History, fiction, and some space in between?

In a bit of serendipity that had the aura of the things Elizabeth Gilbert describes happening in Big Magic, around August I was doing some Mary Dyer Googling and came on a Dyer blog I had never seen, kept by an excellent independent historian, Johan Winsser, at least one of whose articles I'd read in the past. I learned some interesting details about Mary's grave and the location of the Dyer farm (which has led me to plan a visit to Newport and Boston this summer, in time for the anniversary of her June 1, 1660 execution -- but that's another post). I also learned than Winsser had an entire book on Mary and William Dyer in the publication process. I wrote to him immediately (he had seen my 2001 Dyer article and knew who I was) and he graciously sent me his manuscript in PDF. The book came out during the fall -- Mary and William Dyer: Quaker Light and Puritan Ambition in Early New England. (It had been accepted by a university press but for reasons he told me and I don't quite recall he pulled it and decided to self-publish. I just discovered it's free on Kindle Unlimited, if you're interested; of course, I purchased a copy.)  I started it right away, and after many delays, I finally finished reading and taking notes on it this week.

This is (for someone like me) an amazing book. It is the culmination of decades of research deep in all the archives, documented according to high academic standards, careful in its claims, clearly and at times beautifully written. This is the first biographical study of Mary Dyer that is actually reliable, that assembles what is known, judiciously evaluates what might be likely, and doesn't perpetuate hearsay or myths that can't be backed up by evidence, of which quite a few have accreted across centuries of Dyer-ology. I cannot begin to say the difference encountering this book at the very beginning of my work on the project makes, knowing I have accurate information to rely on and a clear indication of what primary sources I would need to check if I want to pursue further. It would have been pretty awful had I only learned about it near the end! This is a kind of scholarship I wasn't trained to do, and am not interested in doing myself, but it is so necessary.

Reading Winsser's book is also terrifying in certain ways. In my early writing I had been mostly working off my general knowledge/memory of Dyer and the Quaker "New England Martyrs" -- I wanted to get into the freedom of the project and start the more personal parts rather than distracting or intimidating myself with research. To focus on finding my voice in writing in a new way. It has been some years since I was immersed in the writings of the early Quakers in New England and the accompanying scholarship, although I have spent a great deal of time reading and taking notes on those texts in years past. Most of them are only available in image PDFs of 17th-century print, and reading them is a real headache. All the complicated specificity came back to me, all the material I need to re-master, all the belief and crazy courage and "enthusiasm" of those past people. So utterly different from me. And I wondered, why on earth do I think I can somehow interweave my life and Mary Dyer's? Outside of a few points of contact, I do not resemble her in the least. I was a Quaker once, but can hardly claim to be one now, though I have never technically withdrawn. Nor does her world in any but the faintest way resemble 2016-2017. 

My Mary Dyer has to be absolutely faithful to the historical one, so far as the facts are known and so far as I understand the world of 17th-century radical Puritanism and Quakerism (which seems to be, I will say, a good bit more than plenty of others who have written about her for a popular audience). But then, as is common for any early modern woman, so much is not known about her, and that's where imagination comes in. Winsser's blog is titled "Mary Dyer: Quaker Martyr and Enigma" and that's correct. I will write another post on what we don't know about her -- basically, it's almost everything we would want to know. We know the outline of where she lived with her husband, what children she had and whether they lived or died, where she went that got her in trouble and with whom, what she (purportedly) said in several highly-wrought encounters with authorities, and what she wrote in two letters (or rather, what she wrote in one that was later edited for publication, and in another of which we have only the edited version). And what her husband said about her in two crucial letters seeking to intervene on her behalf with the Massachusetts authorities, that may or may not be a close reflection of the intimate truth. There are crucial gaps where we know almost nothing about her life (her family and upbringing prior to her marriage; critically, what she was doing during the six years she spent away from her family in England, from which she emerged a Quaker). Mostly, we don't know the things that are the most compelling: what she felt, what she thought, why she did x, y, and z. Any of the private experiences, reflections, character traits that led to the choices she made, that any of us make. Things like Quaker beliefs and discourse and the influence of Foxe's Book of Martyrs on both self-fashioning and strategies of resistance form, as I see it, the container that shaped her and others' actions -- but there is still another level beneath that of human response and motivation that ties her story together from events of the 1630s to the events of the 1650s, that begs to be read. And that is where interpretation comes in -- or really imagination. Interpretation can work with the evidence, but it takes imagination to attempt to enter into the psyche of another and create a story for the gaps. These are the parts of Mary Dyer I am most compelled to explore.

Here is the next place I get anxious. I am so very, very far from the first person to have wanted to imaginatively reconstruct Mary Dyer. Besides the considerable number of less-reliable biographies that exist (from something like Horatio Rogers's solid entry of 1896, to many more popular and sketchy entries, which often insert scenes and dialogue we have no documentation for), there are numerous historical fictions. I knew these existed in the past; what I have learned since beginning the project is that there are a bunch of recent ones too. 

I have an ambivalent relationship to historical fiction. On one hand, I have included in my classes, and in recent years gotten more interested in thinking about it as a form -- I researched all the commentary on historical fiction in the North American Review for a paper at the NAR Bicentennial Conference in 2015 which I recycled for another conference in 2016, and found it quite fascinating and worth reflecting upon even now. I am, obviously, deeply interested in the uses of the early American past; that is, truly, one of the reasons I was first drawn to early American studies as a field: even though "presentism" in historical scholarship is highly suspect, it did feel continuingly relevant to me, and to anyone seeking to understand, live in, and create America. Historical fiction is about the past that is its subject, but also, when you dig beneath the surface, about the era it is written in, a doubleness I find compelling. But. The thought of actually reading historical fiction, especially recent fiction (novels that are not themselves historical texts) on figures I have studied and care about, like Mary Rowlandson or, of course, Mary Dyer, makes me feel almost physically nauseated. Why?

Part of it is simply cringing at the things the writers get wrong, or seeing things I know are made up that are getting passed off with the same status as fictively represented historical facts. I want to know where the imagination is, and I want other readers to know. Anything fast-and-loose bothers me. Part of it may be, at least for Dyer: I want to imagine her, in my way. How can anything I do be worthwhile, if others have gotten there first, and no doubt better, and with a fullness of novelistic imagining that I am not even planning to undertake? I'm just one more person perhaps violating her memory and mystery by imagining her. Isn't what I am going to do just slightly more responsible, but vastly less satisfying from a literary standpoint? And if I'm bringing in my own life too, that is even more historically irresponsible, just in a different way.

Anyway, I know of several fictional works on Mary Dyer that I probably should read, but have, at least for now, decided to defer to a much later stage. One is a multi-part work by an independent researcher/novelist named Christy K. Robinson, Mary Dyer Illuminated (2013) and Mary Dyer: For Such a Time as This (2014). Robinson also has a Dyer research blog and has published her posts (as nearly as I can make out) as a book (some useful material, and broad cultural background, but clearly amateur work and terribly undocumented, which is one reason I was utterly thrilled to discover Winsser's professional-level scholarship). A more mainstream publication with serious good reviews and awards is Beth Powning's A Measure of Light (2016). That one scares me. And last night I discovered a one-woman play by Jeanmarie (Simpson) Bishop, The Joy: the Mary Dyer Story (2016), which I ended up reading through on Kindle Unlimited. And yes, Bishop's Dyer unsettles me, both in ways she sees her that are like me, and ways that are different.

If anyone wants to reassure me that the fact that other people are writing imaginatively about Mary Dyer now doesn't mean that I should not -- that it just signifies she has some kind of resonance at our historical moment -- I would be more than pleased to receive such comments. I can say that to myself, but, like most self-offered reassurances, I'm not sure I believe it. How much I wish that I had a lesser-known figure to engage with (and one who wasn't such an embarrassingly ready-made heroine: white, wealthy, even, as attested by multiple sources including hostile ones, notably intelligent and beautiful). All I can say is that I didn't choose Mary Dyer as a figure to write about; she chose me in some way, and has been in my thoughts since the late 1990s.

I don't want to write history about Mary Dyer, except to the degree that I have to explain events and contexts for my book to make sense. I don't want to write academic interpretation -- well, I did that as well as I could years ago ["From Monster to Martyr: (Re)Presenting Mary Dyer," Early American Literature, vol. 36, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1-30]. I want to meditate on what is known and not known; I want to imagine, but in the voice of personal and lyric essay, where I am open and conscious about the act of imagining, and about how what I imagine is shaped by my life, my desire, my historical moment and its needs. I want to expose all the seams and pull at their threads. I want to think about what she means to me, might mean to other women. That personal and historical desire infuses all historical fiction too, but what excites me is being open about it and exploring it directly. Maybe it shows how I still cannot escape being something of an academic, but it is the way of writing that seems honest to me, and beautiful and urgent in its honesty. 

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And a postscript: Googling to check the page numbers of my article just now, I came on yet another of-the-moment Mary Dyer reflection (August 2017), this time nonfictional and political (Sacco and Vanzetti! Angela Davis!) -- another dimension of my project. So we really are in a Dyer moment, and maybe I just need to accept my project as part of that.