Cast Down. Mark J. Miller
discourses of abjection offer a unique window onto scholarly debates about publicity outlined in the Introduction. Suffering and abjection in revivalist epistemologies of conversion participated in the public creation of a modern subject in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world. Subsequent chapters will draw on these revivalist epistemologies of conversion to trace the irregular development of race and gender in the early nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the evangelical public was constituted by a body of believers who, at least in theory, transcended sectarian, familial, local, national, linguistic, or imperial affiliations. The evangelical public contributed to the development of the bourgeois public sphere but, like other publics, depended on a more recursive relationship between speech, performance, and writing for its success and mobility.3 From the perspective of Shaftesbury and other primarily secular Enlightenment figures, eighteenth-century Protestant evangelical discourse as a whole engaged the nascent propositions of rational-critical publicity at an oblique angle, alternately adapting, criticizing, or troubling its methods. Most importantly, Protestant evangelical thinkers in Scotland and the Americas described rational public debate as itself dependent on God’s grace or other forms of divine dispensation or intervention. Divine dispensation could be encouraged through affective religious performance, including performances of abjection. This evangelical public was still dependent on slavery, silencing, or marginalization, but could credit those problems to sin or divine absence. The religious rhetoric of abjection might therefore be seen as an apology, an atonement, or an excuse for the failure of the gracious community to achieve its ideals, as well as a performance of the impossibility of those ideals.
As Michael Warner writes, Edwards’s most famous revival sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” offers an “expressive language for power and abjection” that outdoes all “secular equivalents,” including sadomasochism and Foucauldian analysis, in its antihumanist “displace[ment]” of affect and its wedding of “pleasure and obliteration” in the gap between the abject, sinful speaking self and God’s irresistible, sovereign will.4 Eighteenth-century evangelical publicity, as Warner has more recently observed, cannot be separated from “secular equivalents” in the period.5 In the eighteenth century, revivalist affect, speech, performance, and publicity wove together Puritan and Enlightenment sympathy to generate abject sensation and stimulation. Edwards offers an unusual, perhaps unique, engagement with Puritan and Enlightenment Common Sense empirical philosophies that link suffering, education, subjectivity, and social order.
By virtue of his education at home and at Yale, his wide correspondence, and the culture of visitation characteristic of eighteenth-century New England, Edwards was influenced by a spectrum of moral philosophy and theology much like that available to his contemporaries in England and Scotland, including faculty psychology and Common Sense philosophy.6 He was also influenced by a Puritan mode of sympathy that helped cohere a transatlantic dissenting community.7 Puritan sympathy was distinguished by its narrower scope as well as its rhetorical emphasis on a discourse of humiliation designed to “soften” proud hearts.
In an instrumental sense, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” was part of Edwards’s long campaign to convert his auditors and readers to a “lively” sense of Christianity by offering an intensely affecting portrait of personal sin and divine perfection. It was also somewhat atypical, as many of his sermons emphasized Jesus’ love and God’s grace. Edwards’s work in another genre, the conversion narrative, is more centrally concerned with the matrix of abjection, embodied accounts of divine encounter, affective erotics of suffering, and public subject formation. Literary critics and historians have long compared Edwards’s conversion narrative to earlier Puritan narratives. With origins in biblical accounts of Paul’s conversion, Augustine’s Confessions, and casuistical manuals for self-examination, Puritan narratives developed practices of self-regulation and identification that contributed to modern notions of interiority at the center of liberal humanist subjectivity. In dialectical fashion, Puritan narratives also provide points of resistance to that subject by narrating the disappearance of a sinful individual self and invoking a gracious self, stripped of personality and, in various ways, inseparable from the divine.8
Studies of 1740s revivalism as a transatlantic phenomenon, as well as the conversion narrative as a popular genre enabling the publicity of the colonial dispossessed, offer two new avenues of approach. Edwards’s use of the conversion narrative in his 1737 Faithful Narrative engaged earlier Puritan and contemporary English and Scottish theories of sentiment and sensation to defend revival conversion, excite intense religious feeling, and resist theological accommodations to free will that would eventually lead to the development of a liberal subject.9 Edwards’s accounts of conversion offer something quite distinct from the “delicious” pain of Enlightenment sentimental narrative. The latter depends upon the sympathizing spectator’s imaginative bridging of the emotional, economic, or social distance between himself and the suffering object of pity while also, as many critics note, maintaining and sometimes reinforcing that distance. For Edwards, conversionistic sympathy encourages the spectator’s imitation and repetition of the process of conversion, including the convert’s sensational experience of suffering, humiliation, and intense, sometimes unbearable abjection.
Over the course of the revivals in New England, performances and narratives of conversion became public sites for recording and contesting norms of bodily behavior. Conversion transformed the relationship between affect, bodily performance, publicity, and emerging notions of racial and gender difference. Like most of his fellow revivalists, Edwards departed from seventeenth-century Puritan models of conversion by rejecting the methodical, preparationist model of “particular steps” and instead grounding conversion in a sensational experience of affect and sentiment, notions crucial to the development of masochism and the liberal subject for whom masochism could be a perversion.10 Under some conditions, affective conversion, rather than the longer process of sanctification or traditional criteria such as civility, community election, age, rank, or education, became the most important qualification for authoritative public religious speech and performance. Understood as the embodied and textual performances of an interior affective experience, conversion authenticated the emergence of a gracious self and sometimes enabled the publicity of more marginal members of colonial society.
The Faithful Narrative attempted to manage revivalism’s disruptive effects but was taken up and transformed in the evangelical public in unexpected ways. Edwards’s so-called “Personal Narrative” of his conversion redoubles its attention to the revivals’ connection between affect, performances of abjection, and disruptive publicity. Unpublished in his lifetime, his “Personal Narrative” describes a remarkably modern subject, marked by an affective experience of interiority, delighted by the thought of being subsumed, pierced, and otherwise abjected, and promoting the tearful performance of suffering and grace. To be sure, previous generations of converts and their ministerial amanuenses had narrated periods of heightened emotion, bodily suffering, and mental or spiritual self-dissolution. Indeed, revival-era disputes about the nature of converts’ affective experiences and performances of bodily harm or weakness reprise sixteenth-century Catholic-Protestant debates about the boundary between the suicide’s sin and the martyr’s redemptive suffering.11 Those debates, centered on the value of suffering for salvation, generated John Donne’s poetic accounts of the redemptive quality of an imagined violent and erotic integration with the divine.12
Because several critics have identified the eroticization of a painful union with God in women’s midcentury revival conversion narratives, it may be tempting to read Edwards’s accounts of tearful suffering and joy as elaborations of a prototypically feminine masochistic eroticism.13 He developed those erotics to promote a Calvinist model of conversion that could negotiate the distant but emerging philosophical and theological challenge posed by liberal humanism and the more immediate threat of competitive, itinerant, “compulsive” evangelism epitomized by the celebrated George Whitefield. Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” frustrates the conversion narrative genre’s contribution to the development of a modern liberal subject by insisting on the uncertainty of grace and limiting the public authority granted to the gracious self. In short, while the spiritual erotics in Edwards’s conversion narratives may resemble masochistic desire, Edwards’s