The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History

by Susan Howe

Susan Howe approaches early American literature as poet and critic, blending scholarship with passionate commitment and unique view of her subject. The Birth-mark traces the collusive relationships among tradition, the constitution of critical editions, literary history and criticism, the institutionalized roles of poetry and prose, and the status of gender. Through an examination of the texts and editorial histories of Thomas Shepard's conversion narratives, the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Howe reads our intellectual inheritance as a series of civil wars, where each text is a wilderness in which a strange and lawless author confronts interpreters and editors eager for settlement. In a concluding interview, Howe comments on her approach and recounts some the crucial biographical events that sparked her interest in early American literature.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, History, Literature, Literary Criticism

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

Susan Howe was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her most recent poetry collections are The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist's Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990).

Her books of criticism are The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (1993), which was named an "International Book of the Year" by the Times Literary Supplement, and My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Her work also has appeared in Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Cary Nelson (Oxford University Press, 1999); The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2003); and Poems for the Millennium, Volume 2, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rotherberg (1998).

She has received two American Book Awards from the Before Columbus Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999. In 1996 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and in the winter of 1998 she was a distinguished fellow at the Stanford Institute of the Humanities.

Reviews

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

the deep sinister crimson of the new directions edition is far too garish for the book—bluntly and aggressively gets across what is, mm, not "subtle" in the book but what the book is already obviously steeped in, soaked in—it reduces the depth of the book to a momentary thin shout, and is far too shiny besides. but what's worst about the new directions edition is that it changes the goodreads subtitle to the unnecessary "essays" and removes from the cover and the first title page the original crucial, layered subtitle of the wesleyan university press edition: "unsettling the wilderness in American literary history." the caption is on its own an argument for rereading, a caption that becomes so much better after you finish the book. the redefinition of wilderness is so good (early America, a wilderness to whom?). removing and recaptioning to "essays" misses the point so stupidly, as if this were an essay collection and not a weaving roving book that is essay, criticism, and poem all at once, that is itself a wilderness to roam about in—the long thickets of quotation, the thorny sort-of-found poetry, the reward/oasis of the ending interview. i bought this book because it was fascinatingly mentioned in an essay i copyedited and fact-checked at my internship this summer, but more urgently because when i was looking at it in the co-op soon after i got my blood on it, as one does, and you can't just abandon a book you soiled, can you. (this point didn't come so naturally when i tweeted about the experience of buying the bloodied book, two months later, which reminded me why i shouldn't tweet about the ~fun shenanigans~ my frequent bleeding get me into, or about frequent bleeding generally.) it's a good book to get blood on: fierce and inquiring, and fierce and inquiring about violence, remote and obscured kinds of violence. not sure how much "violence" crops up in the book, but somehow it's a word that comes to mind.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting hybrid. Part personal essay, part poetry, part scholarly work, in this book Susan Howe breaks down genre barriers. She blends quotations from the journals and books of 17th-20th century American authors. Mainly, she is looking at issues of canonization, editing and who gets to be remembered and who gets to be erased. People she focuses on include Emily Dickinson, Anne Hutchinson and more. If you are interested in American literature and or religion, this is worth reading though at times the blending of so many genres can be difficult.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's the stutter in American literature that interests me. I hear the stutter as a sounding of uncertainty. What is silenced or not quite silenced. All the broken dreams. Thomas Shepard writes them down as soon as 1637. And the rupture from Europe. Continents have entered into contract, creating a zone of catastrophe points. A capture morphology. All that eccentricity. All those cries of "My God, it is I." Mary Rowlandson is an early witness. Metacomet (King Philip) is Leviathan to the Mathers. Rowlandson knows he is human. Moby-Dick is a giant stutter in the manner of Magnalia Christi Americana. No one has been able to fathom Dickinson's radical representation of matter and radiation—such singularities of space, so many possibilities of choice. History has happened. The narrator is disobedient. A return is necessary, a way for women to go. Because we are in the stutter. We were expelled from the Garden of the Mythology of the American Frontier. The drama's done. We are the wilderness. We have come onto the stage stammering."

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, as usual. I don't like to say more: I wish everyone would at least read 1 of her works. This is probably a good one to start with.
Ellie NYC

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

All killer! No filler!

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

life-changing

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Susan Howe approaches early American literature as pet...!" (see description)

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

best thing i have read all semester.

[Zack]

I love how subtle this book is. I love that you feel like you're all out in space but then suddenly it all makes sense.

[Nathanael Myers · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning work.

[Kit · Rating 5 out of 5]

so deep.