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CHAPTER 1

Conversion, Suffering, and Publicity

What did it mean for a congregational minister in New England to write of his desire to be “emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone”?¹ This famous passage from Jonathan Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” (c. 1739) offers a fruitful point of departure for tracing the connections between religious abjection, conversion, and protean theories of masochism in the eighteenth century. Edwards’s treatment of abjection is determined, to a large degree, by his concern for the public perception of the revival and his own place within it. Though often contrasted to “old light” moderates, Edwards intended to harness the disruptive potential of revival affect. This is especially true of the moments of apparent perversity that arise from the extremity of Edwards’s religious sentiments. Looking at Edwards’s expressions of religious abjection in a revivalist context helps us see how they are constituted by the interplay between “personal” emotional experience and public political exigency. Revivalism also helps us flesh out discrete intellectual, textual, and historical connections between Edwards’s religious practice and masochism’s established Enlightenment philosophical basis.

The affective or inward turn in eighteenth-century revivalist publicity, as well as the strong links between Scotland and New England, points to the crucial role of theories of sentiment in structuring Edwards’s accounts of affective conversion. Although historian J. G. Barker-Benfield noted more than twenty years ago that eighteenth-century sensibility and evangelism were “two branches of the same culture,” subsequent accounts of sympathy, eroticism, and pleasure have attended to the former at the expense of the latter.² Studies of the interdependence of pornographic and humanitarian depictions of slave suffering, for example, rely overwhelmingly on Adam Smith’s account of sympathetic feeling to define the relationship between sympathizer and sufferer. While Smithian accounts of sympathy fold neatly into accounts of sadism, I assert a clearer line connecting masochism to the sorts of evangelical affective religious practices that Smith and Burke, following Shaftesbury, condemned as forms of religious enthusiasm. Eighteenth-century “enthusiastic” revivalist affect, speech, performance, and publicity wove together evangelical affect and Enlightenment sympathy to generate abject sensation and stimulation.

Evangelical 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 portrait of the convert’s affective sense of abjection and annihilation as intensely desirable resists the emergence of a liberal humanist subject for whom those desires would be perverse by incorporating affective interiority into a carefully controlled speaking subject.

Edwards also denied other aesthetic and philosophical principles that would be necessary preconditions for psychoanalytic masochism. Edwards’s later treatises on revival and conversion specifically respond to Shaftsbury’s critique of enthusiasm and demand for a rational evaluation of affect, moving in a different direction from Edmund Burke’s later construction of the liberal subject in the flight from sublime terror. Edwards also complicates what Julia Kristeva describes as the generation of speech out of the jouissance of introjected abjection and helps illuminate what more recent accounts of abjection discuss as masochistic self-shattering.¹⁴ Edwards’s constellation of affective states, behaviors, desires, and scenarios, in other words, may have contributed to the development of early masochisms but does not remain within even those fluid boundaries. Instead, it points to one of the many ways in which affective experiences, performances, and accounts of suffering have been used to construct political identifications, subjectivities, and behaviors prior to the invention of masochism.

Sex in the Evangelical Public

Edwards’s exploration of some theological and philosophical underpinnings of an affective experience of powerlessness, self-abnegation, and self-destruction was grounded in the evolving relationship between sentiment, affect, bodily performance, and publicity in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelical revivalism. The most innovative elements of 1730s and 1740s revivalism arose from elaborations of performances of religious feeling in oratory, letters, and print. Revivals in Europe, England, Scotland, New England, and the southern and mid-Atlantic colonies were as diverse in their etiology and processes as their geographic scope suggests but were connected by publications, itinerant performances, and lay practices endorsing intensely affective worship styles.¹⁵

Some of the promise of, and resistance to, revivalism would have been familiar to earlier generations of English and colonial Puritans. Dissent in England and New England was itself a creature of transatlantic colonial print culture.¹⁶ Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ministers regularly wrote and preached about humiliation and abjection to tame the hot, moist, sanguine character of the less pious by stimulating cold, dry, earthy melancholic passions.¹⁷ The periodic rise and fall of public piety had been a recurring, somewhat ritualized feature of the religious landscape in Scotland, England, and New England for decades.¹⁸ For much of the eighteenth century, English and colonial cartoonists, novelists, balladeers, and playwrights associated revivalism with the excessive sensuality of poor or “rustic” young women, Indians, and sexual deviants.¹⁹ Like Shaftesbury, they condemned revivalists for exciting a range of dangerous affective states under the cover of morality.²⁰ George Whitefield’s itinerancy, meteoric celebrity, and fundraising success made him a lightning rod for such attacks. Among the earliest was an erotic 1740 pamphlet speculating at length about the nature of the “secret Sin” Whitefield mentions in his conversion narrative. The pamphlet excerpts and recontextualizes Whitefield’s language of intense religious feeling to describe the devil “working [Whitefield] up” until he was “bleeding with the Excess.” It toys with the possibilities of maternal incest, bestiality, sodomy, and service as the devil’s bottom (sex with “the Devil … always uppermost”) before concluding it was likely the sin of “Onan”: masturbation was held to weaken the eyes, and Whitefield had a severe squint.²¹ Thirty years later, at the other end of Whitefield’s career, Town and Country magazine offered a more genteel parody of “Dr. Squintum’s” imagined marriage to “Parrawankaw,” an Indian princess in America who converted, bore him many children, and became a Methodist preacher.²² Unlike the progressive social critique mounted in French anticlerical erotica, these and other parodies attack, in comfortably bawdy registers, the slippery appeals of affective revivalism to young women, the poor, slaves, Indians, prisoners, prostitutes, sodomites, and those guilty of other sexual sins.²³ Although Edwards and Whitefield offered distinct models of conversion and converted subjectivity, as I will discuss below, these parodies reflect fears of the influence and porosity of a transatlantic revival culture that Edwards’s Faithful Narrative had an important hand in shaping.

Opposition to revivalism in New England was generally less obscene, but American critics shared their English contemporaries’ distaste for affective revivalism’s appeals to the colonial dispossessed. As in England, the criticism, though implicating theological difference, was less concerned with doctrine than style of worship.²⁴ Affective revival in New England pressured hierarchies of speech by encouraging public behaviors and performances that were considered sick or “Distempered,” lazy, rude, immoral, and menacingly linked to riot, slave revolt, Catholic influence, and Indian attack.²⁵ Anticipating later Anglican critiques of Methodist “noise” and irregular movements, New England critics used classical hierarchical psychology privileging rationality and humoral models recommending balance to condemn revivalist demagogues’ excitement of “hot,” “animal,” bodily passions and encouragement of irregular bodily performance, including loud religious exhortation. They focused on behavior that circumvented or corrupted vertical hierarchies of speech and horizontal, collegial relationships between established ministers.²⁶

Anti-revivalist furor overstated the revivals’ immediate effects on social order, if not their later influence.²⁷ What critics denounced as exhortation and frenzy was revivalism’s stuttering, experimental, contradictory, and often self-defeating proliferation of new forms of social organization and identity, less concerned with hierarchies of rank determined by public election or education and more concerned with self-management and various sorts of difference.²⁸ The revivals broadly participated in this shift by engaging gentler models of suffering, sentiment, and individual responsibility for spiritual development that would eventually come to include responsibility for sexuality.²⁹

Eighteenth-century revivalist ministers in New England developed earlier models of conversion by promoting itinerancy, affective styles of worship, the wide distribution of periodicals and books, and the use of newspapers, broadsides, and other inexpensive formats. Edwards and some other established ministers in New England embraced revivalism to foster church membership and increase their pastoral and collegial influence. By focusing on individual emotional relationships with God and using direct, intense expressions of religious feeling, revivalist ministers also promoted religious practice by members of groups often marginalized in English colonial worship, including young women, free blacks, the indentured and enslaved, and members of neighboring tribes such as the Delaware.³⁰ These more marginal members of colonial society used English associations of femininity, heathenism, and incivility with abjection and bodily corruption to develop forms of public religious expression that helped them create oppositional gender or racial identities.

Faithful Narratives, Social Religion, and “Feminine” Suffering

Edwards’s descriptions of Northampton’s 1734–35 “season of awakening” were swept up into the burgeoning evangelical public, where they helped establish performances of intense religious affect as legitimate bases for evaluating conversion. Their history of publication and circulation offers an early example of the evangelical public’s structuring, moderation, and unpredictable dissemination of revival conversion performances.

Edwards’s descriptions were shaped by an English imperial and global Christian imaginary, as well as local concerns in Northampton, Boston, and London.³¹ His earliest recorded narrative of the revival appeared in a letter to Benjamin Colman, pastor of Boston’s urbane, theologically liberal Brattle Street Congregational Church. Colman’s accounts of Connecticut Valley revivals in Boston’s secular New England Weekly Journal had contributed to sensational rumors of back-country religious fervor, and Colman had asked Edwards for a more edifying narrative.³² Satisfied, Colman forwarded Edwards’s letter to London dissenters Isaac Watts and John Guyse, who shared the news with their congregations and requested additional details. Edwards quickly obliged with a longer letter that Colman abridged and published in Boston before sending on to London. Watts and Guyse “corrected” and published that longer letter by subscription for their congregations as A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton (1737). It was quickly reprinted for profit, publicly advertised, and distributed in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Boston, with translations in German and Dutch, becoming a handbook for midcentury revivalism and establishing Edwards’s authority on the “marks” of conversion.³³

Edwards had, since his college days, dreamt of publishing in London, but he may have been surprised by the transformation of his work in the emerging evangelical public sphere.³⁴ Reflecting a widespread concern for the disappearance of local traditions in the face of growing transatlantic trade, Edwards began his longer letter by attributing Northampton’s lack of “corrupt[ion] with vice” to its “distance from seaports,” but his own influence and reputation depended on his narrative’s transformation and commodification in those same routes.³⁵ The Faithful Narrative’s popularity was due to its timeliness—its status as “news”—and its narrative format, which could offer striking portraits of converts’ religious affections. These conversions became something of a succès de scandal. Watts and Guyse, wary of endorsing such “raised affections,” had repeatedly asked Colman for “some other minister in New England” to publish an account. Elsewhere, Watts, citing the “reproaches we sustain here, both in conversation and in newspapers,” explained they were obliged to “make some alterations of the language, lest we together with the book should have been exposed to much more contempt and ridicule.”³⁶ What remained was “surprizing” enough: the narrative justified converts’ vivid imagination of hell as a “dreadful furnace,” of “blood running from [Christ’s] wounds,” and a rapturous sense of Christ’s “beauty and excellency.” Despite insisting that no converts had visions with “bodily eyes” or espoused innovative doctrines, dress, or styles of worship, the Faithful Narrative endorsed converts’ performances of bodily weakness, including fainting, collapse, and near death, as a holy “sinking” under the “sense of the glory of God” or “divine wrath” until God nearly “dissolved their frame.”

Edwards agreed that “there are some things in it that it would not be best to publish in England”; he took special care to condemn lay preaching by pairing the urge to preach with the urge to commit suicide, declaring both “strange, enthusiastic delusions.”³⁷ But Edwards may have been more troubled by Watts and Guyse’s promotion, in their extensive editorial apparatus, of a simpler model of converts’ sense of grace, or “new light.” Edwards’s own model preempted critics who claimed that revival simply excited embodied “animal” passions by using faculty psychology and other Enlightenment theories connecting body and mind through sense and feeling. His account of conversion further distinguished between “natural” affections, such as sympathy, and “gracious” affective responses. As Edwards explained in a 1733 sermon descriptively entitled “A Divine and Supernatural Light, Immediately Imparted to the Soul by the Spirit of God,” strong affections about the things of religion were no proof of grace: “A person by mere nature … may be liable to be affected with the story of Jesus Christ … as well as by any other tragical story … as well as a man may be affected with what he reads in a romance, or sees acted in a stage play.”³⁸ Such natural affect, initiated by reading romances or seeing plays, could be evaluated rationally on the basis of its beneficial effect on the body and mind. In contrast, gracious affect, “imparted” by the “indwelling” of the Holy Spirit, could produce harmful affections and yet remain beneficial.³⁹ As in Edwards’s typological practice, the affective experience of the gracious convert reveals earthly effects to be “images or shadows” of the “Excellency” of divinity.⁴⁰

As this tension between Edwards and his editors suggests, the Faithful Narrative’s layers of ministerial comments, notes, revisions, and counterrevisions tried to manage and stabilize the meaning of revival conversion but tended to highlight and possibly contribute to the multiplication and proliferation of meaning.⁴¹ This tendency is clearest in Watts and Guyse’s introductory attempt to forestall criticism of Edwards’s two exemplary converts, a young woman and a girl whose conversions were almost entirely grounded in affective realizations of sin and grace, without any rational basis or sustained postconversion good works. In the postmillennial framework shared by many revivalists, converts who were young, female, poor, or “heathen” held special value as heralds of Christ’s return and the world’s end. These converts’ greater propensity to bodily weakness, corruption, and sin made their conversion more remarkable but also more suspect, especially if their conversion included “impressions on … imaginations” or visions. Edwards characterized this problem as one of narrative. “[S]ome weaker persons,” Edwards wrote, “in giving an account of their experiences, have not so prudently distinguished between the spiritual and imaginary part.”⁴² Edwards’s own conversion narrative addressed this suspicion by insisting on strict Calvinist limits to grace and describing “weaker” converts as easily corrected by his ministerial guidance. Edwards’s conversion narrative also dramatized this process of correction by narrating one young woman’s slow, agonizing silencing by disease and death, invoking affective conversion within a highly sentimental framework designed to moralize and moderate readers’ responses. The narrative thereby extended a ministerial tradition of adapting women’s sacred speech and performance for use by evangelical men, making confessions of guilt and displays of “inarticulate ecstasy and self-silencing” the most acceptable styles of women’s public revivalist worship in New England.⁴³

In England, though, and increasingly in New England as well, women’s “inarticulate ecstasy and self-silencing” loomed in the shadow of Revolution-era female prophecy, ecstatic religious practice, and sacred violence.⁴⁴ Watts and Guyse, rather than defending Edwards, bowed out. Stating only “we must allow every writer his own way,” they deferred to Edwards’s authorial privilege even as they undermined its basis in sound judgment, a compliment Edwards returned when he rewrote their introduction for his 1738 Boston edition.⁴⁵ Other revivalists with access to print made more concerted efforts to transform Edwards’s account; John Wesley published an edition meticulously pruned of Calvinism, distributing it widely among his followers and sending it to every Anglican bishop. In its various published forms, the Faithful Narrative’s affective conversions broke free of Edwards’s limitations on lay speech and salvation. Edwards’s evocation and defense of affective conversion take shape through a traditional ministerial structuring and management of female preaching and performance, but conversion narratives after the Faithful Narrative, refracted through other revival practices, opened affective experiences and performances to further reinterpretation by a range of editors, readers, and listeners who helped produce new communities that challenged existing hierarchies of speech. In this and other ways, the popularity and power of the Faithful Narrative depended on its transformation by the evangelical public.

This process of transformation would come to be typical of the 1740s evangelical public, in which evangelical communities of letters, contributions to secular periodicals, and book publishing increased and were augmented by new evangelical periodicals in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Boston. The periodicals, consisting largely of letters from British Dissenters, traveling missionaries, itinerants, and settled colonial ministers, offered news of “extraordinary” affective religious performances, including fainting, visions, trances, and ecstatic speech.⁴⁶ In the American colonies, such performances incorporated immigrant and creole English women’s spiritual practice as well as traditional spiritual practices from Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, Native American, African, and other communities variously marginalized and constrained.

Accounts of converts’ “feminine” performance sometimes cover over these multiple cultural influences on revival practice, in part because the language of revival conversion was structured by the sexed norms of Puritan religious performance.⁴⁷ Conversion had been a cornerstone of Puritan social organization since the 1630s, when Puritan communities on both sides of the Atlantic began requiring accounts of religious experience for church membership and voting rights within the church. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New England Puritans often spoke or wrote and recited their accounts of conversion in front of congregations they hoped to join, with ministers occasionally recording and publishing those accounts. They usually described conversion as a movement from knowledge of sin to conviction, faith, mortification and penance or spiritual combat, and true but imperfect assurance of salvation. Well into the eighteenth century, Puritans and other dissenters emphasized the uncertain nature of assurance, often operating within a preparationist model in which conversion was one step in a spiritual journey charted along an emotional circuit running from anxious doubts about salvation to assurance and back to doubt.⁴⁸

In both England and the colonies, seventeenth-century Puritan men’s conversion narratives idealized willing submission to divine and earthly authorities by invoking biblical tropes of women’s submission and servants’ loyalty filtered through the Pilgrim’s Progress, other popular nonconformist narratives, and contemporary spiritual biographies.⁴⁹ In a long mystical theoerotic tradition, Puritan ministers established their fitness to lead by figuring themselves as “nursing fathers,” maternally devoted to their divine charges, and “brides of Christ,” desiring erotic union with divinity.⁵⁰ Thomas Shepard’s journal, for example, records his need to “desire Christ and taste Christ and roll myself upon Christ” or “lie by him and lie at him,” though often, as he wrote in his Autobiography, “Christ was not so sweet as [his] lust.” For Shepard and others, conversion was an uncertain, circular process in which doubt and grace intertwine in a drama of competing desire. Even when “the Lord made himself sweet to me and to embrace him and to give myself unto him,” Shepard wrote, “yet after this I had many fears and doubts.”⁵¹ The Puritan glorification of openness to God as typically feminine engaged the one-sex model of gender that also predominated in contemporary medical and philosophical traditions, so that, as Elizabeth Maddox Dillon observes, this “sexualized rhetoric” articulates “power differentials that did not necessarily inhere in bodies.”⁵² Lower forms of bodily lust, marked as female, figure the higher desire for union with the divine.

The revivals participated in this shift away from this one-sex “feminine” model of piety broadly but unevenly. As New England’s economy and society became more closely integrated with England’s in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the ideal of erotic “female” subjection and servants’ loyalty lost ground among many men and wealthier women in favor of “gentler ideas of piety and suffering” appropriate to those virtuously brought up. In more prosperous towns, sermons, which often reflected a consensus of community ideals, moved toward the English post-Restoration latitudinarian norm of rationality and persuasion and emphasized Jesus’ love rather than God’s wrath.⁵³ Though continuing to evoke emotion, they abandoned erotic “female” piety as a master trope for human relationships with God.⁵⁴ In other ways, though, the revivals resisted the shift away from the one-sex model, describing conversion as divine impregnation and insisting on the convert’s humiliation and suffering.⁵⁵ In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentler notions of suffering became more narrowly associated with middle-class whiteness and female difference.⁵⁶

In New England, these changes in notions of race, gender, and sexuality were precipitated or accompanied by the separation of conversion from church membership and church membership from civil privileges.⁵⁷ With fewer legal inducements to encourage full membership, established ministers in New England leaned more heavily on rhetorical and ritual techniques such as open communion. Solomon Stoddard was a public champion of these techniques, which helped corrode the link between the conversion narrative and religious or civil privileges. Edwards eventually attempted to restrict communion and reinstate the conversion narrative as a requirement for full membership—a fiasco precipitating his 1749 dismissal—but for most of the 1730s and 1740s, he embraced Stoddard’s use of rhetorical and personal means of persuasion to evoke and manage conversion.

The transformation of Edwards’s narrative in the evangelical public chipped away at traditional Reformed limits on grace and thereby transformed the meaning of Edwards’s converts’ suffering, which, even as it incorporated newer sentimental modes, was firmly rooted in earlier notions of sex, bodily control, and ministerial and community oversight. Edwards’s pastoral interest in reinstating conversion as a means of reasserting ministerial control was shaped, in part, by his inability to maintain traditional ministerial and community regulation of sexuality.⁵⁸ Edwards insisted that conversion demanded public accountability for a range of bodily behaviors, including religious performances, sex, and other erotic practices, that could only be addressed within a gathered congregation of the faithful.

The controversy over conversion, sex, and publicity that led to Edwards’s 1749 dismissal was, in some way, prefigured in the Faithful Narrative’s accounts of conversion as a substitution of gracious affective practice for “licentious” bodily practice. Edwards’s innovative incorporation of sentiment into his conversion narrative participated in the wider attempt to attract “gentler” converts, but he embedded sentimental conversion in earlier models of conversion, such as Shepard’s and St. Francis’s, directed at controlling a broad array of fleshly lusts. The Faithful Narrative begins by describing the salutary effect of small-group “social religion” on young people overly fond of “licentiousness,” “night-walking,” tavern drinking, “mirth and company-keeping,” and other friendly or erotic practices outside church or family. One of the “greatest company-keepers,” a young woman, offered Edwards her conversion narrative, and “News” of her conversion “seemed to be almost like a flash of lightning, upon the hearts of young people.” The “licentious” convert shared her narrative with “many” others, who “went to talk with her, concerning what she had met with.” They formed vanguards of young converts, not unlike Wesley’s early bands, who led a “general” revival encompassing all ages and ranks of European creoles and immigrants, “several Negros,” and neighboring Indians.⁵⁹ Even after the revival cooled, Edwards wrote to Colman in 1737 that converts did not “return to ways of lewdness and sensuality.”⁶⁰

Edwards’s “flash of lightning” offers a key into the new importance and challenges of performances, narratives, and published “News” of conversion. It also reminds us of the difficulty with reading eighteenth-century revival practice as either sexual or purely spiritual and therefore outside the bounds of the erotic. The flash or dart of lightning on the heart was a traditional Reformed trope for the convert’s sense of God’s power. Traceable to Augustine’s “light of confidence” and subsequent rejection of fleshly “lusts,” this metaphorical “flash” moved conversion away from older, visionary experiences of revelation such as Paul’s “great light” from heaven.⁶¹ Seventeenth-century Puritans followed Augustine in using the phrase to signal moments of assurance, while Edwards and other revivalists specifically associated it with the new perceptual capacity (the “Divine and Supernatural Light”) granted to converts. The Faithful Narrative characterizes lay performances and accounts of conversion as themselves imbued with this divine power, implicitly justifying print publication as an extension of that process. At the same time, by obscuring Edwards’s role in spreading the news of her conversion, it imagines evangelical publicity as a disembodied emanation into an empty field. Standing as the Faithful Narrative’s first individual account of conversion, the “licentious” convert helps establish the meaning and significance of the book’s subsequent sentimental conversions, which also attempt to describe affective revivalist speech, organization, and performance as a substitute for illicit sexual practice.

Like many revival conversion accounts, the Faithful Narrative could be read as a case study of sublimation, with the important qualification that it explicitly promotes the substitution of embodied, affective “social religion” for illicit sexuality associated with problematic lay religious expression. Social religion, which was evoked, guided, and promoted by Edwards but modeled and dependent on women’s speech, conversation, and organizing, was crucial to Northampton’s shift from illicit erotic activity outside the bonds of marriage to intense spiritual feeling inside the bonds of faith.⁶² Edwards’s two exemplary converts, delineated through new sentimental models of female piety, lapse into silence, while the “licentious” convert, delineated through older models of bodily lust and corruption, undergoes a moral transformation and achieves an important role in promoting social religion. Rather than straddling a cultural-historical boundary after which point sublimation can occur, sentimental narrative extends and continues an older model of converted selfhood in which fleshly lusts are replaced by embodied affective social performances of faith as part of the process of forming an evangelical public.

Letters, Tears, and Being “Swallowed Up in Christ”

In a preface to Edwards’s 1738 Boston edition of A Faithful Narrative, four Boston ministers took special note of Edwards’s claim for the salvific work of conversion narrative. “There is no one thing that I know of, that God has made such a means of promoting his work amongst us,” Edwards wrote, “as the news of others’ conversion.” Why, then, did Edwards leave his own conversion narrative unpublished?⁶³

In New England, the circulation of conversion narratives in the emerging evangelical public extended and magnified the existing conflict between the established church’s dual roles as, first, a gathered congregation of the faithful and, second, an instituted means to grace. As only the gracious, predestined by God, were called to convert, to whom did the narratives speak? What public roles and responsibilities did conversion entail, especially ministerial conversion? Edwards’s own conversion narrative, first published after his death as the “Personal Narrative,” presents a reticulated response to the disruptive consequences of affective conversion by intervening in the genre’s association of embodied performances of conversion with authoritative public religious expression.

Edwards likely composed the letter in which his narrative appeared around 1740, just as he was emerging as a leading moderate colonial revivalist.⁶⁴ Facing increasing sectarian division and public skepticism about revival, his narrative responded by incorporating the intense physicality, self-doubt, and circularity characteristic of more marginal converts’ narratives but locating them in a more entirely affective register. Edwards’s rhetoric of self-abjection may therefore be understood as part of a larger public strategy authorizing intense performances of bodily suffering, increasing revivalist converts’ autonomy from some “gentle” norms of public behavior by encouraging greater self-control and attention to rank in public religious expression. Edwards’s attention to rank would also include a refusal to enter into the wide, less distinguishable, and more unstable sorts of address encouraged by fully capitalized print narratives of conversion and the various versions of the Faithful Narrative.⁶⁵

Edwards follows Puritan conversion precedent by narrating the repeated erasure of a sinful “personality” but diverges by depending more entirely upon affect and sensation, or what Myra Jehlen and Michael Warner identify as a “perverse pleasure” in the “sentiment of annihilation and abjection.”⁶⁶ Part of Edwards’s greater “perversity” lies in his narrow scope and lyrical account of sense and perception. While the Faithful Narrative followed the effects of conversion on a community of believers, exemplifying young women whose conversions were calculated to generate salvific public affect or sentiment, Edwards’s conversion narrative focuses on his highly individuated psyche and embodied affect. Because Edwards’s narrative seems so modern in its descriptions of psychic interiority and eroticized individual affect, his embrace of abjection appears psychologically and sexually perverse. Edwards’s apparent perversity is magnified by his composition of the narrative for the edification of a young acolyte, his future son-in-law. As part of a letter from an established minister to a younger man, the narrative is explicitly didactic, located in the immense body of eighteenth-century English advice literature calculated to control the passions of unmarried men.⁶⁷ Constructed as an exemplum to confront the exigencies of the revival, Edwards’s conversion narrative intervenes in the genre’s support for disruptions of hierarchies of speech and publication, registering subtle shifts in the meanings of sex and rank.

Edwards’s representation of the relationship between his own affective state, his affective performance, his authorial self, and his ministerial role attempts to limit the disruptive potential of revival performance. He begins by outlining a two-stage process of conversion to the doctrine of predestination, first a rational “conviction” and then an affecting, “delightful conviction.” Echoing his earlier sermons on the “new light,” Edwards attributes his “delight” to his new affective capacity or disposition toward God brought about by his reading of scripture. To illustrate his divinely implanted sense, Edwards disperses metaphors of light and taste in Baudelairean profusion, describing God’s sovereignty as “an exceedingly pleasant, bright and sweet doctrine” and even, in carefully couched terms, his sense of what “seem’d to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost every [natural] thing.” Chronicling another series of affecting scriptural readings, Edwards describes his growing awareness of personal sin through formulaic expressions of personal abjection, including his “extreme feebleness and impotence” and his heart’s “innumerable and bottomless depths of secret corruption and deceit.”⁶⁸

Edwards illustrates his increasingly affective sense of his own sin and God’s sovereignty by introducing the metaphor of violent bodily incorporation with Christ. These violent images become his narrative’s primary trope for explaining his affective experience of personal abjection and divine power. Incorporation replays the Puritan ideal of erotic submission to Christ in a more abstract, affective, and explicitly violent key. Edwards begins by expressing his desire to be “swallowed up in Christ” and “have [Christ] for my head, and … be a member of his body.” These phrases apply the metaphor of corporate or church embodiment (Christ as “head” of the church) to his own soul and perhaps gesture toward a “swallowing up” of rational thought in the soul’s victory over death. Then, compounding the metaphor of bodily incorporation, Edwards invokes the metaphor of grafting, imagining himself as a plant “cut entirely off from his own root” and forced to rely entirely on God, “grow[ing] into, and out of Christ.” His tropological account of bodily incorporation with Christ returns to a narrative description of embodied affective performances of an increasingly abstract and comprehensive sense of sin and God’s grace. To magnify the sinner’s essential unwillingness to submit to the divine and the irresistible, sovereign power of God to compel not only submission but also joyful submission through a desirable violence, Edwards amplifies the violence of these images and applies them to rational thought. Alternately absorbed and penetrated by the divine, Edwards was freed from “thought and conception,” swept up in a “flood of tears, and weeping aloud” for “about an hour,” and filled with competing desires “to be emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone” as well as to be cast into a pit so deep that only the “piercing eye of God’s grace” could reach him.⁶⁹ These phrases, drawn from scriptural figures for the influence of grace, were commonplaces in Puritan spiritual autobiography and New England ministerial guides to conversion such as Stoddard’s A Guide to Christ.⁷⁰ By introducing these expressions into a narrative form and using them to mark internal affective shifts in sense and sensation, Edwards imbues them with a greater affective power.

Edwards’s rhetoric of abjection resembles revival conversion narratives by women, the poor, and Native and African Americans, which tended to be more embodied and continued the older Puritan model of conversion as a recursive or sometimes unfinished process. The most remarkable narratives are visionary and deeply uncertain, only hinting at progress toward self-assurance. A brief 1754 narrative by Montauk Temperance Hannabal, recorded by Samson Occom, concludes with Hannabal’s description of a “Swoun” in which she “found [her] Self into great Darkness” with a voice guiding her to “Something” like “a Pole … Put over a Deep hole.”⁷¹ Narratives by European creole and immigrant women are similarly recursive, if usually more assured, describing spiritual development as an embodied battle with Satan and theoerotic absorption or penetration by Christ. Connecticut farm-woman Hannah Heaton, in a 1741 narrative, writes that she “thot [she] felt the devil twitch [her] clothes” and “whisper” suicidal urges “in her ear.” Naming and drawing on her experience at sermons by Gilbert Tennent and George Whitefield, Heaton described one revival in which “many were crying out” and she “thot the flor [she] stood on gave way.” Suddenly resigned to her fate, she “thot I see iesus with the eyes of my soul stand up in heaven a louely g[o]od man with his arms open ready to receive me his face was full of smiles he loockt white and ruddy and was iust such a saviour as my soul wanted.”⁷²

Edwards’s wife, Sarah Edwards, offered a more abstract but similarly erotic sense of floating or swimming like “a mote of dust” in God’s “stream or pencil of sweet light.” “That night,” she wrote, “was the sweetest night I ever had in my life.”⁷³ These narratives engage seventeenth-century Puritan models of sex in which “female” bodily weakness allowed for greater supernatural influence. They also connect “female” piety with other cultural traditions, such as James Gronniosaw’s possible invocation of West African spirit possession: in a narrative dictated to “a young lady,” Gronniosaw, a former slave in New York, “saw (or thought I saw) light inexpressible dart down from heaven upon me, and shone around me for the space of a minute. I continued on my knees, and joy unspeakable took possession of my soul.”⁷⁴ Embodied affective performance of abjection, followed by rapturous joy and pleasure, signals their sense of God’s love and their own salvation.

These converts spoke and wrote themselves into an evangelical public that offered them an ambivalent embrace. Like many nineteenth-century Native Americans, African Americans, and white women who modified the conversion narrative form to enable their own publicity, these eighteenth-century converts’ frequent qualification of their visions and senses as “thought,” or otherwise imagined, attempts to negotiate the greater scrutiny applied to representations and affective performances by the colonial dispossessed.

Edwards’s rhetoric of self-dissolution and abjection translates the physical, embodied visions and sensory experiences described by many poorer converts into a largely internal, affective drama. This shift signals his attempt to promote greater rhetorical self-control and attention to rank. His attempt becomes clearer when we read his Faithful Narrative alongside his 1741 letter to Deborah Hatheway, a recent young convert in Suffield, where Edwards had briefly served as substitute pastor. Edwards begins by repeating his Faithful Narrative’s advice to “set up religious meetings,” but rather than promote the certainty of conversion, in the manner of the licentious convert’s “flash of lightning,” Edwards recommends Hatheway act as though she was uncertain. Because gracious converts are under “infinitely greater obligations,” Edwards writes, Hatheway should evince even more “strife and earnestness” or “earnest and violent” behavior than before conversion, being “always greatly abased for your remaining sin,” “never think[ing] that you lie low enough for it,” and performing acts “that make you the least and lowest, and most like a child.” Because conversion is never truly certain, the best way to maintain a regenerate state is to act as though suspended in the moment immediately before conversion, a state of continuous becoming that never entirely resolves itself into being.

Public expressions of personal abjection, Edwards continues, are most persuasive when the speaker attends carefully to relative rank. When “speaking to your equals,” Edwards advises, “let your warnings be intermixed with expressions of your sense of your own unworthiness … and if you can with a good conscience, say how that you in yourself are more unworthy than they.”⁷⁵ Edwards takes care to avoid the silence that could stem from such a suspension of assurance, a silence associated with the suicide’s melancholy and despair. Instead, Edwards’s ideal speaking subject—his exemplary convert—generates careful speech out of the sense of sin and abjection that precedes assurance, not in the movement from doubt to assurance. The speaker’s heightened awareness of social status allows him to carefully calibrate his religious expressions and performances for the demands of the audience, minimizing revivalists’ overstepping of rank to maintain the revivals’ legitimacy and fostering social circumstances in which further individual conversions could take place.

Edwards concluded his conversion narrative with a scene of extended weeping that may be his most striking and complex portrait of religious affect. Long before the age of sentiment, tears had been a symbol of repentance and sign of passionate religious experience. In the eighteenth century, tears became freighted in the context of sentimentalists’ claims to moral self-government and revivalists’ Antinomian or Perfectionist tendencies. A group of New York Presbyterians, for example, published a short tract calling Whitefield to task for, among other things, a sermon describing tears of repentance as themselves salvific.⁷⁶ Many lay revival conversion narratives followed Whitefield in developing what Henry Scougal’s 1677 devotional manual, reprinted frequently in eighteenth-century New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, described as God’s gift of “a beam of the eternal light” to the saved.⁷⁷ As Whitefield and Scougal recommend, these lay narratives used episodes of weeping as signs of a convert’s movement from doubt, characterized by silence, into a sense of grace, characterized by song, announcements of joy, or other effusive descriptions of God’s excellence. Frequently authored by creole European men of middling rank, these narratives stage the moment of “awakening” to God’s grace as a singular, metamorphic experience of theosis in which “self”-destruction results in the emergence of an individuated gracious self. Such accounts lead more directly to the development of a modern liberal subjectivity characterized by interiority and a highly individuated psyche, or what William James described as the autonomous unification of a self previously unhappy and divided.⁷⁸

In the wake of Gilbert Tennent’s inflammatory The Danger of an Unconverted Ministry and Whitefield’s typically self-satisfied description of “Dear Mr. Edwards” weeping “during the whole time” of Whitefield’s second Northampton sermon, Edwards’s tears might even have been taken to endorse demands for a converted clergy.⁷⁹ Because these demands made conversion the primary qualification for authoritative public religious address, they encouraged forms of lay evangelism that resembled preaching. Indeed, many revival narratives by lay preachers and exhorters dramatize conversion as a tearful movement from tortured silence into bold, “masculine” speech characteristic of an earlier generation of Protestant martyrs. In making this connection between conversion and evangelism, these narratives register the influence of ministers in the evangelical public but also illustrate the evangelical public’s threat to ministers’ traditional monopoly on authoritative religious speech. For example, Samuel Belcher, in a self-written 1740 conversion narrative used to gain full membership in Edwards’s father’s church, charts his spiritual development by naming his attendance of various famous itinerants and echoing their publications. Referring to Edwards’s sermon, Belcher described his terror at falling “into the hands of an angry God … Cry[ing] mightily … in the bitterness of my Soul for mercy.” Then, echoing Whitefield, Belcher “felt my Load Go of and my mouth was Stopt and I Could not utter one word for Some time and I fealt as if my heart was Changed.” In his “Joy and Comfort,” Belcher’s “mouth was opened and [he] Spake forth the praises of God.”⁸⁰ Though perhaps more typical of men, women also engaged this trope, often in a more embodied manner. Lay preacher Susanna Anthony’s narrative, as published by Edwards’s protégée Samuel Hopkins, retains the martyr’s connection between her experience of pain and “bold” dissenting speech. Anthony insisted she had no irregular affective behaviors, but when Satan tempted her to commit suicide, she “twisted every joint, and strained every nerve; biting my flesh; gnashing my teeth; throwing myself on the floor,” and wringing her hand until it was numb. Her damaged hand, a vivid symbol of many converts’ mediated access to writing, was healed after her experience of God’s grace. Recalling this event, she claims, “often fill[s] my soul with a holy boldness, and my mouth with arguments.”⁸¹ Describing a sense of pain and joy engendered by both external torment and an internalized notion of sin and divine perfection, Anthony and other converts ground their “bold” religious speech in the affective experience of suffering and grace.

As these narratives’ frequent invocations of Whitefield indicate, the link between conversion and speech was authorized, in part, by engaging public models of converted subjectivity with which Edwards was at pains to compete. If, as many suspect, Edwards wrote his conversion narrative in 1740 or 1741, he engaged in at least implicit dialogue with Whitefield’s 1740 conversion narrative and the mass “outpourings of faith” sparked by Whitefield’s accompanying preaching tour, whose New England leg Edwards helped arrange. In what would be one of the largest, most coordinated publishing and distribution events of the day, Whitefield’s narrative was attractive and simply available to lay and itinerant revivalists and critics on a perhaps unprecedented scale.⁸² As with revivalist practice more generally, the outlines of Whitefield’s conversion were conventional, but the details were remarkably charismatic, describing a protean figure haplessly caught up in the spiritual battle between God and the devil.⁸³ Eschewing the rational argumentation and elevated, impersonal tone of much contemporary ministerial publication, Whitefield addressed his “dear Reader” directly, offered mildly salacious details of his sinful preconversion life, endorsed prophetic dreams and direct divine response to prayer, and compared himself to a Foxean martyr.⁸⁴ But it was his narrative’s framing of evangelical speech as the result of divine inspiration that would prove most problematic for Edwards. After a period of intense self-doubt, sickness, and severe ascetic self-denial, Whitefield received a mysterious “suggestion” that his inexplicable “thirst” resembled Christ’s on the cross. At that moment, he wrote, “I perceived my Load go off” and “could not avoid singing Psalms wherever I was.” This inexplicable, joyful, spectacular transcendence of illness and self-doubt was reenacted in his public preaching, which dramatized what Nancy Ruttenburg describes as his overcoming of bodily limits and church or civil attempts to restrict his speech through the practice of “compulsive public utterance” and “aggressive uncontainability.”⁸⁵ Whitefield’s multiple public personae allowed him to qualify or revise this and other more charismatic passages while continuing to express such sentiments elsewhere.

Edwards’s weeping intervenes in Whitefield’s account of conversion and religious expression by addressing the connection between tears and speech. Edwards’s converted subject is, like Whitefield’s, generated out of the repetition of the performance of conversion, but the pleasures and public presence of Edwards’s subject are generated by the “loud” performance of self-isolation, weeping, and silence. Overcome by an acutely affecting sense of God’s excellence, Edwards experienced “a kind of a loud weeping” that lasted for hours, so that he was “forced to shut [himself] up” in a room “and fasten the doors.” This self-isolation is the somatic experience of a previously figurative desire for self-effacement, one associated, in an earlier episode of weeping, with a sense of personal abjection and total dependence on Christ.⁸⁶ His assertion of self-control (locking himself up) at the very moment of self-dissolution enables an extended affective performance of abjection but also disrupts Whitefieldean conversion narratives’ association of affective performance and speech: during his weeping, Edwards concludes, he “could not but as it were cry out, ‘How happy are they which do that which is right in the sight of God!’ ”⁸⁷ By presenting his self-isolation as literal and his speech as metaphorical, Edwards reverses Whitefield’s, and many lay preachers’, use of abjection as the prelude to religious speech. Imagining a form of sublimity that rejects Whitefield’s “compulsive public utterance[s]” and works against emerging liberal subjectivity, Edwards narrates the enclosure of his otherwise uncontrollable affective religious performance in a space of guarded isolation.

Edwards’s account of tearful self-isolation here resembles seventeenth-century Puritan converts who, when their sense of personal humiliation failed to lead to a sense of divine love, found themselves lost in “shame’s isolated silence,” but it proposes an alternate path to religious speech.⁸⁸ Edwards describes his room as a place of emotional reflection, a private space of tearful isolation from which to better imagine public action.⁸⁹ In the language of spiritual warfare some revivalists adopted, Edwards’s isolation signals not a withdrawal from the revivalist public but a strategic shift of the field of battle into the less impersonal public of the letter.

In closing his account with a scene of tearful, meditative self-isolation, Edwards also offers insight into his decision to circulate his narrative privately. By insisting that his speaking subject be grounded in the sense of abjection and uncertainty, Edwards’s conversion narrative attempts to manage revivalist speech by engaging the narrative practices of the colonial dispossessed and translating them into a more entirely affective register, but he may have recognized that his narrative was likely to go awry in the evangelical public. Given the potential audience for his conversion narrative, Edwards’s decision not to publish, along with his subsequent preference for analytic treatises and sermons over the more widely accessible narrative form (notwithstanding The Life of David Brainerd, which deserves more detailed consideration elsewhere), suggests his awareness of the capacity of the evangelical public to transform the meaning of his work and reluctance to expose himself to broad and intense scrutiny. By circulating the letter privately, Edwards could better predict and control the audience, influencing those of similar or higher rank while minimizing other interpretations and transformations of his account.

Conversion and Masochism’s Philosophical Bases

Edwards’s conversion narrative frustrates the 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 his conversion narrative’s description of his affecting sense of God’s grace, Edwards describes a divine sublimity that closely resembles Kant’s sublime, which Deleuze and several literary critics have identified as an important basis for the literary and philosophical development of masochism. Deleuze, whose analysis of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1869) offers the best account of masochism’s philosophical bases, argues that a necessary precondition to masochistic desire was the Enlightenment transformation of the law from a Platonic/Christian model, in which the law is dependent on a higher principle, such as “the good” or God, into a Kantian/Oedipal model, in which the good is premised on the law, in which “moral law is the law” and in which the law is “by definition unknowable and elusive” because it must constantly disguise those things it bans.⁹⁰ This Kantian/Oedipal model, Deleuze concludes, helps create the modern subject by premising subjectivity on an acceptance of guilt.⁹¹

Kant’s description of the law’s sublimity has much in common with Edwards’s Calvinistic account of God’s terrible power, as both are fundamentally unrepresentable, free from human intentionality, and beyond human influence. Indeed, the shift from the Platonic/Christian model to the Kantian/Oedipal model was effected, in part, by the Calvinist logic of salvation by faith alone that Edwards champions. Kant’s formulation of moral law reflects an Edwardsian understanding of predestination: those who obey the law, rather than feel righteous, are bound to feel, as Deleuze writes, “guilty in advance.” Agreeing with Edwards in the fundamental unrepresentability of sublimity but attempting to liberate humanity from the strictures of religion, Kant removes that guilt from its moorings in the idea of a transcendent omnipotent God.⁹² By grounding subjectivity in the “universal rational religion dwelling in every ordinary man,” Kant makes irrationality the “sin” of Enlightenment.⁹³ Kant’s attempt to translate Christian law into humanist rationalism offers a mirror image of Edwards’s attempt to incorporate affect into a strict Calvinism.

The political implications of these two opposing descriptions of the sublime help explain Edwards’s defense of extreme religious affect in two subsequent treatises, Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God (1741) and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (1742), that stand as theological companion pieces to his conversion narrative. In attempting to limit the power of affect to challenge existing ecclesiastical hierarchies of speech, Edwards’s sublime counterbalances evangelical speech by women, the young, the poor, and other marginal groups against the liberal humanist constructions of subjectivity that would also threaten ministerial power.

Because Kant’s theory of sublimity derived from his attempt to transform Burke’s political and aesthetic notion of sublimity into moral and idealistic concepts, a brief review of Burke’s differences with Edwards will help clarify the way in which Edwards’s political concerns contributed to his construction of sublimity. Burke and Edwards both develop Shaftesbury’s account of sublimity in “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” (1707), which offers a limited endorsement of “divine enthusiasm” resulting from “ideas or images received [that] are too big for the narrow human vessel to contain” and used “to express whatever was sublime in human passions.”⁹⁴ Sharing this common point of departure, Burke’s description of sublimity, which is frequently credited with offering the earliest description of pleasurable emotional pain, agrees with Edwards’s account of his painfully pleasurable sense of God’s power.⁹⁵ Though rhetorically aligned in their description of sublime power, they differ in their evaluation of the source of pleasure. Burke’s illustration of sublimity as the sense of “shrink[ing] into the minuteness of our own nature” and being metaphorically “annihilated before [God]” closely resembles Edwards’s description of his response to God’s excellence.⁹⁶ Burke’s path to sublime pleasure also resembles a notion of conversion as a singular, metamorphic “new birth,” or the emergence of a saintly self out of the destruction of the sinful self, in which the sense of God’s terrible power is transformed into rapturous joy through God’s grace. For Burke, however, this painful sense of power, which he calls terror, can delight only if its source is placed at some distance through active and strenuous exertion. Burke here follows Shaftesbury’s conclusion that only “enthusiasm” guided by “reason, and sound sense … sedate, cool, and impartial; free of every bypassing passion, every giddy Vapor, or melancholy fume,” can be judged as divine.⁹⁷ Indeed, Burke’s account of sublimity may have been influenced by the political irregularity produced by affective revivalism in the 1740s: he began the treatise at Trinity College, Dublin, before 1749, and, in his later considerations of colonial self-government, was clearly skeptical of American enthusiastic religion. Edwards also follows Shaftesbury in endorsing rational judgment and encouraging converts’ increased self-control in their expressions of personal abjection. Edwards moves away from Shaftesbury by emphasizing that God’s power surpasses human judgment, and away from Burke by embracing the divine sublime and maintaining the accompanying sense of sublime power.

Burke, by describing sublime pleasure as the result of escape from divine power, presents a fantasy of self-creation through flight that provides an aesthetic framework for the construction of bourgeois liberal subjectivity in eighteenth-century England.⁹⁸ Edwards’s sublime attempts to forestall a Burkean departure from his script by describing encounters with overwhelming divine power as pleasurable, thereby disallowing Burke’s path to self-creation. This difference helps account for Edwards’s refusal to reject even the most harmful performances of affect. What Burke and Shaftesbury condemn as the “horrid convulsions” of “languid and inactive … nerves” incapable of overcoming the source of terror, and what other anti-revivalists called “Visions, Trances, Convulsions [and] Epilepsies,” Edwards describes, in Some Thoughts, as being “weakened by strong and vigorous exercises of love” to Christ.⁹⁹ In characterizing weakness and pain as “exercises of love,” Edwards embeds sublime pleasure in the experience of divine power and defends ministerial power against a specifically liberal threat emanating from the staging of the emergence of a gracious self.

Edwards’s opposition to Burke’s conception of the self as defined by a flight from overwhelming power is based on Edwards’s theological association of the phenomenological world with the fallen world. Edwards’s faith in biblical guidance and human corruption places more severe limits on human knowledge than most Enlightenment empiricists allow. Edwards takes up the language of sensation and sympathy only to argue that the “human” experience it produces is sinful and abject, not semi-divine. In so doing, his conversion narrative presents a challenge to the genre’s role in the development of modern liberal subjectivity, interrupting its development of an individuated psyche by repudiating the movement from “sinful” to “gracious” self. Edwards refutes emerging liberal descriptions of human nature as compatible with the divine by describing faith as the joyful acceptance of absolute human abjection and endorsing an affective, tearful experience of both personal abjection and God’s sovereignty. In this way, Edwards’s tears in his conversion narrative ambivalently refigure St. Francis’s blood. Both are shed in a sacrificial manner, but while St. Francis describes his experience to all who will listen, Edwards’s tears are accompanied by a retreat into meditative isolation and the more private realm of the letter. By adopting the individual affective experience of sorrow and selflessness to reestablish Calvinist uncertainty, Edwards conflates the affective realization of abjection with the joy of redemption.¹⁰⁰

Edwards’s relationship to masochism’s Kantian foundations lies in his location of pleasure in the experience of weakness and overwhelming divine power. This relationship is complemented by his preemptive refusal to follow other Enlightenment writers, including Kant but especially Adam Smith and Francis Hutcheson, in their development of the connection between affect, sympathy, and moral virtue.¹⁰¹ Edwards’s conversion narrative, in endorsing an affecting sense of God’s excellence and personal abjection, appears to promote a proto-masochistic pleasure in self-disruption by staging a proliferation of the desire for abjection and a loss of self-control. Edwards thereby seems to posit a religious subject whose desires are premised on the same logic that, as Marianne Noble argues, would structure the more “properly” masochistic pleasures of nineteenth-century American sentimental literature, in which the religious discourse of eroticized submission to the divine is gradually transformed into a secular discourse of transcendent erotic sub-mission.¹⁰² However, as Sandra Gustafson’s analysis suggests, Edwards has a more immediate and more vexed relationship to this sentimental literary tradition than Noble indicates.¹⁰³ Edwards’s portraits of exemplary converts in the Faithful Narrative draw directly on English sentimentalism in its staging of scenes of death and suffering, and his conversion narrative adopts affect as a way of frustrating the development of a modern self, separable from God, for whom such suffering might be perverse.

The pleasurable affective experience of abjection that Edwards describes was in the process of becoming perverse through Enlightenment humanism’s promotion of common sense as the basis for moral action and social cohesion. Theories of common sense, as developed by Smith, Hutcheson, and others, propose that our innate sympathetic response to suffering, combined with our natural inclination toward pleasure and away from pain, will prompt us to alleviate suffering in others. Edwards, in contrast, proposes that such sympathy is dependent on divine blessing or grace. In the absence of grace, our sense of pity is determined by the discrepancy between the sufferer’s actual state and what we consider his or her proper state. Pity is thus a mode of judgment rather than a sensational or physical response. For example, Edwards’s discussion of “self-love” and “private affections” in his The Nature of True Virtue (1765) takes a middle path between Scottish Common Sense philosophers and cynics such as Bernard Mandeville. Edwards agrees that sympathy is a basis for society and moral virtue, but he follows Mandeville’s account of sympathy as governed by the extent to which the sufferer’s interests are aligned with the observer’s and that sympathetic pain may be mixed with pleasure.¹⁰⁴ In following Mandeville’s proposal that sympathy produces an ambivalent reaction to others’ suffering, Edwards allows for Sade’s eroticization of suffering, which demands a sentimental, Richardsonian interest in the sufferer.¹⁰⁵ This ambivalence, in which the sympathetic experience of suffering excites simultaneous pity and delight, would play an important role in the sexualization of erotic suffering.¹⁰⁶

Edwards perfected his strategy of invoking and then intervening in the connection between abjection, evangelical speech, and the development of a Lockean liberal self in his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). As several scholars note, Religious Affections reworks Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding by offering a measured evaluation of the intimate, embodied relationship between individual affect, thought, and social order.¹⁰⁷ Religious Affections explores how the affectionate speech of a body of believers can productively disorder civil and religious society. Disruptions in both individuals and communities may, if properly discerned and managed, forward the work of grace. Key to this evaluation is Edwards’s extended metaphorical comparison of the disruptions of individual bodily function caused by religious affect to the disruptions of New England’s civil and ecclesiastical body caused by revivalists’ disorderly speech. Just as each convert should use his or her affecting sense of individual abjection as a means to evaluate his or her spiritual state, so must the church body in New England use the tumult caused by the revivals to evaluate their divine destiny as a social and spiritual community.

In Religious Affections, Edwards proposes that contemporary ministers risk repeating the seventeenth-century New England Puritan failure to form a wholly divine community if they do not distinguish spiritual corruption from divine influence.¹⁰⁸ He evaluates the revivals’ effect on New England as a discrete community of believers, explicitly revisiting and partially sentimentalizing the seventeenth-century New England Puritan association of feminine weakness, wifely subjection, and maternal suffering with submission to patriarchal government. Compressing the most vivid and literal descriptions of physical suffering from Lamentations 1 into a single sentence, Edwards asks his readers to imagine the daughter of Zion as she “lies on the ground, in such piteous circumstances … with her garments rent, her face disfigured, her nakedness exposed, her limbs broken, and weltering the blood of her own wounds, and in no wise able to arise.” Edwards sentimentalizes the image of the suffering woman by condensing Lamentations’ diffused and insistently metaphorical images of suffering into an intensely physical suffering felt by a single figure. Edwards complicates the sentimental trajectory of the trope by taking special care to associate the daughter of Zion’s wounds with the blood of the “menstruous woman.” Zion has “none to comfort her,” Edwards writes, because she is tropologically related to the “menstruous woman” whose corrupting influence caused her to be shunned.¹⁰⁹ Rather than entirely discarding the ritual suffering and sacrifice of Levitical law in his sentimental image of the daughter of Zion, Edwards attempts to contain her communicative potential by making her both pitiful and unclean, exemplifying the dangers of improperly managed evangelical speech.

This introduction of sympathetic suffering into the trope of Zion’s daughter locates Edwards in a long Christian discourse of abjection that Julia Kristeva aligns with the origin of psychological interiority. Reading Edwards’s use of figures of abjection against Kristeva is especially helpful as a means of evaluating the ways in which revival affect might complicate psychoanalytic categories as transhistorical truths.¹¹⁰ Edwards’s use of a sentimentalized figure of abjection to delimit the boundaries of evangelical speech resembles what Kristeva, following Freud, calls the incorporation of Christian speech into a masochistic economy. Kristeva writes that early Christian writings introject the abject into the clean or pure Levitical self to create “a wholly different speaking subject,” internally divided between the clean and the unclean.¹¹¹ Recalling that the root of “cadaver” is “cadere, to fall,” Kristeva notes that this abject subject lives on a tenuous “border,” mired in the substances that mark Edwards’s daughter of Zion: a “wound with blood and pus … body fluids … defilement.”¹¹² Speech, for this abject subject, becomes a means by which abjection can be ejected but maintained. The abject subject’s perpetual irruption into speech is accompanied by a sense of pleasure at encountering or accessing the infinite through speech, because at the moment of speaking sin, the sinful self realizes and, to some degree, resolves its own sin.¹¹³ At the same time, the passage also illustrates the anachronism of locating Edwards within a masochistic economy, as Edwards collapses the antithetical relationship Kristeva establishes between the masochist’s use of jouissance for the benefit of symbolic or institutional power and the martyr’s use of displaced jouissance to create a discourse that “resorb[s]” the subject into a religious community or divine Other.

The impossibility of locating Edwards’s use of figures of abjection within either Oedipal or Kristevan categories, despite Edwards’s sustained engagement with the philosophical and tropological concepts that would become central to the literary and psychological development of masochism, helps shed new light on accounts of the political or structural valence of masochistic practice.¹¹⁴ Freud’s masochist, for example, is never wholly or even mostly geared for the benefit of symbolic or institutional power but rather uses the structures of power to produce an inappropriate pleasure. He subverts institutional morality by demanding the infraction of a moral code as the prerequisite for the pleasure of punishment. Kristeva, accepting Freud’s description of a masochistic economy but denying its capacity to subvert institutional morality, supposes that the masochist’s apparent subversion actually works to maintain the structures of power that allow for masochistic pleasure. As a result, her proposition that the martyr’s discourse of jouissance could in some way participate in a masochistic economy without, in some way, supporting institutional power sets an incredibly high bar.

In contrast to Kristeva’s separation of the martyr’s subversion from the masochist’s support of those structures, Judith Butler and Leo Bersani propose that masochistic attachments to symbolic or institutional power can simultaneously reinforce and undermine that power.¹¹⁵ Butler argues that the “regulatory regime[s]” that produce desire are themselves “produced by the cultivation of a certain attachment to the rule of subjection” and can therefore be resisted intrapsychically and through performance.¹¹⁶ For Bersani, masochism’s spectacular dramatization of the erotics of suffering encourages “an antifascist rethinking of power structures” that may ironically result in its own “self-immolating” destruction.¹¹⁷ Bersani’s notion of sexuality itself as fundamentally masochistic and marked by self-shattering (ébranlement) offers a productive movement away from masochism as a drive toward a broader notion of a masochistic antirelational refusal of sociality. This refusal cannot be valorized politically but does serve to break up psychic formations or specific ideological superstructures. Bersani follows Laplanche’s return to the notion of primary masochism in his account of the infant’s receipt of painfully inscrutable messages, or “enigmatic signifiers,” from a sexual other (e.g., a parent) and translation of those messages into an interpersonal, social context. If we accept this broader notion of masochism’s ability to make the psychic pleasures of pain explicit and public, we can hear an echo of Edwards’s negotiation of revivalist sympathetic public discourse.¹¹⁸

Although the discontinuities between Edwards’s models of mind and heart and modern psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and subject formation are too great to allow for analogy, it may be worth considering how Bersani and Laplanche’s notion of masochism recapitulates the drama of conversion. The speech of Edwards’s ideal convert, issuing from a place of suspended certitude about salvation, resembles Bersani’s masochist’s public self-shattering, inasmuch as they both figure moments of intense emotional self-abasement and self-erasure as necessarily forgotten or moved away from and yet also necessarily remembered and repeated. Edwards’s uncontrollable weeping describes a moment of ideal self-dissolution. Conversion entails internal, affective, psychic struggle but is primarily a relational experience between the self and the divine. The convert’s most important “existence,” in other words, lies in the relationship between the soul and a transcendent God, the ultimate “Other” for whom all works are meaningless for salvation. Nevertheless, it is in their evangelism, properly managed by editorial discretion and bodily self-control, that converts become significant by entering into a millennial Christian narrative.

Inasmuch as Edwards’s use of the evangelical discourse of abjection prefigures what Bersani and Butler identify as the “self-immolating” or resistant quality of attachment to subjection, its potential to disrupt existing hierarchies of speech is necessarily entangled with its attempt to maintain those hierarchies, as its promotion of abjection worked in and through its management of lay preaching and publication. Whether in his Faithful Narrative, his own conversion narrative, or his later treatises on conversion and revivalism, the difficulty with evaluating Edwards’s use of a discourse of abjection as entirely in favor of or opposed to the maintenance of institutional power derives from Edwards’s navigation of a revival discourse in which the form of subjectivity invoked through that discourse was itself unstable and contested, helping establish a white male revolutionary liberal subject as well as African and Native subjects and communities. The radical promise of affective revival was tied up with its incorporation into public ministerial practice. Edwards’s attempt to contain the communicative potential of an affective performance of abjection participated in the revivals’ eventual contribution to the rearticulation of power along new liberal republican lines but also provided Native and African Americans theological principles and public models for stabilizing and managing affective religious communities in the face of increased skepticism and hostility.¹¹⁹

Subsequent chapters follow two generations of Christian social reformers as they moved away from church-based social reform and toward nonsectarian radical evangelical organizing in the public sphere.¹²⁰ Many of these reformers read Edwards’s work; even those who did not would have been influenced by his epistemology of conversion. In particular, the cultural reverberations of eighteenth-century notions of conversion, suffering, and publicity resound in nineteenth-century developments of race, including racializations of religious abjection, speech, and publication.