Private thread: double voicing or truth to power?
I’ll be traveling this weekend for a wedding, so I’ll have limited time to contribute to the discussion until early next week. But here are a few prompts to get you started. I’ll chime in when I can.
On Tuesday, I covered three of my favorite poems by Anne Bradstreet. Did you find any others at the Poetry Foundation that you admire? What do you love about them? What (if anything) do you find problematic about them?
Bradstreet’s poetry is known for double voicing, a rhetorical technique often used by someone with less power to disarm a more powerful audience while still delivering a subversive message. Bradstreet uses this technique in her “Prologue” to praise male writers and to suggest that her work poses no threat to them even as she subtly argues for her legitimacy as an artist. With one voice she placates patriarchy while with another voice she destabilizes it.
Bradstreet’s counterpart, Anne Hutchinson, chose to confront men in power more directly and was exiled for her trouble. It’s possible that Bradstreet, a poet, and Hutchinson, a minister, had different goals and thus cannot be compared to one another. But they were both ambitious intellectuals who chafed against the strictures of their time.