The Nonconformist's Memorial by Susan Howe

First published: 1993

Type of work: Poetry

Form and Content

Susan Howe’s The Nonconformist’s Memorial is a poetry collection which thematically explores issues relating to women’s voice and history. The work is divided into two main parts, each of which is divided into two subsections. The first part, entitled “Turning,” begins with the biblical account of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus in the garden near the tomb, where she mistakes him for the gardener and asks where the body of Jesus has been taken. Jesus speaks her name, and she turns to him in recognition. She then goes to the other disciples to tell them of what she has seen.

“Turning” goes on to develop a poetic exegesis of this passage from the gospel of St. John. Each poem elucidates an awareness of the relationship between narrative and gender, collective belief and individual experience, power and name, structure and meaning, tradition and revelation, expectation and desire. The poems in this section reverse time and create a cycle from the moment of Mary’s experience back through the historical constructs of the chroniclers of the Bible. Transgressing expectations of linear movement, the poems then cycle into a return where they note Mary’s pivotal experience once more, then spring from that point forward to the early Christian theologians, to the Catholic confessors, and on to the Protestant dissenters. Yet as the last poem of the section, subtitled “The Nonconformist’s Memorial,” suggests, even this final trajectory must turn again to find its narrative center, and poetic grace, in the mind of Mary herself.

“Silence Wager Stories” forms the second section of “Turning.” It begins with a meditation on reason in relation to faith and goes on to explore modes of communion. Although this section is not as long as “The Nonconformist’s Memorial,” the final image of the sea prevents any sense of convenient or complacent closure, thus balancing the literal length of the first section with an image of boundlessness in the second. This final image also works as a thematic transition into the second part of the book, “Conversion.”

The first section of the second part is entitled “A Bibliography of the King’s Book: Or, Eikon Basilike,” and it begins with a prose account of the execution of King Charles I of England. Several points from this prose passage are developed in the poems that follow. Most notably, the tension between the civil and the sacred is drawn out as an “Authorship Controversy,” which revolves around the image of a ghost and the prayer of a female character from another Renaissance work, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1590, 1593, 1598).

In defense of Charles’s execution, John Milton charged the king with whispering the pagan prayer at the moment of death; the irony is that a fictional female has provided grounds for the death of a nonfictional male. King Charles, Milton, William Shakespeare, Sidney, and Charles Dickens all provide allusive threads for “Ariadne’s diadem,” and the section ends with a vision of a great web of meaning which partakes of many texts, yet is none of them.

The second section of “Conversion” moves confidently in the same direction as the first. “Melville’s Marginalia,” by far the longest section in the work, begins with a chronology of the life of poet James Clarence Mangan, then moves into a prose discussion of Herman Melville’s notations and annotations. Melville apparently spent a considerable amount of time writing his thoughts about women in the margins of books, though women rarely appear as characters in his fiction. Significant portions of this marginalia have been erased, however, and the most likely suspect is Elizabeth Shaw Melville: “She is the Perpetrator-With-Eraser.” This suggestion provides the lens through which the poems explore the literary and political erasure of Mangan—who in spite of all, ultimately is preserved not in the margins of Melville’s books, but as the character of Bartleby in one of Melville’s fictions.

The poems that follow the prose discussion tie biblical allusion to English and American literary tradition. Saints and authors, fictional characters and religious icons, experience and enthusiasm, dominion and imagination are all woven into a web of conversation, the prelude to and result of conversion. The final vision is ominous, a recollection of the authority of “print” and its power to erase, to construct, to create margins, to preserve conscience, to scare—and scar—“millions.”

Context

As with much of Howe’s work, The Nonconformist’s Memorial articulates an abiding interest in women’s experience in relation to broader social and philosophical issues. Like the seventeenth century collection of dissenting voices to which the work alludes, Howe is at pains to resist the social pressures that encourage the silencing of women.

Howe’s interest in mixing biography and fiction in verse allows for a particularly fruitful reconfiguration of all three genres. She shares with other postmodern poets a desire to problematize authority and shift the weight of literary perspective to marginalized groups, and Howe never loses sight of her own responsibility as a participant in the ongoing conversation that makes up literary and cultural studies. Her commitment to the preservation and expansion of women’s voices and her talent for historical exegesis make Howe an unusually strong poet and critic. By combining the complexities of form with a particularly sophisticated social awareness, Howe challenges readers and writers alike to confront both past and present in relation to important issues of concern to all.

Bibliography

Calamy, Edmund, ed. The Nonconformist’s Memorial. 2d ed. London: A. Hogg, 1778. An invaluable lens through which to view Howe’s work of the same name. A collection of the writings and epitaphs of ministers ejected or silenced as a result of the Act of Uniformity.

Frank, Robert, and Henry Sayre. The Line in Postmodern Poetry. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. A collection of poetic works with commentary by the respective poets. Howe’s remarks about her own work are enlightening.

Howe, Susan. The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1993. Among other things, this book articulates an awareness of the lapses and gaps in American literary history. Helpful for understanding Howe’s critical vision and her impact as a literary scholar.

Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1985. Useful for understanding Howe’s critical vision of poetic endeavor as a mode of resistance.

Palmer, Michael. Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983. Includes an essay by Howe in which she discusses the religious, philosophical, and ideological significance of genre and structure as they relate to the works of many American writers.