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
