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Even as Puritanism mandated self-subordination to God, Anne Bradstreet invested herself in numerous roles, among them not only dutiful daughter and Puritan, but also devoted wife, mother, grandmother, poet, admirer of nature, and advocate of women's worth. Numerous attempts to privilege one of these positions over others suggest efforts to disclose the "real" Anne Bradstreet, but such readings tend toward oversimplification of her complexity.1 Needless to say, however, Bradstreet predates the twentieth-century decentering of the self by some 300 years. As Ivy Schweitzer notes, "Postmodern theory displaces the feminine and revalorizes alterity, while Puritan doctrine appropriates and neutralizes themthe traditions differ in many crucial ways, not the least of which is the logocentrism of Puritanism that postmodern theory is committed to deconstructing" (The Work of Self-Representation 33). Yet in response to the strictures of her era, Bradstreet cultivates her identity through multiple modalities of self, in a manner both deliberate and intricate. Her quaternions, an important but underestimated early work, enable her to examine the possibilities of performativity for self-assertion, particularly in the context of patriarchy.2 Poems in the quaternions constitute performances of her characters' distinct but related identities, both in the sense of performance delineated by Judith Butler, that which "has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality" (Gender Trouble 136), and in the sense of role-playing and theatrics that Butler distinguishes from her own conceptualization of the performative.3 Bradstreet's comparable distinction in the quaternions underlines her male figures' aggression toward unity within and among females, as well as the males' renunciation of temporality, while the female characters demonstrate alternate possibilities to this "masculine" behavior. In subsequent poems, Bradstreet reacts against patriarchy's same restraints on herself by engaging in disparate roles one at a time. Through this deployment of identity, she maintains multiple aspects of herself in a way that mitigates their forbidden integration.
Bradstreet's quaternions provide the lead work in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, a volume that Bradstreet's brother-in-law first published in England in 1650, evidently without her knowledge.4 As Perry Miller explains, in an era that subordinated women to men and men to God, "women who stepped beyond their domestic confines through literature-by reading or writing-were considered dangerous to themselves and society.... Puritans...