From Monster to Martyr: Re-Presenting Mary Dyer

As scholarship in the field of seventeenth-century American literature moved beyond a primary focus on the intellectual legacy of orthodox ministers to devote more exploration to internal rifts and marginal voices, the Antinomian controversy of 1636-38 was quickly established as the dominant example of New England religious dissent and its central figure, Anne Hutchinson, came to symbolize the possibilities for women's religious expression and resistance. Even as the field continues to diversify, Hutchinson remains a touchstone for discussions of gender in the period, and she has continued to stand as the period's representative exponent of religious dissent. As befits the centrality of the Antinomian controversy within early American literary scholarship, the frameworks that have been brought to bear upon it have ranged widely: compelling studies have addressed Hutchinson as protofeminist and gender transgressor, as one who used language differently, as a religious thinker whose theology had radical social implications, and as the symbol of a new and threatening economic order.¹ Beyond interpreting Hutchinson's effect on the religious and social tensions that informed 1630s Massachusetts, scholars have traced the lasting resonance of her image within the entire tradition of American literature and culture.² Banished and excommunicated in her own time, Hutchinson has been academically institutionalized in ours. And the vast majority of studies of Hutchinson approach her as a self-contained figure: she is the exceptional woman, and she stands alone.

But this focus on Anne Hutchinson is not without problems, particularly from a feminist perspective. If our commitment to Hutchinson's importance is based in her outspokenness and the difference scholars find in her theology, selfhood, and language, the crux of the Antinomian texts surely comes at the point in her examination before the General Court where she breaks from her cagey elusiveness under questioning and, for once initiating rather than responding to discourse, speaks freely of the spiritual experiences that have brought her to her present point. This is, of course, precisely the outburst upon which the General Court seizes on her fatal claim of revelation to banish her.³ Backing into equivocation in her later church trial, and her voice absent from the record after she leaves the colony, nearly the only contemporary accounts of Hutchinson's life remain those from orthodox sources. This outcome aside, many scholars and teachers find in her a positive image of resistance and female difference within the Puritan tradition; were this not the case, she would not be the subject of as much interest as she is. But what feminist scholars have made of Hutchinson may be evidence as much of our need for the past she represents as of the adequacy of materials and narrative the Antinomian crisis provides. If we imagine this history as a fiction (as for a modern reader the title of John Winthrop's account, A Short Story of the rise, reigne, and ruine of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines, already casts it), we encounter, after all, a version of the classic tale of a female fall, in which we watch a woman pay the representational price for succumbing to the seductions of public speech and interpretive authority.

It is in no way my purpose here to argue against Hutchinson's significance. I would like, however, to unsettle our apparent attachment to her as the figure to which we grant a near-exclusive place in the narrative we have constructed around women and dissent in seventeenth-century America. For this story is not the only one available to consider. Leaving aside for now the wide range of unruly women whose more and less well-documented cases we might consider,⁴ the fact is that the larger narrative of Antinomian women's dissent has a clearly defined and compelling second chapter: the story of Hutchinson's friend Mary Dyer, her transformation from silenced object to speaking subject, from Antinomian monster to Quaker martyr. It is a story that, while far from unknown, has received strangely little attention from early Americanists, despite the rich textual resources that surround it.⁵ In one sense, to focus individually on...