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 Why, then, did Edwards leave his own conversion narrative unpublished?63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
