Anne Hutchinson’s “Monstrous Birth” and the Feminization of Antinomianism

Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadtenne d'etudes amencames Volume 27, Number 2, 1997, pp. 133-158 Anne Hutchinson's "Monstrous Birth11 and the Feminization of Antinomianism BryceTraister 133 In Saints and Sectaries: Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1962), Emery Battis recounts the birthing experience of a New England woman named Mary Dyer, the wife of a Boston milliner. Attended by Boston's midwife, Jane Hawkins, and a gentlewoman of good standing and "ready wit, JI Anne Hutchinson, the "travailling" Mary Dyer delivered what governor John Winthrop later came to call a "monstrous birth." As Battis tells it: This was not going well at all. Mary was a strong woman with two healthy children, and a seven-month baby should be a light load to deliver .... Hours ago there had been life evident, delivery seemed imminent. Still Mary strained and gasped, the terrible animal groans tearing through her clenched teeth .... Anne held Mary tightly in her strong arms, wrestling her to stillness against the agony as Goody Hawkins turned the child .... Anne was oblivious to the sweat which soaked her from her own efforts and the heat of the fire which must be kept burning in the closed room .... The last frightful scream tore from Marf s throat and she fell back, mercifully unconscious. It was for Anne and Goody Hawkins to see the hideous fruit of Mary's labors. A 134 Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadienne d'etu,des amencaines creature so horrible in its malformation as to bear only the slightest terrifying resemblance to mankind. It was most mercifully dead. (Battis 1962, 178) Given the fact that there exists no historical record of this particular birthing experience, Battis's dramatization of the "monstrous birth 11 is something of an historical fiction. Unverifiable as the representation may be, however, it nonetheless remains true to the meaning that the third-trimester miscarriage held for the male authorities of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, once they had been informed of the event. Moreover, as Battis brings his narrative focus to bear equally, if not predominately, on Anne Hutchinson's semiconspiratorial participation in Mary Dyer's abortive delivery, his history remains essentially consistent with much of the historical discussion of Anne Hutchinson and the antinomian controversy. 1 The core message of these historical narratives is a familiar one for Americanists: Anne Hutchinson was the origin, cause, centre, and progenitor of the social and religious dispute known today as the antinomian controversy or crisis. In the same way that Emery Battis's depiction of the "monstrous birth" focuses more on the midwife than on the mother, so does the allegorical significance of Dyer's "monstrous birth 11 reside within the purview of Hutchinson's heretically antinomian agency. To put the matter differently, Anne Hutchinson becomes the mother of Mary Dyer's terrifyingly unnatural child in the portrait provided in Saints and Sectaries, a slippage apparent in John Winthrop's first notice of the event in his History of New England: The wife of one William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, and both of them notoriously infected with Mrs. Hutchinson's errours, and very censorious and troublesome, (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations,) had been delivered of a child some few months before, October 17 (1637), and the child buried, (being stillborn,) and viewed of none but Mrs. Hutchinson and the midwife, one Hawkins's wife, a rank familist also; and another woman had a glimpse of it, who, not being able to keep Bryce Twister I 135 counsel, as the other two did, some rumour began to spread, that the child was a monster. One of the elders hearing of it, asked Mrs. Hutchinson, when she was ready to depart; whereupon she told him how it was, and said she meant to have it chronicled, but excused her concealing of it till then, (by advice, as she said, of Mr. Cotton), which coming to the governor's knowledge, he called another of the magistrates and that elder, and sent for the midwife, and examined her about it. At first she confessed...