Cast Down. Mark J. Miller

      From Roses to Neuroses

      Early in the thirteenth century, a monk in Assisi, Italy, tried to quell his lust through a severe self-mortification of the flesh. Tormented by desire, he ran out into the snowy winter night and threw himself into a wild rose bush, whose thorns cured him of his passion. Then, miraculously, despite the cold, the roses began to bud and bloom. Their blossoms, which had been white, were now flecked with red. Seven centuries later, when psychologist Theodor Reik recounted this story of St. Francis in his 1940 treatise Masochism and Modern Man, he took care to distinguish religious martyrdom from sexual masochism. According to Reik, the sexual masochist uses pain to create sexual excitement while the martyr’s pain atones for sexual excitement. Martyrdom, Reik concludes, is a form of what he calls “social masochism” governed by a “sublimated form of masochistic feeling.”¹ The martyr, inspired by accounts of religious suffering and guided by “bishops, churchwardens, and the community” at large, participates in a social ritual governed by what Reik calls the church’s “increasing striving for ‘publicity.’ ”² Religious publicity—the circulation of ideas in print, speech, or manuscript form—generates the martyrological desire that then sustains the church. In the supposedly secular modern age, Reik drolly observes, it is not roses but neuroses that arise from the willed experience of redemptive suffering.³

      This study charts the conceptual continuity that lies between Reik’s roses and neuroses. Following Reik’s suggestion that church publicity played a key role in shaping the desire for suffering, Cast Down focuses on the uses of abjection—the desire for religious suffering—during two periods of rapid transformation: first, the 1730s and 1740s, when new models of publication and transportation enabled eighteenth-century transatlantic Protestant religious populism, and, second, the 1830s and 1840s, when liberal reform movements emerged from nonsectarian religious organizations. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, abjection helped organize a constellation of affective states, behaviors, and ideologies that contributed to the development of the modern notion of masochism but cannot be contained within the bounds of its current definition. Many twentieth-century psychoanalysts, including Reik, understood masochism as an outgrowth of or point of origin for sexuality. Social theorists, psychologists and theologians (often the same people) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries laid the groundwork for this notion by mixing earlier, religious notions of suffering with emerging conceptions of gender and race.⁴ This period of mixing older and new ideas, from early modern to modern, is at the center of my study. The groundwork was laid by early modern Puritan and Quaker converts who developed practices of self-regulation and identification that contributed to modern notions of interiority and the liberal humanist subject. These converts also narrated the disappearance of a sinful “individual” self and appearance of a gracious self stripped of “personality” and inseparable from the divine. Following these developments within Protestant experience and theology, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed a broader cultural shift in the social meaning of religion, rank, and visible markers of sex and cultural difference. These concepts were supplemented and, in some cases, supplanted by the development of gender and race as internal characteristics or aspects of personality.⁵

      The resonance of abjection in colonial American and U.S. culture is due, in part, to the concept’s deep religious roots. Abjection has a long history in the spiritual traditions of the peoples of the book, for whom it takes shape through complaints of misery or vileness (e.g., “zalal” in Eikhah 1:11) used to cement oppositional identity, to console and discipline readers and listeners, and to otherwise structure rituals of purification or sanctification. Derived from the Latin abiectus, literally meaning “cast down” or “throw away,” the term was first applied in classical antiquity to classes of people whose ongoing ceremonial and institutional marginalization allowed the imperium to function.⁶ The term accrued a positive connotation as performances of abjection, such as ancient Christian rituals of circumcision, were used to manage the threat of abject classes by celebrating, incorporating, and containing their practices.⁷ Moreover, behaviors or characteristics abjected by others were adopted for self-definition, as when terms of derision and ridicule (“methodist,” “quaker,” “black”) were reclaimed for use as a means of self-identification. The ambivalence of abjection—its positive and negative connotations—appears in cognates such as the Greek καταβάλλω, which, as an 1841 Boston lexicon has it, connotes both “to throw down” and “to lay, as foundations.”⁸ Abjection is characterized by this twofold ability to suspend