Top 10 Things We Don't Know About Mary Dyer....

I know not many people reading this blog know the story of Mary Dyer. I don't have the energy to outline the basics, but Wikipedia's entry on her isn't too bad -- and oddly enough it paraphrases my article about her at length as "a modern view," something I had no idea of until a friend looked it up and told me. Yikes!

Researcher and novelist Christy K. Robinson published a blog post called "Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Mary Dyer." I thought it might be interesting for others, and probably a useful activity for me, to create a list of the Top 10 Things We All Don't Know About Mary Dyer. Some of them involve missing factual knowledge, but some of them are more the sorts of things that anyone interested in her would deeply wish to know for actually understanding her, inner matters of feeling and motive that would not be knowable even with a fuller archival record. (Or perhaps even if she had kept a diary that was preserved, if it had been more a day to day record and less of a spiritual, introspective document -- how one wishes she had written a reflection on her life even as brief as her contemporary Anne Bradstreet's "To My Dear Children.")

Anyway, here is my list, at least for now (and I apologize, I can't figure out how to space between the paragraphs in a list using the blog template). We do not know. . . .

1. Where Mary Barrett was born (and precisely when), who her family was, what her growing-up was like. Brushing aside the debunked speculations about her being Arabella Stuart's love child, the evidence suggests she was from a wealthy family, probably merchant-class, probably although not necessarily Londoners. She was highly literate (we have a holograph copy of her first letter, with excellent handwriting), so there were the resources and commitment to educate her as a girl. Winsser thinks she may have served at Court before her marriage. Fragments of an embroidered white silk dress survive, and a gold bodkin (I didn't know there were artifacts until very recently). I realized recently that even apart from the evidence of her education, she probably felt loved and valued as a child. Because otherwise, the confidence with which she acted, her ability to withstand public opinion, is much harder to imagine. Don't you think? Here is a picture of a fragment of Mary Dyer's dress, from Johan Winsser's blog. The dark threads are tarnished silver.
   
   
   
   
2. Exactly when, and where, and how she and William Dyer (whom she married in 1633, around the age of 22) became involved with Puritanism, and then so-called Antinomianism or any other form of radical religion. And why, and what it meant to her. We know the Dyers were part of the circle around Anne Hutchinson by 1636-7, but we don't know whether they met her in London. Johan Winsser does offer very compelling background of the likely influence of the radical Antinomian, mystical, perfectionist preacher John Everard who taught at the Church of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, where the Dyers married and which may have been their home church in London, and indeed argues for seeing Mary's religious journey through the lens of Everard's influence: "...[H]is sermons, his teachings, and even his words echo so strongly in her own later religious journey that it is hard to think otherwise. What was to follow in the next years of Mary Dyer's life was not simply her turn to Antinomianism, mysticism, and then Quakerism. It was nothing less than the close following of Everard's six steps to the fulfillment of a Christian life, culminating on her sacrificial death on the Boston gallows" (37). So this is something I need to research further (I am not meaningfully familiar with Everard to date). But still, there is the story beneath the story of what draws one towards a certain belief, how that belief fits within the narrative that shapes one's understanding of the particulars of one's life..... 
3. How did she feel about her "monstrous birth" in 1637, and for how long? About the event in itself, and about the story "going viral" as we now would say? To what degree was or was not this a determining event in her life? If she never got over it, how do we read that in terms of her later story? If she did get over it, how did she do so? How do we understand the influence of becoming "the woman who had the monster" on her later choices? Obviously, there is nothing more important than this -- nothing more intimately unknowable, and yet it is hard not to imagine this as the thing that pushed her out of being the relatively anonymous wife of a prominent Antinomian with a long career in Rhode Island, and into becoming the historically memorable, mythicized, woman she was. This is one of the fascinating and unusual things about Mary Dyer, how her story has two acts, one in the 1630s and one in the 1650s. What I most deeply want to know is how she did not succumb to shame, to being crushed, how she acted so powerfully in spite of that. It is connected for  me to the mystery of how someone like Hillary Clinton or any woman who gets horribly attacked and made into a figure of monstrosity goes on. Maybe she only did so by emptying out her own sense of self to fill it with God -- I fully recognize the likelihood of that. And yet.
4. What exactly did Anne Hutchinson mean to Mary Dyer? What lay behind Mary's act of rising and following Anne out of the church when she was excommunicated in 1638, which is what triggered the passing around of the monster story? I mean, we know Hutchinson was Dyer's religious teacher, and one of her midwives; someone who was important to her, and clearly someone she felt dramatically loyal to. But beyond that what? And for how long? Is this a love story, a lost-love story? This is the point that triggered my fascination with Mary Dyer (I can vividly remember when I heard about it in a way that struck me), that matters the most to me. I can't defend this proto-lesbian reading in any objective way, but I've ventured it in two different published pieces. If Mary loved Anne, she lost her forever, but what you lose can persist forever as the center of your life. I have a personal story to tell that takes up this theme and some ways it lies at the very heart of the book I am trying to write. 
5. How did she feel about her husband William, and he about her? What was their marriage really like? First early on (for that matter, how did he feel about his wife giving birth to a "monster"? What did they say or not say between themselves?), and then later, when she left and came back as a Quaker, which he never became? In later years their marriage was, shall we say, unconventional. William as he emerges from Winsser's book seems smart, highly talented, energetic, ambitious, virile, also highly contentious and quite possibly a pain in the ass to live with. Mary probably wasn't so easy either, although her domestic persona remains opaque. His actions when she was getting imprisoned as a Quaker and his letters to intervene on her behalf suggest love, respect, and commitment -- and yet I don't take them quite at face value. I see him laying on a highly gendered husbandly rhetoric at points that would have been strategically useful, and it may not have been quite an accurate reflection of reality. And then when Mary was facing her final, certain execution in 1660 he wrote a letter pleading for her life from Portsmouth where he was involved in a court case -- but never himself came to Boston. He hadn't seen her then for over six months; he described her acts as "inconsiderate madness" and there is a definite aura in his writing of doing his best combined with throwing up his hands. Katherine, the woman he remarried within a couple of years was, it appears from Winsser's research, illiterate.
6. What led Mary Dyer to leave her husband and her six children (the youngest still a baby, the oldest around 17), in 1651 to go to London, and to remain there six years, even though William came twice, in late 1651 to early 1653 and late 1653 to 1654, and it would have seemed natural for her to return with him? Did she originally plan just a short trip (to settle some family business, say) and then something happened that she chose to stay on? Or did she decide on a break from being a wife and mother and leave knowing she planned no quick return? How did she become a woman who could leave her children? After the question of the Hutchinson-Dyer bond, this is perhaps the most fascinating question to me, and it's one I only discovered reading Winsser's book. I knew she stayed in England for a number of years, but I think other histories often render it as her having gone over with William, and in any case I never really focused on it since we have no documentation of what went on in that time to work with. But now this amazes me. For whatever reasons, a woman of the 1650s decided to do something other with her impending middle age than be a good wife and a mother. A woman who had been made into an emblem of monstrosity wanted something and pursued it. She claimed ownership of her life and story. I love her so much.
7. What did she do, what happened while she was in England? How and when did she encounter the Quakers? What did she think? This is one of the areas that novels and unreliable histories take the most liberty with (creating scenes of conversations with George Fox, ugh) -- of course it's a key part of the story so people want to tell it. But there is, frustratingly, no documentation of her life during this time. Quakers (who had emerged as a group in the north by 1652) had arrived in London by 1654 so it is easiest to imagine she well in with them there, sometime before she left in late 1656; theologically there is no challenge, as a good percentage of former Antinomians later became Quakers. She certainly was not well-known among Friends or seemingly active as a preacher, and some date references suggest she had only been part of the group a couple of years when she died for it.
8. Exactly why did she return to New England when she did, and what were her thoughts about the life she intended there? How much did she know about what she would face? Did her thoughts change in the course of her journey? Having found what she sought, was she content to return to her family in Newport, assuming she would be able to live a life of toleration there? Or something more? She and her traveling companion Ann Burden were on the third ship that brought Quakers to Boston harbor, and like the others they quickly met with trouble. Due to a storm the ship had diverted to Barbados where they spent some weeks, and according to Winsser would have gotten word of the Quakers' struggles in New England before they left. Winsser also believes that Dyer and Burden were not picked up as Quakers simply for docking at Boston and seeking to pass through quietly, but must have spoken out in a way that created a disturbance or attracted attention. After six years, she wasn't just coming back home as a rich man's wife, but coming home to a place where she already signified as a public figure in complex ways.
9. Was Dyer one of the New England Quakers who felt called to practice celibacy? A controversial and relatively little-discussed development among Friends in New England, especially around the town of Sandwich, was that some felt it was part of their spiritual calling to practice celibacy in their marriages. We know who a few of them were, and we know a couple that shocked some others by refuting it (John and Jane Nicholson, and Jane was imprisoned two months after giving birth, but there is a manuscript letter by John in which he talks about how tempted by it he had been). We don't know about Dyer. In some ways this is not a terribly important question -- in the last couple of years Dyer wasn't at home all that much, and she was basically past childbearing age, but I am, so help me, deeply intrigued by the real and imagined dimensions of early Quaker sexual deviance, and have published on this. In a culture based on the structures of the patriarchal family, to be celibate is queer. To privilege relationships outside marriage, incompatible forms of spiritual erotics, is queer. So I find the specter of marital celibacy more interesting and important than a mere signifier of asceticism.
10. What most deeply motivated her to travel to colonies with anti-Quaker laws to visit imprisoned Friends and to witness against the laws by violating them and suffering the consequences? In some ways this isn't as mysterious as some of the other questions; missionary Friends were highly articulate as a group about why they were doing such things, so we can generally understand Mary Dyer within that context. Further, Winsser's theory that she was following John Everard's steps to Christian perfection is very compelling. But I still wonder, what were her reasons at the deepest level, if -- as I have contended before -- certain shared beliefs and practices are like a container, into which more irreducibly personal feelings and impulses and histories flow? Visiting Friends in prison was the key thing she was moved to do, not more overt acts like preaching (so far as we know). Acts of love, of allegiance, as following Anne Hutchinson out of church had been twenty years earlier. I know she believed felt God's eyes on her and God within her. Did she also feel Anne's? What did she feel for William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson when she (scandalously) walked hand in hand with them to the gallows (and then watched them die while she was pulled back, a staged show of lenience)? Was this the fulfillment of what she had begun in another form two decades earlier -- or, not inconceivably, the closest she could get to something she had lost? A middle-aged dramatizing of allegiance and resistance she hadn't had the courage to see to the end as a young woman?  Well. Now I am writing speculative fantasy, and that fantasy is something in the book.  

Here's a terrible old picture of Mary Dyer being led to the scaffold with Robinson and Stephenson. Because you deserve an image after getting through all that.