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
