint of sarcasm behind her writing. She is writing this to try to fool people into thinking that she thinks woman cannot write.

B) Anne Bradstreet’s “A prologue” is an apology. An apology is a form of poetry that puritans often involved a self-effacing or self-humbling stance. The poet either apologizes directly or in directly. She also shows examples of backsliding. Backsliding is a term the puritans used to show even the ones that were among the most elect might diverge from the behavior that God required them to do.

C) Anne Bradstreet has a lot of examples for backsliding. Back then woman are not supposed to write and were only supposed to have children and stay in the kitchen to cook food for their families. Woman were seen more as objects than as human beings. She acknowledges her role as a woman in society but does not agree with it. She even recognizes the supposed superiority that men have over woman, “ Men can…it well” (40). She also relizes what she is doing is out of the ordinary for woman at the time, “I am…tongue”(25) she is showing that she knows that she is a woman that has a mind of her own and that it is difficult to please the people around her because of it. She goes on to agknowlwdge the role of woman in the puritan days by saying, “who…fits”(26). She apologizes to those around her by trying to put herself down sarcastically and with humor. In the first stanza she even says that there are some things she shouldn’t be writing about, like war. She realized that even if she were to write a good poem that most people would thing she stole it or someone else wrote it and she put her name on it, but she kept writing because that was what she liked to do. She wanted to show that woman were inferior to men.

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