What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer by Ann Myles (review)

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• What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer by Ann Myles
• Rebecca M. Rosen (bio)

What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer
ann Myles
Final Thursday Press, 2022
60 pp.

Most readers of Early American Literature have encountered Mary Barrett Dyer, a follower of Anne Hutchinson, in the records of the Antinomian Controversy of 1636–38 sparked by Hutchinson's preaching. Hutchinson's ministerial trials—capped off by the discovery and exhumation of Dyer's non-normative stillbirth, delivered by Hutchinson in her work as a midwife, and buried on the advice of John Cotton—cemented popular conceptions of both women as vessels of unauthorized and unorthodox speech, rendering Dyer, "the woman who had the Monster," physical proof of spiritual error's toll on the human form (John Winthrop, Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and [End Page 227] Libertines [Ralph Smith, 1644]). Scholars of early American and Quaker studies will also recognize Mary Dyer as one of the four members of the Society of Friends executed in Boston from 1660 to 1661, eulogized afterward as martyrs. Though a highly visible presence in both those conflicts, Dyer's own story has never been easy to trace.

Now, in her poetry collection What Woman That Was, Anne Myles gives us the chance not only to encounter Dyer, but also to know her. She gives voice to Dyer, using both her recorded words (from two letters to the Massachusetts General Court) and the imagined encounters she could have had with the texts, figures, and movements of her many times and places. These include the well-documented trials involving not only the accused antinomian Hutchinson, alongside whom she was banished from Massachusetts, but also the trials of fellow executed Quakers William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, and William Leddra, as well as several epochs of nonconformist settler colonial conflicts across the Atlantic world. These poems allow us to see Dyer fully, setting caricature and sensational reportage aside (though Myles has illustrated that dichotomy for us before, in "From Monster to Martyr: Re-presenting Mary Dyer," her 2001 article in this journal (vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–30). Verse allows Myles to recast Dyer as a radical ancestor, achingly present to many who wish to be heard and seen. As "The Prologue: May-shine" suggests, these poems attempt to retrieve "the book of lost words," squaring Dyer's centrality to two major nonconformist power struggles with the glaring absence of her own testimony from the records that cover all but the last months of her life (9).

Dyer, as ventriloquized and met in conversation by Myles, is not a mute victim or zealot. Instead, she is a mystic, ecstatic in her conviction, even as her husband's settler colonial ambitions, land hunger, and desire for domestic normativity both reinforce and interfere with her religious evolution. In doing so, Myles lyrically resolves the two great ruptures in early American gender, religious, and legal history that Dyer marks with her presence to demonstrate how she became a key player in each. Myles expertly showcases Dyer's position at each point in this timeline, pulling out the threads of her nonconformist spiritual self-realization. Woven together, they portray a steady trajectory of radical activism, prophetic clarity, self-possession, and unwavering self-direction.

Teaching Myles's collection within any number of variations of the early American survey would be intuitive. It is a natural pairing with the documents of David D. Hall's Antinomian Controversy (Duke UP, 1990) and [End Page 228] alongside any seminar on women's writings or protest movements of the early Americas. The title poem, "What Woman That Was," interpolates the text of Winthrop's Short Story with Dyer's reconstructed objections, using erasure of the once-dominant propaganda pamphlet to construct a counternarrative stream of consciousness, conveying an insistent recounting by other witnesses whose voices we've lost: "the woman who at that moment knew or didn't know what she'd given birth to why her midwives had buried it in the dead of night who had fainted at the birthing who never saw it for herself the woman with two children dead now...