The political value of denying Indian martyrdom is clearest in The Teares of the Indians (1656), a propagandistic English translation by John Phillips for his uncle John Milton, Cromwell’s erstwhile censor and then-Secretary of Foreign Tongues. Phillips’s preface, addressed to Cromwell, describes the “cry of [Indian] blood ceasing at the noise of Your great transactions, while you arm for their revenge.” In this miniature colonial drama of sound and force, English valor alone can mute Indian suffering.46 In contrast to Foxe’s martyrs, whose sensational suffering formed the basis of dissenting subjectivity, Phillips’s flayed, dismembered, and dead Indians cry out only for English vengeance before being quieted by English force.47 In separating English witnessing from Indian suffering, Teares hollows out the rhetoric of martyrdom to promote English imperial expansion unchecked by Indian presence. Phillips’s insistence on English witnessing and vengeance helped lay the groundwork for later racial distinctions between bold white sacrifice and the mere abjection of Indians and Africans.
Martyrology’s power as a vehicle for religious and political dissent became more fractured in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Protestant martyrology began to compete with Counter-Reformation martyrological accounts of colonial suffering and Indian conversion. French representations of Indian suffering in New France were relatively generous, as they allowed Native converts’ spiritual trials to confirm Native faith.48 Authorities in colonial New England were less generous, increasingly using martyrology as a bludgeon against dissenters, Indian tribes and competing colonial powers.49 Puritan leaders represented Quakers, Indians, and their mutual ally, witches, as effectively torturing the colony.50 The gendered and proto-racial dimensions of Foxean martyrological rhetoric posed special challenge to the colony’s self-fashioned patriarchs. On one hand, martyrology’s link to dissent was so strong that we can detect both disgust and a hint of admiration, or possibly fear, in John Winthrop’s 1646 account of Mary Oliver’s punishment. Oliver, as though embracing Latimer’s admonition to “plaie the manne,” took her court-ordered whipping “without tying and … with a masculine spirit, glorying in her suffering.”51 Martyrological rhetoric also helped Cotton Mather defend his colony’s conduct to London and, he hoped, to heaven. Figuring the colony as peculiarly persecuted, Mather hoped to defray God’s anger at the colony’s failure to treat not only “wild” Indians but even “African slaves … as those that are of one Blood with us [and] have Immortal Souls in them.”52 Martyrological discourse was also central to English colonizers’ practical and spiritual understanding of dissent and colonial violence. The colony’s Quakers and other organized dissenters also proliferated martyrological accounts of their treatment.53 Perhaps in response to the socially destabilizing effect of martyrological discourses, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century editions of the Book of Martyrs actually moved closer to The Teares of the Indians by including only the most graphic scenes of torture. These streamlined editions, whose popularity may also speak to their growing consumption as pornography, minimized the capacity of martyrdom to justify dissent while allowing for new connections between dissent and other forms of suffering.54
Foxe’s proto-racial, gendered notions of the martyr’s suffering would resound in accounts of religious suffering during the transatlantic revivals of the 1720s and 1730s, named, by a later generation of revivalists, the Great Awakening. These revivals were constituted by an incredibly diverse body of texts and practices, including some models of conversion that once again granted social or physical weakness the ability to license religious speech and writing. In New England, these models of conversion helped corrode Congregationalist hierarchies of speech and deference, eventually resulting in the broadening of New England’s “speaking aristocracy,” the class of men who spoke and published on social, political, and theological issues.55 During the revival itself, written and spoken accounts of affective conversion, including the affective experience of personal sin and abjection, allowed for even more disruptive forms of expression. In the manner of St. Francis, socially marginal converts described an intense internal sense of abjection to legitimate their public religious speech and writing.56 Revival conversion narratives recounted individuated, internal experience, but they did so largely through textual surfaces (including written, spoken, or otherwise embodied performances) that explicitly encouraged imitation.57 The predictable teleology and formulaic rhetoric of conversion narratives contained some of the resulting threat to social order. Nevertheless, variations within the genre allowed converts to test the limits of public speech.
Abjection was crucial to the development of revivalist affect out of, and sometimes in opposition to, martyrological suffering. The key difference between the speech of Foxean martyrs and that of revival converts lies in the shift from an external torturer to an internal or supernatural tormentor. Where Foxean martyrology emphasized a “manful” will to suffer, many revival converts described their intensely affective experience of abjection, permeability, and rupture, an experience that historians have identified as feminized in that culture. Moderate revival leaders such as Jonathan Edwards defended converts’ extreme affective sense of abjection and grace as the products of an internal awareness of personal sin and God’s sublime perfection. Revivalist expressions of intense affect are rooted in the Puritan use of textual methods of self-examination, including expressions of self-hatred and annihilation, designed to minimize a “personal” identity associated with sin. Revivalism integrated the public performance and expression of abjection into detailed life narratives that circulated more widely than the ritualized formulae that had been prerequisite to church membership. This integration and circulation allowed performances and expressions of abjection to take on new social and psychological importance.
Nicholas Ridley’s burning and Jonathan Edwards’s affective conversion are two of six scenes of abjection that help sketch out this book’s movement from Foxe to Freud. Each scene illustrates a discrete moment of public subject-creation. Chapter 1 considers the eighteenth-century management of abject affect through the limited circulation of the conversion narrative, epitomized by Edwards’s account of weeping in a closet. The second chapter moves into the early nineteenth century and evaluates the creation of an Indian public subject through temperate ascetic self-control, focusing on Pequot William Apess’s writing and preaching in New York’s reformist Methodist churches. Chapter 3, illustrated by the branded hand of white abolitionist Jonathan Walker, considers the mid-nineteenth-century creation of visibly white public subjects through martyrological narrative. In Chapter 4, a German child’s erotic reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin links political and erotic negotiations of “perversions” of sympathy in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848. Finally, my epilogue, focused on the 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