of interiority, delighted by the thought of being subsumed, pierced, and otherwise abjected, and promoting the tearful performance of suffering and grace. To be sure, previous generations of converts and their ministerial amanuenses had narrated periods of heightened emotion, bodily suffering, and mental or spiritual self-dissolution. Indeed, revival-era disputes about the nature of converts’ affective experiences and performances of bodily harm or weakness reprise sixteenth-century Catholic-Protestant debates about the boundary between the suicide’s sin and the martyr’s redemptive suffering.11 Those debates, centered on the value of suffering for salvation, generated John Donne’s poetic accounts of the redemptive quality of an imagined violent and erotic integration with the divine.12
Because several critics have identified the eroticization of a painful union with God in women’s midcentury revival conversion narratives, it may be tempting to read Edwards’s accounts of tearful suffering and joy as elaborations of a prototypically feminine masochistic eroticism.13 He developed those erotics to promote a Calvinist model of conversion that could negotiate the distant but emerging philosophical and theological challenge posed by liberal humanism and the more immediate threat of competitive, itinerant, “compulsive” evangelism epitomized by the celebrated George Whitefield. Edwards’s “Personal Narrative” frustrates the conversion narrative 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 short, while the spiritual erotics in Edwards’s conversion narratives may resemble masochistic desire, Edwards’s portrait of the convert’s affective sense of abjection and annihilation as intensely desirable resists the emergence of a liberal humanist subject for whom those desires would be perverse by incorporating affective interiority into a carefully controlled speaking subject.
Edwards also denied other aesthetic and philosophical principles that would be necessary preconditions for psychoanalytic masochism. Edwards’s later treatises on revival and conversion specifically respond to Shaftsbury’s critique of enthusiasm and demand for a rational evaluation of affect, moving in a different direction from Edmund Burke’s later construction of the liberal subject in the flight from sublime terror. Edwards also complicates what Julia Kristeva describes as the generation of speech out of the jouissance of introjected abjection and helps illuminate what more recent accounts of abjection discuss as masochistic self-shattering.14 Edwards’s constellation of affective states, behaviors, desires, and scenarios, in other words, may have contributed to the development of early masochisms but does not remain within even those fluid boundaries. Instead, it points to one of the many ways in which affective experiences, performances, and accounts of suffering have been used to construct political identifications, subjectivities, and behaviors prior to the invention of masochism.
Sex in the Evangelical Public
Edwards’s exploration of some theological and philosophical underpinnings of an affective experience of powerlessness, self-abnegation, and self-destruction was grounded in the evolving relationship between sentiment, affect, bodily performance, and publicity in eighteenth-century transatlantic evangelical revivalism. The most innovative elements of 1730s and 1740s revivalism arose from elaborations of performances of religious feeling in oratory, letters, and print. Revivals in Europe, England, Scotland, New England, and the southern and mid-Atlantic colonies were as diverse in their etiology and processes as their geographic scope suggests but were connected by publications, itinerant performances, and lay practices endorsing intensely affective worship styles.15
Some of the promise of, and resistance to, revivalism would have been familiar to earlier generations of English and colonial Puritans. Dissent in England and New England was itself a creature of transatlantic colonial print culture.16 Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ministers regularly wrote and preached about humiliation and abjection to tame the hot, moist, sanguine character of the less pious by stimulating cold, dry, earthy melancholic passions.17 The periodic rise and fall of public piety had been a recurring, somewhat ritualized feature of the religious landscape in Scotland, England, and New England for decades.18 For much of the eighteenth century, English and colonial cartoonists, novelists, balladeers, and playwrights associated revivalism with the excessive sensuality of poor or “rustic” young women, Indians, and sexual deviants.19 Like Shaftesbury, they condemned revivalists for exciting a range of dangerous affective states under the cover of morality.20 George Whitefield’s itinerancy, meteoric celebrity, and fundraising success made him a lightning rod for such attacks. Among the earliest was an erotic 1740 pamphlet speculating at length about the nature of the “secret Sin” Whitefield mentions in his conversion narrative. The pamphlet excerpts and recontextualizes Whitefield’s language of intense religious feeling to describe the devil “working [Whitefield] up” until he was “bleeding with the Excess.” It toys with the possibilities of maternal incest, bestiality, sodomy, and service as the devil’s bottom (sex with “the Devil … always uppermost”) before concluding it was likely the sin of “Onan”: masturbation was held to weaken the eyes, and Whitefield had a severe squint.21 Thirty years later, at the other end of Whitefield’s career, Town and Country magazine offered a more genteel parody of “Dr. Squintum’s” imagined marriage to “Parrawankaw,” an Indian princess in America who converted, bore him many children, and became a Methodist preacher.22 Unlike the progressive social critique mounted in French anticlerical erotica, these and other parodies attack, in comfortably bawdy registers, the slippery appeals of affective revivalism to young women, the poor, slaves, Indians, prisoners, prostitutes, sodomites, and those guilty of other sexual sins.23 Although Edwards and Whitefield offered distinct models of conversion and converted subjectivity, as I will discuss below, these parodies reflect fears of the influence and porosity of a transatlantic revival culture that Edwards’s Faithful Narrative had an important hand in shaping.
Opposition to revivalism in New England was generally less obscene, but American critics shared their English contemporaries’ distaste for affective revivalism’s appeals to the colonial dispossessed. As in England, the criticism, though implicating theological difference, was less concerned with doctrine than style of worship.24 Affective revival in New England pressured hierarchies of speech by encouraging public behaviors and performances that were considered sick or “Distempered,” lazy, rude, immoral, and menacingly linked to riot, slave revolt, Catholic influence, and Indian attack.25 Anticipating later Anglican critiques of Methodist “noise” and irregular movements, New England critics used classical hierarchical psychology privileging rationality and humoral models recommending balance to condemn revivalist demagogues’ excitement of “hot,” “animal,” bodily passions and encouragement of irregular bodily performance, including loud religious exhortation. They focused on behavior that circumvented or corrupted vertical hierarchies of speech and horizontal, collegial relationships between established ministers.26
Anti-revivalist furor overstated the revivals’ immediate effects on social order, if not their later influence.27 What critics denounced as exhortation and frenzy was revivalism’s stuttering, experimental, contradictory, and often self-defeating proliferation of new forms of social organization and identity, less concerned with hierarchies of rank determined by public election or education and more concerned with self-management and various sorts of difference.28 The revivals broadly participated in this shift by engaging gentler models of suffering, sentiment, and individual responsibility for spiritual development that would eventually come to include responsibility for sexuality.29
Eighteenth-century revivalist ministers in New England developed earlier models of conversion by promoting itinerancy, affective styles of worship, the wide distribution of periodicals and books, and the use of newspapers, broadsides, and other inexpensive formats. Edwards and some other established ministers in New England embraced revivalism to foster church membership and increase their pastoral and collegial influence. By focusing on individual emotional relationships with God and using direct, intense expressions of religious feeling, revivalist ministers also promoted religious practice by members
