vulnerability of Moby-Dick’s cabin boy Pip, considers the value of “child pets” and “tea boys” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments of race and religion.
Collectively, these chapters describe religious abjection’s direct and indirect contributions to race. Direct contributions include explicit textual linkages of abjection and race, while indirect contributions include racialized discussions of affect, interiority, publicity, and spectacle. Indirect contributions constitute the majority of the accounts of exclusion from civic or church recognition, psychological depression, and internalized low status on which my study is focused. Religious discourses of abjection participated in the racialization of the concept by using it to help construct race as a social reality ostensibly grounded in objective physical, mental, emotional and other differences. Though these religious uses of abjection were more spiritually than sexually erotic, they offered a vast reservoir of material available to pornographic and other explicitly sexual readings because of their social prominence and powerful affective charge. Indeed, the line between religious and pornographic representations of abjection blurred whenever evangelical reformers began to operate in nonsectarian public spheres, especially as evangelical material was taken out of a sectarian interpretive community in attempts to “sacralize” the public sphere as a vehicle for reform. In these moments, reformers spoke and wrote to such a wide audience and incorporated such a range of material into their work that abjection’s affective charge bled into neighboring categories of desire and signification.
This brief outline suggests some of the ways in which literary-historical readings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious and reformist writing intersect with philosophical, theological, and theoretical discussions of abjection. Before turning to my first chapter, I want to lay out the larger discursive field in which these key debates play. As Reik’s account of religious publicity recommends, attending to this larger discursive field will help ground an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary history of religious abjection, erotic suffering, and the place of suffering in a hitherto under-recognized part of the history and theory of the public sphere.
One of the most heralded eighteenth-century figures in debates about publicity, suffering, and politics is Edmund Burke. His account of sublimity in his Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) takes up the same connections between aesthetic and political problems of interpretation and consensus that would come to preoccupy his later work on social revolutions. Looking at Burke, we can address two familiar questions from the less familiar perspective of my book’s premises and aims. First, how do Burke’s aesthetic concerns relate to his description of “public spirit” as arising “from private reflection upon public affairs and from their public discussion” in salons and print?58 Second, how is this aesthetic dimension connected to Burke’s treatment of race and gender in his Enquiry, as well as his subsequent writing on the American, French and Haitian revolutions?
Burke, in his famous distinction between two species of feeling, the sublime and the beautiful, proposes that the former is caused by sympathy for pain, the latter by sympathy for pleasure. Recent histories of pleasurable pain have focused on Burke’s description of spectatorial delight as a source of erotic pleasure; as later chapters will elaborate, several early accounts of masochistic desire eroticize the sort of absolute, arbitrary power of the master that nineteenth-century abolitionists outlined in their reports on the Southern slave system.59 Seeing Burke’s aesthetics as wedded to his politics sheds new light on his contribution to the history of abjection and helps us examine existing critiques of publicity and the public sphere in the context of religious discourse.
In the Enquiry, Burke proposes that pleasure is derived from the presence of beauty, while “delight” is a sublime sensation that “accompanies the removal of pain and danger.”60 Some degree of “removal,” in other words, is a prerequisite to delight: spectators find pain or danger “delightful” only when it is kept “at certain distances, and with certain modifications.”61 In structuring his account of spectatorial delight, Burke reverses gendered and racialized contexts of seeing. He places spectatorial delight in a political context by aligning sublimity with monarchial power while associating pity with the revolutionary spectator’s terror at the power of weakness. Burke makes an implicit connection between the pleasure of beauty and terror in the French Revolution’s reversal of hierarchies of rank, race, and gender. He begins by attempting to evoke a delightful sort of terror by recounting the “few hours” of “torments” suffered by Robert Damiens, “the late unfortunate regicide” whose protracted public torture, though “inflicted” by “justice” received extensive and sometimes critical coverage in English magazines earlier that year.62 Burke insists that the torture itself, as well as laudatory representations of torture such as his own, performs the moral work of the sublime by reinforcing hierarchy through a display of awesome force. In Burke’s account, the witness’s sympathetic experience of Damiens’s pain is enjoyable not primarily because of pity for suffering but rather sympathy with his terror at the sub lime power (the king) causing the pain. As in much Gothic and sensational fiction, the spectator’s pleasure in sublime terror is meant to be anti-revolutionary and anti-republican.
Finding beauty in the abject entails political risk. Pity is dangerous because it fails to guard against revolutionary, republican terror.63 The Haitian and French revolutions provoked Burke’s bitterest denunciations when terror inverted hierarchies of rank, race, and gender.64 In aesthetic terms, this political reversal was possible because the seeming weakness of the Haitian and French rabble deluded elite spectators and lulled them into submission. Burke describes this power of weakness as the terror of the beautiful, epitomized, in the Enquiry, by a woman’s “neck and breasts,” wherein a “deceitful maze” of swells and curves produces, in the spectator, an “unsteady eye.”65 Beauty’s apparent weakness is the source of its strength, for, as Frances Ferguson remarks, it “is always … robbing us of our vigilance and recreating us in its own image.” Pity may therefore result in “death and defeat—loss of collective liberty” if not prevented by an invigorating experience of the sublime.66
Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) guards against pity’s threat by deploying a sublime image of Versailles as “polluted by massacre, and strewn with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.”67 Crucially for my study, Burke’s condemnation of the Jacobinic mob works by developing eighteenth-century religious languages of public censure, including anti-revivalist accounts of evangelical “enthusiasm.” Burke represents the Jacobinic mob as a sensational catalogue of abjection, a montage of “horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.”68 Republican revolutions, like the Enquiry’s beautiful woman, overcome monarchial power by a deceit that belies the reality of abject disorder. Burke’s terms here closely resemble the much earlier denunciations of evangelical Protestant revivalism. Anglican missionary Charles Brockwell, writing in 1742, denounced a revival in Salem, Massachusetts, by claiming that it caused “Men, Women, Children, Servants, and Nigros” to utter “groans, cries, screams, and agonies” and perform “ridiculous and frantic gestures” until, at the height of frenzy, they become “Exhorters.” Like Brockwell, Burke attempted to curb popular speech by associating it with bodily abjection, linking the publicity of the poor with variously illicit sensations to suggest that they ought to be excluded from recognition by church or state. Rather than demonstrating a historical arc from Enlightenment religious to secular dissent, Burke’s and Brockwell’s shared language of abjection speaks to the common origins and ongoing dialogues between them. This shared language of abjection also indicates how paradigms of race and gender that are now most often considered in exclusively secular terms had religious resonance and implication.
For all his conservatism, Brockwell’s greater engagement with religious discourses of abjection lets him grant abject figures more room for public speech. Both Brockwell and Burke end their scenes with figures who publicly deceive (exhorters and prostitutes, respectively),
