MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Described by Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop as “So monstrous and misshapen, as the like has scarce been heard of: it had no head but a face, which stood so low upon the brest, as the eares (which were like an Apes) grew upon the shoulders”, Mary Dyer’s tragic third child, stillborn in 1673, was infamously documented by religious and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite an attempt to conceal the birth with a secret burial aided by Anne Hutchinson and Reverend John Cotton, the stillborn child’s severe spina bifida malformations quickly gained notoriety through pamphlets, letters and gossip. In many accounts, there is a critical distance crafted between the stillbirth and the humanity of a dead child, heavily emphasizing the death as a metaphoric punishment for Dyer’s sins against Puritan theology. In this inversion of child elegy, the infant body is carefully articulated through animal imagery.

In this conference paper I take up the suppression of this discursive violence that reified Mary Dyer’s tragedy as a manifestation of her monstrosity as it lurks underneath her biography written for children by Nathaniel Hawthorne and included in the widely read, The Whole History of Grandfather’s Chair (1841). Mary Dyer’s life and death occupy two short pages, but the narrative threads that surface here, violence against women, white female martyrdom, and potential agency for public women, are reliant on an unspoken platform of monstrosity and the fear that accompany an unstable community’s confrontation with a precarious future. By considering the narrative of this “monstrous” infant alongside this canonical author’s representation of Dyer written for children, there emerges a complex emphasis on American childhood as a potential space for monstrous depravity and the desire to both obscure and vilify the very youth meant to carry out the American project.