Anne Bradstreet's "Prologue": Her Rhetorical Strategy and Its Effect

When Anne Bradstreet wrote her first book in 1650, Puritan sensibilities concerning the woman's role were stringently defined. Women were considered subordinate to men and intellectually inferior. As a result, women were largely confined to their domestic roles. This did not include writing literature, and certainly not publishing it, so when Anne Bradstreet published The Tenth Muse she was acutely of aware of the challenges she faced as a woman writer. However, it is her response to these social constraints that provides one of the most dynamic elements in her writing. In the "Prologue" that introduces The Tenth Muse, Bradstreet anticipates the skepticism of her audience and skillfully forestalls it by using satire to both prove her poetic skill and to consol a threatened male audience .

Satire, as a rhetorical device, has been used by authors for centuries to mask truth in humor, and has often been used out of necessity as well as for its effect. Author's such as Jonathon Swift and Voltaire would have found their very lives threatened for espousing their political views had they not been cleverly disguised within the humor of their work. For they as well as Bradstreet understood that the safest way to undermine suspicious authorities was to make them laugh. Bradstreet does this brilliantly in the "Prologue" by using satire to produce a feigned humility that seems to concede to the male's superiority in one stanza, only to subtly deride it in the next. In this way, she uses satire to confuse the gender issue, and ultimately to gain some ground for her cause.