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
