Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of “Feminine” Speech

Jonathan Edwards, Affective Conversion, and the Problem of Masochism

“…48 Edwards's rhetoric of abjection also developed in dialogue with revival conversion narratives by the poor, especially poor women, Native Americans, and African Americans, that tended to be more embodied and to continue the older Puritan model of conversion as a recursive, or sometimes unfinished, process. 49 They used English associations of abjection and bodily corruption with femininity, heathenism, and incivility to develop forms of public religious expression that would play an important role in shaping Edwards's models of public piety. 50 Some narratives are visionary and deeply uncertain: Samson Occom's record of Montauk Temperance Hannibal's brief 1754 narrative, for example, simply concludes with a "Swoun" in which Hannibal "found [her] Self into great Darkness," led by a voice to a "Pole .…”

“…72 However, as Sandra Gustafson's analysis suggests, Edwards has a more immediate, and more vexed, relationship to this sentimental literary tradition than Noble indicates. 73 Edwards's portraits of exemplary converts in the Faithful Narrative draw directly on English sentimentalism in its staging of scenes of death and suffering, and his conversion narrative adopts affect as a way to frustrate the development of a modern self, separable from God, for whom such suffering might be perverse.…”