In this chapter, I argue that attention to the concept of worldmaking and its attendant failures provides useful grounds for comparing women writers across time. I expand on recent readings of Bradstreet’s longest and most neglected poem, “The Four Monarchies,” and then consider The Virtues of Society (1799), one of three long history poems written by Sarah Wentworth Morton during the early US republic. My goal is to suggest that understanding the ways these poets engage the intellectual project of imagining and theorizing the world at moments of significant global transformation provides insights into their work individually as well as providing a framework for examining the work of other early women writers. In each case I focus on the poet’s representation of a heroic woman situated in world-historical space, Semiramis and Lady Harriet Ackland, respectively, in order to explore their engagement with historical genres, learned debates, and depictions of exceptional women.
Though both personal and political approaches to literature are relevant and revelatory, they often sidestep the manifest purpose of a poem such as Bradstreet’s—to tell the history of the world. Recent attention to worldmaking and a rapidly changing global imaginary during the early modern period provides a more robust framework for reading Bradstreet’s ambitious attempt at a universal history. Ayesha Ramachandran describes early modern “worldmaking” as “the methods by which early modern thinkers sought to imagine, shape, revise, control, and articulate the dimensions of the world,” synthesizing fragments into a comprehensive whole (pp. 6–7). Understanding Bradstreet’s poem as a form of worldmaking helps us better appreciate her literary ambition. It also helps us account for her evident failures in this poem without attributing them solely to her gender and personal circumstances or the responses of New England Puritans to the English Civil War. “[T]he great secret of the early modern system-makers,” Ramachandran explains, is that “worldmaking is possible, even necessary, because of the insurmountable gap between our fragmentary apprehension of the phenomenal world and our desire for complete knowledge of it” (p. 10). Early modern worldmaking frequently drew on metaphors of the body to imagine the world (Ramachandran 2015, p. 23 ff.). Bradstreet’s apology that “my Monarchies their legs do lack” (1678, p. 191) is as much a gesture toward the worldmaking design of the poem as it is a confession that it, like all such projects, fell short of that design.
While shared marginalization, female embodiment, and the experience of being writers whose authority is automatically doubted are understandable grounds for comparing women across time, history poems are seldom subjects for this kind of comparison. Perhaps this is because they seem too impersonal for comparisons of embodied experience while also emerging from specific historical contexts that get in the way of comparative analysis based on genre and political engagement. By attending to the worldmaking design of these poems, I build on scholarship on women’s engagement of politics in poetry and their self-consciously ambitious attempts to represent global space and world history. Wright observes with regard to Bradstreet’s “Monarchies,” “What matters in the ‘I’ of politic history is not the biographical baggage which he or she (overtly at least) brings to the task, but rather the qualities of discrimination, political judgement and apt expression which are manifest in the narrative” (p. 88). Insofar as it is possible, I focus here on qualities of discrimination and design rather than on their personal circumstances to compare these writers. One challenge, of course, is that their approaches to history differ in important ways. Bradstreet’s worldmaking is a form of universal history that was a generation old when she was writing the poems that make up The Tenth Muse, while Morton’s neoclassicism draws on the epic and her more complete knowledge of the globe, centering America and, eventually, the United States, geopolitically in ways that Bradstreet and her peers could not yet have imagined. Still, we gain some important insights that allow us to deal more substantially with the content of these poems by attending to the poets’ own ambitious representation of world history, the scholarly gestures of these works that are important components of their literary and intellectual ambition, and how exactly these poets imagined the globe. Acknowledging and appreciating the grand design in women’s history poems as well as the inevitable flaws in those designs can help us move away from attributing faults and expressions of failure to the rhetorical exigencies placed on women writers as well as their insecurities and limited educational opportunities.
“She for Her Potency Must Go Alone”: Anne Bradstreet’s Semiramis
Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a small surge in scholarship on Bradstreet’s “The Four Monarchies” that better accounts for the context and aims of this long poem by either exploring her vision of the world or situating her poem among other political works by English women writers during the seventeenth century. Jim Egan and Samuel Fallon have developed readings of Bradstreet’s worldmaking that find in her elegies a fulfillment and refinement of ideas explored in the “Monarchies.” Egan uses Bradstreet’s comparison of Alexander the Great and Sir Phillip Sidney in her elegy on Sidney to make the case that her extensive treatment of Alexander in both works was meant to connect New England to the East. Fallon distinguishes between space and time in Bradstreet’s worldmaking, and his reading of the “Monarchies” identifies a tension between the totalizing project of the history and the present time of poetic address evident in her apologies (pp. 107–108). As he explains, “Worldmaking in such moments is not a matter of charting global space, but something more modest: the careful tending of a fragile intimacy” (Fallon, p. 103). For Egan and Fallon, the elegies fulfill what is only begun in the “Monarchies” through the comparisons and identifications that this lyric genre invites. But in stressing the subtlety of Bradstreet’s “rhetorical sleight of hand” (Egan 2011, p. 23) and her modest “tending of fragile intimacy” (Fallon 2018, p. 103), both critics redirect our attention away from the naked ambition of Bradstreet’s longest poem. Scholars who focus on Bradstreet’s poem as an instance of political writing, including Susan Wiseman (2006), Mihoko Suzuki (2009), and Gillian Wright (2013), pay more attention to Bradstreet’s literary ambitions in “The Four Monarchies” as well as her complicated representation of monarchy.
Anne Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in two works, “The Four Monarchies” and the elegy “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory,” provides an opportunity for thinking about politics, worldbuilding, and genre.5 This notorious queen was known both as an empire builder and as a licentious manipulator. She is rumored to have had her husband Ninus killed in order to gain the throne and then to have had an incestuous relationship with her son, Ninias, or to have dressed as him in order to rule in his place. In the elegy, Bradstreet uses these qualities to raise Queen Elizabeth in comparison:
But time would fail me, so my tongue would to,
To tell of half she did, or she could doe.
Semiramis to her, is but obscure,
More infamy then fame, she did procure.
She built her glory but on Babels walls,
Worlds wonder for a while, but yet it falls.
(Bradstreet 1678, p. 212)
Bradstreet’s use of the inexpressibility topos in this passage builds on Semiramis’ accomplishments as the known quantity, which serves to elevate Elizabeth’s greatness while also striking a warning note about the decline of past empires.
Bradstreet’s treatment of Semiramis in “Monarchies” illuminates the ways in